The Happiness Experiment: Can You Make Every Day Like Saturday?

Posted on January 6, 2016 by resourcefulman

We are most happy on Saturdays at 7:26 pm – at least that’s what this poll showed . However, while the exact time – 7:26 pm – seems odd, there have been several studies showing that people are generally happier on weekends. So how do we make the rest of our week so happy?

This post originally appeared on the Crew blog .

A group of researchers from the University of Rochester found that no matter how much money you make, how many hours you work, or even what you make for a living, people are happiest on Saturdays and Sundays . Even unemployed people feel happier on weekends, according to a study by Stanford University.

It seems like “weekend happiness” is something that we all tend to feel no matter what happens in our lives. Even though I love my job and can create my own schedule, I know that on weekends I feel less stressed. All of this made me ask:

Why is Saturday different from Wednesday?

Planning an experiment of happiness

To find out what exactly made me feel so much better this weekend, I decided to experiment with myself as a test rat. The idea was that if I could uncover my main sources of stress and happiness, I would be in a better position to understand what makes weekends feel different than weekdays.

To find patterns in what made me happy and tense, I tracked the following factors over 10 days:

What did I eat / drink
How many hours did I sleep
Any major events (e.g. parties, dinners with friends, etc.)

Every day I also wrote down:

A 1-2-sentence summary of how I felt at the end of the day
Score from 1 to 10 per day (10 is a perfect day)

I originally planned to run the test over a longer period of time, but even after 10 days, clear patterns began to appear.

Here’s a rundown of my results if you want all the details. The first thing that struck me after looking at my daily ratings is that I did not rate any day higher than 8 out of 10.

In fact, my average daily rating was 6.6 out of 10. Slightly better than average. When I saw that, it made me stop and think about how I live – how I take for granted so many good things that have happened in my life.

I was fortunate enough to be born into a stable, loving family that inspired me to learn. I paid off my student debt and married the girl of my dreams. And for most of the last decade, I have been doing what I love and making a living from it. This is the life I wanted and aspired to. So shouldn’t I give 10 points every day?

I knew there was some reason that was diminishing my daily satisfaction. And looking at my own numbers, it seemed like something was happening on weekdays. Here’s a comparison of how I rated the average weekday and weekend:

My average rating per workday (Monday-Friday): 6.4 / 10
My average weekend rating (Saturday-Sunday): 7.5 / 10

To sort out my dissatisfaction, I went through all of my daily entries and listed common things that made me feel happy or stressed.

My sources of happiness:

Reduced job requirements
Less stress from other people
Get some sleep
Spend enough time on a creative task (in my case, writing)
We work on the most important things every day
Meeting with friends / family
Do good, focused work in the morning.
Sports or exercise
Healthy eating

My sources of stress:

It’s not enough to do in a day
Interrupts
Arguments
Performing tasks that I consider less important (for example, moving furniture, cleaning the bathroom)
Eating heavy / unhealthy foods
No physical activity (gym workout / soccer / stretching / long walk)

I noticed that (probably as expected) the more happiness factors I had in a day, the higher I rated that day. During the 2 days when I experienced 4/5 of the main factors of happiness, I rated those days at 8/10.

The more happy moments a day, the better. What about stressors?

As I peeled off the layers of makeup on the good and bad days, I noticed one source of stress that seemed to be the root cause of all bad days: constant pressure to do “enough work” throughout the day.

Average Daily Ranking When I Thought I Did Enough: 7.6 / 10
Average daily rating for when I thought I wasn’t doing enough: 5.6 / 10

When I felt that there was too much to do in a day, tasks that I considered less important and interruptions from work annoyed me more. This often leads to bickering, fast eating (and often unhealthy), or skipping workouts to save time.

To support my belief that this particular source of stress is causing me the most pain, I looked at the average overall scores for the days each stress source was present or not, and then used a variation to see which factor actually caused greatest impact.

It was obvious that the pressure to do enough work was a key stressor for me. And while I know this is often due to the pressure I put on myself, it sometimes felt like outside forces were at play. Especially on weekdays.

Passive stress: the case from Monday to Friday

My wife and I are similar in many ways, but when it comes to how we work, we are very different. I leave the morning for calm, focused work. No phone. No email. And the wife prefers to catch up on the phone and check e-mail.

Since she is also my co-founder, a lot of the things she sees in her email apply to me. As soon as I wake up, I know what’s going on, which probably makes her nervous too. This immediately makes my blood pump, and it becomes more difficult for me to focus on the work that I have previously identified as the most important.

I learned about a term called “ secondary stress,” which refers to the way stress is transmitted from person to person.

