Eric Barker

Eric Barker writes Barking Up the Wrong Tree.

What can we do to cure boredom?

The quickest and easiest way is to change your context.

If you’re alone, it’s pretty straightforward: get up, go out, see friends, put yourself in a new situation where you have less control over your environment and things will stimulate you.

But there are a lot of areas where boredom seems tougher to deal with: relationships, work, etc.

Boring Relationship?

In the context of a relationship, stop thinking about you or your partner. Again, change your context. Don’t get dinner or drinks and talk. That relies on you two to be interesting. Go somewhere that’s already fun.

Doing thrilling stuff is the key to a fantastic first date. Roller coasters.Horror movies or suspense films.

And if you are just talking, stop playing it so safe. The best questions to ask on a first date are offbeat and fun. It’s better to talk about STD’s and abortions than the weather.

What kills most long-term relationships? A lack of excitement. The research points again and again to how important thrills are:

1. What reignited passion in long term marriages? Doing exciting things together.
2. Think a pleasant evening is all it takes? Researchers did a 10 week study comparing couples that engaged in “pleasant” activities vs “exciting” activities. Pleasant lost.
3. What can improve the sex in a relationship? Try a roller coaster together. Anything that stimulates your central nervous system also gets you going sexually.
4. Why would doing anything exciting have such a big effect on a relationship? Because we’re lousy about realizing where our feelings are coming from. Excitement from any source will be associated with the person you’re with, even if they’re not the cause of it.

Bored At Work?

What about at work? Work can be boring and you can’t change the context as much. Very true and this is a serious issue: a boring job can kill you.

The key to fighting boredom at the office is not excitement, it’s finding meaning in what you do. Broadening the definition of what it is you are doing, seeing it as a mission or calling, and feeling you are making a difference can make you happier, more fulfilled and less bored.

What if YOU are boring?

What if you’re boring? People who bore others are often self-indulgent — they just talk about what interests them. We all fall prey to this on occasion.

The best lesson here is from Steven Pressfield’s advice on improving writing: keep in mind that nobody wants to read your stuff. So keep things simple and always have the audience in mind.

What about chores that are undeniably boring?

If you have to do tasks that are boring and there’s no two ways about it, don’t take a break:

You may think that taking a break during an irritating or boring experience will be good for you, but a break actually decreases your ability to adapt, making the experience seem worse when you have to return to it. When cleaning your house or doing your taxes, the trick is to stick with it until you are done.

What about when other people are boring you?

At least in some situations, don’t be afraid to let your mind wander. Especially on the phone, research shows that people actually like us better when we’re distracted: we’re less negative, less complex and more personal in our speech. We also encourage the other person to talk more.

This piece originally appeared on Barking Up the Wrong Tree.

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Eric Barker writes Barking Up the Wrong Tree.

Know it or not, you often decide whether or not to trust someone based on crazy reasons. How attractive someone is, whether they’re the same gender as you are, whether someone blushes, and the state of your ever-changing mood all affect whether you trust somebody.

In some situations you trust people more just because they have a beard:

…male politicians might want to consider not shaving because the “presence of a beard on the face of candidates could boost their charisma, reliability, and above all their expertise as perceived by voters, with positive effects on voting intention.”

You make up your mind about someone in 100 milliseconds.

Yeah, read it again: 100 milliseconds. What happens when you’re given additional time? You become more convinced you’re right:

Judgments made after a 100-ms exposure correlated highly with judgments made in the absence of time constraints, suggesting that this exposure time was sufficient for participants to form an impression. In fact, for all judgments—attractiveness, likeability, trustworthiness, competence, and aggressiveness—increased exposure time did not significantly increase the correlations… additional time may simply boost confidence in judgments.

And what quality do you value in a friend more than any other? You guessed it: trustworthiness.

What’s the reason most people cite for wanting to leave their job? Not trusting their employer.

And maybe you’re right to be wary. Most people do violate the trust of even close friends:

“60 percent of people confessed to sharing even their best friends’ secrets with a third party.”

Research shows that in life-or-death situations, you can probably forget about all that better-angels-of-our-nature stuff. It’s pretty much every man for himself.
But is that the best way to live? Probably not if you want a long, enjoyable life.

People who give others the benefit of the doubt are both happier and healthier. In fact, high-trusters are actually better at lie detection:

…high trusters were significantly better than low trusters were at detecting lies. This finding extends a growing body of theoretical and empirical work suggesting that high trusters are far from foolish Pollyannas and that low trusters’ defensiveness incurs significant costs.

Expecting others to be selfish can be a self-fulfliing prophecy:

The expectations people have about how others will behave play a large role in determining whether people cooperate with each other or not… One’s own expectation thereby becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: those who expect people to act selfishly, actually experience uncooperative behaviour from others more often.

