I’m excited to share this interesting and easy to apply psychology shortcut with you today. I mentioned it briefly on Instagram last week. I just spent 10 days abroad in Morocco with my sisters and my mom, and at the very end of our trip, we spent 24, maybe like 30 hours in the most beautiful lodge outside of the city, a full day of relaxation, incredible food, right on site at the hotel, the lodge, a beautiful pool day.

The weather was amazing. The actual design of this place is incredible. I’ll link it in the show notes. It’s called the Berber Lodge outside of Marrakesh, Morocco. And when I shared about this experience, the lodge experience, that last day of our trip on Instagram, I mentioned the peak end rule and how staying at the Berber Lodge for the last two nights really increased the overall memory of the trip itself. That last 24 hours made a huge impact on the overall memory of the 10-day trip.

I referred to the peak end rule and someone reached out and said, hey, I would love to learn more about that. And so here I am in today’s show, I’m going to share about the peak end rule, how it came about, like what it was studied. There’s some interesting research around it. And I’m going to share just a couple ideas of how you can apply it to you as a mom, as a woman, as an employee, or as an employer, as a friend, as a memory maker, knowing about the peak end rule can help us build better experiences. And do it easily.

Segment: Mindful Moment

So, before we begin, I want to share a quick, mindful moment and then we’ll get into it. So, if you remember in a mindful moment, I just want to take a couple minutes and ground and breathe with you. If you are driving, of course, don’t close your eyes. If you’re somewhere that you can just take a minute and sit down, find a comfortable.

And this is going to be 90 seconds just to bring you home to yourself. Bring you back inside your body, remind you that everything you need is right inside of you right now. So, settle in, find a seat, allow your eyes to flutter closed, and take a big, deep breath. Inhale through your nose.

And slowly exhale through your mouth.

Take another big, deep inhale through your nose, see if you can count to five as you inhale,

and then let that breath out slowly through you.

With your eyes closed, I want you to pay attention to how the air feels coming in through your nostrils and out through your mouth with a couple deeper breaths.

Welcome back to yourself. Put your hands over your heart. Allow your eyes to flutter open. Thank you for breathing with me.

Peak-End Rule

I want to invite you to think about the last vacation that you went on, whether it was last week, last month, three years ago. What is one of your favorite memories from that trip? Do you remember the whole thing start to finish, or is there something that stands out as sort of the hallmark moment? Of the trip itself, most of us remember things in fits and starts.

The Peak

Our brain takes the entire experience that could be a weekend long, multiple weeks long, and as it’s happening, our brain is compressing it. Taking stock of what we need to know for later, what will serve us, how to feel all the emotions again in shorthand in the future. The peak and rule say that our brain doesn’t compress every moment of an experience equally, that it gives heavier weight to the peak emotional experience and the end of an experience.

The peak doesn’t necessarily mean the positive. The peak can be positive or negative. Think about your baseline emotional state, just sort of the general way that you feel most of the time as a line down a center of a page. And then on this page we’re going to imagine another line creating the peaks and valleys.

Above our baseline state would be positive emotion, below our baseline state would be negative emotion. The peaks and valleys of an experience, say a vacation, as our emotions are enhanced and things are amazing, maybe there’s something incredible and unexpected and surprising and delightful that happens and so, the sort of great things is rolling along above the line. And then there’s this giant peak, this moment or experience, like one piece that feels so great.

And then there’s of course, like little annoyances waiting in line or, you know, having your bag lost at the airport or getting lost somewhere in the city that kind of go below the line. Maybe some of you have had an experience where, you know, most of the trip is like sort of, okay, there’s a couple great things that happen and then something terrible happens. Maybe someone gets hurt.

We have a cousin who went to Hawaii on her honeymoon, and while she and her husband were out on a hike, a waterfall hike, she fell and broke her leg and had to be like airlifted out because they were in this remote part of Hawaii.

And to be honest, I haven’t had a conversation with her specifically about the memory of that. But you can imagine that having your leg snap on your honeymoon in Hawaii is probably a deep negative emotion. It’s the underside, the underbelly of the vacation that is going to factor in a lot more highly to the overall experience than some of the la di da things that happen.

