Below, George Loewenstein shares five key insights from his new book, The Opposite of Happiness: How Bad Feelings Make and Break Us.
George is a Professor of Economics and Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University. He is one of the founders of Behavioral Economics and Neuroeconomics, and an originator of an approach to public policy known as “Nudge.”
What’s the Big Idea?
We spend a lot of time trying to be happier, and bookstore shelves are packed with advice on how to do it. Yet psychologists know far more about negative emotions than positive ones. There’s a reason for that: evolution didn’t design us for happiness. It designed us to survive and reproduce. Joy and pleasure tend to fade quickly, while painful emotions linger, consume our attention, and shape our behavior.
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1. Our emotions are dominated by the dark side.
Tolstoy’s famous opening to Anna Karenina—that happy families are alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way—applies just as well to feelings. There are more ways to feel bad than to feel good, and more words to describe them. English is packed with terms for anger, anxiety, sorrow, shame, jealousy, and regret. On the positive side, however, the vocabulary thins out fast, and many specific miseries lack a positive counterpart. For example, waiting for something bad to happen is always miserable, and we have a good term to describe it: dread. But we lack a satisfactory term for the pleasure of waiting for something good to happen.
The usual list of basic emotions recognized by psychologists makes the imbalance plain: sadness, anger, disgust, fear, surprise, and happiness. Four are negative; one is positive; surprise can go either way. Some researchers add shame—tellingly, another negative.
Negative emotions also overpower positive ones, but not vice versa. Even a trace of bad can ruin something good. How much pleasure remains in a fine meal after a loved one makes a thoughtless comment or bristles because you said the wrong thing? We try to pursue happiness, but the emotional deck is stacked against us.
2. Empathy gaps amplify the power of negative emotions.
Empathy is often an illusion. You cannot truly share someone’s feeling unless you are experiencing it yourself; and they can’t share yours. This is part of why we often feel personally isolated when we are in the grip of a strong emotion, as if no one understands what we are going through. Odds are, they don’t.
“You cannot truly share someone’s feeling unless you are experiencing it yourself.”
Empathy gaps, as I call them, don’t only describe our inability to truly understand someone else’s pain. They also describe our inability to imagine how we would feel or act in a different state than the one we’re in now. These gaps trap us in our present feeling and explain many of the prosaic errors in judgment we make in our daily lives: over-shopping on an empty stomach; planning to go bungee jumping but then chickening out at the last minute; flushing a pack of cigarettes down the toilet, then sheepishly heading to the store a few hours later to replace them.
But the consequences aren’t always so mundane. The inability to imagine a different future can be fatal. Primo Levi told a doctor friend, shortly before he committed suicide, “I know that this phase will pass, just as the others have done, but I’m aware of this only at the rational level; my overriding impression is that it will last forever and that I will never find an exit out.” Levi’s story—a classic case of empathy gaps resulting in a loss of perspective—fits with a large body of academic research finding that suicide is often impulsive.
3. We tend to think of how things could have been better, not worse.
Many emotions, such as envy, regret, and even anger, arise from thinking about counterfactuals: states of reality different from our own. Envy involves thinking about the things other people have that we lack. Regret involves thinking about what would have happened if we made better decisions. Anger infuriates us partly because we compare the action another person took (or failed to take) to the counterfactual of how we think they should have behaved.
One of the many perverse features of human existence is that our automatic tendency is to think about upward counterfactuals—states of reality that are better than our own. We are far more likely to compare ourselves to people who are better off than ourselves. Worse, in the rare instance when we do compare ourselves to people who are worse off, our emotional reaction is most likely pity—yet another negative emotion.
4. Misery feeds on itself.
Public speaking is most people’s biggest fear. It is made immeasurably worse by a phenomenon known as dry mouth. Dry mouth is an offshoot of our evolutionary programming; one effect of being in a state of fear is that our digestive system powers down, which halts saliva production, which makes it difficult to speak, which of course intensifies the anxiety that triggered the fear in the first place. Feedback effects are misery-multipliers that worsen nearly every one of the 12 specific miseries I focus on in the second half of the book.
Beyond physiological programming, our psychological programming also contributes to nasty feedback effects. Mood-contingent memory, for example, is our insuppressible tendency to dredge up negative memories when we are in a negative mood state. This keeps us thinking bad thoughts that trap us in depression, loneliness, and other negative psychic states. Anxiety sharpens our focus on potential threats, which heightens our vigilance, inflates the sense of danger, and leaves us feeling ever more on edge.
“People who are jealous tend people often take actions that push away the very people they fear losing.”
Social factors also contribute. People who are jealous tend people often take actions that push away the very people they fear losing. A fear of rejection makes people paranoid and suspicious, leading them to sabotage relationships and trigger the outcome they dread. And other people can often pick up on one’s own loneliness, leading them to steer clear—once again, worsening the very circumstances that give rise to loneliness.
5. Most miseries make some kind of evolutionary sense. But there is a notable exception.
Almost all the negative emotions I discuss play straightforward functions. Anger is designed to deter aggression from others. Loneliness motivates us to become desirable and indispensable to others. The one exception, I argue, is depression.
There are lots of evolutionary theories of depression. For example, that depression evolved to manage social hierarchies, focus cognitive resources on solving complex problems, or conserve energy during times of inescapable stress, illness, or scarcity. But none of these make much sense to me, in part because depression is so obviously debilitating. My own view is that depression is an evolutionary glitch that arises when our modern world poses challenges that are too daunting and complex to be solved by our stone-age emotional programming.
Those of us who fail to find and sustain happiness are not unlucky or flawed, but merely human—suffering the slings and arrows of an inherently negative nature. My hope is that this knowledge will come not as a bitter pill, but as much-needed solace for everyone struggling through the myriad frustrations and heartbreaks of modern life.
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