The £10,000 Happiness Experiment.

hi I'm Dave from boyinaband and I've agreed to something absolutely terrifying for as long as I can remember I've loved making things and while my artistic ability hasn't really improved I managed to practice my music and video production enough to make a living from it but for the past year I haven't made anything at all my videos tend to take several weeks to make and taking a look at my youtube channel will show you how unusual it is that I haven't made anything for so long but there was a good reason for that in fact I chose to stop after my sister made me realize something she thought the thing motivating me to make those videos might be self-hatred and she was worried it was seriously unhealthy see whenever I tried to relax a part of my brain would say stop wasting time you're worthless if you can't do more than this that criticism was constant until I began to work again soon after releasing my most popular video ever I burnt out the self-criticism stopped and without it pushing me I stopped making things seeing the contrast between this success I'd always dreamed of and how I felt I finally realized my productivity came at the expense of being happy so I set myself a goal find out how to be consistently productive without sacrificing happiness for months I tried everything I could think of but nothing worked I was becoming desperate and I had only one big experiment left a last resort since it genuinely scared me but it could actually work so a few months ago I did it I made a deal with my sister Paula you know the threat thing I was talking about I've come up with it the plan is that if I don't stick to the routine I have to pay ten thousand pounds to Scientology what do you think one you have ten grand I've been saving up like two hundred quid I just spent sixty pounds of that I don't know how much other youtubers make but that's a hell of a lot of money to me when I told my friends they had some pretty varied reactions then I have to donate ten thousand pounds to Scientology oh oh my god [ __ ] oh yeah so this such a good idea do you really need to go this extreme to do it there must be some other way right but one of the first questions was always would your sister actually do that this experiment can only work because I trust my sister both with my bank details and to be harsh enough to actually do it some people's sisters might be too kind of I wouldn't do that to my beloved brother just put in the clip of the ice bucket challenge oh god yeah you are quite sadistic when she decides to do something she will do it no matter what one of the next things people asked was what do you need to do to keep the money what is the routine but the whole point of this is to realize my dream of being consistent so I chose a routine of 8 hours of work per day including daily exercise at this point you're probably wondering but how will your sister know if you're actually doing it I'm sharing this spreadsheet with her I put in the time when I start a part of my routine and she comes along and checks it for me to make sure I'm on schedule thanks Anna and no I can't cheat because every day she also does random spot checks to see if I'm working when I'm supposed to be but wait a minute is there a name for this idea I didn't even know what the concept of threatening your future self was called so we decided to come up with a name for it until Google told me one already existed a commitment contract which as opposed is classier than my idea of calling it a threat bet even though it doesn't rhyme and with the name to it now we can ask a question can a commitment contract make your life better tune in next times and Arthur now as the first day approached I felt excited and terrified it's happening tomorrow and as soon as it was all kind of agreed upon I started to get this like feeling in my chest of like Oh God so I check my alarms and make sure they were all there and immediately starting to be more kind of aware and productive so either be the best thing that's ever happened to me or the worst thing I think I just got that's bad with this panicky muted adrenaline rush you like terrified that I'd overslept but schedule Ike I really have to do this now let's go for a nice while breakfast conservative finance top meeting my sister has done these greens to Richard Jackson if that number wasn't there I would have lost 10 okay it's the end of the first day and I feel a lot better it was stressful for sure there was a point where I really didn't want to stay awake I wanted to just get back to sleep and not work but it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be so that's a good sign I've been getting things done today but I haven't been feeling very much all while I do it I've just been kind of getting on with it because I have to I'm very aware that I could lose ten grand feels unreal to say that like one mistake could mean losing that much money it's crazy but the fear doesn't just come from the loss of money it also comes from where it's going because of all the places to donate why would I pick Scientology it's one of the most abhorrent organizations I'm able to easily donate to well since I couldn't find a donate button for Isis anywhere Scientology is just just crap for so many reasons they have a massive lack of respect for science exemplified by this thing they call the amita they tell desperate sick people there's scientific proof that this 90 CD player wannabe can cure all their illnesses after being taken to court they admitted it is not medically or scientifically capable of improving the health of anyone they also prey on vulnerable people usually disabled or bereaved so they're desperate for any sort of help and they audit them which is being analyzed by the aforementioned pokedex reject so they can be saved by Scientology for as many thousands of dollars as they can squeeze out of them about 125 million dollars of their annual revenue of 200 million comes from selling these auditing sessions tax-free they harass people by filing lawsuits against them they