How do you perform science experiments on happiness? You’ll need a lot of chocolate.

Social psychologist and happiness researcher Elizabeth Dunn and her colleagues conducted an experiment at the University of British Columbia to see how abundance impacts happiness. They gave participants a piece of chocolate in their lab, and then told one group to go eat as much more chocolate as they could in the next week.

Another group were told to abstain from chocolate entirely, and the control group didn’t change their chocolate-eating habits at all. Back at the lab a week later, everyone got another chocolate treat, and two of the groups were pretty “meh” about it.

“This is kind of like the sad reality of the human experience encapsulated in a single study: when we repeat a pleasurable experience, we enjoy it a little bit less than we did the first time,” said Dunn, a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia. “But there’s one group that’s sort of immune to this slow slide toward disenchantment, and that is the group that gave up chocolate for a week!”

That experiment encapsulates one of the core principles in “Happy Money,” which Dunn wrote with Harvard Business School’s Michael Norton. I devoured the book a few months ago, and loved the balance it struck between real-life nerdy research and approachable, practical tips I’ve been applying to my everyday life.

For our latest Uncomfortable Book Club, I called up Dunn to talk about the big five takeaways from her and Norton’s research. Here are some edited excerpts of what she told me.

1: Buy experience

So the idea here is that people get more happiness from buying experiences – everything from trips and concerts to, you know, a special dinner out — than from buying material things: gadgets, clothing, furniture, even houses.

So it’s also worth recognizing that any one thing can be construed either as a material purchase or as an experiential purchase, right? You could think of a tennis racket as giving you a lot of experiences playing tennis, or as this material thing. In fact, people seem to get more happiness from the same thing when they think of it in terms of the experiences it provides, as opposed to its more material aspects. You might imagine that material things would have the advantage here because of their durability – almost by definition, they stick around – and yet experiences seem to have a better emotional return on investment over time, in that they actually grow rosier in our minds, while material things get old and worn out.

2: Make it a treat

I think this might be my favorite, actually. In fact, if I were to summarize the most important takeaway from all of happiness research in just a few words, it would probably be: “abundance undermines appreciation.”

An interesting paradox of modern life is that we have abundant access to pleasures, and yet this can actually undermine our ability to really find joy in them. And so I think it’s really interesting to consider how we create treats for ourselves, in thinking more broadly about our relationship with money. When I was in graduate school, I was living pretty close to the poverty line. And for the most part, it sucks, right? I don’t want to at all romanticize poverty, but on the other hand, the upside was that even a $10 plate of pad thai, to me at the time, was a treat, something that I enjoyed and appreciated.

And as I have gotten a real job and climbed that economic ladder, I started to find that it was a little harder to find these small joys, because I could just take them for granted so easily. And so I’ve actually more intentionally restricted myself in some ways, not in a self-denying way, but rather in a pleasure-enhancing way. I try to really notice when there’s something that used to give me pleasure that no longer does, and then to try to take a break from that thing.

I used to get these kale smoothies from Whole Foods that are really tasty but also, like, the most expensive way you can consume kale. They’re around $12 a pop. I started getting them because I really enjoyed them, but before long, I was just getting them out of habit, right? And I noticed I wasn’t actually enjoying them as much, so I took a break from getting them so often. I just got one the other day, and it was awesome, I hadn’t had one in so long. It was a beautiful, sunny day. I really appreciated it. So it’s noticing when something is no longer giving us pleasure, taking a break from it and turning it back into a treat. 

3: Buy time

My husband is not a big believer in buying time. His perspective is, “Well, if we can do it ourselves, we should do it ourselves.” And I think in doing this research I actually have won this argument, by showing that indeed, people who use money to buy themselves time — and in particular, to buy themselves out of the tasks they dread — are consistently happier than those who do not.

I think sometimes this can be misunderstood as a rich person thing, and it is not. We find that really across the income spectrum, this seems to be pretty broadly true: Finding ways to buy yourself time is good for happiness, and it’s probably a decision that people overlook. I think this can also be helpful, too, in thinking about whether or not to make a purchase. Our book really isn’t just about, “How do you spend all of your riches in ways that will make you happiest?” It’s also, “How can you save money, not spend as much and still get a lot of happiness.” I think one approach is to consider, before you make a purchase, ask yourself: Will this have any impact on the way I spend my time? And if the answer is no, then maybe leave it aside for now. Maybe you don’t need it. In contrast, sometimes there’s a purchase like having somebody help clean, that will fundamentally alter the way you spend time on your Saturday. And that is so valuable, right? We can’t get that time back. 