And cynicism can lead to a downward spiral:

When people trust others, they painfully learn when other people prove to be untrustworthy; however, when people refrain from trusting others, they fail to learn of instances when the other person would have honored their trust.

Think that people are poor because they trust too much and the wealthy get their money by duplicity? Actually, being skeptical of people’s motives isn’t the path to riches:

People were asked how much they trust others on a scale of 1 to 10. Income peaked at those who responded with the number 8.

Those with the highest levels of trust had incomes 7% lower than the 8’s. Research shows they are more likely to be taken advantage of.

Those with the lowest levels of trust had an income 14.5% lower than 8’s. That loss is the equivalent of not going to college. They missed many opportunities by not trusting.

Clearly, on average, it’s better to trust too much than too little, even from a financial perspective.

Okay, but does this mean trust everyone? How do you pick?

You can tell Nobel Peace Prize winners from America’s Most Wanted at a rate much better than chance. More often than not for first impressions, you can trust your gut:

Estimates were significantly better than chance, indicating that individuals can identify permanent altruistic traits in others.

But how does this affect how you should handle relationships?

Oddly enough, nothing worked better than good ol’ tit-for-tat:

A tit-for-tat strategy plays the iterated prisoners’ dilemma game by cooperating on the first move, and then making the same choice as the other player did on the previous move. This strategy has been shown to be a very robust in that it does well with a wide variety of other strategies, provided that there is a sufficiently large chance that the same players will meet again.

That old rule we all know turned out to be incredibly robust. All it required was imitating the other player’s last move. If they’re cooperative, you cooperate. If they screw you, you screw them back.

Robert Axelrod, who documented the findings in his book, The Evolution of Cooperation, explained what we can learn from the findings:

“Tit-for-tat won the tournament, not by beating the other player, but by eliciting from the other player behavior that allowed both to do well.”

At least in the Prisoner’s Dilemma game, “doing unto others as they do unto you” may not put you ahead, but with time it educates others that, all other things being equal, it’s clearly more profitable to work with you than not.

So…

All things being equal, trust people or at least trust your gut. Early in ongoing relationships, consider tit-for-tat.

This piece originally appeared on Barking Up the Wrong Tree.

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Eric Barker writes Barking Up the Wrong Tree.

First impressions matter even more than you think. They’re the most important part of any job interview. And once they’re set, they are very hard to resist. Optimize first impressions from the outset by framing the conversation with a few well-rehearsed sentences regarding how you want to be perceived. This will end up being the structure the other person forms their memories around.

Your handshake, body language and appearance all matter. In fact, the weather matters.

If you have the option, schedule it earlier in the day. People prefer things that are first and are more likely to say “yes” to things when they don’t have a lot of things going on.

Getting the interviewer to explain why they wanted to bring you in is a good persuasion technique.

A course that was successful in making managers more charismatic focused on these techniques:

• framing through metaphor-stories and anecdotes
• demonstrating moral conviction
• sharing the sentiments of the collective
• setting high expectations
• communicating confidence
• using rhetorical devices such as contrasts, lists, and rhetorical questions together with non-verbal tactics such as body gesture, facial expression, and animated voice tone.

Finally, don’t get too stressed out. People who have no job are happier than people with a job they don’t like.

This piece originally appeared on Barking Up the Wrong Tree.

Join 25K+ readers. Get a free weekly update via email here.

Eric Barker writes Barking Up the Wrong Tree.

Trick question. Don’t blame. It makes you less able to deal with the problems of life.

Via The Blame Game: How the Hidden Rules of Credit and Blame Determine Our Success or Failure:

A study conducted by Harvard Medical School psychiatrist George Valliant showed that people who “projected,” or blamed others for their misfortunes, were much less able to adjust to the changing events in their lives… In another study, conducted by psychiatrist Leslie Phillips at Worcester State Hospital, it was found that the more people fell into the pattern of blaming others for their problems, the worse off they became in dealing with their life in general.

Blaming others can actually make you physically ill. And it makes you miserable:

…divorced individuals in the study who blamed ex-spouses, or even themselves, had more anxiety, depression and sleep disorders than individuals who blamed the way that they and their partners interacted.

Blaming external factors is even bad for corporations.

Via The Blame Game: How the Hidden Rules of Credit and Blame Determine Our Success or Failure:

One compelling study showed that organizations that blame themselves for their poor results actually achieve higher stock prices over the long term than those that blame external factors. The researchers studied 655 annual reports issued by fourteen public companies over a twenty-one-year period spanning from 1975 to 1995…

And, sadly, blaming is contagious.

Stop Blaming Yourself

Yes, you want to learn from mistakes but turns out punishing yourself has a lot of negative consequences. Forgiving yourself can help you reduce procrastination, increase creativity, and, ironically, even increase self-control.

