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Undying happiness9/1/2023 ![]() What’s wrong with imagining a better future for yourself? It seems to make sense that thoughts of success could boost our motivation and self-confidence. The idea lies behind bestselling books such as The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale and often features in inspirational biographies. Positive fantasies – and the positive moods that they create – can lead to a sense of complacency A student might imagine themselves in mortar board and gown an athlete with a gold medal around their neck someone on a diet might picture the new clothes they’ll be wearing at the end of their regime. If the general pursuit of happiness is problematic, specific strategies designed to bring about greater contentment can also backfire.Ĭonsider the oft-cited technique of “visualising your success”. ![]() That will be much harder for people who are constantly thinking about their happiness, since they’ll always be lamenting the loss of the many more exciting activities that they could have been doing. The peaks in our mood may be few and far between, but a simple appreciation of the small pleasures amid the stress could help ease us through the day-to-day anxieties, Mahmoodi Kahriz says. These lessons may be especially important in the pandemic. “They have such a high standard for achieving happiness that they don’t appreciate the small and simple things that are really meaningful in their life – and they are more unhappy as a result,” says Mahmoodi Kahriz. They were also less likely to look back fondly on a fun event in the days afterwards – it just occupied less of their headspace. Surveying participants in the UK, Dr Bahram Mahmoodi Kahriz and Dr Julia Vogt at the University of Reading have found that the people who scored highest on Mauss’s questionnaire felt less excitement and anticipation for forthcoming events, and were less likely to savour the moment during the events themselves. Perhaps most important, paying constant attention to our mood can stop us from enjoying everyday pleasures. The same was true when the participants were asked to list 10 activities that might contribute to their happiness: the reminder of all that they could be doing to improve their wellbeing placed them in a kind of panic, as they recognised how little time they had to achieve it all. In 2018, researchers at the University of Toronto found that simply encouraging people to feel happier while watching a relatively boring film meant that they were more likely to endorse the statement “time is slipping away from me”. The pursuit of happiness can even have strange effects on our perceptions of time, as the constant “fear of missing out” reminds us just how short our lives are and how much time we must spend on less than thrilling activities. ![]() We become so absorbed in our own wellbeing, we forget the people around us – and may even resent them for inadvertently bringing down our mood or distracting us from more “important” goals. As well as reducing everyday contentment, the constant desire to feel happier can make people feel more lonely. These findings have now been replicated many times, with many more experiments revealing a dark side to the pursuit of happiness. ![]() People who rate happiness as an important focus for them have been found to enjoy pleasurable moments less while they’re happening. ![]() Far from enhancing their enjoyment of the inspirational story, the focus on their own happiness had muted their joy – compared with the second group of participants, who had been given a dry article to read about the importance of rational judgment. In this experiment, Mauss asked half the participants to read a paragraph expounding the benefits of feeling good, and then had them watch a feelgood film about a professional figure skater. Various factors may have caused that link, of course, but a second study suggested a strong causal connection. The people who scored highly should have been seizing each day for its last drop of joy, yet Mauss found they tended to be less satisfied with their everyday lives, and were more likely to have depressive symptoms even in times of relatively low stress. The participants were first asked to rate how much they agreed with a series of statements such as: “I value things in life only to the extent that they influence my personal happiness” and “I am concerned about my happiness even when I feel happy”. Let’s first consider the counterintuitive ways that the conscious pursuit of happiness can influence our mood, starting with a study by Iris Mauss at the University of California, Berkeley. ![]()
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