Hey everyone. Welcome to being well. I'm Forrest Hansen and welcome to being well. I'm Forrest Hansen and welcome to another edition of 10 Good Minutes.

On these episodes I do a deep dive into a particular subject or

question and explore the research behind it. We've been through a lot this year

between the pandemic and quarantine and social unrest and the consequences of an economy that feels increasingly out of touch with people's real life experience,

it feels like so many things have happened to us that we have no control over, that

have had a huge impact on our lives.

And going through the last year, I think it's really natural to ask ourselves a simple question. How much of our

happiness do we actually control? Before we get into today's material I

wanted to let you know about something that's pretty exciting. I actually

created a video version of this

episode and it's going to be posted to my YouTube channel. If you'd like to check it

out you can follow the link in the summary of today's podcast episode.

If you're a regular

Youtuber, I'd appreciate it if you would subscribe to my channel over there.

I'm planning on posting more videos related to these topics and I'll probably branch

out into some other content as well. So if you've been enjoying the

podcast you'll probably like my channel too. And also hey if you subscribe to it you're

helping me out and I really do appreciate it. All that said let's get into it. One of the underlying

beliefs in the work that I do is that we have a certain degree of control over our

well-being, that there are things that we can actually do in our lives that will improve our happiness in meaningful ways.

But what if that's just not true? What if we really are just kind of a prisoner to our circumstances?

If that were the case, this podcast might be useful as a source of entertainment or as maybe a kind of hobby,

...