Happiness Archives - Farther to Go!

Chronic Happiness
Is Not Good for You

July 22, 2022 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

I recently came across a video of a mental health professional disparaging the brain’s default mode network (DMN). The loudest contingent of the DMN-bashing bandwagon tends to be the mindfulness folks, but it’s not an exclusive club.

This particular person cited a study I’m familiar with and have mentioned previously. Researchers contacted study participants at random times to ask them (1) what they were doing right then and (2) how happy they were.

The results supposedly revealed that people were happier when their attention was focused on what they were doing (accessing the brain’s attention network) than they were when their minds were wandering (accessing the brain’s default mode network).

My first question now would be who were these people? Specifically, I would want to know something about their personalities, given that we are all so dissimilar from each other. That is just one of many reasons why you cannot simply lump a group of people together, average their responses to some questions, and come to a sound conclusion about…anything.

Happiness was, in fact, the subject of the research, so I can’t fault the researchers for asking people to evaluate their level of happiness. But I question the ability of people in general to gauge their degree of happiness or of any other emotion. And I definitely can fault the assumption that happiness is a worthy topic of research.

The study in question was really focused on transient happiness—or acute happiness, if you will—which most people experience to a greater or lesser extent, anyway. By that, I mean we don’t all experience an equal amount or intensity of happiness. And who knows if what I label happy is the same emotion you label happy.

An inability to experience any happiness is definitely an indicator of a problem; the inability to be happy all the time—not so much.

The Pursuit of Happiness

A recent Facebook post advertising a Buddhist-oriented program asserted that anger is a “delusion” and it’s bad because it makes us unhappy. This is both simple-minded and wrong. The relentless pursuit of happiness is far more delusional and destructive than the experience of anger.

I have a handout with a list of 136 positive emotions (along with a similar list of negative emotions). Happy is but one of them. Yet somehow people have gotten the idea that it is the best or most important emotion. And somehow people have concluded that a steady state of happiness is both desirable and achievable. (This seems to be a peculiarly American take.)

One of the other emotions on the list is excited, which is far more appealing to me than happy but far less acceptable to pursue. For one thing, people who pursue excitement are often advised that it is just a poor substitute for happiness. Pursuing excitement is also associated with novelty-seeking and risk-taking.

In the Five Factor Model of Personality, it’s related to extraversion and openness to experience. (Full disclosure: those are the two factors I always score highest in, in that order.) Introverts and ambiverts tend to view extraverts with some degree of suspicion if not outright aversion, so the negative association to excitement is not surprising.

The short-term side-effects of excitement (acute excitement), however, include anticipation, alertness, increased energy, and motivation. Good stuff! But the side-effects of attempting to maintain a constant state of excitement—chronic excitement—are altogether different: impaired concentration, sleeplessness, restlessness, elevated blood pressure, increased adrenaline and noradrenaline, racing heart. The body would react to a constant state of excitement essentially the same as it would to chronic stress.

Furthermore, one would have to continually up the ante, so to speak (seek more novelty, take greater risks), to maintain the same level of excitement. Someone who was chronically excited would likely become a source of annoyance to friends, family, and coworkers.

Chronic happiness is no better for us than chronic excitement. Here’s why:

Sometimes things are not going well, there is a real threat, and vigilance is required.

If someone offers you a pill that makes you happy 100 percent of the time, you should run fast in the other direction. It’s not good to feel happy in a dark alley at night. Happiness is a noun, so we think it’s something we can own. But happiness is a place to visit, not a place to live. It’s like the child’s idea that if you drive far and fast enough you can get to the horizon. No, the horizon’s not a place you get to. —Daniel Gilbert

