Neuroscience Says to Be Happier, Stop Thinking About Happiness

10/09/2024 Editor

A new study confirms that focusing too much on happiness actually makes you less happy.

If you studied economics or business, you might be familiar with Goodhart’s law. Named after British economist Charles Goodhart, it states that “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”

At work, this law can manifest as salespeople offering unprofitable deals at the end of the month just to meet their quotas or call center workers deliberately being unhelpful to meet targets for short call times.

But Goodhart’s law can appear in unexpected contexts, too. For instance, a new study published in the journal Emotion shows that when you make happiness a target and begin consciously measuring your progress, you actually end up less happy.

How chasing happiness decreases happiness

To figure out the relationship between chasing happiness and experiencing happiness, a team of researchers out of the University of California, Berkeley, New York University, and the University of Toronto rounded up 1,800 study subjects and had them answer questions about their beliefs about happiness and keep detailed diaries of their moods.

A peculiar correlation emerged. The more the study subjects checked in on their own happiness levels, the less happy they reported being. What was going on?

The researchers hypothesized that being overly focused on happiness leads people to believe they should aim to feel positive emotions all the time.

“There are plenty of societal pressures, at least within the United States, which encourage the fallacy that people must feel happy all of the time to achieve greater well-being,” commented lead researcher Felicia Zerwas in Neuroscience News.

Perfect bliss is, of course, impossible, and seeking it just creates a bigger gap between expectations and reality, thereby decreasing happiness.

Continually checking in with your emotions can also draw attention to every passing imperfection and negative emotion, paradoxically magnifying those bad feelings. “Latching on to the less-than-perfect aspects of positive moments will ultimately spoil them,” Zerwas warns.

Lastly, tracking happiness as you might track other life goals can drive people to compare themselves with others more. And while you can see what car your neighbor drives or how fancy their house is, you’re unlikely to be able to get an accurate sense of their inward level of peace and contentment from their outward presentation. Comparing your inner turmoil with their cheerful façade is not good for your self-assessment of your happiness.

Better ways to pursue happiness

This research team may be among the first to publish hard data documenting the paradox of happiness, but they’re hardly the first to observe it.

Expats have noted American strivers’ obsession with adding happiness to their trophy case of achievements, leading to more anxiety and less bliss. Nobel laureate psychologist Daniel Kahneman has written about how happiness and overall life satisfaction are often in tension, with life satisfaction being the more important goal for most people.

And Harvard happiness researcher Arthur Brooks has urged those seeking peace of mind to avoid chasing happiness head-on and instead seek it at a slant by pursuing other goals like community, meaning, and service. Happiness is the byproduct of a life well lived, not its end goal, he argues.

All of which is a helpful reminder for achievement-oriented entrepreneurs that putting “happiness” on your to-do list and dutifully managing your progress like any other task is likely to backfire spectacularly. But what’s the alternative? Should you give up on improving your happiness entirely?

No, reply the researchers behind this latest study. “While these findings raise a possible conundrum — wanting to feel happy ultimately involves feeling less happy — people should not take away that they are stuck,” claims Iris Mauss, one of the authors. Instead, they offer three suggestions:

Accept all your emotions. It’s fine to view happiness as an important goal, but rather than constantly evaluating your emotions, the researchers advise accepting them, both the positive and the negative.
Don’t view doing good as a means to an end. Positive activities like volunteering, exercising, or helping out friends aren’t a means to happiness but rather things you should do for their own intrinsic value.
Get social. The team behind this study agrees with tons of other experts that the most reliable way to boost happiness is simply to spend time with other people.