Most of the time people are focused on losing weight because they want to look better. Although that’s a good enough reason for many people, there are other reasons that can benefit anyone who is carrying too much weight. There seems to be a never-ending series of medical research studies coming out that have found new ways our health is damaged by being overweight. There has been a desire to be thin in many societies for a very long time, but now we know there are many more benefits than just looking better. For some people, losing weight can actually prolong their lives. Be on the lookout for the following signs that may be telling you it is time to start thinking about dropping some weight.
Anyone who really cares about their health should be exercising. There really is no replacement for it. if you have found it uncomfortable and difficult to complete your exercise routine because of your size, it’s definitely time to get serious about losing some weight. Exercising when you are overweight could put a greater strain on your heart and make it a bit more risky than it is for someone who is considered a normal weight.
If you find that you are snoring a lot more and a lot louder than you used to, it definitely could be a sign that your weight is becoming a problem. Snoring can disrupt your sleep even when you are not aware of it, and chances are good that you’ll not feel fully rested when you wake up. Excess fat that tends to accumulate around the neck can make your airway smaller, which can lead to increased snoring and even sleep apnea, which can become life-threatening.
In some cases, excess weight can cause various places to feel sensitive and more likely to become sore to the touch. Inflammation can affect the fatty tissues that are just below the skin’s surface which causes this condition. Losing some weight can help alleviate this problem.
Feeling worn out all the time is another thing excessive weight can cause. Inflammation is the culprit here again, and it happens due to all that excess weight. If you find yourself feeling exhausted when you are just doing things you have always done, like walking up stairs or walking your dog, it’s a sign that extra weight is putting too much strain on your body.
This can certainly happen if you are going too heavy on the junk food, which is notoriously bad for keeping you feeling full, but it could also be a sign of type 2 diabetes, which is something that should surely get you to pay attention to your health. Other signs that diabetes may be developing are tingling, or numbness in your extremities, blurry vision and increased urination. Diabetes is a scary word to many people, but type 2 diabetes can often be reversed through weight loss and diet if someone is serious about improving their health.
These are two potentially deadly problems that can have a very serious impact on your health. The good news is that both of these conditions can very often be reversed through lifestyle changes much like type 2 diabetes. Much of the time, even modest weight loss can improve upon or reverse these conditions.
If your waist is larger than 35 inches, there’s a good chance that you have too much belly fat, and recent research has found that to be a significant health risk. Using the “above 35” number doesn’t work for everyone, since people come in all different shapes and sizes, but it could be a hint that your weight is something you need to think more about. Excess weight around the midsection can contribute to your likelihood of having serious problems like heart attack, stroke, type 2 diabetes, and high blood pressure.
Too much fat can lead to the production of more estrogen, which is believed to be linked to breast cancer. Having a parent or grandparent who had cancer increases your risk even without regard for excess weight. Losing weight is certainly no guarantee that your cancer risk will be reduced, but most experts believe that keeping your weight under control can be a benefit.
If you start experiencing pain in areas such as your knees, hips and back, it could be due to the strain excessive weight is causing on those areas. Forcing your joints to support extra weight can actually wear them down, and with time it could make treatments like hip or knee replacement necessary.
While it’s certainly natural and expected for a person to gain weight as they develop from childhood, into their teens and then into adulthood, there should be a time in your life when your weight stabilizes, and does not continue to increase. if you have been steadily gaining weight every year even after reaching adulthood, there’s a good chance that you are overweight or soon will be.
Dear Lifehacker,
I admit that I'm not the snappiest dresser. I know how to keep my clothes clean and ironed and whatnot, but I don't always know what I should wear and I don't look quite as neat and professional as my friends and coworkers. How can I learn to dress better?
Sincerely,
Schlemiel in Seattle
Dear Schlemiel,
This is one of those things many people learn growing up, but if you missed out on that exposure, learning later in life isn't as easy and straightforward. The upside is that most of what you need to learn is observational, and you have hundreds of examples around you every day to learn from. Before you start looking at other people's clothing choices, start by looking at your own.
Perform a Wardrobe Audit
Before you go out to buy anything new, the first place you should go shopping is your own closet. If you're an adult with a job, you're probably covered for at least three situations: work, social outings, and lazy home clothes. Some of your clothes may serve multiple purposes (for example, the jeans you go out in may be comfortable enough to watch Netflix in), but you can probably put together outfits for at least these situations.
