Cassie Holmes is a professor at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, where she is an award-winning teacher and researcher. Holmes’s work on the intersection of time and happiness has been widely published in lead academic journals and featured in such outlets as NPR, The Economist, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and more. Happier Hour is her first book.
There is more and more research on the determinants and results of happiness in human life, and on the show today we get to do an amazing deep dive on this subject with social psychologist, and author of Happier Hour, Cassie Holmes. Cassie is currently running a course at UCLA Anderson School of Management called 'Applying the Science of Happiness to Life Design', and her book draws directly from the content of this course. In our chat, Cassie shares some definitive data on what actually influences our happiness in significant ways, how to invest and allocate your available time, approaches to offsetting hedonic adaptation, and the vital importance of relationships and exercise. Our guest also talks about popular misconceptions and cultural perceptions about success, and why assessing your values and purpose can make achieving more happiness much more realistic. It is here that we find Cassie's main thesis; that through reflection and tracking we can determine more accurately how to use our time in the different parts of our lives and increase our day-to-day happiness, so make sure to join us for this episode of the Rational Reminder.
Key Points From This Episode:
The science behind the important benefits of happiness. (0:02:17)
Current research into the measurement of happiness. (0:04:27)
Cassie talks about the roots of the course she teaches on happiness. (0:07:02)
Misconceptions about what makes us happy and the lasting power of notions of success. (0:10:25)
The cultural roots of our perceptions of happiness. (0:14:58)
Determinants of happiness; Cassie shares the biggest factors in our emotional landscape. (0:20:16)
Working towards a goal, time tracking, and entering flow states. (0:25:28)
Happiness as a decision and as a disposition; how much control do we have? (0:30:26)
How comparison undermines and robs us of happiness. (0:37:01)
Cassie unpacks how to understand the role of relationships in our lives. (0:38:30)
A story from Cassie illustrating the links between discretionary time and happiness. (0:43:35)
Amounts of discretionary time to allocate to yourself each day. (0:49:39)
The worst ways to use time and the activities that enhance feelings of loneliness. (0:52:02)
Cassie's advice on how to avoid time poverty and what to refuse. (0:55:53)
The dangers of an over-emphasis on productivity and urgency. (0:58:21)
Aligning your values and purpose in the professional sphere of your life. (1:01:38)
How the remote landscape and work-from-home model has impacted happiness. (1:03:03)
Going over the exercises and assignments that Cassie finds to be most impactful for her students. (1:06:36)
Cassie's definition of success and its relation to her clearly defined purpose. (1:11:33)
Read the Transcript:
Ben Felix: This is the Rational Reminder Podcast, a weekly reality check on sensible investing and financial decision-making from two Canadians. We are hosted by me, Benjamin Felix and Cameron Passmore, portfolio managers at PWL Capital.
Cameron Passmore: Welcome to Episode 222. This week, we had a chance to speak with Cassie Holmes, who is the author of a just released book called Happier Hour: How to Beat Distraction, Expand Your Time, and Focus on What Matters Most.
Ben Felix: The ER in there, the happier is a very important part of the title. There's a lot of information in there as we learn from Cassie and this conversation.
Cameron Passmore: Cassie is a Professor of Marketing and Behavioural Decision-Making at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management. One of the courses she teaches is called Applying the Science of Happiness to Life Design. This book is based on that very popular course. Cassie also has a PhD in marketing from Stanford and is a trained social psychologist.
Ben Felix: She tells us in the episode a bunch of the exercises, or assignments that she has her students in the class do to help them get in tune with what a good life and what happiness look like, and how to learn about themselves. We actually get some pretty cool practical tools from Cassie during this conversation.
Cameron Passmore: She's worked with past guests; Hal Hershfield, who was a guest in Episode 141, Ashley Whillans, who is a guest in 143, as well as Katy Milkman who is a good friend of the podcast. Great conversation, I thought. Lots to learn, lots to apply to your own life to be happier. Anything else?
Ben Felix: No. A great conversation. It reinforces a lot of stuff that we've learned before. Then of course, Cassie, from her own primary research also has lots of new insights for us. It's a worthwhile conversation. Time well spent, I would say.
Cameron Passmore: Right. With that, here's our conversation with Cassie Holmes.
Hello, Cameron. It's so great to be here.
It's so great to welcome you as well. I loved your book, so congratulations on that.
Thank you. Speaking of time, it took a lot of time. Hopefully, it's worthwhile and helping folks be happier.
Excellent. Well, let's kick it off with scientifically speaking, why is being happy a good thing?
Yeah. It's a really important question, because sometimes people think of happiness as somewhat of a frivolous thing, that may seem indulgent, but it's absolutely not. I would actually say that the last couple years, folks have come to recognize just how important it is with anxiety rates, depression rates, burnout rates as high as they are, everyone has come to recognize just how important our emotional well-being is. To your question of, are there studies to show just how important our well-being is? Absolutely. Research has shown that feeling happy benefits across our domains of life and the workplace and our personal relationships with respect to health.
For example, in the workplace, when we feel happy, it increases our creativity. It makes us more adaptive problem solvers. Happy employees are more engaged and better performers. It helps us in our interpersonal relationships. When we feel happy, we like others more. We are liked by others more. We're more likely to help others out, which also centre interpersonal relationships, as well as if you think of that in the workplace, when we feel happy, we're more likely to help our colleagues, we're more committed to the organization at large.
Also, with respect to health, happiness increases our immune functioning, our threshold for pain and makes us more likely to stick to our treatment regimes, and correlationally is associated with longevity. All of this is to say that, yes, we want to be happy. Wouldn't that be nice? We want to be happier, which I actually think is an important qualifier. The title of my book, Happier Hour is purposeful. It's not about happy that you turn on, yes or no, I am, or I am not. It's what can we do to feel better? Feeling better has these positive consequences.
You're talking about empirical research there. When that research is being done, how is happiness being measured?
