Parenthood can Take a Toll on Relationships, But it Doesn't have to

I became a parent a year and a half ago, and my life changed forever. When I was pregnant lots of parents gave me advice (Enjoy going to the grocery store by yourself while you still can! Go out on dates! Clean your house!). One even warned me that becoming a parent would “rock my world.” I thought I understood. I thought I was prepared for the huge change coming. And while I wasn’t unprepared, I really had no idea exactly how life-changing becoming a parent would be. Now I try to explain to my friends who don’t have children what exactly getting swept into parenthood felt like, and the best I have come up with is this—I had my daughter and she was more wonderful than I could have imagined, and the rest of my life fell into chaos. One of those pieces of my life was my relationship with my husband. We look at each other and marvel that we used to sit around on the weekend and lament that we did not know what to do with ourselves. Now we would give anything to learn the secret to freezing time. Now we try to hold on as life rushes by. Now I tell my husband we need more time and he agrees but asks, “what time?”

The Benefits of Capturing your Everyday Experiences

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What would you rather do right now, write down the last conversation you had or watch a funny video guaranteed to make you laugh? What about a month from now – do you think you’d rather read about a random conversation you had last month or watch another funny video? These are some of the questions researchers asked in a recent set of studies exploring our tendency to underestimate how much pleasure we get out of rediscovering mundane experiences. Participants in these studies consistently expected that they would not be very interested in rereading a log of an ordinary event in their everyday lives. But a couple of months down the road when the time came to reread that log, they found themselves much more interested and experienced more pleasure than they had expected. This was partly because they had forgotten a lot more of the event than they had expected they would! In the moment, we think why record our everyday experiences, we will remember them in the future and they aren’t that memorable anyway. Even just a month later though, our memories of the event begin to dim, the details fall away, and what once seemed ordinary feels a bit more extraordinary.

The Top Ten Worst Reasons to Stay Friends With Your Ex

Your ex is your ex for a reason. But he or she was also an important part of your life for a significant amount of time, and it’s understandable to want to hold on to that relationship in some capacity. Many former couples, whether they were dating partners or spouses, try to remain friends after a break-up, and some are able to manage this transition successfully.

Research suggests, however, that on average exes tend to have lower quality friendships than platonic opposite sex friends who were never romantically involved: they are less emotionally supportive, less helpful, less trusting, and less concerned about the other person’s happiness. This is especially true, not surprisingly, for former partners who were dissatisfied with the romantic relationship, and when the break-up was not mutual.

The probability that a friendship with an ex will be a positive rather than painful experience depends in part on your motives, including the ones that you would rather not openly acknowledge. Here are ten reasons that can get you into trouble.

4 Reasons Not to Settle in a Relationship

Settling is an ugly, depressing word. Few people would suggest outright that you should settle for less than you want and deserve in a relationship. Even Lori Gottlieb, author of Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough, disapproved of the use of the word in her book title, a decision she said was made by her publisher.

But the pressure to settle can be very real, even if it is not communicated explicitly. People who are single after a certain age may be seen as "too picky" and urged to lower their standards. Singles are also likely to face social stigma due to their solo status, a phenomenon psychologist Bella DePaulo has called “singlism.” From our earliest days, we learn that our worth is tied up in our ability to find a mate; that marriage marks the passage into mature adulthood and is our most important adult relationship; and that we are not complete until we find our other half. And then there is the issue of our "biological clocks," an imperative which recent research suggests affects men too.

It's no wonder that people feel rushed to settle down before they are ready, or before they find the right match.

If you have ever found yourself grappling with the question of whether it's better to be alone, or to settle—which Gottlieb calls “one of the most complicated, painful, and pervasive dilemmas many single [people] are forced to grapple with"—read on. Here are four science-backed reasons why you should consider holding out for a relationship that makes you truly happy:

Parenthood, Trial or Tribulation? Part 2

On New Year’s Day I became a parent, sparking my curiosity in the research on parenting and well-being and inspiring a four-part series on parenthood and happiness. This is the second post. Check out the first post here.

