Why the quickest route to happiness may be to
do nothing
Psychological research shows that
the harder we strive to be happy, the less likely we
are to achieve that goal
Strive: If you strive to do something or strive for something, you make a
great effort to do it or get it.
By David Robson
18 December 2018
How do you envisage
the pursuit of happiness?
Envisage: Visualize, predict
Pursuit: Search
For many, it is a relentless journey, and the more you put in, the more you
get out. Just consider the following episode from Elizabeth Gilbert’s
best-selling inspirational memoir Eat, Pray, Love, in which she recounts some
advice from her Guru. “Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You
fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around
the world looking for it,” she writes. “You have to participate relentlessly in
the manifestations of your own blessings. And once
you have achieved a state of happiness, you must make a mighty effort to keep
swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it. If
you don’t, you will leak away your innate
contentment.”
Relentless: Ruthless, unkind, inexorable.
Blessing: Benefit, profit, advantage, gain, interest
Leak away: Loss. Leak is a hole: “WikiLeaks”
Contentment: Contentment
is a feeling of quiet happiness and satisfaction
While this kind of attitude may work
for some, the latest scientific research suggests that it can also seriously backfire for many people – leading, for instance, to
feelings of stress, loneliness, and personal failure. According to this view,
happiness is best seen as kind of timid bird: the harder you strive to catch
it, the further it flies away.
Backfire: If a plan or project backfires, it has the opposite result to the one
that was intended.
These findings help to explain the
familiar stress and disappointment that some feel during special events such as
their birthday, Christmas or New Year’s Eve. But the research
also has profound consequences for your long-term wellbeing, with some useful
guidance for arranging your broader life goals.
Eve: The eve of a particular event or occasion is the day before it, or the
period of time just before it. New Year's Eve is the last day of
the year, the day before New Year's Day.
Broader: Something that is broad is wide. Wide is extensive.
Self-help or self-hinder?
Hinder: Impediment, obstacle
Iris Mauss, now at the University of
California, Berkeley, was one of the first psychologists to explore the idea
scientifically.
She says she was inspired by the sheer volume of self-help books that have been published in
the US in last couple of decades, many of which presented happiness as the sine
qua non of existence. “Wherever you look, you see books about how happiness is
good for you, and how you basically should make yourself happier, almost as a
duty,” she says. But are those volumes only setting people up for
disappointment?
Sheer volume: Big volume
“People might set very high
standards for their own happiness as a function of this – they may think they
should be happy all the time, or extremely happy, and that can set people up to
feel disappointed with themselves, that they fall short – and that could have
these self-defeating effects.”
She also wondered if simply asking
the question – how happy am I? – could create a self-consciousness that quashes the feelings you are trying to cultivate.
Quash: Go against
Working with Maya Tamir, Nicole
Savino and Craig Anderson, Mauss tested the idea with a series of studies. A
detailed questionnaire, for instance, asked participants to rate statements
such as:
·
How
happy I am at any given moment says a lot about how worthwhile
my life is
·
To
have a meaningful life, I need to feel happy most of the time
·
I
value things in life only to the extent that they influence my personal
happiness
Worthwhile: Valuable
As expected, the team found that the
more strongly the participants endorsed those
sentiments, the less content they were with their current life.
Endorse: If you endorse someone or something, you say publicly that you support
or approve of them
The picture was complicated by the
participants’ circumstances. For people who had recently experienced stressful
events such as a bereavement, say, the attitudes to
happiness made no difference. So a desire to be happy won’t necessarily make
you feel worse when your circumstances are genuinely tough –
but it can quell the feelings of contentment that might
naturally arise when times are good.
Bereavement [ bɪri:vmənt ]: Bereavement is the sorrow you
feel or the state you are in when a relative or close friend dies. Sorrow is a
feeling of deep sadness or regret
Quell: If you quell an unpleasant feeling such as fear or anger, you stop
yourself or other people from having that feeling.
Arise: If a situation or problem arises, it begins to exist or people start
to become aware of it.
Tough [ tʌf ]: A tough way of life or period of time is difficult or full of
suffering.
Mauss and her colleagues’ next step
was to see if they could manipulate people’s attitudes to alter their happiness
in the short-term. To do so, they asked half their participants to read a fake
newspaper article extolling the
importance of happiness, while the control group read a similar article about
the benefits of “good judgement”, with no reference to emotion. The team then
asked the participants to watch a heart-warming film about an Olympic win, and
questioned them about their feelings afterwards.
Extolling: Exalting
Once again, they noted an ironic
effect: the film was less likely to buoy the mood of the
people who had been primed to desire greater happiness, compared with the
people who had read the neutral article.
