15. Happiness Shouldn't Be The Goal

Episode 15 | Happiness Shouldn't Be The Goal | 8th September 2026  |  20 min

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You got the thing you were sure would make you happy. So why does it just feel... normal?

We say "I just want to be happy" like it's the most reasonable goal in the world. And of course you want to be happy, most of us do. But somewhere along the way happiness stopped being something we feel and turned into something we chase, a finish line that keeps moving further away the closer we get.

In this episode Jodi unpacks why happiness makes a shaky goal to chase, why the moment you start measuring it you tend to feel less of it, and what to aim at instead, so a day that doesn't feel particularly happy can still be a day that means something.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Happiness is an emotion, and emotions come and go

You don't arrive at happiness and get to stay there. It comes and goes like every other emotion, and healthy regulation gives you enough range and capacity to feel what's actually here, the good and the hard, without rushing to get rid of every uncomfortable feeling the second it shows up.

The moment happiness becomes the goal, you start monitoring it

Turn happiness into a target and you start checking the gauge. Am I happy? Am I happy enough? Is this making me happy? Iris Mauss and her colleagues found that people who place a really high value on feeling happy can end up more disappointed with how they actually feel, especially in the moments they think they should be happy. The measuring is part of what gets in the way of the feeling.

Let the win land before you move the goalpost

We adapt to good things fast. The promotion becomes the job, the new house becomes the house, yesterday's dream becomes today's baseline. Sheldon and Lyubomirsky found the glow fades partly because the good feeling wears off and partly because our aspirations climb, and that pausing to actually appreciate the thing can slow that down. So notice the win. Let it register before it becomes your new normal.

Aim at what holds on the hard days

Happiness was always going to fluctuate, which makes it a wobbly thing to organise a life around. Meaning, growth, contribution and connection give you something sturdier. Ryan and Deci's work points to autonomy, competence and relatedness as needs closely tied to wellbeing, and those are things you can still be moving toward on a day that doesn't feel especially good.

NOTABLE QUOTES

"The thing that you're trying so hard to feel can become harder to experience because you're busy measuring whether you're feeling enough of it."

"You can build an objectively extraordinary life and barely experience any of it."

"Maybe happiness isn't something you need to actually chase at all. More often than not, it's the byproduct of being fully engaged in the life you're already living."

TIMESTAMPS

0:00 The Spark

0:06 Intro

0:47 The Happiness Trap

5:49 Why the High Fades

8:12 Let The Win Sink In

11:06 What Actually Makes A Good Life?

13:59 A Better North Star

18:57 Outro

Hey Gorgeous, Your Next Step Starts Here...

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KEY REFERENCES

• Ford, B. Q., Lam, P., John, O. P., & Mauss, I. B. (2018). The psychological health benefits of accepting negative emotions and thoughts: Laboratory, diary, and longitudinal evidence. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 115(6), 1075–1092. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000157

• Fredrickson, B. L. (2001). The role of positive emotions in positive psychology: The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions. American Psychologist, 56(3), 218–226. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.56.3.218

• Mauss, I. B., Tamir, M., Anderson, C. L., & Savino, N. S. (2011). Can seeking happiness make people unhappy? Paradoxical effects of valuing happiness. Emotion, 11(4), 807–815. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0022010

• Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American Psychologist, 55(1), 68–78. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.55.1.68

• Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2001). On happiness and human potentials: A review of research on hedonic and eudaimonic well-being. Annual Review of Psychology, 52, 141–166. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.52.1.141

• Sheldon, K. M., & Lyubomirsky, S. (2012). The challenge of staying happier: Testing the Hedonic Adaptation Prevention model. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 38(5), 670–680. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167212436400

COMMON QUESTIONS
Why do I feel empty after finally getting something I worked so hard for?

That flat, anticlimactic feeling is really common, and it has a name: hedonic adaptation. We adjust to good things quickly, so the thing you wanted becomes your new baseline faster than you expect, and your brain moves straight to "okay, what's next?" None of that means something's wrong with you or with the thing you worked for. The win just needs a moment to land before it becomes your new normal.

