Everybody loves the weekend. Everybody needs a break. So check out How Can You Make Your Weekends More Awesome, by Eric Barker;
What’s the research have to say about making Friday through Sunday that much better…?
For The Most Part, Don’t Trust Your Instincts
Ever eat or drink too much, feel awful, then do it again… and feel awful again? As counterintuitive as it may sound, we’re actually pretty bad about remembering what really makes us happy.
Reading Harvard happiness expert Daniel Gilbert’s bestselling book Stumbling on Happiness my main takeaway was this:
"Much of our unhappiness springs from the fact that we’re terrible at accurately remembering how things made us feel in the past, so we make bad choices regarding the future."
In Gilbert’s own words (and backed up by many studies):
"We overestimate how happy we will be on our birthdays, we underestimate how happy we will be on Monday mornings, and we make these mundane but erroneous predictions again and again, despite their regular disconfirmation."
When most of us have leisure time, do we do what truly makes us happy or do we opt for what’s easy? Easy wins it most of the time.
Via The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work:
"Studies have found that American teenagers are two and half times more likely to experience elevated enjoyment when engaged in a hobby than when watching TV, and three times more likely when playing a sport. And yet here’s the paradox: These same teenagers spend four times as many hours watching TV as they do engaging in sports or hobbies. So what gives? Or, as psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi put it more eloquently, “Why would we spend four times more time doing something that has less than half the chance of making us feel good?” The answer is that we are drawn—powerfully, magnetically—to those things that are easy, convenient, and habitual, and it is incredibly difficult to overcome this inertia. Active leisure is more enjoyable, but it almost always requires more initial effort—getting the bike out of the garage, driving to the museum, tuning the guitar, and so on."
The things we frequently choose to reduce stress are often the least effective:
Via The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do To Get More of It:
"The APA’s national survey on stress found that the most commonly used strategies were also rated as highly ineffective by the same people who reported using them. For example, only 16 percent of people who eat to reduce stress report that it actually helps them. Another study found that women are most likely to eat chocolate when they are feeling anxious or depressed, but the only reliable change in mood they experience from their drug of choice is an increase in guilt."
So What Works?
Spending time with friends on the weekends definitely helps:
"A large portion of the weekend effects is explained by differences in the amount of time spent with friends or family between weekends and weekdays (7.1 vs. 5.4 hours). The extra daily social time of 1.7 hours in weekends raises average happiness by about 2%."
But you knew that already. What are we missing?
