The Hedonic Paradox: Why Chasing Happiness Makes Us Less Happy

In 2023, the self-help industry made more than 13 billion dollars in the world, relying solely on the idea that happiness can be obtained by having the right habits, mindsets or routines, but it is a disturbing fact that psychological studies reveal that the more a person tries to seek happiness as an end, the less likely they are to find it (Statista, 2023). The hedonic paradox is a description of the phenomenon, which was first formulated philosophically but is now supported by empirical evidence, that happiness tends to be more elusive to those who seek it and more likely to be experienced by those who pursue happiness indirectly.

It was very succinctly put in the nineteenth century by John Stuart Mill: ‘Those who have their minds set on something else but happiness find happiness along the way’ (Mill, 1873). In this article, we examine the psychological processes involved in this paradox, what the research evidence reveals about how it works, and what other non-happiness-seeking activities do to facilitate sustained happiness.

The Psychology of the Paradox: Why Pursuit Undermines Arrival

There are a few different psychological processes that help to account for how the pursuit of happiness goes sour. The first, which is the one used by researchers, is known as the ironic process theory, advanced by social psychologist Daniel Wegner in 1994. Wegner has shown that conscious suppression or control of mental states- thoughts, emotions, or feelings can actually intensify what is being suppressed, as well as generate unwanted mental states.

If a person tells himself to feel happy, feel calm, or not feel sad, the monitoring process he has to perform to determine whether to feel happy, calm, or not sad keeps the unwanted feelings in the “foreground” of his mind. In a famous demonstration, when anyone is asked not to think about a white bear, they are almost driven to think about a white bear. This is also true for emotions; one’s own awareness of being happy enough results in increased rather than decreased salience of unhappiness (Wegner, 1994). The second mechanism is called the hedonic treadmill, also known as hedonic adaptation.

This is the well-established phenomenon in human beings that they can revert to a relatively stable state of well-being following both positive and negative life events. An increase in income, a new partner, a bigger house, all bring a temporary increase in happiness that wears off over time as the experience of this new situation becomes common and routine. The first study of the hedonic treadmill was conducted by Brickman and Campbell (1971), who found that lottery winners were initially happier than those who lost the lottery, but that there was only a small difference in happiness after several years, compared to the case of paraplegics who were made happier by accidents than sighted observers predicted they would be.

Adaptation is the process of balancing out gain and loss, and brings the person back to approximately where they began (Brickman et al., 1978). The hedonic treadmill is especially important in relation to the “paradox of happiness-chasing” because it reveals the structural ineffectiveness of achieving happiness through the accumulation of pleasurable experiences or circumstances. Every new acquisition, whether it be an object, a status, a relationship, or an achievement, brings happiness, which adapts away.

The individual will then look for another more recent or bigger experience to elicit the same response, and so on, resulting in constant work but never contentment. The experiential analogue of running on a treadmill: expend effort, cover ground, but not move position (Frederick & Loewenstein, 1999). A third mechanism is a psychological phenomenon known as evaluative contrast: the tendency to evaluate experiences relative to what was expected and/or previously experienced. If one is seeking happiness as an explicit objective and is assessing his or her happiness in terms of how they “should” feel, each experience is weighed and measured against an ideal of what happiness should be.

Any moment that the person feels happy, but not as intensely as they are looking for, is deemed a failure. Research has demonstrated that one way to decrease enjoyment of an activity is to explicitly ask oneself if they are enjoying something, or to frame an activity as one that is designed to maximise pleasure (Schooler et al., 2003).

What the Research Shows: Evidence for the Paradox

There is increasing empirical evidence from experimental and survey studies that supports the hedonic paradox. Mauss and colleagues (2011) carried out a series of studies investigating the link between valuing happiness, the extent to which people explicitly value happiness as a life goal, and actual well-being outcomes. Indeed, their results were identical: under low stress, those who emphasised happiness didn’t exhibit many significant differences from others.

Participants who indicated the greatest positive affect reported decreased positive affect, increased loneliness and increased life dissatisfaction in conditions of stress, the time when most people most strongly desire positive affect. The more unhappy they felt when they weren’t happy, the more they needed to be happy. This was tested by Mauss and collaborators in a follow-up study.

Researchers randomly assigned participants to read either a positive passage about the importance of happiness and emotional well-being or a neutral passage. They then showed both groups a film clip designed to induce positive emotion. Those who focused on experiencing happiness reported less positive emotion while watching the clip, less meaning in their lives, and greater feelings of loneliness, despite viewing content intended to elicit positive feelings. People used these expectations of happiness as a standard against which they compared their actual happiness, which ultimately fell short (Mauss et al., 2011).

Cross-cultural research further complicates this picture. The paradox appears more pronounced in individualistic cultures, which emphasise personal achievement, self-fulfilment, and individual emotional experiences, than in collectivist cultures, which tend to integrate well-being into social roles, relationships, and contributions to the community.

The study compared Americans and Russians and found that viewing happiness as an individual achievement negatively affected well-being among Americans but not among Russians (Mauss et al., 2011; Uchida & Kitayama, 2009). The wandering mind is another piece of evidence. Killingsworth and Gilbert (2010) conducted a large experience sampling study where they randomly approached participants throughout the day via their cell phone and asked them what they were doing, what they were thinking about, and how they felt.

