Author Archives: Andrew Gottlieb, Ph.D.

Your Brain Wants You to Be Mellow: New Evidence Shows Chronic Emotional Stress Can Increase the Risk of Mild Cognitive Impairment in Later Life

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So you’ve been putting off getting therapy, even though most of the time you feel anxious and upset? Well, a new study suggests that you may be putting your brain in danger.

Researchers at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, Illinois, followed more than 1200 men and women who were 65 and older, average age of about 76. At the beginning of the study they made sure that none of them had mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and measured their emotional distress using a simple 6 item scale of neuroticism. Items such as 1) “Are you the type of person whose feelings are easily hurt?”; 2) “Are you the type of person who is rather nervous?”; and 3) “Are you the type of person who is a worrier?” make up this scale.

At the beginning of the study the average score was about 15 on this emotional distress scale. Patients were followed up for up to 12 years. About 38% developed MCI during the study. Those in the top 10% of emotional distress at the beginning of the study were about 40% more likely to develop MCI.

What is interesting is this relationship held even after researchers statistically removed the effects of depressive symptoms at the beginning of the study. So the results were from emotional distress, not from depression. The risk for MCI increased by 2% for every 1 point increase on the distress scale. This is a pretty strong correlation.

So what does this mean? I think what it means is that chronic emotional upset is hard on the brain. It makes sense, since emotional stress raises stress hormones such as cortisol, which we know can damage the brain, especially the hippocampus, which controls memory. What we don’t know is whether this study was picking up some early brain changes in the elderly, changes which correlate with both emotional distress AND a tendency to develop MCI. A better study would look at younger people, and see if emotional distress in those aged 40 or 50 leads to the development of MCI in later life.

Since about a third of those with MCI will develop Alzheimer’s Disease, any reductions in the prevalence of MCI would be tremendously beneficial to society. Perhaps psychotherapy should be mandatory for all those over 65!

What can you do to lower your brain risk? First of all, honestly evaluate whether you suffer chronic emotional stress. Ask yourself if most of the time you feel calm and happy, or upset and worried and stressed. Also ask your close friends and/or family what they think. If you are someone who suffers chronic stress, then get help. A cognitive behavioral psychologist can teach you good stress management skills, and may help break lifelong patterns of emotional stress. Another good option is to learn mindfulness meditation and yoga and practice them daily. These are known to reduce psychological distress.

Whatever you do, don’t take it lightly if you are in long term distress. Your brain wants you to be mellow!

Copyright 2007 The Psychology Lounge/TPL Productions

Can Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Make a Baby? How Psychological and Behavioral Factors Can Reduce Infertility

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An article in the May 7 edition of U.S. News and World Report titled “Success at Last: Couples Fighting Infertility Might Have More Control Than They Think” shows how health psychology can impact even something as basic as making a baby. This fascinating article shows that behavioral and psychological factors may play a big and controllable role in producing the infertility that 1 in 8 couples suffer. It turns out, that the body may be smarter than we gave it credit for. Woman’s bodies may recognize certain states as not ideal for childbearing, and therefore prevent or lower fertility. Two examples are being overweight or underweight. Overweight risks pregnancy complications such as diabetes, high blood pressure, so the extra estrogen produced by body fat interferes with ovulation. Underweight women may not have enough body fat to sustain a baby, so the pituitary gland releases less of key ovulation hormones. Other behaviors strongly influence fertility. Take smoking for example. Multiple studies show that smoking can delay getting pregnant by a year or more. And one study at Columbia University found smokers entered menopause 3 years earlier on average. Or diet. Trans fats, a key component in such unhealthy foods as donuts, cakes, etc. may raise testosterone, which suppresses the ovaries. Research shows that as little as 4.5 grams, which is the amount found in one donut, can have this effect. Even positive behaviors can negatively affect fertility. One study found woman who exercised four or more hours a week were 40 percent less likely to conceive after their first IVF (In vitro Fertility) treatment than women who didn’t exercise. Once again, it may be that the body interprets hard exercise as danger and stress, and shuts down the fertility system.