Are parents happier than non-parents? Researchers have generally set about trying to answer this deceptively simple question in three ways:

Are people with children happier than those without children?

This is the most common approach to research on parenthood and well-being. In these studies, researchers typically tackle large datasets with thousands of adults, comparing the well-being of people with children to people without children. Although the approach is straightforward, the results are mixed with some studies finding parents are happier than non-parents and other studies find the reverse.

How can these studies with such a basic design find opposite results? One large problem with this approach is that little work is done to find out who exactly is making up these groups of parents and non-parents. Focusing on the non-parents, only 15% of adults do not have children, making them a small comparison group. More importantly, their reasons for doing so may differ greatly. Young adults may not have children when they take part in the research, but plan to have children later. Older adults may not have children because they were not able to do so, or they may have consciously made the choice to not have children. Imagine comparing a married 48-year old with three children to a married 48 year-old with no children who spent years and hard earned dollars fighting infertility and wishing to be a parent? Who do you think is happier? Now imagine that the non-parent comparison is a 48 year-old who loves to travel, lives all over the globe and chose not to have children because they wouldn’t fit a globetrotting lifestyle. Who do you think is happier? In one study, mothers were no happier than women who chose not to have children, but were significantly happier than infertile women (Callan, 1987). Choice plays an important role on the other side of the table as well—some people become parents by choice while others find themselves in the unexpected position of being a parent when they hadn’t intended it. How might choice affect happiness among these different groups?

Are people happier after they have children than they were before they were parents?

Parenthood: Trial or Tribulation?

This is the first post in a four-part series on parenthood and happiness.

On New Years Day I celebrated not only the start of a new year, but a new phase in my life. A few (long) hours after midnight I became a parent, and my life was irrevocably changed. In the journey to parenthood I knew one thing to be true—that I had no idea what I was getting myself into. Would becoming a parent bring me joy, love, and gratitude greater than I had previously known? Would I find myself anxious, worried, depressed, and dreaming of my former life? Or, as I suspected, would I find myself experiencing intense moments of both?

In my short time as a parent I have experienced great joy, love and gratitude as well as intense worry, and sometimes even sadness. Happily, as I sit here typing up this post with my two and a half month old swaddled next to me on the couch, eyeing me trustingly as she falls in and out of sleep, I can say that the balance tends to weigh strongly on the side of joy. But in those moments where I don’t have the luxury to type up this post because I’m tending to a crying child, or changing a dirty diaper, I dream of the freedom of my former life and the balance is just a bit more evenly weighted.

And the one thing I know with certainty is that I still have no clue what exactly I’ve gotten myself into. While my days often stretch out in front of me with the sameness that comes from having an infant with simple needs, I also know that she is growing and changing at a rapid pace. Each week we are in uncharted territory as she learns to smile, sit, and eventually walk, talk and push back as she becomes her own independent person.

Ten Findings About Facebook for its 10th Birthday

Happy Birthday, Facebook!

Over the past ten years, Facebook has added a new dimension to the social lives of over a billion people. Given its popularity, it has become the topic of a growing body of research in the social sciences. For Facebook’s 10th birthday, I collected ten discoveries this research has yielded and share brief summaries below. If you’re on Facebook, then this research applies to you! Happy birthday, Facebook!

1. Does Facebook help us feel better by fulfilling our need for social connection? The authors of one study text-messaged people five times per day for two weeks and asked people about their Facebook use and their well-being. The more people used Facebook at one time, the worse they felt the next time they were text-messaged. In addition, over the two weeks of the study, the more people used Facebook, the more their life satisfaction decreased.

What Your Resistance to Halloween Candy Predicts About Your Life

Tempting Halloween candy

Thanks to yesterday’s festivities, both kids and adults have a few more sweet treats on hand than normal. With a big bowl of candy sitting at home on the kitchen table or stashed in a desk drawer, many of us now face the annual challenge of eating our Halloween candy in moderation. Some of us will succeed; others won’t. We face situations like this constantly in life, where we are tasked with resisting temptations and overriding our impulses.  What might our responses to these situations reveal about the rest of our lives? Are we happy? Are we satisfied? To approach this question, let’s imagine a couple of eight-year olds and their new stashes of Halloween candy. 

