Health & Wellness Magazine Community Of Caring - Summer 2019 | Page 18

TO BE HAPPY
>>
mode. Consider several decades of
research by the psychologist Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi on flow, a state of
complete absorption in an activity.
Think of being engrossed in a Harry
Potter book, playing a sport you love,
or catching up with a good friend you
haven’t seen in years. You’re in the
zone: you’re so immersed in the task
that you lose track of time and the
outside world. was so busy assessing each new job
and country that he never fully engaged
in his projects and relationships.
Instead, he became depressed and
entered a vicious cycle documented by
psychologists Katariina Salmela-Aro and
Jari-Erik Nurmi: depression leads people
to evaluate their daily projects as less
enjoyable, and ruminating about why
they’re not fun makes the depression
worse.
Csikszentmihalyi finds that when
people are in a flow state, they don’t
report being happy, as they’re too
busy concentrating on the activity or
conversation. But afterward, looking
back, they describe flow as the optimal
emotional experience. By looking
everywhere for happiness, Tom
disrupted his ability to find flow. He The second error was in overestimating
the impact of life circumstances on
happiness. As psychologist Dan Gilbert
explains in Stumbling on Happiness,
we tend to overestimate the emotional
impact of positive life events. We think
a great roommate or a major promotion
will make us happier, overlooking
the fact that we’ll adapt to the new
circumstances. For example, in a classic
study, winning the lottery didn’t appear
to yield lasting gains in happiness. Each
time Tom moved to a new job and
country, he was initially excited to be
running on a new treadmill, but within a
matter of months, the reality of the daily
grind set in: he was still running on a
treadmill.
The third misstep was in pursuing
happiness alone. Happiness is an
individual state, so when we look
for it, it’s only natural to focus on
ourselves. Yet a wealth of evidence
consistently shows that self-focused
attention undermines happiness and
causes depression. In one study, Mauss
and colleagues demonstrated that the
greater the value people placed on
happiness, the more lonely they felt
every day for the next two weeks. In
another experiment, they randomly
assigned people to value happiness, and
found that it backfired: these people
reported feeling lonelier and also had
a progesterone drop in their saliva, a
hormonal response linked to loneliness.
As Tom changed jobs and countries
alone, he left behind the people who
made him happy.
The final mistake was in looking for
intense happiness. When we want to
be happy, we look for strong positive
emotions like joy, elation, enthusiasm,
and excitement. Unfortunately, research
shows that this isn’t the best path
to happiness. Research led by the
psychologist Ed Diener reveals that
happiness is driven by the frequency,
not the intensity, of positive emotions.
When we aim for intense positive
emotions, we evaluate our experiences
against a higher standard, which makes
it easier to be disappointed. Indeed,
Mauss and her colleagues found that
when people were explicitly searching
for happiness, they experienced less joy
in watching a figure skater win a gold
medal. They were disappointed that
the event wasn’t even more jubilating.
And even if they themselves had won
the gold medal, it probably wouldn’t
have helped. Studies indicate that an
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