Over 150 years ago, the philosopher John Stuart Mill observed that the people who were happy were those who were focused on something else, not specifically on their own happiness. Yet we live in a society that pretty much tells us that we should always be trying to be happy, we should always be trying to improve our happiness. The pursuit of happiness is actually written into the US Declaration of Independence.

Some of the seminal research on this topic was actually done over 20 years ago at the University of California at Santa Barbara when Jonathan Schooler put out a research report, which he called "The Pursuit and Assessment of Happiness Can Be Self-Defeating."

Since then, there has been a lot of research that has supported this point.

In 2011, Iris Mauss, a psychologist and professor at UC Berkeley did a study analyzing whether the people who really valued being happy were actually happier than others or less happy. For the research, they gathered a group of women and had them do a self-report questionnaire where they ranked their life satisfaction, depressive symptoms, and overall feelings of wellbeing. They also asked the participants to report their current stress level, and whether there were big stressful events that had recently happened in their lives.

What they found was that of the women who were experiencing a low level of stress, the ones who valued happiness more were actually less happy. But in the group of people who were experiencing a high degree of stress, there was no difference in happiness level between those who really valued happiness and those who didn't.

It's interesting that the pursuit of happiness really seems to backfire when life is the best, when stress levels are low. I think this is because we get that feeling of "I should be happy, I'm not happy, but I should be because I have all this stuff, or all these things are going well, so I should be really happy."

When we're under a lot of stress or things are really difficult in our lives, we don't put that pressure on ourselves. Let me know if that makes sense to you, but it definitely makes sense to me.

Iris and her research team decided to follow up with another study because the first showed correlation between valuing happiness, stress levels, and happiness—but not causation. It didn't show that people were less happy because they valued happiness more.

They designed a study with two groups. One group read an article about how important happiness was. The other group read a neutral article. Then they showed some participants from each group a happy movie and others a sad movie.

For those watching the sad movie, there was no significant difference in how they felt. But there was a substantial difference in those watching the happy movie. The ones who had been primed to value happiness—who read about how important it was—reported being less happy than the group who read a neutral article and watched the same happy movie.

These research findings have been followed up with numerous other studies showing similar results.

What This Means for You
But the important question is - what does this mean for you?

It's a hard thing to stop valuing happiness... because... we all want to be happy!

We are so conditioned to think, "What do I need to do to feel happier? Why don't I feel happier now? What would make me feel happier? Given everything that's good, I should be happier."

This leads to all that self-criticism I've talked often about on this channel, and it makes us feel bad about ourselves. So what can we take away from this?

Researchers who study this have identified two main explanations. One I'm going to call the "high bar and disappointment" angle, and the other is the "constant monitoring" angle.

If you value happiness highly, you can create a very high bar of what that means.

In reality, we all experience conflictual feelings most of the time. Those moments where we are purely happy are rare and not sustainable. But if we think we should be purely happy with no caveats, then we're likely to be disappointed.

I was a psychotherapist for 20 years, and I found in working with people—and I've experienced it myself—that disappointment is one of those emotions we really dislike. It's not talked about as much as grief or anger, but I think disappointment is one of the most difficult emotions. I would sometimes be amazed at the degree to which people would try to avoid disappointment because they hated it so much.

With this happiness paradox, if you're always setting the bar high and then you're disappointed all the time, that's a horrible feeling. Obviously, it cycles in on itself.

It's been hard for me to read this research without thinking about my grandmother. Her parents were immigrants who did not speak much English. Until my grandmother was five, she spoke their language and she went to school not knowing any English. She did not have an easy childhood. Her parents were quite poor, and I think she had the view that life was going to be hard.

By the time I knew her, she was moving into retirement and things were easing. I remember how she would have so much joy and happiness at the simplest things: picking blueberries, having a dessert, dancing. There's an element where it feels a little sad. I would have wanted her to expect more. I felt like she deserved more. But she was quite happy and didn't have any sense of being entitled to an easy life or happiness. I do try to channel her every now and then.