Does chasing happiness actually make you unhappy?

It can, depending on how you chase it. Research by Iris Mauss and colleagues found that placing a very high value on feeling happy can leave people more disappointed with how they actually feel, especially in situations where they think they should be happy. The more you monitor whether you're happy enough, the more you notice the gap. Wanting a good life is healthy. The trouble starts when happiness becomes a performance target you keep checking.

Why do I feel bad about feeling bad?

Because you've added a second layer: the original feeling, plus a judgment about having it. "I shouldn't feel this, look at everything I have." Brett Ford, Phoebe Lam and their colleagues found that people who accept their emotions without judging them tend to have better psychological health, partly because they pile less extra distress on top of the original feeling. The judgment is often the heavier part.

What should I aim for instead of happiness?

Meaning, growth, contribution and connection tend to hold when happiness wobbles. Self-Determination Theory points to three needs closely tied to wellbeing: autonomy (a sense of choice), competence (learning and growing), and relatedness (real connection). These are things you can still be moving toward on a day that doesn't feel especially good, which makes them a sturdier compass than an emotion that was always going to come and go.

What is hedonic adaptation and can you slow it down?

Hedonic adaptation is how quickly we get used to things, even really good ones. Sheldon and Lyubomirsky found the glow from a positive change fades for two reasons: the good feeling naturally wears off, and our aspirations climb so we start wanting more. Continuing to actually appreciate the thing can slow that down, so noticing and savouring what you have, rather than immediately reaching for the next milestone, helps the good stuff last longer.

Is it bad to want to be happy?

Not at all. Positive emotion is good for you. Barbara Fredrickson's broaden-and-build work shows positive emotions widen how we think and help us build lasting resources over time. You can absolutely shape a life with more good feeling and connection in it. The catch is the difference between leaning toward more good stuff and requiring yourself to feel happy all the time. One gives you room to be human. The other becomes another thing to fail at.

How do I stop rushing to the next goal and actually enjoy what I've achieved?

Start by letting yourself register the win before you convert it into the new minimum standard. That doesn't mean a parade for every email, it means actually pausing to notice: you handled that differently, you finished the thing, you made it through something that would have flattened you two years ago. If every win gets met with "yeah, but I'm not there yet," you can build a remarkable life and barely feel any of it. Noticing is the skill.

TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:00] The Spark

You finally get the thing you thought would make you happy, , and somehow it feels completely anticlimactic

[00:00:06] Intro

[00:00:47] The Happiness Trap

The highs drop out. There's this weird emptiness sitting underneath it, and almost immediately your brain goes, "Okay, what's next?" And just like that, you're chasing the next big thing,

I just wanna be happy. We say it all the time, and we mean it, and on the surface, it sounds like a really pretty reasonable goal, right? Of course, you wanna be happy. Pretty sure most of us do. But I think somewhere along the way, happiness stopped being about something we experience and became something we started trying to achieve.

Like there's this imaginary point somewhere ahead of us where everything finally lines up, and then we get to have it. It's what I like to call the when I, then theory. When I make more money, then I'll be happy. When I lose the weight, when the business grows, I'll be happy. When I find the relationship, then I'll be happy. When I buy the house, then I'll be happy.

And I think this pattern gets particularly sticky for the high achievers because we're really good at taking something abstract, like that visionary type stuff, and turning it into a target or, like, a goal to work towards. Give us a finish line and we'll run toward it.

The problem is Happiness is kind of a really terrible finish line because happiness isn't a permanent state that you arrive at. Happiness is an emotion. It comes and goes like every other emotion does. And healthy emotional regulation isn't about being happy all the time. It's about having enough capacity and enough emotional range to experience what's actually happening then and there in that moment for you.

