The Dangers Of Chasing Happiness: A StudyFinds Research Review

Constantly striving to feel good could sabotage your satisfaction in life, and make you feel more miserable than ever before. Here’s what the research shows.

Trying hard to be happy may not be the most reliable way to get there. Over the past 15 years, psychologists have found that people who prize and closely monitor their own happiness, scoring each day the way some people score their mood in an app, tend to report lower well-being, more loneliness and more symptoms of depression.

The evidence comes from lab experiments, daily diaries and surveys spanning dozens of countries. It cuts against a message that self-help books, wellness apps and social media repeat constantly: happiness is a project, and you should always be working on it.

The research also points to a fix, and it is not to stop caring about being happy.

Can Chasing Happiness Really Make You Less Happy?

Research suggests it can, especially when life is already going well.

The best-known evidence comes from a pair of studies led by psychologist Iris Mauss, then at the University of Denver, published in Emotion in 2011. In the first, 59 Denver-area women who had recently gone through a stressful life event filled out a questionnaire on how much they valued happiness. Women who valued it most reported lower life satisfaction, lower well-being and more symptoms of depression, but only when their recent lives had been fairly low in stress. Under heavy stress, the link disappeared.

The second study tested cause and effect. Researchers had 69 college-age women read a short passage. For half, it said that happier people enjoy social, career and health benefits. The other half read the same text with “happiness” swapped for “making accurate judgments.” Everyone then watched either a sad film clip or a happy one showing a figure skater winning gold.

After the happy clip, women who had been primed to prize happiness felt less happy than the comparison group. After the sad clip, there was no difference. The happiness group also reported more disappointment, which partly explained the drop. The researchers concluded that “valuing happiness may lead people to be less happy just when happiness is within reach.”

A 2021 replication in Psychologica Belgica by Michel Hansenne pointed the same way. Among 683 adults in French-speaking Belgium, those who scored higher on the same valuing-happiness scale reported lower happiness, lower life satisfaction and more depressive symptoms.

The pressure does not have to come from inside. A 2022 survey of 7,443 people in 40 countries, published in Scientific Reports, found that people who felt society expected them to be happy and not sad reported lower life satisfaction, fewer positive emotions and more symptoms of depression, anxiety and stress. For most of these measures, the link was roughly twice as strong in countries that rank high on the World Happiness Index, such as the Netherlands and Canada. Lead author Egon Dejonckheere said the happiness people feel pushed to reach “may be unattainable.”

Why Does Focusing on Happiness Backfire?

It seems to breed disappointment, self-focus and a sense that time is running short.

Disappointment is the first piece. Imagine finally reaching a beach trip you have planned for months, then noticing on the second morning that you feel fine but not blissful. For someone keeping score, that gap can sting more than a rainy day would. The 2011 researchers made the point with their own example, a birthday party that fails to deliver joy, and contrasted it with bad news, after which no one expects to feel happy. They argue that this kind of letdown is why the effect appeared after the happy film and among women whose lives were low in stress, but not after the sad clip.

Self-focus may be the second. In a 2012 follow-up in Emotion, Mauss and colleagues tracked 206 adults through 14 nightly diaries. The more someone valued happiness, the lonelier they felt during that day’s most stressful moment, even after the team accounted for age, gender, socioeconomic status and general mood. In a small experiment with 43 female undergraduates, those who read a mock newspaper article praising happiness later reported more loneliness and had lower levels of progesterone, a hormone the researchers used as a marker of social connection. The authors wrote that their findings “suggest that wanting to be happy can make people lonely.”

Time pressure is a third possibility. Across four studies published in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review in 2018, Aekyoung Kim of Rutgers University and Sam Maglio of the University of Toronto Scarborough found that chasing happiness made people feel short on time. In one experiment, some participants wrote down 10 things that would boost their happiness, while others wrote down 10 signs that they were already happy. The first group felt that time was scarcer and reported less happiness, and that sense of time running out helped explain the gap. “What we found is that pursuing happiness caused the participants to think of time as scarce,” Maglio told U of T News.

Does Wanting to Be Happy Always Hurt?

No. The problem appears to be constantly checking and judging your happiness, not wanting it.

Researchers have pulled apart what the original questionnaire measures. A 2016 analysis in the Journal of Research in Personality, pooling six samples, found that the scale’s items fall into three statistical clusters, and only one of them was tied to lower well-being. The authors said the concept needs a clearer definition and better measurement.

A 2024 study in Emotion by researchers at New York University, the University of Toronto and UC Berkeley, including Mauss, named that troublesome part. Across five samples totaling 1,815 people in the U.S. and Canada, simply aspiring to happiness was not reliably linked to well-being either way. Being concerned about happiness, the habit of watching and grading your own mood (think of the daily mood score from the opening), was tied to lower life satisfaction and more depressive symptoms, both at the time and six months later. Part of the reason seemed to be that concerned people felt bad about their own feelings during good moments, such as being let down that a nice event did not feel nicer. The authors concluded that “concern and judgment about one’s happiness can undermine it.”

Culture matters too. In a 2015 study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Brett Ford, then at the University of California, Berkeley, and colleagues surveyed 786 mostly college students. Wanting to be happy was linked to lower well-being in the United States, had no clear link in Germany, and was linked to higher well-being in Russia and East Asia. In Russia and East Asia, people who wanted happiness tended to pursue it through relationships and helping others. In all four regions, defining happiness in social terms went along with better well-being.

How Can You Pursue Happiness Without Sabotaging It?

Spend less energy grading your mood and more on people and activities you enjoy.

The research suggests a few practical shifts. Ford’s findings point toward seeking happiness through connection with others rather than as a private project. In Kim and Maglio’s experiment, listing signs of happiness people already had left them feeling less pressed for time than listing ways to become happier, and Maglio has suggested keeping a gratitude journal as one way to do that. And in Hansenne’s Belgian sample, people who made room in their days for activities they enjoy, a habit researchers call “prioritizing positivity,” reported more happiness and fewer depressive symptoms.

Some caveats apply. Most of these studies are correlational, so they cannot rule out that unhappy people come to fixate on happiness rather than the reverse. The two Mauss experiments were small and included only women. And the effects center on an intense, worried style of focus, not on ordinary hopes for a good life.

Still, the studies keep pointing in the same direction. For anyone scoring their mood at the end of each day, the research suggests the number matters less than what fills the day: the dinner with a friend, the project that absorbs them, the walk they forgot to score. As Ford’s team put it, “happiness is perhaps best achieved not by intensely pursuing it.”