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Science Quickly

To Buy Happiness, Spend Money on Saving Time

Science Quickly

Scientific American

Science

4.2639 Ratings

🗓️ 26 July 2017

⏱️ 3 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Volunteers who used money to save themselves time were more content than volunteers who purchased themselves physical stuff. Karen Hopkin reports. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

Understanding the human body is a team effort. That's where the Yachtel group comes in.

0:05.8

Researchers at Yachtolt have been delving into the secrets of probiotics for 90 years.

0:11.0

Yacold also partners with nature portfolio to advance gut microbiome science through the global grants for gut health, an investigator-led research program.

0:19.6

To learn more about Yachtolt, visit yawcult.co.

0:22.7

J-P. That's Y-A-K-U-L-T dot-C-O-J-P. When it comes to a guide for your gut, count on Yacult.

0:34.3

This is Scientific Americans' 60-second science. I'm Karen Hopkins. This will just take a minute.

0:40.3

We all know money can't buy happiness. But according to a recent study, there may be a loophole.

0:46.5

A team of researchers finds that shelling out for services that save time can bring greater feelings of life satisfaction than, say, simply buying more stuff.

0:56.1

The results appear in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

1:00.3

It's safe to say that most of us often feel crunched for time, so much so that we're experiencing

1:06.1

what Ashley Whillens of the Harvard Business School, the lead author of the study,

1:10.4

describes as a time famine. And like Business School, the lead author of the study, describes as a time

1:11.6

famine. And like any famine, this chronic lack of time takes its toll on our health.

1:17.1

When we feel like our to-do lists are longer than the hours that we have time in the day to complete

1:21.1

them, we can feel as if our life is spiraling out of control, thereby undermining our

1:26.2

personal well-being.

1:32.7

Well, if time is money, Willans and her team wondered whether money that's used to buy time could offer some relief, like paying someone else to clean the house, mow the lawn, or

1:38.0

deliver the groceries. To find out, the researchers asked more than 6,000 people from the U.S.,

1:43.8

Canada, Denmark, and the Netherlands

1:45.8

to rate their overall satisfaction with life, and to estimate how much money they lay out each month

1:52.0

to outsource unenjoyable daily tasks or otherwise purchase some time off.

1:57.5

And they found that respondents who willingly swap funds for free time also report feeling more content, regardless of their income or how many hours they work each week.

...

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