Sometimes that's joy and excitement and contentment, but other times that can feel like disappointment or even feeling angry or grieving. You can feel frustrated because something you really wanted hasn't worked out.

Being regulated doesn't mean that those emotions disappear or don't exist. It does, however, mean that you have enough capacity to experience them without every uncomfortable emotion becoming something that you immediately have to either escape from or fix or numb yourself to, or interpret as evidence that your life is going, like, the wrong way.

Brett Ford from the University of Toronto, along with Phoebe Lam and her colleagues in work that was led out of UC Berkeley, actually looked at this across their lab, daily life, and longitudinal studies. So they found that people who habitually accepted their thoughts and emotions rather than judging them, tended to show better psychological health, partly because they experience less additional negative emotion in response to stressful responses or experiences.

I've linked all the research in the show notes if you wanna go have a read of it

so have a look at how this pattern actually plays out. So here's the example, right? Not only do I feel bad, now I feel bad that I feel bad. I shouldn't be feeling this. I wanna feel happy because I should be happier. Look at everything that I have, so why am I not more grateful? Now the original emotion has an emotion.

Suddenly, there's an entire committee meeting that's happening in your head over what could have just been a crappy afternoon. And this isn't to detract from the power of gratitude by any means, okay? So stick with me here.

There's another really interesting line of research from psychologist Iris Mauss, who was at the University of Denver at the time, alongside her colleagues Maya Tamir, Craig Anderson, and Nicole Savino. They looked, uh, specifically at what happens when people place a really high value on feeling happy.

You'd assume valuing happiness would make you, you know, happier. But it kind of doesn't work like that. It's, it's kinda backwards. They found that when people really wanted to feel happy, especially in situations where they thought that they should be happy, they were more likely to feel disappointed with how they actually felt, which in turn could leave them feeling even worse.

I find that, like, really fascinating. So the thing that you're trying so hard to feel can become harder to experience because you're busy measuring whether you're feeling enough of it.

Think about how this now plays out in real life. So the moment happiness is that goal, right? You start to monitor it. You'll throw around questions like, "Am I happy or am I happy enough? Is doing this or is this making me happy? Why don't I feel happier than I am?" You can see where we're going with this, right? But I worked so hard for this. I wanted this for years, especially when you've got a long-term goal that you've strived towards and then you get there, and then you go like, "Why does it just feel, I don't know, normal?"

[00:05:49] Why the High Fades

And this is where we run into another little cool feature of, you know, being human. It's called hedonic adaptation, and basically we're all really incredibly good at getting used to things. It's like complacency, right? Even really, really good things.

You finally get that promotion and your income increases, and you get to move into the big pretty house with the white picket fence, and you reached the goal that 6 or 12 months ago you would've given your left arm for. And then at first, like, it might feel really amazing for a split second. There's that excitement and some pride and relief, and maybe this huge rush of, "Holy crap, I actually did that? Yeah, like cool." And then it kinda just becomes your life.

Like, the new fancy house with the white picket fence just becomes the house, and the new level of income just becomes your income. The business milestone becomes last quarter's result, and usually everything's pitched up against it moving forward, and yesterday's dream becomes today's baseline. You've become the next evolution of yourself along the way.

Kennon Sheldon at the University of Missouri and Sonja Lyubomirsky at UC Riverside tested this in their hedonic adaptation prevention model. They found two really interesting things happening as we adapt to positive changes.

The positive emotions generated by the change start declining, but our aspirations can rise as well at the same time. So we have two things happening here. So now the thing that we wanted, often sometimes quite desperately, has become normal, and we're starting to want an even better version again, which starts to explain an awful lot about that little voice from the beginning of this episode, you know, where your brain goes, "What's next?"

This isn't an argument against ambition by any means. I'm very much a highly driven person myself, and I love ambition. There's nothing wrong with wanting more, creating impact, building things, or growth.

So set ridiculous goals if they light you up, 100%. But for the love of all things good, can we actually let ourselves have the thing when it gets here?

[00:08:12] Let The Win Sink In

Because Sheldon and Lyubomirsky found something else that I think is really relevant. Continued appreciation of the positive change may actually help slow down that adaptation. So in other words, noticing what you have in the moment is, like, super important which is why I think and I believe celebrating the small wins along the way is imperative, particularly if you're someone who is always looking towards what's next and measuring happiness up against it.

And I'm not talking about throwing like a parade and cheerleaders and partying kind of thing every time you answer an email. I mean actually allowing that positive experience to register and sit with you before you turn them into the new minimum standard or your new baseline. So if you handled a conversation differently, notice it and like pat yourself on the back, right?

You got your first client, I want you to jump up and down and maybe do some cartwheels because that's really awesome. You made it through something that would've flattened you like two years ago. That in itself is a mega achievement and you should be really letting that sort of land and sink in with you as well and celebrating that

I want you to soak that goodness up, baby, Because if every win is met with, "Yeah, but I'm not there yet," you can build an objectively extraordinary life and barely experience any of it, yet alone happiness along the way.

Positive emotion is really good for us. It's really good for our health too . Barbara Fredrickson's work on what she calls the broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions, originally out of the University of Michigan, found that positive emotions can actually broaden the way we think and what we notice, which is changing our lens, And over time helps us build psychological, intellectual, and social resources.

So happiness and joy matters, as does contentment and interest and love, as examples. You can absolutely lean towards creating a life where you experience more positive emotion overall, right? You can cultivate optimism. You can practice gratitude and noticing what's going well, and you can shape this lens that isn't automatically scanning for everything that's wrong or threat-based, right?

We can live a more positive lifestyle. In essence, this means that you can become a generally happier human and kinda less grumpy. And this is very, very different from requiring yourself to be happy all the time. One allows, like, the full range of being human and creating more space for all that really cool, good stuff, and the other makes happiness like another performance target you've gotta hit.

And I don't know about you, but I really don't need another KPI in my life.

[00:11:06] What Actually Makes A Good Life?

So if happiness itself isn't the finish line, what are we aiming towards? Psychology has made a distinction for a long time between what we call hedonic wellbeing, and that's our pleasure, enjoyment, positive emotion type things, and eudaimonic wellbeing, which is more concerned with meaning, growth, and living in a way that reflects what matters to you. I'm a strong advocate that we actually want both of these things in our lives.

So enjoy your life, eat the really good food, go on holidays, laugh until you cry or snot comes out of your nose. All right? We are absolutely not about canceling pleasure whatsoever. We want that, we should have it, we need it, and our bodies thrive on it, and our health does too. But feeling good all the time is pretty flimsy scaffolding for an entire human life because some of the most meaningful parts of being alive don't feel good all the time.

A friend once said something to me about grief that stayed with me ever since, and she said, "The weight of your grief shows you the capacity and the depth of your love. The two are, like, interlinked." And I remember thinking, "Oh my gosh, that is so beautiful." Because the deeper you love, the more there is to grieve when something changes or somebody is no longer there.

And love can hold you through grief, and some of the most meaningful things that we have happen can be through these, both of these periods of times in our lives. Meaning can still exist in a season that doesn't feel particularly happy, and growth quite often asks you to spend some time being uncomfortable before anything else feels easier.

That's where the next level of you, that evolution of you comes out

Another friend once said to me, a mentor years ago said to me that adversity breeds character in humans, and I have seen this time and time again, and I tend to agree

Richard Ryan and Edward Deci at the University of Rochester have spent decades developing self-determination theory, and their work points to the three basic psychological needs that are closely tied to wellbeing.

So first up is autonomy, having a sense of agency and choice in your life. All right? Then there's competence, and this is the growing and the learning, feeling capable of, of yourself and what you're doing.

And then there's relatedness, and this is all about genuine connection with other people.

