Category: Happiness

Most people are much better at giving advice than taking it. When it comes to spending our money, we like to think we know best what will make us happy.

What does the guy next door or a colleague at work know about how we should spend our money? Well, a lot more, it turns out, than we might think.

Imagine you are going on a 5 minute speed date with a stranger. Before you meet them, I’ll let you have only one of these two pieces of information about them:

1. Either: a photograph of them with an autobiography.
2. Or: the rating of a previous speed dater (who is a stranger to you).

Which one do you think will better predict how much you’ll enjoy the speed date? You or the stranger?

If you are like most of the participants in an experiment by Gilbert et al. (2010) then you’ll go for number 1. The reason is probably that you prefer to make your own judgement rather than rely on someone else.

We’re all different, right? So, one person’s perfect partner is another person’s slow, painful descent into hell.

In the experiment, though, the ratings of a previous speed dater were the best predictor of how much people enjoyed their speed date. Gilbert and colleagues call this the surprising power of neighbourly advice.

Ask the audience

Here’s one that’s even weirder.

First of all, let’s give you a couple of options to choose from. Imagine now that I give you a chocolate chip cookie to taste. Which do you think would better predict how much you will enjoy it:

1. You imagine yourself eating it.
2. Someone else guesses from watching your facial expression as you first see the cookie.

Perhaps you’re a bit more wary now? If so, you’d be right.

When McConnell et al. (2011) carried out this experiment they found that observers were better at predicting participants’ pleasure than they were themselves.

This suggests three things:

1. We aren’t that good at predicting what we’re going to enjoy (one reason is the impact bias).
2. Our unconscious knows better what we’re going to enjoy than our conscious mind (at least in some circumstances).
3. Other people can pick up on this just by watching our faces.

I don’t think we can argue from this that other people can make all our monetary decisions for us, that’s going too far. But we can say that people who are somewhat similar to us are likely to be better than we might imagine at predicting what we will like.

We have a tendency to ignore other people’s advice about how to spend, thinking we are better off making our own judgements. On the contrary, this research suggests we should pay more heed to other people’s advice as it can be better than our own judgements.

So when spending our money, we are better off to ask, and heed, the advice of others as they may well have a better insight into what we’ll enjoy than we do ourselves, especially if they’ve already experienced it themselves.

Image credit: hobvias sudoneighm

Which of these two types of spending do you think makes you happier, purchases that are made with the primary intention of acquiring a:

• life experience: an event or series of events that one lives through,
• material good: a tangible object that is kept in one’s possession.

When thousands of Americans were asked this question, 57% said experiences make them happier and 34% said things make them happier (Carter & Gilovich, 2010). For once the majority is right.

You can check out the research in these two posts in which I discuss the studies which demonstrate:

• How Experiences Beat Possessions,
• How to Choose Between Experiential and Material Purchases.

Many of the reasons why are discussed in more detail in the articles above, but here’s a summary with a couple of extras thrown in:

• Experiences improve with time because they tend to take on new meanings in our minds, but things just tend to get old.
• People mentally revisit their experiences more than things they’ve bought (Van Boven & Gilovich, 2003). So experiences keep providing pleasure long after the event itself.
• Experiences resist unfavourable comparisons because each is unique. Things, though, are easy to compare unfavourably because they’re similar to other things.
• Also, because experiences tend to be unique, we adapt more slowly to them and adaptation or habituation is the enemy of happiness (Nicolao et al., 2009).
• Experiences tend to be social and social events (generally) make us happy. Things are often not that social.

The boundary between experiences and things is far from clear-cut. For example houses are things but because we live in them, they are also partly experiences. Still, the general point holds that the more experiential something is, the happier it is likely to make us.

So if you want to cheer yourself up, make sure you spend cash on something more experiential than material. You might not be able to hold the result in your hand, but it will live longer in your mind.

Image credit: Mouleesha

Here’s a perplexing study. Nelson & Meyvis (2008) had participants massaged for 3 minutes. However one group had a 20 second break in the middle while the others had a continuous massage. Who enjoyed it more?

People predicted it would be the continuous massage, but they were wrong. People enjoyed the massage with the break more because the break stopped them becoming acclimatised to the massage.

The enemy of happiness is adaptation. Unfortunately we get used to things and they give us less pleasure; after a while we start taking them for granted. It’s sad but true.

But if you keep doing lots of small, different pleasurable things, you’ll get more pleasure overall and you’ll feel happier. This is partly why many small pleasures beat fewer larger ones.

