Why We Stop Doing What Makes Us Happy
Introduction
One of my favorite practical substitutes for the word happiness is balance. When I think back on when I was happiest, more often than not my life was balanced. I was splitting my time well between schoolwork, fitness, friends, personal projects, etc. The combination of these things brought me fulfillment. Unfortunately, I have not spent the majority of my life in balance. More often than not I’m on a slippery slope away from balance without even noticing it.
It always starts with something that feels insignificant. I watch one more YouTube video than I told myself I would. I have one more piece of chocolate than I told myself I would. I skip one workout. Over time one turns into more, and before I know it my life is off balance.
From observing this process happen to me countless times I’ve been able to pinpoint the reasons. I’ll go through them one by one.
Overestimating Willpower
When I do something I told myself I wouldn’t do, I often tell myself “next time I’ll resist”. For some reason I have this idea that somehow next time will be different — this is an irrational expectation. It is highly unlikely that between now and next time I will become a different person. I will likely have the same willpower then as now. So why should I believe that I won’t behave the same way in an identical situation? After all, I probably said the same thing to myself last time, and here I am again.
Once you notice this pattern it becomes funny. There is a famous quote that fits this situation: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results”. None of us want to think of ourselves as weak-minded. It would seem that accepting our lack of willpower is an admission of general weak-mindedness — it isn’t. How we behave is closely tied to our environment and the specifics of a situation. A more accurate statement would be that “in this particular environment and this particular situation, I do not have the willpower to resist this temptation”. Once you frame it that way, it becomes much easier to accept your specific weakness.
Once I acknowledge this weakness it becomes clear that I have to avoid the situation in the first place. No matter if it’s a place, a person, or a time of the day, I make sure that it is impossible for me to make the same mistake again. For example, if the problem is watching YouTube late into the night, I’ll make myself go to sleep earlier. Or if it’s checking my phone too often, I’ll hide my phone. I accept that given the opportunity I won’t be able to resist, so I don’t allow the opportunity to arise. It may seem embarrassing to resort to such extreme options, but to me, it’s better than falling into the same trap time and time again.
If you dig deeper into what tests your willpower you will likely see that it’s something pleasurable; something instantly gratifying. I’ve always found this weird. Why is it that the things that are supposed to make us happy are often the things we try so hard to resist? The answer may lie in the distinction between happiness and pleasure…
Confusing Happiness with Pleasure
Pleasure is so often the enemy of happiness. The reason is that experiencing pleasure makes you want to experience more pleasure, especially when you didn’t have to work hard to get it. This is what makes it, in my experience, the driving force that knocks your life out of balance.
The truth is that living a balanced life requires effort. Working out, eating healthy, and doing productive work all have unpleasant components to them, Yet we know that these are the habits that make us happy. This goes to show that being happy and experiencing pleasure are completely different things that are often at odds with each other.
Unfortunately, our brains are wired to seek pleasure. This is why even when we are happy, we try to see if we can increase the pleasure and decrease the effort. We have the idea that if we can keep the happiness balance and increase pleasure, we will be even happier. This will often materialize itself in the thought “live a little”. By saying this, we’re reinforcing the idea that somehow we are not “living” by setting constraints on our pleasure. All of a sudden we see pleasure as the path to living. We confuse pleasure with happiness.
The ultimate art is to be content with being happy. In my experience this can only be learned through repeating the cycle of reducing pleasure, resultantly being happy, and then losing balance by cheating the constraints you set for yourself. Eventually, you see that the reduction of pleasure is precisely what’s allowing you to be happy. When you untangle pleasure and happiness, you see clearly that constraining pleasure is a prerequisite for happiness.
Even when you no longer confuse pleasure with happiness you’re still going to have pleasure in your life. After all, it is responsible for so many of the peak experiences in life. What we need is a way to stop it from getting out of hand. That’s exactly where having a comparison point can really help you out…
Lack of a Comparison Point
Balance is a relative term. Balance for me may not be balance for you. Regardless, it is critical to know what it is for you. If you don’t, then you will have a tough time knowing when you’re off balance.
