The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - Why the “Pursuit of Happiness” Is a Bad Idea

Episode Date: June 29, 2026

The “pursuit of happiness” is one of America’s founding ideals. But what if chasing happiness is actually making us feel worse? In honor of the 250th anniversary of American independence, Dr. Laurie travels to Independence Hall in Philadelphia to explore what Thomas Jefferson and the founders really meant by “the pursuit of happiness” — and how that idea has changed over time. She speaks with historian Darrin McMahon and psychologist Iris Mauss about Americans’ unique relationship with happiness, why striving for it can sometimes backfire, and why the best path to a good life may involve focusing less on ourselves and more on other people. Experts Mentioned: Darrin McMahon, David W. Little Class of 1944 Professor of History at Dartmouth College Iris Mauss, Professor of Psychology at UC Berkeley and Director of the Emotion and Emotion Regulation Lab  Lahnna Catalino, Associate Professor of Psychology at Scripps College Birgit Koopmann-Holm, Associate Professor of Psychology at Santa Clara College of Arts and Sciences Resources Mentioned: “Declaration of Independence,” (1776) Happiness: A History, by Darrin McMahon (2006) A Dictionary of the English Language, by Samuel Johnson (1755) Democracy in America, by Alexis de Tocqueville (1835) “The Pursuit of Happiness: Pitfalls and Promises,” by Iris Mauss and Brett Ford “Can Seeking Happiness Make People Happy? Paradoxical Effects of Valuing Happiness,” by Iris Mauss and colleagues (Emotion, 2011) “Focusing on the Negative: Cultural Differences in Expressions of Sympathy,” by Birgit Koopmann-Holm and Jeanne Tsai (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2014) “Prioritizing Positivity: An Effective Approach to Pursuing Happiness?,” by Lahnna Catalino, Sara Algoe, and Barbra Frederickson (Emotion, 2014) Related Episodes: “Happiness Lessons From the Ancients: Aristotle” "How to Identify Your Negative Emotions" “Stop Endlessly Chasing the ‘Next Big Thing’ in 2023” See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Pushkin. Oh my God, that guy has a shirt that says spilling the tea since 1776. That's awesome. For this extra special episode in our new happiness hot take season, I've decided to take a little field trip to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. My gosh, there's so many school kids here.

There's like 500 little kids who are here, I guess, see the Declaration of Independence. Do not put that in your mouth. Okay, where do we get in line for the tours? I'm about to visit an important spot in my country's history, one that's particularly inspiring for a happiness expert like me. Hey, Happiness Lab listeners, I'm coming to you live from right outside of Independence Hall in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. This is the building where it all happened exactly 250 years ago this week, and I am super nerding out right now. To see why this building has me nerding out so much, let's do a quick American history lesson. It's the summer of 1776, and the fledgling U.S. colonies have grown more and more pissed off at King George III, and all the taxation and oppression coming out of Great Britain.

That frustration came to a violent head with the so-called shot-herd round the world at the Battle of Lexington. And so the colonists decided to send a group of delegates known as the Second Continental Congress to Philadelphia to figure out what to do next. After some feeble attempts at a peaceful resolution, the Congress concluded, that the only viable solution was to break from imperial rule and form a new independent republic. The delegates appointed a committee of five to write the historic announcement that the 13 colonies were ready

to formally sever ties with the British crown. Fabled wordsmith Thomas Jefferson was charged with penning the first draft. In addition to spelling out the colonists' many grievances and inspiring his countrymen to pick up their muskets and fight for freedom, Jefferson also had to write a document that spelled out the principles the new republic would stand for.

A doctrine that the doctrine that, that he hoped would encapsulate what he would later call, the harmonizing sentiments of the day. After more than two weeks toiling away in a sweltering Pennsylvania boarding house, Jefferson was ready to share his draft with fellow committee members, Ben Franklin, John Adams, Roger Sherman, and Robert Livingston, who then spent two more days making extensive edits, changes that Jefferson would describe as mutilations. Ouch.

