About

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I'm Dr. Tchiki Davis

I've been helping people improve their
well-being for more than 15 years

In this technology-crazed world, it's becoming increasingly difficult to be present, find balance, and make meaningful connections. As a result, many more of us are struggling to achieve the level of happiness and well-being we desire. It is my mission to help you overcome the challenges that prevent your happiness so that you can live a more satisfying and enjoyable life.

You know that improving your well-being is possible, you’re just not sure exactly how to do it. The Berkeley Well-Being Institute can help.

How I Became Obsessed with Well-Being

My passion for helping people improve their well-being started when I was 15. It was a Halloween night and my friend’s parents were out of town. So – don’t tell my mom – but I went to a party.

Late in the night, the big suburban house was still filled with the sounds of teenagers, laughing inanely about whatever we thought was funny back then. At some point, I wandered into the kitchen to get a drink of water. There, standing alone, was a friend of mine. Her head was cast downward, her bangs were in front of her eyes, and she was squeezing her hand into a tight fist behind her back. As I walked up to her I saw something red on her hand. It was blood!

I rushed over to her, grabbing her hand, demanding that she let me help her. But she pulled away from me. I could see tears flooding in her eyes.

Finally, after much prodding, she opened her hand. Lying in her palm was a piece of glass, glass that she had been squeezing as hard as she could. She was so upset about something – I still don’t know what it was to this day – that she pushed that piece of glass against her skin until blood was literally dripping on the floor.

I didn’t know it at the time, but this moment was the first in a series of moments that would change my life. In the years that followed, I saw the scars of self-burning, the glazed over eyes that come with extensive drug use, and the skin that hangs off a body that is being intentionally starved. I witnessed the depths of depression and the heights of mania, suicide attempts and near overdoses. The world, or at least the world around me, appeared to be a really unhappy place.

It turns out that a person can only see so much pain before becoming determined to stop it – or at least that’s what happened to me. Somewhere along the way, my life’s mission became to help people overcome the negative emotions that ruled their lives – or at the very least, help them learn ways to be a little happier.

So, still a 15-year old, I began organizing social events for teens. I raised money by selling hand-made clothing and giving hair-wraps to kids. During and after college, I worked with at-risk youth. And finally, I applied to grad school in psychology to learn more about how to improve well-being.

My Road to Becoming a Happiness & Well-Being Expert

While working on my PhD at Berkeley, I studied emotion science, clinical psychology, neuroscience, education, social innovation, and technology—everything that might help me understand how to improve well-being. And I started to create online tools designed to boost happiness. I even won a couple of awards for them.

In the years that followed my PhD, I consulted with technology companies and organizations to help them create technology products that increase happiness.

The technology products I worked on have now reached more than a million people worldwide.

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But I Found Problems with the Way We Try to Boost Happiness in America

Perhaps becoming a successful technology consultant might have been the end of my story. But that’s not how it felt to me. Not at all. With every new technology product I worked on, I discovered new obstacles that prevented, thwarted, and sometimes even harmed happiness.

As time went on, it got harder to look at myself in the mirror. The obstacles that I was uncovering about how to increase happiness and the half-truths that I saw being broadcast by the happiness industry made me feel sick to my stomach. Even though I was trying to create technologies that would help people across the world improve their well-being, I worried that technologies, which I once thought could be the solution to our unhappiness, created as many problems as they solved. I wasn’t really having the kind of impact I wanted to have.

Week after week, month after month, year after year, I searched for the solution, convinced that I could figure out how to build happiness if I just kept looking. I talked with dozens of people, watched hundreds of TED talks, and read thousands of articles, learning a ton of new happiness-boosting techniques, but not really finding the solution I was looking for.

Eventually, I started wondering if it was even possible to build happiness anymore in the technology age. It was at this breaking point that I turned off my TED talk stream, slapped down the lid of my laptop, and finally invited my intuition to speak. I took a couple of long deep breaths, and listened – really listened.

