Life Lessons from Psychological Research

One of the most profound life lessons I have learned is that many of the things we seek to cheer us up when we're down don't actually do that. That piece of chocolate is more likely to make me feel like a piece of shit in the end than to brighten my day (though, a well-timed piece of chocolate is nothing to frown at when it's eaten for its own sake and not for emotion regulation). The question then is what does help? Here, psychological research has given me a valuable pointer and at least this N of one has found this to work like a charm when applied in daily life. 

According to a study by Bastien Blain and Robb Rutledge, our momentary wellbeing is influenced by learning: 

In their study, they had participants play psychologists' version of a computer game online and answer questions about how they were feeling throughout. Then they used mathematical models of the mind to try and understand what determined how people were feeling moment to moment. Was it how much they were rewarded in the game (like we reward ourselves with chocolate)? Or was it something else these rewards provided, like information about the game and consequently how to do well at it, i.e., the stuff we need for learning? They could disentangle these possibilities by manipulating reward magnitude independently from the probability of getting a reward for a correct choice. What they found was that people's momentary happiness did not actually depend on the rewards they were given, but instead on the information about probabilities that they could leverage on subsequent trials to do better in the game. So what the rewards were teaching people was a better predictor of people's happiness than how big those rewards were!

My personal conclusion was that if this is true, then learning something every day should make me happier. This was during the pandemic when being happier was what most of us needed. So, following a global trend, I went and learned something. Specifically, I returned to practicing the piano. Lo and behold - it made me feel better. My piano practice has tanked a little bit since then, but I still try to learn something every day and throughout, I keep asking myself "What can I learn from this?".  What do you do to cheer yourself up? 

If you want to learn more, you can read the article here. 

Blain, B., & Rutledge, R. B. (2020). Momentary subjective well-being depends on learning and not reward. Elife, 9, e57977. doi:10.7554/eLife.57977

May 2025, Romy

In 2019 I heard a talk by Ida Momennejad. She was showing an algorithm that learned to navigate a grid world that had a cliff. With a regular setting, the algorithm would figure out where the cliff is, and navigate around it while pursuing a reward nearby. When the researchers cranked up the algorithms pessimism, it started to think that not only the cliff was dangerous, but that increasingly extensive areas around the cliff were also dangerous. At first, the pessimistic algorithm would just take ridiculous detours to avoid the cliff, but increasingly it would go more and more out of its way to prioritize avoiding the cliff over doing anything else. I gasped when Ida showed that ultimately the algorithm could learn to perceive the world as so terrible - an ever looming cliff - that the only way to escape the pain was to throw itself off the cliff.

I had two critical insights that day: 1) I had been operating like that algorithm and made my world smaller and smaller to avoid threats, and 2) I could change the world I inhabited.

These insights allowed me to change my life for the better. Awareness is the first requirement for change. By being mindful and recognizing when I was not doing things that would be good for me or doing things that incurred unnecessary effort to avoid potential, unlikely threats, and then choosing otherwise, I increased my world again. I restarted doing things that were fun, I began enjoying things again because I stopped focussing on the terrible things that could happen and aligning everything with avoiding them. I changed the world I inhabited by changing which aspects I looked at. Suddenly there were opportunities and blessings where before all there was was threats and fear. 

What world do you choose to live in? Do you regularly not go places because something bad might happen? Do you regularly work around people because you don't trust that they will respond well to things you bring up? Do you regularly overprepare and overthink or abandon plans altogether because they seem too daunting? 

You can read the published article here. Maybe it changes your life, too. 

Zorowitz, S., Momennejad, I., & Daw, N. D. (2020). Anxiety, Avoidance, and Sequential Evaluation. Computational Psychiatry. doi:10.1162/CPSY_a_00026

April 2025, Romy