I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the idea of the “happiness setpoint,” which I learned about from some university psychology class long ago. It’s the phenomenon by which humans tend to return to one particular happiness level, unique to each individual, regardless of positive or negative events in their lives. Perhaps the best-known example of this is a 1978 study which monitored the happiness levels of recent lottery winners and recently-injured paraplegics, and found that both groups basically returned to their pre-event levels of contentment within a matter of months. We habituate to our circumstances. We return, inevitably, to our setpoints.
I’m thinking about this because, to say the least, it’s a weird time to be happy. When national or global crises take place, there seems to be an unspoken (or sometimes spoken) moral imperative to feel and perform misery in an act of empathy toward those affected, or even just to communicate that you understand the gravity of the situation. Little attention is paid to the idea of cultivating happiness under these circumstances, because “how can you be happy at a time like this?!” But that perspective, though understandable, ignores two key facts: 1) there are many situations in which no amount of worrying and crying can actually improve things, and 2) stress and sadness are bad for your health.
It can feel virtuous to be loudly sad about a sad situation. And obviously, if you’re not emotionally affected at all by what’s going on in the world right now, that’s a cause for concern. But I’ve grown tired of the attitude that to express or experience any happiness right now is some kind of moral failing. I’m sad and struggling and angry and anxious about everything that’s happening, just like everybody else, but I also know it’s neither productive nor healthy for me to feel that way all the time. Stress responses in the nervous system can weaken your immune system and can also weaken the emotional reserves you have available to support and care for other people – and yourself. Assaulting your brain with a daily stream of horrible news might feel like the responsible and ethical thing to do, but it’s only beneficial up to a point. Past that point, it becomes useless at best and detrimental at worst.
There are many ways of locating that “sweet spot” of sadness, the appropriate amount of despair to let into your heart every day before you shut the door to more. I’ve been experimenting with a new regimen of only checking Twitter twice a day, and keeping it off-limits via a site blocker browser extension the rest of the time. I don’t need more than two stress-hormone spikes per day (although usually I encounter more, in one form or another), and I’m unlikely to miss any truly crucial news developments in the matter of hours between each peek. In between, I can read my books and play my video games and do my work, knowing contentedly that I don’t have to stress until the next dedicated window of Stress Time.