Via The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do To Get More of It:

Study after study shows that self-criticism is consistently associated with less motivation and worse self-control. It is also one of the single biggest predictors of depression, which drains both “I will” power and “I want” power. In contrast, self-compassion— being supportive and kind to yourself, especially in the face of stress and failure— is associated with more motivation and better self-control.

Forgiveness, not guilt, increases accountability.

Via The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do To Get More of It:

Surprisingly, it’s forgiveness, not guilt, that increases accountability. Researchers have found that taking a self-compassionate point of view on a personal failure makes people more likely to take personal responsibility for the failure than when they take a self-critical point of view. They also are more willing to receive feedback and advice from others, and more likely to learn from the experience.

Resisting blame makes you more productive and happier.

Via The Winner’s Brain: 8 Strategies Great Minds Use to Achieve Success:

A study conducted in Diego’s Pizzagalli’s Harvard-based Affective Neuroscience Laboratory suggests that those who tolerate mistakes show lower activity in the anterior cingulate cortex — the part of the brain that is responsible for monitoring conflicts among different brain signals and that processes the significance of emotional events — and are able to move on to the next task far more easily than those who don’t tolerate their mistakes very well. In fact, those who become overly upset by the errors they make — i.e., failures — may experience more symptoms of anxiety and depression than others.

How can we resist the urge to blame?

When you want to blame yourself, try to find a benefit in the failure.

Via The Winner’s Brain: 8 Strategies Great Minds Use to Achieve Success:

Reframe a failure to find the benefit, even if it’s just a tiny nugget… Sarah Banks and colleagues have provided fMRI evidence that this act of consciously putting a positive spin on things actually changes brain activity patterns, specifically by engaging areas of the prefrontal cortex, which in turn dampens the response from the amygdalae. Consummate reformers like Wyeth and Meili seem able to tame their amygdalae, and thus negative thoughts, in order to translate even the most difficult circumstances into an affirmative challenge.

Learn from it and move on. Experts don’t waste time with blame. They see what they’re doing wrong and use it as information to improve. Via The Talent Code: Greatness Isn’t Born. It’s Grown. Here’s How:

“Our predictions were extremely accurate,” Zimmerman said. “This showed that experts practice differently and far more strategically. When they fail, they don’t blame it on luck or themselves. They have a strategy they can fix.”

Admitting error and using it to get better is a sign of a great team.

Via The Blame Game: How the Hidden Rules of Credit and Blame Determine Our Success or Failure:

What surprised Edmondson and her fellow researchers was that

 

What surprised Edmondson and her fellow researchers was thatthe most cohesive and best-led medical teams and institutions actually reported more errors than their counterparts… the higher-functioning teams were more willing to disclose their errors and, therefore, to learn from and avoid repeating them.

Eric Barker writes Barking Up the Wrong Tree.

In her book Counterclockwise, Harvard professor Ellen Langer recounts a groundbreaking study she did in 1979 that has since become the stuff of legend.

She took a group of male research subjects in their 70s and 80s on a retreat. The environment had been manipulated to make it seem as if it were 20 years prior.

The residents were all aware of the real year, but being immersed in the world of 1959 and encouraged to act as if they were younger men had powerful effects on them:

The experimental group showed greater improvement on joint flexibility, finger length (their arthritis diminished, and they were able to straighten their fingers more) and manual dexterity. On intelligence tests, 63% of the experimental group improved their scores, compared to only 44% of the control group. There were also improvements in height, weight, gait and posture. Finally, we asked people unaware of the study’s purpose to compare photos taken of the participants at the end of the week with those submitted at the beginning of the study. Those objective observers judged that all of the experimental participants looked noticeably younger at the end of the study.

Other research shows that people who held positive beliefs about getting older lived 7.5 years longer and were healthier.

Women who dye their hair not only report feeling younger, but also their blood pressure drops and they are rated as looking younger in photos — photos where their hair is cropped out.

“Will to live” has been shown to make a difference in when you die.

Langer cites studies showing that women with younger spouses live longer and those with older spouses die younger. How we think about aging affects how we age:

The psychologist Bernice Neugarten suggested that we are deeply influenced by “social clocks” that we gauge our lives by the implicit belief that is a “right age” for certain behaviors or attitudes.

Our mind may have more control over our body than we think. Processes we long believed to be out of our control, like heart rate and blood pressure, proved not to be.

Via Counterclockwise:

In 1961, Yale psychologist Neal Miller suggested that the autonomic nervous system, which controls blood pressure and heart rate, could be trained just like a voluntary system, which allows us to raise and lower our arm and other deliberate acts. His suggestion was met with a great deal of skepticism. Everyone knew that the autonomic nervous system was just that, autonomous and beyond our control. Yet his subsequent work on biofeedback — which makes autonomic processes such as heart rate visible by hooking people up to monitors — found that people could be taught to control them.