Pursuing happiness is likely to keep you stuck on the hedonic treadmill, where you’ll need to keep moving to acquire more and more of the things or experiences you think will bring you pleasure—to each of which you will adapt surprisingly quickly.
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Happiness won’t increase your lifespan. In the final analysis, death comes in equal proportion to the happy and the sad. The result of research conducted by Oxford University with nearly 720,000 women is that “happiness and related measures of wellbeing do not appear to have any direct effect on mortality.”
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If you’re simply here for the party, you should be aware your body processes “empty positive emotions” the same way it processes chronic adversity, which is by activating the pro-inflammatory response to prepare for bacterial threats. (Inflammation is associated with many major and minor diseases, including heart disease, various cancers, rheumatoid arthritis, etc.) A diet of too many empty positive emotions seems to be a lot like a diet of too many empty (sugar-, salt-, alcohol-, or fat-laden) calories.
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Happiness may make you feel good in the moment, but pursuing it by avoiding negative thoughts and feelings and difficult or painful situations can stunt your personal development. That can lead to decreased resilience, greater susceptibility to stress, and reduced creativity and problem-solving abilities.

You’re less likely to become depressed if you regularly experience a range of emotions instead of aiming exclusively for the positive ones.

Research indicates that if you pursue happiness, you may get it (just not all the time), but you’re not likely to feel satisfied. On the other hand, if you focus on meaning, instead, you’re extremely likely to feel satisfied and you may also get happiness as a bonus.

Will Satisfying Your Needs Make You Happy?

July 18, 2018 by Joycelyn Campbell 2 Comments

The happiness industry wants you to believe you can attain a steady state of happiness and that satisfying your needs will take you there. But happiness is ephemeral and transient, which means you can’t be happy all the time no matter what you do. And if you elect to chase happiness, you might find yourself running faster and faster on the hedonic treadmill.

In addition, humans are demonstrably poor at being able to predict how we’ll feel and what will make us happy in the future (affective forecasting). Thus the phrase it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Certainly happiness feels better than sadness, anger, or unhappiness. But feeling better isn’t the point of getting happy. Happiness is supposed to be good for you, leading, for example, to better health and a longer life. That puts it in the same category with other things you “should” be doing, such as eating more fruits and vegetables, stopping smoking, and getting regular exercise—which sucks all the pleasure out of being happy.

But there’s no indication happiness will increase your lifespan and some indication the opposite is true. In fact, research reveals that the bodies of happy people are preparing them for bacterial threats by activating the pro-inflammatory response.

And per BBC Future:

Good moods come with substantial risks—sapping your drive, dimming attention to detail and making you simultaneously gullible and selfish. Positivity is also known to encourage binge drinking, overeating and unsafe sex.

A Hierarchy of Pseudo-Needs

Satisfying your needs is not guaranteed to make you happy—or at least consistently happy. And it’s definitely a less direct path to feeling good than simply pursuing what you want. At first glance, though, it seems more legitimate and less self-centered. You’ve heard the question and maybe even asked it yourself—of yourself: Do you really need it or do you just want it?

I place a lot of the blame on Abraham Maslow, whose hierarchy of needs has wormed its way into nearly all aspects of modern Western culture even though there’s surprisingly little validation of it. He didn’t have access to the information we have available now about how the brain works—but then neither did William James, who was born 66 years earlier and got far more right than he got wrong.

With the help of Maslow’s hierarchy—and perhaps out Puritan heritage—we have turned all kinds of desirable states and situations (wants) into needs. Just like turning happiness into something we should have because it’s good for us, turning what we want into something we need sucks the joy out of it.

System 1, the unconscious part of the brain, treats needs a little differently from the way it treats wants. Its primary goal is survival—and you do need certain things in order to survive, such as food, water, shelter, and social/interpersonal connection. But like the rest of us, you’ve probably convinced your brain you have a host of other needs that also must be satisfied.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

Since System 1 isn’t good at making distinctions, it treats both actual needs and pseudo-needs as if they are essential to your survival. As an example, here’s what happens if you convince your brain you need respect.

If you don’t have respect, you’re not OK. (If you become dehydrated, your brain and your body are not OK. They are in distress. It wouldn’t bode well for your survival if you weren’t sufficiently distressed to turn your attention to seeking water. If your brain perceives respect as a need, you experience distress when you don’t get it.)
It’s the job of the people around you to give you respect—and they’re wrong if they don’t.
Your brain will be on red alert looking for any evidence of disrespect because it represents a threat to your survival. It won’t just notice instances of disrespect; it will divert attentional resources to seeking out such instances. And it generally finds what it seeks.

