Why You Should Treasure Apparently Mundane Moments in Life (M)
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Category: Happiness
This Much Spare Time Makes You Happiest
It is possible to have too much free time for your mental health.
It is possible to have too much free time for your mental health.
When people have about two hours spare time each day they are happiest, a fascinating study finds.
People with between two and five hours spare time a day are equally happy as those with two hours spare.
This suggests that the ‘time poor’ should try and carve out around two hours of free time each day to increase their happiness.
People who have seven hours spare time each day, though, are markedly less happy and satisfied with their lives than those with two hours spare.
This may partly be because people with too much time feel unproductive due to wasting it.
The solution to too much free time is finding and pursuing a purpose.
When people feel purposeful, it makes them happier.
Too busy to enjoy yourself
The findings contradict what many people might imagine: that more spare time is always linked to happiness.
While having two hours is much better than one hour or none, more than this is not linked to higher levels of happiness.
Dr Marissa Sharif, the study’s first author, said:
“People often complain about being too busy and express wanting more time.
But is more time actually linked to greater happiness?
We found that having a dearth of discretionary hours in one’s day results in greater stress and lower subjective well-being.
However, while too little time is bad, having more time is not always better.”
The results come firstly from a set of surveys in which the associations between free time and happiness among thousands of Americans were tested.
These clearly showed that some free time was linked to more happiness, but only up to a point.
Secondly, in a set of experiments people were asked to imagine they had a low (15 minutes), moderate (3.5 hours) or high (7 hours) amount of free time each day.
The results showed that people felt happiest and more productive with a moderate amount of free time each day — around 3.5 hours, or so.
Low amounts of free time were linked to feeling stressed and high amounts to engaging in unproductive activities like watching television and using the computer.
Dr Sharif said:
“Though our investigation centered on the relationship between amount of discretionary time and subjective well-being, our additional exploration into how individuals spend their discretionary time proved revealing.
Our findings suggest that ending up with entire days free to fill at one’s discretion may leave one similarly unhappy.
People should instead strive for having a moderate amount of free time to spend how they want.
In cases when people do find themselves with excessive amounts of discretionary time, such as retirement or having left a job, our results suggest these individuals would benefit from spending their newfound time with purpose.”
Related
The study was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (Sharif et al., 2021).
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How To Get A Bigger Buzz From Upbeat Music
How you can get that beautiful chills-down-the-spine feeling.
How you can get that beautiful chills-down-the-spine feeling.
Upbeat music sounds better when you make a concerted effort to enjoy it, rather than just listening passively.
While many people let music flow over them; making the effort to enhance your emotions can be an incredibly rewarding experience.
Across two studies, researchers looked at the effect of music on positive emotions.
In one experiment, people visited a lab five times over two weeks to listen to music they’d selected for 15 minutes:
- Half were told to just listen to the music and not think about their happiness.
- The other half were told to try and feel happier and think about their happiness.
Although both groups said they’d enjoyed the music equally, it was the group that tried to feel happier that actually felt happier after the two weeks.
Another experiment confirmed the results, with participants listening to upbeat music, and trying to make themselves happy, feeling better than those who just listened passively.
Crucially, though, trying to make yourself happier only worked when the music was upbeat.
The study’s lead author, Yuna Ferguson, pointed out a pitfall with actively seeking happiness from music.
She counsels against continually asking yourself “Am I happy?”:
“Rather than focusing on how much happiness they’ve gained and engaging in that kind of mental calculation, people could focus more on enjoying their experience of the journey towards happiness and not get hung up on the destination.”
The study’s co-author, Professor Kennon Sheldon, said the study demonstrates our potential to change our own levels of happiness:
“…we can intentionally seek to make mental changes leading to new positive experiences of life.
The fact that we’re aware we’re doing this, has no detrimental effect.”
Why not try it right now with your own favourites, or one of the upbeat pieces of classical music used in the study (Aaron Copland’s ‘Hoe-Down’ from the ballet ‘Rodeo’):
Related
The study was published in The Journal of Positive Psychology (Ferguson & Sheldon, 2013).
2 Personality Traits That Predict Happiness
Two personality traits that lead to a happier and more satisfying life.
Two personality traits that lead to a happier and more satisfying life.
Young adults who are more outgoing go on to lead happier lives.
Being more emotional stable also predicts happiness in later life, psychologists discovered.
The study looked at data from 2,529 people born in 1946.
They first answered a series of questions about their personalities at 16 and 26-years-of age.
Forty years later, in their early sixties, they were asked about their well-being and satisfaction with life.
Dr Catharine Gale, the study’s first author, explained the results:
“We found that extroversion in youth had direct, positive effects on wellbeing and life satisfaction in later life.
Neuroticism, in contrast, had a negative impact, largely because it tends to make people more susceptible to feelings of anxiety and depression and to physical health problems.”
High extroversion is linked to being more sociable, having more energy and preferring to stay active.
High neuroticism is linked to being distractible, moody and having low emotional stability.
Increased extroversion was directly linked to more happiness.
Greater neuroticism, meanwhile, was linked to less happiness via a susceptibility to psychological distress.
Dr Gale said:
“Understanding what determines how happy people feel in later life is of particular interest because there is good evidence that happier people tend to live longer.
In this study we found that levels of neuroticism and extroversion measured over 40 years earlier were strongly predictive of well-being and life satisfaction in older men and women.
Personality in youth appears to have an enduring influence on happiness decades later.”
The study was published in the Journal of Research in Personality (Gale et al., 2013).
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