It’s not that I’m against any of these things or that I’m against spending money. Instead I’ve been investing my money in different ways.

I’m not focused as much on buying new “stuff,” but buying experiences and memories – things that seem to enrich my life more than just collecting material things.

For example, instead of trying to keep up with the latest Macbook, I’d rather spend that money going to concerts with friends or hanging out at new bars and restaurants. Buying new experiences such as these often adds an extra meaning to our lives that material things fail to accomplish.

The reason buying experiences leads to more happiness than buying stuff.

Often when we buy that new pair of shoes or new car, we get a feeling called “buyer’s remorse.” This is our tendency to regret our purchases because we feel we may have made the wrong choice, or that we have spent too extravagantly, or something better will be available in the future.

However, a 2012 study published in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology shows that we aren’t as likely to get buyer’s remorse when we buy experiences.

The reason for this is that when we buy objects they are easily interchangeable with other objects. We get a brand new car, but there’s a new model out within the next 6 months. Material things tend to eventually become out-dated or broken. We get an initial boost in mood when we first buy them, but it quickly dies off.

Experiences, on the other hand, aren’t as easily interchangeable. You can’t trade your first concert experience for someone else’s first concert experience. It’s deeply personal to you – and it’s valuable to you and you alone. When we focus on buying experiences that we can never replace, we build memories and good feelings that stay with us for a lifetime.

Ways to spend money on new experiences.

There are many ways you can spend your money on new experiences:

• Going to a new bar or restaurant with friends.
• Attending a concert or sporting event.
• Planning a trip to a place you’ve never been before.
• Checking out a museum or art exhibit.
• Signing up for a new class or workshop.
• Joining a local club or community center.
• Taking up an extreme hobby like skiing or skating or paintball.
• Throwing a themed party at your house.
• Go camping or plan a mountain hike.
• Buy someone a surprise gift just to see their reaction.

When we spend our money on these types of things, we invest in building good memories. Memories that often stay with us and improve our lives in the long-term.

I’m sure you can still recall pleasant events today that happened in your life 10 or 20 years ago. The pleasure you get from these memories is often much longer lasting than the pleasure you get from solely material-based purchases, which lose their novelty far more quickly.

If you focus your spending habits on experiences vs. stuff, you’re likely to live a more happy and fulfilling life. Of course, this doesn’t mean we should never buy stuff – some material goods are necessary for a comfortable living. The key lesson is that buying things that directly lead to positive experiences often has a stronger impact on our well-being than buying stuff just because we want more.

Stay updated on new articles on psychology and self-improvement here.

References

• Carter, Travis J. & Gilovich, Thomas. (2010). The relative relativity of material and experiential purchases. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 98. 146-159.
• Rosenzweig, Emily & Gilovich, Thomas. (2012). Buyer’s remorse or missed opportunity? Differential regrets for material and experiential purchases. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 102. 215-223.

If you’ve ever read anyone’s success story, then you have undoubtedly found out that their victories weren’t absent from previous failures and struggles.

In many ways, those past failures are what make successful people who they are today.

Recent research has shown that when we focus on both the failures and successes of our role models, we are much more likely to be motivated and inspired by them to improve ourselves.

This is because when we see ourselves going through similar struggles as people who we look up to, we can relate to them much more. We see them as humans, and imperfect, just like the rest of us – regardless of how perfect they may seem inside our heads.

By acknowledging the more humble, imperfect, and “human-like” characteristics of our role models, we feel much more capable of overcoming similar obstacles and achieving our goals.

The truth is that even the happiest and most successful person in the world experiences downfalls every now and again. We should therefore expect to have similar struggles when pursuing our own values and goals.

A related study published in the Journal of Educational Psychology found that students who learned about a topic in science, as well as the struggles scientists go through when discovering their theories, ended up better understanding the curriculum when compared to individuals who didn’t learn the history of scientists’ struggles.

Researchers say this is because students often hold a stereotype that scientists are big brained, super geniuses. In other words, they hold an ideal about who these people are – and it’s an ideal they can’t relate to. Therefore they think scientists are somehow “special” and different from us.

But when students learn about the background of most scientists – they find that they aren’t that special, and often times they go through their own frustrations and failures.

Their success is just as much based on hard work and perseverance as it is their genes or biology. Knowing this, students become more motivated and inspired to overcome their own struggles and frustrations.

The big lesson here is to be careful of idealizing mentors, role models, and other people who we may look up to. They are, in fact, human. And they often share much of the same pain we do when trying to improve ourselves and achieve our goals.

Once we understand that even the most successful people go through rough times, we feel more capable of overcoming rough times of our own.

