Don’t Chase Happiness If You Want To Be Happy, Says New Mental Health Research

a new to study published in Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences he explains that obsessively focusing on happiness (or lack thereof) can be a permanent obstacle in his pursuit of it. Instead, accepting your emotions as they are gives you a better chance of unlocking true happiness.

“People who value happiness to an extreme degree are less likely to achieve both short-term and long-term happiness,” explains psychologist Felicia Zerwas of the University of California, Berkeley. “One of the reasons scientists believe valuing happiness can be counterproductive is because it can make people feel more disappointed at times when happiness is most at hand.”

To explain this paradox, Zerwas cites a study in which researchers showed one group of participants a fake happiness-focused newspaper article to induce them to value happiness, while another group read about a topic unrelated to happiness.

The study found that people who were induced to value happiness were less happy compared to people in the other group.

“In investigating what explains this, the researchers found that lower levels of happiness were explained by feeling more disappointed while watching the video,” he explains.

In other words, excessive attention to our own feelings of happiness causes us to focus on the “what ifs” and “why nots” of life to a counterproductive degree.

Zerwas’ study focused on two different approaches that people take when valuing happiness:

1. aspiring to happiness. People who take this approach see happiness as a very important goal. The study suggests that this trend is relatively harmless.
2. concern for happiness. People who take this approach tend to judge whether they are happy enough. It is this tendency, according to Zerwas, that gets in the way of achieving happiness by introducing negative feelings into the pursuit of happiness.

Based on these two approaches, Zerwas suggests that there are two elements of happiness that can “make or break” your pursuit.

1. First, the strategies an individual uses to pursue happiness matter. For example, prioritizing activities that bring positivity into daily life is an evidence-based strategy for increasing happiness. If people can recruit useful strategies to reach their goal of feeling happy, the search is much more likely to be successful.
2. Second, the extent to which an individual feels bad about their emotions while pursuing happiness is important. Feeling bad about something can often help motivate us to pursue our goals more successfully. For example, after receiving a poor performance review, feeling bad can help motivate us to perform better in the future. The same does not happen when our goal is to feel happy; Feeling bad about our emotions during the pursuit of happiness is counterproductive to the goal of feeling happy and makes happiness less likely to be achieved.

Zerwas also mentions a couple of common fallacies that people run into that can lead to disappointment:

1. For one, people don’t always know what will bring them happiness which leads them to engage in strategies that are not really useful. For example, most people believe that spending money on oneself (rather than on someone else) should promote happiness, but empirical research suggests the opposite: people who spend money on themselves are not as happy as people who spend money on themselves. who spend it on other people.
2. Also, Social pressures can sometimes foster the fallacy that people should feel happy all the time. to achieve greater well-being. Research suggests this is not the case. Accepting one’s emotions (whether positive or negative) can increase well-being over time.

“In general, allowing yourself to experience your own emotions, whatever they may be, with an attitude of acceptance could be a useful tool to seek happiness,” he explains.

For anyone caught up in this paradoxical treadmill of happiness, Zerwas outlines two modalities of intervention that might help:

1. The first is an intervention focused on teaching people effective strategies to successfully achieve happiness. Therapists and mental health professionals can help people identify which happiness exercises might be most effective for their specific situation.
2. The second is a focused mindfulness intervention to decrease the pressure to set emotional goals and decrease the likelihood of feeling bad about one’s emotions during the pursuit of happiness.

You can find a full interview with psychologist Felicia Zerwas about her research here: How do we break the hamster wheel of happiness?