A seemingly more technical assault on happiness was mounted in an academic paper published in the respectable Journal of Medical Ethics in 1992. The paper’s author, psychologist Richard Bentall, proposed that happiness should formally be classified as a psychiatric disorder, to be known as ‘major affective disorder, pleasant type’. In support of his thesis, Bentall pointed out that happiness fits the key criteria that psychiatrists use to diagnose mental illness: it is statistically abnormal, consists of a discrete cluster of symptoms, is associated with distinctive patterns of brain activity, and involves distortions in thinking and memory. Happy people, Bentall argued, are impulsive and irrational; they have an unrealistically rosy view of themselves and the world, they find it harder to remember bad experiences, and they overestimate their ability to control events. In other words, they are deluded. Furthermore, their happiness lures them into irrational and damaging behaviour: happy people overindulge in food and alcohol, and become obese.
Happily, Bentall’s paper was a spoof. The real target of his satire was not happiness, but sloppy thinking in psychiatric diagnosis. In reality, there is no reason to believe that happy people are deluded, irrational or living in a fantasy world. Research has found that even very happy people – those fortunate individuals who are consistently much happier than most of the rest of us – still display appropriate emotional responses to the vagaries of life. They may be very happy most of the time, but they do nonetheless experience occasional low moods in response to real disappointments or setbacks. Even very happy people do not live in a state of continuous bliss, cut off from the realities of life.
If anything, the evidence suggests that happiness gives people a better grip on reality. Studies have shown that happy people with a positive outlook on life are better at attending to relevant information, including negative or threatening information. In one set of experiments, volunteers were exposed to potentially worrying information about health, such as evidence of links between caffeine consumption and fibrocystic breast disease. Those individuals who were feeling happy at the time they received this worrying information were more receptive to it, better at remembering it, and more objective in the way they assessed it. Being in a happy, positive frame of mind did not blind them to reality, even when faced with news they might prefer not to hear.
Happy people also appear better able to cope with practical problems because they know when to change tack or give up. This was highlighted by an experiment in which volunteers were confronted with a series of mental tasks,
some of which (unbeknown to them) were literally impossible to solve. Individuals who had a positive, optimistic outlook and a belief in their own ability to control events proved to be significantly better at disengaging from the unsolvable tasks and switching to other tasks that were solvable. The implication is that happy people are more realistic about what they can and cannot achieve.
So the notion that happiness is a form of delusion has little solid basis in fact, and even less to commend it as a philosophy of life. The world might well be a ghastly place, but being unhappy will not make it any better. Happiness does not turn us into ‘contented cows’ – on the contrary, we would all be better off if there were a few more happy people around.
Another dubious piece of folklore asserts that you have to be unhappy to be creative. Happiness encourages intellectual mediocrity, it is claimed, and creative geniuses are usually tortured souls. This romantic belief runs counter to the evidence, which I outlined earlier, that happiness boosts creativity; it is hard to find credible support for the ‘tortured genius’ hypothesis, even in the form of historical anecdotes.
In sum, then, happy people feel better, achieve more, create more, enjoy better health and live longer than unhappy people. They make better employees, better friends, better partners and better parents. They are also less likely to turn to drink, drugs or crime. In a world of happier people there would be less illness, less depression, less crime and shorter queues in doctors’ surgeries. There is nothing feeble or self-indulgent about wanting to make ourselves and our children happier. The only ones who might lose out would be psychotherapists, pharmaceutical companies, drug dealers and the writers of self-help books.
Is there anything good about unhappiness?
Happiness has a lot to recommend it and little to be wary of; the more, the better. What about unhappiness and its key ingredient, displeasure? Is there anything good to say about unpleasant emotions like sadness or anxiety? Biology casts some unexpected light on this issue. The capacity to experience displeasure is actually an immensely valuable asset. Being sad or anxious may feel horrible, but under the right circumstances it can be good for you. How could this be?
The human mind, like the human body, is the product of millions of years of biological evolution. The process of evolution through natural selection has given rise to immensely elaborate physical structures such as eyes, lungs and kidneys, which look as though they have been exquisitely designed for a particular purpose. The brain is also a product of biological evolution, and similar reasoning can be applied to the ‘design features’ of mental and emotional faculties, including the capacity to feel joyful or sad.
Emotions guide our behaviour, and they are crucial for our ability to function in the real world. They immediately point us in roughly the right direction, before we can begin to fine-tune our judgments using the more conventional instruments of conscious thought, logic and reasoning. Individuals suffering from certain types of brain damage that specifically impair emotional faculties can end up incapable of coping with everyday life, even though their intelligence and cognitive abilities remain intact. Even a simple decision like whether to have tea or coffee can become cripplingly difficult if the only thing you have to rely on is pure logic and rational analysis. The emotionless Mr Spock of Star Trek would have been useless.
Sadness, anxiety and other disagreeable emotions can be thought of as the mental equivalents of physical capacities like pain and fever. Being able to feel pain is essential for survival because it stops us doing things that would damage our bodies. Very rarely, individuals are born who lack the capacity to feel pain: they invariably die from injuries or infection before they reach middle age. In a similar way, fever is unpleasant but beneficial. Fever is one of the body’s defence mechanisms for fighting infection. The rise in temperature makes your body a less hospitable place for the invading bacteria or viruses and thereby speeds recovery.
Unpleasant emotions help to protect us in an analogous way. Feeling frightened is immensely beneficial if it stops you being eaten by a lion, and feeling anxious can pay dividends if it stops you ambling down a dark alley where muggers lurk. The American scientist Lewis Thomas described worrying as the most natural and spontaneous of human functions, and argued that we should all learn to do it better.
We are born with the capacity to experience fear, anxiety, sadness and other unpleasant emotions because they helped our ancestors to survive and reproduce (and hence to become our ancestors).2 Someone who was permanently joyful, regardless of their actual circumstances, would be at risk of ignoring real threats to their well-being. Biology tells us that there is nothing natural or biologically optimal about feeling happy all the time. As the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer put it: ‘There is only one inborn error, and that is the notion that we exist in order to be happy.’
If anything, negative emotions are more important in biological terms than positive emotions like pleasure or joy, because they help to keep us alive. Many different things can go wrong in life, threatening our well-being or safety, whereas relatively few things are needed to make a life good. This could explain why the number of distinctly different negative emotions far outweighs the number of different