Passion Struck with John R. Miles - Dr. Cassie Holmes on Happier Hour: Being Intentional about What Matters Most EP 185

Starting point is 00:00:00 Coming up next on the Passion Struck Podcast. We were examining that exact question. What's the relationship between the amount of discretionary time individuals have and their satisfaction? And we conducted a bunch of studies, including one where we analyzed data from the American Time Use Survey, which captures for tens of thousands of working and non-working Americans how they spent a day. for tens of thousands of working and non-working Americans, how they spent a day.

Starting point is 00:00:27 And it also has a question of their life satisfaction. And what we did was we looked at the relationship, so we calculated for each individual, how much time they spend on discretionary activities that day and their life satisfaction. And the results showed an interesting pattern. It showed. Welcome to PassionStruct.

Starting point is 00:00:45 Hi, I'm your host, John Armiles. And on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you. Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself. If you're new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays.

Starting point is 00:01:10 We have long-form interviews the rest of the week with guest-ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes. Now, let's go out there and become PassionStruck. Hello everyone and welcome back to episode 185 of PassionStruck. Recently ranked by Apple is one of the top three alternative health podcasts and thank you each and every one of you who comes back weekly to listen and learn, how to live better, be better, and impact the world. If you're new to the show, thank you so much for being here, or you would just like to

Starting point is 00:01:47 introduce this to a friend or family member, we now have episode starter packs, both on the PassionStruck website, as well as Spotify. These are collections of our fans' favorite episodes that we organize into topics. To give new listeners a great way to get acquainted to everything we do here on the show, just go to PassionStruck.com slash starter packs to get started. In case you missed my interviews from last week, they included Dr. Dominic Dagostino, who's a professor at the University of South Florida, and one of the foremost experts in the world on Cotosis.

Starting point is 00:02:19 And we do a deep dive on that topic, the Science of Metabolism, and the Keys to a Keto Diet. And I also had on Dr. Abby Medcalf, who's in experts in relationships. So if you're needing some advice in that space, that's a great episode to check out as well. And my solo episode from last week was on, how do you make the best use of your time? Check them all out.

Starting point is 00:02:41 And if you love any of them, please consider giving us a five-star rating and review. They go such a long way in helping us increase the popularity of the show and exposing it to new listeners. Now, let's talk about today's guest. Cassie Holmes is a professor at the UCLA Anderson School of Management. She is the world's leading authority on time and happiness. In her groundbreaking book, Happier Hour, had a beat distraction, expand your time, and focus on what matters, which is a Forbes 22 must read,

Starting point is 00:03:12 and we're releasing it as part of this podcast today. Cassie shares her cutting-edge research, guiding readers on how to immediately enrich their lives, by better investing the time that they have, no matter how time poor they may feel. In our interview, we discuss the concept of time, poverty, what it is, and why it's damaging.

Starting point is 00:03:34 Why, if you have less than two hours of free time, or more than five, you're less likely to feel satisfied with your life? We go into that in-between point between those two and five hours, why it's the sweet spot and how most of us can achieve it. The importance of focusing on time rather than money and how it increases happiness by teaching you to use your time deliberately. How unhappy activities can be made less painful by reframing them and so much more. Thank you for choosing PassionStruct and choosing me to be your hosting guide on your journey to creating an intentional life now. Let that journey begin. So excited to welcome Dr. Cassie Holmes to the Passion Struck podcast. Welcome Cassie.

Starting point is 00:04:20 Thank you. It's so fun to have the opportunity to talk with you, John. Thank you. It's so fun to have the opportunity to talk with you, John. Well, I'm a static for you to be here, especially since we're launching your brand new book. I can't even imagine how that must feel for you. So congratulations. Thank you. I am absolutely thrilled after a whole career of research in two years of writing for this opportunity to increase happiness in people's lives by sharing these insights on how the folks should invest their time. So I am absolutely thrilled for this sort of next bit of the journey to spread happiness. Well I really enjoyed the book and I'm going to have our video person put a picture of it up. So anyone who's watching on YouTube can see it.

Starting point is 00:05:08 In the book, you start out by going into how you went down this journey to study happiness and time. And I was gonna ask a question along these lines. We all have moments that define us. Can you tell me about that moment that shaped you and your decision to move to California, join UCLA because that was not your initial path? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:05:34 As I started the book, actually, this fateful night, earlier in my career when I was on the faculty at Wharton, and I had given a talk that day in New York with a new baby at home. I had a four bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more of a

Starting point is 00:05:56 little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more of a little bit more of a was rushing to not miss the very last train that would get me home to my baby and my husband in Philly. I did make the train, but that night I was just exhausted. I remember sort of laying my head against the cold glass of the train window.