But fresh with those mutilated track changes, Jefferson and the committee finally shared their famous announcement with the Continental. Congress. In this very building, on July 4th, 1776, the Second Continental Congress voted to ratify what would later become known as the Declaration of Independence. What words did Jefferson choose to inspire the colonists and express those harmonizing sentiments of the day? I'm guessing you may remember from history class. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and wait for it,

The Pursuit of Happiness. What a mic drop moment and happened right here. The Pursuit of Happiness has been a fundamental part of the so-called American experiment since the beginning. And that's why I couldn't help but travel to this historic spot in Philadelphia. On the eve of the 250th anniversary of American Independence to announce this week's revolutionary happiness hot take. With all due respect to Jefferson and the founding fathers, I hold this happiness hot take to be self-evident that the pursuit of happiness is in fact a very big. bad idea. You heard me right. The pursuit of happiness, not a good idea. Or at the very least, something that can go very wrong if we're not careful. Why is your intrepid podcast host denouncing

250 years of revolutionary wisdom? Why is she criticizing what at first glance may seem to be the entire point of this podcast? Well, get ready to join me on a historic journey to find out. Our minds are constantly telling us what to do to be happy. But what if our minds are wrong? What if our minds are lying to us, leading us away from what will really make us happy. The good news is that understanding the science of the mind can point us all back in the right direction. You're listening to the Happiness Lab with Dr. Lari Santos. One of the things I always love to point out is that the word for happiness in every Indo-European language without exception is cognate with luck. So the old Norse and old English root of happiness is hap. It shows up in words like happens or perhaps or

Miss Hap. Shakespeare uses it. Hap what hap may, he says. This is Darren McMahon, a professor at Dartmouth College and the author of an awesome book entitled Happiness A History. But the idea there is that happiness is a function of luck, a fortune, and that human beings don't really have control over luck or fortune, right? That's in the hands of the gods or the fates, and we can't really control them. And I like to make the point that really in most developing societies, that is the norm, right? Happiness is not something that you can aspire to and control for yourself. If you get a little bit of it here and there, good for you, but you can't count on it. Darren's an expert on how the concept of happiness has changed over the

last 2,000-plus years. I've tagged him in to help me make sense of what Jefferson and the forefathers really meant with their famous phrase. But to find that out, we need to start at the beginning. And for most of human history, happiness wasn't something that even made sense to pursue, because it kind of came down to chance. Now, that older idea gets challenged by many of the wisdom traditions that come into being in the first millennium, BC, the classical religious traditions as well as classical philosophical traditions in Greece and Rome and other places. And essentially, obviously, you have massive differences between the Buddhist tradition and classical Judaism and so forth, but what they share is the idea that God is not random,

that God is not inherently vengeful, and that our own actions, the way that we shape our personalities, the way that we live our lives, has some bearing or fate on our ultimate happiness. And so the crucial idea is expressed wonderfully by Aristotle to the effect that happiness is a life lived accordance with virtue and that we can control in some ways our ultimate fate. No one used a phrase like the pursuit of happiness back in Aristotle's day, but he and his contemporaries were the first to think that such a pursuit could even be possible, that at least with a lot of work, one could, in theory, try to become happier. The thing that's so different, though, about those traditions is that happiness remains a kind of special attainment.

It's the highest attainment. Aristotle says that the happier are the happy few, right? And even though in a tradition like Buddhism, there's the belief that all human beings have the capacity for happiness, there's also the realization that most people don't get there, right? Happiness is attainable, but it's really the highest human achievement. It's something you have to devote your life to. It's a craft that we cultivate through an entire life, and that's just not something that most people are going to be up to. But all that changed during the Enlightenment period of the 18th century. Just around the time that the American forefathers were coming up with their revolutionary ideals, people began thinking and talking about the concept of happiness in a very different way.

Darren argues that the 18th century was marked by several important shifts that redefined how people thought about what it meant to live a good life. The first of these shifts involved a massive change to people's life expectancy. After centuries of disease and famine, people were living longer. Society was also undergoing lots of changes in terms of how people lived. For more hygienic practices, to better home heating, to less smoke inhalation from chimneys, to better lighting, to less itchy bedding, people's lives were starting to feel more comfortable and more controllable. So I talk about the 18th century as this crucial period of a revolution in human expectation. when really for the first time in human history,

large numbers of people were presented with the possibility that they didn't have to suffer inherently in life, that they ought to be happy. And if they're not happy, then we need to address the things that stand in the way, but basically happiness is the human default. This idea of happiness as a default was also championed by the new scientific ideas of the Enlightenment period. The forefathers grew up around the time that Isaac Newton

was coming up with his famous laws of motion and gravity, and when thinkers like Renee Descartes began conceiving of the universe as one big machine, these notions of order and natural law were soon applied to mankind, leading to the idea that human beings are creatures designed by God to feel good and live well. How do we know this well? Because we naturally are attracted to pleasure and we naturally flee pain. John Locke, the English philosopher, sometimes called the Newton of the Mind, was a great admirer of Isaac Newton. And he imagines human beings like objects in space acted upon by gravity, but in this case by pleasure pain.