They found that people spend about 47 per cent of their waking hours thinking about something else rather than about the thing they are doing. Most importantly, mind-wandering was associated with lower levels of happiness regardless of the activity people were engaged in. Research consistently linked positive affect to absorbed attention in the present moment rather than to evaluating whether one felt happy. The data indicated that people experienced happiness most reliably as a consequence of engagement rather than as something they actively sought.

What Works Instead: Meaning, Acceptance, and Purposeful Living

What does one do for lasting happiness when living for happiness leads to the loss of happiness? Researchers have consistently identified three well-established, interrelated paths, none of which necessarily treats happiness as the ultimate goal.

1. Meaning over pleasure

Roy Baumeister and colleagues (2013) made a direct comparison of happiness and meaning as facets of well-being, and they found that although happiness and meaning are related, they are different aspects. Things associated with happiness seemed to have a lot to do with receiving, the act of receiving what one wanted, satisfying immediate needs and desires.

Activities related to meaning were more likely to be giving (contributing to others) or taking on challenges or engaging with something beyond the self. For instance, research consistently reports that parents experience a greater sense of meaning than their childless counterparts. However, they report less happiness in each moment that they are parents. Difficulty and discomfort are part of meaning, while happiness-seeking is about avoiding them (Baumeister et al., 2013).

2. Acceptance over control

One of the best-studied contemporary psychological therapies is Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). It suggests that the desire to control, suppress, or extinguish negative emotions is one of the main causes of psychological distress. This is what most people do while trying to feel happy. ACT fosters what it calls psychological flexibility. This involves “the acceptance of difficult thoughts without struggle and the ability to persist with an action while maintaining one’s values”.

Research on ACT, predictably, has shown that boosting acceptance of negative emotions, rather than reducing them, can lead to remarkable enhancements in well-being. It can also improve anxiety and depression outcomes (Hayes et al., 2006). The paradox here, solved practically, is that it is happier to have an unhappy feeling than to desire happiness.

3. Engaged flow and absorbed engagement

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s studies on flow show that people feel their best when engaged in flow activities. Flow is a state that involves intense absorption and effortless action in a challenging task. In such moments, they rarely think about their experience of well-being. Flow occurs when people engage in a challenge that matches their skills, focus their attention completely, and temporarily push their sense of self into the background. It tends to be the exact opposite of “happiness monitoring”: it is not about the person assessing their happiness, but about the person being happy. And it reliably and retrospectively creates some of the most gratifying experiences experienced in a life. (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990).

Conclusion

The hedonic paradox is not a bad prognosis. It does not mean that happiness is not possible or that positive feelings are not important. It implies the more specific and more practical notion that happiness is a by-product, not an ultimate objective. When people engage in meaningful work, they may experience joy. They may also find joy in meaningful relationships with others and in activities that resonate with their values. In a whole life experience of joy and sorrow, they just seem to find joy.

If their goal is to achieve happiness, they may constantly track their progress towards it. However, they are tracking it for the very reason that they have not yet achieved it. The implications of a culture that is happy-to-buy are profound. The billions spent on self-help to uncover happiness may be systematically shifting one’s attention. This may focus attention on the very thing that makes happiness less available. Research findings reflect this evaluative, self-focused perspective.

A life centred on meaning, connection, and deep engagement is not merely a consolation for the happiness that remained unattained. It’s, as the evidence indicates, where happiness is most likely to be located.

References +

• Baumeister, R. F., Vohs, K. D., Aaker, J. L., & Garbinsky, E. N. (2013). Some key differences between a happy life and a meaningful life. Journal of Positive Psychology, 8(6), 505–516. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2013.830764
• Brickman, P., Coates, D., & Janoff-Bulman, R. (1978). Lottery winners and accident victims: Is happiness relative? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36(8), 917–927. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.36.8.917
• Brickman, P., & Campbell, D. T. (1971). Hedonic relativism and planning the good society. In M. H. Appley (Ed.), Adaptation-level theory (pp. 287–302). Academic Press.
• Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. Harper & Row.
• Frederick, S., & Loewenstein, G. (1999). Hedonic adaptation. In D. Kahneman, E. Diener, & N. Schwarz (Eds.), Well-being: The foundations of hedonic psychology (pp. 302–329). Russell Sage Foundation.
• Hayes, S. C., Luoma, J. B., Bond, F. W., Masuda, A., & Lillis, J. (2006). Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: Model, processes, and outcomes. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 44(1), 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brat.2005.06.006
• Killingsworth, M. A., & Gilbert, D. T. (2010). A wandering mind is an unhappy mind. Science, 330(6006), 932. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1192439
• 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. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0022010
• Mill, J. S. (1873). Autobiography. Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer.
• Schooler, J. W., Ariely, D., & Loewenstein, G. (2003). The pursuit and assessment of happiness can be self-defeating. In I. Brocas & J. D. Carrillo (Eds.), The psychology of economic decisions: Volume 1 Rationality and well-being (pp. 41–70). Oxford University Press.
• Statista. (2023). Self-improvement market size worldwide from 2022 to 2032. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1385518/self-improvement-market-size-global/
• Uchida, Y., & Kitayama, S. (2009). Happiness and unhappiness in east and west: Themes and variations. Emotion, 9(4), 441–456. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0015634
• Wegner, D. M. (1994). Ironic processes of mental control. Psychological Review, 101(1), 34–52. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.101.1.34