If, however, you recognize that respect is something you want:

If you don’t have respect, you are still OK (not in distress).
You’re likely to take appropriate action to generate respect, activating both wanting and liking chemicals in your brain. But whether or not you succeed in getting it, you’re still OK, and you’re much less likely to make others wrong if they don’t give it to you.
Since your brain isn’t looking for evidence of disrespect, it won’t be overly reactive to it, and you will have more attentional resources available.

How Do You Want to Proceed?

Your brain is an insatiable wanting machine.

If you identify what you really want, you can activate your brain’s reward network to help you get it. Unless you’re a horrible human being, that’s a win situation for everyone—you and the people you are close to or interact with.

Your brain is also an excellent threat detection device.

If you are focused on getting your needs met—both your actual needs and the wants you have turned into needs—your brain will be on the lookout for anything it identifies as a lack. That’s a lose situation for you and the people around you.

While it may seem as if satisfying your needs is less self-centered or narcissistic than pursuing what you want, it isn’t. It’s more underhanded, and it keeps your attention focused on you.

Do you want to keep your brain’s threat detector set at red alert or do you want to harness the power of your brain’s reward system?

The answer seems like a (sorry!) no-brainer to me.

The Other Problem with
Affective Forecasting

July 27, 2016 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

The year it was published, I purchased a copy of the Best American Non-Required Reading 2004, which included an article written by Jon Gertner for the New York Times titled The Futile Pursuit of Happiness. The article reviewed the work of several psychologists whose work I eventually became familiar with—including Daniel Gilbert, Timothy Wilson, and Daniel Kahneman—in the relatively new field of affective forecasting. I was intrigued enough to copy the article, reread it, and highlight a good portion. From the vantage point of now, I see it was one of the small handful of bread crumbs along the trail to creating Farther to Go!

But I filed the article away, and in the interim between then and 2012, seem to have forgotten about it. Daniel Gilbert’s book Stumbling on Happiness was already a best seller before I came across a copy of it, and I don’t recall connecting the dots between it and the article I’d been so interested in. I’ve recommended the book to numerous people and refer to it in some of my courses in spite of it’s focus on happiness, not because of it.

Don’t Worry; Be Happy

That’s the other problem with affective forecasting (read my previous post, Miswanting). The emphasis is on happiness rather than on satisfaction and meaning. Happiness is an ephemeral emotional state. We’re simply not always going to be happy—and trying to be isn’t even a worthwhile goal.

We are living in an era in which the Happiness Industry invades and permeates society and every unpleasant aspect of life is frowned upon, and dismissed as an unnecessary social ill. Rather than learning to cope with or contemplate certain aspects of life—fear, sadness, loneliness and boredom—we avoid them, gradually removing our ability to tolerate even the most mundane of the difficult aspects of life. —Siobhan Lyons, Philosophy Now

The things that make us happy are not necessarily the things we find satisfying or meaningful. That’s partly because happiness is a function of the unconscious part of the brain (System 1), which is focused on immediate gratification, while satisfaction and meaning are functions of the conscious part (System 2), which is focused on long-term goals and plans. The pursuit of happiness keeps us fixated on ourselves and on gratifying our immediate wants and needs.

Furthermore, because happiness is an ephemeral and transient emotional state, what makes us happy at one point in time isn’t necessarily going to make us happy at another. But because of the way we’re wired, it’s very difficult to recognize and account for that in the moment.

We’re more different from ourselves in different states than we are from another person. —George Loewenstein, Educator and Economist

And maybe a certain amount of something makes us happy, but too much of it makes us sick—literally or figuratively. Too much craft beer, sex, alone time, hanging out with a best friend, tiramisu, dancing, cooking, listening to music, laughing—whatever it is that makes us happy has at least the potential to also make us very unhappy.

