Can you be happy all the time and still grow as a person? | Benjamin Hardy | Big Think

[Music] So basically, for most of psychology's history, the focus has been on what's negative about people, on diagnosing illnesses, on depression, on problems. In a lab, since like the late 90s, there's been a huge emphasis on positive psychology, on studying what's right about people, on studying human flourishing. The fundamental root of most positive psychology research is the assumption of what's called hedonism, which is basically the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain.

There are a lot of researchers in the positive psychology space, or there's a few who feel like positive psychology research is very limited. Basically, one of the core assumptions is that positive emotions lead to positive outcomes, and that kind of goes against a lot of different types of philosophies. Philosophies like stoicism or Buddhism, or even more spiritual practices that talk about how sometimes actually negative experiences, sometimes negative emotions, produce some of the best outcomes.

So, avoiding solely negative, challenging, difficult emotions is probably one of the worst things a person can do who’s seeking growth. You know, there's a really good poem by Douglas Malek, and he says, he's talking about trees, but he says, "Good timber does not grow with ease. The stronger the wind, the stronger the trees. The further sky, the greater length. The more the storm, the more the strength." Essentially, strong trees require difficult circumstances; they require strenuous environments that force them to adapt deeper roots.

If you're always avoiding negative or challenging emotions, there's obviously going to be some problems internally. You know, you're not dealing with things. I think that there's a lot of problems with positive psychology and kind of the fundamental assumptions. Anticipation is a huge component of psychology. Basically, most people anticipate that an event or a thing is going to be more intense than it actually is.

It's why people wait a long time to jump in a swimming pool; it's because they think that it's going to be an intense experience. If you anticipate that a task is going to be difficult, you're probably going to procrastinate or you're going to put it off, or you're going to have emotional challenges going into it. However, if you just recognize that you're going to adapt to it very quickly once you actually get into it, motivation kicks in.

That's another one of the things that holds people back: they feel like they have to be motivated first, when basically motivation happens once you start doing something. Action precedes motivation. A Harvard researcher— and I forget his name off the top of my head— says that it's a lot easier to act your way into feeling than to feel your way into acting.

So, if you spend a lot of time anticipating an event, it's going to hold you from doing it. But if you just actually start doing it, motivation will kick in. You'll start to actually get accustomed to it; you'll start to develop capacity and will adapt to it.

I think anticipation can hold people back, but obviously, positive anticipation can be a great thing. There's this idea that you're always changing, but that doesn't mean you're always growing. If you want to grow, you must change; but just because you changed doesn't mean you grew or you became better.

You could obviously change your habits. I think that as human beings, we're always adapting and changing based on what's around us. We're always replacing old habits with new ones, but that doesn't mean that you're creating positive habits. If you want to create positive habits, I don't— I mean, it doesn't always have to be hard, but I think generally, it's going to be somewhat difficult.

It's going to take growing out of that. So, yeah, I would say, yeah, you can change habits through a hedonistic perspective; it doesn't mean that you might be developing the ones you want. [Music]