You can be happy without changing your life | Cassie Holmes | TEDxManhattanBeach

Time Time is essential because the way you spend the hours of

your

days is summed up in the years of

your

life

. I'm a happiness professor and I study time, which is kind of ironic because for my personal happiness time turned out to be the most important factor. barrier I remember one day before my career, when I was an assistant professor at Wharton, I had traveled to New York to give a talk and that day, like so many others, was just crazy and hectic, my presentation was sandwiched between meetings that I am running from to dinner with this colleague and then frantically running to the train station to catch the last train that would take me home to my four-month-old son and my sleeping husband in Philadelphia.

Now I took the train that night, but I remember it so vividly. sinking into my seat totally exhausted and leaning my forehead against the glass looking at the night lights while I was like I don't know if I can keep up Between the pressures of work wanting to be a good father wanting to be a good partner a good friend, the endless pile of chores, there just weren't enough hours in the day to do it all, let alone do it well, let alone enjoy it along the way, and I wanted more time, not just so I could do more. fact I wanted more time so I could slow down and really experience the hours I spent so that my entire

life

didn't end up passing me by.

In this blur, I now know that what I was experiencing is time poverty, which is defined as the acute feeling of having too much to do and not enough time to do it, even if you haven't heard this term before. I suspect you know exactly what I'm talking about. by freehand. How many of you agree with this statement? Many of us never seem to have enough time to do everything, and we're not alone. My research team conducted a national survey that showed nearly half of Americans feel this way, and it's not just us in the US, people all over the world.

I was suffering from a hectic pace of life with very little time and that night on the train, when I was feeling very short of time and not

happy

, I came to the conclusion that there was an obvious solution: I needed to quit my job and move to a sunny island somewhere right because with all the hours in my days to relax and do whatever I wanted, I would surely be happier, but then I thought: "It's true that people who have a lot more time are happier and this is a question empirical and one that I could try and probably should try before telling my boss that I quit and my husband that we should pack our bags for life on the beach, so I recruited a couple of my favorite collaborators and together we examined what the relationship between the amount of discretionary time people have and their happiness and through studies including an analysis of the American Time Use Survey that captures how tens of thousands of working and non-working Americans spent a typical day, we found A consistent pattern of results and it looked like it was an upside down U shape like an arch or a rainbow, this is interesting because it shows that happiness decreases at both ends of the spectrum.

Yes, very time-poor people, those with less than about 2 hours of discretionary time in the day, were less

happy

, but this. It didn't surprise me because I knew all about the high level of stress that comes from having little time, it was this other side that surprised those with more than about five hours of discretionary time in the day, we are also less happy and this is interesting because shows that there is such a thing as having too much time, but how could it be right? How could having many hours to relax and spend whatever you want be associated with less happiness?

Well, it turns out that we are driven to be at least a bit of productive research shows that people are reluctant to be idols and therefore, when we spend every waking hour, day after day, with nothing to show for it, that It undermines our sense of purpose and so we feel less satisfied, this is important. to keep in mind because it warns us on those days that feel so hectic the answer is not to drop everything and move on to life, you know, sitting in a beach chair, these results point to something else that is also interesting, that is , if we could only have two hours a day to spend however we wanted, we would reach that sweet spot of happiness now.

I admit that for some, two hours of discretion is like an unattainable luxury, but then, when I did an honest accounting of my days, I realized that the 2-hour goal wasn't totally out of reach, even during that hectic period. of my life. I could spend 15 minutes in the morning snuggling with my little one. 25 minutes talking to my best friend on my ride home from work. 30 minutes enjoying. dinner and a glass of wine with my husband and then 20 minutes singing my baby to sleep, this was equivalent to 90 minutes that I wouldn't have wanted to spend any other way and it wasn't until I did this calculation that I realized that how joyful many of my minutes were, so I'll take together what this research shows us: that the answer to greater happiness is not really about having more time available, but about how we invest the time we have for happiness.

It's not about enriching ourselves in time, it's about enriching the time we have, but how can we enrich our time instead of giving up? I redirected my research agenda to answer this very question: how do we spend our time to experience Greater Joy during our days and so that at the end of our years we can look back without regrets and what I have learned from Leed is that time is not the problem can be the solution because the way we spend our hours of the day can have a tremendous impact on the satisfaction we feel. in and around our lives and does not require any drastic, life-altering changes with just a little intention and attention we can choose to be happier as a first step we need to identify and protect time for those activities that are truly worthwhile those satisfying activities that They align with our values ​​and purpose.