Starting point is 00:06:20 As I was watching the houses and the sort of trees, the darkness, or was by, I was realizing just how fast life was passing. And I just wasn't sure that I could keep up, right? Between my career, wanting to be a good partner, wanting to be a good mother, wanting to be a good friend, all the chores that were awaiting me at home. It just felt like too much. There wasn't enough time to do everything that I wanted to do, let alone to enjoy any of it along the way. I was like, okay, I was feeling time poor. And so this is something that I've been studying more recently, is this time poverty, which is the acute feeling of having too much to do and not enough time to do it. And in that moment, I felt so time for, I felt overwhelmed and stressed, and I was like, the solution to get more time would be to quit it all, move to quit my job, move to

Starting point is 00:07:21 slow paced islands somewhere, and then they're surely I would find happiness. And I have since done research and I can talk about it a little bit more where we've actually found that there is such thing as having too much time. But in fact, I wouldn't be happier if I quit than I had a whole lot more hours in my day. And what I decided on the train that night, sort of pulling a lot of things together, was not to quit, actually,

Starting point is 00:07:50 and that maybe it wasn't a question of how much time we had, but really how we invest the time we have. And so while I was already studying happiness and the benefit of focusing on time rather than money as our critical resource, I realized that I needed to figure out how should we be investing the time that we have so that we can feel fulfilled.

Starting point is 00:08:14 So that our days are not just overly full, but are fulfilling. And so that's been sort of driving my research since then, as well as my teaching. So I shifted from teaching traditional marketing courses to pulling the science together of happiness and time. And I've been teaching a class at Anderson at the Business School here at UCLA called Applying the Science of Happiness to Life Design, which is doing exactly that, sharing the science of happiness to life design, which is doing exactly that, sharing the science of happiness so that my MBA students can be more deliberate in how they spend their time be informed in how they spend their time so that they feel happier in their days and more satisfied in the longer trajectory of their career and lives.

Starting point is 00:09:07 Well, what a name for a course. And I gotta believe it's probably one of the most popular on campus, who wouldn't want to take that class? It is among the most popular. And I hope that it's not just because people think it will be easy, but it is, in fact, impactful and valuable. And as I've observed and heard from my

Starting point is 00:09:27 students is that it is phenomenally helpful in shifting people's attention to their time and how can they optimize not just the sort of nebulous sense of success and status, but something that is more sort of sustainable and fulfilling and satisfying. Yeah, very much needed because when I was going through mine, and I had Max Bezerman and Don Moore on the podcast recently, that's what a lot of my curriculum was about, was decision leadership, behavioral economics, those types of things.

Starting point is 00:10:04 So I would have loved to have a class like that when I was going through it. But I'm not sure the listeners know what a social psychologist is. So I was hoping that you could discuss that, but also what you mean by saying that you conduct me search. Yes, so as social psychologists, it is understanding how the situations and the environment influence us as individuals and the decisions we make. Our judgments and decision making and the outcome that I'm most interested in is how we feel, how satisfied we feel in those choices, how happy we feel, we're generally and the extent to which we feel meaning in our lives. So as a social psychologist, so on when I talk about that faithful night on the train and I had that question of if I quit my job and had a whole lot more time, would I be happier? This was an empirical question that I could answer and had the training as a social psychologist to answer to understand the situation if one had a little time or a lot of discretionary time, how does it influence how people feel? And so this spurred work that I conducted with Hal Hirschfield and Marissa Sharif, where we're

Starting point is 00:11:27 examining that exact question. What's the relationship between the amount of discretionary time individuals have and their satisfaction? And we conducted a bunch of studies, including one where we analyzed data from the American Time Use Survey, which captures for tens of thousands of working and non-working Americans how they spent a day. And it also has a question of their life satisfaction. And so we wanted to calculate for each individual how much time did they spend on discretionary activities, and you might be like, well, what counts as a discretionary activity, since we didn't want to be the ones to determine what counts as discretionary or not, what we did was we presented all of the activities

Starting point is 00:12:13 to another sample of Americans. And we pre-registered that we would count any activity being very conservative, that more than 90% agreed was discretionary. So it was time spent for the purpose of pleasure or another intrinsically worthwhile purpose. So it's basically, what are those activities that people want to do versus obligatory time

Starting point is 00:12:40 so things that people have to do? And what we did was we looked at the relationship. So we calculated for each individual how much time they spend on discretionary activities that day and their life satisfaction. And the results showed an interesting pattern. It showed an upside down U shape sort of like an arc or rainbow. And so on one side, it captured the unhappiness of us time-pour people. That when we have too little time, yes, we do feel unhappy, and that happens to be driven by greater feelings of

