I hope you all had a nice school break week! Last time, we learned about impact bias, hedonic adaptation, and the psychological immune system. These are all ways that our minds deceive us about what we think makes us happy. I hope that you were able to practice one of the strategies that I suggested (savoring, negative visualization, or investing in experiences). I chose to focus on savoring and actually did my homework on about 5 days out of the last 7 (and I did get some strawberries).
This week there are two more facets of our brains to explore that tend to reduce our happiness: social comparison and attention. Social comparison is something that I think we are all very familiar with. As quickly as our eyes can see someone or something else, we can compare it to what we have and make a judgment that either makes us feel good, or bad. I don’t know about you, but for me it’s so automatic that I don’t always notice it. I compare my body to the bodies of others, my intellect to the intellect of others, and my plans and social calendar to the social calendar of others.
This is a problem on its own but there are ways we can break it down even further. Comparison is a problem because we tend to compare ourselves to reference points that don’t make much sense, things that aren’t even comparable. If we are apples and want to be bigger apples, we have a tendency to compare ourselves to watermelons rather than to other apples. Or, in body terms, we tend to compare ourselves with Jonathan Majors rather than with a fellow teenager in our school or a fellow middle-aged parent in our neighborhood. This definitely means that we are suffering in the comparison! And this phenomenon is amplified by media; both television and social.
Laurie Santos presents a study in which the number of hours people spend watching television correlates with how much money they think other people earn. The more tv, the more money you think other people have and can spend. And for social media, the same kinds of things apply. It is very easy to surround yourself with images and stories of folks who are better looking, smarter, more accomplished, more creative, more outgoing, etc.
Another problem with social comparison is that we are all comparing our internal knowledge of ourselves, with the outside, polished up image of whoever we are comparing ourselves to. For example, when I talk with my friend, who just came back from Puerto Rico, I think to myself: “Oh man! Cristy is such an outgoing person and a great traveler; she is always planning something fun!” This is me (with my internal struggles and my midwinter boredom) comparing myself to a story Cristy told me. I have no idea how she feels on the inside! Just because she went to Puerto Rico doesn’t mean she feels internally like a super confident outgoing traveler!
So, we are often comparing our inside neurotic selves with someone else’s exterior presentation. This is made worse by social media because so many of our apps are set up in such a way as to capture a positive moment or look. No one posts about their pimples or their periods or their feelings of inadequacy.
The next area of our brain that affects our happiness is our attention. We have two kinds: top-down attention and bottom-up attention. Top-down attention is on-purpose, effortful attention that we employ (like when we are reading a book). Bottom-up attention is what you can’t help attending to. It is like a car horn honking, or someone yelling your name, no matter what you are doing, you can’t help but attend to the stimulus.
Bottom-up attention affects your happiness, your concentration, and your ability to remain immersed in what you are doing. In a study of folks watching a movie, those who got notifications on their phone lost a whole point on their happiness scale. For learning, the effect is even larger. Those who were engaged in a working memory task, who did not have their phones with them, performed twice as well as those with their phones. And that effect, in both experiments, is regardless of whether the participants looked at their notifications or did not. In fact, it doesn’t even matter if your phone is off or turned over, if it’s out or nearby while you are engaging in something pleasurable, it is going to drain some of your attention and reduce your enjoyment.
Ok, so here are some ideas to help reduce the ways that bottom-up attention and social comparison affect your happiness:
1. For social comparison: curate your feed. Choose better content to come into your brain. Check out how to block body shaming instagrams, unfollow a few folks who tend to make you feel bad. You may also try comparing yourself to your past self rather than someone else. It’s still a comparison, but it’s kinder.
2. Remind yourself of comparison, like daily! Our brains will default to old patterns like records on a record player. You might know your comparison triggers by the feeling you get in your body. Or you might know it by your desires for something you don’t have.
2. Tip for attentional hygiene: Lose your phone during important tasks. (Turning your phone over doesn't count). Working memory performance is almost 2x as much when your phone is in the other room. Try this with social tasks as well as academic tasks. Also try making your phone less attention grabbing. Turn off color as an experiment. Shut off notifications entirely. Finally, be more mindful about why you are picking up your phone by asking the three W’s: what for, why now, and what else (what am I missing by being on my phone right now?)
3. Collective experiment: Now that all kids have Google Classroom and all adults do lots of work at home on computer, what are some ways to reduce the crazy attention-grabbing stimuli of media while you are working? I mean, pop-up ads, in app purchases, all those open tabs on your computer, the way you need your phone to ask your friend a homework question (but you just got a text message!)....We need to game our own attention spans to combat the onslaught of information.
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