The Happiness Trap

by Russ Harris

The Happiness Trap SUMMARY

In writing summaries my aim is to highlight the dominant themes of the book. I utilize paraphrasing and interpretation to convey these themes in my own words. Along the way, I include direct quotes from the author, along with thoughts of my own, that are intended to support or expand on what the author has presented in the book.

With this book in mind, I’m struck by the relevance of the 2a definition of “trap” - something by which one is caught or stopped unawares. This book is certainly about creating long lasting meaningful happiness, however another of its primary objectives is to get us to see the many ways in which we can end up “caught or stopped unawares” in our lives.

The best way to get out of a trap is to first acknowledge that you are in one. The next step is to understand the relevant details of the trap and how it works. Once we acknowledge what the trap is and how it works, then we can go about the task of releasing ourselves from it.

This book utilizes the psychological practice of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy or ACT for short (pronounced as the word “act”).

Why it is difficult to be happy. Humans (Homo sapiens) in our most “modern” form have been in existence for about 200,000 years. Our human minds developed to better enable us to stay alive, obtain crucial resources, and be a connected member of a group or community.

You can’t have any of these things if you’re dead. The better our ancestors were at staying alive while obtaining crucial resources and belonging to a group the longer they lived and the more offspring they had.

The human mind is what made staying alive possible. The human mind is adept at predicting harm, danger, threats, and avoiding them.

As the author Russ Harris puts it - “The primitive mind was basically a ‘Don’t get killed’ device, and it proved enormously useful.”

For our ancestors, having a mind that was always on the lookout and making predictions about bad things that might happen was very advantageous. However, put that same mind into the context of our modern world and more often than not, our minds are worrying about things that never happen. Always assessing and judging everything we come into contact with. Always making predictions for bad things to happen.

In short, the human mind has 3 main imperatives:

1. Don’t get killed

2. Obtain more and better resources

3. Belong in a group

These are the three imperatives that our mind returns to over and over again, in many forms, throughout our day and throughout our lives. There is no avoiding or getting rid of these. Nor would we want to. These are valuable imperatives! It’s healthy and normal to go around fearful that your life is at risk of injury or death, fearful that you don’t have enough in life or a good enough life, and fearful that you will never be an important member of a group or community.

In the book, happiness is defined in two ways. In the standard and first sense, happiness is defined as “feeling good.” A state of wellbeing, gratification and contentment. Experiencing enjoyable feelings in an enjoyable state.

The problem is that happiness is a feeling and, like all feelings, it doesn’t last.

In the other, less standard sense, Russ Harris defines happiness as “living a rich, full, and meaningful life.”

This means knowing and understanding what is important to you as a person. Getting clear on your values and what matters to you. Knowing how you would like to be treating yourself and others. Knowing what kind of person you want to be in the world and in your lifetime. Once you have clarity on these things, you take action to support what matters to you.

This creates a feedback loop. The familiar “upward spiral.” The more in touch we are with what is close to our heart and the more we take action to support those things, the better we feel and the more likely we are to continue to take actions that support meaningful living.

Pursuing a rich, full, and meaningful life will of course lead to many pleasurable feelings and experiences, including happiness and it will also come with many unpleasant feelings, such as fear, sadness, anger, and anxiety.

Full life = full range of emotions

In order to live a full life, one that is filled with meaning and meaningful moments, we have to get good at handling the pain that life inevitably throws our way. At many points in life we will face disappointment and failure. Even the most meaningful lives that are filled with joy will one day face the pains of aging, sickness, death, loss, and rejection.

The author lays out the workings of the “trap” so we can know how it works and in knowing how it works, we can escape it.

Here are the 4 myths (beliefs) that make up the walls of the happiness trap:

1. Happiness is the natural state for all human beings. The reality is that misery is more generally the natural state. The statistical probability of any one of us experiencing and going through a psychiatric disorder is almost 30%. Even if we discounted psychiatric disorder, we are still left with plenty of misery that we all encounter at one point or another in our lives. Be it loneliness, loss, disappointment, rejection, lack of resources, lack or lost opportunities, meaning, purpose - the list goes on and on. Ultimately, we go around believing that there is something wrong with us because we are not happy. As we look at the world through this lens we believe that everyone else except us is happy and of course that leads us deeper into the happiness trap.

2. If you’re not happy, you’re defective. This is predicated on the western societal norm that assumes that mental suffering is abnormal. Mental suffering is seen as a product of weakness or illness. This belief leads us to harshly criticize ourselves as defective, weak, or broken. Mental suffering is routine and normal and the more we criticize ourselves for it, the deeper into the trap we go.

3. To create a better life, we must get rid of negative thoughts. If we believe that we must have only positive thoughts and eliminate negative thoughts then we are setting ourselves up for failure. While it is helpful to have positive thoughts and feelings, they are only one side of the coin of living. For example, imagine you want to have a loving bond with a partner. Yes, it is going to come with pleasure, peace, security, warmth, joy, and satisfaction AND it will also come with anxiety, frustration, disagreements, misunderstandings, pain, and dissatisfaction. Two sides of a coin. It’s hard to think of any meaningful endeavor that does not involve negative thoughts around rejection, failure, doubt, hesitation, or anxiety. Avoiding these uncomfortable “negative” thoughts and feelings is tantamount to avoiding the rich, full, meaningful experience of living. So once again we find ourselves in a trap.