Radiolab did an amazing piece explaining how exhaustion is more in the mind than the body and how athletes manipulate this to complete marathons and Ironman competitions.

How strong is the power of belief in our lives? Can we make our lives better by changing what we believe?

Placebo Effect

We’ve all heard of the placebo effect. If I give you a sugar pill and tell you it’ll improve X, X often improves just because you believe the pill is working.

The placebo effect means that voodoo curses really can kill you, Axe body spray can make men sexier, and fake steroids can make you stronger. What’s truly amazing is that the placebo effect can work even when you know it’s a placebo.

The placebo effect might even have a role in exercise and health. Four weeks after being told their efforts at work qualified as exercise, female research subjects had lost weight and were healthier compared with a control group. Researchers speculate that believing something is exercise may make it have the results of exercise.

In Counterclockwise Langer cites studies that showed that when a medical therapy was believed in, it was 70% to 90% effective but only 30% to 40% effective when the patient was skeptical. Subjects exposed to fake poison ivy developed rashes, and fake caffeine spiked heart rate and motor performance.

Priming

Priming is when you’re unconsciously influenced by a concept and it affects how you behave.

There has been a torrent of priming studies in recent years showing just how much words and ideas in our environment can affect how we act:

• Thinking about old people can make you drive slower.
• Seeing superheroes can make you stronger.
• Seeing the Apple logo can make you more creative.
• You often embody the traits associated with the clothes you wear.
• Watching TV shows about stupid people can temporarily reduce your IQ.

And these aren’t just theoretical. They can be used to improve performance.

Being primed to feel happy before a challenge can make us perform better. Thinking about college professors before a test can get you a better grade.

Overconfidence

I’ve posted before about the multitude of benefits a little delusion can offer:

• People with positive illusions about their relationship are more satisfied, score higher on love and trust and have fewer problems.

• “People who were unrealistically idealistic about their partners when they got married were more satisfied with their marriage three years later than less idealistic people.”

• Irrational overconfidence increases productivity and improves teamwork.

• “Self-deception has been associated with stress reduction, a positive self-bias and increased pain tolerance, all of which could enhance motivation and performance during competitive tasks.“

• Superstition can be performance enhancing. This is why someone wishing you luck can actually make you do better because it increases confidence.

Optimism

Just believing you can become smarter and can become a better negotiator have both been shown to increase improvement.

Optimism is associated with better health and a longer life. It can make you happier. The Army teaches soldiers to be optimistic because it makes them tougher and more resourceful. Hope predicts academic achievement better than intelligence, personality or previous grades.

Being socially optimistic — expecting people to like you — makes people like you more. Expecting a positive outcome from negotiations made groups more likely to come to a deal and to be happy with it.

Dangers of Too Much Belief

Being totally delusional, paranoid or believing in things that are patently untrue is obviously not good. I’m not recommending that.

Optimism can blind us. The happiest people and the most trusting people both had suboptimal outcomes. Those who think they have the most willpower are actually the most likely to give in to temptation. The reason you can predict your friends’ behavior better than they can is that we are all realistic about others’ actions and optimistic about our own. Some priming studies have been disputed.

Recommendations

So what can we do to improve our lives with belief? Here are a few suggestions:

• Manipulate your context to feel younger and feel better. You don’t need to make it look like 1959, but don’t act as if your surroundings don’t matter.

• Try priming yourself to improve performance.

• Moderate overconfidence is beneficial.

• Good-luck charms and placebos can help. A little magic can be scientifically sound.

• Be optimistic. Yes, pessimism softens the blow of bad news, but it isn’t worth it.

This piece originally appeared on Barking Up the Wrong Tree.

Eric Barker writes Barking Up the Wrong Tree.

In order to innovate in a way that is both practical and effective you need to make “little bets.”

What’s a little bet?

A small experiment that tests a theory. It’s just big enough to give you the answer you need but not so big that it wastes too much precious time, money or resources.

Rather than going all-in on the first idea you have and risk losing everything, a little bet allows you to break out of your comfort zone and try something new knowing that if it doesn’t work out you can quickly recover and try something else.

Little Bets

The best book on the subject is the aptly titled Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries. Peter Sims explains why it’s such a strong concept:

Little Bets is based on the proposition that we can use a lot of little bets and certain creative methods to identify possibilities and build up to great outcomes. At the core of this experimental approach, little bets are concrete actions taken to discover, test, and develop ideas that are achievable and affordable. They begin as creative possibilities that get iterated and refined over time, and they are particularly valuable when trying to navigate amid uncertainty, create something new, or attend to open-ended problems. When we can’t know what’s going to happen, little bets help us learn about the factors that can’t be understood beforehand. The important thing to remember is that while prodigies are exceptionally rare, anyone can use little bets to unlock creative ideas.

