Frontiers in Health & Happiness
Jul 20, 2026 · 39 min · 16 segments
What if happiness, compassion, and resilience were not fixed traits, but skills you could train? In this episode of *Frontiers in Health & Happiness*, Dr. Richard Davidson, founder and director of the…
Richard DavidsonGuest
Ayla FudalaHost
You've helped to popularize the idea that happiness and compassion can be learned like any other skill.
Qualities like happiness, compassion, well-being have often been thought of as kind of fixed characteristics.
People as adults recognize that they may be somewhere on this continuum from having very low levels to very high levels.
And it's kind of fundamentally not dissimilar from training in any other kind of skill.
We know that if we practice a musical instrument on a regular basis we'll get better at it if we practice a certain kind of complex sport we'll get better at it and the same is true for these qualities of flourishing and there's now you know many many hard-nosed scientific papers showing that and also showing that when these skills are trained it's not just changes in our subjective experience that are altered, but there are behavioral changes, neural changes and systemic biological changes that also have been documented.
You've helped to popularize the idea that happiness and compassion can be learned like any other skill.
Qualities like happiness, compassion, well-being have often been thought of as kind of fixed characteristics.
People as adults recognize that they may be somewhere on this continuum from having very low levels to very high levels.
And it's kind of fundamentally not dissimilar from training in any other kind of skill.
We know that if we practice a musical instrument on a regular basis we'll get better at it if we practice a certain kind of complex sport we'll get better at it and the same is true for these qualities of flourishing and there's now you know many many hard-nosed scientific papers showing that and also showing that when these skills are trained it's not just changes in our subjective experience that are altered, but there are behavioral changes, neural changes and systemic biological changes that also have been documented.
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