MIT 6.C31 · 12 units · 6-3 Computers & Society elective
Hack Yourself
Data-driven well-being and learning
Your well-being is significantly shaped by your daily choices. This class teaches you how to design those choices — and how to use Python, real MIT data, and generative AI to test whether they actually work for you.
Thriving is not a mystery. It is a design problem.
The class is built around research-backed ideas you can test yourself, using the same decomposition and iteration you already use in computing. Well-being and learning get treated almost like systems problems: how do you gather meaningful data, break a big question into manageable parts, try an intervention, and evaluate whether it worked?
- 7 years
Your mindset can add that much to your life.
- 45%
How much time pressure can cut your creative problem solving.
- 5%
Leaders who know what actually motivates their team.
What you actually do
One class, three threads, every week
The course braids positive psychology, data science, and communication together. The three are not separate courses that happen to share a room — each week's psychology topic is what you analyze and what you write about.
01Positive psychology
Strengths and motivation, resilience and thinking traps, attention and goals, habits and deliberate practice, relationships and psychological safety, rest, and what makes work meaningful.
Every week you run one research-backed intervention on yourself and write up what actually happened.
02Data science
The whole pipeline, not just the modeling: where data comes from, cleaning it, visualizing it, correlation, statistical significance and effect size, clustering, regression, classification, and prompting large language models.
Taught on real datasets, several of them collected from MIT classes and students.
03Communication
Reading peer-reviewed research critically, writing research proposals for progressively broader audiences, designing visualizations that carry an argument, and giving and receiving feedback that people can act on.
You practice these skills throughout the course.
The toolkit
Sixty-odd habits you can hold in your hand
Each week's interventions arrive as printed, playing-card-sized Intention cards: a research-backed habit distilled into a few words and an image. Students earn a few each week, collect them in a booklet, and end the semester with more than sixty. Reorganizing and revisiting them turns out to be spaced repetition and recall — the same learning principles the class discusses in lecture.
- Use a top strength in a new way
- Write your best possible future self
- The ABC resilience technique
- Backward planning
- The habit loop
- Letters to and from your future self
- The pre-mortem
- High-quality connections
- Capitalization
- Satisficing
- A handwritten gratitude letter
From past students
Don't take it from us
I took a class that has and will make such a difference in my life that I feel a responsibility to encourage everyone at MIT to take it. It has helped me be happier and improve as a student and improve as a person, as far fetched as that sounds.
I’ve never taken an MIT class this personally relevant. The class directly addressed real issues I was going through as a student and actively made a positive impact on my student life. I left with a much stronger understanding of my personal habits and psychology.
Absolutely loved this class! Was a great way to learn about psychology while also applying that knowledge to data analysis skills.
I really appreciated how practical the topics discussed in the course were. It felt like a mix of academics and life advice in the best way possible.
Who teaches it
Instructors
Hack Yourself is a joint venture between MIT EECS and the Experimental Study Group. The instructors built the course from scratch and have done every out-of-class assignment themselves — they don't ask students to do anything they haven't done first.
Ana Bell
Senior Lecturer, MIT EECS
Carter Jernigan
Visiting Instructor, MIT Experimental Study Group
Paola Rebusco
Senior Lecturer, MIT Experimental Study Group
The practical part
Subject listing
- Subject
- 6.C31, cross-listed as ES.C31
- Units
- 12 (3-0-9)
- Offered
- Spring term only
- Meets
- Lecture Fridays, recitation Tuesdays
- Prerequisite
- 6.100A or 6.100L, pre- or co-requisite
- Counts as
- 6-3 Computers & Society elective
- Grading
- A / B / C / D / F
Rooms and meeting times are confirmed in the MIT subject listing each term. Registered students get readings, assignments, and the full syllabus on Canvas.