How to spend your way to happiness

To see what works, University of Colorado professor Leaf Van Boven compared discretionary spending on material goods like jewellery or clothing up against experiential items like vacations or theatre tickets. Most of the people he talked to felt that getting out and doing something made them much happier than simply adding another item to their collections — even after accounting for differences in price.

Since we tend to concentrate more on the highlights, memories of our experiences actually improve with time, it seems — whereas a shoe is just a shoe. And this makes us easier to live with as well. People who brag about their possessions are a lot harder to take than those whose major crime is showing off their holiday DVDs.

Things are different, of course, if the clothes don’t really fit or the meal out is a complete bust, says Jeremy Dean, pointing to parallel research by a University of Texas team on his excellent PsyBlog. This may be because unhappy experiences live longer in the mind than purchases that turn out badly.

Whether it's experiences or possessions that count, having less money to work with still shouldn’t be much of a problem, he suggests — it just forces you to be more creative. 

If anyone’s got any suggestions on how to do that, we’d love to hear them.