Constantly striving for contentment can wind up sabotaging life satisfaction. Here’s what the research shows.
Trying hard to be happy may not be the most reliable way to get there. Over the past 15 years, psychologists have found that people who prize and closely monitor their own happiness, scoring each day the way some people score their mood in an app, tend to report lower well-being, more loneliness and more symptoms of depression.
The evidence comes from lab experiments, daily diaries and surveys spanning dozens of countries. It cuts against a message that self-help books, wellness apps and social media repeat constantly: happiness is a project, and you should always be working on it.
The research also points to a fix, and it is not to stop caring about being happy.
Can Chasing Happiness Really Make You Less Happy?
Research suggests it can, especially when life is already going well.
The best-known evidence comes from a pair of studies led by psychologist Iris Mauss, then at the University of Denver, published in Emotion in 2011. In the first, 59 Denver-area women who had recently gone through a stressful life event filled out a questionnaire on how much they valued happiness. Women who valued it most reported lower life satisfaction, lower well-being and more symptoms of depression, but only when their recent lives had been fairly low in stress. Under heavy stress, the link disappeared.
The second study tested cause and effect. Researchers had 69 college-age women read a short passage. For half, it said that happier people enjoy social, career and health benefits. The other half read the same text with “happiness” swapped for “making accurate judgments.” Everyone then watched either a sad film clip or a happy one showing a figure skater winning gold.
After the happy clip, women who had been primed to prize happiness felt less happy than the comparison group. After the sad clip, there was no difference. The happiness group also reported more disappointment, which partly explained the drop. The researchers concluded that “valuing happiness may lead people to be less happy just when happiness is within reach.”
A 2021 replication in Psychologica Belgica by Michel Hansenne pointed the same way. Among 683 adults in French-speaking Belgium, those who scored higher on the same valuing-happiness scale reported lower happiness, lower life satisfaction and more depressive symptoms.
The pressure does not have to come from inside. A 2022 survey of 7,443 people in 40 countries, published in Scientific Reports, found that people who felt society expected them to be happy and not sad reported lower life satisfaction, fewer positive emotions and more symptoms of depression, anxiety and stress. For most of these measures, the link was roughly twice as strong in countries that rank high on the World Happiness Index, such as the Netherlands and Canada. Lead author Egon Dejonckheere said the happiness people feel pushed to reach “may be unattainable.”
Source : https://studyfinds.com/chasing-happiness-can-make-you-less-happy-more-alone-research
