Every person wants to be happy, but happiness can be painfully difficult to achieve. And even when we get exactly what we wanted, we are often less happy than we thought, and the joy that we still feel is fleeting. What's the matter here?
As part of the Yale University Art of Wellbeing course, which has been attended by more than 300,000 people and which is the most popular at the university, professor of psychology Laurie Santos talks about the annoying prejudices that are inherent in almost all people. They prevent us from being happy, even when there are all the conditions for this. Santos explains how to deal with them in his free Coursera Lectures.
Intuition fails you
You probably have a few things that you would like to achieve in life, and it is reasonable to assume that when you get them, it will make you happy. Ironically, this is the first point where many of us go astray. In 2000, researchers Tim Wilson and Dan Gilbert coined a term for this trend: erroneous desire.
We all go through this. Maybe it's like a delicious-smelling fast food that we think will bring us pleasure, but instead it brings illness. Or great professional luck, which, instead of making our life fuller and more fulfilling, suddenly makes us think about changing our profession. And sometimes the opposite happens: a party that we were afraid for some reason turns out to be very fun in the end, and breaking up a relationship or losing a job is the beginning of an exciting new chapter in our lives. The problem is that most people do not know how to predict how certain events will affect their lives, and are often surprised when reality does not meet expectations.
You think in relative terms
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If, for example, you won a medal at the Olympics, it is reasonable to assume that you would be happy to receive a gold medal, a little less happy with a silver, and a little less happy with a bronze. But research shows that something else is actually happening: the gold medalist is the happiest (after all, he did his best), the bronze medalist is the second on this list (after all, he could not have a medal at all), and the silver medalist is the least happy (if he was a little more fortunate, he could have gotten gold).
As an Olympian, your brain weighs the value of achievement against other things, be it other people or yourself in the past. Half of the participants in one of the studies said they would be fine with a salary of $ 50,000 a year, provided they earn more than their peers. Another study found that the unemployed are happier in places where the unemployment rate is highest. Following the success of celebrities on Instagram or watching TV shows about millionaires can distort your idea of how much money others have, and comparisons to imagined well-being can make you unhappy.
You get used to the good
Think of something that made you feel happy last time. Maybe it was starting a new job, buying the latest gadget, or dating the person of your dreams. As happy as you were then, chances are good that the happiness did not last long. This is not because it was not worth rejoicing at all. The reason is a psychological phenomenon called hedonic adaptation. Basically, your brain cannot be in absolute bliss (or absolute suffering) forever - it will eventually adapt and emotions return to normal.
A great example of hedonic adaptation in action is a 1978 study that looked at seemingly much happier people than those around them: lottery winners. Scientists asked 22 participants who won the lottery over the past year to rate their level of happiness and predict how happy they will be in the future. Surprisingly, their happiness ratings did not differ much from the control group, which did not have a single lottery winner. They just got used to their money. This happens with many things, Santos explains: going to the college of your dreams, buying a new car, getting married, your baby's first words. “It's sad, isn't it?” She asks her audience during lectures. “The thing is, we strive to keep the delightful moments like these.”
You don’t realize that you’re getting used to good things.
It is sad that good things become commonplace, but even sadder when it takes you by surprise. Most of the changes in our lives eventually become the new normal, and yet we still expect the next change to be different from the old ones. This is what Wilson and Gilbert call the tendency to overestimate the duration or intensity of future emotional states.
You think that if your favorite team wins the championship, it will be the best event that has ever happened in your life, and that you will ride this wave of happiness for a whole year, and then you are bitterly disappointed when it turns out to be an ordinary holiday that ends several days of fist fights between football fans. The same goes for the bad: you think losing a limb in a car crash will have devastating consequences in life, but it may, on the contrary, lead to warmer relationships with loved ones and a new outlook on life that you did not expect. …
Wilson and Gilbert say this is for two reasons, which they call focalism and immunity neglect. The essence of focalism is that we predict our own reaction to future events, focusing on only one element, without thinking about everything else that may be happening in our life at the same time. A noisy celebration and a brilliant championship trophy in the hands of the captain of your favorite team is great, but after all, the next day you will have to get up early for work and rake things up during the games due to sleep time. Ignoring immunity is our tendency to forget what Gilbert calls the "psychological immune system," the resilience and adaptive forces that we can call upon to help us when things get tough. "In fact,we are much more resilient to adversity than we sometimes think,”says Professor Santos.
Igor Abramov