Starting point is 00:13:17 stress. What was interesting was that on the other side, you also saw low levels of happiness, was that on the other side, you also saw low levels of happiness that there was such thing as having too much time, digging into that effect. So this was telling me that actually maybe I wouldn't be so happy if I quit everything and had too much time. Why? The answer is that when people have too much discretionary time, and particularly if they spend that discretionary time in ways that don't feel fulfilling our worthwhile, that more sort of passive leisure, that people feel a lacking sense of purpose, that we are a verse to being idle, that when we have hours and hours that we spend with nothing to show for how we spend that time, then we feel, again, that we're sort of unproductive. We don't have a sense of purpose and are therefore

Starting point is 00:14:12 dissatisfied. And so this is informative in lots of ways. It informed me that I shouldn't quit my job. But it also informs when people have a lot of time available to them, how should they actually spend that time. And it's not that retirees are necessarily less satisfied. Actually, you see that when retirees spend their time in ways that feel worthwhile, like volunteering, for instance, like engaging in an enriching hobby, then you actually, or even actually connecting, social connection, you don't see this drop off in this sort of too much time effect. So that is a type of question, and that's totally driven by me search.

Starting point is 00:14:57 So me search being, I personally am grappling with a question, in this case, should I quit my job? And how would I feel if I had a whole lot more time? And taking those questions, testing them among a broader sample of individuals, hopefully through random assignment. So you can see the effects of one situation for the versus another.

Starting point is 00:15:17 But in other cases, you can look at patterns within existing data to look at what is the relationship between particular variables. Okay, well I think a great following question to that is then how does the quality of happiness change as we grow older? Yes, and this was another research driven question that we were looking to answer. And it was spurred actually by a conversation that I had with Amit Bhattacharji, who was a PhD student at the time. And this was in Philly. We haven't to live in the same neighborhood. And one Monday morning, we ran into each other as we're

Starting point is 00:15:55 walking into the office. And he was like, very gracious. How was your weekend? And I was oozing with sort of delight and heaviness. I was like, it was amazing. And he was like, what did you do? And basically I did a lot of nothing. I had a lovely weekend walking around the neighborhood with my now toddler at the time, my four-month-old grew older. And my husband and we went out for brunch.

Starting point is 00:16:23 We stroled the neighborhood, we watched a movie and it wasn't very extraordinary. But I was absolutely happy that Monday and then sort of embarrassed after relaying my super happy weekend. I was like, how was your weekend? And he was like, it was amazing. He had gone to New York and gone to a concert with his like college friends and at the face of it, not at the face of it. experiences do lead to greater happiness. And so we wanted to understand whether the extraordinary experiences, the ordinary experiences lead to greater happiness. And so that is another question that we brought to data.

Starting point is 00:17:14 And in that, we initially asked hundreds of individuals across the country, tell us about a recent experience that made you happy. We asked some to tell us about an ordinary experience, others to tell us about an extraordinary experience. And the types of experiences that people generated made me even happy reading them. So the extraordinary experiences tended to be sort of life milestones, getting married, having a baby, graduation, getting a new job, or amazing vacation, going to Paris, diving the blue hole in

Starting point is 00:17:48 Belize, or actually cultural experiences like a meat going to an amazing concert. The ordinary happy experiences that people recollected looked very much like my weekend where it was these simple moments shared with loved ones, whether with friends, family, a pet, treats, so enjoying a glass of wine or delicious sandwich, or actually noticing your environment, noticing the weather outside, a sunset, a sunrise.

Starting point is 00:18:13 And in terms of the happiness that they generated, not only did we ask people to tell us about their experience, but also just how happy and meet them, what we found was that the answer depended on age. So among the younger individuals, they experienced greater happiness from the extraordinary compared to the ordinary. What was interesting was among the older participants,

Starting point is 00:18:40 they experienced as much happiness from the ordinary as from the extraordinary. And it isn't young versus old. It's as people get older, you see an increasing happiness from simple moments. And in follow-on studies that we conducted, it suggests that it's not about age per se of how old you are. It's about how much time you feel like you have left in your life. So younger people tend to view their futures as expansive.

Starting point is 00:19:10 As people get older, they recognize that in fact, their futures are more limited. And in recognizing just how limited one's time is, you recognize how precious all of your time is. And so those even simple moments gain a greater sort of value and draw your attention. And so we found that actually when we led younger people to recognize that their time left in life is actually finite,

Starting point is 00:19:37 then you see that they are more apt to enjoy wonderful levels of happiness, high levels of happiness from even these simple, ordinary moments that are right there in front of us, available to us in our day-to-day life. And this is sort of stepping outside of the research, but you can absolutely understand why in the last couple years, as we have experienced this pandemic, it is leading all of us. No matter how young or old we are to recognize that indeed our time in life is finite.