That’s the peak. The explanation of the peak is the highest and lowest points of the experience, and it doesn’t have to be a vacation. It can be an experience at school. Maybe when you think about your high school as like a whole, there’s a couple things that sort of stand out to you as great or terrible, and those tend to color the overall experience in your memory. Of course, if you spend more time going through it and thinking about it and telling the stories again and reframing it, you can adjust that, but without all the extra work in processing, your initial recall of the experience will include a heavily weighted peak and end.

The End

So, let’s talk about the end just by the bias of recency. The end of an experience will also weigh more heavily in our overall recall of it than all the other pieces. My example of this that I shared on Instagram about my Morocco trip is that after a full and wonderful nine days in the country with ups and downs, we spent the last 24 to 36 hours having a beautiful, delightful, incredible, relaxing, rejuvenating experience in a really, stunning location with comfortable beds and delicious food, and perfect weather. And so even if some other parts of the trips had been a little bit bumpy, truly bumpy. Like the 12 hours before we landed at the Berber Lodge we had been driving back all in one day from the dunes of the Sahara Desert.

I know, wah, wah. We had to drive in the car to get back from the Sahara Desert, but it was a long day in the car, and we knew that going in, it was part of the trip, and by the end of that day, we were just so ready to be done in the car. I would not count the drive from the dunes to the Berber Lodge as a high point of the trip by any stretch of the imagination.

However, spending that next day in just a perfect environment. Virtually erased all the negative that had come before. The negative emotion, the little bits of annoyance, the actual like motion of driving through the Atlas Mountains in a car, being kind of tired of each other, all those sorts of things.

They were erased because of the end, because when we recalled the trip in our most recent memory, the end had been perfect. So, this is it in a nutshell. The combination of the peaks, positive or negative, and the end, positive or negative is going to create most of our bias with regards to memories and experiences that we’ve had.

This is true for entire lifespans. It’s true for, you know, boxed experiences like a vacation that has a start and a finish. It’s true for individual experiences that you might have in interacting with a store.

For example, like you go into Madewell, you’re doing some spring shopping. What is the peak? In the end of that experience, you might have a really great experience and then at the end, the checkout retail specialist is sort of grumpy and isn’t very nice and maybe makes a mistake on your order, and then is kind of, you know, not great about fixing it properly. And so, this whole good experience ends with something negative and you leave the store with sort of a sour taste in your mouth. I’m sure that you can relate or have ideas or, or memories of experiences that have been like overall pretty great until the end and it kind of busts. The whole thing crashes and burns because the end is what you remember most, and the end wasn’t great.

I didn’t see any research around this, but I wonder if this is one of the reasons that traditionally many cultures finish a meal with something sweet, with dessert, that you have a meal, good or bad, and you finish it with something that evolution narrowly. Your body is going to enjoy because we love the density of the energy of sugar and something sweet. So, whether it’s oranges with cinnamon, which is a traditional Moroccan dessert that we ate every day in Morocco or whether it’s a dense piece of chocolate cake or whatever it is that you, that you like for dessert, ending a meal, you can have a terrible meal and end it with dessert.

Finishing with Dessert

We had this experience in Morocco, one of our meals, we went to a restaurant right in Marrakesh Center and the food was okay. I’m not going to say that it was terrible, but it wasn’t what we expected. It was a little bit bland. We kept like laughing about why there wasn’t salt on the table because we needed some salt and cumin to like kick it up a notch.

So, I’d say that the food was average, like I’d give it a 6 out of 10 and the desserts blew our socks off. We decided sort of begrudgingly to stay for dessert, partly because we weren’t very satisfied with the rest of the meal. So, we decided to give it a try. We ordered carrot cake, chocolate torte, and a lemon tart. I’m trying to think if there was something else. Every single bite of every one of those desserts was amazing. They were so good, so good. In fact, that the next night we went to dinner somewhere else. And on the way back to our riad, our hotel, we stopped by the former restaurant to pick up dessert to go because it had been such a great experience. Hilariously one of our least favorite meals of the trip turned into one of our favorite experiences of the trip because of the end.

