According to research published by the American Psychological Association, judging one’s own happiness could backfire and negatively impact your life satisfaction and psychological well-being.
Judging Your Happiness Can Backfire on Your Psychological Well-Being
In three experiments involving more than 1,800 participants, researchers found that worrying about or judging one’s level of joy was associated with lower well-being, due in part to greater negativity and disappointment about positive events.
The research was published in the journal Emotion .
Thinking too much about your own level of joy may be related to a fear of not measuring up or being as happy as others, said lead researcher Felicia Zerwas, Ph.D., who was a doctoral candidate at the University of California-Berkeley during this research and is now a postdoctoral researcher at New York University.
“There are a lot of social pressures, at least in the United States, that encourage the misconception that people need to feel happy all the time to achieve greater well-being,” she said. “In general, allowing yourself to feel your emotions, whether they’re positive or negative, with an attitude of acceptance could be a useful tool for pursuing joy and increasing well-being.”
Contrary to some previous studies, the current study found that pursuing happiness, or viewing happiness as a very important goal, had no negative impact on well-being. However, judging one’s level of happiness did.
The research included diverse participant samples, including Yale University students, community members in Denver and Berkeley, California, and online studies with participants from across the United States and Canada.
Participants answered questions about their beliefs about happiness, as well as their psychological well-being and depressive symptoms. Being concerned about one’s happiness was associated with lower overall life satisfaction and psychological well-being, as well as greater depressive symptoms.
The research also found that worrying about one’s happiness was associated with greater negativity toward positive events.
“Having high expectations about your happiness can be harmful because it makes it harder to achieve the level of happiness you expect from a positive event,” Zerwas said.
The pursuit of happiness can end up leading to depression
Focusing too much on enjoying experiences may contribute to depressive symptoms, a study suggests.
The study, published in the Journal of Happiness Studies, suggests that placing too much value on feeling happy has the effect of reducing the ability to enjoy experiences. The team from the University of Reading and De Montfort University found that this reduction in enjoying positive experiences was linked to depressive symptoms.
However, the study also suggests that the relationship is significantly shaped by the culture people come from. The study took two groups of participants from a UK university to assess whether the link between happiness ratings and depressive symptoms was similar in the UK context to previous studies conducted in the US. The team found that while there was a strong association among UK-based participants, EU and international participants did not show the same association.
Dr Julia Vogt, a psychologist at the University of Reading, said: “To our knowledge, this is the first time that the UK experience of assessing happiness has been examined. We found that participants’ inability to focus their attention while experiencing a range of emotions was a major factor in this idea of not being able to enjoy a positive experience.
“One of the most interesting things we found was how specific it was to the UK participants who took part. The study was trying to replicate a similar trial based in the US and we recruited young people from the UK, but we also had participants who lived in the UK but were from other parts of Europe and the rest of the world.
“The relationship between ratings of happiness and depressive symptoms was observed much more significantly in UK participants than in those of other nationalities or dual citizenship. We do not go so far as to test what these differences are, but there appears to be a significant gap between English-speaking Western cultures and other cultures when it comes to how our internalized value of experiencing happiness shapes our experiences and mood.”
Can the pursuit of happiness make you unhappy?
People generally like to feel happy, but achieving a state of happiness takes time and effort. Researchers have now discovered that people who pursue happiness often feel like they don’t have enough time in the day, which paradoxically makes them feel unhappy. Aekyoung Kim of Rutgers University in the US and Sam Maglio of the University of Toronto Scarborough in Canada studied this effect in a study in the journal Psychonomic Bulletin & Review , published by Springer and the official journal of the Psychonomic Society.
Kim and Maglio conducted four studies in which they investigated how the pursuit of happiness and the state of being happy influenced people’s perception of time. The pursuit of happiness led participants to think of time as something scarce.
In the studies, some participants were asked to list things that would make them happier or to try to feel happy while watching a boring movie about building bridges, thus demonstrating happiness as the pursuit of a goal. Other participants began by thinking of happiness as a goal they had already achieved, achieved by watching a slapstick comedy (rather than the movie about bridges) or by listing things that showed they were already happy. Afterward, all participants reported how much free time they felt they had.
The researchers’ main findings showed that a person’s perception of time scarcity is influenced by their pursuit of (often unattainable) happiness. The feeling of time scarcity decreased for participants who reported having achieved their goal of being happy to some extent.
“Time appears to vanish in the pursuit of happiness, but only when it is viewed as a goal that requires continuous pursuit,” the researchers explain. “This finding adds depth to the growing body of work suggesting that the pursuit of happiness can ironically undermine well-being.” The researchers say the findings imply that while happiness can undermine positive emotions, this is not necessarily the case.
Instead, if someone believes they have achieved happiness, they have time to appreciate it, for example by keeping a gratitude journal. The research also highlights that people have different concepts of happiness, which in turn can influence how they perceive the time they have to achieve happiness.
“Because engaging in experiences and savoring the associated feelings takes more time than, say, simply purchasing material goods, feeling time-poor also leads people to prefer material goods to enjoying leisure experiences,” the researchers continue, saying that feeling time-pressed also often makes people less willing to spend time helping others or volunteering. “By encouraging people to worry less about pursuing happiness as an open-ended goal, successful interventions may end up giving them more time and, in turn, more happiness.”
The two researchers believe that, given the influence that time availability has on people’s decision-making and well-being, it is essential to understand when, why, and how they perceive and use their time differently in the pursuit of happiness and other goals.
#Judging #happiness #backfire