The Art of Constructive Self-Criticism

When we fail at something important to us, whether in relationships, at school, or at work, it can be very painful. These experiences can threaten the very core of who we think we are and who we want to be.

To cope with failure, we often turn to self-protective strategies. We rationalize what happened so that it places us in a more positive light, we blame other people, and we discount the importance of the event. These strategies may make us feel better about ourselves in the short term, but they are less likely to help us improve or avoid repeating our mistakes in the future. Research shows that people who have an overly inflated view of their performance on an academic task show decrements in subsequent motivation and performance, compared to people who view themselves more realistically. It makes sense: if you already think you're great, it may feel like there's no need to put the effort into improving yourself.

The Science of Touch and Emotion

Today we have a guest post by a blogger for the Berkeley Science Review on the science of touch and emotion. BSR will be hosting an event about touch on October 27th. For more info, go to the bottom of this post.

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If someone told you it was possible to communicate gratitude to a complete stranger with a two second touch, would you believe it? Although the power of speech allows us to imbibe great subtlety and complexity in our messages, psychological researchers have demonstrated that something as complex as gratitude or sympathy can be communicated with a simple touch.

In social species, prosocial emotions are those that promote the well-being of the group. By engaging in acts of trust and cooperation, social groups survive. Parents and offspring form attachments, and individuals act in mutually beneficial, altruistic ways to sow trust between one another. A growing number of studies on touch and emotion reveal our deep-seated need for human contact and warmth. Touch may be the key for communicating prosocial emotions, and for promoting group cohesion and survival.

How Your Social Life Affects Your Self-Regulation

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Part of being human is the desire to control or change what we do, what we feel, and what we think. We all struggle with tasks of self-regulation, like cooking more nutritious food, limiting our emotional outbursts, and paying attention in class. I’m sure you can find countless reasons on the internet and within the self-help literature to explain why you’re not so good at regulating your behaviors, emotions, and cognitions. Maybe you didn’t learn how to control your actions well in childhood or perhaps you don’t have as much willpower as other people. One influence you may not have considered, though, is your social environment. Do you have friends you can confide in? Do you feel accepted by your peers? Believe it or not, our social surroundings can have a strong impact on our ability to self-regulate. 

How is your sleep affecting your relationship?

For the first few years of college, I maintained the typical college-student sleep schedule: in bed between 2am and 3am, dragging myself up at 9am for my 9:30am lecture which I inevitably slept through (in the front row… what was I thinking?!?). Chronically sleep-deprived, I would rather be spending time with my new friends and boyfriend than catching those precious zzz’s. Many of those nights made for wonderful memories, but other times I’d find myself inexplicably upset over some small issue, picking fights with my boyfriend (now husband) in the wee hours of the night. “You’re tired, go to bed” my wise boyfriend would tell me. “No I’m not! This is a real issue!” sleepy me would argue back, frustrated at his disregard, not understanding why he didn’t get what I was feeling.

Now that I’m older and wiser, I will publicly state that my husband was right – 99% of the time I was just tired and a good night of sleep made all of my problems go away. Happily, I eventually learned the benefits of getting my requisite 9 hours of sleep, and rarely find myself picking fights in the middle of the night. And now, 10 years later, I’m putting this anecdote to the test – conducting research to answer the question of whether we might, at times, find ourselves in conflict simply because one of us is tired.

Poor Sleep: A route to unnecessary conflict?

