There is an idea that I think many of us carry around without ever examining it: if you want to feel better, do something nice for yourself. Buy the thing or book the meal. The logic seems airtight. You know what you like, so you give yourself more of it and expect the lift to follow.
And while there is nothing wrong with occasionally treating ourselves, some research suggests there might be a better way to feel better.
I am not a psychologist or any kind of clinician. I read this research as a curious generalist and reflect on it, nothing more. The study below is one experiment on particular groups of people, with a modest effect size, not a settled law of human nature or a prescription for your life.
Nelson, Layous, Cole and Lyubomirsky ran a six-week experiment, published in the journal Emotion in 2016, that put this exact idea to the test. They took 473 participants and randomly sorted them into four groups. One group did acts of kindness for other people. One did acts of kindness for the world. One treated themselves, a favorite meal, a hobby, a small indulgence. And one did neutral activities as a control. Everyone did three relevant acts a week for four weeks, with a follow-up two weeks later.
The treat-yourself group is probably the one I would have bet on. I would have been wrong. As the authors put it, “we found that the 2 types of prosocial behavior led to greater increases in psychological flourishing than did self-focused and neutral behavior.” The people doing things for others or the world rose. The people treating themselves did not pull ahead of the control group at all.
In this context, “flourishing” refers to the construct defined by Corey Keyes: a composite of emotional well-being (positive feelings and life satisfaction), psychological well-being (self-acceptance, purpose, personal growth, autonomy, mastery, positive relations with others), and social well-being (feeling connected to, accepted by, and able to contribute to a community). It is meant to capture optimal mental health rather than just the absence of distress, which is part of why a lift in flourishing is not the same thing as a lift in moment-to-moment positive emotion.
A few things are worth holding before this hardens into a slogan. The prosocial vs control effect on flourishing was medium in size (d = 0.31). This is a clue, not a closed case. It is not a license to read “self-care never works” into the data. It does not say that.
What I find more interesting than the headline is the mechanism. Doing kind things for others made people feel good.
The self-treats did not produce that same lift. There is something almost backward about it. The route that points straight at your own pleasure misses, and the route that points away from yourself loops back and delivers the feeling you were chasing in the first place.
This fits an older thread of research the 2016 study builds on. Back in 2008, Dunn, Aknin and Norton found that people who spent money on others tended to report greater happiness than people who spent it on themselves, This corner of the field is not airtight either, though. A 2022 close replication of that spending experiment, with 133 participants, did not reproduce the significant happiness difference using the original analysis. The broad pattern holds across studies, but the precise size of it is still being argued over, which is exactly how this stuff should work.
I have come to read this less as an instruction and more as a quiet correction to a default I did not know I had. The authors put their own suggestion gently, which I appreciate. They write “People striving for happiness may be tempted to treat themselves. Our results, however, suggest that they may be more successful if they opt to treat someone else instead”.
So here is the small thing the finding has changed for me, on an ordinary afternoon when the day has gone grey and I notice the old pull toward buying my way back to feeling fine. I still sometimes buy the thing. But more often now I send the message I have been meaning to send, or do the small unglamorous favor for someone who is not expecting it. It costs about the same half hour, and the half hour does seem to land differently.
If you are reaching for treats because something heavier is sitting underneath the flatness, that is worth taking to a counsellor or therapist rather than to a hobby store. No article is a substitute for that.
