When It Comes to Happiness, Can You Try Too Hard?

The goal of being happy is a hard one to question. All other things being equal, it’s safe to say that feeling good is better than feeling bad. However, what if the search for happiness becomes all-encompassing? Is it possible that you can push the happiness quest over the top?

Perhaps you’re feeling like things are going well for you at the moment. If someone pushed a questionnaire under your nose and asked you to rate your happiness, maybe it would be a 9.5 out of 10. But is just being asked the question enough to take the edge off your good feeling? And what if that same questionnaire asked you to rate the importance of being in such a good mood? Having to stop and ponder this could potentially drive that good mood even farther away.

Wanting vs. Being Happy

According to a new study by New York University’s Felicia Zerwas and colleagues (2024), not everyone is put off by having to think about their happiness. There are individual differences in aspiring to be happy (seeing happiness as a goal) and judging one’s own happiness (being concerned about happiness). Most research, Zerwas et al. maintain, confounds these two very different aspects of the happiness equation.

At its extreme, valuing happiness could backfire, the NYU-led team points out, but for the most part, research supports the idea that people can be happy even when they are highly motivated to achieve this state. Maybe the problem comes when people don’t just want to be happy, but when they judge themselves too harshly if they’re not happy “enough.”

Zerwas et al. propose a theoretical model predicting overall well-being in which the first step is setting a happiness goal (aspiring to be happy). No problems here. In the second phase of this process, potential dangers come in when people start to monitor their progress toward a happiness goal. Now, they start to compare their current to desired happiness, which is where concern enters in.

A “meta-emotion” (an emotion about an emotion) can emerge in which people feel disappointed that they haven’t met their goal. What may start as moderate levels of happiness start to degrade as the meta-emotion builds. The only way to stop the snowballing effect is for people to release themselves from that meta-emotion.

Testing the Happiness Model

In an impressive analysis of data collected from over 1800 student and community samples, Zerwas et al. used happiness measures collected through daily diary, longitudinal (follow-up) and cross-sectional (one-time) methods. Variations among these studies allowed the research team to test the main components of their model.

After revising an initial set of items intended to tap aspiring vs. concerns about happiness, the authors arrived at the following scales. You can test yourself on this final instrument. Rate your gareemnt with each statement from 1 to 7, with 7 being the strongest agreement:

Aspiring to Happiness

Feeling happy is very important to me.

I value things in life only to the extent that they influence my personal happiness.

To have a meaningful life, I need to be happy most of the time.

How happy I am at any given moment says a lot about how worthwhile my life is.

Concern About Happiness

I am concerned about my happiness even when I feel happy.

If I don’t feel happy, I worry about it.

If I don’t feel happy, maybe something is wrong with me.

I get somewhat distressed when I don’t feel happy.

If you want to compare yourself to those in the sample, the averages were between 2.9 and 3.4 for the aspiring items (with most people scoring between about 2 and 4.3), but were higher on concern, with averages hovering around 4 (with most scoring about 2.8 and 5.2).

Other measures included life satisfaction, psychological well-being, depressive symptoms, and general sense of worry. In the studies using community adult samples (drawn from Denver, Berkeley, and an online national website), participants rated themselves either over a 6-month period, across eight daily diaries, or at one point in time. In the 6-month study, participants also rated their meta-emotions with items such as “I felt disappointed about the feelings I experienced during the event.”

Happiness Essential Reads

Why You Should Try the Mind-Wandering Route to Happiness

We Want Children to Be Happy. They Want to Be Good.

Each sub-study tapped into different components of the aspiring-concern happiness scales. The final analysis used what’s called “mediation” to examine why, after controlling for the aspiring scale, concerns about happiness could result in lower well-being. The authors also controlled for scores on the worry scale.

Turning to the findings, concern about happiness was indeed correlated with later well-being (in the six-month follow-up study), but this correlation dropped substantially when negative meta-emotions during positive events was factored into the equation.

Overall, as the authors concluded, aspiring to happiness is “relatively innocuous overall"; there’s nothing wrong with prioritizing the desire to feel good. Consistent with their theoretical model, the danger comes from that meta-emotion of feeling disappointed in yourself. No matter how happy you are, in other words, feeling that you’ve missed the mark is a sure way to deflate the boost in your well-being that you otherwise could experience.

Turning Happiness Into a Joyful Pursuit

The complete irony in these findings should be self-evident: Once you turn the mirror of self-evaluation onto your current state of mind, it can all go away in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, the positive psychology movement, with its emphasis on happiness as an outcome, could potentially heighten the meta-emotion of disappointment in people prone to negative self-scrutiny. Again, the authors examined individual differences, meaning that some people can escape the meta-emotion trap and others cannot.

There is one caveat, however, which the authors note about negative emotional responses to your progress toward goals regardless of whether you are too hard on yourself in the happiness department. In many cases, it can help you redirect your efforts if you know that you’re falling short of your goals. You might, for example, be working on a document with coworkers or on a project with fellow volunteers, and just feel that it’s not exactly where you would like it to be. Recognizing that more is needed is an adaptive response.

When it comes to happiness, though, the meta-emotion has the effect of “infusing negativity into the current emotion and pulling one farther away from happiness." In other words, let the feelings wash over you, good or bad, rather than putting them under a microscope of not fitting some unattainable criterion.

To sum up, the goal of happiness is fine, in and of itself. Letting it grow to an unattainable state of perfection will only make your fulfillment that much more elusive.