A lasting good mood
How to make decisions that make you feel well
Time spent in activities that produce a positive mood make you better off. How obvious is this to you? I’m not going to spend any time debating that.
I’m going to share an explanation for how our emotion provides us what we need to decide how we use our time. I’ve been stewing on the findings of this paper about time, money, and subjective well-being for, well, quite some time.
From it, I ask:
How do individuals benefit from activities that they enjoy?
How do we choose what to do with our time?
Busy people and lazy people
There are two types of people when it comes to how we spend our time. You, and I, are both of these people every single day… the busy and lazy person.
How does a busy person enjoy life? She savors the social connections, activity, and variety of her life. She gains status from being busy, which is both indirectly impressive and likely to reward her in ways being lazy doesn’t.
How does a lazy person enjoy life? He craves the same drivers of positive emotion but often without the tenacity to do so in “difficult” ways. He gains peace from relaxing because he has enough already.
Both types of choices have their benefits rooted in positive emotion.
How does this affect real people?
One contemporary trend is for individuals to make decisions that protect their time so that they can enjoy more of it. This all comes down to choice.
When someone wants to listen to a podcast in the company of others, they want choice in what they think. When people demand to work from home, they are picking up on an opportunity to win some time back. Even the trend of passive income content creators offers a perfect solution to time hungry people sick of work that puts demands on their time, even if this work has been the norm.
Whether or not any of these things are instrumental to happiness, people negotiate hard with self and other for their time. They negotiate hard for choice. But many people don’t know what they are choosing between.
Here is the best general answer I have heard so far: they are selecting for time spent feeling good. Every person aims to pursue positive emotions and moving away from negative emotions. That is the benefit of all this choice.
How heavy is the rock?
As always, there is an easy way to spend time feeling good and a hard way. There is that simple pleasure. There is the project you’ve been putting off. Some choose hard more often, some tend to choose easy. But enjoyable time wins in the long run, whether it is easy or hard, because it is part of our psychology.
Reliably, there are things that produce positive emotions for most people (albeit in varying amounts between individuals). The HBR paper suggests cultivating social connection, helping others, being active, and increasing variety as ways people attempt to feel good.
The intuitive reason for our unhapiness is often the lack of one of the four. When we are robbed of one, it can become a scapegoat. Then our busy schedules or lazy moments cause us to say, “I don’t have time” or “I don’t have motivation”.
Upshot: know what you’re asking for
First, ask yourself how any commitment you make will allow you to spend your time? If it doesn’t align with something rewarding, don’t do it because you won’t be motivated. If it takes all your time, be extra certain it will be rewarding.
Second, protect your time but not at the expense of things that will make you happier. This should be a reminder to you next time you want to cancel plans or next time you aren’t sure about saying yes to an opportunity. There will be good parts of the opportunity, you just have to seek to understand them. You will benefit from seeing that friend too.
Third, don’t justify bad uses of time. If something is truly unenjoyable, it probably won’t fit with your life long term. It might become clear because you realize it’s not helping anyone, giving you any connection, it’s too repetitive, or too passive. The lack of a good thing is enough of a sign.
Parting challenge: set up your week this coming week so you have a richness of the types of moments you want most. Good luck.
Thanks for reading. If you have a different takeaway, leave a reply.
Kyle
