Richard Hogan: Do you think you should be happy all the time? 

Happiness takes work, and thinking it's something that's easy is dangerous

Richard Hogan on happiness: "if you believe you should be in a continuous state of happiness, you're going to be let down"

I can’t think of anything more sought-after in Western culture than happiness. It’s the Holy Grail. We are constantly bombarded with images of shiny, happy people, living their best lives. 

Filtered images on social media platforms present us with lives not just being lived but lives that are brilliantly happy. Blemish free and perfect. Billboards, magazines, telly, radio, and social media are constantly feeding us information about how we should be in a perpetual state of happiness. Just look around the next time you are out in society and analyse the information you are receiving, and you will see how ubiquitous messages on happiness actually are. Ubiquitous and destructive. Because if you believe you should be in a constant state of happiness, you are going to be sorely let down. In my experience, a serious problem arises for people when they come to believe they should always be happy. 

In recent times, there have been many people involved in mental health promotion with little or no training. They have no business giving advice about mental health. Like those bogus doctors we saw in the 1990s jumping on the lucrative diet wagon, minor celebrities are now mental health experts.

The best case scenario is they are well-intentioned but not very skilled, worse case scenario is they are driven by money and not so well intentioned and don’t care about skill. But the advice I often hear causes me a considerable amount of concern, because people believe them. I hear things like, "just think positively or "you were not born to suffer, you were born to be happy". Oh boy, that kind of advice makes people feel utterly despairing. "Just think positively, well if it is that simple why can’t I do it? It’s just another thing I am terrible at, everyone else can think positively except for me." 

There are a lot of dangerous messages out there, like those fad diets that we now know were dangerous for our health, we have to be careful about the information we consume about happiness. Advertising works on the premise that you can’t live without the product they are selling. And people selling happiness as something that is easily attained is dangerous and reckless. 

Happiness takes work. You have to put things in place, which can often mean delaying gratification in the present. Now, in the age of extreme individualism, instantaneous information, and abbreviated communication the concept of delaying immediate pleasure can be anathema for people. In my experience, happiness arises when there is congruence between who we want to be and who we are projecting into the world. The inner and outer selves are aligned. But that takes a considerable effort. Because so many of us are motivated to please others, the self becomes malleable, ready to shapeshift to be valued. 

In my experience that impacts women far more than men. I've read numerous studies which suggest women have higher levels of agreeableness as a personality trait and therefore tend to be driven by a desire to please. By their mid 40s they realise that this endeavour to please everyone is unsustainable and destroying their peace of mind. It is very difficult to love yourself when you don’t value yourself enough to be authentic to who you are. So, think about your selves for a moment. Is there a difference between how you want to be seen and the self you project?

So what is happiness? The majority of people I talk to in my clinic really do not have a clear idea of what it is they are striving for. That can cause a considerable amount of frustration and despair, searching for some unknown object in the dark would be a futile and exhausting endeavour. All the scientific research points to the same thing, happiness is found in your relationship with yourself and others. It really isn’t found in wealth and material gain. Research is clear, once you have enough to meet your needs like food and shelter, happiness doesn’t really shift. Research shows that there is very little, if at all, difference in happiness levels between someone earning €70,000 a year and someone earning €5 million a year. 

In fact, attaining wealth can often prove a very unhappy reality. The thing you thought would be the source of all happiness, has proven to be a false god. A study from NorthWestern University exploring happiness levels between ordinary people and those who won big prizes in the lottery found that, after the initial spike of increased happiness, within a year there was no difference between the two groups. That kind of happiness is remarkably short lived. Think about something you were really excited about buying, how long did that last? External sources of happiness do not cause a sustained increase in happiness levels.

Happiness is subjective. But each of us has an internal standard of happiness that we are striving for. Become more aware of what constructed that standard. Ask yourself, can you control any of that standard, is it rooted in some external force? If you gained agency over it, what would need to change in your life to make happiness more present? All the research points to the fact that sustained happiness does not come from external factors but rather the nature of the relationships you have with yourself and those you love.