Focusing Too Much on Happiness Can Make You Unhappier

While happiness is a desirable goal, fixating excessively on achieving it can lead to negative emotions when you fall short, ultimately making you less happy.

This is the conclusion of a study published in the journal Emotion. “Imagine attending a birthday party and realizing you’re not as happy as you expected to be,” says lead author and social psychologist Felicia Zerwas, who was a doctoral student at the University of California-Berkeley when the research was conducted and is now a postdoctoral researcher at New York University. “You might simply accept this as a fact of life, or you might judge it, thinking how sad and disappointing it is.”

The research indicates that this second way of thinking is problematic. “Over time, injecting potentially positive moments with negativity can accumulate and undermine well-being—similar to how plaque buildup in arteries can harm heart health.”

Sabotaging your own happiness is surprisingly common, according to Zerwas and her colleagues. An interesting pattern emerged when they analyzed mood, personality, well-being, and depression surveys, along with diary entries, from approximately 1,800 individuals over 11 years.

They found that striving for and valuing happiness wasn’t the issue. The problem was how people pursued it. “Someone might value happiness and struggle to find effective strategies to achieve their happiness goals,” Zerwas explains, “while another person might value happiness and successfully identify effective strategies to reach their happiness goals.”

Worrying and stressing over not being happy, it turns out, is not one of those effective strategies. It gives rise to what are known as meta-emotions—feelings about what we’re feeling—and they can be destructive.

“Consider someone on a first date,” Zerwas says. “They hoped to feel happy, but the date started a bit awkwardly. They might start judging their feelings by thinking they should enjoy the experience more; however, this very act works against their goal of feeling happy. Accepting that social interactions often have ups and downs can prevent them from obsessing over the differences between what they want to feel and what they’re actually feeling.”

In the study, individuals who reported worrying about achieving and maintaining happiness tended to experience more depressive symptoms, poorer well-being, and lower life satisfaction than those who simply held happiness as a goal without fretting over whether they were meeting it.

So, what’s the secret? Release the pressure and stop taking your own happiness temperature so frequently, Zerwas advises. Embrace all of your emotions—as all emotions can be informative, offering insights into our psychic makeup. Practice cognitive-behavioral strategies such as mindfulness—being present in one’s emotions and aware of what those feelings are—to truly tune in. This can “reduce the pressure of setting emotion goals,” Zerwas explains. “Damaging emotional experiences can occur during the pursuit of happiness.”