This is a big part of what Inner Spark is actually designed to build within you as well, right? Not this permanent happiness, but more capacity for life, so more trust, better relationships, bolder choices that you can make, and that regulation to respond differently when things get a little uncomfortable or pressure builds up and hits. Because our lives have never been about feeling one emotion forever. It is about having the capacity to enjoy and create more of your life, and this is really important that we can build those skills and develop ourselves into that space.

[00:13:59] A Better North Star

So when I think about what I actually want to orient my life towards, it looks more like this. I want meaning. I wanna do something that matters and positively impacts others beyond myself in huge ways. I want growth and contribution, and I want love and connection. I really don't want more boxes to tick.

Life is too full of those already. I like to think of it more like a compass, or think of it like a North Star even. Am I doing things that mean something and matter to me? Am I still learning and growing? Is there something about the way I'm living that contributes beyond just myself? Am I connected to the people that I love? Am I loving them well? Am I actually letting them love me as well? These are the questions that I can still answer on a day when I'm feeling not particularly happy. Like, I can have a crap day and still have a meaningful life.

I can be grieving and deeply connected at the same time, and I can be disappointed that something didn't work out and still know that I'm heading in a direction that actually matters to me, and that gives me something far sturdier and more grounding than chasing an emotion that was always designed to fluctuate.

And maybe this is a part of why it can feel so confronting when incredibly successful people talk openly about depression, or addiction, or loneliness, or how unhappy that they've been, because we look at the career, and the money, and the accolades, and the influence

All these things we're taught will somehow make you feel complete and happy, and there can be this moment of, hang on, how could you have all of that and still be struggling? We've heard those stories time and time again. Because success can change an enormous amount about your life, but it doesn't remove your humanity.

So having more money might solve some real problems, right? But as Tony Robbins says, it doesn't stop you having problems, you just arrive at them in style. But there will be things that money can't touch You can achieve something extraordinary and still become ill, or you can have millions of people know your name and still ache for genuine connection with another person.

Somebody's suffering is never simple enough to turn into a neat little lesson about happiness because life is a beautiful multifaceted tapestry. And sometimes I'd like to say that we are beautifully burdened as well. But I do think hearing those stories challenges the fantasy that if we can just accumulate enough success or enough wealth or enough whatever it is, right, we'll eventually reach some point where nothing really hurts anymore, and we'll finally feel complete, and therefore happy.

Now, my friend, I'm sorry to say I don't believe that place exists, not in the way that we often talk about it. And I actually think that's really good news because sometimes it means you don't have to keep postponing your life until you reach the something. I mean, how many things have you missed or not done because you've said, "I'll wait until I have this," or, "I'll wait until I feel that or feel this"?

And then you don't get it. You don't get to do the thing in between. So happiness isn't the enemy here. I hope, my hope for you is that you experience bucket loads of it in your life. I hope your life has a stupid amount of joy in it. But happiness is a really poor measure of whether you're doing life well.

And sometimes the healthiest, most regulated response available to you is going to be sadness or anger or disappointment or even grief because something genuinely warrants it. Let yourself have that range. Learn how to build the capacity and that expansion of the range so you don't lose yourself along the way when you feel these things.

All right? And when you're doing that, notice the really good stuff too. Celebrate the win before moving that goalpost and jumping, like, into the next thing you've gotta do. Let yourself actually enjoy what you worked hard to create instead of immediately converting it into that new baseline. Pay attention to the tiny, tiny moments that would be incredibly easy to miss while you're busy waiting for that bigger goal, that bigger one to rock up. The whole stop and smell the roses thing, like I challenge you this. Actually do that this week. Stop and smell a flower. I know that can sound ridiculous, but honestly, just do it.

In the meantime, keep pursuing what you want, keep building, and keep evolving. Just don't hand that next achievement the responsibility of finally making you feel okay or happy, because maybe happiness isn't something you need to actually chase at all. More often than not, it's the byproduct of being fully engaged in the life you're already living.

I'll see you next week

[00:18:57] Outro

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