How To Manage Your Time For A Happier Life - Dr Cassie Holmes

If you are investing your time on the things that matter to you, then you will be happier, you will be more satisfied. And it's not more is better, it is just being intentional and spending the time in ways that matter to you. (wind blows)

You are basically a happiness teacher, right?

Yes. I teach happiness, and particularly focusing on the role of time for our happiness.

Why are those two things intrinsically linked?

Well, because the way we spend the hours of our days sum up to our, the years of our life. And so, the time that we spend is the fabric of our life. And from that, we are either more or less happy. And when I say happy, what I mean is the joy that we experience in our days, as well as the satisfaction we feel about our lives. So, there's both that emotional feeling within, as well as evaluative and cognitive feeling about, um, that. Both of those are linked too. And when I say the word "happy," and feeling happier, which is really the goal and, you know, part of the title of my book, um, that's what I'm talking about.

Interesting. I remember reading a summary of Dan Gilbert and Daniel Kahneman's two approaches of what they thought about happiness, the lying in the pool with a cocktail on a lilo for the rest of your life. Yes, it's not meaningful, but you enjoyed every second individually. And then the other version that was, like, a meaningful one. And it seems like your definition of happiness here kind of combines the two. It's the state enjoyment in the moment, and it's the retrospective feeling of being ha- satisfied about how your life has gone and about each moment that, as it was spent. Is that the commonly-

Yeah.

... held definition when we talk about happiness in the literature and the science at the moment? Is that what people mean when they refer to happiness?

Um, it is the, sort of, what the literature refers to the term that they say is subjective wellbeing, and that is the coupling of this emotional component, so feeling more positive than negative emotion, as well as satisfaction about. Um, and notably, there are instances in which they do sort of come apart, but as, I'm not even just talking about the literature, but really about the implications for us as individuals and how we should be spending our time. What I am going for is that coupling. Like, we both wanna feel s- happy and satisfied while it's happening, but also have it have an impact on our evaluation of how good life is and how meaningful... And meaningful is actually, or meaning is, it's a little bit of a separate construct. Um, but in our research, we've actually looked at what's the correlation between how happy people are feeling and how meaningful they feel like their life is, and they're so highly correlated. And yeah, there are instances where, again, you can pull them apart. But as I'm striving to feel sort of good in and about my life, and I think that that's what a lot of individuals are striving for, that's the operationalization of this idea, this construct, using scientific jargon. But basically, that's our goal, to feel happy within and happy about, and really it's about feeling joy and fulfillment. So, that's the goal.