Book notes reflect a specific time in the reader’s life. If you enjoy my notes and highlights, I highly recommend you buy the original book as it’s likely that there’ll be parts for you to discover that I didn’t find important.

Read my notes below. Or buy Breathe on Amazon.

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How do we decide how we will feel about things that are going to happen in the future? The answer is that we tend to imagine how we would feel if those things happened now, and then we make some allowance for the fact that now and later are not exactly the same thing.

Daniel Gilbert in Stumbling on Happiness

There is no formula to predict what makes us happy. Talking to others who have what we want comes surprisingly close.

Despite the pop-science name and cover this book is not a self-help book. Well, it can be. But I lump it in the same category with Daniel Kahneman’s brilliant Thinking Fast and Slow. Both are elemental reading for anyone with the curiosity to understand how the human brain works.

Here are my notes and highlights on Stumbling on Happiness

“Forestalling pleasure is an inventive technique for getting double the juice from half the fruit.”

“Being effective–changing things, influencing things, making things happen–is one of the fundamental needs with which human brains seem to be naturally endowed, and much of our behavior from infancy onward is simply an expression of this penchant for control.”

Losing the ability to control things will make us unhappy, helpless, hopeless and depressed.

“gaining control can have a positive impact on one’s health and well-being, but losing control can be worse than never having had any at all.”

“emotional happiness is an experience, it can only be approximately defined by its antecedents and by its relation to other experiences.”

“People want to be happy, and all the other things they want are typically meant to be means to that end.”

“once we have an experience, we cannot simply set it aside and see the world as we would have seen it had the experience never happened.”

“people can be wrong in the present when they say they were wrong in the past.”

“all claims of happiness are claims from someone’s point of view”

“physiological arousal can be interpreted in a variety of ways, and our interpretation of our arousal depends on what we believe caused it.”
The men who came across with attractive woman on the shaking bridge mistakenly confused their fear with sexual arousal.

“the attentive person’s honest, real-time report is an imperfect approximation of her subjective experience”

“information acquired after an event alters memory of the event”

“the act of remembering involves ‘filling in’ details that were not actually stored”
Brain will use shortcuts to (incorrectly) fill in missing details based on the context of the experience.

Things and event are important only because of the feelings they produce. That’s all there is.

“Perceptions are portraits, not photographs”

“our brains are talented forgers, weaving a tapestry of memory and perception whose detail is so compelling that its inauthenticity is rarely detected.”

“the general inability to think about absences is a potent source of error in everyday life.”

“when we are selecting, we consider the positive attributes of our alternatives, and when we are rejecting, we consider the negative attributes.”

“we fail to consider how much imagination fills in, but we also fail to consider how much it leaves out.”

“only the nondescribers had drastically overestimated the impact that the win or the loss would have on them.”
They didn’t describe the mix of happy and sad events that would surround each outcome. The describers made more accurate predictions of their future happiness as they were forced to think event surrounding the main event.

Focusing only on the main event “is one of the reasons why we so often mispredict our emotional responses to future events.”
When we think something would make us happy we often only focus on the upsides. Making more money will make me happy. But we forget that making more money probably means we have to work more, which means we have less time for other things we enjoy. And missing on things we enjoy would make us unhappy.

“We think that Californians are happier than Ohioans because we imagine California with so few details”

Looking something in the horizon is blurry. Details come alive the closer it gets. This is true when thinking something far into the future.

Blurry details when agreeing to babysit far in advance vs the full details right now.

“when people are asked how realistic they think these mental images of the near and far future are, they claim that the smooth purée of next year is every bit as realistic as the lumpy stew of tomorrow.”

“we tend to accept the brain’s products uncritically and expect the future to unfold with the details–and with only the details–that the brain has imagined.”
We are not aware of the automatic filling in and leaving out that the brain does.

“people misremember their own pasts by recalling that they once thought, did and said what they now think, do and say.”

“most of us have a tough time imagining a tomorrow that is terribly different from today, and we find it particularly difficult to imagine that we will ever think, want or feel differently than we do now.”

“Curiosity is a powerful urge, but when you aren’t smack-dab in the middle of feeling it, it’s hard to imagine just how far and fast it can drive you.”

“The emotional experience that results from a flow of information that originates in the world is called feeling; the emotional experience that results from a flow of information that originates in memory is called prefeeling”

“Prefeeling allowed nonthinkers to predict their future satisfaction more accurately than thinkers did.”
Go with the gut instead of deep thinking.

“The brain considers the perception of reality to be its first and foremost duty, thus your request to borrow the visual cortex for a moment is expressly and summarily denied.”
We need space for creativity and imagination. Time away from present stimulus.

“difficult to imagine lust when we are feeling disgust, affection when we are feeling anger, or hunger when we are feeling full.”

“We cannot feel good about an imaginary future when we are busy feeling bad about an actual present. But rather than recognizing that this is the inevitable result of the Reality First policy, we mistakenly assume that the future event is the cause of the unhappiness we feel when we think about it.”

“when depressed people think about future events, they cannot imagine liking them very much.”

“time and variety are two ways to avoid habituation, and if you have one, then you don’t need the other.”
If you train once a week you can probably do the same workout each time without getting bored.
If you train four days a week you probably want variety.

“we mistakenly treat sequential alternatives as though they were simultaneous alternatives. This is a mistake because sequential alternatives already have time on their side, hence variety makes them less pleasurable rather than more.”

“we are all too easily fooled by such side-by-side comparisons, which is why retailers work so hard to ensure that we make them.”
Instead of comparing the new items side by side, ask if either is that much better than your current one.

The items next to the crisps affected how much they thought they would enjoy the crisps. But once eating the crisps it made no difference to the actual enjoyment.

“condemning Thomas Jefferson for keeping slaves or Sigmund Freud for patronizing women is a bit like arresting someone today for having driven without a seat belt in 1923.”

“we fail to recognize that our future selves won’t see the world the way we see it now.”

“rats and pigeons may respond to stimuli as they are presented in the world, people respond to stimuli as they are represented in the mind.”

“Research shows that context, frequency and recency” is the key to which meaning we infer on a particular occasion.

“As soon as our potential experience becomes our actual experience–as soon as we have a stake in its goodness–our brains get busy looking for ways to think about the experience that will allow us to appreciate it.”

We have a physical and psychological immune systems.

“A healthy psychological immune system strikes a balance that allows us to feel good enough to cope with our situation but bad enough to do something about it”

We unconsciously cook the facts about ourselves and our experiences and consciously consume them to produce a conclusion in our favour. “When facts challenge our favoured conclusion, we scrutinize them more carefully and subject them to more rigorous analysis.”

We tend to surround ourselves with people who confirm out favoured conclusions. We manipulate the questions to get the answers we want.
Antidote: hire an honest and blunt outsider.

“the brain and the eye may have a contractual relationship in which the brain has agreed to believe what the eye sees, but in return the eye has agreed to look for what the brain wants.”

People “regret not having done things much more than they regret things they did”…”psychological immune system has a more difficult time manufacturing positive and credible views of inactions than of actions.”…”psychological immune systems can rationalize an excess of courage more easily than an excess of cowardice, we hedge our bets when we should blunder forward.”

“Intense suffering triggers the very processes that eradicate it, while mild suffering does not, and this counterintuitive fact can make it difficult for us to predict our emotional futures.”
Military defence will activate for a major assault and stop the attacker. But small group working under the radar can cause bigger havoc. This makes us mispredict our emotional response to misfortunes of different sizes.

“inescapable circumstances trigger the psychological defences that enable us to achieve positive views of those circumstances, but we do not anticipate that this will happen”
We are more content with an irreversible decision than the one we have the option to change. Even when the decision is the same.

“Once we explain an event, we can fold it up like freshly washed laundry, put it away in memory’s drawer, and move on to the next one”
Instead of admitting that some event are random we try to find an explanation. Conspiracy theories…

“clarity and certainty had been shown to diminish happiness”.
We choose certainty, even when we know that gaining it would make us less happy.

Great authors are ‘capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’, the rest of us are ‘incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge’. – Poet John Keats

“we tend to remember the best of times and the worst of times instead of the most likely of times”

“We remember feeling as we believe we must have felt.”

“wealth increases human happiness when it lifts people out of abject poverty and into the middle class but that it does little to increase happiness thereafter.”
If we earn middle class income it makes sense to use “extra” money to lift poorer people closer to middle class than to spend it on ourselves.

“Once we’ve eaten our fill of pancakes, more pancakes are not rewarding, hence we stop trying to procure and consume them. But not so, it seems, with money.”

“The beggar, who suns himself by the side of the motorway, possesses that security which kings are fighting for.” – Adam Smith

“the fundamental needs of a vibrant economy and the fundamental needs of a happy individual are not necessarily the same.”

“Economies thrive when individuals strive, but because individuals will only strive for their own happiness, it is essential that they mistakenly believe that producing and consuming are routes to personal well-being.”

“when people are deprived of the information that imagination requires and are thus forced to use others as surrogates, they make remarkably accurate predictions about their future feelings”

“we tend to overestimate our uniqueness is that we tend to overestimate everyone’s uniqueness–that is, we tend to think of people as more different from one another than they actually are.”

“It doesn’t always make sense to heed what people tell us when they communicate their beliefs about happiness, but it does make sense to observe how happy they are in different circumstances.”

“we can usually estimate–at least roughly–the probability that a choice will give us what we desire. The problem is that we cannot easily estimate how we’ll feel when we get it.”

“The simple, lawful relationships that bind numbers to numbers and words to words do not bind objective events to emotional experiences.”