Can You Fake Yourself Happy?
Mind Fake-Outs
On her blog that spawned the best-selling book The Happiness Project, Gretchen Rubin writes about the “act-the-way-I-want-to-feel principle,” in which she tries to overcome negative emotions with happier actions. “By acting as if you feel a certain way, you induce that emotion in yourself,” she writes. “When I’m feeling an unpleasant feeling, I counteract it by behaving the way I wish I felt—when I feel like yelling at my children, I make a joke; when I feel annoyed with a sales clerk, I start acting chatty.” Anyone who’s taken an Intro to Psychology class might call that avoidance, and that’s why some psychologists argue against positive-psychology theories. If you’re constantly trying to mask a bad mood with a good one, when will you deal with what’s causing the unhappiness in the first place?
Then again, as humans, we might fake our own happiness without even knowing it. Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert gave a TED talk in 2004 about the “psychological immune system”—our brains’ noncognitive effort to make us feel better about an outcome that isn’t desired, like saying, “I didn’t really want that position” if you fail to get a promotion. “Synthetic happiness is every bit as real and enduring as the kind of happiness you stumble upon when you get exactly what you were aiming for,” Gilbert explains. “You find a way to be happy with what happened.”
He uses a free-choice paradigm as an example: when people are asked to rank six Monet prints aesthetically and are then told they can keep the one they liked only somewhat, suddenly that’s the one they like best. The same held true when Gilbert and his colleagues performed the test on anterograde amnesiacs, who didn’t even remember meeting the researchers or ranking any prints thirty minutes afterward. Even then, the amnesiacs changed their print preferences—without even recalling that they could keep any of them!
Don’t Believe Every Cliché
Clearly, it’s possible to make yourself a little happier about a bad situation if you don’t realize that that’s what you’re doing. And maybe that’s the key to “tricking” yourself into happiness—it has to be subconscious on some level. If you force yourself to fake a smile (which produces only minimal results) or act the opposite way that you want to (which could lead to pushing down bad feelings, instead of working through them), you could end up feeling even worse. A 2006 study out of the University of Frankfurt am Main found that employees forced to act friendly and polite during customer complaint phone calls increased their risk of cardiovascular problems and depression in the process. When people have to “fake” happiness in the long run, it stresses out their bodies and minds.
Can you fake it till you make it? It depends on what your definition of “make it” is, but all in all, it doesn’t seem like a lasting solution for true happiness if you’re especially unhappy. That isn’t to argue against working toward a more positive outlook and focusing on things that do make you happy, rather than dwelling solely on the negative, though. As a matter of fact, that’s probably one of the most beneficial things we can do for our mental and physical health. But such a shift can’t be forced; otherwise, it likely won’t work. It happens either naturally (as with Gilbert’s “synthetic happiness” theory) or as a result of accepting situations for what they are and moving on from there. There’s nothing wrong with attempting a smile to ward off a frown, but don’t count on feeling 100 percent better with that alone. It seems that faking anything, happiness or otherwise, will get you only so far.
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