How much does therapy cost? Is it worth it?

Hi, I’m Paul Krismer, and I’m your happiness expert. This week we’re going to talk about: would you rather have cash or therapy to feel happier? It’s kind of a weird question, and you probably already intuitively guessed what answer I would give. But I came across this rather obscure study that looked at this reality of how much extra money it takes to increase our happiness, and how much our general mental well-being improves with therapy. You’re going to be fascinated by the results and the kind of implications it has for our life and society in general. So, stay tuned; that’s coming right up.

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. I’ve often joked that you know, I’d like to be the person that they do an experiment with and say, give me a million bucks and let’s see if I get happier. There’s been lots of study that says money doesn’t buy a lot of happiness, but I’m willing to be the laboratory rat and just find out if a million bucks would make me happy or not. If any of you that are listening want to just treat me as your research subject, I am volunteering.

But there’s this really great study that’s just been done, actually done some while ago by two guys out of the UK, Chris Boyce and Alex Wood. They basically looked at the relationship we have with our improvement in well-being and the relationship we have with our improvement in mental well-being from more money, pay raises, lottery wins, that kind of thing. It’s fascinating. They found that therapy is 32 times more effective at improving one’s happiness than is cash. So if you took, for example, a four-month course of typical psychotherapy costing around 800 pounds (this was done in the UK), it would take a 25,000 pound raise to have an equivalent benefit, showing this enormous value that we can get out of simply taking care of our mental health and working through the stuff that we’re learning and growing in our lives by going and getting some good counseling, versus the little benefits that we get from more money.

This has broad implications. Even the researchers pointed out that in our society, we tend to fix harms or we do reparations for wrongdoing by giving people money. If you get a traffic accident, you get the cost of your medical expenses and then an award for pain and suffering, which is just cash to theoretically make you feel whole again. Or if we look at gross wrongdoings by corporations, and we sue them, we sue them for money in order to somehow feel better. That’s the reward for the suffering that you had. Yet there’s all kinds of evidence that we don’t get much benefit from financial rewards. Maybe we can put a link in the description below to a video I’ve done on materialism and how little benefit we get when our values are pursuing tangible, materialistic things, including things like fame. We get very little benefit, in fact, it deteriorates our life.

If therapy is more effective then money rewards in a lawsuit, maybe lawsuits should be looking to compensate people in a different way. We could similarly look at our whole government policies where every government around the world is measuring its progress for its status as a country based on gross national product or income growth. Overwhelmingly, we’ve seen in the west, in particular, but all around the world, countries on the whole, growing exponentially richer in the last several decades since the 1950s. Yet, since that same period, we’ve seen mental health go down and down and down. So we’re getting richer and richer and richer, and people are less and less and less happy. So we’ve got to have some further consideration as to what in fact the good society is.

This study by Boyce and Wood was all about therapy as an improvement relative to cash. But it’s interesting that there are alternatives to therapy. In previous videos, I’ve talked about just the importance of friendship and very recently did one on the lack of utility in venting, complaining, whereas working through a problem with somebody else, a good listener who wants you to grow and strategize based on the pain, the suffering that you had, that person can be genuinely valuable. Whereas just venting to them will not necessarily be valuable. There are other alternatives to therapy. I want to make this point in particular for men.

Because women, often by nature in their social circles, talk about stuff that’s deeply important to them, they talk about their emotions, they share broadly, and women often get together in these supportive circles of friendships. Beautiful. And I hope all the women that are listening either have those in their lives and are investing in them, valuing those friendships, or pursuing actively that kind of relationships with other people. But for men, we often find that men’s conversations are relatively superficial. We talk about work, we talk about our golf game, we talk about the football game that was on TV last night, and we tend to keep it relatively superficial and safe. I’ve been a participant in what I call men’s work, where men come together to of course have bonds of friendship and deep relationship, and the kind of support that if you were, you know, stuck in a ditch at two in the morning, these are the kind of people that you could call, and they would come and get you. But we make a regular habit of sharing our lives with one another so that we can get the value of processing through the stuff that’s happening in our lives. And there’s lots of good organizations specifically geared towards men for that purpose. And there just couldn’t be a bigger benefit, I think, for men to be working to be their best selves but in addition dealing with the things that are giving them pain and difficulty.

So, do you want cash or do you want therapy? Well, I’m still willing to do the million-dollar experiment. Pick me! But if I can’t get the million-dollar gift to see if it makes me happier, I’m pretty happy to be working through my junk in formal therapy or in groups of close friends that I’ve done for years and years and years. And I’m a highly large proponent, a big proponent of both. I haven’t done therapy for a number of years, but I’ve done it in my life. I think everyone should do it, frankly. If you’re not doing therapy at some point in your life, you’re missing out on getting to know yourself and working through your junk, and discovering your strengths and goodness.

So, go find your way of getting the alternative to cash. Get some way to process your mental well-being and grow that way. Thanks for watching. If you enjoy this kind of content, please click the like button and share this kind of content with your friends and family, and then the world gets a little happier, which is my whole mission. Thanks again. We’ll see you next time, you.