Psychology Today: Beliefs About Happiness That Make You Less Happy
"According to a recent study by Ağri İbrahim Çeçen University’s Murat Yildirim and the University of Leicester’s John Maltby (2022), happiness has its functional and dysfunctional aspects. On the positive side, happiness can promote more adaptive functioning by allowing people to see the upsides of situations. The dysfunctional aspect of happiness, however, “has detrimental effects on well-being and mental health.” Most research on happiness focuses on its functional aspects but, according to Yildirim and Maltby, this fails to address the full picture. When the idea of happiness goes awry in an individual, it may be necessary to provide “intervention and prevention services to foster positive functioning."
Happiness becomes dysfunctional when people adopt the “irrational” belief that, above all, they need to be happy. Using terms from the well-known rational-emotive theory of Albert Ellis, Yildirim and Maltby further define irrational happiness beliefs as taking the form that you “should,” “ought to,” or “must” be happy. When people adopt these beliefs, they start to go down a route of examining everything that happens to them in these absolutist terms. Traveling this highway from eager anticipation to holding yourself to unrealistic standards prevents you from extracting whatever joy you could have from a less-than-perfect (but potentially still enjoyable) evening.
How to Turn Irrational Into Rational Happiness
As the Yildirim-Maltby findings indicate, seeking happiness becomes in and of itself a process doomed to fail. The more you try to wrench good feelings out of a stressful situation, the less you will cope with it effectively, and the more you will continue to thwart whatever happiness you could extract from it. Trying to force yourself to feel good when things don’t go exactly your way will be counterproductive. Do what you have to in order to try to fix the situation but don’t let the idea that happiness is the be-all and end-all color your ability to enjoy what is actually going well.
Taking situations as they come, then, rather than trying to force something to be good, appears to be the key to letting happiness emerge from situations rather than become the driving force. The next time you feel frustrated that you’re not as happy as you’d like to be, ask yourself why that matters so much. Aren’t there other aspects of life’s experiences that are just as important?
To sum up, taking a measure of your own irrational happiness beliefs seems to be the first step toward finding the fulfillment that comes from taking life’s joys as they come, when they come, and appreciating them when they do.
KEY POINTS
- The conviction that you "should" be happy can produce the opposite effect when it takes on irrational qualities.
- New research on irrational happiness beliefs shows how personality and coping combine to potentially make things worse.
- By taking situations as they come, even if they're not ideal, you'll appreciate the good times even more. "
Read the complete article here
#Happiness #Well-being #Beliefs
@globalBraid3744
The idea of rational-emotive therapy is one of the simple ways of improving your outlook on life into simple and doable steps. I agree that irrational happiness can only set you up for disappointment and despair as its irrational to achieve or maintain them. Learning how to find rational happiness is a great idea to avoid these sorts of outcomes.
@sunnyWriting4806
well said! Thank you for sharing your thoughts.
