Perrysburg Pulse Magazine Perrysburg Pulse October | Page 16

experience more joy and contentment.
To find out if we’re making progress,
we need to compare our past happiness
to our current happiness. This creates
a problem: the moment we make
that comparison, we shift from an
experiencing mode to an evaluating
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.
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 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.
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.
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