We are repulsed by pain and we are attracted to pleasure like an object in space acted upon by gravity. And that's just natural, he says. And so we need to get rid of these older kind of hangups we have about pleasure, right? The Christian idea that pleasure is always the gateway to sin, that pleasure is kind of inherently a taboo. No, Locke says, pleasure is a good thing we should work to cultivate it. New scientific advances also changed what people thought about the outward expression of pleasure. Consider, for example, the emerging field of dentistry, which began in France around this same time. Prior to that point, most people had bad teeth and bad breath and you don't open your mouth.

Aristocrats don't smile in public, in part because they don't want to betray their emotions, but in part because they have these kind of gaping mugs that they don't want to show. Well, that begins to change in the 18th century, and the smile becomes, an outward emblem of a good inner life. So feeling well is an indication that you are being well, that you're living well. This importance of living well was also reflected in changes to religious thought during the Enlightenment period. You get a kind of de-emphasis on an older fire and brimstone type approach, you know, that God is an angry, vengeful God who sits up there on clouds and sends thunderbolts down. A greater emphasis on God's love, a greater emphasis on God's desire that

we're happy not only in the next life, but in this life. So you actually see the phrase, the pursuit of happiness all over the place in 18th century America in sermons. And most people, that's probably where they would have heard the phrase for the first time. Yes, that's right. Clever award smith, as Jefferson was, he was not the first to come up with that oh so catchy tagline that he used in the Declaration of Independence. In fact, Jefferson's contemporaries would easily recognize this quote and stuff they were hearing all the time, both in churches and in 18th century novels. But did the pursuit of happiness mean the same thing back then as it does now? Did our forefathers understand that harmonizing sentiment in the same way we do today? Well, let's

start with one part of the famous quote that you probably assume reads pretty much the same now as it did back in the 1700s. The word pursuit. Turns out that pursuit had a very different connotation in the 18th century. Samuel Johnson, Dr. Johnson, the great English man of letters, in his dictionary of the English language defines pursuit as to follow in hostility. And then he uses the example of a pursuer, which apparently in Scottish law in the 18th century is a criminal prosecutor, somebody who hunts down, you know, criminals. The French have this phrase, rather than say the pursuit of happiness, they say la chasseur, the hunt for happiness. And I think that's wonderful because you hunt something.

What happens when you come upon it? You have to kill it. The 18th century notion of. pursuit was supposed to be adversarial, the sort of frustrated hunt that often ends in defeat, if it even ends at all. The great Enlightenment philosopher Thomas Hobbes famously described the pursuit of happiness as a, quote, perpetual and restless desire of power after power that seetheth only in death. That's not exactly the way we tend to think about what it means to pursue happiness today. But did Jefferson really mean to imply that the quest for happiness

was kind of doomed from the start. Darren says that another hint comes from a word that Jefferson and the forefathers chose not to use in their famous preamble. Although the Declaration talks about a right to pursue happiness, many of the state constitutions talk about a right to obtain happiness. So George Mason, Jefferson's close friend in Virginia, drafts the preamble to the Virginia Bill of Rights

just a month before the Declaration of Independence in June of 1776. And the Virginia Declaration of Rights talks about, men as equals with certain inherent rights, including the right to acquire an own property and to pursue and obtain happiness, pursuing and obtaining happiness then becomes a right. And that's reproduced in a whole number of state constitutions, including where I am now in New Hampshire. I love to tell my Dartmouth students that they have a right to obtain happiness, and that notion is really out there in the 18th century.

So much so that in the 19th century, you actually see a jurisprudence develop where people start suing state governments for not fulfilling their right to obtain happiness, which, you know, such a wonderfully American thing to do, but there you have it. By omitting that we had a right to obtain happiness, it seems that Jefferson and the drafters of the Declaration were trying to make an important distinction between the three different rights they mentioned in the preamble. Life and liberty are supposed to be straight up unalienable rights, well, at least unalienable for white, rich landed men. Important sidebar, you didn't exactly get those same rights if you were poor or a woman or a native person or a slave.

working on one of Jefferson's many huge plantations. But I digress. If you were one of the unfortunately limited number of people that preamble was aimed at, you were supposed to get life and liberty as rights, for sure, no questions asked. But the right to happiness didn't work the same way as those first two other rights.

