[MUSIC] So we've been talking about behaviors that tend to make us happy. And one of the most important behaviors that can make us happier than we often expect is doing nice stuff for other people, just this simple act of being kind. Now, if I were to ask you is doing nice stuff for other people going to be the kind of thing that brings you joy? You'd probably say yes, right? Obviously, doing nice stuff for others feels kind of nice, right? The problem is that we don't often do it. We have an opportunity cost of the possibility of doing nice stuff for ourselves. Nowadays there's this mantra of like treat yourself, I think it's like a parks and rec thing. >> Three words for you, treat yo self. [MUSIC] Do for yourself. Self-care. It's like self, self, self, self, self. But the evidence teaches that that's not what happy people do. If you look at people who self-report being very happy, they spontaneously report volunteering more often than not so happy people. They spontaneously report, reaching out to friends more often. Happy people aren't doing self-care and treating themselves, They're spontaneously more focused on other people. And that includes spontaneously giving more money away. We've talked about how money doesn't make us as happy as we think. That's in part often because we spend the money on ourselves. If we could actually give more of our discretionary funds away, it might make us happier than we think. We know that from some experimental studies, not just happy people who are giving their money away, you force people to give their money away and it seems to make them happier. Here's one study on that by Elizabeth Dunn and her colleagues. She does a study that's very fun for subjects because she walks up to them on the street and just hands them some money. So it's a really fun study to be in. So she'd walk up to you on the street and say, hey, do you want to be the study? You have to rate your happiness on a standard scale and then she gives you some money. She either gives you five bucks or 20 bucks. But the key is that she tells you how to spend it. She says by the end of the day, you have to spend this money on yourself so do something nice and treat yourself. Or by the end of this day, you gotta spend this on somebody else, do some random act of kindness with this money. Then she gets you to agree that she's going to call you later in the day and she's going to look at how your happiness changes. Now, what do people predict, right? People's minds lie? People's minds predict that spending the money on themselves is going to feel better, right? After I'll treat yourself, you get something out of this deal in one case but not the other case, right? That's what people predict. People also predict that spending the 20 bucks is going to feel better than spending the five bucks because duh it's like four times more money, right? But what really happens? What really happens is just the opposite spending the money on somebody else improves your happiness more at the end of that day. But even at the end of the week, you're happier just because you spend the money on someone else. And what's interesting is it doesn't matter how much money you spend. That $20 condition has the same magnitude of effect as the $5 condition. Which is good if you don't have that much discretionary income to be spending on other people. But the key is that spending on others makes us happier than we think. But it doesn't just boost our happiness, it has all these other positive effects too. There's evidence that if you are doing more pro-social things in your work or in your school that makes you like school and like work even better. There's also evidence that doing nice stuff for others has a physical impact on our body. In fact, one study by Elizabeth Dunn and her colleagues shows that if you do more nice stuff for others, it actually reduces your blood pressure. So if you have parents with high blood pressure have them donate some of their discretionary income if they have it to good causes because that might reduce their blood pressure. So this study says. And it's a powerful way to reduce something that some of you might be suffering from right now, which is a lot of stress. In fact, another study by Liz Dunn and colleagues really looked at whether or not donating some money might reduce your stress as measured in one of these stress hormones known as cortisol. So she gave subjects in her study 10 bucks. She said, hey, this is your 10 bucks but if you want you could donate it to another student. So I could do this to each of you in this room. Here's your 10 bucks, but if you want you could give it to a good cause, what do you want to do? Well, she just looked at who naturally gave the money and she finds that the more money you gave, the more positive affect you had and the less negative affect you had. So it affects you emotionally. But more surprisingly, maybe the students who gave the most money had the lowest levels of cortisol. Just this simple interaction of trying to give somebody some money is going to lower your stress levels. Now when we think of lowering our stress, we think self-care, I do something nice for myself. I'm going to treat myself. We don't often think I should treat my friend or I should treat my sibling or I should do something nice for my parents but that's what the data really suggest. And so doing good stuff for other people, makes us feel good. It makes our bodies feel good. It's like a way to reduce our stress. How can we actually do this more? How can we harness the power of kindness? Luckily we have our psycprotips, yay. And these are pretty straightforward. You just got to give a bunch of your discretionary money and your discretionary stuff away, right? Just the act of doing this is going to reduce your stress and make you feel good. Now, we all don't have the opportunity to do this. But the good news is we just saw it doesn't have to be very much, it doesn't have to cost a lot to kind of give you a psychological meaning that's pretty big. That's like psycprotip number one. But there's also psychprotip number two, which is even if you don't have the time or the money to donate, you could just do simple random acts of kindness. Give a compliment to a friend, do something nice for someone, hold the door open, right? These simple things seem so tiny, but the psychological effect they have on us is really real. And so that's the key to this behavior. We need to get away from this idea of self-care, treat yourself all the time. We need to focus on other people. It's much more of a key to happiness than we think. [MUSIC]
