Where Happiness Hides

We all think we know what will make us happy: more money. A better job. Love. But psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky says happiness doesn't necessarily work like that. This week, we explore why happiness often slips through our fingers, and how to savor — and stretch out — our joys.

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You 2.0 Where Happiness Hides

By Hidden Brain Staff

/ September 8, 2021

We all think we know what will make us happy: more money. A better job. Love. But psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky says happiness doesn’t necessarily work like that. This week, we explore why happiness often slips through our fingers, and how to savor — and stretch out — our joys.

Additional Resources

Books:

The Myths of Happiness: What Should Make You Happy, but Doesn’t, What Shouldn’t Make You Happy, but Does, Sonja Lyubomirsky, Penguin Press, 2013.

The How of Happiness: A New Approach to Getting the Life You Want, Sonja Lyubomirsky, Penguin Press, 2008.

Research:

The Proximal Experience of Gratitude, Kristin Layous, Kate Sweeny, Christina Armenta, Soojung Na, Incheol Choi, Sonja Lyubomirsky, PLOS ONE, 2017.

The How, Why, What, When, and Who of Happiness: Mechanism Underlying the Success of Positive Activity Interventions, Kristin Layous and Sonja Lyubomirsky, in Positive emotion: Integrating the light sides and dark sides, J. Gruber & J. Moscowitz (Eds.), Oxford University Press, 2014.

The Pains and Pleasures of Parenting: When, Why, and How is Parenthood Associated With More or Less Well-Being?, S.Katherine Nelson, Kostadin Kushlev, & Sonja Lyubomirsky, Psychological Bulletin, 2014.

How Do Simple Positive Activities Increase Well-Being?, Sonja Lyubomirsky and Kristin Layous, Current Directions in Psychological Science, 2013.

Pursuing Happiness: The Architecture of Sustainable Change, Sonja Lyubomirsky, Kennon Sheldon, David Shkade, Review of General Psychology, 2005.

Transcript

*The transcript below may be for an earlier version of this episode.
Our transcripts are provided by various partners and may contain errors or deviate slightly from the audio.*

Shankar Vedantam: This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. There are some things in life that seem to elude us no matter how hard we try to hold onto them. Memories can be like that, so can happiness. Contentment often seems tantalizingly close but recedes as we reach for it. It all raises a question, is pursuing happiness the best way to be happy?(Various Voices): The thing that has brought me the most lasting joy in my life is giving back to others.I think it's my friends.Being outdoors, slowing down, appreciating the small things.One thing that's brought me happiness is my family.I don't think it's possible to find everlasting happiness, but the thing that has helped me the most is giving up looking for it.Shankar Vedantam: This week on Hidden Brain, the psychology of why happiness often slips through our fingers and how to savor and stretch out our joys.Shankar Vedantam: We all know what it's like to want something that will make us happy. Maybe it's a dream vacation, or getting a great job, or meeting a soulmate, but all too often when we get what we want, reality turns out to be very different than we expect it. At the University of California, Riverside, psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky explores the mismatch between what we expect will make us happy and what actually makes us happy. We began by talking about a moment when we felt this mismatch in her own life. She was in her 30s, about to get LASIK surgery to improve her eyesight.Sonja Lyubomirsky: Up until then, I had really poor vision, I was almost blind, I hated my glasses, I hated my contact lenses. So I have the surgery, it takes 30 seconds, and then you go from being almost blind to 20/20 vision. I mean, it's really miraculous and it was amazing. I could see my toes in the shower, when I woke up in the morning I could see the alarm clock without searching for my glasses. When I would walk on the streets, I could read the street signs, that was amazing to me, but it took me about two weeks to get completely used to my new 20/20 vision. Then I just started taking it for granted and it became the new normal for me.Shankar Vedantam: I've worn glasses for many years myself, Sonja, and as you are talking about the wonders of LASIK surgery, I imagine the moment when I can take off my glasses and be able to see perfectly. Of course, that's what I focus on when I think about getting surgery like you did, I'm not thinking of what happens two weeks after that.Sonja Lyubomirsky: Exactly, and whenever we think about changes in our lives, positive and negative, we often think about that moment. It's that moment that I call the news, when you learn that, oh, my vision is perfect, or you get that new job or you win the lottery, but we don't think about what happens as you say in the two weeks, two months, two years after that.Shankar Vedantam: I'm wondering if the problem is especially acute when it comes to questions involving pain or disability. So for example in your case, you spent many years not being able to see clearly, you had the sudden moment of transformation, and two weeks later you got used to it. Is part of the reason this happens, do you think, that we actually have a relatively poor memory for pain or disabilities or shortcomings? Once they're in the rear-view mirror, they really vanish from our attention.Sonja Lyubomirsky: Yeah, that's a really great point. I hadn't really thought of it that way. You could argue this evolutionarily adaptive, for us to forget the pain or the misery that we experienced before and we move on. Another example I like to use is, I have pretty bad allergies and that feeling you have, the runny nose and your eyes are itchy and your throat is itchy, but then sometimes they just disappear and then I feel great or I feel neutral and I completely forget what it's like to have that allergy feeling again until it comes back.Shankar Vedantam: Sonja has noticed the fleeting nature of joy in her professional life as well.Sonja Lyubomirsky: Starting in college I had this dream about becoming a professor. I remember taking this Shakespeare class and watching the professor and I wanted to be her, I wanted to stand on that stage. That was like freshman year, I think. But it was really, really hard, especially grad school, lots of ups and downs. When I finally got my dream job, again, you get the news, oh I have this job or I have my PhD, now people can call me doctor, that was very exciting for a couple days but it's a little anticlimactic. I still remember the day I got tenure, my husband came home from work and I was sitting on my bed where I work in front of my laptop and he's like, "What are you doing?" I'm like, "Well, I'm working." He's like, "Well, why are you working? You got tenure today." Well, because yeah, that's what I'm doing. But it's funny, my PhD advisor, Lee Ross, who he's a giant figure in my field of social psychology but in my life and career as well of course, but he had this saying. He used to say it all the time, and he said, "There are only two things in life that are all that they're cracked up to be. That's sex and tenure," and he was wrong, I mean, at least about tenure. The research shows that people get used to tenure. I actually added a third item to that list, which is Paris. You think it's going to be great and you go and it's really just as great as you think it is, but anyway, it's another example that it's one of those domains where once you get to... you think it's going to be great and it is great but then you start focusing on the next thing. You start

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