Researchers Know A Lot More About Misery Than Happiness

George Loewenstein is the Herbert A. Simon University Professor of Economics and Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University’s Department of Social and Decision Sciences. He also holds courtesy appointments in CMU's Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy and Tepper School of Business. In his new book, the behavioral economist draws on decades of influential research — as well as insights from literature, his own life experiences and a novel “misery survey” — to offer a re-examination of the role negative emotions play in our lives. (Interview edited for length and clarity.)

The title of your book – “The Opposite of Happiness: How Bad Feelings Make and Break Us” — sounds like it could be depressing, but I found the content to be insightful, useful and even inspiring. What made you want to write a book about the “opposite of happiness"?

Bookstore shelves are packed with happiness books — most of them self-help books with tips for achieving happiness. Some of that advice probably works — if people actually follow it. But it misses something important: unhappiness is the more constant feature of human life. Happiness comes in fleeting bursts; misery lingers. And there's no symmetry between the two — the depths of misery a person can sink into dwarf the modest highs of happiness anyone can reach.

That asymmetry shows up even in language: we have more words, and richer, more differentiated ones, for the varieties of unhappiness than for happiness. And there is far more psychological research on misery than happiness. Psychologists have done extensive research on each of the 12 miseries I discuss in my book, such as regret, loneliness, envy, jealousy, anxiety and depression; they have done far less research on happiness. Even prominent happiness researchers admit that happiness is something of an undifferentiated mush, and that they lack a clear account of what evolutionary function happiness serves. Negative emotions are entirely different: each arises in identifiable circumstances, is clearly distinguishable from the others, and drives predictable patterns of thought and behavior. My book takes a step toward correcting the imbalance — offering an account of misery that's general enough to explain its evolutionary function as well as the psychological building blocks common to all its forms, but specific enough to do justice to, e.g., how different regret feels from envy, or loneliness from grief.

You are upfront about your own personal relationship with unhappiness throughout this book. Is there something you learned about human behavior or how our brains work while writing it that has changed the way that you now approach life?

The misery I discuss in the book is purely psychic — it happens entirely inside our own heads. That became vivid to me through the Misery Survey I ran for the book. Over 500 adults, including a large number of Carnegie Mellon alumni, told me, in their own words, about the miseries that hit them hardest. What surprised me wasn't the content so much as the timing — how long ago many of the triggering incidents had happened, and how many people were still actively suffering from them. Even decades after the event, many people couldn't get past an early rejection, or the anger from an old injustice. Reading the respondents’ accounts made me realize how much psychic suffering is, at least in principle, within our control; we're the ones keeping it alive.

I tested that on myself this past summer. My wife and I spend summers in Bellingham, Washington — a paradise if you love the outdoors, which we do. But we know almost no one there, so we're fairly isolated outside of occasional visitors. Early in the summer I was genuinely lonely, and it cast a shadow over what should have been an idyllic stretch of time. Partly because I was finishing the book, however, I caught myself and decided it was absurd to let my feeling of isolation ruin something this good. I succeeded —­­­­­­­­ mostly. I put the loneliness aside and let myself actually enjoy the place.

If you could pick one thing for readers to take away from this research, what would it be?

Negative emotions are inevitable. That's not a reason to stop trying to minimize them — motivating exactly that kind of corrective action is the whole reason they evolved. But it is a reason not to feel guilty or inadequate for feeling bad. That guilt doesn't protect you from anything; it just piles self-blame on top of whatever misery you were dealing with in the first place.