Can You Try Too Hard When Pursuing Happiness?

There is a distinct difference between people who aspire to be happy and those for whom it is a concern.

The difference is that making it a concern makes you question how happy you really are and if you aren’t as happy as you expected to be. You feel like you let yourself down instead of just being happy in the moment. In this way concerning yourself with happiness you are actively pushing it away. While if you were aspiring to be happy you would be finding ways of making yourself happy which would, in turn, make you happier most of the time.

According to a Felicia Zerwas and colleague’s study that was conducted at the New York University (2024), the two different ways to find happiness are an individual difference found in people, with one group preferring to aspire to happiness and the other making it a concern. They come to the same conclusion, that having happiness as a goal could backfire. But only for those who judge themselves for not being happy enough.

As a result of this research, a theoretical model was created by Zervas et al. stating that you can predict wellbeing by how strongly people are concerned with being happy. With another factor in this being meta-emotions that are emotions and/or concerns about how you are already feeling. They studied this in a longitudinal study using a self-made scale that looked at aspiring happiness and concern about happiness. 1800 people took part, and 6 months after completing the first part of the research they were asked about life satisfaction, psychological wellbeing, depressive symptoms and a general sense of worry.

The study found that although there is a correlation between concern about happiness and overall wellbeing, there was a much stronger correlation between meta-emotions and wellbeing. This means that worrying about your emotions plays a much bigger part in making you less happy than your overall concern about becoming happier.

What you should take away from this is that evaluating whether you are happy or not can make the happiness itself vain away making the positive psychology movement seem ironic. However, instead of evaluating how happy you are about everything, you can do this only when concerning more major issues such as is your job making you happy, to promote an overall positive change in your life. So, in other matter just let yourself feel what you are feeling be it good or bad to not encourage meta-emotions take you out of them and potentially make you less happy.