Endless search for state of bliss

If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands. If you scour the internet, the key to being happy comes from your relationships with friends, always wanting more, being grateful, adopting an ‘‘empowering morning routine’’, and even your readiness to sign a petition. And of course, according to the great (very happy) philosopher Pharrell, happiness is the truth, and also feels like a room without a roof (what, even in the rain?)

Regardless of where you look for your answers, the search for happiness seems like innate part of the human experience.

But Professor Nathan Consedine suggests we can’t manufacture – or Google – our way to eternal, internal bliss.

‘‘You have got to look at what matters to you because happiness is an internal readout of the kind that says: here is how I am doing with the things that are important to me – and you can’t trick that system, you can’t.

‘‘And people do that of course; we take drugs, we engage in all sorts of behaviours to try to feel happy but it simply won’t work.’’

The psychologist, who teaches at Auckland University, has another idea – forget chasing happiness and forget thinking so much about yourself and your mental and physical health could improve. ‘‘I think the world would be a better place if we pursued compassion rather than happiness,’’ he explains.

‘‘Happiness tends to focus people very much on themselves; contentment very much on sitting and appreciating or savouring what has been.

‘‘Whereas compassion is a feeling of being moved by the suffering of other people.’’

As part of the happiness episode of Being Human, a series diving into different themes at the heart of the human experience hosted by Antonia Prebble, Consedine explains feeling compassion can be rewarding – including some surprising health benefits. ‘‘It is not just that it motivates us towards trying to make things better for other people but it also is pleasurable in and of itself to care for others,’’ Consedine says.

It is not all that radical an idea; philosophers have written

Professor Nathan Consedine

‘‘I think the world would be a better place if we pursued compassion rather than happiness.’’

about it, and so have sitcom writers – remember the Friends’ episode, where Phoebe wants to prove there is such a thing as a truly unselfish act but she kept feeling good about doing good?

Happiness, Consedine believes, can come easier when we are kind to ourselves.

He describes self-compassion as simply learning to negate the critical voice we all have (he says Freud would call it the internalised parent, the one who tells us we have made a mistake eating that french fry and now we are destined to be unhealthy forever). By speaking more kindly to themselves, Consedine believes a person can ‘‘actually try to enact the things that they want rather than spending all their energy trying to defend themselves from some internal critic that they can’t hide from’’.

‘‘People often confuse selfcompassion with self-indulgence; it is not the same thing.’’

Consedine says there is widespread evidence improvements to a person’s self-compassion can improve many parts of their life, including anxiety levels, their behaviour around food and diet, and even improved blood glucose levels in people with diabetes.

‘‘Now we don’t know exactly why; it could be through biological pathways, it could be through health behaviour, but there has not been an intervention that has actually been able to move people’s blood glucose around in that way before,’’ Consedine says.

He has also worked with a PhD student on the idea of enhancing self-compassion in doctors, to help them care better for their patients.

‘‘In the Buddhist philosophy, if you are compassionate to the self you are actually freed up to be caring for other people.

‘‘If you are not, you will inherently judge, because we tend to exert the same judgments on ourselves as we do on other people. And so if you can improve the way people relate to themselves – particularly a sort of perfectionistic, type A, driven, hypercritical group like doctors – then in theory that should flow into the way they engage with other people,’’ he says.

Regardless of how we cultivate a sense of happiness, being happy helps us think more pragmatically and be more resilient – when we are happier, we have more personal resources to buffer us against future challenges.

‘‘[Happiness is] about what happens cognitively,’’ Consedine says. ‘‘Where our attention is directed, how we solve problems.

‘‘People in more positive states, for example, solve problems quite differently from people in negative states.’’

The expert has a word of warning though; happiness does not last forever. The key, he believes is focusing on what you really want out of a situation, and stop chasing the feeling for the sake of it.

‘‘Like most emotional states, [the feeling of happiness] is quite short term and it typically arises in response to particular things,’’ Consedine says.

‘‘So something happens and you feel happy about that thing – and the extent to which it translates into a more global sense of satisfaction with life or wellbeing, is very very unclear.’’