Morning ☕️

This is the mindful minute - your mental health cheat sheet.

The newsletter that doesn’t judge you for ordering UberEats for lunch & dinner.

What you'll learn in < 60 seconds today 👇

• Why we should prioritize experiences over appearances

• How to maximize our happiness

• 5 micro-habits that'll help you beat procrastination

💡Resources we love this week

🔗 Video: One Decision to Change your Life

🔗 Podcast: The Overwhelmed Brain

🔗 Article: Setting Career Goals When You Feel Overwhelmed

🔗 Book: Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment - Daniel Kahneman 

😂 MOW (Meme of the week)

Appearances vs Experiences: What Really Makes Us Happy

In the search for happiness, we often confuse how something looks with how it’s likely to make us feel. This is especially true when it comes to our homes.

If we want to maximize happiness, we need to prioritize experiences over appearances.

Most of us try to make decisions intended to bring us greater happiness.

The problem is that we misunderstand how our choices really impact our well-being and end up making ones that have the opposite effect.

We buy stuff that professes to inspire happiness and end up feeling depressed instead.

Knowing some of the typical pitfalls in the search for happiness—especially the ones that seem to go against common sense—can help us improve quality of life.

The influence of appearance

It’s an old adage that experiences make us happier than physical things.

But knowing is not the same as doing.

One area this is all too apparent is when it comes to choosing where to live.

You might think that how a home looks is vital to how happy you are living in it.

Wrong!

The experience of a living space is far more important than its appearance.

When we think that the way a building looks will dictate our experience living in it, we are mistaking the map for the territory.

Architectural flourishes soon fade into the background.

What matters is the day-to-day experience of living there, when relationships matter much more than how things look.

Proximity to friends is a higher predictor of happiness than charming old brick.

The impact of experience

Some things we can get used to. Some we can’t.

We make a major mistake when we think it’s worthwhile to put up with negative experiences that are difficult to grow accustomed to in order to have nice things.

Once again, this happens when we forget that our day-to-day experience is paramount in our perception of our happiness.

So why do we make this mistake?

Drawing on the work of psychologist Daniel Gilbert, Montgomery explains that it’s a matter of us thinking we’ll get used to a thing.

The opposite is true.

As Montgomery says, “The problem is, we consistently make decisions that suggest we are not so good at distinguishing between ephemeral and lasting pleasures. We keep getting it wrong.”

Happy City teems with insights about the link between the design of where we live and our quality of life.

In particular, it explores how cities are often shaped by mistaken ideas about what brings us happiness.

We maximize our chances at happiness when we prioritize our experience of life instead of acquiring things to fill it with.

🤏 A Tiny Thought 

"A human being always acts and feels and performs in accordance with what he imagines to be true about himself and his environment."  - M. Maltz

Hot take🔥: If we want to maximize happiness, we need to prioritize experiences over appearances.

5 Micro-Habits That'll Help You Beat Procrastination

It's been said that the “more you fight procrastination, the more you fail. The more you challenge your will, the more it resists.”

BUT, thanks to these simple micro-hacks, you can overcome procrastination without challenging your will.

You can optimize your daily schedule in such a way that there’s no scope for delayed actions.

Here are 5 micro-habits to try:

#1. The 2-Minute Miracle - a simple productivity hack that says if a task will take less than two minutes to complete, do it right now.

#2. Kill Your MITs - instead of trying to do a little bit of everything, focus on completing your “most important tasks” first as these will have the biggest impact on your day, week, or month.

#3. Make a “Not-to-do” List - spend 5mins identifying and eliminating the non-essential tasks in your life to focus on what’s important.

#4. Invest in Building an Awareness Habit - an hourly pause to stop and reflect on what you've done in that hour forces you to be aware of how much time you’re wasting.

#5. Create Mini Steps Leading to a Bigger Goal - a small, achievable goal you can commit to daily will help get you started.

This simple practices will help you to focus on the truly important tasks, and as a result, get more done in less time.

🗳 Post of the week

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Sent with ❤️ from Ollie Health®, Cape Town, 8005