To be fair to Daniel Gilbert, he isn’t advocating the relentless pursuit of happiness, either:

If someone offers you a pill that makes you happy 100 percent of the time, you should run fast in the other direction. It’s not good to feel happy in a dark alley at night. Happiness is a noun, so we think its something we can own. But happiness is a place to visit, not a place to live. It’s like the child’s idea that if you drive far and fast enough you can get to the horizon. No, the horizon’s not a place you get to. —Daniel Gilbert, quoted in The Science of Happiness, Harvard Magazine

However, there is a considerable amount of discussion and debate about how we should approach the subject of happiness. This may be the most useful perspective:

The moments of happiness we enjoy take us by surprise. It is not that we seize them, but that they seize us. —Ashley Montagu, Anthropoligist

Satisfying and Meaningful vs. Happy

One way to bypass the errors we make in affective forecasting is to focus on creating satisfying and meaningful lives rather than happy ones by identifying what we really want. Higher order wants or, as I call them, Big Picture Wants, are abstract but they are neither transient nor ephemeral.

Research indicates that if you aim for satisfying and meaningful, you may get happiness as a byproduct. But if you aim for happiness, you will not get satisfaction and meaning as byproducts. And the people who pursue satisfaction and meaning, even when the going gets tough, report higher overall levels of satisfaction with their lives. Because what is meaningful is less transitory, we have a better chance of achieving and sustaining a meaningful life—and therefore a satisfying one—than we have of achieving and maintaining a happy life.

When we’re oriented to something bigger than we are, and bigger than our immediate wants and needs, we’re less susceptible to the pull of immediate gratification. When we give our big brain (consciousness, System 2) something worthwhile to focus on, we can achieve goals or create things that actually make a difference to ourselves and to others.

Our obsession with happiness may reflect a sense that our lives lack meaning, but pursuing happiness is not the solution. George Loewenstein recommends we invest our resources in the things that will make us happy. I think we’ll be much better off if instead we invest our resources in what makes our lives satisfying and meaningful. That path may be risky and not always easy or pleasurable, but…

If you want a guarantee, buy a toaster. –Clint Eastwood

Miswanting: The Problems with Affective Forecasting

July 20, 2016 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

Affective forecasting refers to our attempt to imagine a future event and predict how we’re going to feel about it when it occurs. The term and the research on it may be relatively new, but we engage in the process whenever we attempt to determine a course of action. The results of numerous studies on affective forecasting reveal that (1) we’re not very good at it, (2) we don’t know we’re not very good at it, and so (3) we keep making the same mistakes when pursuing what we think will make us happy. The term for this coined by Daniel T. Gilbert and Timothy D. Wilson is miswanting.

The reason we’re not very good at predicting our future feelings is that we routinely make all kinds of errors, some of which are described below. First the good news: we’re generally good at predicting whether a future experience will be positive or negative. And when we make short-term (tomorrow) versus long-term (a year from now) predictions, we’re pretty good at accurately identifying the emotions we’re likely to feel when we experience an event.

Impact

What we’re not very good at is predicting how intense our feelings will be and how long they will last. This prediction error is known as the impact bias.

Whether people overestimate how good or bad they will feel, overestimate how quickly those feelings will arise, or underestimate how quickly they will dissipate, the important point is that they overestimate how powerfully the event will impact their emotional lives—Timothy D. Wilson, Daniel T. Gilbert (2003)

So we tend to believe that both positive and negative events will affect us more intensely and that the duration of those effects will be longer than they’re likely to be. We think that getting the new job, the guy/girl, the new house/car, or winning the lottery will cause us to feel fantastic for the foreseeable future. We think not getting the job, failing a test, losing a friend, or experiencing a financial setback will cause us to feel devastated for the foreseeable future.

Big vs. Small

We believe that a bigger problem will have a bigger negative effect on us than a smaller, chronic problem or minor annoyance will. But that doesn’t turn out to be the case for a couple of reasons. One is that we tend to respond to and take care of the bigger problems but often let the smaller ones drag on and annoy us indefinitely. The other is that we have a so-called psychological immune system that’s triggered by big problems to help us cope with them.

