How to Find Happiness
The research has been there for over a decade, but unfortunately it isn’t nearly as persuasive as a good before-and-after story and a ring light.
In 2011, a group of researchers at the University of Denver ran an experiment on a deceptively simple question: does wanting to be happy actually make you happy?
They split a group of people in two and gave them what looked like the same article. For one group, it was all about happiness. Its importance, its benefits, the way it’s linked to health, success, popularity, and long-term flourishing.
For the other group, the article was identical in every way, except one. Wherever it said ‘happiness,’ they changed it to ‘making accurate judgments.’
Then both groups watched a figure skater win gold. The audience going wild and her coach lifting her off the ice celebrating. This was a clip that had been specifically chosen because it reliably made people feel happier.
The group who had been told happiness was important actually felt worse afterwards than the group who hadn’t. In other words, watching something known to produce happiness had produced less of it, precisely because they had been primed to want it.
Researchers have since tested this in daily life, rather than a lab, tracking people across days and weeks. Each time, the same pattern has emerged. Chasing happiness made it harder to feel and what’s more, the effect didn’t fade with time or circumstance.
On good days and bad, those who pursued happiness most actively felt it least consistently.
My Dad Had It Figured Out and I Missed It
It’s one thing to see this in a lab, it’s another to notice how it shows up in your own life.
I’ve been a psychologist for twenty-five years and I’ve spent my career studying why people become who they are, and what gets in the way. Yet I still spend a ridiculous amount of time getting annoyed with myself for not being happier.
But why do I do this?
Well, it either means the culture we’re swimming in is so relentlessly loud about happiness-as-achievement that even people who know better can’t quite hear themselves think. Or it means I’m a bit of a numpty. Possibly both.
My dad had the habit of just being happy. Not evaluating, just instinctively living in a way that let him name the feeling when it arrived, which seemed to reinforce happiness rather than scare it away. He would look up from whatever he was doing, catch your eye, and announce with calm certainty that he was happy.
“So happy.” “Couldn’t be happier.”
Nothing of any obvious significance had to be happening, we could have been eating dinner, listening to music, or doing our own thing in the same room. Then he’d go back to whatever he was doing.
I didn’t grow up with my dad. Perhaps if I had, I would have caught that habit of noticing happiness rather than auditing it. Of letting it arrive without immediately asking whether it’s enough.
For some of us, though, the monitoring is more than just a habit in the wrong direction. It runs deeper than that, worn into the brain by years of anxiety, or depression, or simply a life that taught you, at some point, that you needed to keep a close eye on how you were feeling. If that’s the case, you learned to watch yourself for a reason. That doesn’t make the watching less exhausting, but this isn’t a matter of simply ‘doing it wrong’. I know that suddenly finding myself in the midst of something and actually enjoying it can feel almost arresting. You don’t want to notice in case it scares it away.
If that’s the case for you, ‘the work’ as ‘they’ call it, isn’t as easy as simply switching off the evaluation. Instead it’s to slowly, gently and most probably imperfectly, learn to hold happy moments more lightly.
How To Ruin A Perfectly Good Evening
The mechanism is almost elegant in its cruelty, happening in real time, often without you noticing.
Take a birthday dinner, your birthday. The people you love are there, someone ordered the good wine and by every available metric, this is a happiness-eligible event. But somewhere in the back of your mind, a small officious auditor fires up and starts running the numbers. Am I happy enough? Is this what happy feels like? Should I feel more than this? And the evaluating and checking elbows the actual experience out of the room.
It’s a bit like a sunset. You’re watching it, genuinely watching it, and for a moment something happens that has no name and doesn’t need one. Then you reach for your phone, or you start thinking about how you’ll remember it. And the thing you were trying to capture is already gone, because you stopped being ‘in it’. The sunset didn’t move, you did. Happiness works like that. The moment you turn to look at it directly, you’re no longer where it was.
Researchers have a name for this: disappointment at your own feelings. Which is, if you think about it, a suffering so modern it could only exist now. Not pain exactly, just the gap between how you feel and how you think you should. Well, I say it’s not pain, but to be honest it’s pretty miserable. I have a professional obligation to frame it more precisely than that, but miserable covers it.
Which brings me back to the numpty who is me. It’s not that I don’t appreciate my life, I really do. But I also assess my feelings towards it, constantly, even knowing better.
A Brief History Of Getting This Wrong
It helps to know this isn’t universal. When researchers asked American college students how often they think about happiness, the typical answer was several times a week. When they asked Chinese college students the same question, roughly one in ten said they had never thought about it at all. Many Eastern philosophical traditions treat happiness as a byproduct, something that arrives in the company of connection, purpose, and engagement with something beyond yourself. Not the destination but a consequence of heading somewhere worth going.
We in the West, on the other hand, have turned it into a personal achievement to be optimized. We’ve built this trap three ways, and none of them are subtle once you see them.
The oldest is achievement. John Stuart Mill, the philosopher and economist trained from childhood to be a thinking machine, had a breakdown at twenty with everything apparently in perfect order. What pulled him out was Wordsworth’s poetry, something that interested him that had nothing to do with whether he was happy. “Those only are happy,” he concluded, “who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness.” That was in 1826. We have been building the opposite belief into children ever since: do well, get into a good school, get a good job, be successful, be happy.
Then came an entire industry devoted to the direct pursuit of happiness itself. The books, the apps, the retreats, the influencers posting from Bali looking improbably serene. Monitoring whether you are happy enough became a form of self-surveillance, a bit like trying to fall asleep by repeatedly asking yourself if you’re asleep yet. The pursuit became the product, and the product became relentless.
And if you are in your twenties, you have grown up inside the most sustained, algorithmically amplified version of all of this. You’ve been told, repeatedly and from multiple directions, that happiness is available, achievable, and frankly overdue. The algorithm serves you evidence of other people apparently living inside it continuously. So, you do what any reasonable person would do and try harder. You monitor more closely, find the gap between what you feel and what you’re supposed to feel and you stare at it. There is nothing wrong with you, it’s a completely normal response to the environment you’ve been handed. It just happens to be making things worse. That environment was built around you before you had any say in it.
The Difference Between Noticing And Keeping Score
Knowing yourself is not the same as monitoring yourself. One asks what’s here, the other asks whether what’s here is good enough and then keeps asking, which is the problem. The distinction, as Russ Harris laid out in The Happiness Trap, is between noticing and evaluating. Noticing is neutral where as evaluating turns inward and starts keeping score.
The research draws a clear distinction, that valuing happiness makes sense. Becoming preoccupied with it, continually auditing your emotional state against a standard that is always just out of reach, simply wears you down without delivering on the goal you’re so hopefully pursuing.
In my experience, the people who seem most settled (not chasing happiness but grounded in something more stable) tend not to be the ones checking in on it. They’re the ones who look up from whatever they’re doing, catch your eye, and say so happy. Couldn’t be happier. Then go back to what they were doing.
Stop Looking
The figure skater, winning her gold medal, lifting off the ice wasn’t thinking about whether she was happy. She was thinking about the jump. The happiness, if it was there at all in that moment, was a side effect of being completely somewhere else.
Happiness, it turns out, is a terrible thing to look for directly. Like trying to see something in your peripheral vision, the moment you turn to face it, it’s gone.
That seems worth considering. Especially on a Sunday morning when nothing is wrong and you can’t quite work out why you feel vaguely off, and the day is sitting there waiting to be either lived or assessed.
You already know which one works.
Reference
Source