We learned to recognize when someone was under stress because it was a survival advantage. If you could empathize well, that would be the key to sharing things like food, shelter, or water. If you see someone walking back and forth or talking angrily, your levels of the stress hormone cortisol will naturally start to rise. Mirror neurons in your brain will fire whether you like it or not.

While this level of empathy is good for making friends when it comes to stress management, it can have an uncontrollable negative effect.

Network effect of stress

Passive stress can be even worse than your own stress because it is out of your control. Even if you are good at handling your emotions, if someone around you is stressed, you will feel stressed. The more people around you experience stress, the more feelings multiply.

Stress acts like anetwork effect – the term most often used in business to describe how a product can spread rapidly as more people use it (think, for example, the exponential growth of Facebook or Uber).

If you had a lot of traffic, you experienced the network effects of stress. Even if you are not under stress, you can feel that people are around you. Beeps are heard, people cut each other or shout in cars.

Increased secondary stress is one of the main reasons we feel more stress during the week. While more and more companies are moving to more flexible working hours , businesses around the world are still operating in accordance with the 40-hour workweek expectation . Since many people around you (clients, teammates, friends, and family) are working at the same time, this can force you to work on a schedule that you cannot control.

Everyone has their own to-do list. And the more people you work, the more lists you have. There are more emails, more appointments, and more expectations during the week. We are overwhelmed. Things are getting out of hand. What’s more, many people also do not enjoy their jobs (research firm Gallup found that about 70% of people are unhappy with their jobs ), which leads to deeper feelings of disconnection, leading to more stress and even a decrease in feelings of well-being. …

When the world around you is stressed or dissatisfied, these feelings are easily transferred to you. Researchers at the University of Rochester found similar results when they recorded the mood of 74 full-time adults between the ages of 18 and 62. The researchers called participants at different times and asked them to tell how they were feeling.

They found that participants experienced a stronger sense of well-being on weekends, with two variables having the greatest impact on positive emotions:

Autonomy: the ability to choose what they want to do.
Connectedness: The ability to spend time with those closest to you.

The weekend gave a greater sense of autonomy and unity because more people felt they had free time and could choose what they wanted to do and with whom:

High autonomy + high relationship = positive well-being
Low autonomy + low connectedness = low wealth

I knew that spending time with family and friends makes me happy, but I didn’t expect how much of a source of happiness that would be until I did my experiment. (This was the third largest source of my happiness.) This may explain why even unemployed people feel happier on weekends . A group of Stanford researchers studying the “unemployment problem” found that even if unemployed people can do whatever they want every day, they tend to feel happiest on weekends.

So, even with the freedom to work whenever you want, your feelings of happiness and stress can easily be tied to other people’s schedules.

How to make every day look like Saturday

After seeing the results of my experiment, I became much more clear about what makes me happy and tense. I also learned more about the influence of other people on my feelings of happiness and stress. While I may not be able to change the schedule the world works on, I have found ways to reduce the impact of these external sources of stress on me.

I understand that I will not feel happy all the time. And that’s okay. Feelings of sadness, stress, or anger are part of life’s experience. I want to improve my general outlook every day. When something happens, we choose how to react. While intermittent little stress won’t kill you, constant stress will kill you.

The road is long, and all the time the clouds hanging over you are unhealthy. You will never feel that you have done enough. Your work won’t be as harsh. Eventually, you will run out of gasoline.

As Stephen Pressfield , author of The Legend of Bagger Vance, writes :

“The pro picks up steam early on in the project, reminding himself that this is an Iditarod and not a 60-yard dash. He conserves his energy. He prepares his mind for a long journey. He supports himself, knowing that if he can just keep these huskies in motion, sooner or later the sleigh will drive up to Nom. “

After doing this experiment, I wanted to find ways to work for the long term. If I could do this, I knew that not only would I feel better every day, but I would be able to do better work all the time.

Since doing this experiment two years ago, I’ve discovered several ways to get rid of the main sources of daily stress. Here’s what worked for me:

1. Make a short, prioritized to-do list.

The biggest source of stress for me is the feeling that I have too much work to do. With that in mind, I realized that it wasn’t a matter of the actual amount of work, but that I hadn’t properly organized what I needed to do.

The source of my stress came down to what seemed so innocent: the to-do list. It has become cumbersome. Instead of storing tasks for that day, my list has become a repository of whatever tasks or goals are realistic or not. In hindsight, it seems ridiculous that at some point I needed to complete 161 tasks in one day.

This storage of ideas makes it impossible to sense progress. As the list grows and grows, you feel overwhelmed, and instead of tackling critical tasks that propel you forward, you default to tasks that come your way, like checking your email.