Starting point is 00:20:14 We're seeing people savoring those ordinary moments, paying attention in the day to day and extracting greater joy from those moments. Well, I think that that's a great answer, and it's a great lead-in to this next topic I wanted to go down, which is this podcast is all about how do you live intentionally? And I think, as I read happier hour, the whole lens of the book is about being intentional. And I love this quote from chapter three of the book, and I was going to read it. And you write, apart from the large influence of our personalities and the surprisingly

Starting point is 00:20:50 small influence of our circumstances, a hefty chunk of our happiness has determined our intentional thought and behavior. What this means is that our happiness is significantly influenced by what we deliberately think about and do. And my question, because I thought it was such a powerful quote, is, why do those who place more intentional focus on their time, rather than money, report feeling more positive in their days and more satisfied about their lives?

Starting point is 00:21:19 Yeah. And the answer is absolutely in line with your broader thesis around intentionality. When we pay attention to time as our critical resource, that leads us to be more thoughtful, more deliberate in how we spend it, spending in ways that are closer and more aligned with our values. So we become more deliberate with how we spend our time. Touching back to some of my very early research where I was looking at the effect of focusing

Starting point is 00:21:53 on time versus money, what I found was simply those who are chronically more focused on time versus money or value their time very highly are happier. And that is controlling for how much time they have, which you can measure by age, you can measure by how many hours they work per week. It's also controlling for how much money they have, which you can measure by income level. And what it's picking up on is that those who value time are happier because they are more deliberate in how they invest it.

Starting point is 00:22:27 Now going to the quote that you read is like, okay, so we need to be deliberate. Happiness is a choice. So yes, there are inputs into our happiness that we don't have control over. So our inherited disposition has a big effect actually on our happiness. So where are you born as sort of naturally half glass,

Starting point is 00:22:51 half full type person, or are you sort of more of a natural grime? And this is the effects of our inherited disposition are quite large. And then there's those circumstances, so things that are in our life that we don't have control over like income level, like a level of attractiveness,

Starting point is 00:23:10 near-to-status, yes, you can decide to get married. But these are sort of circumstantial factors that you don't have sort of daily influence over. Those are things that actually have a significantly smaller effect than people think. Because so many individuals think that if only I had a ton of money, if only I was super gorgeous, if only I had that huge fancy house, then I will be happier. The research shows that, yes, sometimes those have an initial effect, but that effect is much smaller than we think. And I actually spend the first sort of two classes in my course trying to sort of re making

Starting point is 00:23:50 that point that these things that we think are the sort of secrets to happiness have less influence than we think. And then the part that I am really interested in is that part that we do have control over that sort of remaining variance in our happiness. And that is how we think and how we behave. And that's where the science comes in because yes, it's about intentionality. But even if I want to be intentional, there's still the question of like, okay, well then what should I be doing? And there is work that can inform how should we be spending our time? There's time-tracking research that tracks individuals over the course of their day,

Starting point is 00:24:28 what are they doing and how do they feel while doing it. And so that we can look at on average, what are those activities that tend to be associated with higher levels of happiness? What are those activities that tend to be associated with the most negative emotion? You see that the activities that on average are associated with the sort of contribute to the greatest amount of happiness or social connection, so spending time with family and friends, those activities that tend to on average are associated with the least amount of happiness are commuting, work, and housework. So getting to work, getting home from work, work itself, you know, doing work when you go home. But notably, that research is based off of averages.

Starting point is 00:25:13 And so an exercise that I have my students do and I walk through in great detail in happier hour is so helpful because it is basically having you tracking your own time. So over the course of a couple of weeks, writing down every half hour, what are you doing? But most importantly, how happy are you on a skill of one to ten, like overall positivity. So not just like, is it sort of pleasurable and fun, but how positive overall, how satisfying, how meaningful. So that you have your own personal data set and can identify, okay, whether those activities that are for me are the most happy, whether those activities that are the least happy. So you don't have to chunk all of work together because there's going to be some work activities

Starting point is 00:26:03 that are more positive, some work activities that are more negative. There are going to be some social activities that are more positive. There are going to be some social activities that are more negative. And so you can pull out what are actually the features underlying those activities that can inform, given that our happiness is also a choice of how we spend our time is it can inform those activities that we spend our time on. Well, I like in chapter three how you went through the study that identified kind of three segments of how we spend our time, happy time, math time, and then the wasted time. And I went through your time tracking exercise myself.