Yeah. In those cases, I was looking at the consequences of happiness. In some cases, it's correlational. Sometimes it's even manipulated. People are made to feel happy. To your question, how do we look at what are the inputs that make us feel better, that make us feel happy, and we measure happiness. When I'm even referring to happiness, what I'm talking about is the emotion that we feel in the day-to-day, so more positive emotion than negative emotion. As well as there's this cognitive evaluation of how satisfied are you with your life overall.
To measure emotion, it is asking, typically it is, how are you feeling right now on how much enjoyment, how much happiness, how stressed, how worried? So that you can take the difference and parse out the positive emotions, as well as what also is limiting those negative emotions of stress and worry. It can be right now, it can also be reflecting back over the last day, over the last week, how frequently, or to what extent have you felt positive emotion? Have you felt negative emotion?
Then there's this other evaluative component, which I think is so important. That's how satisfied do you feel with your life overall. I think part of that, as I am interested in it, and is really a outcome that I'm striving for, for folks in the book and in my research, is how satisfied and how fulfilled. Then there's also how much meaning there is, which is a little bit of a different construct. It moves empirically, and moves very closely with this life satisfaction, and all of this is what I lumped into when I use the word happy, happiness, which there's positives and negatives in using that term. I think it's something that folks can all relate to and understand, but there are these different components of it.
Interesting. When you say happier, it's like some combination of all of those different things.
Yeah. It's feeling better in your life, as well as feeling better about your life.
Oh, that's nice. You teach a course, which I understand is quite popular, called Applying the Science of Happiness to Life Design. How did you ever convince your business school to teach a class on happiness and how did that happen?
It took some convincing, I will admit. I will also say, it took me some time to decide that it was just as important as it is, that I would take it to the curriculum committee and offered to develop this course, based off of my years of research, the research that's in the literature. I was like, “Our students need this.” That was what I was saying is like, and I want to teach this, because this is what I've been studying and I know that I'm – in sadly, maybe I don't want to dishearten my fellow academics out there. While we write these empirical papers, not a lot of folks read them, because those are our fellow academics.
I was like, but there's so many insights that can be applied in our publications, that I was like, people could use this, could apply this, hence the title of the course, applying the science of happiness to life design. It went to the curriculum committee. I’m like, “I want to teach this course.” Then visually, they're like, “No. Why does happiness – is there a place for that at business school?” Then I was like, there is a place. I came back with data, some of which I just shared with you guys, the research that shows how it helps us in the workplace.
As we are educators of our future business leaders, we want to understand, how do we teach our students not just to have the skills to get that first job, which absolutely that is our job, but also, we want our students to succeed and thrive in their careers, both five years down the line, 10 years down the line. What that requires them to do is figure out, how do I take care of myself so I don't get burnt out, such that I continue to stay engaged, engaged in my work? Also, as they are going to have teams that are working under them, understanding how can they support the individuals within their organization, so that they, too, can thrive and be engaged and produce at their best level.
I did convince them. I will say, they are very supportive of the course now. Again, post-pandemic, or in the midst of the pandemic when all of us individually, as well as from an organizational perspective had to reckon with emotional well-being, and as organizations are trying to figure out, how do you retain your employees? How do you recruit them? With this great resignation, the client quitting, all of these things where actually, it's become – No one can ignore it anymore. I will say that UCLA Anderson got onboard with the importance of it, even before it's become so starkly needed.
A course like this, I think is important, because people often get what actually will make them happy backwards. Can you talk a little bit about the things that people think will make them happy?
Yeah. Oftentimes, the things that people think will make them happy are based off of these general notions of success. These general considerations of wants, right? If only I had a whole lot of money, then I would be not only successful, but I would be happy. If only I were super attractive. If only I met someone that the love of my life that I wanted to get married to. If only I had awesome stuff, this fancy house, fancy cars, then I would be happy. Interestingly, there's research to look at, what's the initial effect of those things on our happiness, as well as what's the lasting effect of those things on our happiness?
What you see is that a, they don't have a strong, even have an initial effect that you think. B, we adapt, so they don't have a lasting effect. Taking money, for example, money does income level, there is a relationship. The strongest relationship is actually among the low-income levels. If you aren't able to meet your basic needs, yes, absolutely, more money has an effect on your happiness, because it's reducing that worry, is reducing that stress. It's allowing you to feel sure that you will be able to pay your bills, get food on the table.
Beyond that, you see that the relationship is weaker, and significantly less strong than we expect. Then you also see, when I talked about the lasting effects, that we adapt over time. There's interesting longitudinal work that looks at, what if, based off of effect sizes, if you got a raise in your salary, like 50% raise, yes. Initially, you do see this boost in satisfaction. Within in that data, within four years, people return to their baseline.
There's a couple of reasons that it doesn't have as strong of an effect as you might think. One is social comparison. You're asking like, how satisfied are you? You have income as this very salient assessment of how you're doing in life. You're like, “Well, how am I doing compared to those around me?” As you get wealthier, the folks who are around you are also wealthier. There's always someone who is making more and better off on some of these dimensions. A lot of these dimensions, right, the ones that I said, the fancy house, attractiveness, so social comparison undermines.
Attractiveness, people are like, “Oh, man. If I’m super gorgeous, then I’d be super happy and gorgeous people must be super happy.” There is a significant effect, but it's such a small one. It is point, what I mean, not getting into statistics, it is a very small one. Also, the effect of getting married. You see that on wedding day, yes, there is this boost. Over time, people return back to baseline. Social comparison is one factor, but also hedonic adaptation. This is our tendency that when we are exposed to something again and again, or experience something again and again, we get used to it over time, such that it doesn't have as strong of an impact on our feelings.
It's good that we adapt when bad stuff happens, because it makes us resilient, right? It starts to feel as awful, as painful over time. But it's bad when good stuff happens, because we stop – it stops making us as happy over time. We can talk about this later, because I pull it in across the book to figure out, how can we offset hedonic adaptation, such that those happinesses, those joys in our daily life continue to have the effect that they could potentially have, so that we can continue to feel happy with the time that we spend on these activities that are so potentially happy, without missing out just because we're not paying attention.
