178-How Our Mind Hinders Our Happiness #1

Our brains are super complex but sometimes the nuance gets lost when the wires cross between our conscious and subconscious, our prefrontal cortex and the limbic system. This is when we need to be super intentional and really think about why our intuition is telling us.  This series will dive into some of the ways, the biases, our brain gets it wrong so that we can be better prepared the next time we notice this happening.  

 

One way is miswanting, which we discuss right now.  

 

Transcript:

 

Welcome to Everyday Happiness where we create lasting happiness, in 2 minutes a day,  through my signature method of Intentional Margins® (creating harmony between your to-dos and your priorities), happiness science, and musings about life. 

 

I'm your host Katie Jefcoat and I was listening to the Yale happiness course by Dr. Laurie Santos and she was talking about how we can’t always trust our intuition, our mind when it comes to our own personal happiness, because our mind doesn’t get the nuance.  

 

We’ve been talking about this idea that what we think we want for happiness won’t actually, scientifically, make us happier.  The best job, perfect body, winning the lottery won’t really change our happiness as much as we think it will.  We’re focusing on the wrong goals.  Check out episodes 170 and 171 for a little more high-level background on this concept of our intuition overestimating how happy we think we will become if we get that thing or achieve that goal.  

 

In her lecture at Yale, professor Dr. Laurie Santos introduces the work of researchers and professors Tim Wilson at the University of Virginia, and Dan Gilbert at Harvard.  They coined this fantastic term called MISWANTING. The definition of this is “this act of being mistaken about what and how much you're going to like these things in the future”. The problem is that our brains deliver to us this idea that we want certain things, but we are often wrong about it. We are constantly miswanting.

 

So why does this miswanting occur and what can we do about it?  Well, the researchers seem to think that just being aware of our biases is the way to counterbalance miswanting.  It can be as simple as wanting a doughnut.  I want a fried dough ball with a sugary frosting, it will taste good, and it will make me happy.  I eat the doughnut and although it tastes delightful at the moment, but now, I am no longer happier - the feeling didn’t last.  I miswanted.  

 

This all comes down to the perils of us humans predicting our future feelings and people specifically mis-predict the duration of how good or bad a feeling will be.  

 

So today, I invite you to think about miswanting in the context of your day-to-day and just be aware of when our brain plays these little tricks on us.  

 

Until next time, smash that subscribe button and leave a review, we would be forever grateful.   

 

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