THE pursuit of happiness is making us miserable, a Melbourne therapist warns.
Dr Russ Harris said Western society was not only looking for happiness in all the wrong places but was chasing a false ideal.
The GP and psychotherapist said the Western world was trapped in the mistaken belief that positive thinking lit the path to happiness.
But he said the human mind was not designed to think positively and forcing it to do so was fuelling an epidemic of misery.
Dr Harris, author of a new book called The Happiness Trap, said the mind had evolved to think negatively as a kind of warning system, processing all conceivable threats to ensure survival.
"As a consequence, today you've got a mind that will pull you into scary scenarios about the future, will tell you ways in which you're not equipped to handle it, will compare you to other people who are maybe better equipped," he said.
"You've got a mind that will inherently automatically think negatively.
"But all the positive thinking in the world is not going to undo a hundred thousand years of evolution."
UK-born Dr Harris, who migrated to Australia in 1991, said rather than finding happiness, people who tried to suppress or replace negative thoughts with positive ones found themselves in a constant struggle with their own human nature.
The key was learning to accept life's pitfalls, challenges and disappointments and all the negative thoughts they generated, he said.
Dr Harris said a new therapy, known as acceptance and commitment therapy, was helping achieve just this.
Based on the ancient eastern practice of mindfulness, which promotes a deep mental state of awareness, openness and focus, ACT aims to help people deal with difficult and painful thoughts and feelings.
While mindfulness has been taught for thousands of years in disciplines like yoga, meditation and martial arts, Dr Harris said ACT's simple techniques could be learned in just minutes.
"What you can do is learn to see negative thoughts for what they are: just words popping up in your head," he said. 'You don't have to try to
get rid of them, you don't have to try to struggle with them, or suppress them or replace them.
"Instead you learn how to allow them to be there without a fight.
"You massively reduce their impact and their influence so there's no need to get rid of them."
But Dr Harris said the way people pursued happiness was not the only stumbling block. They also needed to revise their definition of happiness, which was commonly thought to mean feeling good.
"Common ideas and beliefs about happiness are misleading and inaccurate, and actually contribute to the epidemic of depression and anxiety," he said.
"Many of the most meaningful things you can do in life bring a whole range of feelings.
"Having kids, for example, brings the most wonderful feelings of love and joy, but also brings frustration, anxiety, fatigue and anger.
"As long as you are fixed on the popular idea that happiness is the same as feeling good, you are going to be struggling with reality."
Dr Harris said ACT taught a definition of happiness as "living a rich, full and meaningful life, while experiencing the full range of human emotions".
While it might sound new-age and touchy-feely, there is a growing body of scientific evidence of the benefit of ACT on a range of conditions, including depression, stress, obsessive compulsive disorder, chronic pain, anxiety and addictions.
A 2002 US study produced one of the most stunning results, with hospital re-admissions of schizophrenic patients treated with just four hours of ACT halving over the next six months.
Dr Harris said a person did not have to have a clinical condition to benefit, with everyday life throwing up many challenges.
"Whether it's a confidence issue, whether it's facing illness, whether it's high stress, or whether it's a recognised disorder, you are always faced with the same issues basically, difficult feelings and difficult thoughts," he said.
Product Description
What if almost everything you believed about finding happiness turned out to be inaccurate and misleading? What if those very beliefs were in fact making you miserable? Too many of us are caught in the happiness trap: we think that we should be happy all or most of the time, and we believe that we can control the circumstances of our lives in order to avoid unpleasant experiences.
In reality, every life is touched by disappointment and difficulty. Ironically, it is our fear of negative experiences that keeps us trapped in cycles of unhappiness. Based on the insights and techniques of a new form of psychotherapy called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Harris offers key principles and techniques for escaping the “happiness trap” to create a full, rich, and meaningful life.
Harris shows how mindfulness and acceptance can help us to overcome common emotional problems. He presents the six key techniques of ACT that have been proven effective in helping individuals to:
handle painful feelings more effectively
escape the grip of self-defeating habits, including addiction
rise above fears, doubts, and insecurities
create a richer and more meaningful life
About the Author
Dr. Russ Harris is a physician and psychotherapist specializing in stress management. Having used the principles of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) to overcome his own struggles with anxiety, he now trains individuals and mental-health professionals to use the ACT techniques to overcome a range of psychological problems and improve the quality of their lives. He lives in Melbourne, Australia.
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Joined: Sep 30, 2004 Posts: 758 Location: United Kingdom
Posted: Thu May 08, 2008 12:46 pm Post subject:
Thanks sabbath, there's some interesting stuff there. I've never been a great fan of positive thinking as a therapy/cure. A happy delusion is still a delusion.
Thanks for this very interesting post. I don't know how much research has been carried out into Dr Harris's arguments. The most extensive research on hapiness and its attainment that I know of can be found here www.gethappy.net if any1 is interested in reading further into this area.
I think striving to be happy has been the leading cause of my unhappinesses in the past. Needing to always feel happy is like a guaranteed shortcut straight into depression. Not fun in my opinion... not fun at all!
Same goes with needing to feel like your life is really significant or really means something. It stops you from just sitting back, chillin' and having a good time. Weather or not you're significant, insignificant, happy or unhappy... we all die at the end of this trip anyway!
I have noticed that people who are genuinly happy don't think about it, they just are. Although I don't believe we can all be happy all the time, clearly as life hurls things at us we alter emotional states.
Birthdays are supposed to be happy, ergo the pressure can make them quite miserable, Christmas the same.
ACT is intriguing, I might have to try it someday. I do have a book on mindfulness that is pretty good.
Not just thinking positively but even the neutral statements, such as in CBT, can be too positive and invite one to argue against them. That's what I ended up doing anyway. Just being able to detach from all the words in one's brain is appealing in a way that having "happier" thoughts isn't.
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