The monitoring problem is when we constantly ask ourselves, "Am I happy now? Why aren't I happy? How happy am I? What is it I'm feeling?" We're always monitoring our emotional state.

Obviously some degree of this is needed. But we're talking about balance. If this is something you do frequently, it's worth knowing that constant self-monitoring has been tied to increased depressive symptoms.

I am going to focus on five things that you can begin to put in place to help you shift away from that prioritizing of happiness and towards something that maybe will surprise you with happiness.

Part of the problem is that we try to push away those negative feelings. We don't like to feel anger or guilt or sadness, and we go to a lot of effort to push them away. It doesn't work.

I know this is very hard and it's very complicated. I do have a lot of videos and blogs on emotional intelligence and emotional regulation. But the main point is to stop focusing on some kind of unattainable ideal. We are almost always going to have a mix of feelings, and sometimes good enough is good enough. Acknowledging and letting yourself feel what you actually feel can actually be really helpful. Not doing this leads us to a lot of guilt and negative self-talk, which is my point number two.

There's an element in a lot of online content which says, "If you're doing it right, if you put your energies in the right way, in the right area, you're happy."

I believe this content contributes to how badly we feel when we aren't happy. Sometimes it is true that if you approach things in the "right way" we are happier.  But not always.  We don't have control over everything, and human life can be hard.

I also have videos that go into stopping the negative self-talk and changing these things. I know it needs a lot of work, and I do have an online program called Roadmap to Joy. In that program—and even if you're not interested in the program, bear with me because I think you'll understand the point I'm making—I really focus on the feeling of joy, not happiness. I think joy is about those little tiny moments, usually moments when we're mindfully present, usually moments that are pretty simple like the ones I mentioned that would bring my grandmother joy. It's really those small things. It's not always the big goals.

I also have a free webinar called "Rewire Your Brain for Joy and Confidence." In this webinar, I go into some of the scientific research on how we can actually change the focus of our brain away from things that are either problems or triggers and move towards more mindfulness and more joy. That webinar has a lot of practical tools as well.

This recommendation comes from a lot of research. In particular, when you are engaging in activities, be focused solely on that activity. This is particularly true for the ones you get to choose. 

An example that comes to mind for me is skiing (I love to ski). When you're skiing, you can think of nothing else. You can't really spend time assessing, "Am I happy? Am I not happy?" (Although sometimes if you're cold you might be focused on that and 'why AM I doing this now?!'...) but basically you have to be really hyper-focused on what you're doing. It's incredibly relaxing to have my mind and my body focused at the same moment on the same thing. I think people who engage in music or art feel the same way.

I want to bring in a caveat with this, but first let's talk about prioritizing positivity. This would mean asking, "How can I look at this in a positive way?" Practices like gratitude have been shown overall to help improve well-being. 

There are some mindfulness practices that help with this: taking extra time to breath in the sight and smell of a beautiful flower for example. Taking the time to enrich our experience of the positive involves mindfully putting your focus on something positive with all your senses: hearing, sight, smell, touch, taste.

Now, my caveat here is that false positivity is not helpful. If trying to be positive just ends up making you feel more guilty because you really can't do it, or more frustrated, skip this one. Maybe there are little small ways to build it in—the smell of a cup of tea—but not forcing yourself to change how you think. That's why I said there's a caveat for me on the issue of prioritizing positivity, although research does show that this helps people overall feel more wellbeing.

Purpose doesn't have to be some big huge purpose. It doesn't have to be an enormous goal. Your purpose could be taking good care of your pet. Your purpose could be being there when your grandchildren call. Or your purpose could be learning more about poetry.

Engaging in activities that give you meaning and pursuing goals for that type of satisfaction can sometimes surprise you with more contentment.

The science directly contradicts our culture's obsession with happiness. Constantly engineering your life for peak positive emotion is a fundamentally flawed strategy.

To end today, I want to share the full quote from John Stuart Mill as it ties into a lot of what we've been saying here: