Translator: Tanya Cushman Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
So I'm here today to talk about something
that is clearly near and dear to all of our hearts:
happiness, right?
But what I want to do is approach it from a somewhat unusual perspective
by asking the question
of whether or not - can there be a dark side of happiness?
Is this a really odd question to ask?
Am I a hater of happiness?
Where are we going here?
So we know that happiness is something that's gained a lot of recent attention.
We see an explosion in the scientific study of happiness
as well as this overwhelming surge of attention in the pop culture media.
We see books like "The Happiness Project,"
"Stumbling on Happiness,"
"Authentic Happiness,"
"The How of Happiness,"
"The Art of Happiness"
and a recent favorite of mine that I discovered,
"Get Happy Today" with the dolphin emerging out of the ocean.
(Laughter)
Not quite sure how that works.
We also see this evident in the pharmaceutical industry, right?
We see like almost skyrocketing rate in prescriptions for antidepressants,
ranging from Prozac to Paxil to Cymbalta.
So where are we going here?
Is there some basis for this upward trend towards greater and greater happiness?
And I would suggest, well, yes,
there is some scientific basis that psychologists have found
that suggests why positive emotion and happiness
might actually be good for us.
What do we think these things are?
Well, we know that they build vital social bonds,
it enhances creative thinking
and also builds physical immunity to stressors.
So should we just continue on this upward and upward trend
towards greater happiness?
Or should we stop, take a step back and ask ourselves,
Is happiness unconditionally always a good thing?
I'm going to suggest, as the title of my talk indicates, yes,
that like everything in life, there's two sides to every story,
and happiness,
Why should it be any exception?
And so what I want to do now
is turn ourselves to thinking about this other side of happiness
or what some people like to think about as a dark side of happiness.
(Laughter)
Thank you.
I'm going to take us on a journey into the dark side,
and I'm going to start by echoing - I think a lot of us like to echo -
some of the ancient observations that philosophers knew way long before us,
and we're just sort of catching up.
So here's a quote by Aristotle,
who had some really keen insights into the human condition about emotion.
He said, "Getting angry or sad is easy and anyone can do it;
but doing it in the right amount at the right time and in the right way
is not easy nor can everyone do it."
I want to pluck out three themes here
and take them on our journey into the dark side of happiness.
I want to look at the amount of happiness,
the timing of happiness
and the way in which we become happy.
So let's start to take these themes into the dark side,
looking at the amount, the time and the way.
I'm going to start with this first theme, looking at the amount.
Here, I want to ask the question,
Can there ever be too much of a good thing?
Well, we know that the relationship between happiness and well-being or health
is not a straightforward line.
In fact, it seems to look somewhat more like an upside down or inverted U.
So let me show you what I mean by that.
So here we have a graph
with health up here and happiness down here.
So what we've seen so far
is that, well, higher doses of happiness seem to be associated with greater health.
Okay.
But as we start to pass a critical tipping point,
this truism about happiness seems to unwind,
where we start to see that the benefits unravel
and they actually become associated with negative consequences.
And so what might some of these be?
Well, on the one hand,
we see that extreme degrees of happiness
are actually associated with less creativity
and a greater increase in a host of negative behaviors,
ranging from risk-taking to alcohol and drug use
and an increased risk of mental illness.
And in my lab, we've looked at this latter - cause of mental illness -
specifically finding that extreme degrees of happiness
are associated with an increased risk for and diagnosis of mania,
which is a component of bipolar disorder.
Let me give you a preview into what that looks like here.
I find this quote really, really appropriate.
So here we see,
"The case for the dangers of positive emotions
is made most straightforwardly by individuals with mania.
Their joy is infectious, their optimism and self-confidence unbounded.
One manic may give away his life savings on a whim,
while another joyfully drives 100 miles an hour to a sexual liaison
with a potentially dangerous stranger."
So I hope what I've showed you here
is the relationship between happiness and health is not straightforward,
and, in fact, suggests
at some point, there may be too much of a good thing,
when we get past that critical threshold.
Okay.
So now I want to look at the timing.