4. You should be able to control what you think and feel. Yes, we do have some amount of control over what we think and feel, just not as much as we are led to believe. Thoughts, feelings, cravings, urges, memories, rules, judgments will pop up in our mind without our direct control. It is well established that the more we try not to think about something, the more we think about it. The classic example of this is - “don’t think of a polar bear.” Now every time I try to not think about a polar bear, I am of course thinking about a polar bear. The belief of being able to control the content that our mind leads to struggling with trying to “get rid” of content that just keeps coming back over and over again. The harder we try to control the content of our mind the more intense our frustration, self criticism, and distress becomes. If we stay determined in our belief that we should be able to control the content of our mind, we are diving deeper into the trap. We get caught up in struggling against our own mind instead of putting our attention on creating and taking action towards a meaningful life.

The Illusion of Control

The human mind gives us advantages and abilities to:

• Plan

• Invent

• Analyze

• Solve problems

• Imagine futures

These abilities allow us to control the world around us in ways that no other animal can. Using our minds to control the world around us has proven to be useful and effective.

“If we don’t like something we figure out how to avoid or get rid of it.”

Humans are uniquely skilled in our ability to avoid or get rid of what we don’t want to experience.

If it’s raining outside and we don’t want to experience getting wet, we can avoid it by going indoors or under some sort of shelter from the rain. If we don’t like what’s playing on the radio, we can get rid of it by turning to another station or turning it off.

The illusion of control - The trap of overusing control strategies to to avoid or get rid of unwanted internal experiences.

With such a high level of control and success in our ability to avoid or get rid of unwanted experiences in the material world, it makes sense that we end up applying the same control strategies to our unwanted internal experiences. All of our unwanted thoughts, feelings, memories, emotions, sensations, urges, and cravings

When we use control to directly avoid or get rid of our unwanted internal experiences it often doesn’t work. If it does work, it works for a short while until the unwanted internal experiences come back again, then we get rid of them, and then they come back again, and so on.

The author states that using internal control in moderation is useful and effective. The problem is when we overuse control to the point that we begin to avoid or get rid of the people, places, goals, and things that actually matter to us in life in order to avoid or get rid of the unwanted internal experiences. We begin to overly rely on our mind’s ability to avoid or get rid of, at the expense of living a meaningful life.

In our effort to avoid or get rid of the discomfort that comes with living, we can end up getting trapped by our own strategies.

Russ Harris lays out the three significant costs of control strategies:

1. They take up a lot of time and energy

2. We feel silly, defective, or weak-minded because the thoughts/feelings we’re trying to get rid of keep coming back.

3. Many strategies that decrease unpleasant feelings in the short term actually lower our quality of life over the long term.

Psychologists have a term called “experiential avoidance.” It is a pattern of continually attempting to avoid or get rid of thoughts, feelings, memories, cravings, sensations, or other internal experiences, even when doing so is costly, damaging, or counterproductive.

Experiential avoidance has been associated with anxiety disorders, depression disorders, substance abuse, ptsd, ocd, and a many other disorders.

In one of the earliest scientific papers published on ACT it was stated that - “many forms of psychopathology are not merely bad problems, they are also bad solutions, based on dangerous and ineffective use of experiential avoidance strategies.”

The book walks us through the six core principles of ACT and provides dozens of exercises to work on and improve our skill set for these six core principles. Through reading and practicing the skills in the book, we become better able to deal more effectively with our internal experiences. We learn to let go of ineffective strategies and begin to learn and practice effective new strategies to handle uncomfortable and painful internal experiences.

Using the author’s exact words, the six core principles of ACT are:

1. Defusion: Relating to your thoughts in a new way, so they have much less impact and influence over you. As you learn to defuse painful and unpleasant thoughts, they will loose their ability to frighten, disturb, worry, stress, or depress you. And as you learn to defuse unhelpful thoughts, such as self-limiting beliefs and harsh self-criticisms, they will have much less influence over your behavior.

2. Expansion: Making room for unpleasant feelings and sensations instead of trying to suppress them or push them away. As you open up and make space for the these feelings, you will find they bother you much less, and they “move on” much more rapidly, instead of “hanging around” and disturbing you.

3. Connection: Connecting fully with whatever is happening right here, right now; focusing on and engaging in whatever you’re doing or experiencing. Instead of dwelling on the past or worrying about the future, you are deeply connected with the present moment.

4. The Observing Self: A powerful aspect of the mind, which has been largely ignored by western psychology until now. As you get to know this part of yourself, you will further transform your relationship with difficult thoughts and feelings.

5. Values: Clarifying and connecting with your values is an essential step for making life meaningful. Your values are reflections of what is most important in your heart: what sort of person you want to be, what is significant and meaningful to you, and what you want to stand for in this life. Your values provide direction for your life and motivate you to make important changes.

6. Committed Action: A rich and meaningful life is created through taking action. But not just any action. It happens through effective action, guided by and motivated by your values. And in particular, it happens through committed action: action that you take again and again, no matter how many times you fail or go off track.

The first 4 principles of ACT are mindfulness skills. The last 2 principles are values, and committed action.

This leads to a formula that looks like this:

Mindfulness + Values + Committed Action = Psychological Flexibility

Or also like this one:

Be present, open up, do what matters

It looks simple because it is. However, simple does not equal easy. Reading about these principles and skills is not the same as learning and practicing. Just like reading about how to play guitar is not the same as practicing playing guitar. Russ Harris includes several dozen useful exercises and practices for engaging and growing our ability to be present, open up, and do what matters throughout The Happiness Trap.