Happiness depletes me: Seeking happiness impairs limited resources and self-regulation

Abstract

People seek happiness when they try to experience as much positive emotion (and as little negative emotion) as possible. A growing body of research suggests that seeking happiness, rather than resulting in yet more happiness, often leads to negative consequences, like less happiness and less available time. Adding to this happiness paradox, the current research examines whether seeking happiness leads to the impairment of self-regulation due to the depletion of regulatory resources. We first demonstrate that trait-level happiness-seeking is associated with worse self-regulation both via self-report (Study 1) and actual behavior (Study 2). This result is corroborated in subsequent experiments that manipulate the pursuit of happiness and find that it, versus a control condition, makes people more vulnerable to lapses in self-control behavior (Study 3) and, versus an accuracy-seeking condition, makes people persist less in a challenging task (Study 4). Our findings suggest that continuous acts of happiness-seeking may cause a chronic depletion of resources, which leads to daily self-regulation failures, a critical component in a cycle of reduced personal happiness and well-being.