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According to Chi-Yue Chiu, of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore:

“Distress following excessive self-praise is likely to occur when a person’s inadequacy is exposed, and because inaccurate self-assessments can prevent self-improvement.”

Researchers discovered this effect in students from both the U.S. and Hong Kong, suggesting that it may be cross-cultural. However, they found that students from Hong Kong tended to be more humble in their self evaluations overall, which was consistent with previous research supporting the trend of Asian cultures being more modest than Western cultures.

This finding shouldn’t be that shocking to readers of The Emotion Machine. I have long advocated that we take an honest and reasonable approach to how we view ourselves.

I like positive psychology and I think it offers many useful theories and practices for how we can benefit our lives. But this shouldn’t be confused with the “positive thinking movement.” The former is a scientific discipline, while the latter is a heavily commercialized and distorted industry with little scientific backing.

I’ve experienced the heartache of believing things like The Law of Attraction and The Secret first hand, and I’ve later warned about these dangerous trends in personal development – which often emphasize the importance of excessive self-praise and over-confidence, even when it is irrational and potentially very harmful.

When the self-help “guru” James Arthur Ray had participants go on a physically demanding “Spiritual Warrior” retreat that consisted of several days of fasting, and then spending hours locked in a sweat lodge, several people needed to be hospitalized after – and some even died. Ray believed that through excessive confidence and self-belief, they could overcome any physical limitations. His excessive confidence was wrong, and it had dire consequences for those who fell prey to it.

Of course, some level of self-praise and confidence is essential to our evolution. Because without any confidence, we can never be motivated to take the risks required to successfully adapt to our environment.

If a fish gets thrown into a new pond, but it is too fearful and avoiding of it’s surroundings, it will have greater difficulty finding food to survive. But if it has the confidence to explore its new territory and take calculated risks, it will often have a greater probability of discovering new means of survival, without being crippled by fear.

Self-praise is one of the biggest ways humans can build a more confident demeanor and be more motivated to take action, but it needs to be balanced.

Sports psychologists have demonstrated how athletes can use positive self-talk to improve their performance. But clearly overestimating our abilities can at times lead to some destructive outcomes.

Another study showed how overly optimistic people are susceptible to underestimating the risks that bad things will happen to them, such as getting cancer or getting into a bad car accident. This optimistic attitude can motivate people toward more reckless behaviors because they mis-attribute the risks of their actions.

Again, it’s about balance. Self-praise and confidence are good, but only when they are deserved and when they are grounded in reality. Trying to fool ourselves into thinking we are more than we are can only backfire in the end.

An optimist often tries to find the good in everything. This perspective can cause less stress, less anxiety, and a more empowering and motivating attitude.

Positive psychologist Martin Seligman coined the term learned optimism to explain that people can cultivate more optimism by challenging their negative self-talk. Seligman believes that learning an optimistic attitude is crucial to finding happiness and living healthier.

However, despite these benefits, some research is showing that too much optimism in certain situations can actually be harmful.

According to some psychologists, excessive optimism can cause us to ignore information that goes against our rose-tinted perspective (a kind of “confirmation bias“). This leads some optimistic people to only focus on benefits, but at the same time ignore risks and costs.

In one study, experimenters had participants estimate the risk of a negative event happening to them in the future, such as car theft or getting cancer. After the participant predicted a probability, they were told the actual statistical likelihood it would happen to them.

After a short break, participants were then asked again what the probability of a certain negative event was. What researchers found was that optimistic people only changed their estimates when the information they were given was better than expected, but tended to ignore information that went against their optimism:

“For example if they had predicted that their likelihood of suffering from cancer was 40%, but the average likelihood was 30%, they might adjust their estimate to 32%. If the information was worse than expected – for example, if they had estimated 10% – then they tended to adjust their estimate much less, as if ignoring the data.”

These findings were consistent with some brain research that was also conducted. Researchers found that when people were presented information better than expected, there was high activity in the frontal lobes (suggesting that the participant was re-calculating their estimate). But when the information was worse than expected, there was much less activity in the frontal lobes, almost as if participants were disregarding the new information.

Dr. Sharot who led the study added:

“Our study suggests that we pick and choose the information that we listen to. The more optimistic we are, the less likely we are to be influenced by negative information about the future. This can have benefits for our mental health, but there are obvious downsides. Many experts believe the financial crisis in 2008 was precipitated by analysts overestimating the performance of their assets even in the face of clear evidence to the contrary.”

I don’t wish to deride optimism, I think it’s incredibly important to being a flourishing human being. At the same time, I think it needs to be balanced and realistic. Ignoring reality might bring us some temporary pleasure, but it can also hurt us badly in the long-run. We need to learn how to acknowledge the obstacles, risks, and costs that come with life, while still being confident and hopeful about our future.

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