Mood Matters — How Happiness Dictates Decisions
Can’t focus? Check your mood.
If you’ve read any self-improvement work in the past decade, you know how important it is to build better habits. Our existence reflects the foundational routines that make up our lives. Unless we try to change those habits, we’ll never become our ideal selves.
Central to building habits is self-control. With every decision, we face a trade-off. Should we work for instant gratification or long-term payoff? The mental process of making that final decision is nebulous. In the past ten years, we’ve gone from self-control acting as a resource to almost completely disavowing that theory.
The time and effort that went into those experiments did help us discover a few fundamental rules about decision-making. First and foremost, our self-control isn’t a fixed trait. It’s something we can alter with the right interventions. Second, self-control doesn’t act alone: motivation, attention, acceptance, and many other factors matter in our decisions.
New research shows that even mood can dictate whether you participate in the mundane or give in to temptations. If your to-do list is filled with chores, this work indicates you’ll have a higher likelihood of completing them if you’re happy.
Hedonic Flexibility
In past studies, when participants’ moods increased, they generally chose another mood-enhancing activity. Regardless of how good they felt, they’d prefer to maintain or improve it further. This behavior led to a simple question, how does anyone get anything productive done? If your mood is always the number one priority, what resources do we have left for long-term activities?
That’s where hedonic flexibility comes in. In this new study, participants would seek out mood-increasing activities when they felt bad. Yet, when they felt good, they’d shift towards mood-decreasing activities. It’s almost as if the behaviors themselves worked to keep individuals at a neutral medium. Instead of seeking out pure enjoyment, they sought contentment.
The implication is that we’re naturally suited to balance pleasure-seeking with the understanding that hard work is essential to survival.
In this sense, your good mood acts as an activator for your least compelling work.
Mood had a lasting impact up to a few hours after the participants reported their happiness levels. The researchers summarized it best,
“Our findings suggest that mood shapes the decisions people make about which activities to undertake in the next few hours and that, in turn, these activities influence how they feel.”
Tracking Mood
If your mood is a predictor of time management and productivity, what should we do with that information? First, you should be tracking your mood. I use an app called daylio. It prompts me to record my mood and activities.
“You can’t monitor what you don’t measure.”
Daylio helps me track which activities in my life correlate to being in a good mood. After a few weeks, I can review which activities are more likely to end up with me having a good day and, in turn, more capable of doing the work I feel I should focus on.
If we can learn what makes for a good mood and how to leverage that to get more done, we’ll be on our way to a more fulfilling life. Dr. Taquet, one of the studies researchers, believes mood is a crucial determinant of what we’ll achieve on any given day. In a follow-up with Science Daily, she wrote,
“Our findings demonstrate that people’s everyday decisions regarding which activities to undertake share directly linked to how they feel and follow a remarkably consistent pattern. “
Better your future self. Learn how with our free email course on Self-Talk.
