Dare to Act Differently and Be Happier
What seems the safe option is not necessarily the best one in challenging times.
Or is it? In 1932, when economic circumstances were far scarier than anything we face today—unemployment had soared to 23.6 percent and economic growth was negative 12.9 percent—Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was running for president that year, gave a speech at Oglethorpe University, in Atlanta, in which he proposedexperimenting and risk-taking as a response to trouble. “It is common sense to take a method and try it,” he told the students. “If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.” He won, and he did try something—launching the New Deal, which permanently changed the role of the federal government in American life.
Just as the flight to safety has a human dimension beyond financial advice, Roosevelt’s exhortation to adopt an experimental mindset holds a daring bit of advice for all of us—one that applies not just to our economic choices but to our life more generally. Are you in a period of particular personal turbulence, feeling like a cork tossed about in currents beyond your control? Is your well-being showing red numbers as the American economy was in 1932? Consider what FDR famously went on to say at his inauguration in 1933: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Forget flying to safety in your old routines and familiar habits. Instead, go experiment with your happiness.
Read: The United States of fear
So what might a happiness experiment be? In effect, the academic literature that I cite almost every week in this column is loaded with examples. Such studies are behavioral interventions that, in their scientific methodology, are designed to mimic the sort of clinical trials used in testing new drugs; these tests are considered the gold standard for establishing causality.
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Take, for example, a 2022 experiment about gratitude that was published in the journal Affective Science. College students recruited to this psychological study were randomly given one of four assignments: write a letter expressing gratitude to someone (without sending it), text someone a gratitude message, share a post about gratitude on social media, or make a list of ordinary daily activities. (In this experiment, the last group is the control, meaning no gratitude intervention is involved.) All three of the gratitude-sharing methods led to higher feelings of life satisfaction for the assigned participants compared with those in the control group.
This finding offers information that should be extremely useful for ordinary life: If you want to get happier, simply adopt a protocol of regularly thinking about someone for whom you feel grateful and telling them so. Maybe so, but we need to bear in mind an important proviso: This is an excellent study, but there are no absolute guarantees that you will see the same effect in your life—because either you or your benefactor for whom you’re grateful might be an outlier or have some special circumstance that creates an exception. In fact, no experiment, however perfectly designed, can guarantee a constant result.
Still, that 2022 paper is good evidence that this approach to gratitude is worth trying in your own, private experiment. You might not think of it in these terms, but you probably already conduct experiments in many areas of your life. For example, if all of your friends are following a particular TV show and rave about it, you are unlikely to say to yourself, My tastes might be different, so I’m not going to bother watching it. You’ll probably try it yourself to see. After watching an episode, you’ll see how you feel—or, to put it in more formal language, you will gauge your well-being level to see if the intervention had a positive effect. If you think it has, you keep watching; if not, you don’t.
This isn’t a perfect method—there’s no control group, and you are a sample of one!—but if you reconceive this process as your own experimental practice, it can yield many new ideas and habits for your life. This mindset can be really productive, especially when times are rough and you need to get out of a rut.
When measuring happiness, researchers have generally found the strongest positive results after focusing their experiments in a few specific areas. One 2023 literature review, in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, looked at 57 recent happiness studies and found that the most common happiness interventions were in the areas of gratitude, social interaction, mindfulness, exercise, and exposure to nature. (One job of such a systematic review is to assess the quality of available research; in this case, the study found that the gratitude experiment I cited above was among the most flawlessly executed.) An important common feature of the interventions involved in these studies is that they aim to disrupt the behavioral routines and habits that reduce people’s well-being. I mention this trait because it’s exactly why you might need the experimental mindset in your life.
If you feel you could do with a happiness boost, and are willing to do something different, try out these protocols for each of Nature Human Behaviour’s five buckets:
Week one: gratitude
Each day for a week, start your morning by thinking for five minutes about someone who has improved your life. If that person is no longer alive, write them a note and keep it for yourself. If the individual is still living, send them a quick text or email.
Week two: social interaction
Each day when you are in public, make a point of speaking in a friendly way with a stranger for just a few minutes. This could be the person sitting next to you on the bus or subway, or it might be someone walking their dog in your neighborhood.
Week three: mindfulness
For 10 minutes first thing in the morning, put away your phone, sit quietly in a comfortable place, and simply pay attention to what is happening around you. Make a nonjudgmental note of what you see and what you happen to hear, and be aware of your other sensations, such as sunlight, temperature, and odors.
Week four: exercise
Try to fit in a workout for at least half an hour each morning. If you haven’t done so in a long time—or ever—get up early every day and just walk outside for an hour, or run if you like. Whatever the activity, do it without a device so you are fully present in the experience.
Week five: nature
Find a green space in your environment, and visit it each day for half an hour, weather permitting. If doing so is possible, sit on the grass and touch it with your hands.
To get the full benefit of making each activity your own personal experiment, write down the results. Every day, you should track a few metrics by rating variables such as positive and negative mood levels, overall life satisfaction, and your sense of connectedness with others. When each week’s experiment is complete, keep collecting your data to see whether the positive effects you recorded during the test endure or evaporate. If you follow this approach, I can virtually guarantee that you will end up with fewer negative habits and more positive ones. The ultimate success of your home-laboratory testing will be a measurable rise in your well-being.
Especially when chaos strikes, pursuing this experimental philosophy will feel neither comfortable nor natural at first. This is what Roosevelt told his young audience about that challenge in his 1932 commencement address:
Probably few will disagree that the goal is desirable. Yet many, of faint heart, fearful of change, sitting tightly on the roof-tops in the flood, will sternly resist striking out for it, lest they fail to attain it. Even among those who are ready to attempt the journey there will be violent differences of opinion as to how it should be made.
Experimenting will get easier as you experience greater success and have fun doing it. Furthermore, your experiments will spark curiosity and imitation in others, as they see you changing yourself for the better, even in a difficult outside world. They might even try it themselves—in which case your own progress will be a gift to others. As FDR concluded, “May every one of us be granted the courage, the faith and the vision to give the best that is in