However, being well-dressed starts with being prepared for a situation. Few people you see who look great in their outfits started by hitting the store right before they arrived. Do a review of your closet. Ask yourself if you would be ready, right now, to dress for the following type of events:
Weddings
Funerals
Job interviews
Black tie events
Dressy restaurant outings
Birthday/graduation/anniversary parties
This list is by no means comprehensive, but as an adult (particularly if you're young), you can probably expect to be invited to at least a couple of the things on this list—if not all of them—in a given year. Do you have clothing appropriate for each of the events? If not, start picking out specific events you want or need to be prepared for and start there.
Learn the Basics For Specific Situations
There are certain basics that apply to any situation. Here is a non-comprehensive list of the basics you should cover:
Buy clothes that fit. Often, it can feel better to wear clothes that are a bit bigger on you than you would normally wear. However, if you wear pants with a 36" waist and you get something with a 38", it will look loose and frumpy.
Wear things that you're comfortable with. Part of the reason you wear nicer clothes, aside from fitting in with your current event, is to boost confidence. If you can't enjoy how you look, or your clothes don't feel natural, you'll fidget, squirm, and grimace your way to undoing all your hard work.
Never wear white after Labor Day. Or do. Either way. As you learn more, you'll soon discover that there are rules that are made to be broken.
Once you've narrowed down which occasions you want to focus on first, you can start tracking down outfits for specific events. Is a suit overkill for a job interview? What type of dress should you wear to a wedding? How much do you have to spend on dinner before jeans are no longer okay? Ask these questions on a case by case basis.
Once you narrow down which situations you want to dress for, you can start searching for appropriate looks. The sources for these won't always be the same. For example, you can find advice on how to dress for work right here on Lifehacker, but you may have to turn to other sites for the perfect dress to wear to the club.
Over time, the skills and tricks you learn for one outfit will carry over to other situations. Don't overwhelm yourself by trying to buy hundreds of dollars worth of clothes for every possible event that you don't even know you're going to yet. Get clothes for the dinner date you're going on next week and the experience you get there will inform what type of shoes you should wear to the office.
Find a Mentor or Group of People to Provide Feedback
No amount of Googling will tell you that you look good. Your body is unique and there are dozens of factors that can make an outfit that looks fantastic on one person look horrible on another (or vice versa). Your best shot at looking great is to have someone personally look at how clothes fit you. The more experience that person has with making fashion decisions, the better.
If you can't find someone to help coach you, there are still options. Reddit has dedicated subreddits devoted to helping both men and women get their questions answered, as well as post pictures to ask for feedback. There are also apps and sites like Fashism that exist solely to share outfits and get opinions or inspiration.
If you're not comfortable with sharing pictures of yourself online (and have some cash to spare), you can hire a personal shopper. In some cases, their whole job is to find the clothes you're looking for and bring them to you, but others will walk you through the process and provide feedback. Alternatively, if you want to save that money, you can ask employees at clothing stores for feedback. Don't take up all their time—most of them have plenty of other duties to tend to—but if you go to any type of dedicated outlets, many employees are not only inclined to have an eye for what looks good, but some of them are there specifically to help you find something that works for you.
Read Fashion Sites (and Keep Reading)
Once you've got the basics down, you can start getting into the nuance of your wardrobe. This is where specialized sites and publications for men andwomen can be useful in keeping up to date on style changes over time. While you may have been able to get with wearing overalls with one strap unbuckled in the 90s, you couldn't pull that off today. Fashion evolves over time. Keeping up with current trends—to a certain extent, at least—is just another part of the process.
Also keep in mind that every publication you subscribe to will have its own particular style. Check out a few magazines and sites and see how much their style relates to your own. Don't just dive in to the first publication with Robert Downey Jr. on the cover (mostly because you can't pull off what he can...he's Iron Man), but instead find something that offers tips in the style you're looking for.
More importantly, though, find resources for a style you like and can be comfortable in and continue in that vein. Don't just grab the first copy of GQ you can find and buy whatever Bryan Cranston is wearing. Your wardrobe needs to be a reflection of your personal style, as well as being something that you can feel good in.
