All you know about happiness is wrong
Need cheering up this Blue Monday? The key to finding your happy place is to embrace pain, not joy, writes Victoria Lambert
How are you feeling right now: ecstatic, jubilant, tickled pink? Or are you just middling pleased with life, a bit comme ci comme ça, heading towards glum even? Chances are you are feeling more of the latter – especially considering today has been dubbed Blue Monday, said to be the most depressing day of the year on account of the weather, our debt levels (payday for most is still weeks off) and most probably the low motivational levels we’re feeling towards our New Year’s resolutions.
It’s not that we don’t want to be happy – more that happiness as a day-to-day condition is something which often feels just out of reach, especially at this time of year.
However, more than ever we talk about learning to be happy, finding our happy place, and achieving happiness as though it is the only true goal of life. Supporting that ideal are the thousands of exhortations from past philosophers, writers and mystics including Mahatma Gandhi, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Albert Schweitzer, all hell-bent on letting us in on the secret of joy. Yet with so much advice on the one hand and so much determination on the other, it’s remarkable how unhappy we all seem to be so often.
Now a new book called The Other Side of Happiness is aiming to explain why so many of us feel so dissatisfied with our lot and – to put it bluntly – how to cheer up. But to do so – says its author, Brock Bastian, an associate professor in the school of psychological sciences at the University of Melbourne – we must also embrace pain as much as pleasure.
“We have high expectations of our own happiness,” says Prof Bastian. “On average our lives are pretty good. We live in comfortable housing, we can go out and eat any food, we don’t want for very much in terms of basic needs. Yet we are experiencing an epidemic of depression.”
This is certainly true. According to the Mental Health Foundation, depression is the predominant mental health problem worldwide. In 2014, 19.7per cent of people in the UK aged 16 and over showed symptoms of anxiety or depression, with women more affected than men.
Prof Bastian believes that part of the trouble is that doctors have responded to the crisis by overprescribing painkillers and antidepressants. “We are now becoming reliant on medication,” he says, adding: “It’s impossible to imagine life 100 years ago without these drugs – and no one would want surgery without anaesthetics and pain relief. But somewhere along the line we have taken this amazing ability to kill pain and become hugely addicted to killing it.
“In seeing pain – physical and emotional – as a medical problem to be solved we have warped the way we feel about sadness, too.”
At the same time, he is also concerned we have come to misunderstand the very nature of happiness, too. “The idea that it is a positive feeling is wrong. Happiness isn’t just the sum of positive feelings, it is the contrast with negative experiences. Happiness is not sitting in a hot spa that brings joy but the contrast with a cold plunge pool. That’s when you appreciate feeling good.”
If it is that simple, learning to find contrast, why aren’t we all able to get happy? The problem, says Prof Bastian, is that avoiding pain is leading to a lack of emotional toughness. “To build resilience requires exposure to hardships and difficulties, as well as developing realistic expectations of life. Any negative experiences we have make us feel like we are failing at life, yet the reality is that difficult experiences are quite good for us.
“We have a lack of tolerance for the other side as it makes us uncomfortable so we avoid it as much as we can.”
The other problem stems from the intrinsic search for happiness itself. “We know from the psychology of goal pursuit that as soon as you set a goal, you feel disappointment if you don’t achieve it. So ironically, the harder we search for happiness, the less happy we will be. Particularly as we know that society and culture value happiness highly.”
So how can we begin to reset out attitudes to happiness?
“We need to put value back on pain [in its broadest sense] bearing in mind that you can’t be happy without it.” An example would be the way a community pulls together after a natural crisis, such as flooding or a storm, he says.
Prof Bastian also refers to the 2014 ALS Ice Bucket Challenge – when people dared each other via social media to dump a bucket of ice cold water over their heads to raise money for motor neurone disease charities. “The pain of being drenched in a bucket of ice cold water made the act meaningful and led people to be generous.”
The ALS charity in the US raised more than $100million (£73.98million) as a result. Psychologists were not surprised by the effect, Prof Bastian says. “A study carried out prior to the challenge
‘Our lives are pretty good and yet we are experiencing a depression epidemic’
asked people to donate to a charity. Some of the volunteers were asked to put their hand in a bucket of ice water first. This group gave more money. They seemed to find it more meaningful.”
He believes that pain can also be a shortcut to mindfulness.
“When you are in pain, you are not thinking about past and future, but only now. Pain connects us to our sensory world. It might seem to be quite brutal, but people are more sensitive to tastes and flavours after experiencing pain.”
He also suggests we learn to think of emotional pain differently. “If we see pain as a big black blob, we won’t cope with it well – and we won’t think of how to use it better.”
Of course, Prof Bastian is not suggesting that we seek out unhappiness per se – “Too much is as bad as too little; it’s about finding the sweet spot” – but it is reassuring to think that perhaps none of us suffer truly in vain. “Negative experiences build psychological immunity to future pain and stress,” he says. “We all need a moderate amount of lifetime adversity.”
To prove his point, Prof Bastian suggests you think of a time that has made you feel truly happy – giving birth or graduating from university, for example.
“When you break it down, these events will not have been easy. There will have been fear, anxiety and pain involved. It’s those feelings which make the happiness so real.”
Like many Australians, Prof Bastian finds his own joy through surfing. “I do it very badly, but I enjoy it. And part of that pleasure comes from its unpredictability. Surfing brings risks – from sharks and tides – but I enjoy overcoming those fears. Sometimes it is important to expose yourself to measured risks.”
‘When you are in pain, you are not thinking about past and future, but only now’