Stop pursuing happiness. Build something stronger.
Society often views happiness as a destination to be reached through self-help books and the advice of Instagram influencers. Christian Waugh, professor of psychology at Wake Forest University, says the pursuit of resilience—rather than happiness—provides a more sustainable framework for navigating life’s stressors.
Waugh studies emotions, stress and coping and has published research on how people regulate their emotions, why some people rebound more effectively from stress and trauma and how their responses evolve. He is the author of the Substack, “The Joyful Struggle.”
By embracing moments of joy and allowing space for negative emotions, individuals can build the emotional flexibility needed to bounce back from adversity, he says.
Waugh explains what contributes to long-term well-being and shares recommendations for better emotional resilience in the face of life’s challenges.
Your research suggests that valuing happiness too highly can actually make us less happy. Why does the direct pursuit of happiness backfire, and what should we be aiming for instead?
One of the things that we’re told in our society is to be happy. It’s become an industry now that people want to make themselves happy but there’s sometimes a danger to that. When we pursue happiness, we think to ourselves, “Am I doing this well?” The problem is that when we’re stressed or we’re feeling negative emotions we think that maybe we’re not happy, maybe we’re not doing something right. When negative emotions happen and bad things happen, these aren’t indicators that you’re not doing well. They’re indicators that you’re just living a normal life. So the framing should not be about pursuing happiness at all costs and thinking of negative emotions as threats, but rather it should be about knowing that negative things are going to happen and staying happy despite and, sometimes, because of them. This is what resilience is and it’s a better goal to pursue.
Many people think resilience means being tough, but your work emphasizes flexibility. Why is the ability to shift quickly between emotions more important than simply “staying positive?
I like to think of resilience like a metal. The resilience of a metal is marked by its ability to bend under pressure, but not break. And when that pressure resolves, it bounces back to its original form. This is how we should think about resilience with humans as well. Not that we can’t feel negative or we have to suppress our emotions through all the bad things, but rather that we can feel those things and then bounce back when they’re over. It’s about adapting to the world no matter what comes at you, knowing that you’re going to respond appropriately to good things when they happen with happiness and joy and amusement, but also to bad things when they happen, with sadness and anger and grief. Being able to do both of those things is the mark of a resilient person.
What does the research say about how we actually achieve long-term wellbeing?
Several years ago, some professors found that when people experienced frequent positive events throughout their life, that led to them having higher well-being and happiness than if they just experienced a few really intense happy events. This is because of how the brain works. When the brain frequently experiences something, it comes to expect that thing. If I frequently experience positive events day by day, then when I wake up in the morning, my brain expects something good to happen to me that day. That optimism and expectations of positive events then carry over into allowing more good things to happen.
What can we do to increase those small moments of happiness or “micro joys”?
Some things that help increase the frequency of these small happy moments include appreciating the world around you, being out in nature, and appreciating other people when they do things for you. With gratitude, we’re actually creating a positive moment with something that might’ve just gone by without us noticing. We tend to be focused on the future and the next thing, but taking time out to celebrate the accomplishments we have, just an extra moment longer, extends that positive emotion. And one of the best ways to do this is to share our achievements, our joys with others. Happiness and wellbeing is really your attitude about how your life is going, that in this moment, how is my life? Is it more joyful and filled with moments of positive emotion, or is it less so?
What have you learned from your research about ways we can regulate our moods and build resilience?
The main takeaway of my research is that to have good stress, we don’t always have to focus on how to get rid of the bad feelings. A lot of times having good stress is about improving the positive feelings and focusing on adding positive emotions to our stressors as opposed to taking negative emotions away. For example, in one study we found that those who were resilient after the terrible attacks on 9/11 were those who felt positive emotions like compassion and love, not those who didn’t feel angry and afraid. The framing is not about pursuing happiness at all costs and thinking of negative emotions as threats to that, but rather knowing that negative things are going to happen. If you stay happy despite them, then that is what’s actually being successful. When I talk about this idea of resilience as being a better target, people feel kind of relieved because it gives them permission to feel bad sometimes.
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