Roll with your emotions
Pursuit of persistent happiness can be exercise in frustration; contentment with range of feelings is more worthy goal
Mental health experts have found that there are psychological health benefits to accepting negative thoughts without judgment.
This time last year, I was on a mission to win at happiness. But instead of boosting my well-being, the process just frustrated me. I found out the hard way that experiencing happiness is associated with positive well-being, but pursuing happiness, not so much. And in obvious-to-me-now news, research shows that people who place a high value on happiness are more likely to be disappointed when they don’t achieve it.
“It seems like where some of the trouble starts to arise is when people want to feel very intense or frequent happiness,” said Brett Ford, a psychologist who studies emotions at the University of Toronto. “And they judge themselves when they don’t get it.”
I reached for a more persistent positive state after I began meditating. And like whoever picks out the magazines at Whole Foods, I became obsessed with mindfulness. But I had good reasons. It helped me give up booze and eased my chronic depression. That’s why I thought mindfully holding happiness in a vise-grip was the best way to prevent a relapse. But conjuring cheer is not what mindfulness is about. Besides, no emotion is supposed to last forever.
“A lot of people think mindfulness is about positivity, but it’s not at all,” said Dr. Judson Brewer, a psychiatrist who studies behavioral change. “Positivity can be a habit loop that we get habituated to and develop stronger and stronger expectations, just like anything else.”
Brewer, the director of research and innovation at Brown University’s Mindfulness Center, explains it like this: You want to feel good, so you hop on YouTube to look at cute puppy videos. Your brain will eventually need more and more puppy videos to sustain the same level of happiness. Maybe you’ll switch to kittens. Maybe puppies and kittens. Either way, it’s a losing proposition.
Another barrier is our Western culture’s obsession with #selfcare. Helping others and focusing on strong social connections are associated with higher wellbeing, but Americans often focus inward for their happiness. I can say that while meditation and long walks in the woods were great ways for me to decompress, they didn’t make me any happier. To be honest, they made me kind of lonely, an experience research backs up. The only time I felt effortless joy was when it was a byproduct of helping or being with others: giving a friend advice, baking someone a loaf of bread, playing Settlers of Catan with my parents.
It was only when I specifically sought happiness that the whole thing went awry.
Why seeking happiness backfires
When mindfulness didn’t extend my minute-by-minute happiness, I started a gratitude journal. After combing through well-being research, it seemed as though this practice would be my bullet train to bliss. So I planned on writing thankful thoughts for a year. I made it a couple of months. Expressing appreciation did noticeably boost my outlook for a few weeks, but then it started to feel like homework. And the whole time I was thinking: Is it working yet? Am I happier today than yesterday? How much happier?
Even though it was a worthy activity — looking at things in a positive light did change my perspective — I felt like I failed when it didn’t make me super happy all the time.
“Any time you’re setting a standard for your mood, when you don’t meet that standard, it’s painful,” said Ford. “You’re basically adding pain on top of a lack of happiness.”
Ford told me that the downsides to happiness are most striking in positive contexts; you’re more disappointed when you expect to be happy. And even if there is evidence that an activity will make you feel good — like writing a gratitude letter or practicing random acts of kindness — monitoring, assessing and judging the experience as it’s happening are problematic.
Simply put: Thinking about your happiness experience will interfere with your ability to actually experience happiness. An added negative is that whatever you’re doing might lose its intrinsic value.
Acceptance is key
While my pursuits may have been slightly off-base, I was right about mindfulness. Well, the acceptance part of it anyway. Ford and others have found that there are psychological health benefits to accepting negative thoughts without judgment — meaning you don’t assign a value to your emotions. People who don’t dwell on their feelings experience fewer mood disorders, anxiety symptoms and negative emotions overall. If you feel sad, feel sad. Don’t view it as bad or try to make it go away.
“Emotions — these adaptive responses to situations — are relatively short-lived; they want to run their course,” said Ford. “If we didn’t get in our own way by ruminating and creating this experience in ourselves again and again, they would pass on their own relatively quickly.”
But Ford’s research shows that acceptance acts most strongly on negative emotions, with little effect on positive ones. That explains why meditating helped with my depression, but it didn’t make me any happier. It’s also clear I put too much pressure on myself to feel a certain way, something that isn’t uncommon for those with a history of depression. Ford told me that people who feel “a desperate need to be happy” — and are really concerned about it — tend to be the most unhappy.
What I realized, finally, is not to set goals for my feelings. It is natural and beneficial to face an array of emotions. Some days I might feel happy, or maybe I’m stressed-out. Most days I’m simply … fine. Part of the joy of being human is experiencing all of our feelings, but we shouldn’t hold onto any of them too tightly.
“We can’t be happy all the time, but we can be OK with whatever emotions we are having,” said Brewer. “And in that sense, there’s a level of contentment that comes with that. I’m content that I’m happy. I’m content that I’m not happy. Whatever emotion is here is here.”