The Truth About Happiness
Our favorite feeling has a hidden dark side
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Aristotle once wrote about the mean between extremes. Emotions like anger, he said, are only virtuous in moderate amounts. If you feel too much, people will find you annoying. If you feel too little, they’ll think you’re insane. The ideal amount is the mean between extremes: not too much and not too little. The same is true of happiness.
While it might be difficult to envision a problem with too much happiness, the reality is there. The lofty feeling comes surprisingly well-equipped with devices built to manipulate our thinking. If these devices go unchecked, they can guide us into terrible decisions.
But another look at our favorite feeling reveals that even minor amounts can prove problematic. Fortunately, understanding the ways in which these problems emerge can help us to ameliorate their damage. To get this understanding, however, we must start with what happiness is.
Happiness
Happiness is an emotion, but for a more nuanced view we’ll employ a simplified definition used by happiness researchers. What they find is that happiness is best described in two ways: (1) the doing of things you typically enjoy—reading, traveling, playing guitar—and (2) life-satisfaction, the result of admiring your past accomplishments.
The first of these constructs is easy enough to explain. When we’re happy, it’s normally because we’re doing something we like. Maybe we’re playing guitar. Maybe we’re cooking food. Whatever it is, the activity usually entails immediate hedonic value, and we enjoy doing it because it literally feels good. This feeling is largely created by the neurotransmitter dopamine.
Dopamine brings us the pleasant qualities of happiness through the brain’s reward systems. Here, it gets secreted anytime we get something we like and whenever we want that thing again in the future. If we give people control over a button that stimulates these systems, they’ll press it up to 400 times a minute. They describe the experience as “similar to orgasm.” Happiness, in other words, offers a thoroughly good time.
Life-satisfaction is a bit different. Rather than come from immediately rewarding things like playing guitar or buttons that simulate orgasm, it comes from delayed gratification. Practicing scales or rudiments can feel horribly tedious or cruel, but looking back at how the practice made you better can yield ample happiness for your future self. This postponement of immediate rewards for those further off is the origin of life-satisfaction.
Both of these constructs combine to give us a well-rounded definition of happiness. We feel it in the moment when we’re doing something we like, and later on when we’re reflecting on a life well-lived. Either way, the experiences make us happy.
Inclined to Approach
When you experience happiness in one of these forms, your body undergoes a suite of physiological and cognitive changes. While most of these changes feel good, they also lead to undesirable styles of thinking. The clearest example of this comes from something called approach-related behavior.
Approach-related behaviors are those that literally induce you to approach. In most animals, this shows itself as an increased willingness to explore open spaces: The animal feels safe, is comfortable in its surroundings, and doesn’t feel endangered by things like predators or starvation. So instead of hiding in a dark corner, the critter will move about and approach.
The human analog of approach-related behavior is more expansive. Rather than just explore open environments, we’re more likely to start new projects, chat with strangers, and push ourselves into novel social situations. These behaviors are described under the broaden-and-build theory of happiness: The happier we feel, the more we try to broaden and build our socio-cognitive horizons.
The reason that happiness inspires these behaviors is because of the way it evolved. In short, happiness evolved as a way to tell our bodies that everything is alright — a feeling that only occurs when we resolve ourselves of potential danger. When we’re happy, then, our body thinks it’s okay to approach new ideas, actions, and people with comfort and ease. The result is an inclination to approach.
When we use emotions as information in this way (called affect-as-information theory), we tell our bodies to respond to the environment in specialized ways. With anger, for example, we experience a rise in blood pressure, an increased heart rate, and a frame of mind that primes us to penalize. This mindset encourages us to get angry at things like belated texts or awful drivers. Happiness does the same thing but to a different effect.
When we use happiness as information, we feel a bias toward approach. While under one light this motivates us to broaden and build, in another it mires our thinking: Because everything is going well, we don’t feel the need to think too critically about our actions. As a consequence, we succumb to a handful of approach-related dispositions that aren’t exactly good.
The Pitfalls
Happiness, what many of us consider the zenith of all being, has a tremendous ability to cloud our thinking. While the way in which it does this is often difficult to detect, it reliably guides us into certain cognitive pitfalls. Three of the more salient of these pitfalls are distractibility, risk-taking, and bias.
Distractibility is one of the easier-to-notice pitfalls. When we’re happy, we tend to get more distractible: we start new projects, neglect old ones. While this isn’t true all the time—flow, for instance, is an interesting counter-example—happiness does tend to move us more toward the new. While this might be advantageous for immediate happiness, it pushes us further from the tasks that build life-satisfaction.
The second pitfall is an increase in risk-taking. At its most extreme—like what we see in those who experience mania—we have more unprotected sex, gamble away more money, and are more likely to speed recklessly down the freeway. In those of us who experience normal quantities of the stuff, we feel a watered down version of all these things: some of us are less inclined to purchase insurance, while others of us are more likely to binge-drink.
The most troubling pitfall, however, is bias. Because we’re inclined to approach, we tend to think more superficially. We rely more on scripts and schemas, are less adept at error-detection, and even become more likely to sterotype our peers. In one experiment, those primed to feel happiness were more likely to label African American names as “criminal” and white names as “politician.” In another, they were more easily persuaded by bad arguments.
Each of these pitfalls is motivated by the feeling’s approach-related behaviors. Because we feel happy, safe, and comfortable, we can move forward without critically analyzing our actions. The result is an unpalatable mix of cognitive pitfalls, many of which can lead to detrimental outcomes.
Rectifying Happiness
Fortunately, there seems to be a way to rectify these unfortunate pitfalls. Amazingly, all it takes is to recognize their existence. Once we understand how emotions influence our thinking, the effects they exert tend to evaporate. This happens for many of our primary emotions.
The way in which emotion affects our subsequent thinking, as we’ve seen with happiness, is called incidental affect. You experience some emotion—happiness, anger, sadness, fear—and the feeling then organizes your body to respond to the environment in certain ways. The way your body responds is unique to whatever emotion you’re feeling. But once you become aware of how these effects take shape, their influence can disappear.
In one well-known experiment, people were surveyed on an uncharacteristically sunny day (nice weather is known to positively influence mood, so the change was expected to increase happiness). When asked how they felt about their lives as a whole, those in the sunny places said they were by-and-large happier. When asked to contemplate how other factors—like the weather—might have influenced their conclusion, the effect disappeared.
The same has been found for many of happiness’ downsides. When you take note of how happiness might distract you, you tend to focus better. When you understand how it makes you more judgmental, you see the same thing. Knowing how emotions bias your judgements and decision-making can help you rob them of their biasing power.
None of this naysaying is to detract from how pleasant and desirable happiness is. When you have the feeling, you should definitely stop and smell the gardenias. Just know that somewhere deep down the feeling might be guiding you into certain insalubrious behaviors. You’re better off knowing that it does.
Especially Fun Papers
- These four papers (here, here, here, and here) show how dopamine controls approach-related behaviors in ancient and modern vertebrates.
- Dopamine, as shown in this, this, and this study, is directly implicated in distractibility and risk-taking.
- These three papers (here, here, and here) show how incidental affect guides our judgements and decision-making.
- Rectifying bias isn’t always easy (as shown here and here). Knowing these biases exist, however, is a positive step toward reducing their influence.