I’ve gotten a little obsessed with longevity — all of the Peter Attia “Outlive” stuff, right? In a way, this is like the mini version of longevity: Create this time for yourself. And it’s more of a sure thing; you can do all the crazy longevity things and not really end up buying yourself time at all. But buy yourself your Saturday afternoon, and it’s pretty much a guarantee that you’re going to get those hours, and that you can do something with them that is much more emotionally rewarding than cleaning your home. You might not be able to add years to your life, but you can buy yourself that Saturday afternoon. 

4: Pay now, consume later

Pretty much everything about modern society is oriented toward getting us what we want right away and letting us pay for it later. And really, we’re arguing that people are better off doing the exact opposite. I think since we wrote the book, our society has moved even further toward “get it now and pay for it later.” 

If you can pay up front, you still experience the pain of paying. People don’t like paying for things, you probably don’t need a PhD to make that point, but it’s important to recognize. Paying is painful, and it’s painful whenever it happens. But you do want to separate payment from consumption so that the pleasure of consumption isn’t dragged down by the pain of paying.

So in that way, people are on to something and designing a society where we consume right away and pay for it later. But the better flip is to go: Let’s separate these things, but let’s take the payment upfront, which is helpful because this helps us constrain our spending. Then if I consume later, I’ve already paid for it, and by the time I experience it — especially, I think of this with things like vacations: If you can pay for them upfront, then you can just go and enjoy them, almost like somebody else paid for you to go. Because the really interesting thing about human psychology is that we see our past selves almost as different people, and our future selves almost as different people. And so you can let somebody else treat you to a vacation. You know, if your past self has paid for it.

5: Invest in others

So this is the one that I really devoted a lot of my career to studying. What we see is that when people use money in ways that benefit others, they actually seem to get more happiness than when they use that same amount of money to benefit themselves.

I think at first glance, it’s a bit counterintuitive. But gift-giving is such a fundamental part of human society that this seems to be something that we argue is a cultural universal: People experience joy from giving to others, using their financial resources to benefit others. We did this original study in Vancouver, Canada, but then we started testing this idea in countries around the world, including places where people were struggling to meet their own basic needs. What we saw is basically, wherever we looked, humans get joy from giving to others. And so this is just, I think, a really beautiful thing to be able to come back to about our species and something that we can harness when we make spending decisions in our own daily lives.

Defend Your Splurge

Money messes with all our lives, but the right purchase at the right time can make things a little better. Tell us how you’ve treated yourself lately by replying to this email, and we’ll include the best stories in our newsletter!

This week’s splurge comes from our producer Alice Wilder, who’s celebrating the last days of summer produce.

Growing up in Rochester, New York, one of our neighbors had a rhubarb patch in his front yard. He let us pick from it, and our summers were filled with rhubarb jam and strawberry rhubarb pie courtesy of my dad. As an adult in North Carolina, I was disappointed to learn that it doesn’t grow well in our climate, and would call the local co-op in early spring to make sure I was there to snatch some rhubarb when it was in season.

This spring was filled with grief for me, and I missed some of my favorite spring traditions: foraging mulberries from neighborhood trees, making honeysuckle syrup, and a strawberry rhubarb pie. It’s long past rhubarb season, but while at the grocery store I saw some in the produce case, imported from a continent away, with a price to match. But I couldn’t let the opportunity pass me up, and spent $15 on a couple pounds of rhubarb, making a cake and some jam. It tasted like summer.

The Comfort Zone

What our team is watching, reading and listening to this week.

• Check out Dunn’s TED talk about the science of giving, and how it makes us happier. 
• Related listening for this week’s ep: A beautiful episode of “Invisibilia” about having a parent with dementia.
• And some related reading, about the things we leave behind online.
• AI has dead celebrities working again 🙁
• We’re loving Claire Murashima’s TikToks showing what it’s like to work at NPR.
• And Alice interviewed her for the newsletter “Starting Out!”
• Workplace hack: Make an enemy!
• This retreat for women executives lowkey sounds like a horror movie.
• It’s time for the commodification of fall 🤗🎃
• Zoë is combining two of Dunn’s principles (“buy experiences” and “pay now, consume later”) by going to see Orville Peck after buying tickets months ago. Let’s end on Peck’s cover of a great Magnetic Fields song.

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