Where do these perceptions, I think you called them the if onlys. Where do these perceptions of happiness come from?
Yeah. I think they come from general notions of success. I mean, being out of business school, there are notions of what success is. I think, it gets heightened in a business context. Particularly, the focus are on wealth and material possessions, but I think it is largely cultural.
Interesting. Okay. I was wondering if it's cultural, or is there a biological drive to get more stuff?
I think it’s cultural, because you see some cultures that which are less driven by stuff, by material possessions than we are within the Western – I can speak for the United States, I know. Maybe Canadians are less materialistic, but –
Yeah. We're pretty similar.
It's actually can be quite damaging for our happiness, if we are striving for these general notions of what success is. Given that those metrics of success aren't as linked to our emotional well-being and satisfaction, as folks expect they'll be. That's why I spend a lot of time in my course applying the science of happiness, life design and the book, Happier Hour, to help people figure out for themselves, what are they striving for? Whether they are ultimate goals. Not they. I mean, you as an individual, what ultimately drives you?
One of the exercises that I love in the book is this five why's exercise, which asks, so what do you do? Oftentimes, it's in the context of work. But it doesn't have to be. Folks who don't work can absolutely gain from this as well and benefit from it. What do you do? Then why is that important? Is your first level of why. Then well, that's interesting. Why is that important? Once you ask yourself the five levels, it really drills down and helps you identify for you, what really matters, what is driving it, what is your purpose?
This is really helpful, because once you identify for you, and I share my example. I'm actually going through this exercise, has proven supremely helpful for me. If you guys want to hear more concrete terms. I'm like, okay. What do I do? I am a business school professor. What is the role of that? What's the importance of it? Well, to do research, teach, and then administrative stuff. Well, why is that important? It's like, okay. Well, it's to develop knowledge and disseminate knowledge, and then the administrative stuff. Then why is that important? Well, I want to make people smart. But why smart? Then it's like, well, actually, it's about being smart about their happiness. I want people to be smart about what makes them happy. Creating knowledge about what makes people happy. Then I want them to be smart and to share the research, share the insights, so disseminating knowledge about what makes people happy.
Then with service, or in general, is helping make people happy. By me identifying for myself, that is my purpose. When I am doing tasks, I can be like, “Is this in-line with what I've set out to do?” When it does, it is so fulfilling. It is notably, my goal is very different than those around me. Actually, looking at when I'm like, how am I doing? I don't need to look at those around me, because they're striving for something different. It's very fulfilling, when you're you are accomplishing on your goal along the way. It's very clear.
It's not this general notion of like, “Oh, if only I had more. If only I were doing more.” The only parts where it's like, I want to do more and be motivated is if I am falling short of my own goal. If I'm like, “Oh, actually, I could do this to create knowledge about what makes people happy, disseminate knowledge.” It's helpful in terms of identifying where you're going to be spending your time, what are those activities that are worthwhile for your own purpose, is helpful for assessing how you're doing, your own sense of satisfaction derived from that, as well as it actually makes some ways in spending time that might not feel particularly fun in the moment.
Once you realize like, “Oh, actually, this isn't serve as – not of this general notion of being successful.” Actually, it's in service of what I'm striving for. Then it's like, okay, sure. I will, whatever. Spend an hour on email, even though it's not fun. But it allows me to work with my research team, or disseminate knowledge with my students about what makes them happy, so it makes it more feel more worthwhile.
What are the evidence-based determinants of happiness?
There are several. I would say, the biggest is a relationship. Actually, I frame all of this with respect to time. If you're looking at what are the inputs into happiness, so our natural inherited disposition is at play. Where are you born as glass half-full type person, a more cheery disposition, where you see the positive of things or not. That does have an effect. Actually, a sizeable effect on how we feel on a day-to-day in our satisfaction. Then there are these circumstances, like income level, attractiveness, marital status, that do have an effect.
As I already mentioned, they have a smaller effect than we expect. There is this other bucket that has a significant effect. That is what we do and what we're thinking about in the day-to-day. I think, given my perspective and my research, I think it's very more precisely, how do we invest the time? How do we spend our time? What are we thinking about during that time? How do we mentally approach that time?
To say that, okay, how do we invest our time? How do we engage in that time in a meaningful way? Then the question, which I don't know, which was actually, what you were asking, or this is what you're asking, is like, okay, well, then how should we be spending our time? What are the ways of spending time that have a significant positive effect on your happiness? The answer to that is, well, I have exercises to allow folks to identify for themselves, but there are very clear underlying dimensions that research shows. Social connection, genuine social connection, the extent to which you feel a sense of belonging, investing in time in ways that increase that are absolutely critical to the happiness we feel in our days, as well as our satisfaction we feel about our lives.
Then there are other ways of spending time. Actually, and I don’t know if you want me to dig deeper into this role of social connection, because I think it touches really interestingly on some of the previous questions that you guys asked, as whether these notions of contributors to happiness, and oftentimes, these notions of if only fame, or money. There was a really interesting longitudinal study conducted out of Harvard over 75 years. What they did was they tracked a cohort of men, starting in their youth. Some were Harvard students, some were living in Boston, just not Harvard students. They tracked them over the course of their lives, touching base with them and measuring, what are they doing? How are they doing?
From this, you could see, accumulating this data and looking back on their lives, the single biggest predictor of satisfaction, of happiness in their lives was not wealth, was not fame. What it was, was having strong, supportive relationships. Those relationships could come in the form of friendship, or family. It was making sure that you had relationships that were real and genuine and available to you for that support, as well as the fun of it.