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Peak-End Rule Research

The peak and rule were brought to light by some of my favorite researchers, psychologist and economist, Daniel Kahneman, and researcher Barbara Frederickson. These two conducted a study back in 1993 titled When More Pain Is Preferred to Less Adding a Better End. Through this research, Kahneman and Frederickson found that our memories are not accurate, that they’re not reasonable when it comes to recalling events that we’ve experienced. The way that they discovered this was through a three-part experiment.

They had a group of people round one, the people put their hand in cold water. This was 57 degrees Fahrenheit, or 14 degrees Celsius for 60 seconds. Round one 60 seconds of cold water done.

In round two of the experiment, the same people put their hand in the same coldest water for 60 seconds and then keep their hand in slightly warmer water for an additional 30 seconds. 60 seconds at 57 degrees Fahrenheit, and then 30 more seconds at 59 degrees.

In round three, all the participants had the option to choose whether they wanted to repeat round one, which remember round one is 60 seconds of the coldest water done. Or if they wanted to repeat round two, which was 60 seconds of the coldest water, followed by 30 seconds of slightly warmer water.

Now just hearing about the experimental conditions, what would you choose?

 60 seconds of cold done, or 60 seconds of cold and 30 seconds of slightly warmer, but still very cold. The most logical choice seems that it would be to repeat round one. That was the shortest number of uncomfortable conditions.

That isn’t what happened. 80% of participants chose to repeat round two. Having the slightly less uncomfortable final 30 seconds greatly shifted the perspective of the participants round two, even being 30 seconds longer of discomfort felt better because the end was slightly less uncomfortable than the rest.

Notice that to have a little bit better experience, the researchers didn’t turn the heat all the way up. It wasn’t like, oh, now you get to finish with this beautifully warm water. It was just slightly less uncomfortable, and that increased the ability of the brain to process it as a positive or more positive experience.

This type of procedure was repeated by Kahneman, this time with a different partner, Radelmeyer in 1996. I think this is a fascinating study as well.

They wanted to retest the responses based on this peak end rule that had been established years earlier, and they did this through colonoscopies.

Now, I must be honest, I have not yet had a colonoscopy. I know I’m 40 at some point soon I probably should just for general like baseline health and wellness. I haven’t yet done that though. I have however, witnessed colonoscopies in nursing school, and I’m familiar with what they’re like. Not entirely pleasant experiences from what you can imagine, having a tube, you know, inserted into your rectum and scoping around in your bowel for a little while.

In this study, the patients were divided in half and the colonoscopies were conducted as normal. With one half of the patient, let’s say group one, they finished the colonoscopy as they typically do, removed the tube, and they were done. The second group, like the previous experiment, they finished with a slightly less uncomfortable end. This was accomplished by leaving the colonoscopy scope inserted in the patient’s body, but not moving it around during the colonoscopy.

You know, things are kind of moving around and they’re taking pictures and whatever. They finished with three minutes of simply leaving the scope in place, which, again, not comfortable, but slightly less uncomfortable than having it inserted and moving. The final three minutes were just leaving the scope in place gently, not moving it around and then taking it out, and that was the end.

So, would you rather have your colonoscopy end as soon as possible, or end with three minutes of stillness? Now this sounds bizarre, doesn’t it? What happened is that participants who were asked to recall and evaluate the experience found that the group two, the prolonged colonoscopy procedures, rated their experience overall as less painful.

Then those who underwent the typical colonoscopy procedure, also patients who felt the longer discomfort, so that extra three minutes at the end were more likely to return for future colonoscopies. So, the gradual release in the discomfort from these longer procedures led patients to evaluate the experience as more positive and to take better care of themselves by returning for future colonoscopies.

Okay, so let’s bring this home a little bit outside of just like laboratory or medical experiences, which those are valid and relevant. We all, well, maybe we don’t all go to labs, but we all have medical experiences. How do we then think about using peak end rule to our advantage so that we are able to experience more positive emotions and recall our memories or create memories with more intention in our lives?

