If you’re seeking happiness, you may have heard that variety is the spice of life. Interesting data suggests it’s true. When you’re pursuing happiness or figuring out how to be happy, variety can drive a positive experience—for more reasons than you think.
It’s a worthy concern: You want to be happy. And when you’re happy, you’ll not only be more energized and experience more success in work and life, but you’ll also be able to be more present for your people and support those you care about.
Research on variety provides a pathway to happiness.
How to Be Happy
Having variety in your life doesn’t have to mean giant shifts like a change in careers. It can encompass small things, like the projects you tackle during a workday or the way you spend your leisure time on a weekend.
If you want more variety in your life, you can add it in a many ways. For example, you might work on a couple of key projects or multiple tasks during your workday. Or you might have coffee with a few different people. During a weekend, you might spend the day doing laundry, going on a hike and then having dinner with friends later on.
1. Invest Time
Variety affects your happiness because it keeps you engaged and stimulated, and the novelty reduces boredom. But you must be sure you’re not hitting a point of overwhelm or trading off your feelings of productivity.
When you’re seeking variety, you’ll be wise to invest enough time in each of various activities. If you infuse more variety in your life with too little time invested in each, it will tend to reduce your happiness. It can leave you feeling stressed, because you’re trying to do too many things at once and not getting anything done to your satisfaction. This is according to analysis of eight different studies published in the Journal of Consumer Research.
You can incorporate the right amount of variety by choosing to work on two larger projects in a day, rather than a dozen small tasks. Or you might choose to go to the fitness club on Saturday morning, but pass on also hitting your yoga class in the afternoon.
How to be happy with more variety? Spend enough time on each of various activities to immerse yourself and enjoy the experience—and to feel like you’ve made progress and have been productive with each of them.
2. Add Variety Later in the Day
Variety also drives happiness because it’s linked with feeling more activated or energized.
Research from Duke University found that variety is linked with positive experience when it occurs later in the day, because that is when you’re more likely to be more aroused physiologically.
Earlier in the day, you may prefer less stimulation or variety. The volume on the radio as you arrived home in the evening will feel like too much when you start your car the next morning. Or if you’re shopping, you’ll be more likely to select fewer yogurt flavors in the morning than later in the day—or prefer to see less options served up in your online perusal of clothing in the morning versus the evening.
This is relevant for work as well. In the morning, you may be wise to immerse yourself in a more intense project—and really focus in on it for a few hours. And then in the afternoon, do your tasks that require more cognitive switching or shifting from one set of responsibilities to another–driving small wins.
How to be happy with variety? Introduce more variety—and do so later in the day.
3. Seek Variety in Your Friends
Another way to introduce variety in your life and boost your happiness is to connect with diverse friends and colleagues.
In fact, when more people interact more frequently in a community, it has a positive effect on outcomes. In cities, having a greater number of people who are open to new ideas and who interact regularly, tends to increase creativity, innovation and economic health, according to research published in Research Policy journal.
In addition, you can find friends that make you happy by having greater variety of relationships. Specifically, when you have about 50% of your friends who are different from you, that appears to be optimal, according to a study of 40,000 households published Psychological Science.
In fact, people said they felt a greater sense of belonging when they could talk regularly, work together, borrow things or get advice from their neighbors who were different than they were—and this feeling increased people’s likelihood to stay within the community.
You need some friends who are similar to you, but having those who are different from you introduces important elements of variety.
How to be happy with more variety? In addition to hanging out with kindred spirits, also seek our friends and colleagues who are different than you. Invite them onto your projects, ask them to have coffee or seek advice from them.
4. Seek Variety in the Places You Go
Another way to increase variety in your life is with the places you go. In fact, you’ll tend to feel happier when you have more variety in your routines and when you go to novel places. This is based on research published in Nature Neuroscience.
Interestingly, the study followed participants’ movements using GPS tracking and then asked them about their feelings. When they went to more places and had a greater variety of experiences, they tended to report more positive feelings.
How to be happy with more variety? Expand your physical or mental routine. Take a different route to work, meet in a different conference room than your typical go-to, meet over coffee rather than in the project space or do a walking meeting. Meet your friend at the dog park, rather than your usual lunch haunt.
How to Be Happy
There is plenty of research on happiness, but introducing variety may be one of the most overlooked strategies. All kinds of variety can increase your happiness, from variety in your projects or the way you spend time to the people and places that are part of your life and routines.
The more we know about how to be happy, the more we can create the conditions for joy, fulfillment and great experiences—and variety can be a terrific strategy for you.