Starting point is 00:26:42 Oh, you did? Yeah. Yes. And I'm going to have you. And I'm going to have you. Well, I found that if I would have taken it four or five years ago, I would have been spending much more of my time on either moa or waste of time, but that now I feel much more fulfilled about what

Starting point is 00:27:00 I'm spending the majority of my time in. And I think a big part of it is a lot of my professional career, I was thinking very individualistically about where I was trying to take my career and the accomplishments. And I think as I've gotten older, I've shifted a lot more of my view into being world-centric instead of self-centric and how I approach everything that I'm doing in that. My real purpose here is to give back and to help. For me, it's the big thing about trying to address as much human suffering as possible while bringing more joy to the world. And I think, since I've kind of built my life through that intention, it's definitely changed my time parameters

Starting point is 00:27:42 and also where I don't want to be wasting it. Yeah, A, that's wonderful. Where you're spending your time is fulfilling. And that's an interesting part of this, the sort of results of you doing your own personal time tracking, not only does it allow you to identify which activities are the most worthwhile and fulfilling and which are those that feel wasteful. But it also allows you to see where you're spending your time. So how much time are you spending on these various activities and touching back to this notion of time poverty and that feeling of having too much to do and not enough time to do it. Oftentimes when people do this exercise, they realize just how much time they are spending in wasteful ways

Starting point is 00:28:27 that are not contributing to anything. Oftentimes for my students, this sort of pops up with screen time, whether it is on social media, screen time on their little phones, or watching TV, and not that those activities in themselves are bad, but when you look at their ratings of their own personal ratings of how happy they felt doing it, when you see that their people feel so busy that they don't have time to spend on those activities that they give 9s and 10s to, meeting up with a friend for dinner after work. It's like, oh, I don't have time for that. Yeah, those are the activities that give the sort of contribute most to or produce the greatest happiness. But then there's spending hours and hours watching TV. The ratings are sort of at the meh level, a middling five, for instance.

Starting point is 00:29:25 at the meh level, a middling fye, for instance, but recognizing just how much time, you might be spending on that, then with this information is wonderful because then you know what time you can reallocate and where you should reallocate it on what activities you should reallocate them. I think that's great. And in chapter one, you talk a lot about what Bernat Brown's calls

Starting point is 00:29:47 scarcity. And I wanted to ask you, how does being time poor limit not only the quality of our lives, but the quality of our relationships and our ability to give time to others? Being time poor is about it. It has these negative effects. It makes us less healthy, effects, it makes us less healthy, less kind, and less confident, and less happy. The less kind is that when we feel time poor, we are less likely to spend time on others, to take the time to help another out, or to even spend time with another with our sort of full attention on them. Interestingly, we have worked with Zoe Chancin, Mike Norton, where we found a sort of counterintuitive effect, where despite the fact that when we feel time poor, we are less likely to give time to others,

Starting point is 00:30:35 when you do, it can actually make you feel like you have more time. And that might sound surprising, but the reason is that when we spend time to help others, it makes us feel really effective and recognizing, oh my gosh, I can accomplish a lot. I did accomplish a lot with my time. I can accomplish a lot with my time. feeling of having too much to do and not enough time to do it. So underlying that is the sense of confidence that you can complete what you set out to do with the time that you have. And by spending time on others, increasing your sense of self-efficacy, it actually makes you more confident that you can accomplish a lot with the time you have in all of a set and that time feels less limiting and it increases your sense of time affluence, which is wonderful because then it's like this wonderful virtuous cycle, then you feel less constrained, then you are more open and willing to engage and help out others. of my favorite. So in my course applying the science of happiness to life design, each week I give my students an assignment, sort of an experiential assignment. So one of the assignments is the time

Starting point is 00:31:52 tracking exercise which I shared with you. Another is doing random acts of kindness. So doing something for someone else, and I have them actually do too, one for someone that they don't know, and one for someone that they do know. And then I have them reflect on how do they make them feel. And interestingly, even though this is an investment of time, in many cases, to do something nice for someone else, what it made them feel is very accomplished and very satisfied and actually like they had more time again, reducing that overall sense of constraint and limitation from this particular resource. So I love that assignment because that not only spreading niceness for those week of non-nice students, but just seeing how it sort of perpetuates them to do more niceness, right? And then it makes the recipients

Starting point is 00:32:46 of the niceness like go and do nice things for others. Well, I think I want to stay on this scarcity topic just a little bit longer. Earlier this year, I got to interview both David Vago, who's a professor at Vanderbilt and Dr. David Yaden, who you might know because your times crossed when you were at Penn. But he's now at Johns Hopkins. Both of them are two of the foremost experts in the world on self-transcendence. And in fact, David Yaden wrote a paper with Dr. Vago

Starting point is 00:33:18 and Martin Selegman and Jonathan Height about characterizing a new framework for it. And one of the things you bring up in the book is awe. And that when we experience awe can help us with these feelings of scarcity, what are some ways that you recommend doing that? Yeah. And that is, it's a wonderful link.