Also, remember the cardinal rules in any kind of etiquette: follow the host and don't deviate too much from the crowd. If you're looking to dress for work, find out how your boss dresses (as well as seasoned coworkers who are on your level). If you're going to a wedding, you don't want to upstage the bride and groom, but you should fit in with most of the guests. When you've got that down, and you can be happy with what you see in the mirror, you're already ahead of the curve.
It's easy to think of happiness as a result, but happiness is also a driver.
One example: While I'm definitely into finding ways to improve personal productivity (whether a one-day burst, or a lifetime, or things you should not do every day), probably the best way to be more productive is to just be happier. Happy people accomplish more.
Easier said than done though, right?
Actually, many changes are easy. Here are 10 science-based ways to be happier from Belle Beth Cooper, Content Crafter at Buffer, the social media management tool that lets you schedule, automate, and analyze social media updates.
Here's Beth:
1. Exercise: 7 Minutes Could Be Enough
Think exercise is something you don't have time for? Think again. Check out the 7 minute workout mentioned in The New York Times. That's a workout any of us can fit into our schedules.
Exercise has such a profound effect on our happiness and well-being that it is an effective strategy for overcoming depression. In a study cited in Shawn Achor's book The Happiness Advantage, three groups of patients treated their depression with medication, exercise, or a combination of the two. The results of this study are surprising: Although all three groups experienced similar improvements in their happiness levels early on, the follow-up assessments proved to be radically different:
The groups were then tested six months later to assess their relapse rate. Of those who had taken the medication alone, 38 percent had slipped back into depression. Those in the combination group were doing only slightly better, with a 31 percent relapse rate. The biggest shock, though, came from the exercise group: Their relapse rate was only 9 percent.
You don't have to be depressed to benefit from exercise, though. Exercise can help you relax, increase your brain power, and even improve your body image, even if you don't lose any weight.
We've explored exercise in depth before, and looked at what it does to our brains, such as releasing proteins and endorphins that make us feel happier.
Body weight, shape and body image were assessed in 16 males and 18 females before and after both 6 × 40 minutes exercising and 6 × 40 minutes reading. Over both conditions, body weight and shape did not change. Various aspects of body image, however, improved after exercise compared to before.
Yep: Even if your actual appearance doesn't change, how you feel about your body does change.
2. Sleep More: You'll Be Less Sensitive to Negative Emotions
In NurtureShock, Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman explain how sleep affects positivity:
Negative stimuli get processed by the amygdala; positive or neutral memories gets processed by the hippocampus. Sleep deprivation hits the hippocampus harder than the amygdala. The result is that sleep-deprived people fail to recall pleasant memories yet recall gloomy memories just fine.
In one experiment by Walker, sleep-deprived college students tried to memorize a list of words. They could remember 81% of the words with a negative connotation, like "cancer." But they could remember only 31% of the words with a positive or neutral connotation, like "sunshine" or "basket."
The BPS Research Digest explores another study that proves sleep affects our sensitivity to negative emotions. Using a facial recognition task throughout the course of a day, researchers studied how sensitive participants were to positive and negative emotions. Those who worked through the afternoon without taking a nap became more sensitive to negative emotions like fear and anger.
Using a face recognition task, here we demonstrate an amplified reactivity to anger and fear emotions across the day, without sleep. However, an intervening nap blocked and even reversed this negative emotional reactivity to anger and fear while conversely enhancing ratings of positive (happy) expressions.
Of course, how well (and how long) you sleep will probably affect how you feel when you wake up, which can make a difference to your whole day.
Another study tested how employees' moods when they started work in the morning affected their entire work day.
Researchers found that employees' moods when they clocked in tended to affect how they felt the rest of the day. Early mood was linked to their perceptions of customers and to how they reacted to customers' moods.
And most importantly to managers, employee mood had a clear impact on performance, including both how much work employees did and how well they did it.
3. Spend More Time With Friends/Family: Money Can't Buy You Happiness
If you want more evidence that time with friends is beneficial for you, research proves it can make you happier right now, too.
Social time is highly valuable when it comes to improving our happiness, even for introverts. Several studies have found that time spent with friends and family makes a big difference to how happy we feel.
