Is your pursuit of happiness affecting your happiness? – How discrepancy thinking affects happiness and performance

It was World Wellbeing Week last week, and I was wondering what that means to people, and how it impacted you?

• Did you consider whether wellbeing means you should feel happy?
• When you think about wellbeing and happiness do you think it is something lacking in your life?

It is an opinion of mine that our modern pursuit of happiness is one of the reasons for the general trends for unhappiness. It is not your fault, as you are bombarded with messaging and content on how you should be happy. Even the NHS has a webpage on six steps to being happy. But the problem with the media-fed pursuit of finding ‘happiness’ is that it feeds a modern obsession that we should be happy all of the time. Happiness is an emotion, and like any emotion it is a temporary state, it waxes and wanes. It is not meant to be constant.

And this striving for happiness brings another problem. If you are continually striving to achieve happiness, it means your brain perceives that right now, your present moment, is not happy. It perceives a discrepancy. And your brain doesn’t like discrepancies, so it wants to fix them. But to fix a discrepancy, your brain has to bring attention to gap. It has to bring more attention to the gap between your future, desired state of ‘happy’ and your actual present moment state – which you have now perceived as ‘not happy.’

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But the paradox around all of this is that your brain can’t fix this discrepancy gap. The desired state of ‘happy’ only exists in your mind. It is not a real. And because your brain can’t fix this, it will offer you something else – rumination and worry thinking.

But the more you desire it, the more your brain thinks your present moment is lacking it. And when the brain perceives something as important, it puts more attention to it, and therefore likes to provide you with lots of evidence of these important things.

So now with your brain perceiving a discrepancy gap, you will begin to perceive more reasons why you are not in your desired state of ‘happy.’ The weather is not sunny, people haven’t commented on your new clothes, work is a constantly boring, you need more money, people are so annoying, and so on.

What’s the answer? – Get content with the grey.

Consider this for a moment………..most of our lives we exist in a neutral state of grey. There are amazing times, of happiness, richness, colour. And there are dark times that sometimes appear bleak. But these are the exceptions. The majority of time, from waking up to going to bed, is just a neutral blandness – it is grey.

And why do you not like the grey? Because you add judgements to it.

‘I wish this was different’ – ‘this is boring’ – ‘I wish I wasn’t here’ – ‘I want something else’

It is this adding of judgements to your ‘grey’ existence that makes the brain create desired states and discrepancies. And we do this all of the time with simple things.

You have to vacuum the house – ‘I hate this,’ ‘I wish I didn’t have to do this,’ ‘vacuuming is so boring.’ Your brain starts judging this task as ‘a pain’ and your present moment state changes, because now you have created a discrepancy. And from this discrepancy thinking you start building reactions that tend to be dysfunctional.

But think about it – vacuuming is simply moving a machine around a floor. It is a neutral task. It has become unpleasant because of the judgements you have brought to it, and your desire to do something you perceive as more fun. It is unpleasant because you have created a discrepancy in your mind.

How does this influence performance?

We do this discrepancy thinking when it comes to performing too. Some situations when we have to perform just come with features that make it slightly more difficult. It could be weather if you are outside. Maybe it’s the venue you have to do a presentation. Perhaps there is someone that will be in a meeting that you do not like.

These features may have a slight or even stronger sense of unpleasantness. But when you get drawn into thinking about how you want it to be different, how you want this situation to be more desirable, then you are adding more unnecessary unpleasantness. You have created the discrepancy and because your brain senses that this is important, that is where your attention goes. Rather than being on your performance, your attention is now ruminating on how it can fix the discrepancy gap. But remember, the more desirable situation doesn’t exist other than in your head and you’ve now made the brain perceive this gap as important. What happens now is that your perception and attention are attuned to picking up all the evidence as to why your present moment situation is not good for performing well.

It is natural to want things to be different when you sense that they are not perfect for performance. But is the dwelling on it that creates mental, emotional and physical reactivity that will impact your performance.

How do I change?

1. Bring Awareness to your experiences

• Check-in to your personal context – am I tired, stressed, feeling low? This could be exaggerating your feelings of experience.
• What is this experience bringing to me?

2. Notice what your Attention does

• Notice how your attention goes to adding judgements to experience.
• See if you can view this as your own added content – and ask ‘How is this serving me?
• What’s going on in my mind and body? – bring your attention to the present moment. Pick an object or a body sensation and be curious as to what is going on there. With your attention in the present moment, your mind is less in mind wandering and discrepancy thinking.

3. Bring a helpful Attitude to your experience

• Greyness can often be surrounded by unhelpful attitudes that you bring to an experience, which then makes it darker. Offer yourself some slack – be compassionate to yourself. Yes, it’s a grey task or moment, and that’s okay. Recognise that you are in a grey moment and accept it.

4. Take skilful Action

• Tell yourself you have the capacity and personal resources to deal with this moment. Approach this moment as a challenge that you are prepared to face up to. That uncomfortableness will pass.
• As best you can, don’t avoid this and turn away from it to do something that stimulates you (e.g. scroll social media, eat or drink something to give you a lift). This is you teaching your brain that you can’t tolerate the ‘grey.’ And then the next ‘grey’ moment becomes something that is unpleasant and to be avoided.

?I am not discounting that there are many things that offer richness and colour to our lives that can be actioned. Exercise, social connection, doing something that stimulates you or that you are passionate about, are examples of actions that can temporarily raise your levels of ‘happy.’ However, constantly desiring ‘happy’ is more likely to cause you ‘unhappy.’

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Stuart is a high performance psychologist and founder of the Munro Performance Empowerment Program? which is an 8-session program of mental skills training. This program has been shown in research from two major universities (Loughborough and Staffordshire) to improve performance Awareness, Empowerment, and Resilience, as well as increasing participants’ belief that they have the resources to cope with difficult situations. Through this training, participants have shared they achieved a greater capacity to deal with difficulty and therefore perform more effectively. Direct message Stuart for more information.

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