Time and How to Spend It summary

What kind of positive experiences lead to enduring, sustainable happiness? In researching this question the author came up with the STORIES checklist.

This stands for Story, Transformation, Outside & Offline, Relationships, Intensity, Extraordinary, and Status & Significance.

Once you place yourself in your own hero’s journey, you can start to see that change – Transformation, on our checklist – is the name of the game. After all, if you were watching a story in which the hero wasn’t changing in some way, it would be pretty boring and maybe even sad, right? Well, the same holds true for your life, and it’s why change and personal development are key to feeling happier and more fulfilled.

This is a good time to consider two simple but revealing questions: Looking back over the past ten years, how much do you think you’ve changed, on a scale of one to ten? Now, how much do you think you’ll change over the next ten years?

Next on the STORIES checklist is Outside and Offline, which is pretty self-explanatory: valuable experiences that lead to happiness are more likely to take place in nature and away from the online world.

Let’s first consider the benefits of nature.

While solitude and some time alone can be a nice change of pace from time to time, no one enjoys feeling lonely. This might sound obvious enough, but what you may not know is just how dangerous loneliness can be.

Over time, persistent loneliness has been proven to cause stress and create more protein fibrinogens in your body, which clog arteries, increase blood pressure and make you more likely to get diabetes and have a heart attack.

There’s a good chance you’ve heard about flow, a state of being in which you’re so fully immersed in what you’re doing that you lose track of time. Studies have found that when we’re experiencing flow, we’re also experiencing some of the happiest moments in our lives.

This brings us to the Intensity part of the checklist. After all, finding flow essentially means being so  intensely focused on what you’re doing that all your troubles recede. Needless to say, when it comes to deciding how to spend your time, choosing an experience that gives you flow is often the smart way to go.

The penultimate item on the checklist for improving how you spend your time is Extraordinary. This, as the name suggests, stands for experiences that are out of the ordinary. But it also means paying attention to the peak moments that determine just how memorable an experience is.

Peak moments, as well as endings, have a disproportionate amount of influence on how we experience things. In fact, psychologists have a term for this effect: the peak-end rule. Essentially, it means that you can wait in line for an annoying length of time, but if the line speeds up in the last moments, you’ll likely look back at the experience as not that annoying.

All societies contain hierarchies of some sort, and wherever there’s a hierarchy, there are people of different status. In the workplace, for example, we have clerks, supervisors, managers and directors. But there are also two other primary ways for gaining status: there are the experts who gain status through their education, and successful people who’ve earned theirs through money.

This is significant, since researchers have found that status can bring happiness, primarily through the added amount of control and number of options in life that come with it.