I’ve written about stress from my to-do list before. It has been a long and difficult journey to discover what works. A shorter list alone does not solve the problem.

To “win” your to-do list, you need a short, prioritized list that’s flexible enough to adapt to future challenges.

Instead of putting everything together in one long list, I restructured my daily list by looking at a typical day and sorting what I needed to do by priority. Here is a list of the typical things I do in a day:

Write
Product Feature Planning / Marketing Projects
Drawing up marketing plans
Sharing feedback with teammates
Meetings / Calls / Investors
Share one thing a day
Respond to your most important emails / project messages

After identifying what I do every day, I rank them in order of importance. I consider writing my first business, not only because it is important to me, but also because I know that if I don’t write earlier in the day, I won’t have time later. After receiving this list, I put these tasks into the Trello project management tool.

Under each column, I put the current project I’m working on. For example, this blog post might be titled “Writing.” I have set enough tasks that will take about 5-6 hours to complete. This leaves ample time for other unexpected tasks that may arise, as well as for interruptions.

When I schedule specific breaks, I make them part of my daily routine, making it easier to make time to eat well, exercise, or meet friends and family (all sources of happiness).

This is what a typical to-do list looks like to me now:

Before the “Writing” column, I created a column for my morning routine and a “Unsorted” column in which I put pop-up messages to prioritize later.

If the task that comes up is not critical, I look at this Unsorted list only after I have done everything that has already been prioritized for the day. Every night when I finish work, I try to make a to-do list for the next day. Since the columns in my to-do list have already been created, I get a constant reminder of my priorities. I just need to fill in the blanks.

Another problem I’ve always faced with my to-do list is that it can’t be crossed out. An important thing can just sit there for months and eat away at my motivation, causing me stress. Since my list has never changed, I have not seen any progress. Thanks to the way I am currently organizing my list, I can easily complete individual tasks, which makes me feel like I’m on my way to winning.

With a shorter list of priorities, you can focus on the things that bring positive energy instead of feeling stressed and doing lower quality work.

2. Reassess your deadlines.

Over the past year, I’ve been tracking my personal deadlines. I only hit a quarter of them. Like most people, I always think I can do more. But when I miss a deadline, it becomes a source of stress. My solution was to make everything I needed clear and accessible.

For example, when I write, I am not setting a word count or a goal to complete a blog post. Instead, my goal is to just write every day. It can be a paragraph or an entire article. As long as I write something, I win. It’s only when I get to the end of the story that I change the task to “Complete blog post”.

Time and time again, setting unrealistic deadlines is a recipe for burnout that makes it harder for you to maintain a high level of performance over the long term. If you overwork yourself today and don’t work tomorrow, what will be the result? Less repeatable progress and more stress.

Someone who writes 200 words a day every day for ten days does the same as someone who writes 2,000 words once every ten days. Of course, if you are in the zone, don’t stop. Write 50,000 words if you feel it. But if your attention starts to fade (that is, maybe you can’t help looking at your phone or visiting your favorite website), this is a signal to interrupt.

Everything always takes longer. If you do something earlier, you will feel like you have extra time. When was the last time you felt like you had extra time? Do as much as you can today so that you want to do it again tomorrow.

3. Do focused work – but before you start, tell the people you work with

Not all clocks are the same. Just because you work more hours does not mean that you are doing more (or better). Multitasking is a myth. When we try to do multiple tasks at the same time, we may feel like we are doing more, but research shows that we actually do less and make more mistakes . One hour of focused work without distractions is more valuable than three hours of work interrupted by checking texts, emails, pings and calls.

When I first started working non-stop, I was embarrassed. It seemed to me that I was rudely putting on headphones and not answering people when they talk to me. As I thought about my rudeness, my mind was not fully focused on work.

I realized that one of the mistakes I made was that I didn’t tell the people I worked with regularly that I was going to do purposeful work. Not everyone works like that, so if I want to, I need to tell others about it. Here’s an example of a message I’m sending to my wife before getting started.

This approach was much better than the previous one, when I would get angry if my wife asked me something while I was busy with focused work. This almost always led to an argument – another source of stress.

While it takes time to communicate to the people you work with, it is much better than snarling if they ask you for something while you are trying to focus. Or ignoring them. Both only add to the stress for everyone.

4. Spend time with someone who makes you happy every day.

I realized that no matter how much to do, spending time with someone I care about makes me feel happier than trying to squeeze in a few more hours of work. Waste time with those you love .

5. Sleep. But if you can’t sleep, wake up and work on what’s on your mind.

I know that I usually need 7.5-8.5 hours of sleep per night to feel rested. I noticed that because during the week I feel more stress from work-related work, I sleep less on average compared to the weekend.