Using Peak-End Rule in Regular Life

Knowing that I was going to be talking about this today, I had an experience this morning with my daughter that I thought was interesting. She missed school one day last week because she didn’t feel well, and then she had the homework to make up. I was gone until Thursday last week. So, I came home, she went to school on Friday and then she had the homework over the weekend, and I hadn’t followed up on it.

And I think Dave was relieved to have me home. And so, we were just like happy to let her play all weekend. Normally we have a rule that you do your homework before you play with friends.

She played all weekend and had a fantastic time, and I wouldn’t trade that. But she woke up this morning and realized she hadn’t done her homework yet. And while I am not in agreement with this, there’s sort of a weird policy with her classroom that if you don’t have your homework finished, that you do it during lunch. Rather than being able to sit at lunch and socialize with her friends, she would have to sit at a separate table and do her homework during lunch. She hates this. And so, we agreed that she could stay home and finish her homework even though it would make her a little bit late for school.

We’re sitting at the dining room table, and she is just having a really hard time. I don’t know if she was extra tired or just feeling stressed out by being late to school and not having done her homework over the weekend and feeling a little overwhelmed by it all. And so, I’ve been practicing not stepping in. Really avoiding helicopter parenting. So, where I could have just walked her through every step of every problem, I decided to, I’ll have to do another episode on this. I’m doing some research or learning in school about some techniques for perseverance. And so, one of those is to provide encouragement but not take over.

So, I was providing encouragement and she was just having a hard time poor thing. And I was just trying to get her through it and just helping a little bit as, as little as I could while keeping her on task. And I finally went and got my own journal and said, I’m just going to, you know, work parallel to you.

So, while she was working, I was doing my journaling and toward the end, I was thinking about peak-end rule. This had been a hard, like 25 minutes of her working on her math and her spelling and you know, some tears involved and just high stress. And so, I thought, what could I do to make this fun at the end just to like wrap it all up and have it been fun. And so, I turned on a fun song as she was kind of finishing up and we did a big celebration of her finishing her last assignment and or her last problem on the assignments and, you know, celebrated putting it in her backpack and gave her a high five. And we packed her snack for school.

And while there was a piece of me that was just a little bit like burned out parenting wise and annoyed. Like if we had just remembered, you know, there’s a lot of in my head, like we could have done this homework over the weekend. We have the whole time. She did a lot of playing. We could have done it on Friday or on Saturday and avoided this morning of tears and being leaked to school and all those other things that at the end of the day don’t matter at all.

And yet they can kind of cloud your perspective thinking about peak-end rule and about my ultimate value of wanting my kids to enjoy learning and enjoy school and not have this negative homework experience to color her ideas about going to school and about being able to even do homework. Like I want, if they must do homework, we might as well enjoy it on some level.

So, I tried to intentionally engineer the end of the experience that the full experience had been kind of tough. I intentionally engineered the end of the experience with the amount of control that I had. I couldn’t, of course, make her feel differently, but I could encourage positive emotion through encouragement and fun and playing some fun music and things that I knew would kind of boost that.

And on the way to school, same thing, like we had a great conversation, and we were excited, and she got to school beaming. Even though she was an hour late, she was beaming, and I didn’t make her feel bad that she was late, and she had gotten her homework done and she got lots of high fives and we said, you know, we kind of recommitted to the plan of getting her homework done right after her after school snacks so that she doesn’t have to feel stressed out about it.

She can do you know her after school snack, hang out for a minute, get the homework done, and then go out and play with her friends like she does every day. This is an example of using the peak end rule with intention to engineer a better memory of an experience. So, without a child struggling with homework and being late to school, what are some ways that you can use the peak end rule?

Apply it to your everyday so that you can have better memories and better overall experience in your life? I’m going to give you a couple ideas. Number one is to try to end on a high note. That’s an obvious one relates to the example that I just shared. How do you end an experience for it to be perceived?

The best coming last. In some ways, you know, that common saying, save the best for last, which sometimes in my life I’ve sort of bucked against and said, hey, why save the best for last? We should have dessert first. You know, live life right now. And when you’re considering the peak and rule and the way that our brains are wired, sometimes it makes sense to end on the high note, reserve the best and fun moments toward the end of the event.

