Category: Professional Development

Frank T. McAndrew, Knox College

In the 1990s, a psychologist named Martin Seligman led the positive psychology movement, which placed the study of human happiness squarely at the center of psychology research and theory. It continued a trend that began in the 1960s with humanistic and existential psychology, which emphasized the importance of reaching one’s innate potential and creating meaning in one’s life, respectively.

Since then, thousands of studies and hundreds of books have been published with the goal of increasing well-being and helping people lead more satisfying lives.

So why aren’t we happier? Why have self-reported measures of happiness stayed stagnant for over 40 years?

Perversely, such efforts to improve happiness could be a futile attempt to swim against the tide, as we may actually be programmed to be dissatisfied most of the time.

You can’t have it all

Part of the problem is that happiness isn’t just one thing.

Jennifer Hecht is a philosopher who studies the history of happiness. In her book “The Happiness Myth,” Hecht proposes that we all experience different types of happiness, but these aren’t necessarily complementary. Some types of happiness may even conflict with one another. In other words, having too much of one type of happiness may undermine our ability to have enough of the others – so it’s impossible for us to simultaneously have all types of happiness in great quantities.

For example, a satisfying life built on a successful career and a good marriage is something that unfolds over a long period of time. It takes a lot of work, and it often requires avoiding hedonistic pleasures like partying or going on spur-of-the-moment trips. It also means you can’t while away too much of your time spending one pleasant lazy day after another in the company of good friends.

On the other hand, keeping your nose to the grindstone demands that you cut back on many of life’s pleasures. Relaxing days and friendships may fall by the wayside.

As happiness in one area of life increases, it’ll often decline in another.

A rosy past, a future brimming with potential

This dilemma is further confounded by the way our brains process the experience of happiness.

By way of illustration, consider the following examples.

We’ve all started a sentence with the phrase “Won’t it be great when…” (I go to college, fall in love, have kids, etc.). Similarly, we often hear older people start sentences with this phrase “Wasn’t it great when…”

Think about how seldom you hear anyone say, “Isn’t this great, right now?”

Surely, our past and future aren’t always better than the present. Yet we continue to think that this is the case.

These are the bricks that wall off harsh reality from the part of our mind that thinks about past and future happiness. Entire religions have been constructed from them. Whether we’re talking about our ancestral Garden of Eden (when things were great!) or the promise of unfathomable future happiness in Heaven, Valhalla, Jannah or Vaikuntha, eternal happiness is always the carrot dangling from the end of the divine stick.

There’s evidence for why our brains operate this way; most of us possess something called the optimistic bias, which is the tendency to think that our future will be better than our present.

To demonstrate this phenomenon to my classes, at the beginning of a new term I’ll tell my students the average grade received by all students in my class over the past three years. I then ask them to anonymously report the grade that they expect to receive. The demonstration works like a charm: Without fail, the expected grades are far higher than one would reasonably expect, given the evidence at hand.

And yet, we believe.

Cognitive psychologists have also identified something called the Pollyanna Principle. It means that we process, rehearse and remember pleasant information from the past more than unpleasant information. (An exception to this occurs in depressed individuals who often fixate on past failures and disappointments.)

For most of us, however, the reason that the good old days seem so good is that we focus on the pleasant stuff and tend to forget the day-to-day unpleasantness.

Self-delusion as an evolutionary advantage?

These delusions about the past and the future could be an adaptive part of the human psyche, with innocent self-deceptions actually enabling us to keep striving. If our past is great and our future can be even better, then we can work our way out of the unpleasant – or at least, mundane – present.

All of this tells us something about the fleeting nature of happiness. Emotion researchers have long known about something called the hedonic treadmill. We work very hard to reach a goal, anticipating the happiness it will bring. Unfortunately, after a brief fix we quickly slide back to our baseline, ordinary way-of-being and start chasing the next thing we believe will almost certainly – and finally – make us happy.

My students absolutely hate hearing about this; they get bummed out when I imply that however happy they are right now – it’s probably about how happy they will be 20 years from now. (Next time, perhaps I will reassure them that in the future they’ll remember being very happy in college!)

Nevertheless, studies of lottery winners and other individuals at the top of their game – those who seem to have it all – regularly throw cold water on the dream that getting what we really want will change our lives and make us happier. These studies found that positive events like winning a million bucks and unfortunate events such as being paralyzed in an accident do not significantly affect an individual’s long-term level of happiness.

Assistant professors who dream of attaining tenure and lawyers who dream of making partner often find themselves wondering why they were in such a hurry. After finally publishing a book, it was depressing for me to realize how quickly my attitude went from “I’m a guy who wrote a book!” to “I’m a guy who’s only written one book.”

But this is how it should be, at least from an evolutionary perspective. Dissatisfaction with the present and dreams of the future are what keep us motivated, while warm fuzzy memories of the past reassure us that the feelings we seek can be had. In fact, perpetual bliss would completely undermine our will to accomplish anything at all; among our earliest ancestors, those who were perfectly content may have been left in the dust.

This shouldn’t be depressing; quite the contrary. Recognizing that happiness exists – and that it’s a delightful visitor that never overstays its welcome – may help us appreciate it more when it arrives.

Furthermore, understanding that it’s impossible to have happiness in all aspects of life can help you enjoy the happiness that has touched you.

Recognizing that no one “has it all” can cut down on the one thing psychologists know impedes happiness: envy.

Frank T. McAndrew, Cornelia H. Dudley Professor of Psychology, Knox College

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Matthew Baldwin, University of Florida

After following a white rabbit down a hole in the ground and changing sizes several times, Alice finds herself wondering “Who in the world am I?”