All to say, investing time in people and in the relationships that you have is absolutely critical to happiness. There's also things, like exercise. Exercise, it's one of these things that we feel we don't have time for, and so we don't do. It's been shown to be a significant mood booster. It helps offset anxiety, depression. It increases our self-esteem. Being outside, spending time outside, there's really interesting geolocation data from a study out of the UK, where they would like, could at any moment could see where that individual was, and they would ping them and ask how happy they are.
What they saw was there was a significant effect of simply being outside, compared to being inside. Yes, even better if it's sunny, and even better if you're in a natural environment, versus an urban environment. Simply being outside had a significant positive effect. Yet, we’re inside 85% of the time, according to their data. I'm sure it depends on where you live.
Wow. Interesting. Is the longitudinal study, is that the Harvard one?
The longitudinal study, yes. It’s the Harvard adult development.
Right. Okay. You mentioned, there’s the biological set-point, there's the stable circumstances, and then there's how you spend your time. Then within how you spend your time, investing in social relationships is the most important.
It does have, I would say, the most important. But then, there's these others, like of doing things that contribute to your sense of – so pulling from self-determination theory, which is that our primary drivers are relatedness, or our relationships, so we've talked about that. There's also competence, so the extent to which we feel like we are successful at achieving our goals. And agency, the extent to which we feel we have some say, or control in how we dedicate our efforts and time.
Competence, that's where picking up on this role of purpose, which I talked about before, that, to the extent that you are able to identify, perhaps using the five why's exercise, what is it that ultimately drives you? Then you're spending ways, time on activities that help you fulfill those goals. That time is also really fulfilling. This is actually when pulling in the idea of fulfillment. Spending time in ways that you feel you are working towards your goals. Oftentimes, this requires quieting outside distractions.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, he termed this as flow of when you are immersed in a state that is using your skills, and is intrinsically motivating, so aligned with your purpose, and you are not distracted, it's like, you lose your sense of time, you are so engaged. In these states of flow, you really create at your best. You’re performing at your best. When you come out of those states, it's so satisfying, and so fulfilling. To the extent that you are investing your time on activities that allow you to feel that way, are really, in those worthwhile ways are important. Yet, another activity that I think are exercise that I absolutely encourage folks to do, and which I talked about in detail how to do this is time tracking, so that you can identify for yourself.
Over the course of one to two weeks, I say two weeks, just because it gives you a more complete representation of the types of activities that will fill your time. Even if it's one week, because it's tedious to do, but it's worthwhile, is writing down every half hour, what are you doing? Or what have you done? Not just these broad ideas, or categories of work, family, but being more specific. You can pull out, what are the work activities for me? It's like, working on writing my book, versus going to a faculty meeting. Those are both work, but experience very differently.
In addition to writing down the activity is rating on a 10-point scale, how did that activity make you feel? That 10-point scale is picking up satisfaction, picking up enjoyment, picking up fulfillment. What's really cool about at the end of the week, you have this amazing data set that's personalized just for you, so you can pull out and identify, what are those activities that got your highest ratings? What are the underlying dimensions of those happiest activities? You'll see very likely, that it's about social connection, that is about activities that help you feel a sense of purpose, or life satisfaction from achieving whatever goal that you have.
Also, exercise. Interestingly, with exercise, oftentimes, you'll see that, yes, maybe you felt good during it. Also, you can pick up on the carryover effects on subsequent activities. You can see ratings of even with sleep. On days when you've worked out in the morning, you've gotten a good night's sleep, you'll probably see on average, your ratings across that next day are higher. From that exercise, you can also pull out, what are those activities that get your lowest ratings? You can also see just how much time you're spending across your various activities. You can pick out, what are potentially ways you're wasting your time, that if you're spending a whole lot of time on something that is not all that necessary, and they're getting middling ratings, according to you, then that helps you figure out, how can you reallocate away from the wasted time, invest more in those worthwhile, and by worthwhile, it's according to you, those activities that made you feel the enjoyment, maybe feel satisfied, maybe feel fulfilled.
Yes, there's research that can speak to, on average, what are the types of activities that are more worthwhile, but I think even more hopefully, is for you to collect your data. You can identify those activities, or those dimensions across activities that are most worthwhile.
So to what extent is being happy a decision that people make, as opposed to a natural state of being your natural disposition?
It's both. But, one we have control over and one we don't. We have our natural disposition. If you're lucky, or unlucky, and we don't have a lot of control over that. The thing that we all have control over, no matter where our natural disposition puts us along the continuum, is how we spend our time, how we engage in that time. That's the part that I'm really excited about and have been researching and wrote a book and teaching a course of helping, no matter what your starting point is, how can you invest to feel better in your days and more satisfied about your life? We do have choice. It just takes understanding initially and reflection, as well as knowledge from the data and the inputs.
Also, it takes practice. It requires not just knowing what are those activities that are most worthwhile for you, but actually, spending the time, investing the time, making the time for, protecting time for those activities that are worthwhile.
Does someone's natural disposition change over time?
No, that's the baseline. You do see age effects, but that’s picking up across average is like, you got the distribution of folks along their natural disposition. You do see that across the population, there are patterns with respect to age. We've done, or I've done this research as well to look at how does age influence how we experience happiness, as well as the types of experiences that elicit happiness. We have found, for instance, that in terms of how people experience happiness, younger people tend to experience, or associate happiness more with excitement and that loud happiness.
As people get older, it becomes more about calm contentment. This plays into firstly, is the types of experiences that elicit greater happiness. Younger people, we looked at, what's the happiness that people enjoy from extraordinary experiences, versus ordinary experiences? Extraordinary experiences being those, life milestones, once in a lifetime vacations, going out to exciting concerts, or going to the best restaurant in the world type things. Versus the ordinary experiences, which are those simple moments shared with a loved one, whether it's a friend, family member, or pet, often shows up in the data, enjoying a treat, noticing your beautiful surroundings, a sunrise, or sunset.
