The pursuit of happiness is making you miserable

0:00 The antidote to depression is not happiness. It is contentment. Pursuing happiness and optimizing for happiness is ultimately a hollow and empty pursuit that is likely to leave you in a worse place than where you were when you started. Or at least that's been my journey with attempting to pursue happiness. And this is not just a semantics argument. I actually think this matters tremendously because when you are depressed, generally speaking, you will probably try to do what you believe will make you feel less depressed. And so if in your head you picture a continuum and depression is on one end of the continuum and happiness is on the other, which is what I think most people believe, you're going to try to swing that continuum towards

0:45 happiness. And you're going to do whatever it is will make you feel happier in that moment. And it's not going to work. Or what I should say is sometimes it works kind of you can experience happiness during a depressive episode or at least sometimes you can sometimes you can't sometimes the anhidonia is so complete and so total and you are so consumed by that black hole of nothingness that it makes no difference what you do but sometimes it's not like that sometimes it's just like this kind of sucks but like there are moments there are moments within this that are all right and I'm kind of enjoying myself and I just want more of those moments and so sometimes when you're in a depressive episode, you do something or something happens to you and you feel kind of good for a little bit and you're like, "Okay, we're on to something. We're getting somewhere." And then it goes away and you think, "Well,

1:32 I had it and then I lost it. I had the happiness and the happiness faded. If I could just figure out how to hold on to that, then I could start to turn this thing around. Then I would get out of this black hole. I could get unstuck." And I know that seems like a plausible theory, but you can't hold on to it. Happiness is not designed to be held on to. Happiness is an emotion. And every emotion by definition is an acute timelimited event. Emotional states cannot be maintained indefinitely. They are temporary acute reactions to situations. So you cannot happy your way out of depression. Pursuing happiness will not work for three reasons. Number one, anhidonia. Sometimes you can't feel

2:19 it. If you are incapable of feeling happy no matter what you do and no matter how good your life is, which is a thing that happens to at least a proportion of the depressed population, including me sometimes. Well, then what's going to be your play? What are you going to do to make yourself happy if those neurons that are responsible for making you feel that way just say, "Nope, not today. We are having none of that. I don't care what you do. I don't care what the weather is. I don't care how many people love you. I don't care how much money and respect you have. I don't care if it's like the best day of your life. We are refusing to make dopamine today. It's not happening, buddy. Get over it. There are times when that's what your brain does. And happiness cannot push you through that. Happiness cannot push you through anhidonia when it is that dark and when

3:06 it is that bleak. Problem number two with pursuing happiness, you might end up doing some messed up stuff. Because a lot of what makes us happy in the moment isn't necessarily great for us. And this is why I think so many people with depression, they end up with other problems, too. They end up with addictions or financial problems or infidelity problems or all kinds of stuff because they get so desperate to do anything that's going to break through this cloud, this haze that eventually they start, I keep saying they, we cuz I'm one of you, we start doing extreme things and we stop caring about like, well, what's this going to mean for me like tomorrow or in a week or in a month? Because if it makes us feel something today, that's all we really care about and we do it and we go for it and our lives get worse as a

3:52 result and things start to collapse because we run out of money and our health fails and people get mad at us and pursuing happiness at least in the acute sense in the like what would make me feel good right now right this very moment sense that's going to lead you to ruin. Do not do that. It will screw up your life. Before I get to number three, please indulge me in a brief rant. I've shared my frustrations with the healthcare industry on more than one occasion. It sometimes seems purposefully designed to be as difficult for patients to navigate as possible. Something anyone who has ever changed insurance plans or moved to another state and tried to establish a new care team can attest to. Sometimes my clients have to move out of state for a month to take care of an ailing family member, for example. And since I'm not licensed in that state, well, you can't see me

4:37 until you come back. So, if you need therapy or you need professional support during a very, very challenging time in your life like that in a place that you're not familiar with, you're left with nothing but internet searches. The challenge of building a health care team who understands your conditions and takes your insurance is entirely solved by the sponsor of today's video, Zachdoc. Zachdoc helps you find and book with a wide range of medical professionals who take your insurance. Whether you're looking for a primary care provider, a dentist, an optometrist, or a psychologist like me, Zachdoc has you covered. They give the power back to you, the patient, by letting you see all of your options in one place so that you can make an informed decision about who to give your business to, just like you would with any other service. I just can't imagine

