At the start of 2025, Sam Maglio, PhD, a professor of marketing and psychology at the University of Toronto Scarborough, made a resolution that he felt could defeat the so-called happiness paradox. He had just wrapped up a scientific study on the concept, which suggests that the more one strives for happiness, the less happy they will be. It’s a familiar feeling: Think of disappointing New Year's Eves and less-than-joyous birthday parties.
A decade ago, Aekyoung Kim, a Jeonbuk National University professor who studies happiness, introduced Maglio, who studies time management, to the concept. Since then, the pair have investigated the ties between time and happiness. So Maglio resolved to stop using his cell phone inside his home.
Our modern world is full of forces telling us we need to be happier, from self-help books to TED talks to an omnipresent feed of smiling friends, family, and strangers on social media. The allure of happiness has birthed an industry built on the idea that happiness is an achievable aim.
That’s the first problem, says Maglio. “If you have a goal and put an ounce of effort toward it, you’ll be closer to that goal,” he says. “But happiness works the opposite way.”
Hacking the Happiness Paradox
What’s at work in that paradox? In their latest study, “Happiness depletes me: Seeking happiness impairs limited resources and self-regulation,” published in the journal Applied Psychology: Health and Well-Being, Maglio and Kim decided to find out.
In a number of tests, participants seeking happiness showed less self-control, less mental sharpness, and more unhealthy behaviors.
In one test, a group of people was presented with a bowl of chocolates. Some had been primed to think about their own happiness and others hadn’t. Those seeking happiness ate more chocolates, showing less self-control than the others.
In another test, one group was offered an array of items. Some were told to choose things they thought would make them happier. Others were asked to pick whatever they liked. The researchers then gave both groups puzzles to solve. The people who strived for happiness showed less mental resources left for the puzzle and gave up sooner.
Maglio and Kim deduced that seeking happiness pulls us in many directions, making it harder to focus and stealing time to enjoy what really makes us happy. The result: We’re stripped of the resources we need to make good life decisions.
Those chocolates may sound like a key to happiness, the researchers say, but they’re an example of how viewing happiness as a goal leads to a loss of self-control that makes us less happy in the long run.
Obsessing Over Happiness Backfires
In 1974, an American economist named Richard Easterlin published a seminal study on the link between income and happiness, finding that as a country’s income rises (based on its gross domestic product, or GDP), the people living there don’t report greater long-term happiness. That study launched a half-century of work into the happiness paradox, of which Maglio and Kim’s study is among the latest.
What makes the topic so interesting, says Iris Mauss, PhD, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, is that happiness is one of few truly universal values spanning culture, religion, and geography. More than a decade ago, Mauss started to design studies around the idea that people may have become too engrossed in the pursuit of happiness.
From her vantage point in northern California, she felt things had gone a little too far. Happiness had graduated from a cottage industry to a full-fledged obsession.
All around her, people seemed to be optimizing their lives for maximum happiness. Often, she noticed, they ended up stressed and disappointed.
In an early study, Mauss gave people a diary to record positive things that happened in their everyday lives and how they responded to them. She found that the people who were most eager to be happy judged those everyday experiences more negatively.
“It’s a poison drip,” Mauss says. “The concern about happiness infuses negativity into those daily experiences. And it adds up over time to make you less happy.”
In additional studies, Mauss has found that the more concerned someone is with happiness, the less happy they will be overall. Imagine, she says, someone walking around constantly measuring their own happiness. “You can picture how that psychological process might disturb the very experience of happiness.”
Less Judgy, More Appreciative
The ethereal quality of happiness makes it hard to define, hard to study, and even harder to pin down. As a society, researchers say we have a fundamental misunderstanding of what happiness is. By studying happiness, scientists hope to find a way out of the paradox.
One escape route, Mauss has found, is to stop imagining happiness as a singular moment or achievement of a goal. By being less judgmental of your own emotions, that poison drip may stop infecting your own happiness.
After wrapping up his recent study, Maglio thinks of happiness as a way of relating to the world. It’s like the feeling of sand beneath your toes at the beach, he says: fleeting, all-consuming, and requires living in the moment. On the other hand, he says, if you grab a fistful of sand, it’s going to begin leaking from your hand.
“Rather than appreciate it’s there, you’re going to focus on trying to hold onto it,” he says. That is exhausting.
Maglio knows what made him happy: his family. He also knows what consumes most of the time he should be spending with them: his smartphone. So at the start of the year, a few weeks before publishing his findings on happiness, he came up with his own strategy to fight the paradox: He started putting his phone in the basement when he got home from work and retrieved it the next day. Four months later, he says, he’s feeling happier.
“People have the capacity to be happy within them,” he says. “And it’s cheap.”
