Want More Joy? Turn One Experience Into Many

Life is full of small pleasures. A quick lunch between meetings. A short video while waiting for the bus. A favorite song on the way home. A few minutes of a game before bed. Millions of people consume such simple pleasures every day, often to feel a spark of enjoyment. But we often rush through them—eating without really tasting, listening without really hearing, already thinking about the next task. So a simple question comes up: How can we get more enjoyment out of these everyday moments?

You might think the answer is to improve the experience: Buy a better sandwich. Find a better song. Watch a better video. Our research suggests another possibility: You can enjoy the exact same experience more simply by thinking about it differently. And, somewhat surprisingly, that involves multitasking.

The Surprising Upside of Multitasking

Multitasking has a terrible reputation. We are constantly told to stop checking our phones during dinner, close those 17 browser tabs, and focus on one thing at a time to improve our well being. Usually, that's good advice. But my co-authors and I wondered whether thinking of an enjoyable experience as a form of multitasking might sometimes have an unexpected benefit.

Consider a ham and cheese sandwich. As you take the first bite, you could think of yourself as doing one thing: eating a ham and cheese sandwich. Or you could think of yourself as doing several things simultaneously: eating ham, eating cheese, and eating bread. Obviously, it's the same sandwich. Yet, in our research, people enjoyed their food more when they thought of it as several simultaneous experiences rather than one unified experience.

We found the same pattern with music. Before listening to a jazz song, people were either told they were about to listen to a jazz song featuring guitar and saxophone. Or they were told that they were about to simultaneously listen to the guitar and listen to the saxophone. Again, it was the same music, same instruments, and basically the same information. Yet, people enjoyed the song more, and even grew less tired of it over time, when they thought about it as multitasking, or multi-experiencing.

Why Does This Work?

Imagine someone plays you a song and tells you to listen to it. Now imagine they tell you to simultaneously listen to the different instruments in the song. Suddenly, there seems to be more to pay attention to. That's essentially what we found. When people think of an activity as involving multi-tasking, they expect it to require more attention. And that expectation changes how they approach the experience: They actually pay more attention because they believe more attention is required.

This simple trick can thus combat our mind’s impressive ability to wander away from whatever we're supposedly enjoying. Thinking about the different experiences occurring simultaneously can pull some of that attention back and channel it into the experience itself. You notice more of what's already there, and that can make the experience more enjoyable. Our findings thus highlight a surprising upside of multitasking: Multitasking can hurt enjoyment when it pulls your attention away from what you're consuming, but simply thinking about an experience as multitasking can increase enjoyment because it pulls your attention into the experience.

You May Not Need a Better Experience

There is a broader lesson here. We often try to increase enjoyment by upgrading the thing we're consuming. We pay extra for better sandwiches, better speakers, and better games. And, of course, companies encourage us to think that the solution to our boredom is to have newer and better experiences. Our research highlights another route to getting more from an experience: extracting more enjoyment from what is already there.

The next time you listen to a song, try listening simultaneously to the vocals, the drums, and the guitar. When eating something you like, notice its different ingredients, tastes, or textures. When playing a round of Tetris, notice the music and visuals as separate things you're experiencing at the same time

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You don't need to do this with everything. In fact, our research suggests that this approach works best for relatively short and simple experiences. When an experience is already highly complex—think of listening to a symphony orchestra with dozens of instruments playing at once—there may already be plenty competing for your attention, and thinking about it as multiple simultaneous experiences may add little. The trick, then, is to uncover the multifaceted complexity hiding inside life's simpler pleasures.

But when you want to squeeze a little more pleasure out of an ordinary moment, remember that what feels like one simple experience often contains several experiences hiding in plain sight.

Sometimes getting more out of life doesn't require adding anything at all.