Our right to happiness was not guaranteed because the forefathers didn't give us an unalienable right to obtain happiness, only to pursue it. You know, they're reading Cicero and Plutarch and Epicurus and Aristotle, and they take from them this idea that we have to shape our personalities through hard work, right, through discipline, through moral craft and cultivation. We need to take on much of the advice that you and positive psychologists give us. Happiness doesn't just happen. We have to

put the blocks in place. And so they profoundly believe that idea. And I think that Jefferson and others would have said that, you know, you can't guarantee the outcome because the outcome depends on a life well lived, and that takes work. It takes dedication. It takes craft, both at the individual level and at the social level, and those two are related for the founders. And we can't predict that outcome until it happens. So a right to get in the game, a right to pursue but not to obtain. And that gets to the final way that the 18th century notion of the pursuit of happiness differs from what we usually mean today, what Jefferson and his contemporaries implied by the word happiness. In the 18th century is this wonderful period that's suspended between a very modern

an idea of thinking about happiness simply as just getting more and more pleasure for longer and longer periods, and an older Judeo-Christian and classical notion of happiness as virtue, happiness as a kind of sustained attention to crafting a life well-lived. Darren says that the Enlightenment notion of happiness was best summarized as, it's complicated. Pleasure was definitely a big part of the pursuit of happiness for Jefferson and his contemporaries. The forefathers were into living a life that felt good in the moment. But happiness for the forefathers also meant something much broader than merely feeling good. To pursue happiness in the 18th century, a person also had to live virtuously.

As Jefferson himself put it in later writings, happiness is the aim of life, but virtue is the foundation of happiness. The forefathers thought that personal happiness could be obtained by prioritizing the public good, by cultivating virtues like moderation, discipline, and self-sacrifice so that you could strive for the betterment of all. I asked Darren what he thought Jefferson would say if he could see how people think about happiness in its pursuit today. Yeah, I don't think he'd be too pleased. Let's put it that way. Hmm, I guess all our expensive lifestyle brands and personal wellness routines

and TikTok self-care hacks would make poor old Jefferson think that modern Americans had veered a little off track. I think he would see a world in which people have turned inward and pursue their own pleasures at the expense of those of others as really profoundly disturbing. But Darren says that this concern about how Americans pursue happiness has actually been around for quite a while. When we get back from the break,

we'll meet a 19th century writer who was seriously disturbed by how our countrymen were pursuing the good life. We'll hear what he thought Americans were getting wrong and what modern science shows we can start doing to get things right. The Happiness Lab will be back in a moment. Pride is like love. You feel it in your life.

Heart. I.R. Radio, Canada's number one streaming app for radio and podcasts, including IHart Pride Canada, your favorite hits and must have party bangers, plus personalized and curated playlists, like back in the day pride. Come together, celebrate. Take pride with you anytime, anywhere. Just ask your smart speaker to play IHartPride, Canada. Stream us on your phone, or listen now at iHeartRadio.ca. It's 1831. Just 55 years. after the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

And a young French aristocrat by the name of Alexis de Tocqueville has just landed on the bustling streets of New York City. Over the next few months, Tockville would embark on a famous anthropological study of how things were going for our new young republic in the half century since it gained independence. He's charged in the 1830s by the French government

to come to America to study prisons so that he can help carry out prison reform in France. And so he comes to America, really if only number of the country, of months, but it produces this magnum opus published in two volumes in 1835 and 1840, which is his series of reflections on the democratic experiment in America, really seen as a vision of what the world will become for Europe. And he sees America and the American experiment as a kind of image of the future. What did Tocqueville think when he observed this new American experiment?

Well, let's just say, Monsieur Alexis would probably have been very supportive of this week's happiness hot take. You know, he has this wonderful line there where he says that Americans find themselves in the most fortunate conditions, and he says no one could work harder to be happy. He has this line where he says, an American will build a house, you know, and before the roof is on, we'll move on to the next one, because he's constantly pursuing happiness. He says that preachers there, and he gets this exactly right, give sermons, and it's hard to tell whether their goal is happiness in this life or salvation, because the two are so conflated. And yet in the mist of this ceaseless, restless, you know, desire or pursuit of happiness, he finds what he

calls a strange melancholy. Toakville identified two distinct problems with 19th century America's pursuit of happiness. The first is one that historian Darren McMahon alluded to before the break. Americans in the 1800s seem to be forgetting the forefathers' double sense of happiness, that the good life involved not just striving for personal pleasure, but also seeking out the public good through virtues like kindness and self. for strength. But Tockville also noticed a second problem with Americans' pursuit of happiness. It just didn't seem to be working. Democracy in the 1800s had bestowed Americans with more

opportunities for prosperity and social mobility than was had by nearly any other country in the world at the time. But America's newfound freedom to pursue a better life seemed to come at a cost. As Tockville put it in his famed double-volume democracy in America, there is something astonishing in the spectacle of so many lucky men restless in the midst of abundance. He continued, it seemed that a cloud habitually hung on their brow. They seemed serious and almost sad even in their pleasures. Americans, he said, were in such a rush to obtain happiness

that they clutch everything but hold nothing fast, and so lose grip as they hurry after some new delight. That continues for each American, Tokville explained, until death steps in in the end and stops him before he has grown tired of this futile pursuit of that complete felicity, which always escapes him. In a world of frenetic, ceaseless energy, where we're constantly working to be satisfied and never are, you know, that creates a kind of fatigue.