5:23 trying to find a care team without a centralized database like Zachdoc. It would be like trying to buy a house and having to go to every individual realtor's website instead of using one of the websites that lists them all simultaneously. Way too much time and energy. No thank you. Zachdoc has already helped millions of people build a healthcare team who cares. And they want to help you, too. To check out Zodoc, head down to the link in the description of today's content. Thanks so much to Zakdoc for sponsoring this video and helping us all take better care of our health. And number three, adaptation syndrome. You might have also heard this referred to as the hedonic treadmill. It's the exact same thing. I can best demonstrate

6:08 adaptation syndrome by talking about my landscape lights. And I know that probably sounds like the dumbest thing ever, but just give me like two minutes and you'll get it. Um, so a few years ago, my wife got bored of our house and wanted a new one. That's [laughter] that's not quite what happened, but it's it's kind of what happened. Um, no, in all in all uh reality, it was a mutual decision. We we started going house shopping. We found this house that was really cool. It was kind of older. And it had landscape lights, but like not the new solar ones, but like ones that actually have wires running to them under the ground. And we looked at this house like in the winter, and half of the landscape lights were like on the ground in the snow. And the little control box that controlled them was like in a pile of mud. A p a puddle of mud. Mud doesn't come in pile format typically. Anyway, the point is we

6:55 figured they probably didn't work. We didn't care about them. They had nothing to do with the reason we bought the house. We bought the house anyway. Come spring, I decided I'm going to see if they work. So, I like pick them all up and I put the box back and like attach it to the house, plug them in, and I realized that they actually do work and they're kind of cool looking. And then that night I realized all but one works. There's one landscape light that doesn't work. So about a week later I decide to try to fix that landscape light and it was unplugged. It was disconnected from the wiring system. I connected back into the wiring system and that night nothing works. It shorted the whole system out. And keep in mind I'd had these landscape lights for a week. Okay. When I realized they didn't work because after a week of having them and realizing that I actually liked them quite a bit, I was

7:41 like depressed about it. I became very upset that I no longer had landscape lights that I didn't even care about a week ago. And I tried desperately to fix it and I did eventually fix it. But that's not the point. The point is I they they became something I expected, right? They just became part of my baseline level of happiness. The first day when I found out they worked and didn't expect them to work, that was a moment that was above baseline. So when that happened, it was like this boost and it was like, "Oh, cool. This is I like this. This feels good." But then it just becomes normal. It just becomes part of my life and part of the house and it just becomes an average and it doesn't produce acute happiness. But then when something's wrong with it, it produces acute unhappiness. And that's what adaptation syndrome is. Whatever you have, you just get used to it. If you're a super attractive person, but

8:26 you always have been, you kind of don't care, right? It's just like that's old news to you. If you're wealthy, if you're healthy, if you have a great family, like whatever you have, unless it's new, you've probably had it for a while. And you probably don't maintain conscious awareness throughout the day that you have this thing, it is it is just normal to you. It then just becomes a thing you have to maintain to stay at this baseline level. And if you lost this thing, you'd incur a drop in your acute happiness. So just stacking a bunch of these things up doesn't actually make you happier. In fact, it can paradoxically make you miserable because it's just more and more statuses and relationships and things to maintain and it can be completely overwhelming. So earlier in this piece of content, I positioned contentment as a more

9:11 effective antidote to depression than happiness. Let me define that because semantics do matter here. So contentment versus happiness, happiness is an above average acute emotional state caused by some type of above average experience. So when you do something or when something happens to you that is like it's better than normal that produces happiness for some certain period of time and then that feeling goes away unless you're depressed or anhadonic and then it doesn't produce anything. Contentment is not an emotion. Contentment is a decision. It is a mindset. It is a way of looking at your life and it's saying my life is okay. That doesn't mean it's awesome. That doesn't mean it's great. It it's maintaining conscious awareness that there are probably many good things in