It’s an excellent book but what really struck me was when I saw this same underlying principle popping up again and again in different arenas.

In Business

In Eric Ries’ acclaimed bestseller The Lean Startup he makes it clear that little bets, or “experiments”, are critical to moving a business forward in a safe fashion:

…if you cannot fail, you cannot learn.

He tells the story of how Nick Swinmurn, founder of Zappos, tested his theory that selling shoes on the web would work.

Swinmurn could have started the company, raised venture capital, aligned partners and then found out if it was a terrible idea. Instead he went to local shoe stores and took pictures:

His hypothesis was that customers were ready and willing to buy shoes online. To test it, he began by asking local shoe stores if he could take pictures of their inventory. In exchange for permission to take the pictures, he would post the pictures online and come back to buy the shoes at full price if a customer bought them online.

Zappos began with a tiny, simple product. it was designed to answer one question above all: is there really sufficient demand for a superior online shopping experience for shoes?

And, obviously, it worked.

The Arts

So little bets make sense for formal things like businesses but can they help someone in a more creative arena?

The more creative an artist is the more likely they are to use this method:

Via Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries

In a study of thirty-five artists, Getzels and Csikszentmihalyi found that the most creative in their sample were more open to experimentation and to reformulating their ideas for projects than their less creative counterparts.

Howard Gardner studied geniuses like Picasso, Freud and Stravinsky and found a similar pattern of analyzing, testing and feedback:

Via Creating Minds: An Anatomy of Creativity Seen Through the Lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Ghandi:

…Creative individuals spend a considerable amount of time reflecting on what they are trying to accomplish, whether or not they are achieving success (and, if not, what they might do differently).

Chris Rock makes “little bets” in order to improve his comedy:

Via Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries:

For a full routine, Rock tries hundreds (if not thousands) of preliminary ideas, out of which only a handful will make the final cut… By the time Rock reaches a big show— say an HBO special or an appearance on David Letterman— his jokes, opening, transitions, and closing have all been tested and retested rigorously. Developing an hour-long act takes even top comedians from six months to a year.

Everyday Life

What about for normal people with normal lives? It works for the rest of us too.

In Cal Newport’s book So Good They Can’t Ignore You he recommends little bets for someone trying to develop their skills and create a career:

The important thing about little bets is that they’re bite-sized. You try one. It takes a few months at most. It either succeeds or fails, but either way you get important feedback to guide your next steps. This approach stands in contrast to the idea of choosing a bold plan and making one big bet on its success.

As Dan Pink explains in his excellent career guide The Adventures of Johnny Bunko:

There is no plan.

Life is too complicated to be able to predict the future. All-in bets on your career are too risky. You need to make little bets and experiment.

Keep in mind that feedback is critical. If you want to test a theory or master a subject you need solid feedback and you need it fast. This is what the best mentors provide. So have some system in place that will tell you whether or not the little bet is meeting your goal.

Picking a “Little Bet”

Okay, so which bets do you make? How do you use them to get where you want to go?

Peter Sims lays out a straightforward process for coming up with little bets and how to best execute them to learn and get results.

Via Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries:

• Experiment: Learn by doing. Fail quickly to learn fast. Develop experiments and prototypes to gather insights, identify problems, and build up to creative ideas, like Beethoven did in order to discover new musical styles and forms.

• Play: A playful, improvisational, and humorous atmosphere quiets our inhibitions when ideas are incubating or newly hatched, and prevents creative ideas from being snuffed out or prematurely judged.

• Immerse: Take time to get out into the world to gather fresh ideas and insights, in order to understand deeper human motivations and desires, and absorb how things work from the ground up.

• Define: Use insights gathered throughout the process to define specific problems and needs before solving them, just as the Google founders did when they realized that their library search algorithm could address a much larger problem.

• Reorient: Be flexible in pursuit of larger goals and aspirations, making good use of small wins to make necessary pivots and chart the course to completion.

• Iterate: Repeat, refine, and test frequently armed with better insights, information, and assumptions as time goes on, as Chris Rock does to perfect his act.

What’s a little bet you can try today?

This piece originally appeared on Barking Up the Wrong Tree.

Eric Barker writes Barking Up the Wrong Tree.

Ever notice that we take our comedians seriously and we think our politicians are liars? Is something wrong there?

Chris Rock, Louis C.K., and Patton Oswalt not only make you laugh but they usually have you nodding your head thinking, “Yeah, life is like that.” Meanwhile, you take everything an elected official says with a grain of salt.

Research is finally starting to catch up to what you’ve known for a long time.

Why do you find things funny?