Tockville was one of the first to notice a deep irony in Americans' pursuit of happiness. The more we seek happiness out, the less happy we seem to become. Unfortunately, it would take 200 more years before scientists thought to test whether Tockville's hypothesis was at. actually right. Despite the fact, and perhaps even because of the fact that we pretty intensely strive to be happy, we fall short of it. So there's a self-defeating nature within the pursuit of happiness. I'm chatting with Iris Mouse, a psychology professor at UC Berkeley. Iris is an expert on what we get wrong in our quest to feel happier. And in fact, it's even been shown that the more intense intensely people strive to be happy, the more likely they are to get away from happiness.

Iris has christened this phenomenon, the paradox of happiness. And I think a lot of the bad effects of the pursuit of happiness come from that sense of obligation that we put on ourselves and maybe also on other people. The moment you say that it's at least somewhat in people's own control, the idea arises, that people maybe should or ought to strive for their own happiness. Iris has studied the paradox of happiness in a series of clever studies. In one experiment, she brought subjects into the lab and had them read different theories about the importance of feeling happy.

In what we call the obsession with happiness condition, we had participants read an article that really extolled the importance of being really happy and being really happy most of the time. So they read sort of a fake newspaper article that backed this up with a lot of real signs, except for we very much emphasize the idea that you should be happy all the time. And in the control condition,

participants read a similar article, but happiness wasn't mentioned. And then participants watched a couple of emotional film clips. One film clip was really sad, and the sad film clip showed a husband losing his wife. Very sad film clip. In the happy film clip, participants saw a figure skater win the Olympic gold medal.

And it was actually Sarah Hughes, who won the gold medal in 2002. But the scene was really similar to what we saw recently when Elisa Lou won the gold medal. So it's like pure joy. She realizes she's just like knocked it out of the field and celebrate. with her coaches and the audience goes wild. Both groups of participants, the experimental group who were told that they should feel happy all the time

and the control group who read the non-happiness-related article or asked to fill out a survey about how they felt after watching the videos. Now, in the sad film clip, there was no difference between the two experimental conditions, no matter how highly participants valued happiness in that moment, they all felt really sad. But in the happy film,

film clip, we saw a really interesting difference between the two experimental conditions, such that the group that was led to highly value happiness actually felt less happy after watching Sarah Hughes win the gold medal. Participants who thought they were supposed to feel happy wound up feeling less positive after witnessing a good event. In this and other studies, Iris has observed that, paradoxically, the more we think we're supposed to be pursuing happiness, the less we seem to obtain it. People almost feel like an obligation to reach that state of happiness.

And so they're evaluating how they feel compared to where they think they should be. And we actually assessed that idea with a question in the study where we had asked our participants also how they felt about their own feelings. So a question like, how disappointed were you with how you felt when you watched the film clip? And people who were in the valuing happiness condition, they actually were more disappointed about how they had felt. So there's something about the idea that here happiness is within your reach. You're seeing this really lovely, beautiful, joyful film clip. It's within reach. And yet you're falling short.

And so people judge themselves for that. But why does seeking out happiness expecting to obtain it, paradoxically. make us feel worse. Iris says that we can gain some insight by looking at what happens when we set our sights on any big objective. Happiness is a goal. And from that perspective, you can see the pursuit of happiness as goal pursuit. And we have quite a bit of understanding of the sort of like steps that people walk along as they pursue goals. Psychologists argue that our minds go through four distinct steps when pursuing a new goal. The first step and the first spot where we could go wrong is in choosing a goal. Iris has found that there are better and worse ways to set a goal from the

perspective of feeling happier. You can think of that goal either in terms of how intensely you want to be happy, but also in terms of how often you want to be happy. And most people set pretty high goals for being happy. They want to be pretty intensely happy, but also, also pretty frequently happy. So is this the step where people go wrong in terms of pursuing happiness? So for a while, people, including myself, thought that if we set the goal too intensely, too highly, we're like striving really hard to be happy, that that in itself is harmful or self-defeating. But when you take a really close look, it turns out that just being motivated, to feel happy in and of itself. We sometimes call it aspiring to being happy. That alone is not necessarily

inherently harmful. And so we've moved away from thinking that the goal itself is what's harmful to thinking that it's rather how people go about pursuing that goal that reveals the pitfalls of pursuing happiness. And step two in how people go about pursuing that goal is what psychologists have called affect regulation. And that's just the idea that people will regulate their own affective or emotional states to be more in line with their goal. If your goal is to feel happier, you'll probably be motivated to change your situation or what you're paying attention to in order to improve your mood. You may also try to regulate your affect by actively suppressing your feelings. And Iris says that this is a point in the goal pursuit process where people tend to go wrong.