Starting point is 00:33:42 And based off of research by Jennifer Acher, Kathleen Voss and Melanie Redd, they looked specifically at that of how does having an experience of awe influence sense of time, time affluence on the flip side and time scarcity. And what they found was that those who have, even reminded of an experience of awe makes people feel more time affluent. It limits that sense of constraint, what are some sort of nice opportunities to experience awe.

Starting point is 00:34:16 One is through social connection. So having that deep engagement and interaction with another human being and you can think that sort of feeling when you hold a baby, it's just that intense sense of connection. You can find it through others' accomplishment and creativity. So through art in the book I mentioned my awe from sort of hearing about one of my colleagues research Andrea Guest who won the Nobel Prize for her work in discovering a super massive black hole so she's in the sciences and that was just an extraordinary feat that instilled a sense of awe in me nature. outside and exposing yourself to the immensity, the enormity of the world around us and the beauty in it can also evoke a sense of awe. Even if you don't get these sort of experiences of awe, they're not impossible to attain, but they are hard to attain, but actually getting outside and exposing yourself to nature has more immediate effects to. There's work that shows the role of moods simply being outside. And yes, it's better if it's nice weather. Yes, it's better if you're in a natural environment

Starting point is 00:35:36 versus an urban environment. But even with those features, I'm sort of pulling out the influence of those features, simply getting outside without having a roof over your head makes people feel happier. It lightens their mood. And to the extent that you experience a lot, then it will also expand your sense of time. One of the things I try to do to incorporate more of it in my life is I get up very early in the morning and go on a walk. Most days about 5am with my dog and I can't tell you how many incredible things I've seen in the sky and just experienced on those walks especially when I'm taking a break from a podcast. I'm just trying to be totally into sensing what's around me and being deliberate about mindfulness.

Starting point is 00:36:27 You just get this piece at that time in the morning that I don't find in the hustle around us, which gives you a much greater ability to absorb all that. So that would be a tip to a listener as well of a way to experience it. Unlike self-transcendence experiences, which happen much less frequently, there are ways that you can experience Oz, you're explaining much more in your daily lives. Yeah, absolutely. As you mentioned in your walk that's outside, there's so many benefits, but at your outside in the sort of the quietness of the morning, which allows you to notice what's around you. So there's the sort of meditative aspect. There's the awareness aspect, the mindfulness aspect.

Starting point is 00:37:12 But another thing is that you're moving your body. And so exercise, this is another activity that increases happiness, mood, and hypothesized through increasing a sense of self-efficacy, also time affluence. And so for me, it sounds like you go on locks with your dog early in the morning. For me, it is my early morning run. And it's sadly exercises, one of these things that we tend not to do when we feel busy. And when I feel particularly busy, I'm like, oh, I don't have time to go for a run tomorrow morning. But that is the wrong choice because exercise has been shown to increase sense of

Starting point is 00:37:56 self-esteem, self-efficacy, and actually an immediate sort of mood booster. And that mood booster like translates over into sort of subsequent activities in your day. By increasing that self-efficacy, as I mentioned in the effect of giving time to others, makes you feel like you have more time because they've increased the self-efficacy same with exercise. So by coming home from that run and like, oh my gosh, I did it. Like, and I can do it. And I can do anything. It's like, again, that sense of limitation, that time constraint tends to sort of cloud our experience that gets lessened.

Starting point is 00:38:33 So that we are excited and willing and capable to take on more of the things that feel worthwhile. Yes, I couldn't agree with you more. And I think another important thing that you brought up in the book was the topic of sleep. And I recently had on Dr. Sarah Medneck, who you might know, she's at UCLA Irvine expert on really the power of the nap. And now she has a book called The Downstate. And she is well brought up in our interview, just how integral our sleep patterns are to our overall happiness. I was hoping for the audience. Maybe you could just give them a patterns are to our overall happiness. I was hoping for

Starting point is 00:39:05 the audience, maybe you could just give them a couple links to it as well, because you carve out probably a third of a chapter just discussing it. Yeah, and so as I mentioned in the assignments that I give my students over the course of the course, one of the assignments, actually I give it the same week as I have them exercised for at least 30 minutes each day. I also have them sleep at least seven hours, hopefully eight, for at least four days that week so that they can experience what is the effect of sleep on their subsequent mood and their experience over the course of the week. I am not a sleep expert, but each year in my course, I have Dr. Alon Avedon, who is a sleep specialist at UCLA, come and talk to us and share with us. It sounds like similar. The science of sleep that Sarah Mennick shared with your listeners is exactly that. Being well-rested has amazing cognitive benefits, but also from the thing I'm interested in is how people feel