Humor is the brain rewarding us for finding errors and inconsistencies in our thinking.

Via The Boston Globe‘s review of Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind:

Hurley and his coauthors begin from the idea that our brains make sense of our daily lives via a never ending series of assumptions, based on sparse, incomplete information. All these best guesses simplify our world, give us critical insights into the minds of others, and streamline our decisions. But mistakes are inevitable, and even a small faulty assumption can open the door to bigger and costlier mistakes.

Enter mirth, a little pulse of reward the brain gives itself for seeking out and correcting our mistaken assumptions. A sense of humor is the lure that keeps our brains alert for the gaps between our quick-fire assumptions and reality.

This is why you think good comedians are also telling the truth about life. They’re pointing out the inconsistencies and craziness, the errors we take for granted until they’re pointed out.

You know the old saying “it’s funny because it’s true”? It’s correct. We laugh more when we feel the jokes are true. The more error correction, the bigger the reward.

Chris Rock’s humor about how men and women relate is so accurate it’s been written up in scientific papers. Tina Fey’s Palin imitation changed how people voted.

All forms of play are about learning.

Via Play: How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul:

Play creates new neural connections and tests them. It creates an arena for social interaction and learning. It creates a low-risk format for finding and developing innate skills and talents.

Most animals stop playing and learning once they reach adulthood. Humans are unique in that they have the capacity to play all their lives. Why? Nature designed us to be lifelong learners:

We are designed to be lifelong players, built to benefit from play at any age. The human animal is shaped by evolution to be the most flexible of all animals: as we play we continue to change and adapt into old age.

So making laughs and guffaws sounds a lot more impressive now, huh? It probably doesn’t surprise you too much to hear that funny people are smarter than average. Students who are playful do better in school:

Playfulness was associated with better academic performance (i.e., better grades in an exam). Also, students who described themselves as playful were more likely to do the extra reading that went beyond what was needed to pass the exam. This can be seen as first evidence of a positive relation between playfulness in adults and academic achievement.

Why do women always cite “sense of humor” as something they find attractive in a man? Because humor is a hard-to-fake sign of intelligence. (In fact, you can predict how many women a man has slept with by how funny he is.)

Humor can improve your life

Humor isn’t just an entertaining distraction. It improves many facets of life and we’d be better off with more of it.

Couples who reminisce about shared laughter are happier. In his book Just Kidding: Using Humor Effectively Louis Franzini presents research that salespeople who use humor close more deals.

A fun workplace was more attractive to prospective employees than compensation or opportunities for promotion. Researchers believe that humor can help teams bond, as well as increase the quantity and quality of communication while building trust.

Via Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries:

A host of studies indicates that humor creates positive group effects. Many focus on how humor can increase cohesiveness and act as a lubricant to facilitate more efficient communications, like Bob Petersen’s story team. Researchers have developed a general view that effective humor can increase the quantity and quality of group communications. One reason for that is that humor has also been demonstrated to increase trust.

Via Richard Wiseman’s excellent book 59 Seconds: Change Your Life in Under a Minute:

People who spontaneously use humor to cope with stress have especially healthy immune systems, are 40 percent less likely to suffer a heart attack or stroke, experience less pain during dental surgery and live four and a half years longer than average…On the basis of the results, the researchers recommended that people laugh for at least fifteen minutes each day.

What’s interesting — and something we often forget as adults – is it seems we all may need fun in our lives:

Via Play: How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul:

But when play is denied over the long term, our mood darkens. We lose our sense of optimism and we become anhedonic, or incapable of feeling sustained pleasure… There is laboratory evidence that there is a play deficit much like the well-documented sleep deficit.

This piece originally appeared on Barking Up the Wrong Tree.

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You want to laugh? Here are a few of my favorite bits of “error correction” (all NSFW):

-Louis C.K. on turning 40 and children.

-Patton Oswalt on why AA meetings are better than Weight Watchers meetings.

-Eddie Izzard on World War 2.

-Lewis Black on America and milk.

Eric Barker writes Barking Up the Wrong Tree.

1) Know What Really Works

Most of the things you instinctively do to relieve stress don’t work.

Via The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do To Get More of It:

The APA’s national survey on stress found that the most commonly used strategies were also rated as highly ineffective by the same people who reported using them. For example, only 16 percent of people who eat to reduce stress report that it actually helps them. Another study found that women are most likely to eat chocolate when they are feeling anxious or depressed, but the only reliable change in mood they experience from their drug of choice is an increase in guilt.

So what does work?

According to the American Psychological Association, the most effective stress-relief strategies are exercising or playing sports, praying or attending a religious service, reading, listening to music, spending time with friends or family, getting a massage, going outside for a walk, meditating or doing yoga, and spending time with a creative hobby. (The least effective strategies are gambling, shopping, smoking, drinking, eating, playing video games, surfing the Internet, and watching TV or movies for more than two hours.)

