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Research: Pursing hedonism doesn’t make you happy

Judging your own happiness could backfire and negatively impact life satisfaction and psychological well-being.

A smiling woman. By Eric McGregor - CC BY 2.0
A smiling woman. By Eric McGregor - CC BY 2.0

What does it mean to be happy? This is made challenging by “happiness” being the subject of debate in relation to usage and meaning. It is also a culturally-laden term and a factor perceived differently by different individuals within the same culture.

Furthermore, there are different approaches within psychology to assess happiness. And individuals have their own conception and ‘feelings’ as when they are or are not happy.

Whichever approach is used it appears, from a new study, that there are dangers with self-diagnosis. Judging your own happiness could backfire and negatively impact life satisfaction and psychological well-being. Instead, experiencing emotions with acceptance is more useful.

These findings are based on three recent academic experiments. In the three experiments comprising more than 1,800 participants, researchers found that having concerns or judgments about one’s own level of happiness were associated with lower well-being, due in part to greater negativity and disappointment about positive events.

For the research, participants answered questions about their beliefs about happiness, as well as their psychological well-being and depressive symptoms.

The research did point to being concerned about one’s own happiness was instead associated with lower overall life satisfaction and psychological well-being, as well as greater depressive symptoms. Furthermore, having concerns about one’s own happiness was associated with greater negativity about positive events.

In other words, thinking too much about one’s own level of happiness could be related to fears about not measuring up or not being as happy as other people (what the researchers term “negative meta-emotions”).

This connects with societal pressures, especially in high-income countries, which encourage the fallacy that people must aspire to eudaimonia all of the time to achieve greater well-being.

In contrast, allowing yourself to experience your emotions, whether they are positive or negative, with an accepting attitude is deemed to be a more useful tool for pursuing happiness and increasing well-being.

This is not the same as the pursuit of happiness, or viewing happiness as a very important goal, but rather seeking to avoid judging one’s own level of happiness (that is, aspiring to happiness and concern about happiness represented distinct individual differences).

The research appears in the journal Emotion, titled “Unpacking the pursuit of happiness: Being concerned about happiness but not aspiring to happiness is linked with negative meta-emotions and worse well-being.

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Dr. Tim Sandle is Digital Journal's Editor-at-Large for science news. Tim specializes in science, technology, environmental, business, and health journalism. He is additionally a practising microbiologist; and an author. He is also interested in history, politics and current affairs.

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