Starting point is 00:40:11 because it's a great mood booster. And actually, I think the flip side is where the bigger effect comes from. When you feel sleep deprived, you feel crabby. Now that everyone around you, you feel less capable in yourself and it's actually the negative effects of your mood on being sleep deprived will absolutely taint your experience over the course of all of your other activities. So it's like even if you're super intentional and you're doing the activities or filling your days with activities that are worthwhile. If you go into those

Starting point is 00:40:46 activities exhausted, then they're not going to be as enjoyable as they would be otherwise. So there is value sleep. And again, we've talked about time poverty and I ask folks to complete this sentence. I don't have time to. And what you see is people's answers to that highlight what time poverty limits ourselves or limits from our lives and keeps us from investing in. And the answers are often, I don't have time to exercise. I don't have time to get enough sleep. And then these are very physiological things that we need in order to enjoy and to get the most and to be most present and to bring ourselves as possible to our days.

Starting point is 00:41:36 And then there's the other things that are very disappointing that people don't have time to, so they don't have time to do. And that is invest, sort of, wholly in their relationships, invest in themselves by pursuing their personal passions and interests and hobbies. So yes, time poverty limits us in so many ways, and that's why it's so important to figure out

Starting point is 00:42:01 how do we lessen those constraints, lessen those limitations, so that we can be more affluent, broader, bigger in our lives. And as we've already mentioned, a couple of them, experience all, get into nature, do something for someone else, acts of kindness, as well as exercise. Well, I happen to read a research paper you did in 2021 with Colin Weston Sanford DeVoe. And I thought this would be something our listeners would want to hear about as well as how do you approach happiness by treating the weekend like a vacation? Yes, and I'm glad you asked about that. This is such simple intervention that we have found can have a big effect on our happiness. So in the context of our time off, so vacation.

Starting point is 00:42:51 So we as actually Americans are really bad at taking vacations, we're the only industrialized nation that doesn't have legally mandated vacations. And even though we get less vacation than many folks in other countries, we don't even take the vacation that we're given. Almost half of Americans don't take all of their paid vacation. And that's because a, vacations are expensive, and so we don't feel like we have enough money. B, we don't feel like we have enough time.

Starting point is 00:43:20 So we don't feel like we can take the time away from the busyness and the routine and all of our tasks and our daily life to take that break. You should take vacation though because it's correlated with greater happiness, satisfaction, creativity, job performance, job engagement. So you should take vacation. In addition, we did recognize that actually we do get time off each week. Most Americans got weekends off from work. Yet why does do those weekends not feel like a break? Well because throughout the weekend we're sort of in that routine of doing and aren't intentional and aren't really paying attention to it as a break, we're sort of getting things done, checking things off of our to-do list. And we were interested in what if we treated

Starting point is 00:44:13 the weekend like a vacation, what if we treated it like the break that it can and should be how would that affect our happiness, in particular how would that affect our happiness when we returned to work on Monday. And we conducted a simple experiment which we replicated several times. We're among a sample of working Americans who got the weekend off on the Friday going into the weekend. We gave half of the instructions, treat this weekend like a vacation.

Starting point is 00:44:45 That is to the extent possible, think and behave in ways you would on vacation. The others we told treat this weekend like a regular weekend to the impossible, think in the haven ways you would on a regular weekend. That's it. They could interpret that. They could do with it what they will. They had their weekend. And then on Monday, when they returned to work, we reconnected with them, and then we measured their happiness again. And what we found was that those who treated their weekend like a vacation or were instructed to,

Starting point is 00:45:16 were significantly happier than those who treated it like a regular weekend. And we were curious, did they do different things or what sort of driving this effect? We did see that behavior changed a bit. So people did those in the sort of cloning quote vacation weekend conditioner, the vacationers. They did spend a little bit more time eating, so probably at meals. Less a little bit less time doing work, a little bit less time doing work a little bit less time doing housework. So these are a little bit more life vacation, but it wasn't how they spent their time that was reflected in how they felt over the weekend and how they felt on present. They were more mentally engaged in the activities that they were doing throughout the weekend than those in the regular weekend condition.

