Something old, something new

Welcome back to Techno Sapiens! I’m Jacqueline Nesi, a psychology professor and mom of two young kids whose favorite “novel experiences” involve a variety of snacks.

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5 min read

Happy Monday, sapiens! How was your weekend? My husband and I snuck away from our pasta-flinging, somersaulting, dirt-collecting barbarians angel children, and did something a little different. We celebrated our anniversary with a “Candlelight Concert”1: a small theater, hundreds of candles, and a string quartet playing fun arrangements of Beatles songs.

It was the best.

I, a person who is very normal and definitely not a nerdy psychologist, spent a good portion of the concert thinking about the research on novel experiences (in addition, of course, to how much I love my husband). We rarely do this sort of thing, and I found myself reflecting on how great it can be to do something new.

As humans, we tend to fall into a pattern of hedonic adaptation, where we quickly adapt to positive experiences and return to a certain “set point” of happiness. One of the best ways to counteract this tendency? Injecting novel experiences into our everyday lives. One study, for example, finds that simply telling people to treat their weekend “like a vacation” versus “like a regular weekend” results in better moods and greater satisfaction.

Adding variety can go a long way toward increasing happiness: whether that’s visiting a new place, taking the scenic route on a familiar drive, or, of course, sitting in a candlelit room, clapping along with strangers to a viola version of Hey Jude.

So, in the spirit of novelty, today we’ve got a grab bag of news and research from the worlds of parenting and tech.2 Let’s dive in (and, hopefully, feel a little bit happier in the process).

New research: Is self-care actually other-care?

We hear a lot about the benefits of self-care: treating ourselves to a favorite meal, taking time out of the day to relax, or even heading to the spa for a massage. But what if these efforts are misplaced? A new study compares the benefits of acts of “self-kindness” to a different type of kindness: one directed toward others.

Participants were asked to spend two weeks performing three “acts of kindness” per week. The “self-kindness” group was randomly assigned to do those