The Nuance
What the ‘Happiness Paradox’ Can Teach Us About Our Feelings
Paying too much attention to your emotional state can make you miserable
If you want to feel slightly less happy right this minute, there’s an easy way to make that happen: Ask yourself how happy you’re feeling.
“The moment you check in — how happy am I now? — you feel happiness less,” says Iris Mauss, PhD, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. “The very question interferes with happiness.”
Mauss has spent years studying a phenomenon that some have termed the “happiness paradox.” The paradox is that when people try hard to be happy — when they make feeling happy a goal — their well-being tends to suffer for it.
There are a lot of reasons for this. Some appear to be cultural. Some have to do with the ways we define and pursue happiness.
But an overriding lesson from the happiness research is that the more you obsess about your emotional state — the more significance you assign your feelings, and the more you try to steer them — the more likely you are to get into emotional and psychological trouble.
Recently, Mauss and her research collaborators asked people to define happiness.