What we found was that among younger people, they tend to experience greater happiness from extraordinary experiences compared to ordinary experiences. What was really interesting is as people get older, they experience greater happiness and increasing amount of happiness from those ordinary experiences, such that among are older, and if you're doing a median split on the data, that older folks experience as much happiness from these ordinary, simple moments, as they do extraordinary experiences, which is really important. The reason it's important because it highlights how much happiness is available to us, without a lot of money, without traveling the world, or going to eat at the best restaurant in the world, or whatever it is, that there's a lot of potential happiness right there in our day-to-day, everyday life.
What we also found is when we made young people recognize that their time in life is limited, just like older people naturally do. As people age, they start recognizing that their time in life is limited, because it is becoming more limited and therefore, salient. When we make young people recognize that their time in life is also limited, then you see that they start to savour more. They notice those simple pleasures and moments and enjoy as much happiness from them.
I mean, this is a big point that I make in the book is that there's a lot of happiness available to us in the day-to-day, in our mundane, ordinary moments, that it's so easy, and we so tend to miss, just because we're not paying attention, because we're distracted. Research shows that we are distracted almost 50% of the time. If we're not paying attention half the time to what we're doing, of course, we're going to miss the moments that we're spending. Yes.
I was going to ask if then, young people should do the trip around the world, like you mentioned when they're younger, but it sounds like, maybe they should just remind themselves that they're going to die and not take a trip around the world.
I will say, the trips around the world, the extraordinary experiences do produce a lot of happiness, irrespective of age. You see that is high across age. It's just that ordinary experiences to offer happiness. If you don't have access to the trip around the world, then also, recognize that you can look right around you and enjoy happiness.
Would it still make sense to say then that if someone was going to do a trip around the world, or whatever other big awe-inducing experience, it's better to do that when they're younger?
No, actually. Because you don't see a decrease in the happiness from extraordinary. It’s just the catching up of the ordinary.
Oh, interesting.
Got you.
Cool. Glad I asked about that.
Yeah. I don't want to dissuade you from the trip around the world, because that will be exciting and it will be happy, no matter how old you are. Then in the days around, you trip around the world, paying attention to what's in your day to day life, so that you can also be feeling happy during that time.
You don't need to dissuade me, I don't like traveling anyways. I want to come back for a second to the natural state idea, when you're talking about that earlier. Would it make sense to say that within a group of people, differences in happiness will be partially explained by their whatever inheritable characteristics. For an individual person, that almost becomes irrelevant, because the actions will influence you relative to your own set point? Does that make sense?
Absolutely. Yeah. That's totally right. That's, again, I touched on it earlier, when I talked about the title of the book, Happier Hour.
Oh, I see.
It's for you individually. How can you spend your time and how can you shift your mindset, so that you can feel happier, as happy as you can, irrespective of those around you? It's actually for happiness. You should not be – One trick to feel happier is not to be looking at those around you to assess how you're doing. Social comparison undermines happiness, even in those rare cases where you're like, “Oh, I must be doing fine,” because they're doing worse off. We're actually more sensitive and pay more attention to those who are doing better than us. Don't look to those around you to assess how you're doing. Your goal, each of our goals is to be happier, as happy as we individually can be. We have choice in that.
That's super insightful. You talked earlier about the importance of relationships. This may sound like a silly question, but what constitutes a relationship from that perspective?
Yeah. It's really that underlying sense of social connection. Going back to why the time tracking research is so helpful, is that there are individual differences, and what types of activities really give you that sense of social connection. Just using me versus my son as an example. I am an introvert. My sense of social connection absolutely comes from a one-on-one conversation with someone. His sense of social connection comes from being in a group of people. In terms of a sense of closeness with another individual, that is based off of — and one of the exercises that I have my students do, and I describe in the book, is this relationship closeness induction task, which is a series of questions that go from most basic, the types of questions — and it's only a 15-minute task or exercise.
But from it, people feel significantly closer, and they are a friend of the other person, even if they started off as strangers. What it is is the first set of questions are these like, what’s your name? What do you do? The things that typically are the things that people talk about at a cocktail party. Those are the things that make us feel close and connected. You then move on to the next set of questions for five minutes, where it is like, how do you to spend your time? It's about your daily experience, and you can have people reflect on their experiences. It's these questions that are deeper. Then the last set of questions is where you really get that sense of connection, where it's like, what was your favourite childhood memory? What are you really proud of? What's a big fear?
It's not just your experience, but it's also your emotional experience. What you see in this is this reciprocal and escalating self-disclosure. Reciprocal, because these questions, I ask, you answer. Then you ask me and I answer. It's a two-way street. Both have to be listening, as well as disclosing. The increasing disclosure, the personal nature of it is where you get that sense of closeness.
For when I talked about the Harvard adult development study, at the end of the life, having strong supportive relationships, it is having people that know you, and you feel known by, and that care about you and you feel cared for by. Those are those strong relationships, close relationships. Again, there's individual differences in a general sense of connection and belonging that happens. There's some variation on whether it's few people, like one person, or what settings propelled that.
It's a little bit subjective. It almost sounds weird to ask, because it's over-engineering social relationships. Do you think people should be conscious of whether they're getting that if they're investing time in relationships?
Totally. Yeah. Because it's both from the relationships. If you're spending a lot of time with someone, and it doesn't feel great, so there's also work that shows that there are these toxic friendships that have a very negative effect. Actually, the effect is stronger, because as we all know, or as it shows up in so many different contexts, we are more sensitive to negative inputs than we are to positive inputs.
Removing those toxic relationships that every time you spend time with this person, you come away feeling lousy, don't spend the time. Also, within the types of activities, if you're looking at your time tracking data, for instance, and you're like, “Oh, these are social.” It's like, as an example, if I go to lunch with my colleagues, it's a group of eight colleagues, versus I go to coffee with one colleague, and I can look at my ratings. From that, I'm like, “Oh, wow, those lunches with the groups, for me personally, no sense of social connection.” But they do require – that took an hour of my time.
