What if the mad dash to be perpetually happy was making us sad?
Who doesn’t want to be happy?
It’s a wonderful state, deserving of a powerful seat at the good life table. Happiness has become a hot subject of study over the last three decades, along with the explosion of the field of positive psychology.
This near-mystical state comes with myriad benefits, beyond, well, being happy.
Happy people:
Have more friends
Are healthier
Have better immune systems
Are more active contributors to society
Get more done at work.
The list of happy-related yumminess is long.
But, what exactly IS happiness?
How do we GET it?
And is happiness really a MUST for a good life?
Let’s take these questions one at a time.
First, what “is” happiness?
Such a loaded question, devoid of a universal answer. Ask the average person on the street and the answer is usually “state-based.” It’s an emotion, a feeling, kind of like joy, upbeat, positive, you know…happy!
Drill down a bit, and the answers begin to expand out into the “life conditions' 'that lead to this state. One person's happiness is being in the arms of love, another’s is coding a complex algorithm. Yet another finds it in the reduction of chronic pain from extreme to moderate, still suffering, yet less.
Someone else might describe it as the feeling of besting competitors or finding justice after a long fight. In parts of the world where extreme poverty, starvation, violence and suffering are a part of daily existence, it might be described as a day with food or water, or a temporary lull in violence.
Ask a positive psychology researcher and you’ll get a different set of answers. In her book, The How of Happiness, acclaimed researcher Sonja Lyubomirsky describes it as:
“the experience of joy, contentment, or positive well-being, combined with a sense that one’s life is good, meaningful, and worthwhile.”
Happiness researchers, in fact, cannot offer any universal, agreed-upon definition to their research subjects when conducting experiments. Which makes it challenging to draw broad conclusions.
How do we know that, across different labs, cohorts and experiments, we’re all even talking about the same thing? Truth is, we don’t. And, they aren’t.
Most rely on some variations of standard survey questions, like, “looking at your life as a whole, are you (1) very happy, (2) quite happy, (3) not very happy, or (4) not happy at all?” Subjects are asked to rate their happiness, but are never offered a definition. Because, they cannot be. It’s just too subjective.
So, we’re left with pieces of a puzzle that often come down to, “we just know it when we feel it, and it’s different for everyone.” This is part of the challenge when trying to make robust claims about happiness. We never quite know if we’re talking the same language, or truly describing the same thing.
Which brings us to that second question:
How do we get happy?
Something interesting and a bit ironic happens when we pursue happiness as a primary goal, a mandatory prerequisite to a life well-lived. The all-consuming quest to make ourselves happy can, in fact, lead to misery. As Viktor Frankl offered in Man’s Search for Meaning, happiness is not “pursued,” instead, it must “ensue.”
In part, because we rapidly habituate to the big, quick hit sources we most often pursue. We’re happier for a hit minute or month, but the feeling fades and we eventually revert back to our previous happiness mean. But also, and more subtly, 100% up-time happiness is not a realistic aspiration. Nor, despite popular lore, should it be.
Happiness is a bit like fitness. You can train and orient your life to cultivate a solid base and keep relatively fit on a regular basis, but you cannot sustain peak condition for more than a short certain window of time. Your body and mind need to cycle in and out. Peaks and valleys are natural and necessary. Expecting only peaks is setting yourself up for frustration and futility.
Beyond the fact that we are all wired, on some level, to cycle in and out of the land of giggles lies a stark realization.
One, we often don’t want to hear, but is critical to not only our happiness, but our ability to live good lives…
We need the valleys as much as the peaks.
Not necessarily depression or deep lows, but simply the chance to cycle back to baseline “things are good” or even” wow, that day sucked,” to provide the contrast necessary to know when we’re happy. It’s this very contrast that gives us the ability to know what happiness is. It gives us something to compare it to, along with the context needed to see and embrace gratitude. We know when things are good, because we’ve experienced when they’re not.
Research, in fact, shows that the full spectrum of experiences and emotions—what’s become known as “emodiversity“—and not a state of perpetual joviality, is what leads to the experience of a generally good and happy life. Our state of body and mind both improve when we feel not just joy, gratitude and love, but also sadness, anger and fear, among many others. Human flourishing, over the long haul, has to allow for unhappiness, as well as happiness.
Another thing. When it comes to happiness, we are not entirely in control.
This is so important to know…