Too much of a good thing can backfire. And that, research reveals, includes happiness. It’s intriguing to find significant research explaining the downside of emotions. Not least because I’ve always been intrigued with the upside of bad emotions and the downside of good emotions. Anger, for example, has an upside. And, in a never forgotten experience with a client, paranoia—at least for a lawyer—can have an upside too.
American culture is all about the pursuit of happiness. We’ve institutionalized that pursuit in the Declaration of Independence. But we understand the governmental caveats to that pursuit to assume also that we don't do anything illegal or violate the rights of others.
Still, I’m not a happiness-hater. Normally I have more than my fair share of happiness...
Negative downsides
Colorado University’s June Gruber has found that there’s a small subset of overly happy students who are at risk for developing mania or bipolar disorder. Her research goes further revealing that feeling happy at inappropriate times can be a warning of trouble ahead. In another study, she found that people feeling overly high levels of happiness can be less empathetic toward individuals in pain, lead to excess risk taking, including drug and alcohol use, binge eating, driving too fast and promiscuous sex. Other research suggests that one manic may give a way his life’s savings on a whim, while another joyfully drives 100 mph to a sexual liaison with a potentially dangerous stranger. While positive mood can be helpful for creative tasks, studies also show it can impair performance on more detailed-oriented cognitive tasks.
Significantly, other research finds that too much happiness impacts not only what we pay attention to, but how we process information. Happiness also exerts significant effects on memory, judgment, creativity and decision making.
One red flag about too much happiness reveals these are the situations when there’s a strong potential for people to become more gullible and readily assume the fundamental attribution error—unduly emphasizing a person’s internal characteristics (character or intention), rather than external factors. This effect has been described as "the tendency to believe that what people do reflects who they are." Of course reality is that sometimes behavior reflects who they are and sometimes it reflects external factors.
Pursuing happiness
It’s often true that the more people pursue happiness, the less they seem able to obtain it. The reasoning is that the more we strive for it, the more likely we will be disappointed. And, thus, the more readily we create higher expectations, expectations that are often beyond reach.
In sum, sometimes happiness is good for us. Other times it can be downright harmful. It’s like food: appropriate amounts are good, but too much is damaging.
If not happiness, then what?
June Gruber finds that moderation may well approach to happiness. That moderation can come in what she and her colleagues call “emodiversity,” a set of emotional states that include both negative and positive ones. Not surprisingly, her research reveals that the greater our emotional diversity, the less potential for depression. Furthermore, those with emotional diversity tend to see the doc tor less spend fewer and in a hospital and spend less money on healthcare.
My own essential orientation is that the pursuit of meaning is a far more worthwhile goal than the pursuit of happiness. I view happiness as serendipity, a byproduct of my fundamental approach to life through meaning. I first understood that insight through the highly relevant little book by Viktor Frankl, a survivor of the Holocaust who studied other survivors. His little book is aptly titled, Man’s Search for Meaning. First published in 1962 it is found in print and other forms. Gruber agrees fully with that overall conclusion, saying, “I try not to set my goals based on how I can feel happier, but rather on what can bring meaning.”