Psychology Today

Key takeaways from 3 Ways to Tell If You’ve Fallen for the Happiness Myth

New research shows how to test irrational beliefs about your need to be happy. Open at source

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Pushing yourself to be happy can only make you more miserable when your situation fails to live up to your unrealistic standards of total bliss.

Key to their analysis of what you might consider the happiness paradox is that problems begin when you let “should, ought, and must” enter into your need to put yourself in a good mood.

To sum up, there are situations in life you can fix and those you can’t. Feeling convinced that changing your mood is the only way to be well-adapted might very well take you off the road to fulfillment and onto the path of dysfunctional thinking.

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