2) It’s All About A Feeling Of Control

As is often said, stress isn’t about what happens to you, it’s how you react to it. This is true.

We’re not as stressed when we feel in control. Again, the emphasis is on feel. Even illusory feelings of control can eliminate stress. (This is the secret to why idiots and crazy people may feel far less stress than those who see a situation clearly.)

Anything that increases your perception of control over a situation — whether it actually increases your control or not — can substantially decrease your stress level.

Via Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long:

Steve Maier at the University of Boulder, in Colorado, says that the degree of control that organisms can exert over something that creates stress determines whether the stressor alters the organism’s functioning. His findings indicate that only uncontrollable stressors cause deleterious effects. Inescapable or uncontrollable stress can be destructive, whereas the same stress that feels escapable is less destructive, significantly so… Over and over, scientists see that the perception of control over a stressor alters the stressor’s impact.

Why do people choose to become entrepreneurs when working for yourself often means more hours for less money? Control:

A number of studies show “work-life balance” as the main reason people start their own small businesses. Yet small business owners often work more hours, for less money, than in corporate life. The difference? You are able to make more of your own choices.

Do things that increase your control of a situation ahead of time. According to one study, the stress management technique that worked best was deliberately planning your day so that stress is minimized.

The best way to reduce job stress is to get a clear idea of what is expected of you.

The trick to not worrying about work stuff while at home is to make specific plans to address concerns before you leave the office.

3) You Need Some Stress To Be Your Best.

Heavy time pressure stresses you out and kills creativity. On the other hand, having no deadlines is not optimal either. Low-to-moderate time pressure produces the best results.

Via The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work:

If managers regularly set impossibly short time-frames or impossibly high workloads, employees become stressed, unhappy, and unmotivated—burned out. Yet, people hate being bored. it was rare for any participant in our study to report a day with very low time pressure, such days—when they did occur—were also not conducive to positive inner work life. In general, then, low-to-moderate time pressure seems optimal for sustaining positive thoughts, feelings, and drives.

In his book The Art of Learning, Josh Waitzkin discusses one of the key elements that pro athletes like Jordan use to perform at their peak: spontaneous relaxation.

“…one of the most telling features of a dominant performer is the routine use of recovery periods.”

They’re not Zen masters who experience no stress. Far from it. But they’ve taught themselves to turn it on and off. The pros are able to fully relax during the briefest periods of rest. This prevents them from burning out during hours of play.

Via The Art of Learning:

The physiologists at LGE had discovered that in virtually every discipline, one of the most telling features of a dominant performer is the routine use of recovery periods. Players who are able to relax in brief moments of inactivity are almost always the ones who end up coming through when the game is on the line… Remember Michael Jordan sitting on the bench, a towel on his shoulders, letting it all go for a two-minute break before coming back in the game? Jordan was completely serene on the bench even though the Bulls desperately needed him on the court. He had the fastest recovery time of any athlete I’ve ever seen.

One Last Thing:

I’m stressed RIGHT NOW!!! What’s the quickest, easiest thing to do?!?!?!

Watching a video of a cute animal can reduce heart rate and blood pressure in under a minute.

Via Richard Wiseman’s excellent book 59 Seconds: Change Your Life in Under a Minute:

In an innovative study, Deborah Wells examined whether merely looking at a video of an animal can have the same type of calming and restorative effects as those created by being in its company… compared to the two control conditions, all three animal videos made the participants feel much more relaxed. To help reduce your heart rate and blood pressure in less than a minute, go online and watch a video of a cute animal.

Here you go:

This piece originally appeared on Barking Up the Wrong Tree.

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Eric Barker writes Barking Up the Wrong Tree.

Via the documentary Lucky:

Every year Americans spend $7 billion on movie tickets, $16 billion on sporting events, $24 billion on books… and $62 billion on lottery tickets. More than half of all American adults play the lottery making it, by far, the most popular form of paid entertainment in the country.

Odds you believe your best shot at getting rich is winning the lottery: 1 in 5.

Odds you will actually hit the jackpot in a Powerball lottery: 1 in 195,249,054.

People have a lot of irrational beliefs when it comes to the lottery. Many believe if they give a lottery ticket away it’s more likely to win.

What if you educate people about the statistics showing the odds are stacked against them when they gamble? Doesn’t change their behavior one bit.

And if you believe that winning the lottery will solve all your problems? You might be a little irrational too.

Are lottery winners happier than paralyzed accident victims?

Yes… but not by as much as you’d guess.

Some time after winning their money, lottery winners weren’t all that much happier than people who hadn’t won — and accident victims weren’t anywhere as unhappy as the researchers had assumed.

