Good morning,

Welcome back! How has your weekend been so far?

I was in Los Angeles for work last week. Work meetings went well, and I snuck in a great visit to Culture Brewing in Manhattan Beach. 🍺

Here’s what I have for you today:

• One big thing. The science of hedonic editing shows how bundling pain and spacing joys can increase your happiness. 🎁

• You have to check this out. We all do a particular kind of mental math, usually without realizing it. ➕🧠🟰

• Tools and tech. A podcast to be 10% happier. 🔟

Are you ready to jump in? 🦘

1️⃣ ONE BIG THING

Editing life to boost happiness.

You go to the doctor with a persistent stomach ache.

She identifies the source of your ailment and prescribes five liquid shots of a medication that smell and taste like kerosene.

She gives you two options for the treatment: You can take all five shots back to back, or you can take one shot an hour for five hours.

Which option would you take?

The next week, the doctor declares your treatment a total success. She gives you a coupon for a free gelato cup at the shop right by your house as a reward.

She has two coupon options: One allows you to eat one gelato cup per day for five days, and the other gives you five gelato cups to eat back-to-back in the shop.

Which option would you take?

If you're like me, you probably did all the nasty shots at once and spread the delicious gelatos over five days.

Let’s try this again.

Your good friend goes out of town and asks you to take care of her two goldfish. While in your possession, both of the fish die. It turns out that was Alka-Seltzer, not fish food. Sad. 🪦🪦

Your friend is coming home soon. Do you tell her one of the fish died one day, and then the second fish died the following day? Or do you tell her all of the bad news at once?

You feel bad, so you decide to have flowers delivered to your friend's home. Would your friend enjoy a huge 100-flower bouquet delivered once or a 10-flower bouquet delivered once a week for 10 weeks?

Which options did you take?

If you're like me, you bundled the bad news into one conversation, and your pescagrieving friend is getting flowers for ten weeks.

Your hedonic editing instincts.

As we just saw, you have an instinctive ability to bundle together bad things to minimize their negative impact and to separate good things to maximize their positive impact.

Behavioral scientists call this concept hedonic editing.

The behavioral economist Richard Thaler first documented it in 1985.

To best understand hedonic editing, I think it helps to first understand two key elements of prospect theory, a foundational part of behavioral economics developed by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in 1979:

• Loss aversion—people are more concerned with avoiding losses than achieving gains.

• Diminishing sensitivity—the value of each additional gain/loss diminishes. The first bite of a candy bar is better than the second bite, and far better than the 40th bite.

Loss is unpleasant. We are hardwired to avoid losses, whether money, time, or outcomes. But diminishing sensitivity means that when losses occur back-to-back, each additional loss hurts slightly less than the one before.

But not always.

Mental accounts and mental bundling.

The bridge between prospect theory and hedonic editing is mental accounting, a concept proposed by Richard Thaler in 1980.

His research found that people categorize and evaluate things like money differently based on its source, intended use, or other subjective factors, rather than viewing all money as equally interchangeable.

Have you ever splurged on a fancy meal after getting a year-end bonus or tax refund? Why hadn’t you gone out for that meal with money from your regular paycheck? Because these two sources of money are in different mental accounts.

Mental accounts also exist for experiences and memories.

Which brings us back to hedonic editing and how you can use it to your advantage.

Increasing happiness with hedonic editing.

Your hedonic editing instincts are already quite good, as you saw with the kerosene-flavored medicine, gelato, tragic fish news, and flower examples.

However, you can also apply this idea in new ways to increase your real-time happiness and overall life satisfaction.

Thaler proposed four ways to minimize the pain of losses and extend the joy of gains:

• Combine losses—bundle bad things. If you woke tired, spilled coffee on your pants, and scratched your car while parking, bundle this into "I had a bad day."

• Separate gains—spread out good things. If you get a box of cookies or candy you love, have two pieces per day, rather than consuming the whole box at one time. (This will also avoid that trip to the doctor for an "unexplained" stomach ache.)

• Integrate a small loss with a larger gain. Bundle a small loss with a larger gain in your mental accounting to cancel out its impact. If you lose $10 but win $200 in Vegas, think of it as winning $190.

• Segregate out small gains from a larger loss. If you lose $200 but win $10, keep those two things separate in your mind. “At least I won $10.”

All of this applies to far more than money. Consider these strategies across all aspects of your life.

But keep your mental accounts in order.

Evers, Imas, and Kang's hedonic editing research found that the strategies above only work when the ideas bundled or segregated are similar in nature.

Their research suggests, for example, that if you lose $50, your two fish die, and your boss yells at you, attempts to bundle these as one "loss" will be ineffective. They are too different to combine into one.

Hedonic editing at the scale of life.

Many of the examples above are fairly trivial. Sometimes, that is the nature of explaining concepts like this.

To close out today, let’s look at a more impactful example from an Englishwoman named Sally.

Back in 2018, she went rock climbing at a local gym. She had never done any type of rock climbing before in her life. She overcame nerves and sweaty palms with an instructor and achieved more than she expected. It filled her with energy and confidence. 

“I just thought, I want a bit more of this in my life,” Sally realized.

“There were often things on the horizon, such as going on holiday, which was always something to look forward to and think, oh, this is a new experience, going somewhere I've never been before… But other than that, I don't think I was doing a huge amount of new things, to be honest.”

Instead of saving new experiences only for her vacations, Sally decided to commit to doing something new (to her) once a week for 52 straight weeks.

This wasn't a bucket list project.

These were just new experiences for Sally. She went to laughter yoga, used a stand-up desk for one day, laid in a hammock, took a drumming lesson, used a potters' wheel, made pasta from scratch, tried acupuncture, and much more.

Sally had a conscious plan to do something she'd never tried before each week. She wanted to space out her experiences of the joy of novelty and pride of achievement, not bundle them into a single vacation memory.

At the end of the first year, she decided to keep going. Sally has tried something new every week since 2018.

She created a wonderful website that shares her approach and includes a list of all the things she has tried:

In the seventh edition of this newsletter, Two Selves on Vacation, I talked about how your brain consolidates experiences into memories and how our overall evaluation of our lives is essentially a chain of memories. Daniel Kahneman calls this psychological perspective the “remembering self.”

“Memories are all we get to keep from our experience of living, and the only perspective that we can adopt as we think about our lives is therefore that of the remembering self,” Kahneman explains.

On memories and time.

Think about Sally’s clever use of hedonic editing.

She is consciously creating and spreading memorable experiences. One per week.

How do you think that impacts her overall sense of how satisfied she is with her life?

And how do you think this impacts her perception of the passage of time?

Why does time appear to go so slowly in our youth and then speed up progressively as we age?

Could it be the density of new experiences?

Here is how Sally describes it:

“I feel like I've perhaps slowed down time in a weird way…”

Well, I’d say that’s an idea worth returning to next week. What do you think?

Thanks for reading this week.

I’ll see you here again next Sunday morning.

Kevin

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