Starting point is 00:46:13 What we sort of deduce from this is that there is a vacation mindset. When we do take a break from all the doing, which is sort of running through our head, those to-do list, it takes us out of the present moment. We're always thinking about what's next, as opposed to like recognizing that yes, at the breakfast table on Saturday morning, be there, be paying attention. Like, it's a break to the extent that people experience it like a break,

Starting point is 00:46:42 then you get this boost in happiness. So it's a lovely intervention because it doesn't require additional money. It doesn't require taking additional days off, although again, you should take a vacation more than you do. But it does remind us and sort of give us the license to take the breaks from our routine and from the sort of hecticness of it all, that we from our routine and from the sort of hecticness of it all that we not only deserve but really need to be refreshed and happy. Well I think that's great and something I'm gonna have to try to do on more of my weekends. Well we're getting close to the end of the interview and one of the questions I had to ask you is how much time do we need to feel time affluent and is there a happy hour sweet spot?

Starting point is 00:47:27 In that inverted U shape that I shared with you from our analysis of the American Time U survey data, we saw that collapsing across individuals those who work in that data, we saw that those with less than approximately two hours of discretionary time in their day, you see that drop off in happiness, so that's sort of the two little time. We saw that those with more than about five hours

Starting point is 00:47:50 of discretionary time in their day, you saw that drop off in happiness from too much time. That suggests that there is between two and five hours, but I don't want it to be sound as concrete as that. But I think that the bigger takeaway is that there's a pretty wide range where it's not about how much time you have, except at the very extremes, it's not about how much time you have. It's how you invest that time. And as we've sort of covered over our conversation today, it's both the activities that you spend your time on, but it's also your mindset when you're spending that time paying attention. And so it's that being intentional, both in how you spend the time as well as while you're spending the time of that sort of mindfulness and paying attention given the time that you're spending anyways. So yeah, I think that beyond thinking about a sweet spot,

Starting point is 00:48:48 it's not about quantity, it's about quality in both the activities and your engagement in those activities. Well, Cassie, I think you just gave kind of a masterclass on this whole topic that I did want to tell the other. But there's more in how to tell the other. I wanted to tell the audience I purposely didn't go into a lot of the exercises because I think that's one of the most important things that I found in the book is each of the nine chapters has specific exercises such as the five Y test, the uology test, a chaotic approach to your life as well as other things.

Starting point is 00:49:26 So I would highly encourage you to read this book. I thought it was great because we always talk about time, but this actually brings the science about this marriage of time and happiness together. So last thing I wanted to ask you is if there's one thing you hoped the reader would take away from the book, what would it be? But you have choice and how happy you feel in your days and how fulfilled you feel in your life, you can do it. It all starts, I guess, with making an hour, a happier hour and from there, everything follows.

Starting point is 00:50:03 and from there everything follows. Well great and Cassie if there was a way for the listeners to get to know more about you, where would you point them to? Yeah, on my website www.cassycasus.com. That pulls a lot of it together as I talk about sort of, I don't want to spend time on social media and I tell my students not to spend too much time so I'm not really on social media, but my website pulls together sort of my research and where it's covered and so you can find me there. Okay, well thank you so much for giving us the honor of being on the show and congratulations again on your incredible new book. Thank you so much. This was a treat. I thoroughly enjoyed that interview with Cassie Holmes and I wanted to thank Cassie,

Starting point is 00:50:53 Eileen Boyle, and Gallery Books for the honor of interviewing her. Links to all things Cassie will be in the show notes at passionstruck.com. Please use our website links if you buy any of the books from the guest featured on the show all proceeds go Keeping the show free for our listeners videos are at YouTube at John our miles Please go there and join the 14,000 subscribers that we have Advertiser deals and discount codes are all in one convenient place at passionstruck.com slash deals You can find me on both Twitter or Instagram at John our miles

Starting point is 00:51:24 And I'm also on LinkedIn and if you wonder how I book these amazing guests slash deals. You can find me on both Twitter or Instagram at John R. Miles and I'm also on LinkedIn. And if you wonder how I book these amazing guests, it's because of my network. Go out there and build yours before you need it. You're about to hear a preview of the PassionStrike podcast interview I did with Jason Fyffer, who is the editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur magazine and author of the new book, Build for Tomorrow, an action plan for embracing change, adapting fast, and future proofing your career. We should remember that everything that we do, everything that we love, everything

Starting point is 00:51:51 that we think, everything that we consume on a daily basis. At one point, do and scary to somebody else. I mean, just think about it with John Pope Sousa. He was opposed to recorded music. The phonograph has ultimately led to you and I being able to talk together right now on a podcast. Remember, we rise by lifting others. Share this show with those that you love.

Starting point is 00:52:12 And if you found this episode useful, especially on time management and happiness, please share it with someone who can use the advice that we gave here today. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so that you can live what you listen. And until next time, live life, passion struck. you

Passion Struck with John R. Miles - Dr. Cassie Holmes on Happier Hour: Being Intentional about What Matters Most EP 185

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