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

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

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

It's safe to say that most of us often feel crunched for time.

So much so, that we're experiencing what Ashley

Willans of the Harvard Business School, the lead author of the study, describes as a

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

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

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

personal well-being. 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 deliver

the groceries.

To find out, the researchers asked more than 6,000 people from the US, Canada, Denmark, and the Netherlands to rate their overall satisfaction with life,

and to estimate how much money they lay out each month to outsource

unenjoyable daily tasks or otherwise purchase some time off.

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.

To follow up, the researchers conducted a smaller experiment, in which they gave volunteers

40 bucks to buy a little something for themselves. The same participants got another

forty dollars that they were told to spend on something that would save them time. And again, buying

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