Shouldn’t lottery winners be ecstatic and paralyzed accident victims be miserable? No.

What the authors of the study found was that:

1) Much of happiness exists outside of objective life circumstances. Attitude and perspective mean a lot more than actual events.

2) We’re prone to a contrast effect. Events in our lives don’t have set values; they’re compared to other events. Winning the lottery is such a big deal it actually makes every other good thing in the winner’s life less enjoyable.

3) We’re also prone to habituation. Simply put, we can get accustomed to nearly anything, no matter how good or bad. After time, a wheelchair doesn’t seem so bad — and a million dollars doesn’t seem as good.

But you still want to be rich, right?

There’s no denying it: Yes, you would probably be happier if you were rich… but not by much. Past about 75K a year, money doesn’t bring very much extra happiness.

Think about this for a second:

Would you be happier of you were a billionaire or if you were Amish?

Correct answer: they’re both equally happy.

And this:

Do you think you’d be happier homeless in Fresno, California or homeless in Calcutta, India?

Correct answer: Calcutta, hands down.

Via Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being:

The downtrodden of Calcutta are far happier than you’d think, given their circumstances. How can these people possibly be happy?

The problem isn’t with them, it’s with us. We’re falling prey to what’s called a “focusing illusion.” All we’re thinking about is money and living standards and not the other factors that are often more responsible for happiness than we give them credit for: religion/meaning, family, marriage and friends.

Can you tell me the best way to play the lottery or not, Eric?

So back to the lottery. Can research give you any help on the best way to play the lottery? Actually, yes.

Buy your tickets as early as possible.

Because what you’re really buying is a chance to dream.

And the smartest thing to do is to prolong that enjoyment as much as possible.

This piece originally appeared on Barking Up the Wrong Tree.

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Eric Barker writes Barking Up the Wrong Tree.

Many say technology is tearing us apart but studies generally show that tech and the internet make us happier. What gives?

There’s certainly a near-term and long-term difference: your brain loves things that give you more options even if too many choices end up making you miserable. (Humans aren’t always rational. Welcome to Earth.)

More relevant, technology is a tool, and it’s all about what you do with it. Research has shown time and time again that what makes you happier is relationships with people.

Problem is we all have a tendency to use technology to replace relationships.

You do it with television:

Study 1 demonstrated that people report turning to favored television programs when feeling lonely, and feel less lonely when viewing those programs.

Television competes with friends for your free time and acts as a (poor) substitute. It fills the slot of real relationships so effectively that when your favorite TV shows go off the air, it can be the equivalent of a real life break-up. And more TV only makes you more unhappy.

You do it with your phone:

“The cellphone directly evokes feelings of connectivity to others, thereby fulfilling the basic human need to belong.” This results in reducing one’s desire to connect with others or to engage in empathic and prosocial behavior.

You’re not addicted to your phone — brain scans show it’s more like you’re in love with it. (There are now more iPhones sold than babies born in the world every day.) By stripping away the emotional information in faces and intonation, text messaging might be simulating autism.

Too much computer time can degrade social skills. Research shows Facebook often promotes weak, low-commitment relationships and it’s curated presentation of only life’s best moments can make us depressed. Email can stress you out and turn you into an asshole if you’re not careful.

So should we smash the machines and live like the Amish?

No way.

Like I said, it’s all about how you use it. In fact, research shows compulsive internet users have happier marriages. Overall, Facebook users get more emotional support than average.

So how do you get the good without the bad?

Technology can increase happiness and improve relationships if you leverage it to connect with other people:

The results were unequivocal. “The greater the proportion of face-to-face interactions, the less lonely you are,” he says. “The greater the proportion of online interactions, the lonelier you are.” Surely, I suggest to Cacioppo, this means that Facebook and the like inevitably make people lonelier. He disagrees. Facebook is merely a tool, he says, and like any tool, its effectiveness will depend on its user. “If you use Facebook to increase face-to-face contact,” he says, “it increases social capital.” So if social media let you organize a game of football among your friends, that’s healthy. If you turn to social media instead of playing football, however, that’s unhealthy.

So don’t just hit the LIKE button. Comment, interact and most importantly, plan face-to-face get togethers.

Your phone can make you happier too. (In fact, there’s an app for that.) Use your phone to make plans to meet with friends in person or to connect with those you can’t see face to face.

And when you’re with friends, put it away. Seeing friends and family regularly is worth an extra $97,265 a year. Whatever you want to check on that phone ain’t worth a hundred grand.

Summing up:

We frequently use technology to replace relationships. This is bad. Technology can increase happiness and improve relationships if you leverage it to connect with other people.

This piece originally appeared on Barking Up the Wrong Tree.

Join 25K+ readers. Get a free weekly update via email here.