Lately, I find myself in almost daily conversations with friends and family about happiness. When a friend doesn’t beam from ear to ear, or offer a resounding, “I’m so happy!” during conversations about work, romance or life, I will often detect a look of guilt. And this compulsion to be happy needs to stop.
Happiness shouldn’t be the one thing that makes us feel alive.
We are complex. Our wide range of emotions teaches us to see the world more fully. A dreary day allows us to know a beautiful one. And the experience of being heartbroken shows us the infinite bounds of having a heart so full with love that it hurts.
We need to stop focusing on this dream of forever happiness and begin accepting something that is so much bigger and better than that one emotion. Once we do that, we are not only alive – happy or not – but we are also something even more special, which is human.
American culture is obsessed with telling us that happiness should be the focus of our lives, whether through self-help books, movies that always have a ‘happy ending’ or even the constant usage of the smiley emotion. I mean, it’s even in listed as a fundamental right in our Declaration of Independence.
When pop singer Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter is asked “What is your aspiration in life?” in the song Pretty Hurts, she responds without pause: “Oh, my aspiration in life would be to be happy.” This is what many of us who aren’t the Queen aspire to as well, which doesn’t seem too unreasonable.
But should it be?
Psychologist Iris Mauss at the University of California, Berkley found that the pursuit of happiness might just leave you worse off. “Wanting to be happy can make you less happy,” said Mauss in an interview with livescience.com. “If you explicitly and purposely focus on happiness, that appears to have a self-defeating quality.”
Her two research studies, which focused on women because social scientists have found that men have higher rates of concealing emotions, consistently found that the more you focus on attaining happiness, the worse your outcomes will be.
In her studies, participants who were not happy would begin blaming themselves for feeling sad. They thought it was an immediate flag for their failure, making these negative feelings even more counter-productive. The people who accepted these negative feelings as normal, however, were much happier in the long run. So, accepting your sadness could actually make you feel good.
Embracing our vast range of emotions could even increase our chances at survival. In his lesser-known book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, naturalist Charles Darwin points out the ways in which emotions help us to survive. He argues that when you’re feeling sexually aroused you more likely to find a mate to reproduce with, and when you feel fear or anger in a dangerous situation, you will likely respond by seeking safety.
For Darwin, emotions were very much tied to surviving, which requires more than just happiness.
So let’s stop pursing smiles and laughter and fun at the expense of everything else. Be open about how you’re feeling, don’t try to hide behind it or conceal it. Feelings should never make you feel guilty, and happiness isn’t the be-all end-all. It’s just a feeling and you are so much more than that one feeling.
Plus you’re most alive when you’re not just happy. Ask Darwin.