tap phone line sent death threats even have people arrested for crimes they didn't commit all while presenting itself is this great thing like when they claimed they had the largest non-governmental anti-drug campaign drugs are robbing our children of their future helping young people lead lives without drugs is the foundation for a drug-free world coordinating the largest non-governmental drug education and prevention campaign on earth which academic and medical experts later said had factual errors in basic concepts such as physical and mental effects addiction and even spelling the very idea of them makes me feel sick and that's exactly why I picked them to donate to I have another incentive to stick to the plan when things get difficult and it wasn't long before that incentive started to be really important I am really not feeling it right now I wish there was a way I could use positive reinforcement instead of a threat to motivate myself to do this but there is literally nothing I have control over that would make me do this editing I do not feel like exercising today I promise you I would not be doing this if I didn't have to I've just been talking to my friend dan on skype and he had a really good point why do you think this is gonna work when you may have already lost more than that amount of money by not making videos I mean I hadn't been working for a whole year if I had worked I could have earned a lot of money so when you think about it I've kind of already faced this threat I kept losing money didn't motivate me then why would a vote emit vote on it why would it motivate me now why would you vote to make me well there's the whole donating to Scientology thing but interestingly enough even if I wasn't giving it a scientology it turns out Dan's implication that I've been trying this threat all along is wrong there's two reasons both of which in both things we all have in our brains that are completely illogical the first is called loss aversion the name for how our brains put a higher value on losing something than gaining it the thing which totally blew my mind was that - our brains losses are twice as valuable as gains and the other reason this threat is different is because of the bias which causes procrastination hyperbolic discounting this is where our brains value things which are in the present much more than things in the future like disproportionately more which results in us making some stupid decisions a great example of those stupid decisions involves marshmallows a scientist got a bunch of small children and said they had a choice they could have one marshmallow right now or they could wait 15 minutes for the researcher to come back and get two marshmallows then the researcher left and the child began thinking logically it would obviously make sense to wait but because the hyperbolic discounting bias makes our brains value the present too much it became a massive challenge some of the kids were able to find ways to distract themselves and resist the bias others not so much so if we take a mathematical look at the value of marshmallows even though there's literally only a 15-minute wait hyperbolic discounting can make two marshmallows in 15 minutes less valuable than one marshmallow right now and this isn't something you just grow out of the kids who succeeded in the test work fine look at the happy small children getting their well-deserved marshmallows yes yes very vicariously gratifying when the kids who could delay their gratification grew up there were some fascinating results compared to those who couldn't wait they could maintain a healthier way to be more socially competent deal with stress better be more self-confident basically the more you can resist hyperbolic discounting the happier and more productive you will be so how does that relate to my experiment dan pointed out that I've lost more than 10 grand by not working in the past year and that that was a threat in itself but that isn't the same as the threat in this experiment my brain sees an immediate 10,000 pound loss is more valuable than a future over 10,000 pound gain thanks to the biases of hyperbolic discounting and loss aversion to clarify even though this threat is worth less the biases make me value it more so apparently the lesson is you can't trust your own brain brilliant but the fact that there's a way for me to use this to my advantage is frickin fantastic it lets my calm rational self change the environment of my emotional irrational self so it can't waste my time and after a month of changing my environment other things began to change lately I've been feeling surprisingly better than expected most of the time there's still a resistance to work but I'd say about half that time like five minutes in I've lost myself in what I'm doing and it's not difficult anymore the rest of the time is still an absolute slog but I don't expect to be constantly happy I think that's unreasonable for anyone to expect but I just don't want to be constantly unhappy I used to feel some pretty intense self-hatred if I didn't release videos at least four times a month and right now my target is zero times a month and don't get me wrong anything above that is great but I am so glad I chose to measure the value of this experiment by effort and not by how many things I've maybe tweaked yeah I'm just glad a measuring effort not output previously before the commitment contract I would constantly feel this sense of worry like I hadn't done enough work that day now I'm starting to notice I'm feeling relaxed after I finished my routine I'm able to enjoy a game without feeling guilty for instance I didn't expect not to feel stressed after work it's really cool this is a lie easier than it used to be mainly because it's really thanks sunny now there's one last thing I can imagine some people watching this would say you don't have to do this you don't have to become a factory line robot just to give us a video every week so I want to clarify I'm doing this for me not out of a sense of obligation to my audience I want to be consistent