Do you spend enough time recalling and treasuring the everyday details of your life?

One final word of caution for the selfie and social media mad: don’t take this as a license to pull out your phone even more frequently. Excessive self recording isn’t good either, and Zhang points out that trying to capture a moment oftens interferes with enjoying it. Choose your moments carefully and savor them; don’t obsessively document.

Another study in the series looked at how much happiness we lose by not taking the time to recall and savor the seemingly boring details of our day-to-day lives. It found that volunteers significantly underestimated how much joy they’d get out of a recollection of an average day with their partner (and how interested they’d be in recalling the... See more