This scene, from Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” might resonate with you: In a world that’s constantly changing, it can be challenging to find your authentic self.

I am a social psychologist, and over the past few years my colleagues and I have been conducting research to better understand what it means to be authentic. Our findings provide some valuable insights that not only shed light on what is meant by authenticity – a somewhat vague term whose definition has been debated – but can also offer some tips for how to tap into your true self.

What is authenticity?

In “Sincerity and Authenticity,” literary critic and professor Lionel Trilling described how society in past centuries was held together by the commitment of people to fulfilling their stations in life, whether they were blacksmiths or barons.

Trilling argued that people in modern societies are much less willing to give up their individuality, and instead value authenticity.

But what, exactly, did he mean by authenticity?

Like Trilling, many modern philosophers also understood authenticity as a kind of individuality. For example, Søren Kierkegaard believed that being authentic meant breaking from cultural and social constraints and living a self-determined life. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger equated authenticity to accepting who you are today and living up to all the potential you have in the future. Writing many decades after Heidegger, the French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre had a similar idea: People have the freedom to interpret themselves, and their experiences, however they like. So being true to oneself means living as the person you think yourself to be.

Common among these different perspectives is the notion that there is something about a person that represents who they really are. If we could only find the true self hidden behind the false self, we could live a perfectly authentic life.

This is how contemporary psychologists understood authenticity as well – at least at first.

The authentic personality

In an attempt to define authenticity, psychologists in the early 21st century started to characterize what an authentic person looks like.

They settled on some criteria: An authentic person is supposed to be self-aware and willing to learn what makes them who they really are. Once an authentic person gains insight into their true self, they will aim to be unbiased about it – choosing not to delude themselves and distort the reality of who they are. After deciding what defines the true self, the authentic person will then behave in a way that is true to those characteristics, and avoid being “false” or “fake” merely to please others.

Some researchers have used this framework to create measurement scales that can test how authentic a person is. In this view, authenticity is a psychological trait – a part of someone’s personality.

But my colleagues and I felt there was more to the experience of authenticity – something that goes beyond a list of characteristics or certain ways of living. In our most recent work, we explain why this traditional definition of authenticity might be falling short.

Thinking is hard

Have you ever found yourself trying to analyze your own thoughts or feelings about something, only to make yourself more confused? The poet Theodore Roethke once wrote that “self-contemplation is a curse, that makes an old confusion worse.”

And there’s a growing body of psychological research supporting this idea. Thinking, on its own, is surprisingly effortful and even a little bit boring, and people will do almost anything to avoid it. One study found they’ll even shock themselves to avoid having to sit with their own thoughts.

This is a problem for a definition of authenticity that requires people to think about who they are and then act on that knowledge in an unbiased way. We don’t find thinking very enjoyable, and even when we do, our reflection and introspection abilities are rather poor.

Fortunately, our research gets around this problem by defining authenticity not as something about a person, but as a feeling.

When something feels ‘right’

We propose that authenticity is a feeling that people interpret as a sign that what they are doing in the moment aligns with their true self.

Importantly, this view does not require people to know what their true self is, nor do they need to have a true self at all. According to this view, an authentic person can look many different ways; and as long as something feels authentic, it is. Although we are not the first to take this view, our research aims to describe exactly what this feeling is like.

This is where we depart a bit from tradition. We propose that the feeling of authenticity is actually an experience of fluency.

Have you ever been playing a sport, reading a book, or having a conversation, and had the feeling that it was just right?

This is what some psychologists call fluency, or the subjective experience of ease associated with an experience. Fluency usually happens outside of our immediate awareness – in what psychologist William James called fringe consciousness.

According to our research, this feeling of fluency might contribute to feelings of authenticity.

In one study, we asked U.S. adults to recall the last activity they did and to rate how fluent it felt. We found that, regardless of the activity – whether it was work, leisure or something else – people felt more authentic the more fluent the activity was.

Getting in the way of fluency

We were also able to show that when an activity becomes less fluent, people feel less authentic.

To do this, we asked participants to list some attributes that describe who they really are. However, sometimes we asked them to try to remember complicated strings of numbers at the same time, which increased their cognitive load. At the end, participants answered some questions about how authentic they felt while completing the task.

As we predicted, the participants felt less authentic when they had to think about their attributes under cognitive load, because being forced to do the memory task at the same time created a distraction that impeded fluency.

At the same time, this doesn’t necessarily mean you’re not being authentic if you take on challenging tasks.

While some people may interpret feelings of unease as a hint that they aren’t being true to themselves, in some cases difficulty might be interpreted as importance.

Research by a team of psychologists led by Daphna Oyserman has shown that people have different personal theories about ease and difficulty when carrying out tasks. Sometimes when something is too easy it feels “not worth our time.” Conversely, when something gets difficult – or when life gives us lemons – we might see it as especially important and worth doing.

We choose to make lemonade instead of giving up.

This might mean that there are times when we feel particularly true to ourselves when the going gets tough – as long as we interpret that difficulty as important to who we are.

Trust your gut

As romantic as it sounds to have a true self that’s merely hiding behind a false one, it probably isn’t that simple. But that doesn’t mean authenticity shouldn’t be an something to strive for.

Seeking fluency – and avoiding internal conflict – is probably a pretty good way to stay on the path to being true to yourself, pursuing what is morally good and knowing when you’re “in the right place.”

When you go searching for the self in a sea of change, you might find yourself feeling like Alice in Wonderland.

But the new science of authenticity suggests that if you let feelings of fluency be your guide, you might find what you’ve been looking for all along.

[Get fascinating science, health and technology news. Sign up for The Conversation’s weekly science newsletter.]

Matthew Baldwin, Assistant Professor of Psychology, University of Florida

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.