Stop Chasing Happiness: Why the Goal Is the Problem + What To Do Instead (Episode #36)

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 What if the pursuit of happiness is exactly what's making you unhappy?

Recording less than a week out from ACL reconstruction surgery and battling what might be the flu, Jess is using a very personal hard season as the jumping-off point for one of the most universal questions there is. 

In this episode, she introduces the concept of eudaimonia — an ancient Greek philosophy of wellbeing — and makes the case that happiness is a feeling that was never meant to last, and that chasing it might be the wrong goal entirely.

 In this episode, she covers:

• Why happiness is a feeling — and why feelings don't last
• Eudaimonia vs. hedonism: the difference between chasing pleasure and living well
• What Yale's 'Science of Well-Being' reveals about what actually creates lasting happiness
• The deep connection between health and happiness — and why you can't fully separate the two
• Evidence supported strategies for developing contentment and peace that surpasses happiness 

Connect with Jess:

• Instagram: @vitalbalancewithjess 
• Website: jessicatrone.com
• Email: vitalbalancewithjess@gmail.com

DISCLAIMER: The content shared in this podcast is for informational and educational purposes only, is not a substitute for the advice of medical doctors or practitioners and should not be used to prevent, diagnose, or treat any condition. Consult with a physician prior to beginning any fitness, health, or wellness regimen or routine.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:04

Welcome to Vital Balance with Jess, the podcast for women who want real life strategy, no BS conversations about women's health. I'm your host, Jess. While building my career as an attorney, I struggled with hormone imbalances, anxiety, metabolic dysfunction, and a healthcare system that left me with more questions than answers. So I took matters into my own hands. And here's what I discovered. The real magic happens when you get curious, start asking questions, and listening to your body like it actually knows what it's doing. This podcast isn't about weight loss, physical appearance, or rigid wellness routines. It's about agency. I want you to know just how much control you have over your everyday well-being. And I want you to experience stable energy, predictable moods, a sharp yet calm mind, and a body you can trust. Because when women are well, our homes and communities thrive too. Let's get started.

