Happiness is a worthy pursuit. But fixating too much on achieving it often leads to bad feelings when you fall short—which ultimately makes you less happy.
That’s the finding of a new study published in the journal Emotion. “Imagine someone going to a birthday party, and midway through the event they realize they are not as happy as they were expecting to be,” says lead author and social psychologist Felicia Zerwas, who was a doctoral student at the University of California-Berkeley when the research was conducted and is now a postdoctoral researcher at New York University. “One might just acknowledge that it is a fact of life and birthday parties. Or, one might judge it, thinking how sad and disappointing it is.”
This second way of thinking, the research shows, is the problematic type. “Over time, infusing potentially positive moments with negativity can accumulate to undermine well-being—similar to the way plaque might build up in arteries and undermine heart health.”
Sabotaging your own happiness is surprisingly common, Zerwas and her colleagues found. Something interesting emerged when they analyzed mood, personality, well-being, and depression surveys, as well as diary entries, of about 1,800 people for 11 years.
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They found that striving for and valuing happiness wasn’t a problem. How people pursued it was. “Someone can value happiness and struggle to identify effective strategies to reach their happiness goals,” Zerwas says, “and someone else can value happiness and successfully identify effective strategies to achieve their happiness goals.”
Worrying and stressing over not being happy, it turns out, is not one of those effective strategies. It gives rise to what are known as meta-emotions—feelings about what we’re feeling—and they can be destructive.
“Consider someone on a first date,” Zerwas says. “They had hoped to feel happy, but the date started off a bit awkward. They may start to judge their feelings by thinking they should enjoy the experience more; however, this very act works against their goal of feeling happy. Accepting that social interactions often have ups and downs can keep them from obsessing over the differences between what they want to feel and what they are feeling.”
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In the study, people who said they were worried about achieving and maintaining happiness tended to have more depressive symptoms, worse well-being, and less life satisfaction than those who simply held happiness as a goal—and didn’t fret about whether they were meeting it.
What’s the secret, then? Take the pressure off and stop taking your own happiness temperature so often, Zerwas says. Embrace all of your feelings—both happy and sad ones—since all emotions can be informative, providing us insights into our psychic makeup. And practice cognitive-behavioral strategies such as mindfulness—being present in one’s emotions and aware of what those feelings are—to truly tune in. This can “decrease the pressure of setting emotion goals,” Zerwas says. “Damaging emotional experiences [can occur] during the pursuit of happiness.”