Making sure that they still are incorporated into the body of the event. For example, you don’t want to have a birthday party that goes on and on and-on-and people leave early, thereby missing the fun thing that you saved for the end. Have the, the final moment be sort of the, the exit plan you can rely on, ending on a high note as increasing everyone’s overall perception and memory of the experience itself.

You can also use this idea in your health. So, ending exercise at lower intensity. For example, like just like the 60 seconds of cold water abruptly ended versus 60 seconds of cold, plus 30 seconds of slightly less cold. You can have events that feel difficult or tough and at a little bit lower intensity.

So maybe you do a hard run and then you finish. A mile of walking or, or, or slow jogging. Maybe you go on a hard hike and then you finish with 20 minutes of stretching, you lower the intensity toward the end of your physical activity. Uh, maybe you are doing your homework and you do the hard stuff and then you save one or two kinds of enjoyable problems for the end.

Relying on that, saving some of the best for last allows you to use the peak and rule to your a. Intentionally. Number two is to create more peaks. More peaks for more memories. We remember moments of intense pleasure, even if those moments are short-lived or if they’re, you know, not the whole experience.

So, if you can add in some intensely fun. Or exciting or surprising or interesting events, even in a mundane day or week, you will remember the whole experience as being better than the sum of its parts. For example, one of the experiences that we had in Morocco was writing camels, watching the sunset over the dunes of the Sahara Desert.

It. Unbelievable. And it took a long time to get there from where we were staying in Marrakesh. So, hours of road tripping. Granted, we saw some fun sites along the way, but for the most part we were in the car for a whole day and a half. We did this incredible experience and then we were in the car for a long time on the way out.

When I think about it in like the specific moment by moment. There was a lot of just sort of boring car ride. When I think about it, the experience was incredible because it was well worth the sort of low-level baseline, mundane to have that short-lived, incredible experience. Hashtag worth it, right?

You have things in your life that are totally worth it, even though they take some building, some time, some investment, some trouble to get there. Along with this one, another tip is that you don’t have to have every experience be long lived at some point, I remember thinking it wasn’t worth going on vacation unless I could stay for multiple nights, like an overnight trip.

Didn’t really matter. What I’ve experienced in the last decade is that even one night away can feel like an entire vacation doing short bouts of intensely pleasurable or positive experiences. Feel like, uh, a whole memory is being made. You can have short vacations; you can have small portions of your favorite meal and still love it.

You can treat yourself to little bouts of enjoyment and have those small moments of joy increase your overall experience in your life dramatically. So, the peak end rule in summary. Provides, uh, an evolutionary purpose of allowing our brain to sort of compress and synthesize entire experiences into short memories, and we can engineer those memories to be even more beneficial for us.

By intentionally including peaks, positive peaks and by intentionally finishing on high notes. By seeking out and crafting these types of experiences in everyday life, in the way that you serve meals to the, to the family, in the way that you plan vacations, in the way that you host a party, in the interaction that you have with an employer or employee or coworker or friend, how can you build positive emotion?

Even in short bouts and finish on a high note, finish with a compliment finish with something slightly less painful than whatever the difficult thing that you were discussing is. In this way, you can use peak end to collect many wonderful memories over the years to come. Thank you so much for tuning in and listening today to episode 2 31 of the Live free Creative podcast.

You know that I love sharing with you. I love being a part of your weekly experience, and I hope that you get a little bit of joy out of every episode that you listen to. If it’s been a while since you’ve shared an episode with a friend or family member, consider sending a text to a sister or a friend or a neighbor, uh, that you think they might enjoy.

Maybe this one may be one of your other favorites. This podcast travels by word of mouth, and I would love to invite you to share your favorite episode with someone this week. Thank you again for being here. I hope that whatever you’re carrying that feels heavy, feels a little bit lighter this week, and that you’re able to find beautiful peak moments of joy in the middle of the life that you’re leading.

I’ll chat with you next time. Bye-bye.