Even pure psychological stress can affect fertility. Here’s the biological mechanism. A few hours before ovulation, the pituitary gland sends out luteinizing hormone (LH), which tells the ovaries to release an egg. But if you are experiencing psychological stress such as a fight with your husband, or a dressing down from your boss, or a kid having a tantrum, then your LH will be suppressed, disrupting ovulation.

Even mild stress may have a big effect. One study of monkeys found that moving monkeys to a new cage, combined with a little less food and 1 hour on treadmill caused 70 percent of the monkeys to have irregular menstruation! So don’t skip that meal and take a long run when stressed, or you’ll greatly lower you odds of getting pregnant.

What’s worse is that IVF treatment itself may lead to large amounts of psychological stress. One fertility expert found that 40 percent of women in infertility treatment had all of the symptoms of an anxiety disorder or depression: sleep disturbances, difficulty concentrating, and irritability. So if stress lowers fertility, and fertility treatment increases stress, then fertility treatment may actually harm fertility!

But cognitive behavioral therapy may improve the situation. Alice Domar and colleagues at Harvard found that a 10 week cognitive behavioral group therapy program improved the success of fertility treatment from 20 percent to 55 percent in the women who participated in the group therapy. So what can we learn from this research?

  1. A woman’s body is wise. It will respond to behavioral and psychological stressors by lowering fertility. Anything that resembles stress, even hard exercise, will trigger physical responses that lower fertility.
  2. At critical points such as several hours before ovulation, even normal stressors can disrupt the ovulation process. And in stress-prone or perfectionist or angry women, the likelihood of experiencing stress during these critical hours is very high. Thus for women who are experiencing difficulty getting pregnant and who by personality are “stressy” (you know who you are!) cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) will be helpful in learning to manage and lower stress.
  3. Infertility treatment is by its nature stressful, and this leads to a paradox; infertility treatment may lower fertility if it increases stress. It may be helpful to evaluate stress levels in women undergoing IVF and if stress is high, intervene with CBT group or individual therapy.
  4. The ultimate in infertility treatment may be what I recommended to my friend Jill, who had tried many cycles of IVF to no avail. I told her, “You’re young, why don’t you and your husband stop trying to get pregnant, and just have sex for fun, and enjoy life for a few years. If nothing happens then you can adopt.” She was pregnant within the year, and now has two lovely children. A good long relaxing vacation with no schedule, no hard exercise, healthy food, and no stress may be the best fertility treatment available, and even if it doesn’t work, at least you’ve gotten a great vacation!
  5. Finally, what this research shows us is how linked our minds and bodies are. Changing thoughts and feelings and behaviors changes our bodies, and fertility is just one example of this.

Copyright 2007 The Psychology Lounge/TPL Productions

Is Your Shrink Being Paid to Give You Drugs? The Secret Link Between Psychiatrists and the Drug Industry

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Regular readers of this blog will remember my earlier article on Rebecca Riley, the young girl whose overtreatment with powerful psychiatric drugs may have led to her death.

Now it turns out that some psychiatrists may actually be getting paid by the drug industry to give kids powerful drugs! And this is in spite of an almost complete lack of evidence that these drugs work or are safe for children.

The New York Times has an article called Psychiatrists, Children, and Drug Industry’s Role, and this scary article documents the secretive practice of paying psychiatrists to prescribe certain drugs.

The article documents that more than half a million children are now receiving atypical antipsychotics such as Risperdal, Seroquel, Zyprexa, Abilify, and Geodon. These drugs have never been tested on or approved for use in children!

In Minnesota alone, the only state that requires such reporting, from 2000 to 2005 payments from pharmaceutical companies to psychiatrists soared by six times, to $1.6 million, and the rates of prescribing antipsychotics to children went up by nine times.

And the Times found that the money worked. Those psychiatrists who received more than $5000 from the drug companies wrote 3 times as many prescriptions for atypical antipsychotics than those doctors who got less or no money. Other interesting figures are that the average payment to psychiatrists was $1750, with a maximum of $689,000. (Nice work if you can get it!)

I should point out that atypical antipsychotics are not benign drugs. Side effects can include rapid weight gain that leads to diabetes, and movement disorders such as tics and dystonia, which can lead to a lifelong muscle disorder.