One really common mistake that people make, maybe because it's so easy, is to simply not show how they feel on the inside. I might feel a little bit sad and I might decide, ah, it's easiest not to show that. But it turns out that that's actually really harmful to happiness, in part because, it disconnects us from other people. And so the idea is that emotion suppression might feel like a quick fix in the moment, but it actually cuts us off from one of the main pathways to happiness, which is social connection. So step number two, this affect regulation step is a spot where we need to be careful. We're prone to suppressing our feelings more than we should. We also tend to go wrong in the next step of the happiness goal pursuit process. Step number three, which Iris calls

monitoring. So basically we check in, how am I doing? Am I getting further along on my path? Am I falling back? Am I falling behind? But the mere act of posing these monitoring questions can also be a recipe for unhappiness. There's a saying, ask yourself whether you're happy and you cease to be so. and that encapsulates that very idea that you will destroy the very thing you're seeking when you're kind of checking in with yourself. Am I happy yet? How happy am I? Studies have shown that monitoring our happiness too frequently can make us less happy.

One experiment used what's known as an experience sampling procedure in which people are pinged at random times and asked to report what they're thinking about and how they're feeling. Participants reported feeling happier when they were not thinking about their own happiness. Results like these are common, but Iris says they don't necessarily mean that we should abandon monitoring altogether. No monitoring at all can't be the answer. Of course, you have all these, you know, like happiness tracking devices these days, right? And a lot of people use them to great effect because asking yourself in a really systematic way how happening. am I can give you really important clues as to what makes you happy and how can you do more of the

things that make you happy? So there's attention here when it comes to monitoring where monitoring is sometimes bad and sometimes good for happiness. One factor, Iris says, is when you do the act of monitoring? Are you asking yourself, how happy am I? How happy am I during a positive event? Or do you check in after a positive event has ended? Studies show that the former type of monitoring makes us less happy than the latter, in part because the act of monitoring takes us out of the present moment. But monitoring how an event feels after it's over doesn't seem to hurt our happiness as much. So step number three, monitoring isn't all bad, but it's also a spot where we need to be careful about our technique. And that brings us to step number four of the goal pursuit process.

One that Iris has found often goes awry when it comes to the pursuit of happiness, what psychologists call the response phase. We respond to and pass judgment on what it means to be off track from our goal. One very frequent reaction could be to ask ourselves, what does it mean that I'm less happy than I want to be? And a really common answer is, I think there's something wrong with me because I'm less happy than I want to be. This is the step, Iris says, in which the paradoxical effects of pursuing happiness creep in the most, in part because it involves a lot of what she calls meta-emotions. So meta-emotions are just emotions, feelings that we have about our feelings. That's the meta part.

I'm guessing that even if you haven't heard the term meta-emotions, you're probably very familiar with them. Think judgment, shame, disappointment, frustration, all the negative reactions you have when you don't feel the way you want to feel. And Iris has found that meta-emotions explain a lot of the paradox of happiness. In one study, she surveyed a group of participants about how much they valued happiness. She then asked each subject to keep a detailed diary of all the things that happened to them throughout the day. And they told us about the happiest event of their day for 14 days. And then we also asked them about their meta-emotions. How disappointed were you?

how judging did you feel about your own feelings? The subject's happiest moments included lots of different positive events. Get-togethers with friends and yummy meals and birthday parties. But how much subjects enjoyed these good events depended on how much they valued happiness. Subjects who said they worried most about happiness were also the ones who showed the most negative meta-emotions during their happy events. Those participants spent even the most positive moments feeling disappointed and judgy. These results suggest overthinking and judgment can spoil the very moments when happiness is most in reach. The final part of goal pursuit isn't exactly a step per se, but it's something Iris thinks is super important for understanding where we go wrong when it comes to striving for happiness.

And that is the cultural context in which we find ourselves whenever we're trying to pursue a goal. Just like people have ideas about happiness, so do societies and cultures. And that context is actually incredibly important. It can really facilitate and take pressure off individuals, but it can also work against them. As a German immigrant currently living in Berkeley, California, IRS has seen firsthand just how different two cultures can be when it comes to the pursuit of happiness.