9:58 your life that deserve recognition and deserve appreciation. That doesn't mean those things will always make you happy. But contentment is not an emotion. And I need to give Okay, there's a whole exit clause to this whole thing. I said contentment is is basically acknowledging that your life is okay. If it's not I if if it's not like oh you know it's just me being you know pessimistic and like hyperfixating on the negative or like my anxiety thinking well it's good now but how long is it really going to be for if legitimately like if your life is not good like for example let's say you're actively in an abusive relationship just an example then no contentment is not the play here at least like maybe there's some degree of contentment you can find but some of you listening to this or watching this like are are not in a situation where

10:44 contentment is viable. Like, it's not possible. If that's the case, then this stuff I'm talking about here isn't for you. No offense, I still care about you. I still have content for you, just not this one. If that's the case, actual change needs to occur. If if if your life is really really not okay, I'm not trying to gaslight you into thinking that it is. We need to actually do some work on that. Okay? So, that's that's outside the scope of this content, but I need to acknowledge it because I guarantee some of you listening are like, "Okay, but it's not. I can't just trick myself into thinking it is. I know this. That's not what this is about. I understand. I've been there, too. This is something different. So, happiness is emotion. Happiness is an emotion. Contentment is a decision. There's a mindset. That difference matters

11:30 tremendously because decisions are much more depression resistant than emotions. Can depression screw up your decision-making? Oh, absolutely. Can it screw up your thought process? 100% yes. Does it typically screw up your emotions even more than those things? At least for me, it does. Maybe you're different. That's been my experience. I find emotions to be very unreliable. And I try, I guess, shockingly, not to rely on them a whole lot and to instead, I guess, kind of build my foundation on things that I can depend on more than my very, very fickle special snowflake feelings because they just don't always serve me terribly well. So here's why contentment beats happiness in my mind. Number one, it is more achievable and

12:16 sustainable even during periods of anhidonia. I have had many periods of depression and many periods of anhidonia where I couldn't feel anything good. But I could at least look at my life and say I know it kind of is good though. Like I'm not an idiot, right? I can see that I have many wonderful things. I have many blessings. I have worked hard for many things and I still have them. I just don't feel anything from having them right now. And if I expect to feel something from having them right now, I will then paradoxically experience disappointment because I had an expectation that was unmet. But if I can just accept and acknowledge right now I am incapable of feeling that thing, but it doesn't mean I don't have the thing. Then that is something that can help

13:01 sustain me through periods of depression and through periods of anhidonia when the feeling cannot be accessed and that helps prevent me do really stupid things like abandoning everyone I love because I cannot feel their love and I therefore think that means they don't love me anymore and need to start my life over. Not that I've ever done that but you know like hypothetically that could happen. Reason number two and I kind of already said this already so I'm being a little repetitive but I want to restate it. Contentment usually leads to healthy behaviors whereas pursuing happiness I believe often leads to unhealthy behaviors. I'll give you a personal example here. Something I've struggled with a lot in my life uh is spending too much money. And I I find it very difficult to be happy with like the state of anything that I have. Like I

13:47 always want more and better. Not in a like competitive way. Not like oh they have a better phone than me. I need a better phone. It's more just like I I do it to myself honestly and this is the problem with happiness and this is why contentment is so much better in my opinion. Let's say that I have a watch that I really like and I then like start looking at other watches online. Not even shopping, right? Just looking, just browsing, just window shopping. And I find a watch that I like more than my current watch. That will create discontentment within me. At least inherently it will. If I don't practice some mental discipline around that because if I see something that is better than a thing that I have, I instantly don't want the thing that I have anymore. That is how my brain works. Perhaps that is how your brain

14:33 works too. And so I have, again, this is not the only domain of my life that I've done this in, but it's just an easier one to understand as an example. I've boughten a lot of stuff. Did I say boughten? That's embarrassing. I have purchased many products that I had no reason like I didn't need them. But I thought I'll be even happier if I have this instead. And I am for like, you know, 20 seconds after I buy it. And then you know the 20 seconds again after it comes in the mail and everything in between those very brief moments of time is just normal. It's just me again. And it doesn't it doesn't produce anything beyond those acute moments. And it actually makes me more upset because then now I'm stressed about money too because I just wasted a bunch of it. And

