Does trying to be happier make you happier?
What an experiment on valuing happiness found, what music and gratitude studies found, and what separates trying to be happier by a standard from trying through an activity.
Answer to the question
Does trying to be happier make you happier?
It depends on how the trying is done. In one experiment, women led to value happiness responded less warmly to a cheerful film, and disappointment in their own feelings accounted for the gap. In other experiments, trying to feel happier through music or regular gratitude practice raised reported mood and happiness. Trying through an activity fared better than trying through a standard.
Key takeaways
- Mauss and colleagues (2011) report two studies of women: valuing happiness more went with lower happiness when life stress was low, and leading women to value happiness dulled their response to a happy film.
- In the film study, disappointment in their own feelings accounted for the weaker response, and the dulling appeared after the happy film and not after a sad one.
- In Ferguson and Sheldon's two studies, people who tried to feel happier while listening to music reported higher positive mood after 12 minutes, and rising happiness across five visits over two weeks.
- In an eight-month study of expressing optimism and gratitude, Lyubomirsky and colleagues found that joining knowing the aim and continuing to invest effort mattered in the activity groups and not in the control group.
- The studies differ in where attention goes: to a score of how happy one is, or to an activity, and David Robson's The Expectation Effect reads the belief that one ought to be happy as an expectation.
This article is general information about research on happiness and mood. It is not medical or psychological advice. If you are concerned about your mood or wellbeing, speak to your GP or a qualified professional. Medical review: Reja Batool.
In an experiment by Iris Mauss and her colleagues, women who were led to see being happy as important responded less warmly to a cheerful film than women who were not, although the film was the kind of event that normally lifts a mood. Trying to be happier, in the sense of holding happiness up as a standard, took some of the lift away.
Other experiments point the opposite way. Participants who set out to feel happier while listening to music reported more positive mood, and those who kept at it over five sessions in two weeks reported rising happiness. Whether trying to be happier works in these studies depends on what the trying is aimed at, a score or an activity.
Valuing happiness dulls moments
The paper by Mauss, Tamir, Anderson and Savino appeared in the journal Emotion and reports two studies. In the first, women described how much they valued happiness and how happy they were. Those who valued it more reported being less happy, and the pattern showed when life stress was low. That is the condition in which happiness is easiest to reach, which is why the authors called the result a paradox.
The second study moved from association to experiment. Some participants were led to value happiness, then watched a film designed to produce happy feelings. They responded less positively to the film than the others did, and their disappointment in their own feelings accounted for the gap. The dulling appeared after the happy film and not after a sad one, a pattern that fits the idea that a standard only bites when the good feeling is on offer.
Trying to be happier by setting a standard changes what a feeling means. A person who watches a film for pleasure takes the pleasure as it comes. A person who watches it as a test of whether they are as happy as they should be gets a second feeling, a verdict on the first one.
David Robson's The Expectation Effect brings this work into a wider argument that what people believe about a feeling shapes how they respond to it, and it sets the paradox beside research on how people treat their negative emotions. On that reading, the belief that happiness ought to be present works as an expectation, and the film study shows an expectation being measured against the feeling it was meant to produce. The same logic applies to ordinary occasions such as a holiday meal or a birthday, where a person who expects to feel happy has a ready-made yardstick for how the day is going.
Trying to be happier by doing
Yuna Ferguson and Kennon Sheldon tested the opposite case. In their first study, participants listened to music for 12 minutes. One group was asked to try to lift their mood and the other simply listened. The group trying to be happier reported higher positive mood than the group that only listened, and the difference appeared with a positively toned piece of music but not with a second piece.
Their second study ran across five visits to the laboratory over two weeks. Participants who were instructed to go on trying to be happier, and who listened to music at each visit, showed rising subjective happiness over time.
The authors concluded that deliberately using positive music to improve mood can raise happiness, particularly alongside an intention to become happier. The paper appeared in The Journal of Positive Psychology in 2013. The instruction was brief and the activity was ordinary, which makes the result easy to picture in daily life.
