4. Spend Money Now, But Consume Later

4. Spend Money Now, But Consume Later

Buying something and consuming something are two separate things.

Research shows that a waiting an event can actually make people happier than the event itself.

Whenever possible, delay your consumption into the future.

The guy who buys a beer and drinks it right away might get X amount of pleasure from it. But the guy who saves the beer until later, gets X amount of pleasure from when it’s eventually consumed plus all the additional pleasure of looking forward to drinking the beer.

Book your holidays in advance, order yourself some books, clothes, or whatever from Amazon. And then enjoy a waiting of pleasure.

5. Spend Money to Buy Time

Let’s imagine you go to a museum. If you can buy quick line ticket - do it. You basically use your money to exchange some “unhappy” time with “happy” time. I’m sure there are lots of activities in your life that you don’t particularly enjoy. Maybe it’s lawning the mown, washing the dishes, cleaning the house, doing the taxes, filling in tedious documents, and so on. Depending on how much money you have, it may make sense to outsource some of these activities. And then you use the time you won for activities that contribute to your happiness. Instead of cleaning the house for two hours, you may go to the gym and then spend some quality time with your family. The point is, buying time allows you to replace misery-inducing activities with happiness-enhancing activities. Further, you might want to spend that additional time on sleep:

And now I d like to sum up and mention the key points of my presentation. Your genes , external factors and your behavior contribute to your level of happiness, but your behavior has much more significant impact than external factors. We ‘ve also spoken about influence of money spending on our happiness and mentioned some crutial advices to feel better.

That brings me to the end of my presentation and several conclusions.

I’d like to end my presentation with the quote of Robert Kiosaki who is famous American writer, businessmen and investor

. The desperation of obese and overweight is reflected in the steady steam of advice pouring daily from the internet, best selling books, newspapers and magazines. Our appetite for any twist diet that will take pounds off seems to be insatiable as our appetite for rich food. Here is the diagram that represents incremental growth of the overweight population till the 2008. The same character of growth is observed nowadays, which proves that the problem is really serious.

Now, let’s talk about the complexity of the problem and contradictive research results. I’d like to notice that scientists are not staying aside trying to find the ways to tackle the problem. Obesity turned out to be quite a complex problem and all obvious and simple “decisions” of the problem like sticking to the special diet and leading more active way of life seem to fail at the end. Of course we hope that someday scientists may provide us with the pill that readjusts our methobalism and resets our cravings so we prefer broccoli to burgers, but now the researches are quite contradictive and there are no significant results achieved still. For example, a study published in September’s American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found a link between increased dairy intake and weight loss, although in the May 2008 Nutrition Reviews discovered there was no such link. A paper in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine in January 2010 postulated a connection between job stress and obesity, but in October a report in the journal Obesity concluded there was no such correlation. That proves that the problem of obesity is more complicated than it seems.

Now I’d like to move to the next point of my presentation and talk about the factors that influence the problem. Many factors contribute to the problem. It is partly environment—the eating habits of your friends, what food is most available in your home and your local stores, how much opportunity you have to move around at work. It is partly biology—there are genetic predispositions for storing fat, for having higher satiety thresholds, even for having more sensitive taste buds. It is partly economics—junk food has become much cheaper than fresh products. And it is marketing, too—food companies have become masterful at playing on human social nature and our feelings to steer us towards unhealthy but proﬁ table fare.

And we cant stop wondering if there is any possible solution. And what is the most effective way to fight with the problem. And this question brings me to the last point of my presentation. It turns out that the best way to tackle the problem is behavioral approach and psychological therapy. And it is not only about the problem of obese people, but also about alcohol drug addicted, children with autism. The reason is that we are taking after our surrounding. The poor eating and exercise that we observe in our friends and colleagues encourage us to follow the suit. On the state level there were some proposals like banning the sale of beverages that contain high amount of sugar or introduce special tax on the high dence production that weren’t accepted yet.

And now I d like to sum up and mention the key points of my presentation. The problem of obesity is quite complex, but still important because it is widespread. It’s complexity leads to contradictive research results. The best way to tackle the problem is convincing people that certain diet restrictions are really crutial for their health.

I d like to end my presentation with the quote of a famous American author Adelia Devis. Which highlights that obesity is much more complicated than it seems.

“To say that obesity is caused by merely consuming too many calories is like saying that the only cause of the American Revolution was the Boston Tea Party”

Thank you for your attention. Now you are free to ask any questions.

⇐ Предыдущая 1 2 34