Whereas, my coffee with the individual colleague I've hung out and I'm feeling super connected, super happy, that's really informative. It's not to say that the other colleagues at the lunch is just to say, I need to make time for me with each one of those colleagues individually, instead of in a group setting. Again, the time tracking exercise and the way that you can analyze or make sense and find patterns in your own data is so insightful.
Can you talk about the relationship between discretionary time and happiness?
Yeah. This is stemming from personal experience, that I shared it in motivating the book and motivating Happier Hour. It was from me feeling like, I just didn't have enough time. There was this very salient day, or night earlier in my career, when I was still living in Philly, on the faculty of Wharton and I had gotten up that day to give a talk in New York. My presentation was sandwiched within these back-to-back meetings. Then I'm rushing to a network and all your colleague dinner. Rushing to get the very last train that would get me home to my four-month-old, and my husband back in Philly.
I did make the train, but as I was sitting on a train that night, looking out the window, everything was rushing by. I was so exhausted and felt so defeated. I’m like, I don't know if I can keep up, between the pressures of work, the trying to be a good parent, trying to be a good partner, trying to be a good – that never ending palette of chores, there simply weren't enough hours in the day to get it all done, let alone to do any of it well. Let alone to enjoy any of it along the way. I'm like, I know what I need. I need a whole lot of discretionary time. To do that, I should quit my job and move to a sunny island somewhere.
Because with this idea, which I'm sure so many in those crazy days can relate to is like, “Oh, maybe I need to quit. If I had a whole lot more time, I'd be a whole lot happier.” Before I quit my dream job, we tested this. With some of my favourite collaborators, Hal Hershfield, and Marissa Sharif, we tested what's the relationship between the amount of discretionary time that folks have and their happiness. Across studies, one of the things that we did was we analyzed data from the American Time Use Survey, which captures for tens of thousands of working and non-working Americans, how they spent the hours of a regular day.
From that, we calculated how much time they spent on discretionary activities and their happiness. We saw this really interesting pattern, which was an upside-down U-shape. It was a negative quadratic relationship, like an arc, or a rainbow. On the one side, you saw that in this data set, folks with less than approximately two hours of discretionary time in a day were less happy. That was me on the train that night. That was all of you, whom I'm sure relate to that feeling of not having enough time, and being stressed about it.
What was really interesting was the other side of the arc, where we saw that in this data set, those with more than approximately five hours of discretionary time in this regular day were also less happy. What this suggests is there's actually such a thing as having too much time. Not only is it that maybe more time doesn't continue, like more and more isn't better. Actually, there is such thing as too much.
Digging into that, what our data and additional studies suggest is that we are driven to be productive. We are averse to being idle. When we spend hours upon hours of our days with nothing to show for those hours, we feel less productive. It undermines our sense of purpose. From that, we feel dissatisfied. I think, this is a really important thing for folks to keep in mind, that it's not that having a whole lot of discretionary time is the answer to happiness. Maybe folks can relate to that. On the first day of your beach vacation, it is quite decadent, and maybe even second, the third. The fourth morning you wake up, or speaking for myself, that fourth morning, I’m like, “All right, guys. What are we going to do today?” I'm like, “Enough of this sitting around. Let's do stuff.”
With that, you can pick up on the psychology of this, that we don't want to be overly busy. We don't want our days to just be full with these, often in cases, not necessarily worthwhile, but just full. What we want is our days – so we don't want to look back and just be depleted. What we want us to look back, and even if we're somewhat busy, that we look back and feel fulfilled, right? Really, it's not about how much time you have available. It's really how you invest the time you have. That's actually what propelled — I did not quit my job. Instead, I actually shifted my research agenda to figure out, okay, so it's not about how much time. How do we spend it? That's what motivated my subsequent research, as well as developing the course, as well as Happier Hour is okay, how should we be investing this resource that we do have that is limited? Absolutely, it is limited, both in our days as well as in our lives.
It's not just a problem, because this is this resource that we get to invest and this is the life that we're living, how we spend our hours add up to our days, or years and our life overall. It's absolutely critical that we figure out how we allocate, how we invest the hours that we have, so that we feel happier during them, and we reflect on them with greater satisfaction and happiness.
Did you say the optimal amount of discretionary time is two hours per day?
In this particular data set, we saw that between two and five hours, it was flat. There's this pretty wide swath. What's interesting about that two hours, and I don't want everyone to be like, hang their hat on that specific number. It does say, I think it's actually helpful, because two hours at the face of it initially was like, there's no way. I do not. There's no way I would have two hours in a regular workday to do whatever I wanted. Actually, looking into how I spent even during those days of having my four-month-old and being an assistant professor at Wharton, even within those days, it's like, okay, well, I spend 20 minutes in the morning cuddling with my little die.
As I’m walking home, I'm on the phone with my best friend for another half hour. Sure, I would prefer to be sitting over a glass of wine with her while talking, but I'm still getting that connection with her. Having dinner with my husband is adding it up. I was like, even at that time, where I felt I had no time. It’s like, actually, I have about an hour and a half in my day, even a regular day, that was absolutely joyful. I wouldn't have wanted to spend those 90 minutes in any other way. With those, actually, two hours, isn't totally out of reach.
Again, I don't want folks to hang their hat on the two hours. It does suggest – I'm actually pulling from some of the other insights and results of the book, that it isn't so much about how much time you spend on your various activities. It's really making sure that you get the most of those hours, the most of that time. Even the joyful – I talked about the role of distraction, and the happiness from ordinary moments. If you are spending your time, even on those busiest days, on these activities that there's a lot of happiness right there available for you, make sure that you're paying attention that you don't miss out, so that those minutes have a significant effect on how happy you feel overall.
You talked earlier about the best ways to use time. Are there worst ways to use time?
