Is happiness overrated and can we escape the hedonic treadmill?
Why is everyone chasing happiness nowadays and few seem to also be comfortable with not being happy all the time?
Why has it become so badly perceived to also experience moments of unhappiness and the only measure of fulfilment in life is to be happy (all the time)?
Or not to even mention that persons that demonstrate traits of happiness are more positively perceived than those that exhibit traits of sadness, discomfort, or anger.
We live in a society that somehow has collectively decided what is socially acceptable and what is not in terms of expressed emotions. And being unhappy is not socially acceptable, on one hand we tend to stay away from people that don’t look happy, but also when we experience unhappiness we tend to isolate and hide our feelings, because we know that is not socially accepted and we tend to also not accept it within ourselves.
And apparently, what gives us the most happiness are social relationships. So, you can imagine what a pressure there is to be happy, or at least to show signs of being happy?
How does happiness feel to you I may ask? You want to BE happy, but how does feel for you? In your body, in your mind, in your thinking, how does it feel to be happy? What is happening is your life when you feel happy?
I want to start by making a distinction and invite you to reflect if this distinction resonates for you. In my personal view, being happy and experiencing happiness are different.
Being happy is a state of being, reflecting all your actions, thinking, behaviour. It’s a constant flow that comes from within you and doesn’t depend on anything else external. It’s entirely up to you to be happy, to decide your being is happiness.
Experiencing happiness can happen without being happy. For example, a person smiles at you, and you are automatically triggered to smile back. Someone says a joke and you laugh at it. You receive some good news, and you experience happiness for that piece of news. But this happiness is not from within you, but triggered by external factors, it’s sequential, meaning that it comes, and it goes, and you can never know how long it’s going to last, because as soon as the stimuli disappears, so does your feelings of happiness.
Happiness it’s a long researched and debated subject, and apparently researchers find that people worldwide would rate happiness more important than wealth, acquiring material goods, and getting into heaven.
There is a saying that the moment you start to chase happiness, it’s already gone. So why so many people wish to be happy, and yet when asked what it means to be happy, they don’t have an answer or are not even able to recognise the happiness in their lives already?
Are we chasing for something we don’t even know how to recognise? Is it that happiness can pass you by?
With the extensive focus on happiness, public institutions and governments start to put emphasis on ways of measuring happiness of their population and this how happiness tends now to also take a political turn (in addition to the economic one and psychological one). A very good example is the initiative of the World Happiness Report which in 2022, already celebrates its 10th Anniversary.
Having a deeper look as the World Happiness Report, the data collected is based on 6 (six) predictors of happiness: GDP per capita is in terms of Purchasing Power Parity (PPP); the time series for healthy life expectancy at birth; social support; freedom to make life choices, generosity, and perceptions of corruption.
These 6 predictors are then corrected with the positive effect and negative effect. Positive affect is defined as the average of previous day affect measures for laughter, enjoyment, and doing or learning something interesting. Negative affect is defined as the average of previous day affect measures for worry, sadness, and anger.
If you have the time and patience to read the report, I believe it has a lot of insightful information and provides the critical thinking process developed over the years in measuring happiness, culminating with preliminary conclusions on how complex to measure happiness is and that it’s also linked to personal (genetics factors included) and environmental aspects. More recently, linked as well with subjects as sustainability. On this thread of thoughts, they also conclude that GDP is getting less and less to be seen as an objective measure of progress and wellbeing and that other indicators should be consider that put at the centre the human experience.
I share with you one conclusion of the report that in my view reflects that measuring happiness is also a way of recognising the vulnerabilities and risks in each individual and that a measure that fits all doesn’t depict reality in its fairness:
“We should use findings from genetically informative designs to create happiness enhancing interventions, social policies, activities, and environments that enable flourishing of genetic potentials and simultaneously buffer vulnerability and risk. “
A full version of the report, can be found here: World Happiness Report 2022
As much as we would try to conceal in a set of criteria what means to be happy, I believe this also restricts a lot the individual pursuit of happiness and what this means for everyone. Then there is also the social pressure to somehow comply to feeling happy because you tick all the boxes of criteria used to assess your happiness level, yet you don’t feel happy.
While happiness it’s a pursuit worth attaining, while getting there, one also faces twists and turns that may not fall under the happiness criteria.
With the pressure of conforming to what happiness is somehow, we learn to repress negative emotions because are “bad” or start thinking there is something wrong with oneself because they just don’t feel happy as others would do, or convince ourselves that what we have it’s already much more than others have and we “should” feel happy, right? We wouldn’t be grateful and humble if we would just not recognise the happiness that is blooming everywhere around us (as per defined standards).