Twice the price but not twice as nice

Small pleasures also take advantage of the fact that eating twice as much cake in one go isn’t twice as nice. It’s a bit better but not twice as good. It’s certainly much better to have some cake than no cake, but not twice as good to have double the cake.

Think about two people attending a sporting event, a concert or a show. Yes it’s better for them to sit at the front than sitting all the way at the back but is it worth paying twice the price? In terms of happiness it’s not. You won’t enjoy the event twice as much. It’s much better to get cheaper tickets and have two outings.

Savour small things

People who are able to savour the small things in life are happier. People who are richer tend not to savour the small things so much, partly because they expect more from life. This means they don’t gain all they can from being wealthy (I know, your heart bleeds!).

But we know better; so off you go now to a coffee shop, or cheap trip to the park, or to buy the worst seats in the house. It’ll be more fun in the long run.

Image credit: chotda

What was the last good, positive thing that happened to you? Perhaps it made you smile or dance around the room or maybe even want to shout it from the rooftops.

We all want to feel good, both in the moment and about our lives in general. And most of us do this automatically by using strategies to help savour those precious happy times.

But research suggests we don’t always use the best strategies to feel good. In fact some strategies heighten good feelings and overall satisfaction, while others can reduce them. Quoidbach et al. (2010) call these savouring and dampening strategies. They carried out some research to see which were most effective and how they affect both our thoughts and feelings.

Here are the standard four savouring strategies that we tend to use. Each is paired with the corresponding dampening strategy:

1. Showing you’re happy

Savour: If you’re happy and you know it…then smile! Our physical actions feed back into how we feel and displaying happiness makes us feel even happier. This is known as embodied cognition: check out this article on 10 Postures That Boost Performance.

Dampen: But sometimes people don’t like to show they’re happy. Whether it’s because of fear, shyness or modesty, people do hide their positive emotions. Whatever the reason, it’s likely to make us less happy if we suppress our positive emotions.

2. Being present

Savour: Our minds naturally wander, even when we’re busy (see this article: Does Keeping Busy Make Us Happy?). But if we can keep focused on what we’re doing now we’ll feel better.

Dampen: Distraction is the enemy of savouring. Instead of enjoying what’s happening now, our minds wander off. Unfortunately we quite often wander off to our worries. This dampens down the positive emotion we feel.

3. Celebrating

Savour: If something good happens then make sure you celebrate it by telling others. By capitalising on our success (or luck) when it comes along, we increase our positive emotions. So, throw a party!

Dampen: Instead of celebrating, though, sometimes people look for faults. Yes, they say to themselves, this was good, but it could have been better. This tends to reduce life satisfaction, optimism, self-esteem and happiness. Avoiding nit-picking will lead to more enjoyment.

4. Using positive mental time travel

Savour: Although our minds often wander to depressing subjects, they can also wander to good things. We can remember good times and anticipate upcoming events. I’ve often thought that one of the secrets of life is to try and always have something to look forward to, no matter how small it is.

Dampen: The other side of the coin is that our minds can just as easily take us back to past embarrassments or forward to imagined future irritations. The more we can resist this, clearly the happier we’ll be.

What works best?

All of these are very familiar but which savouring strategies work best and which dampening strategies are the most detrimental?

Quoidbach et al. found that positive mental time travel and being present were most strongly associated with heightened pleasure. The interesting thing is that these are opposite strategies: one involves focusing on the here and now while the other involves drifting off somewhere else.

The fact that both work is probably because most people feel happy enough the majority of the time and, if they don’t, they can wander off in their mind somewhere else fun.

So that’s our feelings in the moment, but what about our thoughts, our evaluations of how we’re doing: our life satisfaction? The best savouring strategy for increasing our life satisfaction was capitalising. According to this research there’s nothing better than celebrating our wins for helping us feel our lives are going well.

On the other hand fault-finding and letting the mind wander to negative events are most likely to reduce our satisfaction with life.

Overall this study found that there was no one silver bullet to maximising your positive emotions and life satisfaction. Some strategies were better than others, but overall the people who were happiest were those who were flexible with which strategy they used.

So if you want to feel better for more of the time then try out all of these strategies at different times and in different situations. The more you can adaptively boost (and avoid dampening) good feelings, the better you’ll feel.

Image credit: Martin Gommel

Much of modern civilisation can be credited to our very human habit of keeping busy.