00:11When you have 21 minutes to speak,two million years seems like a really long time.But evolutionarily, two million years is nothing.And yet in two million years,the human brain has nearly tripled in mass,going from the one-and-a-quarter pound brain of our ancestor here, Habilis,to the almost three-pound meatloafthat everybody here has between their ears.What is it about a big brainthat nature was so eager for every one of us to have one?
00:41Well, it turns out when brains triple in size,they don't just get three times bigger; they gain new structures.And one of the main reasons our brain got so big is because it got a new part,called the "frontal lobe."Particularly, a part called the "pre-frontal cortex."What does a pre-frontal cortex do for you that should justifythe entire architectural overhaul of the human skullin the blink of evolutionary time?
01:06It turns out the pre-frontal cortex does lots of things,but one of the most important things it does is an experience simulator.Pilots practice in flight simulatorsso that they don't make real mistakes in planes.Human beings have this marvelous adaptationthat they can actually have experiences in their headsbefore they try them out in real life.This is a trick that none of our ancestors could do,and that no other animal can do quite like we can.It's a marvelous adaptation.It's up there with opposable thumbs and standing upright and languageas one of the things that got our species out of the treesand into the shopping mall.
01:46(Laughter)
01:48All of you have done this.Ben and Jerry's doesn't have liver-and-onion ice cream,and it's not because they whipped some up, tried it and went, "Yuck."It's because, without leaving your armchair,you can simulate that flavor and say "yuck" before you make it.
02:06Let's see how your experience simulators are working.Let's just run a quick diagnosticbefore I proceed with the rest of the talk.Here's two different futures that I invite you to contemplate.You can try to simulate them and tell me which one you think you might prefer.One of them is winning the lottery. This is about 314 million dollars.And the other is becoming paraplegic.
02:29(Laughter)
02:30Just give it a moment of thought.You probably don't feel like you need a moment of thought.
02:35Interestingly, there are data on these two groups of people,data on how happy they are.And this is exactly what you expected, isn't it?But these aren't the data. I made these up!
02:47These are the data.You failed the pop quiz, and you're hardly five minutes into the lecture.Because the fact is that a year after losing the use of their legs,and a year after winning the lotto, lottery winners and paraplegicsare equally happy with their lives.
03:04Don't feel too bad about failing the first pop quiz,because everybody fails all of the pop quizzes all of the time.The research that my laboratory has been doing,that economists and psychologists around the country have been doing,has revealed something really quite startling to us,something we call the "impact bias,"which is the tendency for the simulator to work badly.For the simulator to make you believe that different outcomesare more different than in fact they really are.
03:31From field studies to laboratory studies,we see that winning or losing an election, gaining or losing a romantic partner,getting or not getting a promotion, passing or not passing a college test,on and on, have far less impact, less intensity and much less durationthan people expect them to have.This almost floors me --a recent study showing how major life traumas affect peoplesuggests that if it happened over three months ago,with only a few exceptions,it has no impact whatsoever on your happiness.
04:07Why?Because happiness can be synthesized.Sir Thomas Brown wrote in 1642, "I am the happiest man alive.I have that in me that can convert poverty to riches, adversity to prosperity.I am more invulnerable than Achilles; fortune hath not one place to hit me."What kind of remarkable machinery does this guy have in his head?
04:30Well, it turns out it's precisely the same remarkable machinery that all off us have.Human beings have somethingthat we might think of as a "psychological immune system."A system of cognitive processes, largely non-conscious cognitive processes,that help them change their views of the world,so that they can feel betterabout the worlds in which they find themselves.Like Sir Thomas, you have this machine.Unlike Sir Thomas, you seem not to know it.
05:00We synthesize happiness, but we think happiness is a thing to be found.Now, you don't need me to give youtoo many examples of people synthesizing happiness, I suspect.Though I'm going to show you some experimental evidence,you don't have to look very far for evidence.
05:16As a challenge to myself, since I say this once in a while in lectures,I took a copy of the New York Timesand tried to find some instances of people synthesizing happiness.Here are three guys synthesizing happiness."I am so much better off physically, financially, emotionally, mentallyand almost every other way.""I don't have one minute's regret. It was a glorious experience.""I believe it turned out for the best."
