Anxious to be Happy
Who doesn’t want to be happy? It’s part of the American Dream and the pursuit of happiness is even in our Declaration of Independence. But can the desire to be consistently happy lead to anxiety?
In her book America the Anxious: How Our Pursuit of Happiness Is Creating a Nation of Nervous Wrecks, Ruth Whippman, a Brit living in California, explains how the struggle to be happy can be counterproductive. “My instinct is that…happiness should be serendipitous, the by-product of a life well lived, and chasing it in a vacuum just doesn’t really work,” she writes. She examined a study done by Iris Mauss at UC Berkeley who found that people who have a goal to be happy are less likely to actually be happy. While controlling our experience is an understandable wish, it often leads us to feeling like there is something wrong with us when we feel worried or sad. Whippman argues that in a culture focused on the individual goals and pursuits, we can forget that joy comes from our relationships. So instead of focusing on ourselves and trying to control our emotions, we can focus on others and our community.
When we let go of trying to always be happy, we have time and energy to focus elsewhere.
The question of how much control we have over our emotions is also addressed by Russ Harris in The Happiness Trap: How to Stop Struggling and Start Living. Our minds are powerful, but Harris points out that we don’t control everything, particularly in our internal world of emotions. Most of us have some experience with the ineffectiveness of telling ourselves “don’t worry” or “just be happy”. If it were easy to do (or in our control) we would already be happy. If someone holds a gun to our head but tells us not to worry, we will still struggle to stay calm.
Many of us are set up to believe control is possible because we are told as kids that we need to control our emotions (“don’t cry”, “don’t be a chicken”, or “get over it”). The myth of control is compelling because we so rarely see others talk about difficulties and most of the time everyone else seems truly happy. This is where many of us get stuck. Who wants to be the first person to open up and talk about difficult emotions? It requires so much vulnerability but also paradoxically is what allows us to deeply connect with others. When we can admit we are human, others are more likely to follow. Talking about challenges can help us feel less alone and takes away some of the power of the emotion.
