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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.
“We found a huge variety in how people answered,” she says. “Some people said happiness meant having good feelings, which is maybe the most intuitive response.” But when asked what good feelings they were talking about, some mentioned “excitement” or “joy” while others said “peacefulness.”
Some people didn’t talk about feelings at all. “They defined happiness in terms of knowledge — the knowledge that their life was meaningful, or the knowledge that they were a better person than they were five years ago,” she says. Others admitted their idea of happiness was acquiring more material possessions.
‘In the U.S., happiness is a relatively individualistic enterprise.’
The fact that we can’t even agree on what happiness is may partly explain why cultivating more of it is a challenge.