The Times describes one unfortunate girl, Anya Bailey, who was given Risperdal for an eating disorder by her psychiatrist George Realmuto, who had received more than $7000 from Johnson and Johnson, the maker of Risperdal.

Although the drug helped her gain weight, she also developed a painful and permanent dystonia in her neck that now causes her chronic pain and a movement disorder, even after stopping the drug.

And she was never given any counseling for her problems, only drugs!

So what can we learn from this article? First of all, the practice of paying psychiatrists to prescribe certain medications is widespread, but only Minnesota requires full disclosure. We should pressure our legislatures to mandate full disclosure in every state. Write to your state and federal congress and senate and ask them to either ban this practice or to require full disclosure, on the web, by name of doctors, of how much money is given by each drug company.

Secondly, when you take your child to a psychiatrist, you should ask them for a full written disclosure of any money they received in the last few years from drug companies for speaking, or for research. Payments to psychiatrists (and other M.D.’s) are disguised as speaking honorariums or research payments, but when a doctor receives $5000 for giving one or two talks, it is safe to say that they are being paid for something else. If the psychiatrist admits to receiving money, then you should probably find another psychiatrist, as this creates a bias to prescribe that I do not think can be overcome.

Third, you should be dubious about any suggestion to give your child an antipsychotic medication for any diagnosis other than true psychosis. This means that unless your child is actively hallucinating, and delusional, i.e. “crazy” there is no evidence that antipsychotics will help them. For instance, there was only one well-controlled study of the use of atypical antipsychotics in bipolar illness in children, and it found little or no difference between using the antipsychotic and not using it. And most of the children in the group receiving the antipsychotic dropped out of the study due to side effects. A second study by the same researchers found no advantage to using antipsychotics.

Fourth, consider taking your child to a psychologist or counselor rather than a psychiatrist. Psychologists don’t receive money to influence their treatment decisions and use behavioral approaches that don’t have side effects. And there is much more research evidence that supports the use of these behavioral approaches in childhood disorders. Dangerous medications should be reserved for second or third line treatments only. Remember the old saying that to a young boy with a hammer everything becomes a nail, similarly to a doctor whose specialty is giving drugs, all problems become biochemical.

Finally, let’s put pressure on our legislators to outlaw this thinly disguised bribery, which threatens the health of children and adults. Shame on the pharmaceutical industry! And even more shame on psychiatrists, who of all people should be trustworthy and not willing to accept such bribes. I make the perhaps radical suggestion that patients boycott psychiatrists who accept money from drug manufacturers. If doctors can’t earn a decent living without taking payments from drug companies that often have the appearance of bribes, then perhaps they need a new profession. I realize that there are decent, honest psychiatrists who either don’t take drug company money or don’t let it influence them, but I suggest that it may be hard to tell the difference unless psychiatrists employ full disclosure.

Copyright 2007 The Psychology Lounge/TPL Productions

My Afternoon With the Dalai Lama: Lessons and Insights

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I sat a mere thirty feet from his Holiness the Dalai Lama yesterday for 90 minutes. The day April 29, 2007 will always be special to me. It was very magical. Not because of what he said, standard but true Buddhism 101 and meditation practice, but rather his character and his energy. There is a magic about this man, who more than anyone else seems to be completely in his own skin, and truly comfortable in that skin. He laughs, and he smiles, and he just seems unflappable. No pretense. When asked about parenting tips to raise a compassionate child, he laughs, and says, “I am monk. What do I know about raising children?” but then he continues, “Maximum care, maximum affection, and more time is the key.”

His basic message was about happiness. Happiness is mental, not based on people’s situations. Does this sound familiar? Basic cognitive therapy 101, happiness depends on how you think about things. Someone poor and homeless could be happier than someone wealthy and accomplished, depending on their respective expectations.

In the Dalai Lama’s view, happiness also comes from good companionship—friends, lovers, children, and a calm mind. Again, the Buddhists knew something 5000 years ago that modern social scientists are merely rediscovering—the critical importance of social support in mental health. For instance, 40 percent of married people describe themselves as “very happy” versus just 24 percent of single people. Those with 5 or more close friends are more likely to describe themselves as happy.

