A Harvard Happiness Expert Says This Is the No. 1 Myth That Keeps People From Being Happy
If you don’t understand what happiness actually is, you’re going to have a hard time achieving it
July 22, 2024 | Source: INC. | by Jessica Stillman
There’s a funny truth about happiness — the more you chase it, the harder it seems to be to grasp.
As once memorably put it, “Like an attractive man, it seems the more actively happiness is pursued, the more it refuses to call and starts avoiding you at parties.” Maybe the reason for that, Harvard happiness researcher Arthur Brooks recently suggested, is that so many of us have such a completely wrong idea of what happiness actually is.
Happiness isn’t an emotion.
Go ahead and take a whack at it yourself: Define happiness. I’ll give you a beat.
What did you come up with? I am willing to bet that whatever exact phrasing you used, many of you probably said something along the lines of, “Happiness is when you feel X, Y, or Z.”
But not according to Brooks. “Happiness isn’t a feeling,” he said in a recent Big Think video. “Feelings are evidence of happiness — like the smell of your turkey is evidence of your Thanksgiving dinner.”
Emotions, both those we label good and bad, are “nothing more than information about the outside world,” Brooks says. Unpleasant emotions point out things we should avoid or change. Positive ones draw us towards things we crave and enjoy. But none of them on their own add up happiness.