05:37Who are these characters who are so damn happy?The first one is Jim Wright.Some of you are old enough to remember:he was the chairman of the House of Representativesand he resigned in disgracewhen this young Republican named Newt Gingrichfound out about a shady book deal he had done.He lost everything.The most powerful Democrat in the country lost everything.He lost his money, he lost his power.What does he have to say all these years later?"I am so much better off physically, financially, mentallyand in almost every other way."What other way would there be to be better off?Vegetably? Minerally? Animally?He's pretty much covered them there.
06:10Moreese Bickham is somebody you've never heard of.Moreese Bickham uttered these words upon being released.He was 78 years old.He'd spent 37 years in a Louisiana State Penitentiaryfor a crime he didn't commit.[He was ultimately releasedfor good behavior halfway through his sentence.]What did he say about his experience?"I don't have one minute's regret. It was a glorious experience." Glorious!He is not saying,"Well, there were some nice guys. They had a gym.""Glorious,"a word we usually reserve for something like a religious experience.
06:39Harry S. Langerman uttered these words, and he's somebody you might have knownbut didn't, because in 1949 he read a little article in the paperabout a hamburger stand owned by two brothers named McDonalds.And he thought, "That's a really neat idea!"So he went to find them. They said,"We can give you a franchise on this for 3,000 bucks."Harry went back to New York, asked his brother, an investment banker,to loan him the $3,000, and his brother's immortal words were,"You idiot, nobody eats hamburgers."He wouldn't lend him the money,and of course, six months later Ray Kroc had exactly the same idea.It turns out people do eat hamburgers,and Ray Kroc, for a while, became the richest man in America.
07:15And then finally -- you know, the best of all possible worlds --some of you recognize this young photo of Pete Best,who was the original drummer for the Beatles,until they, you know, sent him out on an errand and snuck awayand picked up Ringo on a tour.Well, in 1994, when Pete Best was interviewed-- yes, he's still a drummer; yes, he's a studio musician --he had this to say: "I'm happier than I would have been with the Beatles."
07:39Okay. There's something important to be learned from these people,and it is the secret of happiness.Here it is, finally to be revealed.First: accrue wealth, power, and prestige, then lose it.
07:49(Laughter)
07:52Second: spend as much of your life in prison as you possibly can.
07:55(Laughter)
07:56Third: make somebody else really, really rich.And finally: never ever join the Beatles.
08:02(Laughter)
08:04OK. Now I, like Ze Frank, can predict your next thought,which is, "Yeah, right."Because when people synthesize happiness,as these gentlemen seem to have done,we all smile at them, but we kind of roll our eyes and say,"Yeah right, you never really wanted the job.""Oh yeah, right. You really didn't have that much in common with her,and you figured that out just about the timeshe threw the engagement ring in your face."We smirk because we believe that synthetic happinessis not of the same quality as what we might call "natural happiness."
08:37What are these terms?Natural happiness is what we get when we get what we wanted,and synthetic happiness is what we make when we don't get what we wanted.And in our society, we have a strong beliefthat synthetic happiness is of an inferior kind.
08:53Why do we have that belief?Well, it's very simple.What kind of economic engine would keep churningif we believed that not getting what we wantcould make us just as happy as getting it?With all apologies to my friend Matthieu Ricard,a shopping mall full of Zen monksis not going to be particularly profitable,because they don't want stuff enough.
09:17(Laughter)
09:18I want to suggest to you that synthetic happinessis every bit as real and enduringas the kind of happiness you stumble uponwhen you get exactly what you were aiming for.I'm a scientist, so I'm going to do this not with rhetoric,but by marinating you in a little bit of data.
09:34Let me first show you an experimental paradigm that is usedto demonstrate the synthesis of happiness among regular old folks.And this isn't mine.It's a 50-year-old paradigm called the "free choice paradigm."It's very simple.You bring in, say, six objects,and you ask a subject to rank them from the most to the least liked.In this case, because this experiment uses them,these are Monet prints.So, everybody can rank these Monet printsfrom the one they like the most, to the one they like the least.Now we give you a choice:"We happen to have some extra prints in the closet.We're going to give you one as your prize to take home.We happen to have number three and number four," we tell the subject.This is a bit of a difficult choice,because neither one is preferred strongly to the other,but naturally, people tend to pick number threebecause they liked it a little better than number four.
