Bedtime Routines That Make You Happier

Hi, I’m Paul Krismer, your happiness expert, and this week we’re going to talk about how your night predicts your morning, and your next day. Would you believe it if I said to you that science knows that the activity that you’re doing the night before is highly predictive of how you’re going to feel the next day? It’s this idea that we can instruct ourselves to behave a certain way in the evening, and then have a different kind of outcome the next day. Of course, this makes common sense. If I said, “Boy, if you were really wasted the night before and had, you know, tied one on and had a whole bunch of beer or something, woke up the next day and you had a hangover and you felt terrible,” well, that might be expected. But what I’m going to share with you this week is really quite surprising, powerful, and a tool that you can use in your own life to make your life happier and more successful. So, stay tuned.

As a coach, public speaker, and best-selling author, I teach topics just like this one all around the world. So, stay tuned and I’ll give you practical tools that you can use to make both yourself, and those around you, both happier and more successful. So yeah, the things that we do in the night is predictive of how we’re going to feel and behave the next day. There was this great study, super underreported, got way too little air time by a guy named Oh Young, studied with a number of other people. They took a large number of subjects, about 183 of them, and followed them for several weeks, surveying them three times a day to check in with what they’re doing and how they’re feeling. They got amazing results.

The main thing they were looking at in the first survey in the evening was what kind of activity people were doing in their relaxation, off work time, and were they engaged in activities that were about mastery or relaxation. Were they essentially learning something, developing a skill, or were they just chilling? And they also had this comparative analysis between, were they learning something with a certain sense of self-efficacy that it was their chosen activity versus the kind of hassle of half twos, tending to kids, cleaning up, that kind of stuff. And they got amazing outcomes.

The people who were engaged in mastery activities woke up the next morning and began their work with a much elevated sense of mood. They were excited, they were inspired, they were joyful. People who were engaged in building themselves somehow began the next day in a higher mood, and a better mood. And that’s a little surprising because sometimes we think, well, we work hard all day long, and then when we have the evening time, we want to just chill out and relax, and that should help us wake up the next day feeling good. But the science shows otherwise.

The science shows that relaxation is all with very well and good for your mood at that time when you’re in the middle of the relaxation, but it’s not predictive of high emotions and good outcomes the next morning. And so, if we can be engaged in mastery activities in the evening, where we have this sense of chosen activity, then not only should we enjoy the activity we’ve chosen, but we’re going to feel better the next morning. And it was important that it be self-chosen and not the kind of hassles that we often have to deal with, cleaning our houses, taking care of kids, doing administrative stuff, paying our taxes, all that kind of stuff. Not that, that’s all we’re talking about.

We’re talking about activities like learning a new language, volunteering for an organization you care about, doing a hobby, some way that we’re building ourselves and feeling the sense of mastery over some skill or task that we want to achieve, that we’ve chosen, that we want to achieve. And not only do we get this higher elevated mood in the morning, which is really cool, but here’s the kicker, in the afternoon, when most people are beginning to have less energy and excitement about their workday, people who had done mastery activities the evening before, by the afternoon, they felt that they were in a proactive state of mind, that they were future oriented, that they were designing processes, achieving outcomes, uh, presenting information often others, owning processes that had this proactivity, self-efficacy, this this sense of agency that they can get what they want and just apply their effort and get it done. Amazing stuff.

So, choose an activity in the evening that develops yourself, causes some level of personal growth, you’ll wake up happier, and you’ll be more effective at work. That’s a pretty cool formula and highly under-reported study, and I hope there’s some juicy stuff for you to think about. How do I spend my evenings? And I get it, in the world we live in today, there are a million things that allow us to be passive. Netflix, Amazon Prime, social media, it’s just chilling, it’s just so easy to do. Where do you think, I don’t know, go to the 1940s or something like that, where there was no TV or very little. You might listen to the radio a bit, but mostly, people would have had activities in the evening.

They would have been learning to play an instrument, they would have been working on a task at home, they would be helping their neighbors construct something, there was this real sense that we had things to do that challenged us all day long, and the challenges changed, and hopefully they would be more hobby-like or self-chosen in the evening. But today, it’s so easy to be passive given all the stuff that we’ve got at instant entertainment in front of us, including probably what you’re looking at right now. It’s harder for us to be conscious about choosing the life we want. So, that’s my encouragement for you.

When you think about your evening activities, maybe plan a few for this coming week. What would you do tomorrow night, Wednesday night, maybe Friday night, it’s a chosen, self-mastery activity? Because that’s going to be predictive of your happiness and your success. Hey, if you like this kind of content, click the like button, share with your friends and family, share with your HR director, and thank you for watching. We’ll see you again next week. Bye for now.