Bad ending ruined it all 😤 — Peak-end rule
A holiday that never happened, are you happy, and experiencing life more.
Hi there 👋 This is the 9th edition of “10x your mind”. Wow, the time flew by! We’re coming to an end to the ten weeks of running this newsletter. I hope you learned more about human behavior than before. My hope is that you are consciously and unconsciously already applying the learnings day-to-day and making smarter decisions 🙌.
Although the ten weeks are coming to end, I plan to continue writing this newsletter. I’m loving your responses and feedback, especially the ones where you can relate my stories to your life ❤️. I’m looking forward to continuing this journey with you and making more discoveries and new connections.
This week’s mental mistake is about the screw-up we do while saving memories. It’s called the peak-end rule. We briefly touched upon it last week. More on it this time.
Happy reading 📕
During my graduation years, my friends and I used to ride on Kinetic Hondas to college. If you don’t know, Kinetic Honda was like a Vespa, an old-style motorbike.
The rides were fun except during winters 🥶. The temperature would drop to 3-5 degrees Celcius. What’s worse, our college tests were held early mornings during peak winters.
By the time we'd reach college, our fingers felt numb. Writing with numb fingers was no fun. A friend once commented that she’d rather ride faster and cut down the ride time.
That got me thinking. Riding faster meant bearing chillier wind. What’d I choose — ❶ Experiencing super chilly wind for less time or ❷ Experiencing bearable chill for more time?
The first option sounded logical. Get over and done with it asap.
I tried going faster. I felt worse. It didn’t feel right.
How come I prefer a long bad time over a short one 🤔?
This puzzled me for years until I learned about the peak-end rule.
Before we dive into this rule, let me tell you about the two selves that we always live with. One is our experiencing self. It’s the current self, experiencing each moment in life.
The other is our remembering self. It’s the memory in charge. It chooses what to save in memory and what to discard. To be efficient, it doesn’t save the entire experience.
It saves just these two things:
Peak—the extreme part of the experience (whether pain or pleasure).
End—the last bit of the experience (how you felt at the end).
It tends to discard the duration.
e.g, After watching a movie, what you remember most are the parts that made you laugh or cry or jump from your seat. You’d also remember the climax. Whether the movie lasted 80 mins or 100 doesn’t matter much.
We are guilty of caring more about our remembering self than our experiencing self. Most of the decisions we make are based on the likes and dislikes of our remembering self.
The mental mistake of recalling past events based on extreme moments and ending, while ignoring the duration, is called the peak-end rule.
The peak-end rule helped me understand the duration-neglect during my college rides. It didn’t matter that I felt cold for less time. What mattered was the peak experience (I felt super chilly vs chilly) and the ending (similar in both rides).
The fact that the ‘ride was shorter’ was a detail that the remembering self ignored and the experiencing self disliked.
To use the peak-end rule to your advantage, give your experiences a strong finish whenever possible. e.g., I like to run the last 0.5k faster to finish a long run. The painful experience of the long run is shadowed by ending the run on a high note.
A holiday that never happened
Imagine you’re given an option to enjoy a great holiday with your loved ones for a week. There’s a catch. After the holiday, your memory of it will be erased. You won’t remember a thing. Your holiday won’t even be captured on social media 😛.
How do you feel about taking that holiday now?
People get turned off by the idea of not enjoying those moments for the rest of their lives. There’s nothing in it for our remembering self. But the truth is that our experiencing self would still be enjoying 💯.
We need to treat the present moment preciously even if it’s not worthy of remembering.
In the experience vs memory game, we are guilty of supporting team memory.
While holidaying in Krabi, we visited many beautiful islands. One of them was great for snorkeling. Another had a beautiful double beach where you could swim to your heart’s delight. Another one was perfect for kayaking.
There was one island whose name kept popping up but we couldn’t figure out why people visit it. No one was allowed to swim there. There were no water sports.
Eventually, we realized that it’s insanely popular for Instagram clicks! You take a tiring boat trip, click a picture, upload it on your social media, and head back.
Memories are important. I get it. But that picture you click should be a genuine moment. Not an empty memory.
If there’s no story behind it, it’s no picture.
It’s time we do justice to our experiencing self, not just live life by the whims and fancies of our remembering self.
Are you happy?
If I ask you, “Are you happy?”, you think about how you’re feeling now. Your answer can vary depending on how your day is going.
Let’s say you gave a presentation at work. Your boss objected multiple times during the presentation. In the end, she pointed out that it needs more work.
Your remembering self saves the peaks (multiple objections) and the ending (boss not happy).
Conclusion: I’m not having a great day.
If you have another tiny argument with a colleague about something, this feeling can turn into, My work life sucks. That can easily turn into, I’m not happy.
Although your boss objected multiple times, she didn’t object for a major part. Although you had an argument with a colleague today, you enjoy working with him every day. But these details are wiped out while saving memories.
The remembering self is prone to errors. It’s easy to go wrong while saving memories because of the peak-end rule.
Couples getting separated believe that they were never happy together. They remember just the fights and the bad ending.
If memories are flawed, how do you know if you’re truly happy?
How do you know if you were happy the past month?
As the remembering self goofs up so many times, we need to include the experiencing self in the discussion.
Psychologist Daniel Kahneman proposed a solution on these lines.
You were happy the last month if:
You spent most of your time doing things that you’d rather continue than stop.
You spent very less time doing things that you wanted to escape.
You spent very less time doing things that were neutral, i.e you don’t care either way.
The last one is important because life is too short to be wasting time doing things that you don’t care about.
You can apply this to both physical and mental happiness.
Were you physically happy the last month? Ask yourself those three questions 👆.
Were you mentally happy the last month? Ask yourself those three questions 👆.
Another big measure of happiness is when you’re in the flow state, as defined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. This is a time of 💯 absorption in a task.
Creative people often get into the flow state when they are composing music, painting an art piece, etc. We also experience the flow state when we’re engrossed in a gripping novel, working on a crossword puzzle, watching a show, etc.
It’s the time you hate to be interrupted.
Although the three questions and the flow state can tell a lot about your happiness levels, there are exceptions.
When grieving, we stay sad even while watching a funny movie. When stuck in traffic, we are happy to be with a loved one. But in normal situations, we can extract max pleasure or pain, just by being present in the moment.
e.g., To extract max pleasure from eating, just focus on eating. If you mix eating and watching T.V., both pleasures are diluted.
There’s another way to give your experiencing self a better time. Switch from passive leisure (watching T.V, browsing social media feeds) to active leisure (meeting friends, going for a chilled-out walk).
So although you can’t be happy when you have a nagging headache or an injury, you can control most of your life by experiencing more.
To summarise, we can be happier by:
Switching from passive to active leisure.
By being present in the moment.
Involving ourselves in tasks where we tend to lose sense of time.
By doing more and more of what we want to continue and saying no to things we want to escape.
Saying no to things that fall in this group, ‘I don’t mind doing it but I won’t jump on it’.
But mostly, we can be happier by spending more time with our family and friends instead of strangers we see while commuting.
It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that happiness is the experience of spending time with people you love and who love you.
— Daniel Kahneman
I’ll be making tiny tweaks to this newsletter in the coming weeks to make it better for you.
If you have any suggestions on what you’d like to read (or not read 🤔), please hit reply and let me know.
A nice write up for leading a happier & meaningful life.