A longer experiment looked at what makes effort pay off. Sonja Lyubomirsky, Rene Dickerhoof, Julia Boehm and Kennon Sheldon assigned participants for eight months to regular practice of expressing optimism or gratitude, and compared them with a control group. Two things shaped the results. People who joined knowing the study was about becoming happier gained more, and so did people who kept investing effort over time. Neither factor made a difference in the control group. The authors concluded that such activities are more than placebos and work best when people know about them, endorse them and commit to them. The study appeared in Emotion in 2011.
In these studies the instruction was to do something: listen, express optimism, express gratitude. Trying to be happier had an object other than the person's own mood reading, and the participants had something to occupy them while the effort ran. The activity was the unit of effort, and any change in mood arrived as a result of doing it.
Doing differs from checking
Put the two sets of studies side by side and the difference in trying to be happier is in where attention goes. The film study turned attention to a score, how happy am I compared with how happy I should be. The music and gratitude studies turned attention to an activity and let the mood follow. People often read their mood as information about how things are going, an idea covered in What is mood-as-information theory, and a standard of happiness turns that reading into a judgement on the moment. A task has edges: it starts, it runs and it ends, and mood can be noticed afterwards. A standard has no edge, because every moment can be compared with it.
The same gap between expectation and experience shows up when people forecast a purchase, as in Will a New Car Make You Happier, where the forecast is the standard and daily life supplies the reading. What happens after the purchase is the subject of Hedonic Adaptation After the Purchase. The studies here differ in sample, task and measure, so the contrast is a reading of the pattern across them and not a head-to-head test.
What the contrast means in daily life
The papers do not prescribe anything, but read together they leave these differences between effort that helped and effort that did not:
- The effort that hurt was happiness held up as a standard, which dulled the response to a happy event.
- The effort that helped was aimed at a specific activity, such as listening to music, expressing optimism or expressing gratitude, and not at a general aim of being happier.
- It was kept going, over five visits in two weeks in the music study and over eight months in the longer one.
- In the eight-month study, people who knew from the start that the activities were about becoming happier gained more than people who did not, and the same held for people who kept investing effort over time.
Common questions
Does trying to be happier make you happier?
It depends on how the trying is done, and trying to be happier through an activity fared better than trying through a standard. Valuing happiness as a standard dulled the response to a happy film in one experiment, while trying to feel better through music or regular gratitude practice raised reported mood and happiness in others.
Why would valuing happiness lower happiness?
In the film experiment, participants led to value happiness felt disappointed in their own feelings, and that disappointment accounted for their weaker response. A standard turns a good moment into a test.
What kinds of trying worked in the studies?
Doing something specific: listening to music with the aim of feeling better, expressing optimism and expressing gratitude. Continued effort and knowing the aim mattered in the eight-month study.
Does it matter how long you keep trying?
In the eight-month study, people who kept investing effort in the activities gained more. Effort made no difference in the control group.
Sources
Robson, D. The Expectation Effect. Seed book; vault hub Books/The Expectation Effect.
Mauss, I. B., Tamir, M., Anderson, C. L., & Savino, N. S. (2011). Can seeking happiness make people unhappy? Paradoxical effects of valuing happiness. Emotion, 11(4), 807-815. doi:10.1037/a0022010 https://doi.org/10.1037/a0022010
Ferguson, Y. L., & Sheldon, K. M. (2013). Trying to be happier really can work: Two experimental studies. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 8(1), 23-33. doi:10.1080/17439760.2012.747000 https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2012.747000
Lyubomirsky, S., Dickerhoof, R., Boehm, J. K., & Sheldon, K. M. (2011). Becoming happier takes both a will and a proper way: An experimental longitudinal intervention to boost well-being. Emotion, 11(2), 391-402. doi:10.1037/a0022575 https://doi.org/10.1037/a0022575