Misconstrual

In order to predict how we’re likely to feel about something, we need to be able to imagine the event. That’s easier to do if we’ve experienced it or something similar in the past. If we’ve been to a lot of parties, we can imagine—in general—how we’ll feel about attending a party on Saturday. If we’ve cleaned out the garage before, we can imagine how we’ll feel about doing that on Saturday, too. But if we haven’t experienced an event, what we imagine or expect may not bear much resemblance to the way the actual event unfolds. Thinking we can predict the future leads us to believe in the veracity of what we imagine.

Memory

Even if we’re able to imagine an event because we’ve experienced it before, our memory of it—and how we felt at the time—may be faulty simply because it’s the nature of memory to be faulty. And the feelings we experience when remembering a past event are not necessarily the same feelings we had when the event took place. Additionally, when we don’t recall actual details of an event, we may come to rely instead on our beliefs or theories about how such an event will make us feel.

Variability

When trying to decide where to vacation, which movie to see, or which house to buy, we tend to focus on, compare, and overestimate the differences between various options and underestimate their similarities. Furthermore, the order in which people are asked to think about differences vs. similarities has been found to influence the accuracy of their affective forecasting. Those who thought last about the similarities tended to be happier about their choices.

Hot vs. Cold States

When we’re in a “hot” emotional state (anxious, fearful, hungry, courageous, or sexually excited, for example), we have a hard time predicting what we will want when we’re in a “cold” (more rational) state—and vice versa. That means when we’re in a cold state—satiated, for example—we’re likely to predict we’ll have enough willpower to avoid binging on the bag of potato chips we’re picking up at the supermarket. But later that evening, when we’re hungry—in a hot state—we do, in fact, binge eat.

These mistakes—which arise because of the way we’re wired, not because there’s something wrong with us—aren’t the only mistakes we make when trying to predict what will make us happy or sad in the future. But hopefully they help clarify why it’s so hard to make accurate predictions and why we’re often disappointed by the choices we make.

Next time: The Other Problem with Affective Forecasting

Are You Living the Good Life?

August 28, 2015 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

Does living “the good life” mean living a happy life? Or does it mean living a meaningful life? Although happiness and meaning correlate positively, as the researchers put it—or at least overlap to some extent—they are not the same thing and in some cases they represent two entirely different paths.

The concept of “the good life” is often credited to Aristotle, although there was considerable debate among the Greeks as to exactly what constituted a good life.

Aristotle thought the good life included virtue and excellence of character, along with health, wealth, and beauty. His view fits somewhere in between the Stoics, who believed virtue was sufficient, and Epicurus, who believed the good life was strictly one of pleasure.

The Greeks had a word for happiness, which they considered to be an important element of the good life. Eudaemonia has several possible translations, including “human flourishing” or “good spirit.” But what does that mean?

For most people today, the concept of the good life has come to represent the life one wants to, or would prefer to, live. For some, that’s a life of pleasure, but not for all. Whatever its components, the good life is something to strive for, wish for, or hope to achieve. Interestingly, however, no matter how we define it, or how well off we are, the good life is persistently difficult to attain.

When people are dissatisfied with their lives, their dissatisfaction seems to be the starting point for identifying what a good life would look like and then going after it. But how you go about pursuing the good life depends on what you think the solution to your dissatisfaction might be: happiness or meaningfulness.

The Pursuit of Happiness vs. the Pursuit of Meaningfulness

Quite a bit of research has been conducted to determine how people who pursue happiness actually feel and how people who pursue meaningfulness actually feel. The results of the research are pretty clear, but there are a few problems with the concept.

One problem is with the way the issue tends to be phrased. The pursuit of happiness vs. the pursuit of meaning doesn’t accurately describe what we’re talking about. Meaningfulness doesn’t reside “out there,” so it isn’t something we can go after. We determine the meaning of things. Things (or people or situations or activities) mean something to us because we have assigned meaning to them. And the meaning we assign to them is very specific and very personal. A thing can mean one thing to one person and something else to another person. In addition, the meaning we assign to things, people, situations, or activities can change. If meaning resided within the thing, the meaning of the thing wouldn’t change.

As David DiSalvo says, we are meaning-makers. We can focus our lives on what we determine is meaningful to us, but we can’t go looking for meaning out there and expect to find anything.

