Cultivating happiness often misunderstood

Of course we would like to be "happy", but that is not the only goal for most people.

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2014/april/giving-and-happiness-041414.html

Stanford Report, April 14, 2014

The paradox of happiness is that chasing it may actually make us less happy, a Stanford researcher says.

So how does one find happiness? Effective ways exist, according to new research.

One path to happiness is through concrete, specific goals of benevolence – like making someone smile or increasing recycling – instead of following similar but more abstract goals – like making someone happy or saving the environment.

The reason is that when you pursue concretely framed goals, your expectations of success are more likely to be met in reality. On the other hand, broad and abstract goals may bring about happiness' dark side – unrealistic expectations.

Those are the conclusions of a study recently published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology by Jennifer Aaker, a social psychologist and the General Atlantic Professor of Marketing at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Co-authors are Melanie Rudd, an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Houston, and Michael Norton, an associate professor of business at Harvard University. Rudd, who studied under Aaker at Stanford as a doctoral student, was the lead author on the study.

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Aaker said, "Although the desire for personal happiness may be clear, the path to achieving it is indefinite. One reason for this hazy route to happiness is that although people often think they know what leads to happiness, their predictions about what will make them happy are often inaccurate."

One underappreciated way to increase one's own happiness is to focus on elevating the happiness of others.

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when people pursue abstract prosocial goals and expect their relentless giving to result in tremendous and rapid change for the better – and it fails to materialize – they can suffer from "helper burnout," which can negatively impact happiness.

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