Hello everyone and welcome to therapy in a nutshell. I'm Emma McAdam, a licensed marriage and family

therapist, and this is the podcast where I condense mental health skills into bite-sized nuggets of

health. When I worked with teenagers in wilderness therapy, I would often ask them the question.

What do you want from life? The vast majority of them would say something along the lines of,

I just want to be happy. Many of them had put loads of work into that desire. They sought

happiness in friendships and in drugs. They looked for pleasure in dangerous behaviors and sexual

exploits. they tried to escape

pain through smoking pot or avoiding school or family, and, you know, they hated their parents

for trying to stop them from enjoying life. The harder they tried to feel happy, the more miserable

their lives became. In America, there's a constant pressure to feel happy all the time.

Maybe it's because the pursuit of happiness is written into our Constitution,

but somehow this is warped into a mixture of using happiness to sell product,

and a sense of shame for not feeling happy all the time. You know, this idea of you're not feeling happy? What's wrong with you?

Research shows that the more pressure we put on ourselves to feel happy, the worst people feel.

On a side note, making people feel miserable, but promising them happiness if they buy your products,

happens to sell more products. People who try to live up to

society's expectations of happiness tend to feel worse in comparison to people who focus their

lives on their purpose, their values, and their meaning. Today, we're going to look at one way

we can create a good life without becoming obsessed with happiness.

In my humble and perhaps pessimistic opinion, we've been duped into thinking that

happiness is the goal of life. Happiness may be the outcome of a good life, but if you put all

your efforts into happiness, you may end up feeling miserable. People who live rich and

...