15:20 the third is that contentment is not suscept susceptible. Having a hard time with my words today, friend. Contentment is not susceptible to adaptation syndrome. In fact, it combats it. If I am able to say in any domain of my life, what I have is good enough for me, at least for now, then there's no desire to have more. That's the thing about desire. Desire is not inherently a bad thing, but it creates a deficit state that then must be resolved. When you become aware of a thing and when I say thing like that could it could be a material possession it could be a status it could be a place you want to live it could be a person

16:05 when you become aware of something your life doesn't have that you wish it did have you experience discontentment that you then must resolve with some expenditure of resources and this is where I think like I'm not going to get too in the weeds on this but this is getting harder and harder like I contentment is noseding because we know everything that's out there now. You didn't used to have that, right? Even, you know, 10, 15 years ago, you didn't know what everyone else was doing all the time. And you just looked at your own life, not in a vacuum, but like maybe just compared to the people you knew and not compared to like every single human being on Earth. Because a single data point cannot be good or bad. Something can only be good or bad when it's compared or contrasted with something else. So, if you were like the only human being on Earth, you would not

16:52 be able to judge your life as good or bad. like good or bad compared to what? There's other adjectives you could use. Maybe it's really hard. You could call it very lonely. But to say it's good or bad is to say there's another thing out there and my stuff is better or worse than that. And so we can only view things as good or bad when we compare. And we can only compare when we gain more awareness of what else there is. And so that's not always good for us. That can be very antithetical to contentment. And and this is a whole other topic, but that's why I think sometimes simple living is so much better for people with mental health issues because we're going to get so bogged down in these comparisons. So spent a lot of time making my case for why contentment, right? If you've bought

17:40 in at all to the things I'm saying today, I'm sure what you'd like to hear from me next is how. And I got you covered. That's the remainder of the content for today. There are a few strategies that I personally have had pretty good success with as a as a naturally very malcontent person with increasing my own contentment about my life. And the first is probably not a huge surprise given what I do for a living. It is therapy or having a care team in general. It's not that a therapist is going to like do some magic trick to make you content, but when you talk about things in your life or talk about your life in general with another person, especially in a consistent structured way where you can get some feedback and some ideas every now and then, it it come. It's so different than just recycling and ruminating the same

18:26 thoughts over and over in your own mind. The second way you can become more content is to keep a very close eye out for when you engage in emotional reasoning. Emotional reasoning is when we assume that our feelings or lack thereof are an accurate reflection of reality. Basically, we let our feelings run our life. Here's an example I can give. This is so this is emotional reasoning is a cognitive distortion, which basically means it's a thinking error that supports and facilitates maladaptive belief system. Things that we think are true but are ultimately subjective and unprovable that hold us back and make us miserable. So, I have a little over half a million followers total on like YouTube, Instagram, and Tik Tok combined. And I have two books out that have hundreds of five-star reviews. And I wake up every single

19:13 morning thinking no one wants to hear what I have to say. And I know that's ridiculous, but I do. And every time I sit down to record, even today, I don't know what video this is. This might be like my 500th video. Every time I sit down to record, I get nervous. I'm I'm nervous right now while I'm talking to you. I probably I hide it well. I know. But I am. Maybe I didn't hide it well when I tried to say susceptible earlier, but I think for the most part I hide it well. The reason that I I feel nervous every single time is because there's always just stakes in my mind like how bad like I could do or say something so stupid that this whole thing falls apart and everyone hates me. I don't even know what that would be, but theoretically it could happen. And so when I feel that emotion, that nervousness, I might be

20:01 tempted to think that means you're going to do a bad job, that that would be emotional reasoning, believing that the emotional reaction you're having to this situation is like a predictor of how it's going to go or an accurate reflection of how it did go because as soon as I stop recording, I'm going to be like, I wonder how stupid I sounded today. And that's emotional reasoning. Emotional reasoning drives discontentment. If you can know that your feelings can be all over the place and they don't necessarily have a lot of bearing on reality or basis in reality, you can allow those things to happen. It's it's not going to stop them. Like I said, I this happens every time to me. It's not going to stop the feeling from happening, but it allows you to