And this brings me to the next aspect: very much of what is perceived as happiness (worth pursuing) is generally linked to material things: how much money we earn, what things we can afford, how many holidays, what comfort we can provide to our children, their education, their toys, their experiences.
And indeed, research shows that income does plays a significant role in how happiness is perceived (the sweet spot being USD 60,000 — USD 75,000 annual income, above that happiness doesn’t necessarily increase).
Depending on the environment you live in, this aspect of linking happiness directly to level of income, might be more pertinent than other factors to consider.
Others take the happiness notion further and develop the idea of wellbeing, attaining a state of wellbeing.
Well-being goes beyond hedonism and the pursuit of happiness or pleasurable experience, and beyond a global evaluation (life satisfaction): it encompasses how well people are functioning, known as eudemonic, or psychological well-being. Assessing well-being using a single subjective item approach fails to offer any insight into how people experience the aspects of their life that are fundamental to critical outcomes. An informative measure of well-being must encompass all the major components of well-being, both hedonic and eudaimonic aspects, and cannot be simplified to a unitary item of income, life satisfaction, or happiness. (Well-being is more than happiness and life satisfaction: a multidimensional analysis of 21 countries)
The more I investigate into this subject, the more complex it becomes to assess what happiness is and how can we attain it, in a sustainable way.
There is also the theory of hedonic treadmill, which supports the idea that everyone has a baseline of happiness to which he will return, regardless of what happens to them. That is, although there could be an initial spike in happiness or sadness, as times goes on, the feeling of happiness or sadness caused by an event starts to dissipate and the habitual state settles in.
Take this theory with a classic example: say you get married, move into a new house, get a promotion, lose a job, suffer an accident, etc., over time, you’re likely to return to your set point of happiness.
Research also points that we are genetically programmed (about 50% of our happiness potential is dictated by genes) for how happy we can be, whereas 10% is influenced by our environment and 40% by adjusting ourselves to circumstances. There is good news and bad news in this (depending on whether you have an optimistic or pessimistic approach to life). The positive is that we have a certain degree of freedom to influence our level of happiness and the “bad news” is that some are born with more happiness material than others. However, that alone is not a predictor for happiness, but it helps (similar as with talented people, talent alone cannot compensate for the hard work required to achieve performance and results).
The vast research also points that for the variable part that we can control and adjust, practicing loving-kindness meditation also helps dismantle false assumptions about what leads to happiness and wellbeing.
Over time, meditation may be the gateway to creating insights that change our outlooks on ourselves and others, thereby increasing empathy and compassion.
To increase happiness, we can reflect on what we really want to do, choose the people and activities we really enjoy, learn by revisiting our negative thoughts, and focus on the present moment.
To conclude on my analysis regarding the pursuit of happiness, I want to quote Tal Ben-Shahar (2006), an American and Israeli writer in the field of positive psychology and leadership, for his tips on amplifying our level of happiness, remarking as well that part of the pursuit of happiness is also to accept our emotions, including fear, sadness and anxiety:
Give yourself permission to be human: Accept your emotions, including fear, sadness, and anxiety. Rejecting them leads to frustration.
Simplify your life. Focus on one thing at a time and reduce multitasking.
Find meaning and pleasure. Engage in goals you want to achieve instead of what you feel obligated to do. Spend two hours per week on hobbies. Spend time with our loved ones.
Focus on the positive and be grateful. Each day, write down five things for which you’re grateful.
Increase the effort you put into your relationships. Go on a date with your significant other or spend more time talking to your children.
Be mindful of the mind-body connection through exercise and the practice of mindfulness meditation, yoga, and breathing techniques. Research has shown that exercising leads to decreased levels of depression (Lyubomirsky & Tucker, 1998).
There are other tools we can use to shift our thoughts. By being mindful of what we think while reacting to situations, we can begin to focus on what we need to change in order to view the entire situation differently.
Whether pursuing happiness in life as a single measure of the quality and richness of our lives restricts or expands our human experience, it’s subject to individual perceptions. However, there is also data showing that a much more complete way of evaluating our lives is addressing the state of wellbeing.
My final intention is that this reading triggered some reflection on how you currently pursue happiness and how do you perceive the lows of happiness and escaping that treadmill of happiness.
My personal reflection is that happiness can be sourced from within by focusing on meditation and connecting to ourselves. While material things can influence temporarily our state of happiness, we would always revert to our baseline of happiness. And that baseline of happiness it’s entirely in our hands to define, nourish and develop.
If you want to explore where you are in your happiness pursuit and identify what matters, you can always contact me for a free conversation to assess whether 1:1 coaching with me is the best thing for you supporting your next steps.