The fascinating thing about seeing the Dalai Lama is that once I settled down into a calm and meditative state listening to him, something transformative happened. I started to write down some ideas for creative projects, and suddenly words were flowing out of my pen. Anything was possible. I found myself having one of those magical moments that scientists describe as “Flow”. My confidence soared, and I had some important insights into life.

One of these insights was about watching television. I realized that watching television is about having nothing better to do at the moment. Even good television pales if there are wonderful social opportunities or creative ones. We watch TV because we are tired and a little bored. (Of course, even the Dalai Lama watches a little TV in the evenings, as he writes in the Art of Happiness—mostly nature documentaries, and not episodes of “24!” )

Another insight was about purpose. What is your purpose on this planet? What is the main thing you want to accomplish? So much of our striving and actions have no central purpose focus. We just sleepwalk through life. We just fill time. Some of us do it with work, some do it with relationships, some do it with reading, some with television, but all addictions have the same basic theme—how do I fill the time between being born and dying? If we know our purpose, then time fills itself.

The day after seeing the Dalai Lama, I awoke to a strange sense of emptiness. I felt like somehow it was gone: that quiet feeling of confidence, of knowing, of lack of worry. Was it all just a contact high? Later that same day, with meditation, contemplation, and writing I felt like I could get some of it back, so I knew then that my afternoon with the Dalai Lama had led to something real.

Namaste.

Copyright 2007 The Psychology Lounge/TPL Productions

Shopping for Happiness ™

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I’ve been working on a book length project on how to apply the current happiness research to everyday life, and this is an excerpt from that book.

It is said that money can’t buy happiness. This is mostly true. Like most generalizations, though, there are exceptions. What I hope to do in this chapter is to use the happiness research to teach you how to be better at shopping for happiness.

The happiness research teaches us several things. One basic principle is that of habituation, or getting used to things. This unfortunately robs us of joy from new and shiny possessions.

Thus using your hard–earned money to buy that shiny sports car will most likely not result in as much happiness as you anticipated. This is disappointing. After all, what is the point of making money if spending it doesn’t bring happiness?

The happiness research also shows us what tends to make people happy are experiences. This gives us some clues how to spend money to maximize happiness. Instead of buying things, which fade remarkably rapidly in their ability to please us, it makes more sense to use your spending to purchase items that allow you to have experiences you will enjoy. Or to directly purchase experiences that you will enjoy such as exotic trips, unique experiences, or thrills and chills like a parachute jump or bungee cord drop.

Let me give you some do’s and don’ts of shopping for happiness.

In many financial magazines and journals you will see little articles about how much money you can save by skipping the latte at your local café. They run the numbers, calculating one latte per day investing for umpteen million years, invested at 10% interest, becomes some ridiculous number by the time you are 93, perhaps even several hundred thousand dollars. It certainly would be nice to have a spare $200,000 by the time you are 93, assuming you make it that far.

The problem with all these articles is that they ignore what science has discovered about happiness. It really depends how you spend the $3 on your latte. If you spend $3 on a latte just so you can rush in and out of your local Starsucks, jump in your car, and spend your morning commute more caffeinated, then the articles are right. You’d be better off making coffee at home, putting it in a go cup, and investing that money for the long term.

However, if the way you enjoy your latte is by sitting at your local café where you know people, chatting with your table neighbor, reading the New York Times or Wall Street Journal or the local paper, and in general, relaxing and socializing, then this is a $3 very well spent indeed! What you done is to purchase a pleasant and social experience. If you do this daily, you will form a community of sorts, which always increases happiness.

Spending money in order to have satisfying experiences leaves you with memories of those experiences, which linger, and raise your happiness level.

Let me give another example. Someone close to me was living with a woman and he was struggling to find athletic activities he could share with his partner. She didn’t like hiking,  and would complain bitterly when they climbed hills.

Biking was even worse. She was a slow and unconfident rider. He was resentful at how slowly she rode, as it prevented him from enjoying a workout. He also constantly worried about her in traffic, as she had little experience riding, and often would dart out into traffic. She would get mad at him when he rode ahead of her. It was no fun for either of them.