I mean, I've been here for a while, but I still remember sort of like when I first moved to the U.S., and that was actually California, which might be a special relationship to the pursuit, of happiness within a country that has a pretty special relationship to the pursuit of happiness. It's small things, but I remember the first time somebody said to me, enjoy. And I just noted that that struck me as almost a little bit funny. It's that notion that, number one, it's important to enjoy, which is a little bit suspect to a German, but also number two, that it's very much

in your control. You're going to make it happen. And Iris's observations about these cultural differences have been borne out by research. There's actually a really lovely systematic study by a psychologist named Birgit Koppenholm, where she compared systematically American and German attitudes toward emotions. And she analyzed condolence cards that people send if somebody has lost a loved one. Both of them acknowledged grief and loss and mourning, of course. But the American condolence cards would also highlight an element of a silver lining. They would say something like, I hope you find comfort and so forth.

So some positivity coming back in, whereas the German condolence cards would like all the way lean into the morning with phrases like in deepest sadness and Tiefstat, And there was no element of, you know, a silver lining. There is something more important to happiness in American culture and were a little bit more tolerant or embracing of sadness and unhappiness in German culture. So let's recap. Iris argues that to understand where we go wrong in the pursuit of happiness, we need to understand the steps our minds take during any goal pursuit. And those four steps are, setting a goal, regulating your affect to meet that goal, monitoring how you did, and then responding as needed if you got off track. And that entire process of goal pursuit is embedded within a particular cultural context which can make the process

easier or harder. So where do we go wrong when it comes to these steps? Sometimes it's during affect regulation. We preemptively shut off our negative emotions, which prevent us from connecting with others. Sometimes it's in the monitoring step. We get so obsessed with affect. We get so obsessed with asking ourselves if we're feeling happy, that we pull ourselves out of the present moment. And sometimes it's in that final response phase, when we get stuck judging whatever experience we're having with lots of nasty meta-emotions. And if all these steps happen in a culture that heavily emphasizes how happy we should be, that demands we enjoy and find silver linings all the time, that can make it hard not to feel bad about ourselves whenever we fall short of expectations.

So that's what we get wrong when it comes to our goal pursuit of happiness. But is there a way we can engage in that pursuit more effectively? Well, we'll find out when the Happiness Lab returns from this quick break. Listen and you're there for heart-wrenching knockouts. The world's biggest stage. And breathtaking triumph. In 2026 FIFA World Cup, the knockout stage. Every match, every moment. Listen on TSN radio. Join the globe. On the road to the July 19th final. 26, FIFA World Cup. Stream it all live on TSN Radio. Available on IHeard Radio.

Psychologist Iris Mouse has spent her career trying to understand what we get wrong in our quest for happiness. Before the break, she explained the science of goal pursuit and where we tend to go wrong when it comes to the four steps of pursuing happiness. Now that we're back, I've asked Iris to teach us what the same science shows about how we can do better. Her first piece of advice involves a more effective way of handling affect regulation. Rather than trying to suppress and avoid negative emotions, Iris says we should focus on the positive by intentionally engaging in happier activities. And this idea of prioritizing positivity

was introduced by a researcher named Lana Catalino. And I mentioned positive activities because it's really about the things that you do. So you're less in your mind and you're actually able to just live your life. It's structuring your day. to make it more likely that you're going to have positive things happening to you. Another spot where Iris says we can do better is during the act of monitoring.

Those moments when we ask ourselves, Am I happy yet? Am I happy yet? Iris has found that we can monitor in a healthy way if we use different questions, like what went well today? Or what are some things that I enjoyed? Savoring is the idea of paying attention, thinking about positive, pleasurable experiences. that we've had. So basically, if you're once and a while checking in with what experiences you

have in your life and how they contribute to making your life better overall, that's actually okay, and it actually predicts greater happiness. A third change we can make while pursuing happiness is in that final response phase. Rather than judging how off track you've gotten, Iris recommends embracing what researchers call radical acceptance, the act of non-judgmentally accepting your current situation just as it is. And people have pointed this out for a long time. There's Buddhist notions of mindfulness. There's acceptance and commitment therapy. One of the core active ingredients of which is emotional acceptance. And those things bring people greater happiness. But the most important recommendation Iris has for pursuing happiness more effectively is a suggestion I'm pretty sure

Jefferson and our forefathers would be proud of. We need to rethink the particular kind of happiness we're trying to pursue. There's sort of like two types of happiness that we distinguish. One that's more about feeling good, hedonic happiness. And the other that's more about leading a good life, sometimes called eudaimonic happiness. And that happiness helps us avoid some of the pitfalls that we fall into when we're single-mindedly focused on the more hedonic aspects of happiness. New research has observed a bunch of reasons that pursuing that virtuous, eudaimonic happiness feels better than going after personal pleasure. First, lots of studies have shown that focusing on other people's happiness tends to make us feel better than focusing on our own.