Conflict is an important, inevitable, and healthy component of relationships. Romantic partners who are sharing their lives together are expectedly going to have times of disagreement. In fact, being able to express differences of opinion and find compromise may very well be the hallmark of a healthy relationship. However, conflict is not always helpful and even at its best, is generally unpleasant. Minimizing unnecessary squabbles is vital for the longevity of relationships. And here is where I think sleep comes in. People who are sleep deprived tend to experience more negative emotions (see this post for more on sleep and mood), are more reactive to negative events, and are worse at problem solving. A recipe for disaster – whereas someone who is well-rested might be able to clarify when they think they’ve been criticized, or simply shrug off a sink of dirty dishes, someone who is sleep-deprived is more likely to be a ticking time bomb, possibly reacting automatically without the capacity to stop and think it through.

In our research, we examined the link between sleep and conflict, testing three main questions:

After sleeping poorly…

1.       Are people more likely to report experiencing conflict with their relationship partners?

2.       Is their conflict more severe?

3.       Are they less able to resolve conflict?

The short answer is Yes. A bad night of sleep is associated with more frequent, severe and less resolved conflict between relationship partners. But read on for the longer explanation…

Why "Never Give Up" is a Bad Motto

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“Never give up” has become one of the most popular pieces of advice in Western culture. It’s not popular with me, though. I do agree that persistence in the face of obstacles is necessary, important, and admirable. Many worthwhile goals require serious commitment and perseverance in order to achieve them. The problem with this advice is that at some point in our lives, we all have goals that are unattainable, and this is where “never give up” falls short. When faced with an unattainable goal, giving up and trying something else might be a better course of action than continuing to try again and again. We have a precious, limited amount of time, energy, and other resources, and there may be times when these are better directed at a new goal. 

In psychology, we refer to “giving up” as disengagement and to “trying something else” as reengagement. When a goal is unattainable, some of us have stronger tendencies than others to disengage and then reengage. It’s easy to think of people who have a tendency to give up as being weak or depressed. However, research shows that is not the case! When goals are unattainable, the tendencies to disengage and then reengage are actually associated with higher subjective well-being. Let’s take a look.

You Are Not a Bridezilla

The word "bridezilla" was reportedly first used in the mid-1990s to refer to the bride-to-be who turned into a monster while planning her wedding, throwing tantrums when she didn't get her way and making ridiculous demands on her friends and family. But in recent years the derogatory term, a reference to a fictional giant mutant dinosaur-like creature who went on crazed killing sprees (i.e., Godzilla), has almost become synonymous with "bride," encompassing behaviors that are almost impossible to avoid.

When The Green-Eyed Monster Strikes: The Best Antidotes to Envy

Life is full of reminders of what we lack, usually in the form of other people. There is always someone who is more successful, more talented, more attractive, or more advanced in meeting important "milestones" than we are. We encounter these people every day--in fact, they are often our friends, family members, and colleagues. Sometimes these encounters can leave us with a bitter taste in our mouths, or a green glow in our eyes, that familiar sting of envy. Defined as a state of desiring something that someone else possesses, envy is a vicious emotion that can crush self-esteem, inspire efforts to undermine others' successes, or even cause people to lash out violently. It also just feels horrible. So what can we do to disarm the green-eyed monster when it strikes?

The Trouble with Destiny: Relationships Take Work

Do you believe in Soul Mates?

If I could give one piece of advice as a relationships researcher, it would be this: Relationships take work. Sure we’d all like to believe in destiny, thinking there is someone out there who is meant for us. Then when we find our soul mate, we will slip into an easy and comfortable companionship that provides us with decades of endless laughter and joy, and not a single fight or tense moment. But that is the stuff of dreams, people. Of course there will be times of joy greater than you imagined and laughter that brings you to tears, and those moments should far outweigh the fights and tension. But to believe that you are destined to be with one person and when you find the right relationship for you, it will be one that doesn’t take work, well that belief may be detrimental for your relationship.

In a great test of what happens when people believe they are "meant to be", close relationships researcher C. Raymond Knee looked at the extent to which people held Destiny Beliefs or Growth Beliefs, and the consequences of these beliefs for their relationships.

Destiny Beliefs. People who hold high destiny beliefs report that potential relationship partners are either compatible or they are not, that successful relationships are built on finding a compatible partner, and that relationships that begin poorly will inevitably fail.