20:47 contextualize the feeling and realize that feeling may not be an accurate reflection of the reality of your life. And therefore, you can still maintain contentment even in the presence of distressing emotions because you know that those emotions might just be random neuronal misfirings or remnants from experiences from your past. People, places, things that have nothing to do with your life right now. Because our brains are frustrated, convoluted spiderwebs of reactivity. And they don't always get it right. And you got to remember that or you're going to drive yourself crazy. The third, speaking of driving you crazy, this one is going to drive you crazy. It drives me crazy. The third way to increase contentment

21:34 is to accept discontentment. Don't you just love it? What I mean by that is I'll go back to my watch example again. Okay, so I have a small watch collection and in theory I would like for it to be perfect. What does that mean? I don't know. I I I will never be 100% satisfied with anything in my life. And so if my goal is to be 100% satisfied, that's the paradox. I will never be satisfied. If my goal is to be 100% content, I will never be content. The only way I can achieve contentment, like true contentment, to say like I can rest, I can relax, I can be at peace with the state of things around me, is

22:19 to have an allowance or a budget for discontentment. Is to not expect myself to be at 100%. If I want to be 85% content with my watch collection, I can achieve that and I can sustain that. And then I'm not going to do something stupid like buy a new one because I wake up one day and I'm like, I don't like the blue on this anymore. I wish it was dark blue. I don't know why that's my shopping voice, but whatever. You get the point, right? Like I I am not a stable enough person to maximize contentment. Because even if I got to 100% in something, I changed my mind a day later because I'm fickle like that. And maybe you are, too. And if you are, the more fickle you are, the more you need to stretch that discontentment budget, the more you're going to need it. Trust me on this one. Don't aim for 100%. You'll drive yourself nuts. create

23:05 a discontentment budget and as long as you're within that budget, you can achieve contentment. If you're out of that budget, then again, you know, as for my previous point, maybe something needs to change. Number four, realize that having or doing more doesn't inherently solve anything. This goes back to just acute mood states. Again, that's all you're doing is you're fluctuating your mood states. When you do something that like in the moment makes you feel good, you are not one purse or fishing rod or golf club or car or shirt from happiness. You are not a a purchase or an achievement away from looking at your life and saying, "Oh, there it was. There's the one missing piece." And it's it's so tempting

23:52 because again, those things do make you feel good for a while. And that's the that's the red herring in all this basically is it seems like if you could just stretch that feeling out further then you'd be okay. But again, you can't. Feelings don't work that way. They are always acute. They are always temporary. And if you're trying to find a way to make them permanent, give up on that. It's not going to work. aim for something else like contentment instead. And the fifth way you can do that is by increasing the weight of what you have on the scale. What I mean by that is, and this might just be my brain, you can tell me if it is. In my

24:38 head, there's like this constant scale. This goes back to the idea of like contentment being realizing your life is okay. Right? in my head more or less there's this scale and all the things I have are on one side of the scale and all the things I don't have that I wish I had are on the other and whichever side feels heavier is essentially kind of what drives my contentment or discontentment. The problem is my brain seems to inherently weigh the things that I don't have as like five times heavier, maybe more honestly than the things that I do because I know I have a lot. But somehow the weight of the things I don't have feels even higher and and it it's like the gravity on that side is higher like that's on a different planet or something. And I use

25:24 techniques like gratitude and mindfulness to make myself more consciously aware of what is on this side, the the side of things that I already have. If you don't have video for this, because sometimes I forget that that side even exists. Sometimes I I feel because of the way my emotions work. If I let my emotions run my life, there would be times when I would tell you I have nothing. Because there are times when I feel nothing or feel that I have nothing but I never actually have nothing. I can feel it when it is not true. That's also kind of emotional reasoning again. It's like reverse emotional reasoning. Not feeling something also doesn't mean that thing is true. Obviously these especially that last one like people study these principles their entire lives and don't

26:11 master them. So I know that I probably kind of speed ran some of those. Let me know what in this piece of content really resonated for you because I know that I kind of just barely touched on like a lot of really complicated topics here and I would be more than happy to deep dive on any of them that you found value in. So, please if you did just take a moment and let me know and I'll probably make a video about it. As always, I hope this helps. See you later.