Stumbling on Happiness by Dan Gilbert — Summary Lessons
I am a happiness psychology nerd.
I created a bachelor’s to major in happiness and have read some 10,000+ pages of nonfiction.
One of the top 5 books I’ve read is Stumbling on Happiness by Harvard professor @DanTGilbert.
Here is a mega thread of lessons learned from the book.
- Getting “more happiness” out of it…
Habituation is getting used to things. Pleasure wears off with repeated experience; however, variety and time can help overcome habituation.
Within an experience, favor variety.
Think of going out to a tapas bar — you wouldn’t want 10 of the same dishes.
If experiences occur over a longer time then avoid variety for variety’s sake. Example — if you go out to eat every month, get your favorite dish each time.
- Post traumatic growth…
Gilbert writes that resilience is actually the most common response to a traumatic event.
Of course this is NOT to discount PTSD or related issues. But simply put — negative events don’t affect us as much or for as long as we expect them to.
Also written explanations of past trauma (objective and neutral journaling) help us process and release trauma.
- Psychological immune system…
The mind operates like an immune system that strikes a balance between competing needs in order to keep us alive.
The mind wants us to feel good enough to cope but bad enough to want to do something about it.
It will rationalize very bad stuff but still leave us wanting for something better.
- Memory is tentatively constructed and unreliable…
Memory is basically coded as a summary based on peak experience and ending experience.
We reconstruct memories based on this summary rather than actually “remembering” them. We reweave not retrieve.
- We make a lot of errors in thinking about the future (main idea!)..
One of the most common errors in thinking about future is making it too much like present. We use present to fill in our memories of the past and as primary material for imagining the future.
Moderacia island has average everything. Extremia has great weather and awful hotels. When making reservations we pick extremia. When cancelling plans we pick extremia. Why?
When selecting we tend to favor what has the most positives (extremia) and when rejecting we tend to favor what has the most negatives (also extremia).
Maybe the most common source of misperception is the “least likely is most likely bias” (my term).
The LEAST likely experiences are the MOST likely to be remembered.
We draw conclusions from a distorted sample of memories. The unusual events shape what we think of as usual.
Think of being stuck in the slowest line at the grocery store. Why do you feel you always pick the slowest line?
It’s because you remember the times is was most slow and you forget the times is was fine.
If I had to randomly miss one meeting this week how big of a deal is it?
I’m going to overestimate how big of a deal it is because I’ll remember that time I slept through my final and not the 10 other times I missed a meeting and it was no big deal.
We recall the best/worst of times not the most likely of times.
We make another critical error in thinking of the future — it is hard to imagine what is missing.
There is a part in Sherlock Holmes where a racehorse is stolen from the stables.
The cop asks Holmes what he notices. Holmes says- “there is the curious case of the dog in the stables”.
The cop says- “The dog didn’t do anything.”
Holmes says- “that is the curious incident.”
The fact that the dog did NOT bark is strange.
It means the thief knew the dog.
The point of this story is to show when we remember the past and imagine the future we rarely notice what we’re missing.
It is a form of “absence blindness” we can’t see what isn’t there.
- There is one “solution” to our psychological mistakes…
Surrogates — people who are CURRENTLY experiencing the life situation that we are considering are the most accurate way to predict happiness level from a given decision.
There was a study where they had people eat a bunch of snack food then predict how happy they would be with a bag of chips the next day.
One group ate the snack food then made a prediction intuitively about their future happiness.
The 2nd group ate the snack food then got sample reports from “surrogates” who actually had eaten the bag of chips.
The 1st group thought they would be unsatisfied (they were full in that moment and it distorted predictions). They ended up enjoying the chips more than thought.
The 2nd group went off the reports. Their predictions were quite accurate.
It’s better to trust the real time reports of others than our haphazardly constructed assumptions about what will bring us future happiness…
Book summary…
Most of life is about predicting our future happiness. Unfortunately, we suck at it due to how our brains operate.
Using surrogates and empirical research into what makes for happiness may help.
But we’re really just stumbling through life.
For lessons from my stumbles through my study of happiness subscribe to www.studyhappiness.blog