This was a problem. What was the solution? I suggested to them that they spend some money to solve this. What did I suggest? I told him to buy a tandem bicycle. I had seen one on EBay, a recumbent tandem, for about $1800 shipped.

He bought it, and they started to ride together. She would ride on the back of the bike where all she had to do was peddle, and he would steer the bike from the front position. He got a great workout, even if she didn’t peddle very hard, and she was guaranteed to keep up.

It became a very enjoyable activity for them, riding almost every weekend, talking while they rode, and enjoying a pleasant and athletic activity together.

What did my friend purchase? It seemed like he purchased an expensive tandem bike. But in actuality, he purchased a “ticket to ride” or a ticket to a recurring pleasant experience for him and his wife.

Similar examples would be buying backpacking equipment, golf equipment, scuba gear, running shoes, and so on. But it should be something you use regularly. Buying a pair of skis and boots that you only use 3 days a year will not have a significant impact on your happiness level, in fact, in many of these cases it’s better to rent.

For instance, I enjoy scuba. But other than a mask and fins, I own no scuba equipment. The main reason is that I only scuba dive a few days each year, and thus the hassle of buying and owning and maintaining the equipment is not worth the small increment in happiness that my own gear would bring. If I dove frequently I would own my own equipment.

This brings me to another useful principle in shopping for happiness. I didn’t invent this one, my friend Dan came up with this principle. Dan taught me one simple principle for purchasing things. He told me that one should buy the very best in things that you interact with every day.

Again, if I scuba dive daily, I should buy the best equipment I can afford. Or if I am a bicyclist, and I ride daily or almost daily, then it makes sense to spend three, four, or even five thousand dollars on a great bike if I can afford that.

As a result of Dan’s law, I am writing this on my very sleek three-pound Dell XPS laptop computer, which I use almost daily for writing and web-surfing in cafes. At home I write on a three monitor workstation, with a 32 inch monitor flanked by two 24 inch monitors. This is a delicious luxury which I use for many hours each day. As an avid computer user, I think one of the best investments one can make is to buy large flat screen monitors for all of your computers. Especially if you are over 40, and developing presbyopia.

How does this apply to buying cars? Cars are tricky because there are at least three different issues that are relevant: status, function, and add-ons.

The most obvious issue is status. Unfortunately, this is the one that has the smallest and most fleeting impact on happiness. If you buy your car to impress others, they will be less impressed than you expect, even if you buy an outrageous car like a Ferrari or Lamborghini. Secondly, their being impressed will actually give you less happiness than you expected, and you will get used to the oooh’s and aaaah’s all too quickly. Finally, the hassles and owning and insuring and driving a supercar will soon outweigh the relatively small happiness that status brings you. So rule # 1 is don’t buy things for status.

(The same applies for kitchens, bathrooms, televisions, or any other product where you might be torn between shopping for status versus function. If you are buying granite countertops because you like chopping food on granite, that makes sense. If you are buying them so your friends will say “Ooooooh and Aaaaaah” when they come into your kitchen, then your happiness dividends will be much less than you expect. After all, your friends will habituate to your new kitchen, and will stop marveling at its wonders after a few visits. And long before that, you too will have grown used to the “new normal” and lost your initial joy in it.)

Going back to the example of a car, you should be thinking about function. Therein lies the rub. Most expensive cars are not very different in function from less expensive cars. All cars have four wheels, a motor, brakes, and a radio. Heresy! You are thinking. Of course expensive cars are different. But not very much. Once you get into the $20,000 to $30,000 range for a car, you are getting a fast, quiet, and comfortable car that takes you where you wish to go. Above this amount, you are primarily paying for status or for features you can’t use much. Case in point, many expensive cars go very fast. A Ferrari can do a top speed of 155 mile per hour. Cool, right? There’s only one catch. It’s hard to get up to this speed on your morning or evening commute. In fact, you are lucky if you even get up to 45 mph.

So buying features you can’t use won’t increase happiness much, and may even frustrate you. Trying driving a six-speed manual transmission Ferrari in bumper to bumper traffic on the freeway sometime, if you don’t believe me.

