If we want something, we tend to strive for it. With some combination of luck and skill, we sometimes achieve it. Goods such as a new car or a new house, positive life-changing events such as a new job or a promotion, are all within reach if we try hard enough. Or so said Horatio Alger, whose many novels during the Gilded Age told the “rags-to-riches” stories that are at the heart of the “American Dream.”

“Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” are the “unalienable rights” that, according to the American Declaration of Independence, have been given to all human beings by their Creator. Indeed, there is much evidence that people like to feel happy and want to be happier than they are, even if they are already fairly happy. In most countries, life satisfaction and happiness are judged to be more important than money and wealth.

So do we achieve happiness by pursuing it?

In stark contrast to the Declaration of Independence, and two centuries of the “American Dream”, there is much psychological research that suggests that pursuing happiness will make you less happy. Ironically, the more you want to be happy, the more likely you are to become unhappy.

How does this negative spiral to unhappiness unfold? What is it about happiness, or its pursuit, that makes us less happy?

A recent article in the Psychonomic Bulletin & Review tackled this question. Researchers Aekyoung Kim and Sam Maglio postulated that this spiral unfolds because of a perceived scarcity of time.

Any pursuit requires an investment of time—we work harder to get a bigger grant or a high-impact journal publication and hence have less time for other things. When we pursue happiness, this similarly requires an investment of time, for example by planning that trip of a lifetime to Koh Rong Samloem.

Now here is the difficulty with that: happiness is a goal that is often never fully realized. Maybe Koh Rong Samloem is indeed paradise, but the toilet in your room might still malfunction on the day of your arrival with no one available to fix it. Being so keen on happiness, chances are that you will find the blocked toilet particularly irksome, and you will anticipate needing to dedicate more and more time toward your continued pursuit of happiness. Before your next holiday to Cradle Mountain in Tasmania, you’d better check out the availability of plumbers and read all the reviews on Tripadvisor (all 6,348 of them) to make sure your next holiday makes you really, truly happy.

Now, I can almost guarantee you that Cradle Mountain (like many places in Tasmania) will make you happy, but if you tried too hard to anticipate plumbing problems and to make sure there is a 97% consensus of happiness among visitors, then chances are you have felt as though you have less and less time available in the actual present.

And therein lies the spiral: the occupation with the pursuit of future happiness keeps you so busy, you never have time for anything right now. There is no time to be happy.

Researchers Kim and Maglio explored this idea, that pursuing happiness leaves you with no time to be happy, in four studies.

In their first study, a sample of around 100 online participants were asked to indicate their general level of the pursuit of happiness by rating their agreement with various items (e.g., “To have a meaningful life, I need to feel happy most of the time”). Participants were also asked to rate their perceived time scarcity (e.g., “Time is slipping away”). In support of the hypothesis, Kim and Maglio found a significant (though modest; r=.24) correlation between the two measures. The more important happiness is to people, the more they felt that time was scarce.

In the second study, Kim and Maglio added an experimental intervention: participants in the laboratory watched a movie on TV after either being instructed to try and feel happy while watching the movie, or being instructed to let their emotions flow freely. The movie was about the construction of bridges, a topic that is rarely considered a trigger for ecstasy. After the movie, people who pursued happiness felt that time was generally scarcer than participants who were instructed to let their emotions (including, perhaps, boredom) flow freely. Seeking unattainable happiness from a construction movie makes people feel they generally do not have much time.

In a third study with 300 online participants, Kim and Maglio presented (fictitious) information that the pursuit of happiness takes very little time, before querying people’s time scarcity perception again. Those participants thought that time was less scarce than participants in a control condition that received no information about time and happiness, presumably because being told that happiness could be attained quickly left people less concerned about running out of time during their future pursuits.

In a final study, participants in a seeking-happiness condition wrote down 10 things that would make them happier. Participants in a happiness-now condition, by contrast, reported 10 things that demonstrated that they were a happy person already. Afterwards, people again rated time scarcity and reported their current level of happiness. You may not be surprised that people in the seeking-happiness condition reported greater time scarcity and significantly less happiness than participants in the happiness-now condition. Further statistical analysis via a mediation model revealed that the effect of condition was mediated by perceived time scarcity—that is, the request to report 10 things that would make a person happier led to perceived time scarcity, which in turn reduced their happiness.

Taken together, the 4 studies by Kim and Maglio provide good evidence that the perception of time scarcity is an impediment to happiness, and that perceived time scarcity may ironically increase as one strives harder to become happier.

So how do we escape this spiral of unhappiness?

One obvious exit route is to facilitate a feeling that happiness has already been achieved—the moment the intensity of the pursuit is dampened, so are the adverse effects on perceived time scarcity. One route to such facilitation of achieved happiness is by keeping a “gratitude journal”; that is, recording reasons for one’s current happiness in a journal, similar to the happiness-now condition in the last study of Kim and Maglio. (In today’s world, the good old gratitude journal is now actually a gratitude app.) There is evidence from randomized controlled trials that keeping a gratitude journal has considerable emotional benefits.

Enjoy Life, Liberty and the Happiness you already have.

Psychonomics article focused on in this post:

Kim, A. & Maglio, S. J. (2018). Vanishing Time in the Pursuit of Happiness. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. DOI: 10.3758/s13423-018-1436-7.