it's the trait I've come to admire the most in other people after possibly honesty and I want so much to be able to describe myself that way I tried everything I could think of over the past 12 months to fix this I tried staying with friends which was fun but it didn't make me productive I tried traveling to no effect I started therapy which helped a bit but it still wasn't consistent I flew to VidCon in LA and I made new friends I started a daily routine including therapy exercises meditation and physical exercise I went to London hoping I'd get inspired after a week I fell into a depression didn't contact anyone there at all instead each day I research the science of happiness I tried a new routine based around what I'd learned I started taking Saint John's wort after finding studies that it helped with depression I stopped after five weeks of no effect things hit a low point when on the 18th of October I didn't want to get out of bed I was so sad I remember being in that bed thinking this is like that textbook stereotype you hear about does this mean I actually have depression I tried having a food replacement which has all the nutrition the body requires for two months no effect December came and I tried several supplements including caffeine tablets and nicotine patches shown in studies to increase focus in some people I saw a psychiatrist wondering if I had a mental disorder he prescribed me several medications and none of them had any noticeable effect on me so at the end of a year of experiments I was really desperate I felt like if I didn't do something drastic I'd fall into an even deeper depression that's why I chose to start this commitment contract so what about my initial goal has the commitment contract made me happier and has it made me more consistently productive well I am more productive I created this video as well as the music video I just released about how I felt during this whole process and that was a hell of a lot of planning since I've never tried a narrative style music video before I also finished the next two videos coming up one which has 80 pages of research and script writing and another which involved an hour of singing every day no way would I've been able to be that consistent before this commitment contract but in general a my consistent well I can answer that really specifically because I've used software to track everything I've done on my computer for the past three years I've categorized things as productive or distracting like gaming is classified as distracting video editing is productive here is the productive time from one of the months back when I was hating myself into working really inconsistent a few random productive days but it went up and down all over the place and here it is for one of the months during the commitment contract that's a hell of an improvement barring a couple of days when I was unwell or when I took time off even when compared to the most productive month before the commitment contract I am more consistently productive now in fact compare it to any other month and this is the most consistently productive time of my life yay so if I compare the data from all three years for an average day before burning out I had three and a half hours of productive time and with the commitment contract five and a half hours of productive time a day on average you have no idea how satisfying it feels to say that number so I'm definitely more productive but am i happier well did those extra productive hours take at all I can show you because I've also been writing a journal for years there are some entries I found which really exemplify how I used to feel uploaded the video and then wasted hours on YouTube and Facebook haven't been consistent in days wasted day just a tomorrow and now here are some recent entries feeling a little frustrated that I haven't finished the script perhaps in future it would be smart to tackle complex parts at an earlier stage feel like I'm not making much useful progress perhaps if I spent some time planning the difficult parts more specifically that might be useful I still get frustrated but when I do I am way less aggressive with myself I think more constructively now and maybe most importantly I'm not fighting myself anymore so in the moment I wouldn't say I'm significantly happier but I would I'm significantly less unhappy a lot of that unhappiness has been replaced with a feeling of relaxation rather than happiness but when I think long-term I feel much happier about my life I finally feel confident that I'll do the things I say I will so after months of feeling hopeless this commitment contractors actually made me happy and productive this is literally what I dreamed would happen literally dream everyone I've talked to thinks this is crazy and extreme and honestly at first I did too but I'm so so glad I did it I didn't expect this result at all but I am genuinely happier than I have been in years and I wish more people knew about this if it's working for me maybe a commitment contract can help other people who feel they're fighting against their own brains to be the person they want to be so if you know anyone like that please tell them about it because maybe it could change their life too just for watching and have a nice day

Channel: undefined

Views: 1,516,271

Rating: 4.974824 out of 5

Keywords: commitment contract, scientology, £10000, boyinaband, happiness, experiment, science, productivity, self-help, productive, work, motivation, motivated, loss aversion, hyperbolic discounting., ulysses pact

Id: hEd4UW5f7s4

Length: 16min 17sec (977 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 13 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/556pm]

The app he's been using to log productivity is RescueTime btw :)

[u/monsteralpaca]

damn 10 000 to scientology

[u/RachelWolfeFem]

He didn't make it clear whether this was an ongoing plan

Is it done now? How is he still motivated?

Is he still going? Why?

[u/XMBomb]

Anyone know, what the PC usage program he uses is?

Edit: Found it! https://www.rescuetime.com/