Yeah. This, again, can get easily identified in your time tracking exercise and your personal data. There are worst ways to spending time. Actually, picking back to up on those drives from self-determination theory of relatedness. If you're spending time in a way that works that, if you spend your time in a way that actually makes you feel lonely, that's bad. Social media is one of the activities that research has shown, can actually increase sense of loneliness. Because what you're doing, particularly – There's also differences in, in use of social media, if you use it passively to watch other people's lives, you have negative effects. If you actually use it actively to connect with others and engage with those others that are in your life that you have relationships with, then it actually has positive effects.
Passively looking at other people's lives, which is the majority of the time spent on social media, that actually increases sense of loneliness, because you're watching them. You're not interacting with them. You feel like you're missing out. Things that make you feel incompetent, burden, don't give you a sense of agency. Things that feel like a waste. Commuting, research shows that for the average person, hours spent commuting are among the least happy, because they feel like a waste. You're just trying to get through that time and it feels like a waste.
For many, work hours feel unhappy. I think that's because for many, it's undermining a sense of agency. It feels like an obligation. It's not, if you haven't done the work to identify what pieces of your job are in line with your purpose, then it also feels like a waste. With the pandemic, we're not in the same space as our colleagues anymore. We don't get that social connection, those friendships that traditionally were available to us and cultivated through our time at work. Housework, an obligation, not fun.
There are ways of spending time that are not positive. Then the question is, okay, some of those are necessary, and some of those are not. Unnecessary, social media. But necessary is household chores and parts of your work. I share, it's helpful to identify that unnecessary, because hopefully, with that intentionality, you just spend less time on those activities. You minimize the waste. For the unnecessary ones, I share strategies of how to make them feel less wasteful and more worthwhile.
For instance, one strategy that's super helpful, that's coming out of research by Katy Milkman and colleagues, it's such a simple idea, but has a big effect, is bundling. Taking this unfun activity, like commuting, bundling it was something that is totally fun, like listening to the Rational Reminder Podcast, or listening to the audiobook of Happier Hour beats ways of spending time that – or calling your friend on the phone. These are ways to make the time, you're learning something, you're feeling a sense of connection. It's enriching. All of a sudden, that time you spent that felt like a waste commuting, or while folding laundry, for instance, all of a sudden, feels more worthwhile. You can make those wasteful ways feel more worthwhile and therefore, happier.
Is the best way to avoid time-poverty, simply saying no to requests?
It's saying no to particular requests. This is touching back to the five why's exercise. Once you identify your purpose, and even looking at your time tracking data, and know whether those ways of spending time that actually do make you feel happy, using those as filters, these incoming requests are incessant. Often, it feels easier to say yes than no in that moment. The cost of saying yes is high, because then you're experiencing those days overcommitted to things that aren't even fun, or even worthwhile. You've wasted entire days, even though you've been really busy in these obligations.
Use of filter. It's not saying no to everything. It is saying no to those incoming requests that are not in service of your purpose, or in-line with your purpose, and which you know that you're not going to have fun doing them. Anyway, so using those filters is a very effective way. It's super important, because there's interesting work. The effect, I love the name of the effect, because it highlights is the yes, damn effect. We think, we always think that we will have more time in a month from now than we have today. We're like, we say yes to things for a month from now, because we're like, “Oh, I won't be as busy then as I am today.” But there's no way in heck that I would say yes to it if I was asked today, because I'm so busy.
A month from now, it's just like today where you end up being really busy. You say yes. Then a month later you're like, “Dammit, I shouldn't have said yes.” Recognizing that while we think we will have more time in the future available to us, we will not. Use that also as a way of for an incoming request, would I be happy to say yes to do it today? That's a good gauge of whether you will be happy a month from now when you're actually faced with the time to do it. You don't say no to everything, but you are use these filters to figure out what you should say yes to. Then you do say no to everything else.
You talked earlier about productivity and feeling productive, being good. Can productivity become too much of a focus?
Yes. We want to feel productive. We're driven to feel productive. Because, it's like, to feel satisfied, we need to feel somewhat productive. When you then shift productivity to be the goal, then that you become hyper-focused on that, losing sense of these other contributors to your ultimate satisfaction. What's also interesting is in our culture, when productivity, and that sense of urgency of always doing replaces what’s really important.
Being productive is like checking stuff off your list. Efficiency is checking them off even faster. That doesn't incorporate what is actually important. What are those activities that are most worthwhile? What I would suggest is a paradigm shift away from efficiency towards what's worthwhile, so that when if you're being productive and checking things off the list, that these are things that are really worthwhile spending your time on in the first place.
Yes, I'm not saying be unproductive and not – as I said, I'm not suggesting quit your job and go relax on the beach. But, just being busy, just getting things done isn't the source of satisfaction. It is getting things done that are activities are in-line with your goals and what matters to you. One of the most impactful exercises, well, I actually love all the exercises, but a very impactful one is actually one that helps identify, what is important even, rather than just what’s for sure?
That is writing your own eulogy. Chainmail, sounds and texts, and it is. What it is leading one to do is projecting forward to the end of their life and looking back, and how do you want to be remembered? What legacy do you want to leave? Yeah, what do you want people to say about you? What are those three words that you want people to say upon your passing?
This is actually not an exercise about death. It is absolutely an exercise about life. It is what is the life that you want to live? From writing that, what the highlights is, what's important to you? What are your values? What is your purpose? Understanding those higher-level things that are important. Thinking about your life overall informs how you spend your subsequent hours, so that you aren't just thinking about what's urgent in these incoming requests, irrespective of their importance. Instead, you're thinking about, is this important? Is this worthwhile? For me, what matters to me? Including the relationships, including your purpose driven passions.
What about work? How important is aligning your five why's, or your purpose with your employers?
I think, there's a slight nuance in that, that it doesn't have to be aligned with your employers, but it should be aligned with the work that you do. Finding out what drives you, and how does the work, even activities within your work, contribute to that. It doesn't necessarily have to be aligned with what the mission of the company is, or even your boss. But it is, to the extent – I mean, we spend – if you're working a full-time job, you're spending about a third of your waking life working. What you don't want to do is just try to get through those hours. It's like, “Oh, I'm not. What is it? Working to live.” Whatever. Living to work, whatever. You don't want to be just trying to get through the work hours in order to live your life, because this is your life. These are hours in your life.