During the week, I often have one or two nights a week when I cannot sleep because my brain is working in a rush . I lay in bed and tried everything I could to get myself to sleep. As I lay awake longer and longer, I felt my stress build up. I know sleep is important, so the longer I try to sleep, the worse I feel. So instead of lying awake in bed when I can’t sleep, I tried something new.

If I’m worried, I wake up and work on what’s on my mind. It doesn’t matter if it’s 2 am, 3 am or 4 am. Half an hour of working on what’s in my head calms me down much more than spending hours rolling around trying to get me to sleep.

Get enough sleep. But if you can’t, wake up and work on what’s bothering you.

6. You don’t have to exercise every day – just move.

Although our bodies crave movement, you don’t need a lot of training to get to the level you need for your health.

National Geographic researcher Dan Buettnerexamined the areas of the world where people live the longest . One thing that he and his team consistently discovered was that the people they studied performed constant, low-intensity exercise, usually while walking, standing up and sitting or going out into the garden.

Too long in one position leads to a deterioration in blood circulation. Moving around gives you time to freshen up. Whether it’s a walk to the office, time to stretch while you cook dinner in the microwave, or exercising, any type of blood flow acts as relaxation. This is an opportunity to refresh your brain and lift your mood.

Move between work. Change positions. Lie on the floor. Switch the table you are working at. To go for a walk.

7. Make it easy to eat healthy foods.

I knew from my experiment that the feeling of healthy eating was one of the main sources of happiness for me. But what surprised me most was that it was almost 10 times more effective than exercising and getting good sleep. But when I start to feel hungry, I feel that my willpower weakens and I crave bad food .

Therefore, I aimed to ensure that products are always near me, which do not reduce my energy level and do not require special preparation. This is my typical list of healthy, out-of-the-box snacks that I try to have with me:

Dry fried edamame
Low fat Greek yogurt
Giant sack of carrots
Easy-to-open tuna cans
Thinly sliced turkey

(Although I recently went vegan, so I’m looking for yogurt, tuna, and turkey substitutes.) This list was compiled through a lot of trial and error in finding foods that make me feel full and give me the nutrients I need.

Food is your fuel. To feel good, you have to get it right.

8. Give five minutes to daily affirmations.

I’m lucky, but I don’t think about how lucky I am.

As one of our writers Jeremy Duvall recently wrote , one of the main reasons for the lack of gratitude is the so-called hedonistic adaptation, a fancy term meaning that we automatically adapt to good (or bad) things when they happen. When something happens that makes us feel good, like a pay raise, we momentarily increase our happiness. However, soon after that, we plunge back into being just as happy (or unhappy) as before.

To better understand what I already have, I began to set aside five minutes each day to write answers to these prompts:

To start the day:

“I am grateful for …”
“What could make today great?”
“Daily statements. I (ie creative, happy person) … “

At the end of the day:

“Three Amazing Things That Happened Today.”
“How could I have done better today?”

I learned about this technique by listening to a podcast hosted by bestselling author and frequent contributor to productivity, Tim Ferris.

As you write down your answers to these questions each day, you are reminding yourself of what you should be grateful for and what you value. This exercise was based on the psychological theory of self-affirmation, which states that thinking about your values can act as a buffer against negative events that occur. It shapes your mind so that no matter what happens today, good or bad, you are reminded that you already have something to be grateful for.

At first, I didn’t think that taking the time to write what I’m grateful for would help a lot. I thought it wouldn’t be that much different from just thinking more often about what I’m grateful for. But after a few days, I noticed that as the day progressed, I became more positive. It had a big impact on something that took me only five minutes, the same for me to put on my pants and brush my teeth.

Living on the weekend is not life

We are always looking forward to trying to make our life better. And while progress requires looking ahead, sometimes we need to stop and look around. We lose sight of it if we just get through five stressful days and recover in two.

To live a life that makes you happy, identify what you are grateful for, what makes you happy, and what causes stress. You can then copy the experiment above to find ways to remove sources of stress and add sources of happiness to each day.

If the first thing you try doesn’t work, try again. I don’t have a perfect formula yet, but I have a clear idea of what makes me feel content with my life.

When writer Stephen Pressfield was battling criticism, his friend Tony Keppelman told him :

“… be happy. You’re where you wanted to be, aren’t you? So you take a few hits. That’s the price to pay for being in the arena and not on the sidelines. Stop complaining and be grateful.”

Keppelman was right. Part of the game is knocking down. That’s for sure. But what matters is not what hits are going to be, but how you deal with hits, successes, and everything in between.

Can you make every day look like Saturday? | Crew

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