What's up guys, welcome back to Voice Over Work, an audiobook sampler, where do you listen? Today is Thursday the 15th of February 2024, in his book The Anxiety Cure, Nick Trenton challenges the conventional wisdom that money can't buy happiness. The Anxiety Cure is a simple guide to making your every waking moment a calm one. It's 100 actions that will scientifically reduce your anxiety, and also increase your happiness. Each idea has true science behind it, and includes a plan for implementing it into your daily life. This isn't a blog post with abstract ideas, this is a book of action and implementation. Check out Nick Trenton's books on Amazon and new audiobook platform, or at bit.ly slash Nick Trenton. Conventional wisdom tells us money can’t buy happiness.

But there are some more surprising findings to be explored, and one of them is that spending money can, in some ways, make you feel better. University of Cambridge psychologist Sandra Matz and her research team did an in-depth analysis of six months’ worth of transactions for 625 customers at a UK bank—that was over seventy-six thousand bank transactions. They grouped the transactions into fifty-nine different categories—for example, spending at garden centers, dentists, or coffee shops. Each of the categories was scored according to traits on the Big Five personality scale. As an example, charity spends might be highly associated with the traits of conscientiousness and agreeableness, and spending at nightclubs would correlate with extroversion. All 625 customers were given personality tests and asked separately to rank their satisfaction with life. Matz and her colleagues crunched the data and tried to see how well matched the spending habits were with the personalities of the people. For example, they noticed whether a person who measured as extroverted tended to spend on activities or items that aligned with that extroversion or not.

Generally, they found that when people spend money according to their personalities, they reported better emotional responses and overall happiness afterward. But what about other research that has found weak links—or no link at all—between consumption and happiness? In the 2016 paper, Matz concludes that “psychological fit” is the mediating variable. The research found that the better the fit between the product bought and the personality, the greater the happiness effect, and that this effect was more significant than a person’s overall income or how much they spent. So, money can’t buy happiness—but buying things that align with your personality can...and this takes money! Matz and colleagues did a follow-up study to confirm these findings. They asked different people to spend ten dollars, either at a bookstore or at a bar. They found that for introverts, spending at a bookstore increased their happiness, and for extroverts, spending at a bar increased theirs.

However, when the spend was reversed, there was no increase in happiness. “Finding the right products to maintain and enhance one’s preferred lifestyle could turn out to be as important to well-being as finding the right job, the right neighborhood, or even the right friends and partners,” says Matz. It turns out money does buy happiness—but it’s not the absolute amount you have but rather how you spend it that matters. It’s about using money in a strategic, targeted, and deliberate way. Elizabeth Dunn claimed in her 2011 study on the subject that “most people don’t know the basic scientific facts about happiness—about what brings it and what sustains it—and so they don’t know how to use their money to acquire it." Her conclusion: if money isn’t making you happy, then you’re not spending it right! Though Most of Us tend to shop by looking for the lowest price, Dunn claims we need to rethink this and consider the happiness we incur from the spend of each dollar. Her advice falls along key insights: 1. Spend money on experiences and not things (unless, of course, the thing enables the experience!).

2. Spend money to benefit others rather than yourself (yes, this really will make you happier). 3. Spend money on small things rather than big things (the happiness, it would appear, is equivalent). 4. Forget about spending money on extended warranties or complicated insurance—they won’t make you the slightest bit happier! 5. If in doubt, delay spending or postpone consumption—you may decide in time that you don’t really want something after all. 6. Avoid comparison shopping since it creates false urgencies and distorts your perception of value. 7. Focus ultimately on other people’s happiness rather than your own. Again, it would appear that our assumptions about how money and happiness relate are not often grounded in the reality of what makes us happy day to day. People may believe that owning a coveted gadget or expensive item may be the thing that makes them feel better despite consistent evidence that it is sharing and social participation that has the most reliable effects on our happiness.

A 2013 study found that even experiences can fail to provide happiness if they’re solitary—it’s when we include others that we seem to derive the most satisfaction out of an event or activity. Imagine a scenario where Emily, a participant in the study mentioned, decides to go on a hiking trip to a beautiful scenic location. She plans to experience the serene natural surroundings and unwind from the stresses of daily life. In the beginning, Emily embarks on the hike alone, taking in the picturesque views and enjoying the tranquility. While the experience itself is pleasant, she notices a subtle feeling of something missing, a lack of true fulfillment. Curious about the findings of the study, Emily decides to invite her close friends Sarah and John for a hiking adventure the following weekend. Together, they embark on the same hiking trail, sharing laughter, conversations, and the awe-inspiring scenery. As they make memories and experience the beauty of nature as a group, Emily notices a significant shift in her emotional state.