SPEAKER_02 1:23

Welcome to Vital Balance. I'm Jess. I'm recording this episode six days out from ACL Reconstruction Surgery. If you hear a small hum in the background throughout this episode, I'm gonna go ahead and apologize and say that that is my circulating ice machine to keep my knee iced as much as possible. If I'm being honest, I didn't want to release an episode this week. I thought about all the reasons I was justified in not doing it. The first two days after surgery were the worst, mostly because I did not handle the pain medications very well. They made me dizzy, I was slurring my words, they even affected my vision. I wasn't able to read. Then, just as the heavy-duty pain meds wore off, I came down with what may or may not have been the flu, which I'm still dealing with. You can probably hear it in my voice. The virus has traveled from my head down to my throat and chest and has become a nasty cough. And these woes don't even include the actual pain of the surgery, the pain that I have in my knee and having to start physical therapy 48 hours after surgery. I'm not sharing all of this for sympathy, but because it's actually part of why this episode feels so timely to me right now. I'm almost a week into a recovery that's gonna last about 12 months. I can't currently walk without crutches. I sleep in a brace that covers almost my entire leg, and I'm forced to be really sedentary. A lot of time spent on the couch, a lot of icing and elevating my leg, and I won't be back on the tennis court for probably close to a year. And here's what a lot of downtime does: it gives you the space to think, which sounds nice in theory, but when you're in pain and you're frustrated and you can't do the things you love, you can't live the life you're used to living, that thinking can go to some pretty negative places pretty quickly. It's easy to fixate on what's not working, to feel sorry for yourself. And if someone asked me right now in this moment, are you happy? the honest answer would be no, not particularly. Which is exactly why I wanted to record this episode now. Because the question, are you happy, as simple and universal as it sounds, might be the wrong question. Maybe that's not the question that we should ask ourselves. My kids used to ask me that question a lot when they were younger. Mommy, are you happy? And I think they were just trying to figure out what feelings are and which ones are worth pursuing. They wanted to know, you know, if I said yes, I am happy, then they would associate happiness with my actions and the way I was acting in that moment. And what I find fascinating looking back is that even at three or four years old, they already concluded that happiness was a positive emotion they wanted to achieve. Out of every feeling a person can have, happiness was the one worth asking about. But the more I've thought about happiness, and I've had a lot of time to think about it this week, and but I've thought about it a lot in recent years, the more I've realized that what we call happiness isn't actually what we mean when we say we want to be happy. Because here's the thing most of us don't realize happiness is a feeling, and feelings, by their very nature, are temporary. They come and go, they shift, sometimes minute to minute. They are physiological responses to our circumstances, our thoughts, our bodies, and yet we talk about happiness as if it's a destination, something we can arrive at and stay there. I just want to be happy, or I'll be happy when I achieve this or when I do this. We treat it like it's a place we can move into and live. But what if that framing is exactly what's making us unhappy? What if chasing the feeling of happiness and trying to hold on to it and manufacture it is actually working against us? What if the goal itself needs to change? And that's what today's episode is about. We're gonna talk about happiness, what it actually is, why the way most of us think about it sets us up for disappointment, and what ancient philosophy and modern science both suggest we should be pursuing instead. And yes, we're gonna talk about how all of this connects to our health. Let's start with the way most people define happiness because I think it's worth naming clearly before we challenge it. When most of us say we want to be happy, we mean we want to feel good. We want to feel pleasure, joy, ease. We want more good days than bad days. We want to wake up feeling excited for the day and all that it has to offer. And there's nothing wrong with wanting that. The problem is that feelings, all feelings, including the good ones, are transient by design. Our nervous system is not built to sustain any single emotional state indefinitely. It's built to respond and adapt, which means that no matter how good things get, we will not feel happy all the time. This is sometimes referred to as the hedonic treadmill. The idea that humans quickly adapt to positive changes in their lives and return to a relatively stable emotional baseline. For example, you get a promotion at work, you're elated, you've been waiting for this promotion for months, but then it becomes the new normal and that elation fades. Or maybe you move into your dream house, you're thrilled, you never imagined you would live in a house like this. But then over time, it too becomes your norm. And that feeling just doesn't last. Not because something is wrong with you, but because that's how human beings are wired. So if you're building your definition of happiness around a feeling, and specifically around the expectation that the feeling should be sustained, you are setting yourself up for a cycle of chasing and disappointment. You feel happy, then you don't, then you wonder what went wrong, then you chase the feeling again over and over. Now, I want to introduce to you a concept that I think reframes all of this in a really meaningful way. About three or four years ago, I stumbled across the Greek word eudaimonia. In English, it's most often translated as happiness or well-being, but that translation doesn't really do it justice. The concept originated with Aristotle in one of his books entitled Nicomachian Ethics. What makes eudaimonia different from the happiness we just discussed is that eudaimonia is not a feeling, it's a way of living. Aristotle defined it as happiness or well-being derived from a life of activity governed by reason, a life lived virtuously, purposefully, and in alignment with our highest values. In other words, eudaimonia is not something you feel in the moment. It's something you build over time through the choices you make, the way you treat people, the work you invest in, the life you construct deliberately. It's less about how you feel today and more about who you are becoming and how you are living. And this is where it gets really interesting because Aristotle wasn't saying pleasure and happiness don't matter. He wasn't advocating for a joyless life. He was saying that if you live well, if you pursue virtue, purpose, and reason, happiness in the deeper sense