Level Up Your Mental Health 🚀

The game theory of wellness 🎮🎲

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Let’s play a game:

Each morning you wake up with 2 points.

As you go about your day, for every positive interaction you get +2 points, for every negative interaction you get -3 points.

You wake in the morning and have three options:

Meditate, Read, or check Twitter:

1. Meditate: +1

2. Read: +1

3. Twitter: +2 ~ -3

While meditation and reading will be positive. Checking Twitter can give you the greatest hit of positive emotion but it can also give you a negative jolt if you stumble on a negative comment or news.

Let’s say you check Twitter and it turned out well: +2

A short while later you’re taking a walk, listening to music on your headphones, and a new song you absolutely love starts playing.

Positive: +2

As you walk a car hits a puddle and you’re splashed with muddy water. The driver doesn’t even stop to apologize.

Negative: -3

You have two choices from this interaction:

1. Yell at the driver and think of insults as you walk: -1

2. Forget it even happened: 0

The splash really makes you angry and so you yell at the driver: -1

In the afternoon, you have a really good lunch: +2

Your roommate comes back from work and you both get into an argument about chores: -3

Total points by end of day: 1

You apparently had a bad day, since you ended with fewer points than you started with.

Happiness is an optimization game

We usually think of happiness on long timelines and in very fanciful, vague terms. We imagine it to be this future state where we finally have what we wanted for so long and we’re in love with everything.

It’s better however to look at happiness from this daily perspective. To zoom in on each interaction that make up a day.

When you think of it like this happiness is more in your control.

It becomes clear that engaging in certain actions will only lead to loss. And your time is better spent seeking out positive interactions that add points to your day.

This doesn’t mean you only do things that make you feel good in the short term.

It doesn’t mean you spend each day avoiding confrontation, eating junk food, or scrolling social media. The long-term consequence of these actions will be negative when you become angry, unhealthy, and unproductive.

Instead, it means you see happiness as an optimization game. You become extremely conscious on a minute by minute basis how you spend your points in a day.

Ultimately how happy you are in life will be the average of these very mundane days.

Happiness is less about getting a raise at work every 6 months and more about not yelling at that driver.

It’s less about getting a thousand followers on Twitter and more about not replying the trolls. That rude comment on Twitter doesn't need your reply, it's already a -3, arguing further just leads to more loss.

When you start to see wellness, your mental health, from this game theory perspective the ways you can optimize it also become much clearer.

Rather than fueling the negatives—find bright spots to insert into your day. Go to the beach, call a friend, exercise, cook for someone…

Lasting happiness is something you work on daily. It’s the most important game you’ll play.

Play it well. Take care of yourself.

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P.S.

• Play this fun game that teaches game theory.

• My Best of Wellness playlist on Spotify.