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LLike many teenagers, I was once plagued with angst and annoyance – feelings my parents often encountered with bewilderment rather than sympathy. They were already in their fifties, and growing up in post-war Britain, they struggled to understand the sources of my discontent at the turn of the 21st century.
“The problem with your generation is that you always expect to be happy,” my mother once said. I was taken aback. Happiness was certainly the goal of life, and we should strive to achieve it at every opportunity? I just wasn’t ready to accept my melancholy as something beyond my control.
The ever-growing body of wellness literature seems to suggest that many others share my point of view. As a writer covering the latest research, however, I have noticed a shift in mindset and now come to the conclusion that my mom’s judgment was perfect. Over the past 10 years, numerous studies have shown that our obsession with happiness and high personal confidence can make us Less satisfied with our lives and less effective in achieving our real goals. This is because we can often be happier when we stop focusing on happiness.
Consider first the counterintuitive ways in which the conscious pursuit of happiness can influence our mood, starting with a study by Iris Mauss of the University of California at Berkeley. Participants were first asked to rate how well they agreed with a series of statements such as: “I only enjoy things in life to the extent that they influence my personal happiness” and ” I am concerned about my happiness even when I feel happy ”. People who scored high should have grabbed their last drop of joy every day, but Mauss found that they tended to be less satisfied with their daily lives and were more likely to have depressive symptoms even in times of relatively low stress.
Various factors may have caused this link, of course, but a second study suggested a strong causal link. In this experiment, Mauss asked half of the participants to read a paragraph outlining the benefits of feeling good, and then asked them to watch an enjoyable movie about a professional figure skater. Far from enhancing their enjoyment of the inspiring story, the emphasis on their own happiness had dampened their joy – compared to the second group of participants, who received a dry article to read on the importance of rational judgment.
These findings have now been replicated over and over again, with many other experiences revealing a dark side to the pursuit of happiness. In addition to reducing daily satisfaction, the constant desire to feel happier can make people more lonely. We’re so engrossed in our own well-being that we forget about the people around us – and we may even blame them for inadvertently lowering our mood or distracting us from more “important” goals.
The pursuit of happiness can even have strange effects on our perception of time, as the “fear of missing out” reminds us of how short our lives are and how much time we need to devote to less than exciting activities. In 2018, researchers at the University of Toronto found that simply encouraging people to feel happier while watching a relatively boring movie meant they were more likely to approve of the claim “m ‘escapes’. The same was true when participants were asked to list 10 activities that could contribute to their happiness: the reminder of everything they could do to improve their well-being put them in a sort of panic, because they recognized how little time they had to do all of this.
Perhaps most importantly, constant attention to our mood can prevent us from enjoying everyday pleasures. When polling participants in the UK, Dr Bahram Mahmoodi Kahriz and Dr Julia Vogt of the University of Reading found that people who performed better on the Mauss questionnaire felt less enthusiasm and anticipation for upcoming events and were less likely to savor the moment during events. himself. They were also less likely to look back fondly on a fun event in the days that followed – it just took up less of their free space. “They have such a high standard of achieving happiness that they don’t appreciate the small, simple things that really make sense in their lives – and they are more unhappy as a result,” Mahmoodi Kahriz says.
These lessons can be particularly important in the pandemic. Mood spikes can be rare, but simply appreciating the little pleasures amidst stress could help us overcome everyday anxieties, says Mahmoodi Kahriz. It will be much more difficult for people who are constantly thinking about their happiness, because they will always complain about the loss of the many more exciting activities that they could have done.
The law of repulsion
If the general pursuit of happiness is problematic, specific strategies designed to elicit greater contentment can also work against you.
Consider the oft-cited technique of “visualizing your success”. A student could imagine himself in a mortar board and in a robe; an athlete with a gold medal around his neck; someone on a diet might imagine the new clothes they will wear at the end of their diet.
The idea is behind successful books such as The power of positive thinking by Norman Vincent Peale and is often featured in inspiring biographies. It seems logical that thoughts of success can boost our motivation and self-confidence. What is wrong with imagining a better future for yourself?
A lot, according to research by Professor Gabriele Oettingen and colleagues at New York University, which has shown that this intuition is counterproductive. One of his early studies found that dieters who spend time imagining their newer, healthier figure tend to lose less weight than dieters who don’t indulge in such fantasies. Likewise, students who dream of their future jobs are less likely to find a job after college than students who don’t consider their successes in such detail.
Researchers suspect that positive fantasies – and the positive moods they create – can lead to feelings of complacency. “You feel great about the future, with no urgency to act,” says Dr. Sandra Wittleder, NYU postdoctoral fellow. This process could be brought into play in a recent study tracking student progress over two months: the more they reported fantasizing about their success, the less time they spent studying for their exams – presumably because, at an unconscious level. , they assumed they were already well on their way to getting a good grade. Inevitably, they performed less well overall.
Not only do these fantasies reduce the chances of success, but failures have an even greater emotional impact once you compare your previous hopes with your current situation. Echoing Mauss’s research on the pursuit of happiness, the Oettingen team found that students who engaged in this type of positive thinking suffered from more depressive symptoms months later.
If you really want to be successful, you are much better off engaging in “mental contrast,” which involves combining your fantasies of success with a deliberate analysis of the obstacles in your path and the frustrations you are likely to face. A dieter, for example, might think about the health benefits before considering the temptation to junk food, and the ways it might prevent you from achieving that goal. When considering these potential failures, they may not feel so good in the short term, but many studies have shown that this simple practice can increase motivation and improve long term success. “It creates a kind of tension or excitement,” says Wittleder, who has shown that the method can help dieters avoid temptation and eat healthier.
Thinking in black and white
These unexpected effects should give pause for thought to anyone striving for even greater satisfaction – a topic that will be on many people’s minds as a new year dawns. If we’re wrong, an overly ambitious set of resolutions will only prepare us for stress, disappointment, and loneliness.
Rather than making an elaborate list of life changes, we should aim for fewer, more realistic goals, and be aware that even some seemingly benign habits are best used sparingly. You will have heard that keeping a “gratitude journal” – in which you regularly count your blessings – can improve your overall well-being, for example. Still, research shows that we can overdose on it. In one study, people who counted their blessings once a week showed the expected increase in their satisfaction with life, but those who counted their blessings three times a week were actually less satisfied with their lives. “Doing the activity may in itself seem like a chore, rather than something you actually enjoy,” says Dr. Megan Fritz of the University of Pittsburgh, who recently reviewed the conflicting evidence for various happiness interventions.
You also need to reset your expectations about the way forward. While greater contentment is achievable, don’t expect miracles and accept that no matter how hard you try, feelings of frustration and sadness will arise from time to time. In fact, some negative feelings can serve a useful purpose. When we feel sad it is often because we have learned something painful but important, while stress can motivate you to make changes in your life. Just recognizing the purpose of these emotions and accepting them as an inevitable part of life can help you cope better than constantly trying to make them go away. Any effort we make – whether it’s specifically aimed at greater happiness or other measures of success – will come with challenges and disappointments, and the last thing you should do is blame yourself for sometimes feeling bad when the plans don’t work.
In the end, you could adopt the old adage “Prepare for the worst, hope for the best, and don’t be surprised at everything in between”. As my mom tried to teach me all these years ago, take the pressure off yourself, and you may find that contentment comes when you least expect it.
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David Robson is a science writer and the author of The intelligence trap: revolutionize your thinking and make smarter decisions (Hodder & Stoughton, £ 9.99). To order a copy, go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
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