Having a wide variety of experiences — even bad ones — is important for our wellbeing

1. 1/10/21, 9:40 AM
Why heading back to the office could bring us all ‘psychological richness’ | Financial Times
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Why heading back to the office
could bring us all ‘psychological
richness’
Having a wide variety of experiences — even bad
ones — is important for our wellbeing
September 29 2021
Commuting may actually be good for us, alleviating ‘brain fog’ and making each day different © Hollie
Adams/Bloomberg
Next week, I will slowly begin The Great Return to the office. After 18
months of working from home, I’m a little nervous — trying to concentrate
in a bustling newsroom, having to look tidy, the messy business of dealing
with other human beings. But what I fear most is something else entirely:
losing the sense of wellbeing I’ve often felt during these months of
isolation.

2. 1/10/21, 9:40 AM
Why heading back to the office could bring us all ‘psychological richness’ | Financial Times
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Perhaps I have nothing to worry about. Research published on Tuesday
from neuroscientists at University College London suggests that going
into the office — at least the commuting part of it — might actually
be good for our wellbeing, alleviating “brain fog” by generating “more
diverse experiences”
, and helping to make “each day more unique”
.
“Diverse experiences” is one way to describe taking public transport in
London. And it should be noted that this study was commissioned and
paid for by the rail industry. But it just might be on to something.
According to a recent paper in Psychology Review, there is a component
of wellbeing that is often overlooked: having a diverse range of
experiences — even if they are unpleasant — can contribute to
“psychological richness”
.
The question of what it means to live “the good life” is something that
philosophers have wrestled with from the time of Aristotle. Since then,
wellbeing has largely been seen as being made up of two main
components: happiness, or “hedonic wellbeing”
, which is associated with
joy and comfort; and meaning, or “eudaemonic wellbeing”
, which connotes
purpose and making a contribution to society.
But Shigehiro Oishi, lead author of the research and professor of
psychology at the University of Virginia, says this framework neglects a
third dimension of wellbeing, characterised by variety and perspective-
changing experiences.
“This new concept of a psychologically rich life is really to address the
issue in the literature that was essentially so dichotomous in thinking —
that the good life is about either being happy or leading a meaningful life,”
he tells me. “It’s a different type of life goal — you’re trying to accumulate
different kinds of experiences.”
Oishi and his team’s research suggests that while most people still say
they most want happiness and meaning, a sizeable chunk — as many as

3. 1/10/21, 9:40 AM
Why heading back to the office could bring us all ‘psychological richness’ | Financial Times
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one in six people in Germany — cite psychological richness as the most
important element in their lives. Furthermore, the report finds that people
with psychologically rich lives tend to be more curious and more open to
social and political change.
We could use this to help us reframe what we consider negative
experiences as opportunities for expansion and a change of perspective.
Indeed, Oishi’s team analysed hundreds of obituaries from newspapers in
the US and Singapore and found that those who had gone through major
life challenges such as divorce or financial difficulties experienced higher
levels of psychological richness.
The research might also help explain why places that, for me at least,
seem rather uninspiring tend to rank so highly on “happiness” charts —
Finland was recently named the happiest country in the world for the
fourth year on the trot — while places I consider more exciting but which
are more stressful, such as New York, tend to rank poorly.
Perhaps, then, we should welcome the
stress that office life brings. “Your
home environment is incredibly familiar,
and there’s a real value in familiarity —
there’s comfort, it reduces stress
levels,” says Joseph Devlin, professor of
cognitive neuroscience at UCL and
author of the research on commuting.
“However it’s not a very rich
environment because there’s very very
little novelty in it.”
For me, working from home has
brought richness — my daily walks
haven’t left me wanting in terms of variety and interest, and the stillness of
home has allowed me to think deeply, which I sometimes struggle to do in

4. 1/10/21, 9:40 AM
Why heading back to the office could bring us all ‘psychological richness’ | Financial Times
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a buzzy newsroom. But I hope that my “new normal” of hybrid working will
allow me to keep my sense of wellbeing and even add to it, with new
challenges and stresses that I will try to embrace, knowing that while they
might not add to my hedonic joy or even bring me meaning, they make me
psychologically richer.
jemima.kelly@ft.com
This article has been amended to correct the spelling of Shigehiro Oishi