Remember I said there were three factors. The first was status which I hope that I have demonstrated has relatively little lasting impact on happiness. The second is function. Function matters somewhat, but what really matters is the basic functions of a car, the ability to drive at reasonable speeds with reasonable comfort and quiet. That’s why convertibles rarely bring people as much happiness as they expect.

Convertibles are really fun about one or two weeks a year. But much of the time it is too hot, too cold, or too rainy to benefit. And convertibles are not very pleasant cars with the tops rolled up. So it makes more sense to rent a convertible for a week or two a year, and enjoy it. Most mid-range cars function very well, and expensive luxury cars have only a few additional functions, and sometimes these functions are more trouble than they are worth. As an example, the BMW 5 series, which has something called an I-drive ™ which is like a joystick that controls the car’s functions. Many reviewers have complained that this feature is confusing and difficult to use, and requires constant reading of the car’s manual.

The third principle of shopping for happiness with cars is the add-on principle. Instead of buying an expensive car, and having no money left over, buy a cheaper car and invest the money you save by customizing and improving the car in ways that will actually increase your happiness while driving.

An example is two items that can have a big impact on happiness. The first is a GPS unit. If you are like my friend’s girlfriend, who is directionally impaired, and who constantly is getting lost and arriving late to every destination, then buying a GPS unit will have a huge impact on your happiness level while driving. She has told me numerous times that buying a GPS was the best thing she ever bought for her car. It eliminated a constant annoyance in her life, for an investment of only about $300. (Or buy a good mount for your smartphone and use that as a GPS navigator.)

The other investment in a car that makes sense is a good sound system for your car. Now if you only drive 5 minutes a day, skip this paragraph. But if you are like most Americans, and you commute a significant distance each day, then it makes good sense to spend some money on adding a great sound system to your car, if it doesn’t have one already.

You will definitely want a way to play all of your favorite music. It doesn’t matter whether that is a way to plug in your Ipod, a CD changer, or some other device. You may also want to consider a satellite radio unit, especially if you like commercial free radio and you like talk radio without commercials. (No one has ever demonstrated that commercials add to happiness levels.) So for the mere $15 a month that it costs, satellite radio may be an excellent investment in happiness.

Once again, neither a GPS nor a satellite radio is very expensive, and they can be just as easily installed in a $15,000 car as a $100,000 car.

I practiced this with older cars for many years. When my Nissan Maxima passed its 15th year, I decided to give it a birthday party, and to improve the car. I replaced the sound system, put new shocks in the front, and added an anti-sway bar to improve its cornering ability. This greatly improved both the driving quality and the experience of being inside the car, and was much cheaper than buying a new car.

In a similar way, you could utilize the add-on principle for a house. Instead of buying a new house, you might focus on improving several areas of your current house, focusing on function rather than status.

I was speaking with a client recently, who loves cooking. She was contemplating a kitchen remodel. She was talking about granite countertops.

I asked her, “Can you cut food on granite?”

“No, of course not,” she said.

“Can you prepare food on granite?” I asked.

“You can,” she said, “but it’s not a good idea. The food can stain the granite.”

“How is a granite countertop going to make your cooking experience more enjoyable? “ I asked.

She thought about it for a moment, and then said quietly, “Well, it probably won’t make it more fun, but it will look nice.”

So I asked her how much the granite countertop would cost. She told me $12,000. I asked her if her budget was unlimited. She said no. Then I said, “Are there any functional items that would make your life easier as a cook? Are there any things you would rather spend your $12,000 on?”

She thought about it, and then she mentioned a special European dishwasher that had two drawers, so that you never had to unload it. And a special type of oven that was costly but worked better.

In the end, she decided to keep her tile countertops, and instead spent the money on high- end incredible appliances that she uses every day.

This was a great example of shopping for happiness. She spent her money on things that would bring her direct joy every day. In general, if you want to spend money on making your kitchen “look impressive”, you’d be better off spending the money on a beautiful painting, or on functional items that you can enjoy every day. Very few people spend time sitting in their kitchen, simply staring at and admiring the granite counters!

Let’s talk about more shopping decisions, and other ways to shop for happiness.