10:23Sometime later -- it could be 15 minutes; it could be 15 days --the same stimuli are put before the subject,and the subject is asked to re-rank the stimuli."Tell us how much you like them now."What happens?Watch as happiness is synthesized.This is the result that has been replicated over and over again.You're watching happiness be synthesized.Would you like to see it again?Happiness!"The one I got is really better than I thought!That other one I didn't get sucks!"That's the synthesis of happiness.
10:52(Laughter)
10:53Now, what's the right response to that?"Yeah, right!"Now, here's the experiment we did,and I hope this is going to convince youthat "Yeah, right!" was not the right response.
11:05We did this experiment with a group of patientswho had anterograde amnesia.These are hospitalized patients.Most of them have Korsakoff's syndrome,a polyneuritic psychosis.They drank way too much, and they can't make new memories.OK? They remember their childhood, but if you walk in and introduce yourself,and then leave the room,when you come back, they don't know who you are.
11:27We took our Monet prints to the hospital.And we asked these patients to rank themfrom the one they liked the most to the one they liked the least.We then gave them the choice between number three and number four.Like everybody else, they said,"Gee, thanks Doc! That's great! I could use a new print.I'll take number three."We explained we would have number three mailed to them.We gathered up our materials and we went out of the room,and counted to a half hour.
11:55(Laughter)
11:56Back into the room, we say, "Hi, we're back."The patients, bless them, say, "Ah, Doc, I'm sorry,I've got a memory problem; that's why I'm here.If I've met you before, I don't remember.""Really, you don't remember? I was just here with the Monet prints?""Sorry, Doc, I just don't have a clue.""No problem, Jim. All I want you to do is rank these for mefrom the one you like the most to the one you like the least."
12:21What do they do?Well, let's first check and make sure they're really amnesiac.We ask these amnesiac patients to tell us which one they own,which one they chose last time, which one is theirs.And what we find is amnesiac patients just guess.These are normal controls, where if I did this with you,all of you would know which print you chose.But if I do this with amnesiac patients, they don't have a clue.They can't pick their print out of a lineup.
12:48Here's what normal controls do: they synthesize happiness.Right? This is the change in liking score,the change from the first time they ranked to the second time they ranked.Normal controls show -- that was the magic I showed you;now I'm showing it to you in graphical form --"The one I own is better than I thought.The one I didn't own, the one I left behind,is not as good as I thought."Amnesiacs do exactly the same thing. Think about this result.
13:14These people like better the one they own,but they don't know they own it."Yeah, right" is not the right response!What these people did when they synthesized happinessis they really, truly changedtheir affective, hedonic, aesthetic reactions to that poster.They're not just saying it because they own it,because they don't know they own it.
13:43Now, when psychologists show you bars,you know that they are showing you averages of lots of people.And yet, all of us have this psychological immune system,this capacity to synthesize happiness,but some of us do this trick better than others.And some situations allow anybody to do it more effectivelythan other situations do.It turns out that freedom-- the ability to make up your mind and change your mind --is the friend of natural happiness, because it allows you to chooseamong all those delicious futuresand find the one that you would most enjoy.But freedom to choose,to change and make up your mind,is the enemy of synthetic happiness.
14:27And I'm going to show you why. Dilbert already knows, of course.You're reading as I'm talking."Dogbert's tech support. How may I abuse you?""My printer prints a blank page after every document.""Why complain about getting free paper?""Free? Aren't you just giving me my own paper?""Look at the quality of the free paper compared to your lousy regular paper!Only a fool or a liar would say that they look the same!""Now that you mention it, it does seem a little silkier!""What are you doing?""I'm helping people accept the things they cannot change." Indeed.
14:56The psychological immune system works bestwhen we are totally stuck, when we are trapped.This is the difference between dating and marriage.You go out on a date with a guy,and he picks his nose; you don't go out on another date.You're married to a guy and he picks his nose?He has a heart of gold. Don't touch the fruitcake!You find a way to be happy with what's happened.
15:17(Laughter)
15:18Now, what I want to show youis that people don't know this about themselves,and not knowing this can work to our supreme disadvantage.
