Happiness literature pet peeve - The tricks of mood management

Positive psychology has produced a host of techniques in the past few decades for extending the duration of positive moods (‘happiness’) and reducing the severity and frequency of negative moods. These include savouring, basking, gratitude, mindfulness, renunciation and even just plain-old Ophra-friendly ‘positive thinking’.

These are really important areas of research but I find it extremely hard to get stuck into them because they are just so nauseating. Every website on these topics is loaded with motivational pictures of things like meadows, mountains and birds splayed with pseudo-spiritual tripe like ‘it’s not happiness that we should be grateful for, but gratefulness that brings us happiness…’

Pass me a bucket.

This is true even of the websites of major research groups like that of Robert Emmons and Martin Seligman.

These techniques invariably promise to help you flourish through the application of simple, 10 minute a day techniques.

Does that sound familiar? Does that sound a bit like those advertisements you come across on the internet like ‘lose ten pounds of fat with this one weird trick’? Does it remind you of a late-night exercise-machine commercial?

The advocates of these techniques are making out like ‘happiness’ (which until recently they defined in a very narrow way to mean only positive emotion, or perhaps they didn’t even grasp that it might mean more than that) is simply a matter of a few behavioural adjustments. Just be thankful to humanity’s reason and ingenuity and the bounty it has bestowed on you before each meal and all your worries about whether you’ve chosen the right career or should have a second child or should vote for Clinton will just float right away.

I’d like to compare this fundamentally American approach to well-being—positive emotion through quick tricks—to the ancient Greek admonishments to ‘know thyself’ and ‘become who you are’. That’s the kind of shit that can help you to analyse and not merely to mood-manage your existential dread.

But guess what, it’s not a 10-minute trick; it’s a lifelong process. Worse still, introspection is fucking painful. Sometimes you have to admit that you’re wrong. Sometimes you have to admit that you’re a terrible person. Sometimes you have to painstakingly work your way through some tough writing to arrive at a better articulated value system. Sometimes you need to engage in a 12-hour a week exercise routine for a year to get that body you want. Sometimes you need to admit that maybe the very thing holding you back is your tendency to try ’10-minute a day programs’ instead of actually dealing with your shit. The Greeks got that, which is why their principle art form is the tragedy and their heroes spend all their time fighting against the Gods to affirm their individual wills.

Now don’t get me wrong, these techniques of positive psychology are valuable and do have empirically verified modest effects on your mood, and mood is a significant part of well-being. I said they were important and I meant it. What grinds me is that in amongst all the inspiration and earnest smiling of these techniques there is no attention paid to deep introspection and the role expansive concepts like self-determination play in psychological well-being.

I’ve being too harsh. Mindfulness is in there, which teaches practitioners to be aware of their thoughts through breathing exercises.

Breathing exercises!? When I was a depressed teenager I spent nearly every day sitting on a bench at the beach trying to process my inner turmoil. I was mindful as fuck. I didn’t need a breathing exercise I needed help unpacking and understanding the underlying psychological drivers of my distress. These pertained to things like coming of age, unrequited love, unarticulated foundations for self-esteem, disquiet at the injustice of the world and household drama.

Do these strike you as things that can be addressed with behavioural therapies?

Of course not! These are rational causes that need to be engaged with on a rational level. I wasn’t doing anything particularly wrong nor was I merely in a state of chemical imbalance. I didn't just need an attitude adjustment. I needed some philosophy. I needed someone to teach me about values and how to articulate why you might hold one. Someone to help me understand my strengths and weaknesses as a person, to help me systematically grow the former and eliminate the later. Someone to help me process why the future daunted me and help me build a picture of my future that I could draw motivation from. Most importantly, I needed someone to engage with my subjective experience, not prescribe trite practices that work for everyone. All the work in deep psychology and existential philosophy points to the centrality of ‘self’ in determining psychological well-being.

Fix the self, and mood will follow. Focusing on mood is treating the symptoms rather than the cause of negativity. It’s fine if someone is mostly on kilter, but dangerous otherwise. Someone with structural barriers to happiness, like an unresolved fractious relationship with a parent or a conflict between evangelical values and homosexuality, can only get a band aid with mood management. Eventually they are going to need to excavate those foundations and stabilise them.

There are emerging notions in positive psychology that do engage with these issues. Seligman has a great packet on personal strengths. Some gratefulness training has investigated treatments where patients focus on things they like about themselves and things they would like to change. Seligman has even recently realised that positive emotion is not the be-all and end-all and has incorporated meaning, relationships and achievement into his model of well-being (PERMA for flourishing).

Meaning, relationships and achievement. I wonder where you could find a comprehensive philosophy of these things. Oh what’s that, they were principle of object of inquiry of philosophy between 1850–1950 and gave birth to psychiatry in the work of Freud, Jung, Adler and Frankl. No way?!

This is like spending 30 years excavating a dig site only to realise that you should be in the next valley over. It happens that there are mountains of good researchers in that valley, including empirical researchers, that haven’t been engaged because they don’t like to populate their websites with sun-beams and because their ideas don’t boil down to one word slogans and lite-as-air bestsellers.

The desire to find something ‘simple’, ‘easy’, and ‘quick’ that you can ‘do in the shower’, is precisely why we aren’t helping people to actually attain well-being. There is no ‘trick’ to well-being, and there certainly isn’t some objective factor that grants it to everyone. You’re going to need to know yourself and become who you are, and we need work on how to help people with that.