Is happiness always a good thing in every context?
Or can there be a wrong time for happiness?
And here I want to give two examples where I think it may be the case.
One of them looks at competition.
So we find that situations in which people are competitive -
so imagine you're trying to win an athletic tournament
or beat someone on a game of chess,
Do you want to be feeling happy?
What would you think?
What might be the appropriate emotion
you want to feel?
Well, what researchers find is that the more happy you feel,
the less well you perform on these situations
and that people who perform better on these situations are actually angrier.
So happiness is not always adaptive in these situations.
My lab has looked at the context of loss.
So here we find -
we bring people into the lab,
we have them watch sad movies, depicting things of death and dying.
It's a nice lab to be in.
We also have them interact with strangers
as well as intimate romantic partners
sharing times of extreme suffering and loss.
And what we find
is that those individuals
who continue to remain happy at high levels in these situations
are at greater risk for emotional impairment
as well as - so poorer functioning in their everyday lives.
So this suggests that you don't want to be happy all the time
and you don't want to be happy in every context.
In some, the timing of happiness is really crucial.
And so now I want to conclude with our final question here,
looking at the way in which we become happy.
Specifically, I want to think about,
Can there be wrong ways to pursue happiness?
Since we all want to become happy -
we're reading these books,
we're thinking, seeing it in the media -
Are there actually wrong ways to pursue this path?
So does anyone recognize what this is here?
Okay, good.
So this is the Declaration of Independence,
and it seems ingrained in us as Americans
that we hold true "Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
Right? So this is sort of one of our core cultural values,
but yet should we always be pursuing happiness?
What do you think I'm going to say here?
No. And why?
So there's some really, really provocative work
coming out by Iris Mauss, a psychologist,
suggesting that there's a group of us out here,
perhaps some in the audience today,
who highly value happiness,
that this is a core value in their life.
They expend efforts to become happy,
they consider it a core component of who they are,
and they put just enormous amounts of their mental attention
towards ways to become happy:
"How can I become happier? What can I do? Where can I go?"
What do you think happens with these people?
Well, they're actually setting a very high happiness standards - right? -
for where they ought to be,
for where that path toward ultimate happiness should lie.
And what happens when we set up high standards or high expectations?
We often become disappointed
because we usually are not meeting standards when they're very high,
and this applies even to happiness.
And this is especially evident in contexts that are positive or pleasant,
so situations where we expect to experience some degree of happiness.
So this paradoxical effect
is that there's people who value happiness,
they set up high standards.
By doing so, they end up actually feeling disappointed,
and as a result, they feel less happiness.
So it's those who try to be happy
are those who actually can set themselves up to become less happy.
And we've seen this:
not only that people report less happiness,
but they also show increased symptoms of depression,
and in recent work,
we found they show increased symptoms of mania,
a component of bipolar disorder -
having this zest or almost obsession with the pursuit of happiness.
And so in many ways,
this hearkens back to ancient, you know, observations
that people have seen years before a lot of the psychologists got on board
with the happiness train,
which is that
"Those only are happy
who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness."
And so I just want to conclude with a few take-home themes.
One of them is that I don't think happiness is bad, by any means.
I think it's a really crucial component
of our daily lives.
It's what gives us meaning and gives us a reason to thrive.
But the second message I want to take home today
is that happiness needs to be treated carefully;
it needs to be experienced in moderation.
So not too much.
It needs to be experienced in the right context.
So timing is crucial.
And we shouldn't strive to be happy all the time, every time.
And then finally, as you saw that quote there,
it's really important to not be so focused on becoming happy,
but instead, as many sort of ancient Buddhist traditions really strive,
to just accept your current emotion state as it is,
accept whatever degree of happiness you may have in the moment
and just let it come as it will.
So with that, I hope that I've provided a sort of broader portrait of happiness
as this really fascinating but complex phenomena
that indeed has two sides and possibly even a dark side.
And so with that, I just want to thank you.
If you want to shoot me a note, I'm right there.
[june.gruber@yale.edu]
(Applause)
Thanks.