IHappiness is a goal worth achieving, but obsessing too much about achieving it often leads to bad feelings when it is not achieved, which ultimately makes one feel bad. less happy.
That is the conclusion of A new study published in the magazine Emotion“Imagine someone goes to a birthday party and, halfway through, realizes they’re not as happy as they expected,” says lead author and social psychologist Felicia Zerwas, who was a doctoral student at the University of California-Berkeley when the research was conducted and is now a postdoctoral researcher at New York University. “You could just acknowledge that it’s a fact of life and birthday parties. Or you could judge it, thinking how sad and disappointing it is.”
Research shows that this second way of thinking is the problematic one. “Over time, infusing potentially positive moments with negativity can accumulate and undermine well-being, similar to how plaque can build up in arteries and undermine heart health.”
Zerwas and his colleagues found that sabotaging one's own happiness is surprisingly common. Something interesting emerged when they analyzed surveys on mood, personality, well-being and depression, as well as diary entries from about 1,800 people over 11 years.
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They found that striving for happiness and valuing it weren’t the issue, but how people pursued it. “Someone person may value happiness and strive to identify effective strategies to achieve their happiness goals,” Zerwas says, “and another person may value happiness and successfully identify effective strategies to achieve their happiness goals.”
Worrying and stressing about No It turns out that being happy is not one of those effective strategies. It gives rise to what are known as meta-emotions (feelings about what we feel) and they can be destructive.
“Think about a first date,” Zerwas says. “You were hoping to feel happy, but the date started out a little awkward. You may start judging your feelings, thinking you should enjoy the experience more; however, this very act works against your goal of feeling happy. Accepting that social interactions often have ups and downs can prevent you from obsessing over the differences between what you want to feel and what you do feel.”
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In the study, people who said they were worried about achieving and maintaining happiness tended to have more depressive symptoms, worse well-being, and less life satisfaction than those who simply had happiness as a goal and did not worry about whether they were achieving it.
So what's the secret? Take the pressure off yourself and stop taking your happiness temperature so often, says Zerwas. Embrace all your feelings.Both happy and sad—since all emotions can be informative and give us insights into our psychic makeup. And practice cognitive-behavioral strategies like mindfulness (being present to one's emotions and aware of what those feelings are) to really tune in. This can “reduce the pressure to set emotional goals,” Zerwas says. “Harmful emotional experiences [can occur] “during the pursuit of happiness.”