As I’ve already said, balance slowly gets away from you. It happens a little at a time. The thing is that we are so good at getting used to how things are. As life slowly gets off balance you can be fooled into believing that this is what balance feels like. But after a few shifts of this kind, you can look back and see how far you’ve diverged from your actual balanced state. To prevent this from happening you need to be strongly in tune with what balance feels like. I believe this is where a mindfulness practice can really help develop the awareness necessary to recognize a shift away from balance.
Sleep is an example where I had to learn what balance feels like. Back in high school, I wasn’t in tune with how varying amounts of sleep impacted my state. When I had ample sleep and was functioning optimally I didn’t note that the quality of sleep was the cause. Similarly, when I was running low on sleep and was dysfunctional, I didn’t connect the two. Nowadays I am extremely aware of how sleep impacts my state. When I wake up I’m immediately aware if I’m in or out of balance. This sensitivity makes it easy for me to self-correct the moment I don’t get a night of good sleep and prevents the issue from snowballing. Speaking of snowballing…
Snowballing
When we break a rule we set for ourselves we often miss the implications of it. I’ve found for myself that breaking one rule leads to breaking a bunch of other rules. But at the moment that I break the rule, I’m not aware of the chain of events that is about to unfold.
Sticking with the example of sleep, let’s say I convince myself that staying up until 2am watching YouTube is a good idea. “I’ll wake up tomorrow morning and be crazy productive” is likely how I justify that to myself. Instead I wake up, have a rushed breakfast, skip my meditation because I’m trying to make up for lost time, my mind is whirling with thoughts as a result, my normal time of productivity between breakfast and lunch is gone, and I’m thrown off track from there. Now it’s not always that catastrophic but the point remains: one rule broken leads to others being compromised as well. When I made the decision to stay up it didn’t occur to me that all these events would unfold; I only saw it as breaking a single rule.
For the nastiest temptations we have in our lives there’s probably a reason they’re so nasty. It’s usually because they’re associated with other temptations. This applies to both behavioral temptations as well as material temptations. The attractiveness of the temptation tries to make us forget all the bad things that go along with it. If you’re honest with yourself though, you should be able to see that snowballing is inevitable, and that the temptation comes bundled with others. So when you think of giving in to the temptation you should see it as giving in to the others as well. Once you frame it that way, the tradeoff becomes clearer and it becomes easier to resist.
Conclusion
In the book A Brave New World a dystopian world is described where everybody is always experiencing pleasure. Any time someone experiences discomfort they are trained to take “soma”, the perfect recreational drug. What’s off-putting about this world is that on the surface it seems ideal. Why can’t everyone always be experiencing pleasure? As I was reading I was thinking to myself why it’d feel wrong to say everyone was happy in this book. Eventually I put a finger on it: while everyone was always experiencing pleasure, they were missing fulfillment.
Fulfillment comes from putting in effort to plant the seeds and then seeing the tree grow. The expression “labour of love” captures the essence of fulfillment: you enjoy the labour. At the heart of balance is the understanding that you have to put in effort to maintain it. Think about balancing on 1 leg. It requires effort, but once you are balanced there is a period where you are able to stay with minimal effort. But the moment you relax is when you start tipping over. Achieving balance and believing that you are there for good is what leads to its undoing.
So why do we stop doing what makes us happy? Because we substitute pleasure for happiness and abandon the idea of balance. I don’t think we can prevent ourselves from falling into this trap. But by seeing the mechanics by which it happens we can hopefully improve the speed at which we recognize it. And each time we return to balance it becomes easier to do so next time. This way we can spend less time on a slippery slope, and more time enjoying the stable ground.
Thank you Ilya Kreynin and Jason Loi for editing