15:26Here's an experiment we did at Harvard.We created a black-and-white photography course,and we allowed students to come in and learn how to use a darkroom.So we gave them cameras; they went around campus;they took 12 pictures of their favorite professorsand their dorm room and their dog,and all the other things they wanted to have Harvard memories of.They bring us the camera; we make up a contact sheet;they figure out which are the two best pictures;and we now spend six hours teaching them about darkrooms.And they blow two of them up,and they have two gorgeous eight-by-10 glossiesof meaningful things to them, and we say,"Which one would you like to give up?"They say, "I have to give one up?""Yes, we need one as evidence of the class project.So you have to give me one. You have to make a choice.You get to keep one, and I get to keep one."
16:10Now, there are two conditions in this experiment.In one case, the students are told,"But you know, if you want to change your mind,I'll always have the other one here,and in the next four days, before I actually mail it to headquarters,"-- yeah, "headquarters" --"I'll be glad to swap it out with you.In fact, I'll come to your dorm room, just give me an email.Better yet, I'll check with you.You ever want to change your mind, it's totally returnable."The other half of the students are told exactly the opposite:"Make your choice, and by the way,the mail is going out, gosh, in two minutes, to England.Your picture will be winging its way over the Atlantic.You will never see it again."Half of the students in each of these conditionsare asked to make predictionsabout how much they're going to come to like the picture that they keepand the picture they leave behind.Other students are just sent back to their little dorm roomsand they are measured over the next three to six dayson their liking, satisfaction with the pictures.And look at what we find.
17:09First of all, here's what students think is going to happen.They think they're going to maybe come to like the picture they chosea little more than the one they left behind,but these are not statistically significant differences.It's a very small increase, and it doesn't much matterwhether they were in the reversible or irreversible condition.
17:28Wrong-o. Bad simulators. Because here's what's really happening.Both right before the swap and five days later,people who are stuck with that picture,who have no choice,who can never change their mind,like it a lot!And people who are deliberating -- "Should I return it?Have I gotten the right one? Maybe this isn't the good one?Maybe I left the good one?" -- have killed themselves.They don't like their picture,and in fact even after the opportunity to swap has expired,they still don't like their picture.Why?Because the [reversible] condition is not conduciveto the synthesis of happiness.
18:06So here's the final piece of this experiment.We bring in a whole new group of naive Harvard studentsand we say, "You know, we're doing a photography course,and we can do it one of two ways.We could do it so that when you take the two pictures,you'd have four days to change your mind,or we're doing another course where you take the two picturesand you make up your mind right away and you can never change it.Which course would you like to be in?" Duh!66 percent of the students, two-thirds,prefer to be in the course where they have the opportunity to change their mind.Hello? 66 percent of the students choose to be in the coursein which they will ultimately be deeply dissatisfied with the picture.Because they do not know the conditions under which synthetic happiness grows.
18:53The Bard said everything best, of course, and he's making my point herebut he's making it hyperbolically:"'Tis nothing good or bad / But thinking makes it so."It's nice poetry, but that can't exactly be right.Is there really nothing good or bad?Is it really the case that gall bladder surgery and a trip to Parisare just the same thing?That seems like a one-question IQ test.They can't be exactly the same.
19:21In more turgid prose, but closer to the truth,was the father of modern capitalism, Adam Smith, and he said this.This is worth contemplating:"The great source of both the misery and disorders of human lifeseems to arise from overrating the differencebetween one permanent situation and another --Some of these situations may, no doubt, deserve to be preferred to others,but none of them can deserve to be pursuedwith that passionate ardor which drives us to violate the ruleseither of prudence or of justice,or to corrupt the future tranquility of our minds,either by shame from the remembrance of our own folly,or by remorse for the horror of our own injustice."In other words: yes, some things are better than others.
20:12We should have preferences that lead us into one future over another.But when those preferences drive us too hard and too fastbecause we have overrated the difference between these futures,we are at risk.When our ambition is bounded, it leads us to work joyfully.When our ambition is unbounded,it leads us to lie, to cheat, to steal, to hurt others,to sacrifice things of real value.When our fears are bounded,we're prudent, we're cautious,we're thoughtful.When our fears are unbounded and overblown,we're reckless, and we're cowardly.
20:51The lesson I want to leave you with, from these data,is that our longings and our worries are both to some degree overblown,because we have within us the capacity to manufacture the very commoditywe are constantly chasing when we choose experience.