You do want to make sure that also within your workday, within your day, the hours outside of your workday, across those, you want to be thinking about what's worthwhile and what's waste. It doesn't necessarily have to align with your boss, or your organization.
We've done a considerable amount of research on working from home and working asynchronously, for example. You talked about the importance of relationships, flow, distractions, commuting, and how that can affect happiness. How's the shift towards working from home affected happiness?
Yeah. You see in some dimensions, it's good. Then overall, you see the accumulating hits on emotional well-being. It's good that since I mentioned previously that hours spent commuting are among people's least happy. We have, if you're working from home, move that place. What's really been missed, and again, you're starting to see the big effects of this is that connection, that social connection.
Sure, when you see your colleagues on a Zoom and all of them, you're like, “Oh, I see you, guys.” But you don't. You're not having those conversations that forge friendship. There's this interesting question in a previous Gallup poll, which sounds silly, but in actuality is really critical is, do you have a best friend at work? Though most people say no, those that say yes are significantly more engaged. They're better performers. They're more satisfied in their jobs and a big predictor of life satisfaction is actually job satisfaction.
Going again, it's not okay to get through your day. You're like, “It's okay If I'm unhappy at work.” That's not actually true. Because your job satisfaction, how happy you are during those hours and about your work carries over to influence how satisfied and happy you are in your life overall. In this work from home environment, those having a best friend, even making a friendship, a lot of people have changed jobs and joined organizations during this time. There's no way they're going to make a new friend in those setting to work.
Even for those who have friendships already, those friendships don't get cultivated, or fostered. You lose that sense of friendship. I mean, if you're talking about retention, the thing that retains people is that they feel like they're spending their workdays, their hours during the day with friends. If you don't have that, then there's not a lot that's going to keep you, other than the paycheck, which is extrinsically motivating, but intrinsically. Then yeah. It's this plus and minus.
Also, we talk about the role of distraction, and agency. When it's time, it's become clear how important it is that people carve out time that is not on these Zoom calls, so that they can actually get the work done. They carve out time, even though their work computer is in the space of their home, that doesn't mean that folks should always be working. There should be delineating and specifying that I am not at work right now. I am going to disconnect from that to fully connect and that that reprieve and rest and the break that one needs, so that they can reengage fully when they get back to work.
You talked about a couple of them briefly. What do you think the most impactful assignment that you give to your students is?
Yeah. I mean, I've talked about several of them. I will just point out again, for reflection and insight and to time spending, I always say, the time tracking exercise. To help identify what's important to you, the five why's exercise, the eulogy exercise, and one that I haven't talked about, but which picks up on some of our earlier conversation is you're counting times left exercise. This is something that is really important to recognize just how precious our time is, so that we don't miss out, so that we aren't subject to hedonic adaptation on these potential opportunities of joy.
In this exercise, what I urge you to do is reflecting back over the last couple weeks, what is it, activity that brought you joy that you loved doing? Oftentimes, this is a very everyday mundane experience. The next, and so using again, myself as an example, and this is helpful, because it's like, even in those busiest weeks, I can absolutely identify experiences that brought me joy. My coffee day with my daughter, Lita. This is something that we do once a week. It's very typical, regular. The next step is to calculate, how many times have you done this activity in the past? I percolate with Lita, so during my maternity leave, I would bundle up and take her to the coffee shop, which I called it as a coffee date, because I needed to get out of the house and that was my source of joy.
Then our weekly one, since it's been the two of us, time together, just the two of us, we go to the coffee shop, she gets her hot chocolate, I get my latte. We get croissants. I've heard that in our life so far, we've done about 400 coffee dates. Then the next step is calculate, how many times in the future will you do this activity? I calculate it. Okay, accommodate. You have to accommodate for changes in your circumstances. If your moment of joy involves another, which it often does, but it doesn't have to be like, talking to your dog, or reading a book on in that comfy part of your room, but accounting for changes in if there is another person involved, changes in their circumstances.
I calculated for Lita, so she's seven, I’m like, five years, she's probably going to want to go to the coffee shop with her friends, instead of me. Then she's going to go off to college, and then she's probably going to live somewhere that is not where we live. I calculated that we have about 230 coffee dates left together. Then the last step is to calculate all of your total times doing this activity that you love. What percentage do you have left? I calculated that we have about 35% of our coffee days for that. That's less than half, and she's seven.
What does the observation do? Well, it motivates me to make the time, to protect the time, to carve out time for this 30 minutes with my daughter. It also makes me pay attention during that time. These are precious minutes. Phone goes away. That constant to-do lists that's running through my mind quieted, because these are precious minutes. It highlights, yes, it's important, but this highlights that it is also urgent, which typically, we don't feel like these things are urgent. We assume they will always be there. It's so important. That's why I think this exercise is so impactful, is again, because it's not just the activities that we spend our time on, it's how we spend that time during those activities, so that the minutes that we spend, in this case, 30 minutes, colours how I spend the rest of the week.
We look forward to the time, we would reflect back on this time. When you ask me how happy I am, how satisfied I am in my life, I can say, very, because I have this sense of connection. We talked about that important role of connection. I have this amazing relationship with my daughter. Yes, I spend more time with her outside of it, but it's really this crucial time that is grounding that relationship. Again, it's not about how much time you have, or even how much time you spend on your various activities. It's absolutely how you engage in it, so that you make those hours have as big of an impact as possible on how you reflect back on your weeks, how you think about your life overall.
Cassie, this has been great. We have one final question for you. How do you define success in your life?
That is, I create and disseminate knowledge about what makes people happy and make those around me happy, then success.
Awesome. This has been a great conversation. Thanks so much, Cassie, for joining us.
Thank you so much for having me. It's been fun.
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