One way to identify these activities is by tracking time over the course of a week. Every half hour write down what you did and rate on a 10-point scale how you felt when you left. of that activity, another thing you can do is just reflect and in fact, you can do this right now, so think back to your last few weeks, what were those moments that made you feel the most joy when I reflect on my coffee dates with my daughter Lita? stands out now, look, this is an activity that was born from a very functional routine every Thursday since she was little on the way to drop her off at her preschool and I went to my office clearly she wanted coffee so we would stop at the local coffee shop and very soon this routine without meaning became this cherished and long-awaited ritual, we have a playlist for a coffee date and everything every week, this is a wonderful half hour we spend together chatting eating Nutella Quant she drinking her hot chocolate me my flat white it's time for just the two of us and yes, this is a very regular activity that is special to me, but the specialness of such regular activities is not an anomaly.

In my research among many people we found that those activities that produce the most happiness are often remarkably mundane and you may have also noticed when I had you think about your most joyful activities, they were probably quite common and it is important to keep this in mind. because, since these activities are so common when we are in a hurry when we feel that time is insufficient. We are very quick to neglect these activities or even if we take our time, we rush through them or are distracted on our phones or in our heads scrolling through our to-do list thinking and planning. for what follows, but to be fair, it is easy to miss these moments because we have become accustomed to them, we have become so accustomed to these simple Joys that we hardly notice them anymore and this is due to honic adaptation, which is their psychological propensity . we get used to things over time and when you do the same thing over and over again when you are with the same person over and over again they stop having such an intense emotional impact on you now it is good that we are adaptive in the face of negative circumstances adaptation hónica helps us get through those difficult times, it makes us resilient, but it's bad that we also get used to the good things in life, for example, think about the first time someone you really cared about said I love you, it's like fireworks . in your mind and in your heart and then, a few years later, I love you comes down to loving you when you hang up the phone or walk out the door and if something as profound and wonderful as the Declaration of Love comes down to a couple of words that you barely hear and that they show the power of honic adaptation and that we must be careful and aware of it in order to compensate for it and continue to feel the happiness of the joys of life.

One way to compensate for the honic adaptation is to count the times you have left just because it's an everyday activity now doesn't mean it will continue to happen every day and certainly not like it does now, for example, with my coffee dates with little Lita , I counted as a first step, I calculated how many times we have done this in the past, so including our daily coffee dates during my maternity leave with her and then our weekly, since I calculated that Lita and I have been on approximately 400 dates to have coffee together, now the next step is to calculate how many times are left, do you have to do this activity in the future teacher taking into account the factors that are likely to change then L is now 8 years old when she turns 12?

I suspect she'd rather go to the coffee shop where they're friends rather than me, so it'll be less frequent and then she'll go to college and then move to New York if she's like me, so I figured Lita and I have 230 dates. to drink coffee in the future, now the last step. Calculating the total number of times, what percentage do you have left of this? I realized that Lita and I have about 36% of our coffee days left together, that's way less than half and she's only 8 years old. At first, this may seem sad and you may find yourself asking yourself I thought this lady was a happiness teacher, so why does she make me cry?

But I can assure you that the effects of this exercise are really positive and impactful because recognizing the preciousness of these times motivates us to take advantage of the time no matter what. I'm busy, I'm absolutely booking and protecting time for my weekly coffee dates with Lita and yes, they used to be Thursday mornings on the way to preschool, but now she's in elementary school, which starts way too early, so that our Thursday morning coffee dates have happened. on the weekend, but that's okay because we still spend time, something just as important as making time is how engaged we are during these times.

After I had counted, I made sure to put away my phone to silence that otherwise constantly running to-do list. in my head because I know I can't distract myself from this moment by thinking and planning what's next because this is the time that matters and it's only 30 minutes each week, but these minutes influence how I feel the rest of the week. and really how I feel about my life in general, not only do I feel happy during these dates, but I also feel happy beforehand while waiting for them. I feel happy later when I think back and remember them when I evaluate my satisfaction with my life.

Overall, I do minutes and the resulting connection and relationship I have with my daughter has a huge effect. I can honestly say now that despite still having that high pressure job and my husband and now two kids instead of one and that endless pile of tasks I have. happy and this goes back to what I said before when it comes to happiness it is not about the amount of time we have available but the quality in how we invest the time we have and how invested we are as we spend that time with just a little intention and attention we can find extraordinary happiness and ordinary moments thanks