[MUSIC] So we've been talking about behaviors that promote our happiness and we're going to end with one that's a little bit unexpected. Which is that if you want to be like happy people, you need to invest in what's called time affluence. So I'm sure most of you have heard this term affluence before, but when we think of affluence, we often think of a particular kind of thing you could be wealthy. And if you do a google search for affluence, you'll find pictures that look like this. It's like money, gold bars, monetary wealth, financial wealth is what we normally think about. But that's not the prescription here, the prescription is to become wealthy in time. What we're going to call time affluence. We're going to define it is this idea that you have a subjective sense that you have some sufficient time to pursue leisure and other activities that are meaningful to you. You just feel like you could take a day off, you could take a couple of hours and like sit in the grass and do nothing, right? That's time affluence. It's the opposite of what we often feel, which you might refer to as feeling time famished. When you're literally starving for time. And the evidence suggests that time famine works a lot like hunger famine, where you're putting your body into stress mode. You're literally putting your body into triage mode and activating your fight or flight simply because you don't have enough time. And so time is really hard, in fact I quote Drake here, which I often do with my students because I love Drake, his notes that, I spend money because spending time is hopeless, right? And we often have this trade off between money and time, especially for older adults. I think for students it's a trade off between grades and time, right? Like you're worried about your academics versus time, but which of these things you prioritize the evidence it just matters a lot for your happiness? In fact one study by Hershfield and colleagues looked at this directly, they tested people and asked, what are the things you value more in a set of surveys? Do you value your money? Are you willing to give up time to get more money or do you actually value time? Are you willing to give up a little bit of money, maybe work less hours at work to get some free time? And again, this is money, but you can replace all this with your academics and your grades, right? And what they find is that overall people tend to value money more than time, but in fact the opposite seems to matter for happiness. The people who self report valuing time a little bit more they're happier than those that value money more. And the same, I think is true if you look at academics and other things like we don't prioritize time, but the evidence suggests that if we invested in our time, we'd feel a lot better. That kind of raises the question of like, why is free time positively affecting our happiness? What do we get out of free time? One is we just like don't feel so frantic with work and so frantic with feeling busy. But there's also evidence that having free time makes us do some of the other kinds of behaviors that we just saw are good for happiness. Like for example, being a little bit more social, we know that if you have a little bit more free time, you're more likely to hang out with your friends. But there's also evidence that if you just feel like you have more time, you're more likely to be nicer. You're more likely to engage in those kindness behaviors that we know matter for happiness. And one of my favorite studies on this topic is one of the most famous studies, in fact, in the field of psychology. It's a study by Darley and Batson that took place in the 1970s, which asked, what are the factors that influence whether or not people help? And they studied helping in a somewhat different population. They studied the helping in Princeton seminary students. So these are people who are studying to be a priest. So if you think there's somebody who wants to do good in the world, it's like a person who's actually studying to be a priest, right? And so they said, what are the kinds of things that can push priests helping one way or another? And they were really interested in the effect of time. And so they set up a study that was the kind of thing that used to do back in the day where they were less rules about how you set up a study. And so they set up a study where these priests were going to be walking by like kind of doing their thing. And there would be someone who was pretending to be hurt on the street, lying in the middle of the street looking like they needed some serious help. And the question was just whether or not the priests stopped to help them. But what they did ahead of time was to put the priests in different conditions in terms of how rushed they were. They varied much free time the priests felt like they have. So all the priests are going to give a lecture at the seminary, so they have to walk across campus to go give this lecture. And interestingly it's a lecture on the good Samaritan. Do you remember what the good Samaritan is, you know, the story of the good Samaritan? Is basically about being nice to a stranger who needs your help. So they're going to give a lecture about, you need to be nice to strangers who need your help. But they're varying the hurry conditions they have. Some of the students were put in a very high hurry condition they were told, you gotta get over there right now, in fact, you're already late you need to rush over there whatever you do, right? So they're rushing to give this lecture and there's a guy hurt on the street. Versus a medium condition like, you've got to get over there soon. You gotta make it pronto, but it's not like you're already late. Versus a little rush condition like, you just got lots of free time. And the measure was just like when they are running over to give this lecture about the good Samaritan, did they stop and act like a good Samaritan themselves. And so here's a graph of what they found, which I find a quite shocking graph, right? Even in the low hurry condition, only 60% ish of priests are stopping to actually help this person who needs help. But what's more shocking is that in the high hurry condition when these priests are in a rush. Only about 10% of them stops 90% of the priests just like cruise by and don't help someone. What does this mean? This means that we're all susceptible to kind of just being jerks when we're in a rush and we feel like we just don't have any time. So think about what that's doing generationally to students who are so time famished, right? So we're less nice to other people, but there's also evidence that we're less nice to the planet, right? At a time when we really need to be worrying about things like climate change, one of the things you need to do to behave better and nicer to the planet is just have a little bit more free time. And it turns out that if you don't have free time, you're often less good about things like recycling and just doing nice things for the planet than you expect. We know this from one study by Ashley Whillans who studies Time Affluence, she has a fantastic book called Time Smart and if you want to learn more time hacks, you should check out. But she did this study where she was looking at whether or not students choose to recycle. So they're doing some sort of art project where there's a bunch of paper scraps and the recycling bins just outside. So all you have to do, it doesn't take that much time. You have to take the recycling scraps and take them outside the classroom. But she either does puts students in a condition where they're thinking about time is money. They kind of calculate how much salary they're going to make their kind of prime to think like, my gosh, my time is money or they're in a control condition where they're primed to think about something else. And what you find is use of almost a fourfold increase in the extent to which students are interested in recycling. Merely in cases where they're not kind of thinking about time, whether not feeling so time famished. So we're nicer to other people were nicer to the planet. Time affluence makes us happier, it's all pretty awesome. And it raises the question, how do we get more time Affluence? And luckily we have our Psychprotips. And the Psychprotip here is just that given that time affluence maps onto so many of the behaviors we want for happiness we need to start prioritizing it. And that means really thinking about your to-do list and thinking about whether or not you can pair it down, right? Time Affluence comes from having a calendar that looks like this that's just busy all the time. We need to prioritize some space in there that we just can feel free in, where we don't have so many things that make us feel so overwhelmed. So we can just kind of chill and do whatever we need to do and feel like we have some space. There's another strategy though, which is that if you want to feel more time affluent, you have to make good use of the free time you have already. And there's evidence that you can feel more time affluent if you make good use of what researchers called time confetti. What's time confetti? It's kind of like the small little scraps of time, we have have in between the important tasks of the day. So if a class finishes early or your parents come home, dinner ends a little bit sooner than you think, you got this 10 minutes here five minutes there. Is little pieces of confetti if I were to throw it kind of like in this picture, it's like little pieces of that with time. We don't often think of them as that important. Like if you get the little five minutes here and there, you're probably going to check your phone or do something stupid, right? We don't realize that they add up, and the evidence suggests if you use your time confetti well, it can first of all allow you to do more things that you want to be doing. But it can also make you feel a little less time famished, so you're not so strapped for time. And researcher Ashley Whillans recommends making what she calls a time confetti to-do list or a time confetti wish list. It's not your normal to-do list, It's like when you get five minutes here and there, what can you do? So if this lecture would end a little bit early, you have these five minutes and you look on your phone at the list and be like, that's when I do a little quick meditation. Or that's when I text a friend to set up some social connection, you have this list of go to things that will take you just five minutes that you can do when you have some free time. And so that's the importance of time affluence, we really need to be making space for things and making open time. And this is hard to do, but if you prioritize it, you can really get a happiness benefit from it [MUSIC]