Travel is a great example where shopping for happiness principles are useful. First of all, travel in general enhances happiness. This is because even trips that aren’t that great tend to improve in memory, especially as we tell and retell the stories. Some of the biggest disasters on trips end up making the most memorable stories.

I’m reminded of an infamous bus trip I took while in graduate school, on a hippy bus line from Seattle to Baja Mexico. My then girlfriend and I decided it would be a lark to spend three weeks traveling around Baja on this hippie bus, and off we went. Many disasters ensued, including a middle of the night near head-on crash with another bus which took off the side mirrors on both buses, a trailered boat breaking an axle, falling off the bus, and taking a short and tragic trip across the chaparral, ending up in pieces, multiple encounters with Mexicans who were baffled by this group of Americans, getting off the bus when it became apparent that it was dangerous to stay on the bus, hiking to a deserted beach in the desert, and waking up in the morning to a beautiful experience of homemade fruit salad and skinny dipping, which resulted in every local bee attacking for hours, hiking out from the beach in a hurry as a result, and getting lost in the desert when I proudly said I knew exactly where we were, waking up in the middle of the night in a cheap hotel room only to discover 6 inch roaches trying to drag our food bags away, and then sleeping fully dressed, with blindfolds and the lights on for the rest of a very fearful night!

And these are just the highlights!

This is the stuff of legend, and I have to admit it was one of the best trips of my life. It also brought us closer because we had to cope with all of these disasters.

There are principles of shopping for happiness in travel which many people ignore. For instance, many people will pay more money to upgrade to business or first class when flying. This is generally not a good investment in happiness. (Unless work pays for it, then why not?)

(I should add at this point that these comments apply to people who do not have unlimited financial resources. If you are a Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, you have a completely different set of problems in terms of shopping for happiness, which I will talk about later in a section called Shopping for Happiness Tips for the Billionaire.)

This is not to say that business class and first class are not pleasant experiences. In comparison to coach, they are. The reason why they do not deliver a proportionately higher level of happiness, relative to their cost, is that most airline rides are short. If you are flying 2 to 5 hours, the difference is not very significant. It’s especially less significant if you tend to nap on cross country flights. If I close my eyes, and nap for half of my cross country flight, then I am looking at a 2.5 hour experience in First Class, for a cost of an extra thousand or more dollars. Spending $500 an hour to have a slightly wider seat, better food, and a few free drinks seems like a bad investment in happiness.

The same principle applies to hotels. Many people like to stay in four of five star class hotels, probably because they like the status of doing so. In general this is not a wise investment of travel money, especially if you tend not to spend a lot of time in your hotel room.

If you mainly use the hotel to sleep, then a five star hotel offers very little that a two star hotel does not. As long as the bed is comfortable, and the room is quiet at night, nothing else really matters. A big TV is not important, as you can watch TV at home. A gorgeous swimming pool is also not so important, as you can use the five star hotel’s swimming pool even if you are staying across the street in the two star hotel. Or you can go to the beach, which is free.

There is one exception, though, which is if you plan on never leaving your hotel during your stay. In that case it may make sense to pay more for a luxurious hotel room, as you will get to experience that luxury 24/7. This may have a small impact on increasing your happiness level.

The better way to spend money on travel is to use the happiness research which tells us that status items do not bring much happiness, and that experiences are what we remember fondly. An example of this would be to skip the five star hotel in Hawaii which costs $300 or $500 a night, and to instead stay at the $150 three star hotel. Then invest the difference in buying great experiences.

One day you might spend $200 on renting a pair of jet skis, and have a very exhilarating experience zooming around the coast. Another day you could spend that $200 taking surfing lessons, and renting surfboards. Whether you surf successfully or not, you will have a memorable experience. The next night you treat yourselves to a dinner in the best restaurant in Honolulu, where you run into Barack Obama, who is having dinner with his family at the next table. (True story from 2006.)

Think about travel stories you have told or listened to. Was it very memorable that the hotel room was large or luxurious? No. What was memorable is when you left the hotel and had exciting experiences.

To be continued…

Copyright 2006-2017 The Psychology Lounge/TPL Productions/Andrew Gottlieb, Ph.D.

 Shopping for Happiness ™ is a trademarked term. Trademark 2006, Andrew Gottlieb.