That’s when it clicked. No amount of digging would uncover some magical secret to happiness; there was none. The only way that I could succeed in my mission to improve well-being was to tell you the truth about building happiness – the good, the bad, and the ugly.

My New (More Honest) Approach to Happiness & Well-Being

I have been developing my new approach to happiness over the last few years. And it's still a work in progress, because happiness & well-being are more complex than I originally thought. At first, I was scared to confront the truth, because the truth doesn’t fit nicely into a neat little self-help package. I was angry, because many of the stories we’ve been told about how to increase our happiness can keep us stuck and miserable. And I was sad, because I devoted my life to something that was, at least in part, a lie. Being honest with you about what it really takes to build happiness in our technology-crazed world is the only way for either of us to move forward.

To succeed in my mission to help you improve your well-being, I will teach you ways to build your happiness, but I’ll also point out the obstacles that you'll have to overcome. I’ll show you how to use technology in healthy ways, but also tell you why technology probably plays a bigger role in your unhappiness than you realize. And I will share with you my stories of hobbling towards happiness – stories that include successes and failures, easy wins and tough challenges, epiphanies and slow painful growth.

I’ll peel back the onion for you so that you can see how to build happiness step-by-step, learn why it’s so hard to build in the first place, and discover why it’s getting even harder to build now that technology is an inseparable part of our lives.

You’ve been trying to increase your happiness. Well, has it worked? If your answer was a resounding, "Yes!" then I doubt you’d be here with me.

Why I Created the Berkeley Well-Being Institute

You’ve probably already read really good self-help books or articles. And have they made you happy? If your answer was a resounding, Yes! then I doubt you’d be here with me. More likely, the approaches you’ve taken in the past haven’t worked, or haven't worked as well as you would like. You are still hopeful that you can build your happiness, you’re just not sure how to.

Well it turns out that the way to improve your happiness is the same way we improve just about any other aspect of ourselves – by building the right skills. For example, think about how you improved at math. First, you figured out which skills you needed to learn – skills like addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division – then you practiced these skills until they got a lot easier. The more you practiced and the broader your skill set, the easier math became. And when you didn’t practice for a while, your skills probably got worse.

You build happiness the same way – by building "happiness skills".

Most self-help books, courses, and apps actually do teach you these happiness skills—things like positive thinking, mindfulness, and resilience. The main reason why they don’t work is because learning happiness skills is about so much more than what you do—it’s about how you do it.

Think of it this way: If you were just starting to learn math, what would you do? Well, you could first try some long division, then try some addition, and then find the circumference of a circle. But would this really be the best way to learn math? Of course not!

But this is exactly the way most people learn happiness skills. You get an app, a life coach, or a book that starts you with mindfulness, and then maybe teaches you gratitude and then shows you some tricks for being more resilient, with no consideration for ether your skill level or how difficult each skill is. We know that this isn't the best way to learn, but for some reason, this is how the skills that increase happiness are taught. It's no wonder we struggle, give up trying, and feel like happiness is impossible.

First, please stop blaming yourself! It's not your fault.

Second, we need to approach happiness and well-being is a new way. We have to follow the right steps, build the right skills, in the right order. The "right steps", "right skills" and "right order" are different for everybody. We all start at different skill levels when it comes to happiness. We may have picked up some skills in our lives, but not others. Having never learned these skills in school, most of us have major gaps. Most of us need a lot of help to figure out what to learn, when to learn it, and how to learn it.

So building happiness is not as simple as most people say it is. But by knowing why it's hard, we can actually start to find solutions to the things that prevent our happiness.

That's what I do. I've spent more than 15 years exploring different pieces of the happiness puzzle. I don't have all the pieces yet, but I find more and more pieces all the time. And I created The Berkeley Well-Being Institute to share these insights with you, to help you finally start making improvements to your happiness and well-being.

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