will follow naturally. You don't chase it. It's a byproduct. The contrast to eudaimonia is hedonism, which in the philosophical sense simply means the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain as the primary goal of life. So maximizing good feelings, minimizing bad ones. And honestly, most of how our culture approaches happiness is pretty hedonistic. We optimize for comfort, we scroll on social media to feel stimulated, we eat things that taste good, we avoid difficult conversations, we make choices based on what will feel best in the short term. The problem is that pleasure is temporary. Comfort is often temporary. And a life organized entirely around the avoidance of discomfort tends to produce less meaning, less resilience, and ironically, less lasting happiness. Eudaimonia, by contrast, often requires discomfort. It requires doing hard things. It requires sitting with difficulty, growing through it, and choosing virtue even when it's hard, when it's inconvenient. And research, which we'll get to in just a moment, actually backs this up. The things that produce the deepest, most lasting sense of well-being are rarely the things that feel best in the moment. I think about this in the context of health all the time. The choice that feels best in the moment isn't always the one that serves you. Staying up late is more immediately pleasurable than going to bed. The processed food is more immediately satisfying than the nourishing meal. The rest day sounds better than the workout you know will make you feel good afterward. Hedonism optimizes for the moment, whereas eudaimonia optimizes for the long term. So we've discussed both happiness and eudaimonia, what they are, and which one is arguably more worthwhile to pursue. So now I want to talk about why all of this matters. Number one, you cannot feel your way to a meaningful life. Feelings are just not a reliable guide. If you make every decision based on what will make you feel happy right now, you will very likely lack a true sense of peace and contentment and will always be searching and yearning for that next good feeling. This means you will avoid hard conversations that need to happen. You'll probably skip the workout in the early mornings, you will stay in situations that are comfortable but not good for you. You will optimize for ease and end up with a life that feels hollow. Think about it like this: the people who seem the most genuinely content, not necessarily happy all the time or, you know, super cheerful, but they're grounded, stable, purposeful humans. They're almost always never the ones who've had the easiest lives. They're the ones who've gone through hard things and come out with a clearer sense of who they are and what matters to them. They've built something. They've invested in relationships, in their health, in their growth. The contentment they carry isn't a feeling they chased. It's something they built intentionally. In this day and age, most of us spend so much time being comfortable and so little time being challenged that we therefore don't make the difficult choices in order to better ourselves and our lives. We avoid discomfort because it's foreign to most of us. We might even fear it. But that complacency leads to dissatisfaction, likely because we don't grow as a human. Instead of becoming more resilient or resourceful, instead of realizing what we're capable of and that we can achieve hard things, many of us sit with feelings of shame and self-loathing for the decisions we made that provided short-term comfort, but were ultimately meaningless or somehow made us worse off. Life is full of hardship. If we have an end goal of happiness as defined by pleasure, won't we end up disappointed? While difficult to recognize, life's challenges often lead to greater satisfaction, ultimately. And if those challenges produce discomfort, they arguably discredit hedonism and other more mainstream definitions of happiness. If this strategy results in true happiness, why do so many of us ask the simple, short-term focused question? Because it's easy. How we actually live our lives requires discipline and effort. Number two, there is a marriage between happiness and health. Eudaimonia is often compared to health in classical thought, which makes sense. After all, without health, can we achieve happiness or well-being? The two typically go hand in hand, hence the common idiom of wishing loved ones health and happiness. People typically associate those two together. Realistically, most people will experience at least one health hardship in their lives, and how disheartening to think that it could render happiness impossible. Since many noble life pursuits and virtues exist independent of health, I do believe we can achieve eudaimonia without it, but accomplishing most of those pursuits with poor health would be really challenging. Essentially, I think the union of health and happiness is really quite important. For example, when my kids bring home illness from school, we typically operate on survival mode until everyone heals. We are all more irritable, less patient, more stressed. It is difficult to feel peace and contentment when you don't feel well, as evidenced by my current predicament. On the other hand, when we prioritize our health, life feels infinitely easier. It typically means better mood and higher energy levels. And when we have higher energy and a more stable mood, our days feel more peaceful and productive. This begs the question: if we live life in a manner supportive of our health, will happiness naturally result? If so, this reinforces the theory that we should aim for something other than happiness if we want to actually achieve happiness. Number three, let's discuss what the science actually says, the modern day science on happiness. I want to share some findings from the research on happiness and well-being because I think they're both surprising and validating with regard to what we have discussed thus far. A few years ago, I enrolled in a course called The Science of Well-Being, taught at Yale and available online through a platform called Coursera. And one of the first things I learned in the course is that what most people think will make them happy does not. Does not make them happy. Good grades, a high-paying job, the perfect body, a bigger house. The research consistently shows that these things produce a temporary boost in happiness. And then we adapt and the happiness fades and we revert back to baseline, which is what I've already discussed. So, what does the research show actually contributes to lasting well-being? A few things stand out. Number one, strong, safe, nurturing relationships. Number two, a sense of meaning and purpose, having something to work toward that is bigger than yourself. Number three, engagement or being fully absorbed in meaningful activities, or what is often referred to as being in a state of flow. Number four, gratitude, actively noticing and appreciating what is good in your life rather than taking it for granted. Number