Another problem is that happiness vs. meaningfulness represents an apples and oranges kind of comparison. Happiness is a feeling, and therefore transient. It’s the nature of feelings to come and go. Happiness bubbles up in us, often unexpectedly, and the unexpectedness is part of its charm or desirability. If we were happy all the time—which is impossible, anyway—we would miss out on that aspect of it. And since happiness is a feeling—an experience—it is subjective. It’s not easy to describe our personal experience of happiness to someone else.

“When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” —Humpty Dumpty

A third problem results from this ephemeral nature of happiness: how do you define it? Some people have decided that happiness means what they choose it to mean:

In her 2007 book The How of Happiness, positive psychology researcher Sonja Lyubomirsky [describes] happiness as “the experience of joy, contentment, or positive well-being, combined with a sense that one’s life is good, meaningful, and worthwhile.” —Greater Good Science Center website

The Greater Good Science Center is well-meaning, but the notion that you can’t experience happiness unless you also believe your life is good, meaningful, and worthwhile—whatever that means—is absurd. Ask a toddler.

Viktor Frankl (Man’s Search for Meaning) said, “Happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to ‘be happy.’” So he and Lyubomirsky appear to be on the same page. But it isn’t true that happiness can’t be pursued. It’s pursued all the time by quite a large number of people—not only pursued, but attained—at least temporarily. It’s also not true that money can’t buy happiness. It doesn’t always, but it definitely can. At least for a while.

Attempting to maintain a steady-state of happiness requires the ongoing pursuit of bigger and better things or experiences. We have an unfortunate tendency to become complacent with what we already have. We then require more things and more experiences to feed our happiness addiction—or our pleasure addiction, if we’re on board with Epicurus and consider the good life to be a life of hedonism. Yet another piece of bad news is the overwhelming evidence that most of us don’t really know what will make us happy, which can make the pursuit of happiness extremely frustrating and possibly even futile.

Happy as a Clam*

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with feeling happy or wanting to feel happy. Happiness is great stuff, but there’s a reason why pursuing it or trying to be happy all the time is not a good idea.

A good mood is a signal [to the brain] that things are generally going well, the environment is safe, and it is all right to let one’s guard down. A bad mood indicates that things are not going very well, there may be a threat, and vigilance is required.

Good mood, intuition, creativity, gullibility, and increased reliance on System 1 form a cluster. At the other pole, sadness, vigilance, suspicion, an analytic approach, and increased effort also go together. A happy mood loosens the control of System 2 over performance: when in a good mood, people become more intuitive and more creative but also less vigilant and more prone to logical errors. —Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

*The full expression is happy as a clam at high tide. Clams are happy at high tide because they can only be dug up at low tide. At high tide they’re safe and secure, which is what System 1 wants us to be.

The Good Life: Gratified or Satisfied?

So what’s the solution to the problem of dissatisfaction? Pursuing happiness and pursuing what is meaningful use different parts of our brain. The pursuit of happiness keeps us fixated on ourselves and on gratifying our immediate wants and needs. Our unconscious (System 1) is focused on the short-term rewards that make us feel good in the moment (because that indicates we’re safe) but which can actually add up to an increase in dissatisfaction. The pursuit of happiness doesn’t appear to be the solution to our existential dissatisfaction.

We have the ability to determine what is meaningful to us. Because what is meaningful is less transitory, we have a much better chance of achieving and sustaining a meaningful life—and therefore a satisfying one—than we have of achieving and maintaining a happy life. When we’re oriented to something bigger than we are—and bigger than our immediate wants and needs—we’re less susceptible to the pull of immediate gratification. When we give our big brain (consciousness, System 2) something worthwhile to focus on, we can achieve goals or create things that actually make a difference, to us and to others.

Our obsession with happiness may be intimately related to a feeling of emptiness, to a sense that our lives lack meaning. Although we recognize our dissatisfaction, we don’t realize the source of it. As a result, we’re stuck on the hamster wheel of System 1 looking for the solution in all the wrong places, unable to look up long enough to even identify what’s most important to us, let alone figure out how to attain it.