Growth Beliefs. People who hold high growth beliefs report that the ideal relationship develops over time, that challenges to a relationship can make it even stronger, and that successful relationships are mostly the result of hard work and learning to resolve incompatibilities.

Searching for happiness: What makes life meaningful?

Recently I’ve been contemplating giving up on the modern world and moving to a cabin in the woods. I mean – what is with all of this technology, the 50+ hour work week, and guilt over the simple pleasures like spending time with friends and family on the weekends? Maybe I would be able to feel happier and more fulfilled if I turned my back on the world of today and instead started living a simple life. After all, despite the fact that technology has made our lives easier over the past century, people do not report being happier than they were before smart phones, computers, and the internet.

Picture it – a cabin in the woods next to a gurgling river, a garden out back with beautiful flowers and delicious produce, a feeling of being close to nature, like my ancestors. More time for important social interactions, which are really at the heart of a meaningful life. No more random interneting or hours spent ignoring my husband in favor of my smart phone. Instead I’ll spend my days doing meaningful things, going to bed with the setting sun and sleeping as much as I need. Really, imagine it. Don’t you all want to come and join me in the woods?

But would I really be happier if I gave up modern conventions and moved to an isolated cabin? Up until a few hours ago, I really thought that might be the solution. But then I read an article by a 26 year-old, Paul, who had given up the internet for a year. He felt that the internet was preventing him from figuring out who he truly was, and it was time to take back his life and his identity. And giving up the internet was good – for the first few months. He spent more time with friends, used his boredom to write more and explore his creativity in other ways. He read more and went out more. But then Paul adjusted to not having the internet and soon found himself developing bad habits offline. He was unable to keep in touch with people who were far away, and his snail mail began to overwhelm him until he was unable to cope with sending responses to his fans. The moral of his story – we are who we are and we will be who we will be, internet or no internet.

5 Ways Gratitude Can Backfire

Gratitude is good. Good for your health and well-being. Good for your relationships. In fact, I've written about the benefits of gratitude here, here, here, and here. But is gratitude always good? No. Although a focus on appreciating what you have instead of lamenting what you have-not is generally good advice, gratitude is not a panacea. Here are a few ways in which gratitude may be the wrong prescription:

1.       Overdosing on gratitude. When it comes to keeping track of your gratitude, the adage “more is better” doesn’t necessarily apply. If you set too high of a goal for your gratitude, you may find yourself falling short, which paradoxically could leave you feeling less grateful and happy than if you hadn’t tracked your gratitude at all. In a study of gratitude journaling, people who tracked their gratitude once per week were happier after six weeks, whereas those who wrote tracked their gratitude three times per week were not. If you find yourself hesitating when putting pen to paper, you may begin to think your life isn’t that good or you don’t have that much to be grateful for. If that is the case, take a step back and focus on quality over quantity.

How to End a Bad Relationship for Good

Sometimes we find ourselves in relationships that make us miserable more than they make us happy, relationships that we know in our hearts are not right, yet still have a hold on us. If this sounds like you, or someone you care about, here are some research-based strategies you may not have considered before for ending it for good and getting on with your life.

Do it for Future You

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It's only a month and a half into the New Year, and most of us have already abandoned our New Year's resolutions. We had the best of intentions, but our intentions only got us so far, and eventually we fell back into our old habits--eating and drinking too much, exercising and sleeping too little. Why are we so bad at this?

There are a number of reasons for our difficulty with New Year's Resolutions and other efforts to make positive changes in our lives. For example, our goals are often unrealistic or vague, we give up too easily when we have setbacks, and we have a tendency to "bask in projected glory"--research suggests that when we announce lofty goals and envision ourselves accomplishing them, we become less motivated to pursue these goals in reality because we feel, in some sense, that we're already there.

In addition to these obstacles, we may also be hindered by an inability to see our future selves--the ones who will suffer the consequences of the poor decisions we make today--as us. Rather, we tend to see them as different people altogether, people whose happiness is less important than the happiness of our present selves.