Can You Be Too Happy?

When Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, how could he have known the way 21st-century Americans would twist around the phrase "pursuit of happiness"? The Founding Fathers certainly weren't envisioning the billions of dollars that Americans now plunk down every year for shelf upon shelf of self-improvement books, audio tapes and DVDs. Yet that's what it's come to: even people who consider themselves pretty happy today are demanding to be happier, and they are paying big bucks for that entitlement.

But is it really a good thing to be ultrahappy? Nobody thrives on sheer misery, of course, but might there be perils in endlessly striving for more and more good cheer and sunny days? Or, put another way: is happiness overrated?

A growing number of psychologists are thinking it might be, and one team in particular has been conducting some large-scale, data-heavy studies to test the point. Shigehiro Oishi, Ed Diener and Richard Lucas decided to compare people who see themselves as being extremely happy with people who describe themselves as being only moderately so. Surprisingly, this had never been done before—at least not this thoroughly. They studied men and women, young and old, students and working people, hundreds of thousands of people from all over the globe. After all the data crunching they came up with some consistent and surprising insights.

For the sake of shorthand, let's call the two groups the Blissful and the Contented. The psychologists weren't interested in fleeting moments of ecstasy but rather in stable states of happiness—people's summary judgments of their own lives. Once they had the Blissful and the Contented sorted out, they looked at various measures of healthy functioning: enduring intimate relationships, education, career and financial success, civic involvement, charity, and so forth. Some of the studies were longitudinal, which means they could see if happiness at one age actually led to healthy functioning much later on.

Not surprisingly, the scientists found that Blissful people were more likely than the merely Contented to have rich and stable intimate relationships. They had predicted this, figuring that people who are less happy about their lives in general would be more motivated to shake things up, which could mean a roaming eye. People who are extremely happy, by contrast, may construct more positive illusions about their partners, which create and sustain enduring relationships, which in turn make people even happier.

But the findings about education and work and financial success were not so intuitive. For example, in one part of the study focusing only on students, the merely Contented were much more conscientious about their schooling: they skipped fewer classes and had better grades. By the time they hit the working world, the merely Contented were more highly educated, and they went on to be more successful in their careers than the Blissful. They also brought home much fatter paychecks. Indeed, in one substudy, college freshmen with the most cheerful dispositions ended up 19 years later, at the age of 37, making about $8,000 less than their drearier counterparts.