The pursuit of happiness is a big old mistake, or so some interesting research over the past decade tells us.
Emotion, the journal of the American Psychological Association, published a study in 2011 that explored the “paradoxical effects of valuing happiness.” The authors’ findings go something like this: People who place a high value on happiness will work harder to be happy (just as people who place a high value on physical fitness will work harder to be fit), but that also means the standard they set for happiness can be prohibitively high – and therein lies the paradox. The more you want to be happy, the more likely you are to fall short of the standard you set for happiness. So instead of finding joy, the happiness seekers more often stumble upon disappointment.
Happiness may not be all that great for society as a whole, either. For a study published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology in 2010, volunteers were invited to play the “Dictator Game.” After establishing the mood of participants, researchers gave them each 10 raffle tickets and asked them to decide how many they wanted to keep and how many they wanted to give away. The experiment’s happy people kept more tickets for themselves.
Workplace happiness may be overrated, too. Andre Spicer and Carl Cederstrom, writing in the Harvard Business Review, collected a variety of research suggesting that companies shouldn’t go out of their way to make sure employees are happy because: there is no correlation between happiness and increased productivity; angry people perform better in negotiations than happy people; the emotional neediness of workers who expect their job to make them happy can strain relationships with bosses; and workplace happiness makes the loss of a job more devastating. They also point out that it is impossible to determine how happy someone is anyway. “Measuring happiness,” they wrote, “is about as easy as taking the temperature of the soul or determining the exact color of love.”
None of this means people should forget about being happy, but it may be a good idea to shift the focus a little bit – perhaps with help from a psychology professor named Laurie Santos.
Her “Psychology of the Good Life” is the most popular class ever taught at Yale, which by the way has been around for more than three centuries. The great news for those of us who probably won’t be Ivy Leaguers any time soon is that the course is now available to everyone at coursera.org as “The Science of Well-Being.” The Washington Postreported last week that more than 91,000 people in 168 countries were now taking the online course, which was launched just two months ago.
So what are some of Santos’s secrets to a happy life?
It starts with cognitive bias or identifying “the ways in which our minds suck,” as one student put it to the Post. “Our minds make us think that certain things make us happy, but they don’t,” the student said. Homework assignments included getting more exercise and sleep, and writing letters of gratitude to the people who matter most. One student started meditating, another deleted the social media apps from her phone. Still others made more time for hobbies that bring them joy and less time for worrying about grades and other measures of success.
The collective data tells us that the pursuit of happiness is indeed a mistake, a waste of time that does more harm than good. It is far better to pursue exercise, sleep, gratitude, generosity, time with loved ones, a slower pace and increased attention on moments worth savoring. Oddly enough, each of these activities has a tendency to create a familiar but elusive emotional byproduct. Some people call it happiness.