There's also evidence that the good feelings we get from doing nice things for others tends to stick around longer than the boost we get from selfish actions. Psychologists have long known that hedonic pleasure is subject to what's called hedonic adaptation, the tendency for good feelings to go back to baseline after a positive event. But studies show that we tend to adapt less quickly to the positive feelings we get from actions that benefit other people. Kindness just isn't as subject to hedonic adaptation,

which is kind of cool. Finally, research shows that we tend to have more realistic expectations about how goodwill feel after purposeful activities than hedonic ones, which means that seeking out eudaimonic goals leads to less judgy meta-emotions than going after hedonic pursuits. It's a pretty young area of research, but we're beginning to see the people who see happiness more in terms of these eudaimonic, virtue, value-based, pro-social-based aspects

tend to be more likely to achieve lasting and sustainable happiness compared to people who predominantly see happiness in more hedonic terms. Now, I really want to emphasize something that I find really important and interesting, and that's that sometimes we sort of jump to the conclusion that those two types of happiness are sort of mutually exclusive. Like, you're either going to be miserable, but super virtuous, or kind of like the happy pig that Socrates talked about. And psychological research actually indicates that that's not the case. They can be distinct. You can pull those two aspects of happiness apart, but usually they coincide. So having a value-driven life also feels good to people. And I think that's a really lovely and hopeful conclusion that you

don't have to choose between one or the other. Hmm. Iris's hopeful idea that you don't need to choose between personal pleasure and the public good seems suspiciously similar to what the forefathers were trying to tell us 250 years ago. To paraphrase Jefferson, if happiness is our aim in life, then virtue is the foundation through which we achieve it. Happiness is not just about pleasure pain calculus, although it's about that as well, but it's also about crafting and cultivating a life. Could returning to that 18th century notion of happiness that it necessarily involves both the personal good and the public good be the key to pursuing the good life more effectively,

historian Darren McMahon thinks so. In fact, Darren says that this same solution to our faulty pursuit of happiness was proposed over 200 years ago by the scholar who first observed the paradox at the heart of this week's happiness hot take, the OG critic of our country's pursuit of happiness, Alexis to Tocqueville. Tocqueville is critical in some ways, but he's also a great admirer of America. There's just no question about that. And he's constantly looking for ways that this experiment can be preserved. And he has this wonderful phrase where he says that Americans are good at what he calls self-interest rightly understood. Tocqueville noticed that even though the citizens of our new

Republic, had a passion for material pleasures, they still understood, as he put it, when to sacrifice some of their private interests to save the rest. They still had what he called, an enlightened regard for themselves, which could prompt them to assist one another and the state. Tocqueville ended his historic visit, still feeling hopeful that future Americans would discover what the forefathers knew well, and what modern psychological science has now shown so clearly that feeling good is deeply intertwined with doing good. And he sees in the 1830 still a great deal of that around him, and he has confidence in some ways that this will preserve America and the American experiment. I'm not sure if he were with us today, you know, how optimistic he would be.

I think he would see, like we all do, the kind of evisceration of that eudaimonic side, the evisceration of the link that the founder saw profoundly between the pursuit of individual happiness and the pursuit of social happiness, the recognition that those two go to. together. And that ultimate divorce, I think, would really worry Toakville as it worries many of us. Like Darren, I am pretty worried about this ultimate divorce, that people today don't always remember this important connection between the pursuit of individual happiness and the pursuit of social good. But like Toekville, observing our American experiment back in the 19th century, I still think there's lots of reason for hope. And that's why I was so excited to share this week's happiness hot take, that the pursuit of happiness, at least as we tend to do, do it today is a bad idea. We assume that the pursuit of happiness is all about us, that heedonic

pleasure is the path to feeling good. We also get wrapped up in this idea that we're supposed to feel happy, that our pursuits of the good life are supposed to succeed, and when they don't, we tend to freak out about what went wrong and judge ourselves with lots of painful meta-emotions. But the science shows that a healthier, more effective pursuit of happiness requires acknowledging what our forefathers knew so well, that we have an unalienable right to strive for happiness, but not necessarily to obtain it, and that our pursuit will go a lot better if we remember that cultivating other people's happiness is the most effective path to achieving it for ourselves. So on this 250th birthday of the American experiment, an experiment that I really hope will still be going strong 250 years from now,

I hope that all my listeners will take this week's happiness hot take to heart and embrace the kind of happiness that really is worth it. pursuing. And since I wanted to share something extra special for my listeners in honor of 4th of July this year, I'll be continuing my conversation with happiness historian Darren McMahon next week. But next time, he'll be interviewing me. You'll get to hear the conversation I had with Darren at his home institution at Dartmouth College as part of the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center at Dartmouth's public conversations on the pursuit of happiness. That's all next time. On the Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos.

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