Neuroscience Says to Be Happier, Stop Thinking About Happiness
If you studied economics or business, you might be familiar with Goodhart’s law. Named after British economist Charles Goodhart, it states “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
At work, this law can look like salespeople offering unprofitable deals at the end of the month just to make their quotas, or call center workers being deliberately unhelpful to meet targets for short call times.
But Goodhart’s law can pop up in unexpected contexts, too — for instance, a new study published in the journal Emotion shows that when you make happiness a target and begin consciously measuring your progress, you actually end up less happy.
How chasing happiness decreases happiness
To figure out the relationship between chasing happiness and experiencing happiness, a team of researchers out of the University of California, Berkeley, New York University, and the University of Toronto rounded up 1,800 study subjects and had them answer questions about their beliefs around happiness and keep detailed diaries of their moods.
A peculiar correlation emerged. The more the study subjects checked in on their own happiness levels, the less happy they reported being. What was going on?
