The Happiness Trap: How to Stop Struggling and Start Living (Second Edition)

by Russ Harris

We go through life holding on tightly to many unhelpful beliefs about happiness—ideas widely accepted because “everyone knows they are true.” And these beliefs seem to make good sense—which is why you encounter them in so many self-help books and articles. But unfortunately, these misleading ideas tend to create a vicious cycle in which the more we pursue happiness, the more we suffer. And this psychological trap is so well hidden, we don’t even realize we’re caught in it.

In summary then, we are all hardwired to suffer psychologically: to compare, evaluate, and criticize ourselves; to focus on what we’re lacking; to rapidly become dissatisfied with what we have; and to imagine all sorts of frightening scenarios, most of which will never happen. No wonder humans find it hard to be happy!

But to make matters worse, many popular beliefs about happiness are inaccurate, misleading, or false and will actually make you miserable if you buy into them.

Many people believe happiness is “our natural state.” But the statistics above show very clearly, this is not the case. What is natural for human beings is to experience an ever-changing flow of emotions—both pleasant and painful—varying throughout the day depending on where we are, what we’re doing, and what is happening.

If we live a full human life, we will feel the full range of human emotions: the pleasant ones, like love and joy and curiosity, and the painful ones, like sadness, anger, and fear. All these feelings are a normal, natural part of being human.

Myth 2: If You’re Not Happy, You’re Defective Following logically from myth 1, Western society assumes that psychological suffering is abnormal. It is seen as a weakness or illness, a product of a mind that is somehow faulty or defective. This means that when we do inevitably experience painful thoughts and feelings, we are often ashamed or embarrassed about it, or we criticize ourselves for being weak, silly, or immature.

ACT is based on a radically different assumption: if you’re not happy, you’re normal. Let’s face it: life is tough and full of challenges; it would be weird if we felt happy all the time. The things that make life meaningful come with a whole range of feelings—both pleasant and painful.

Happiness. We want it. We crave it. We strive for it. But what exactly is it? If you ask most people this question, they’re likely to describe happiness as a “good feeling”: a pleasurable feeling of joy, gladness, or contentment.

The ancient Greeks had a special word for a life based on the pursuit of happy feelings: hedemonia, from which we get the word hedonism (seeking pleasure). We all enjoy pleasurable feelings, so it’s hardly surprising that we chase them. However, like all human emotions, feelings of happiness are fleeting; they come and they go. No matter how hard we try to hold on to them, they never hang around for long. And as we shall see, a life spent in pursuit of “feeling good” is, in the long term, deeply unsatisfying. Indeed, research shows that the harder we chase after pleasurable feelings and try to avoid the uncomfortable ones, the more likely we are to suffer from depression and anxiety.

But there’s another meaning of happiness that’s radically different: the experience of living a rich and meaningful life. When we clarify what we stand for in life and start acting accordingly—behaving like the sort of person we really want to be, doing the things that matter deep in our hearts, moving in life directions we consider worthy—then our lives become infused with meaning and purpose, and we experience a profound sense of vitality. This is not some fleeting feeling—it is a powerful sense of a life well lived. The ancient Greek word for this type of happiness is eudemonia, these days often translated as “flourishing.”

When we live our lives in this way, we will, for sure, have many pleasurable feelings; and we’ll also have many difficult ones, like sorrow, anxiety, and guilt. (As I said before, if we live a full human life, we will feel the full range of human emotions.)

In other words, away moves are things we say and do that make our lives worse, keep us stuck, exacerbate our problems, inhibit our growth, negatively impact our relationships, or impair our health and well-being in the long term. They are things we ideally want to reduce or stop doing—and another big aim of this book is to help you do a whole lot less of them.

As with toward moves, there’s no “official list” of away moves; we all decide for ourselves which of our behaviors fit this category.

It’s essential to understand this principle because it underpins everything in this book; the technical name for it is workability. If what you’re doing in a particular situation is helping you move closer toward the life you want to build, we say it’s “workable” (a toward move); but if it’s having the opposite effect, we say it’s “unworkable” (an away move). And only you can ever decide whether something is workable for you.