Buoy: If someone
in a difficult situation is buoyed by something, it makes them feel more
cheerful and optimistic.
It seems that reading about the
happiness had raised the participants’ expectations of how they “should” be
feeling when watching something optimistic and hopeful, and so they were
constantly questioning how they felt. When their actual feelings didn’t reach
those standards, they finished the film feeling disappointed rather than elated.
Elate: Excited. If you are elated, you are extremely happy and excited because
of something that has happened.
You’ve probably felt this way during
a big event like a wedding, or an expensive “trip of a lifetime”: the more you
wanted to enjoy every last moment, the less fun it became, whereas an
unexpectedly good trip somewhere nearby may have been a far more positive
experience. Mauss’s research, however, shows that this might apply to many
other areas of your life.
Mauss has since shown that the
desire for (and pursuit of) happiness can also increase feelings of loneliness
and disconnection, perhaps because it causes you to focus your attention on
yourself and your own feelings rather than appreciating the people around you.
“Self-focus might make me engage with other people less, and I might judge
other people more negatively if I perceive them to ‘mess’ with my happiness,”
Mauss added.
These effects don’t end there.
Earlier this year, Sam Maglio at the University of Toronto and Aekyoung Kim at
Rutgers University found another way that the conscious pursuit of happiness
may backfire: by leading us to feel that time is slipping away.
Like Mauss, Maglio and Kim used a
range of elegant studies to pin down a causal effect, including self-reported
questionnaires and interventions. One of their studies asked participants to
list the 10 things that would make them happy in their life (which might be
something as simple as devoting a few hours a week to be with your family).
Rather than leading to feelings of optimism about the future, it caused them to
be especially stressed about the limited amount of time they had to do all
those things – and they were less happy as a result. This was not true if they
simply listed the things that made them happy at that moment - it was the
desire to increase their happiness that was the problem.
The problem, says Maglio, is that
happiness is something of a nebulous and moving goal – it’s very difficult to
feel that you’ve reached maximum happiness and even if you do feel content, you
want to prolong those feelings. The result is that you are always left with
more to do. “Happiness devolves from something pleasant that I can enjoy right
now, to something burdensome that I
have to keep working at over and over and over,” Maglio says.
Burdensome: If you describe something as burdensome, you mean it is worrying or
hard to deal with.
Remember Elizabeth Gilbert’s
description of “the mighty effort to keep
swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it” in
Eat, Pray, Love? That’s exactly the kind of thinking that, according to
Maglio’s research, will actually make us less happy.
Mighty: Huge, enormous
These results should not be taken to
discourage treatment for serious mental health issues such as depression: with
a clinical problem, it is always better to seek professional help. And Maglio
argues that the findings aren’t a reason to avoid big life decisions that
really could improve your own wellbeing – such as leaving an abusive partner.
Sometimes, we really do need to focus on our immediate happiness.
If you aren’t facing a major life
challenge, however, these effects might lead us to rethink our attitudes and
behaviours. Maglio points out that social media makes us especially conscious
of other people’s airbrushed lives,
potentially increasing our desire to live a happier, more exciting life. He
thinks we would be happier if we didn’t look to others to set our standards for
what constitutes a good and meaningful life.
Airbrush: To improve the image of (a person or thing) by concealing defects
beneath a bland exterior
“If you are constantly reminded of
your friend at this exotic location or at that fancy dinner, I think that might
serve as a reminder that other people are happier than you – and kick-start
that goal of happiness again,” Maglio said. “I definitely think this desire for
happiness is increasing nowadays.”
Mauss, meanwhile, points out that a
lot of research has found that people who take a more “accepting” attitude to
negative feelings – rather than constantly trying to fight them as the enemy of
our wellbeing – actually end up more satisfied with their life over the
long-term. “When you are striving to be happy, you may become judgemental and
unaccepting of negative things in your life… you almost berate
yourself for feelings that are incompatible with happiness,” she says. For
these reasons, she advises adopting a more stoic attitude to life’s ups and
downs, in which you accept bad feelings as fleeting events rather than trying
to eliminate them entirely.
Berate [bɪreɪt ]: If you berate someone, you speak to them angrily about something they
have done wrong
None of this is to deny that some
small tricks – such as keeping a “gratitude journal” and practicing kindness to
others – do increase your wellbeing, particularly if they cause you to
recognise your contentment in the here and now. (See our feature: A 10-minute
exercise to boost happiness.) But don’t expect a huge, immediate lift in your
mood, and try not to keep on questioning how you are feeling.
Happiness really is like a timid
animal. And once you stop chasing it, you might just find that it appears
naturally of its own accord.
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