Science, art, philosophy, technology, commerce and all the rest: it’s not just necessity that’s the mother of invention, it’s also boredom.

But there is a tension in us between our desire for activity and inactivity. Given a choice we’ll remain idle—whether happily or otherwise—but at the same time we take almost any excuse to be busy. And let’s be honest, some of these excuses are pretty flimsy (how else can you explain train-spotting, shoe shopping or golf?).

This tension is very nicely demonstrated in a recent study by Hsee et al. (2010). When given the choice, participants preferred to do nothing, unless given the tiniest possible reason to do something: a piece of candy. Then they sprang into action.

Not only did people only need the smallest inducement to keep busy, they were also happier when doing something rather than nothing. It’s as if people understand that being busy will keep them happier, but they need an excuse of some kind.

A wandering mind

So the secret to a happy life is to keep busy, right? Well not quite. Unfortunately just being busy isn’t enough. That’s because our minds can wander just as easily when we’re busy as when we’re idle. Even when busy we’re often elsewhere in our minds.

We know this because Killingsworth and Gilbert (2010) sampled the experience of 2,250 US adults at random intervals. Each time participants reported, through their smartphone, how they were feeling and what they were doing. Almost half the time people were asked, at that moment their minds were wandering from whatever they were doing—43% to pleasant topics, 27% to unpleasant topics and the rest to neutral topics.

The only time their minds weren’t wandering was when they were having sex.

The interesting thing was that both neutral and unpleasant topics, which comprised 57% of mind wandering, made people considerably less happy than their current activity, whatever it was. And even when thinking happy thoughts, they were no happier than when fully engaged with their current activity.

As Killingsworth and Gilbert conclude:

“…a human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind. The ability to think about what is not happening is a cognitive achievement that comes at an emotional cost.”

Overall this study found that what people were thinking was a better predictor of how happy they felt than what they were doing.

This all serves to back up the idea that being mindful is a good thing. Paying attention to whatever you are doing right now is likely to make you happier than letting your mind wander off.

Similarly, finding a reason to be active and engaged in whatever it is, is also likely to make us feel better than sitting around idle, even though our natural tendency is towards idleness. So being busy does make us happier, as long as we can stop our minds wandering.

Image credit: beast love

It’s a mystery why money doesn’t make us happy, because it feels like it damn well should. With money we can buy whatever we want, go wherever we want, even be whoever we want. Surely that should make us happy?

And yet study after study shows that in affluent societies money might bring satisfaction, but it doesn’t bring much happiness.

Perhaps, as people become really rich, they don’t choose more enjoyable activities (i.e. they stay in the office working)? Perhaps material goods just can’t make us happy? Or perhaps there is always someone richer, spoiling the party with their more impressive wealth?

Failure to savour

There’s something missing from these accounts, though, and it’s the old argument that when you live in luxurious surroundings, have experienced the best restaurants and received the most lavish gifts, it becomes more difficult to savour the simple things in life.

Supporting this account, a new study published in Psychological Science has found that participants were less able to savour positive emotions both when they were richer themselves and when they were prompted to think about wealth by looking at a picture of money (Quoidbach et al., 2010).

In a second study participants who were cued with the idea of money didn’t enjoy or savour a chocolate bar as much as those not reminded of money. When participants looked at a picture of money beforehand, the average time spent eating the chocolate went down from 45 seconds to 32 seconds. Levels of enjoyment reported afterwards also went down, from 5 to 3.6 on a scale of 1 to 7, where 7 is maximum enjoyment.

And this is only the effect of looking at a picture of money for a few seconds. Think what our society, with its constant reminders of opulence in both public and private, are doing to us. It’s a wonder we can enjoy anything.

Relativistic psychology

This is just one facet of our mind’s habit of comparing everything with everything else, from complex concepts like money right down to the most basic perceptual level. Like when you open your eyes in the morning, or turn up the volume on your mp3 player; for a moment the senses are overloaded but soon the contrast fades as the mind acclimatises.

It’s easy to forget that things aren’t ‘loud’ or ‘bright’, they are just ‘louder’ or ‘brighter’ than something else. Money is just one more thing that our minds treat in this relativistic fashion.

So spare a thought for the super-rich, the poor darlings can’t appreciate a tin of spam, a lump of coal or a cardboard box in quite the same way that you and I can. It’s not much of a silver lining I’ll grant you, but it’s something to hold on to.

Image credit: Darrren Hester