New Research: Boost Happiness By Thinking ” What If Good Things Had Never Happened In My Life”
How ironic, recent research applies Munger’s idea of inverting to improve happiness. Rather than giving thanks for your blessings this research promotes the idea of imagining what your life would be like if the good things never happened. For example what if I got a job out of school and missed out on the opportunity to run this blog and meet you guys! Now that I think about it I’m rather blessed in my unemployment.
-Miguel
Click Here To Learn About Some Very Counterintuitive Happiness Research
Introduction (Via Scientific American)
From time to time, I contemplate the fantastic possibility that had one of us ventured several footsteps to the right or the left that evening, my husband, my children and my home might be subtracted from the life I lead today. Counterintuitively, this counterfactual exercise in considering how much worse off I could be today brings me not distress, but pleasure. Then again, a series of elegant studies published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology suggest that my experience is not so counterintuitive after all.
The biggest increase in satisfaction with the relationship occurred not in the group that pondered the sunny beginnings of their union but in the “mental subtraction” (or “How I might never have met Peter”) group.
Why does “subtracting” a love, a triumph, or a dash of good fortune from our lives give us a bigger boost than simply savoring their reality? According to University of Virginia social psychologist MinkyungKoo and colleagues, the key mechanism is that thinking about how an event might never have come to pass renders it more mysterious and more surprising. Prior research has shown that surprise – and its cousins novelty, unexpectedness, variety, uncertainty, and unpredictability – is associated with more intense and more durable emotional reactions.
Click Here To Learn About Some Very Counterintuitive Happiness Research
