⏰ What does time have to do with happiness?

Unfolding the relationship between time and wellbeing

Why being time rich can make us happy

What a beautiful week this week has been. Places are starting to open up again, and I got an extra day to enjoy it all thanks to my past self for taking Friday off. A 3 day weekend feels like the right amount of time to rest before coming back to work, does everyone else agree??

In all seriousness, I do think that I personally have felt like work has slowly penetrated into my personal life a lot since lockdown started. I’ve probably talked about this about a million times already by now, but as much as I love the flexibility that it offers, it also somehow makes me feel like I have less time for myself. So of course, when I saw an episode from The Happiness Lab titled The Day of Rest I was intrigued and had to listen.

In this episode, Dr. Laurie Santos, the host of the show, talks to Sarah Hurwitz, a White House speechwriter from 2009–2017 — a big job! (P.S. If you’re not familiar with Dr. Laurie Santos’s work, I’d highly recommend checking her out. She’s a Yale professor who specializes in the subject of wellbeing and has a wildly popular (and free!) course on Coursera called The Science of Wellbeing). They discuss Hurwitz’s exploration of Judaism and her discovery that observing a day of rest and doing less actually made her happier. The discovery wasn’t instant or easy, especially given the social norm element of everyone else working while she wasn’t, and the feeling like she was missing out. But what she lost in numbers of work hours she gained in her personal time, which has been shown over and over to be linked with subjective wellbeing.

Why does having time, or feeling like we are time rich make you happy?

Researchers refer to this notion as Time Affluence. Studies have shown that the link between material wealth and happiness has a limit — emotional wellbeing improves with in increasing income, but there is no further progress beyond an annual income of $75,000. On the other hand, time affluence is shown to increase wellbeing, even at higher levels of it. It’s also interesting to think about how time is essentially the thing we need to experience activities we enjoy. So what are the other factors linked to Time Affluence and how can we get the most out of it?

Time Affluence and Mindfulness

In this study, people who reported having more time affluence were also able to be “in the present” more. In other words, they were able to enhance their states of mindfulness. Though mindfulness might be a buzzword right now, studies have actually shown its positive associations with happiness and wellbeing. One study looked at people’s commute to work (back when commuting was a thing…), and the results showed that people who chose active modes of transport such as walking or cycling reported having more time affluence than car commuters (interesting.. given that walking is a relatively slow travel mode). Walkers and bicyclists in this study had lower levels of stress and higher levels of competence, and they perceived their commute as relaxing and exciting. The results suggest that engaging in these active modes of transport allowed them to be more mindful and to relax. The senses of ‘being in the now’ also made them feel more time rich.

Time Affluence and spending time with others

People with higher time affluence also reported spending more time connecting to other and doing activities which promoted personal growth and physical fitness. These experiences help fulfill our psychological needs. Just speaking from personal experience, it’s no wonder then, that a) the 90 minutes I spend every morning doing yoga makes me much happier and feel more time rich; and b) not being able to go out and see friends can blur our sense of time and make lots of people feel time poor.

The more you give, the more you get

And if we still feel like it’s hard to objectively increase our time affluence, this study has the remedy. Giving time to others in the form of giving help has been shown to increase our perception of time affluence. The results in this study suggest that if people spend more time on others, we’ll feel more time affluent. As a bonus, this also improves the wellbeing of the self and others, because helping others has been shown to increase our self-efficacy. Having said that, there is a limit of how much time you can give. When we feel like we’re giving too much time away, our wellbeing can start to drop. It’s all about finding a balance, and maybe finding time to give help more!

I think if there’s anything we can take away from this, it’s that we need to start taking and making time more for ourselves, and also for others if we want to feel happier 😊

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