The Science of Well-being | How We Can Overcome Our Biases

Rethink "Awesome Stuff"

• intentional, effortful activities can have a powerful effect of how happy we are even much more so than our genetics or much more so than our circumstances
• stuff that we buy has this terrible feature where it's not really dynamic at all—it doesn't change at all, & it sticks around
• think about not investing in awesome stuff as much. it doesn't make us as happy as we think. invest instead in things that are not going to stick around like experiences. they're not going to stick around. you're not going to have time to adapt to them

Leaf Van Boven and colleagues did this study: they had friends rate hearing about other people's experiential or material purchases. if you had them rate your overall impression of that person, it is higher after talking about experiences than material stuff. if you had other friends rate how psychologically well-adjusted are you, you get people to think you're much more psychologically well-adjusted if you invest in experiences than material things.

• experiential experiences are better than material stuff bc experiences are less susceptible to social comparison
• experiential purchases just seem to make other people happy because they include other people in a way that stuff often doesn't or just you telling people about your crazy experience can make other people happy

Thwart Hedonic Adaptation

Savoring: stepping outside of your own experience to review/appreciate it

• allows you to notice things more --> start higher on your hedonic adaptation curve & takes you longer to go down
• focuses you on that experience longer which helps prevent adaptation

Jose and colleagues talked to people who savor/don't savor their experiences & had them write down the things they did during that experience that may have caused them to savor/not savor it

• things that enhance savoring:

-talk to another person about how good it felt
-looked for another person to share it with
-thought about what a lucky person you are
-thought about sharing this later with others
-showed physical expressions of energy
-laughed or giggled
-told yourself how proud you are
-thought only about the present, was absorbed

• things that reduce savoring:

-focused on the future, when it was over
-reminded yourself it would be over soon
-told yourself it wasn't as good as you hoped
-reminded yourself that nothing lasts forever
-thought how it would never be this good again
-thought about ways it could be better
-told yourself you didn't deserve this good thing 

Kurtz and colleagues looked at savoring through taking images/pictures of the experience

• negative: not being mindful & too focused on taking the picture that you don't notice things
• positive: see different aspects through the photo & appreciate the experience more 

Sonja Lyubomirsky and colleagues had students replay their happy memories in their mind for 8 minutes a day, 3 days a week

• people in the study increased their positive emotions 4 weeks later
• revisiting the good stuff can lead to happier moments

Negative Visualization: thinking about the reverse that could have happened

• can cause you to break out of hedonic adaptation by realizing you enjoy the things you have
• realizing the chances/luck that you got to meet certain people or be where you are
• pretending today was your last: thinking about losing something puts your attention on what it's like to not have that thing --> good things pop up bc you worry about losing it

Gratitude: quality of being thankful, being appreciative of the things you have

Emmons and McCullough looked at gratitude and have people write down 5 things that they're happy about in their life, things that they might be grateful for

• if you have negative physical symptoms (being sick, things bothering you), these can go down when you're feeling grateful
• when you're grateful, you put your body through better things (like having better health habits)
• gratitude manipulation: being grateful affects things you wouldn't think it would
• taking gratitude to the next level by sharing it can be even extra powerful

Marty Seligman used this intervention called a Gratitude Visit

• if you write someone a letter about how grateful you are for them & physically give it to them can increase subjective well-being not in just how you feel but also in your personal relationships 

Barton Et Al looked at using gratitude as an intervention to fix marital problems

• he plotted couples' communicative styles and looked at whether gratitude could help that
• high withdrawers are the worst communicators
• if you have a lot of gratitude, you can almost nullify the effects of the other bad things
• people who feel grateful don't see the effects of other bad things as much in their marriage
• having gratitude for your partner & being thankful they are there & expressing it can fix things

Grant and Gino looked at if simply thanking someone can make them work harder

• ex. your superior at work comes in and says "thank you i appreciate your hard work"
• they tested it with fundraisers at a university where the people fundraising was thanked by their superior in person. these people stuck around after & did beyond what they're paid to do
• it increased work ethic by 50%

Reset Your Reference Points

Reference point: salient but irrelevant standard against which we constantly compare things

Carey Morewedge and colleagues looked at how biases affect our preferences of food

• you predict how happy you are going to be when eating something & then they put other food in front of you (ex. sardines or chocolate)
• they saw that having something else there can mess up your ability to enjoy this one thing

Concretely re-experiencing: go back & re-experience what your old reference point was before

• ex. you get a job at google (yay) but a year later you're just still at google (meh). remember where you were before when you had a sucky job & wanted to work at google
• this will switch your reference point into resetting
• you go away & come back & see how good you have it now

Concretely observing: finding a reference point that's not as good as yours & observing what that reference point really is like

• you have these ideas of what other things are like (if only i was doing this, if only i had that) & when you see it for real, you might like what you have even more

Strategies to stop comparison

1. Stop technique: be mindful & when you catch yourself comparing, you yell at yourself to stop

2. Practice gratitude. if you're focusing on the things you have, your attention is limited. you can't be grateful for what you have while also being jealous of what someone else has. Gratitude is the killer of envy so the more your practice it, the less likely you will make the comparisons in the first place

3. Be conscious of the kids of social comparisons you're letting in. curate the information that you get because once it gets in, you can't stop it. but you can control the kind of information you let in.

4. Take a break. Nelson and colleagues tested taking a break vs. taking no breaks

• they had people listen to their favorite song over and over again. he said you're going to listen to that or you can listen to it with breaks. when people took breaks from it, he saw people's actual happiness 
• if you don't have a break, there's nothing else to happen
• he also did this with commercials on tv: if you watch something with no breaks, it gets boring but if there are commercials, you get a break & your enjoyment is higher
• this means you should be splitting up the awesome things that you love most in life
• pause & come back to it --> you're going to bump out of your hedonic adaptation curve
• it's the opposite for bad things. if you're dealing with bad things in your life, don't try to break them up because you'll feel bad every time you go back to it. try to squish them all together so you don't notice as much as if you break it up.

5. Increase your variety

• ex. you get the same flavor at an ice cream shop all the time. you keep getting it & it won't be as good. you're going to be adapted to it
• switch things up & when you go back to it, it'll be better
• the more you do the same thing over & over, the less variety you have, the more you're going to adapt to it & it'll be a boring reference point
• have the good things in your life happen relatively, not frequently so you'll enjoy them more
• space out the good things in your life & they become happier bc they increase variety