The sense of satisfaction and happiness she derives from the activity is significantly heightened compared to her solitary hike. The collective experience enhances the enjoyment, deepens the connection with her friends, and creates a sense of shared fulfillment. Through this real-life example, we can see how the study's findings hold true. While solitary experiences may provide some level of happiness, the inclusion of others amplifies the satisfaction derived from an event or activity. In this case, the shared experience of hiking with friends enriches the moment, highlighting the importance of social connections and meaningful interactions in enhancing overall happiness and fulfillment. Recalling what we’ve already learned about the power of memory and anticipation and how important it is to cultivate happiness as a social and contextual phenomenon, this makes sense. Experiences can be talked about later or made into shared memories. On your deathbed, you’re less likely to talk about a fancy watch you once bought than you are to fondly recall adventures, holidays, or fun experiences with loved ones.

If we consider, then, what the best spend of any sum of money is, we can probably derive the most happiness by focusing on what that money can help us do and with whom. Granted, there are gray areas. Splashing out on an expensive treat may create no extra happiness for us but incredible amounts of joy when we gift it to someone else. A TV may just be a TV for one person, but for another, it’s a powerful tool that enables countless cozy nights shared with a loved one as they watch movies together (maybe sad ones?!). This is why Sandra Matz’s study came to the conclusion it did—there are no fixed rules for what counts as a “possession” and what counts as an “experience”—instead, it comes down to the degree of alignment between the money spent and what that individual values most in life. Remembering the PERMA model, we can see that anything that cultivates our feelings of achievement, meaning, or relationship to others will increase our well-being. So, buying a new sofa may not make you as happy as investing in a challenging but rewarding bike ride with your family, the people who matter most in your world. Okay, so the lesson is to spend wisely and spend in accordance with your personality and values.

Opt for (preferably shared) experiences if you want the most happiness bang for your buck. Finally, if you really want to make yourself happy, don’t spend money on yourself at all. In another 2008 study by Dunn and colleague Richard Norton, participants were given twenty dollars to spend on either themselves or on others, and then they checked in with them afterward to see how they were feeling. Even though the amount spent was the same, participants reported, on average, more happiness when they spent on others than when they spent on themselves. Generosity, it seems, also benefits the giver—and the effects have been repeated in other studies done all over the world. Similar studies have tried to tease apart just exactly what mode of giving leads to the most happiness, and they find time and again that, dollar for dollar, “pro-social spending” has the highest returns happiness-wise. And there could be a neural basis for it all. A University of Zurich study led by Soyoung Q.

Park informed fifty participants that they would receive money in four weeks, before being split into two groups—one deciding to spend on themselves and the second to spend on others. Then, the participants were asked to perform a decision-making task while their brain activity was analyzed. The people who committed to spending on others actually showed differences in brain function, with more activity in areas associated with both generosity and happiness. Importantly, merely the thought of being generous had this effect. There are some caveats, though. Some studies have shown that the happy feelings are exaggerated when the recipient is closer to you, which makes evolutionary sense. But it may also be down to the fact that when people are closer to home, we can see the effect that our generosity has on them, which turns out to be an important factor. Lara Ankin, who worked extensively with both Dunn and Norton, conducted research that found that people were happiest with their charitable donations when they could see and appreciate the effects they had.

There’s One More interesting finding worth considering in the question of money and happiness. A 2002 study by Kasser and Sheldon discovered that the people who were happiest around the Christmas season were those who also put greater emphasis on the religious, traditional, and family aspects of the holiday and less on the consumption aspects. It would seem that people who value other things above money tend to have happier lives in general. Let’s put it all together: We cannot hope for material consumption and money to make us happier as people (despite everything the marketers would have us believe). On the other hand, money is a tool and, used correctly, can play a big role in helping us engage in the things that do make us happy—being with others, expressing ourselves, contributing to what matters, and living a life of meaning and purpose. This has been the Anxiety Cure 37 Science-Based 5-Minute Methods to Beat Back the Blues, Stay Positive and Finally Relax, Written by Nick Trenton, Narrated by Russell Newton Copyright 2023 by Nick Trenton Production Copyright by Nick Trenton Please be sure to visit Amazon.com or Audible.com for more information on this book and the author. Show notes and further information can be found at RussellEricNewton.com. With an eclectic collection of insights, knowledge, and trivia from some of the newest audiobooks on the market, this has been the Voice Over Work podcast brought to you by Newton Media Group, a family of creative services.