five, accomplishment, not achievement for external validation, but genuine mastery and growth. Number six, living in the present rather than ruminating on the past or anxiously anticipating the future. Notice what is not on that list. Money. Beyond a threshold of basic financial security, more money doesn't meaningfully increase emotional well-being. Now, this number has changed over the years when this course first came out. I think they were saying after$75,000 a year, there was no difference in happiness. But I think that has gone up to a family uh household income of around$100,000, but that is also dependent on where in the country you live, because obviously there are higher costs of living in big cities than there are in rural areas. What else is not on the list? Status, appearance, possessions. Basically, none of the things our culture tells us to pursue most aggressively are significant predictors of lasting happiness. Dr. Martin Seligman, one of the founders of positive psychology, captured much of this in his perma model. So perma is an acronym, and P stands for positive emotion, E engagement, R relationships, M meaning, and A accomplishment, right? Which are basically the six things that I just previously mentioned, right? So his framework essentially describes eudaimonia in modern psychological terms. And what strikes me about it is that every single element requires intention and effort. None of it just happens to you. You have to make a choice to live a certain way. One more finding I want to mention. Research does suggest that happiness depends on three factors: genetics, circumstances, and intentional activity. Genetics accounts for a small portion of our baseline happiness or set point. Modern psychology seems to indicate that some people are born more happy than others. Circumstances, right? Which would be like where you live, your income, your health. And while these things all play a role, they account for less than most people assume, just like the genetic component. And then lastly, intentional activity. So this is the way you live, the choices you make, the practices you engage in, how you direct your attention and energy. These account for a very meaningful portion, and it's entirely within our control. So we are not just a passive recipient of happiness or unhappiness. We have more influence over our well-being than the culture of complaint and victimhood would have us believe. Okay, so what do we do with this information? How do we pursue and achieve eudaimonia? Number one, redefine what you're pursuing. The first and most important shift is conceptual. Stop asking, am I happy? Or why don't I feel happy and what can I do to change that? Remember, happiness is a fleeting emotion. So answering those questions will only get you so far. Start asking better questions. Questions like, am I living in a way that reflects what actually matters to me? Am I investing in the relationships that sustain me? Am I growing as a person? Am I contributing something to this world, to my community? Am I building a life with a sense of meaning? These questions are much harder to answer. They require more self-knowledge and more honesty, but they point towards something real and lasting rather than something fleeting. This doesn't mean completely dismiss your feelings. When you feel persistently unhappy, that's worth paying attention to. It's often a signal that something in your life is out of alignment. But the goal is not to feel happy at every moment. The goal is to build a life that generates meaning, purpose, and genuine well being over time. Number two, audit your pleasures. Take an honest look at where you're seeking happiness and ask yourself whether those sources are actually deliberate. Delivering? Are you seeking quick hits of dopamine through scrolling on social media? Or maybe that nightly fast food meal that tastes very pleasurable and satisfying during the 15 minutes it takes for you to consume it? But how do you feel after scrolling social media? Or after that fast food meal is gone? Experiencing pleasure isn't inherently wrong, but if your primary strategy for happiness is the accumulation of pleasurable moments, it's worth understanding that this strategy has a ceiling. At some point, more stimulation stops producing more satisfaction. The research on hedonic adaptation is very clear on this. Number three, invest in the things that actually work, which are those things that we've really already discussed, right? The things supported by positive psychology. Based on everything the research tells us, here's where I'd encourage you to put your energy. Number one, your relationships. Show up for the people who matter. Invest in the friendships that challenge you and restore you. The quality of our relationships is one of the strongest predictors of long-term well-being, but it does require consistent, intentional effort. Number two, your sense of purpose. Why do you get up in the morning? What do you truly care about? For many people, it's their family, their faith, a mission of helping others. Figure out what it is for you. Number three, your health. Because health creates the supportive conditions for everything else, right? When you feel good in your body and mind, you have more capacity for connection, for presence, for joy. The investment in your sleep, your nourishment, your movement. It pays dividends in every area of life. Number four, gratitude. I know it sounds simple, but the practice of deliberately noticing what is good and what we truly appreciate in life is one of the most evidence-supported tools for improving well-being. It doesn't require any money or any special circumstances. It just requires our attention. And attention, fortunately, is something you can always choose to redirect. And lastly, let happiness be a byproduct. This is the piece I keep coming back to. The people who seem the most genuinely content, like I said, maybe not the most visibly cheerful, but the most grounded and at peace are rarely the ones who made happiness their primary goal. They're the ones who made something else their goal. Their family, their faith, their health, their community. And in the process of showing up for those things consistently and with intention, something that looks a lot like happiness followed. I think Aristotle was on to something. Act with virtue and purpose. Let happiness be what happens when you do. My kids will probably keep asking me if I'm happy, and I'll answer their question. But what I really want them to know when they're old enough to understand it is that the feeling of happiness is not the goal. It's not something you chase or hold on to or measure your life by. Stop asking whether you feel happy right now. Start asking whether you are living your life honorably, whether you're investing in the people and the purposes that matter, whether your daily life reflects your actual values. Do those things and let happiness take care of itself. Thank you so much for being here. Until next time.

SPEAKER_00 25:50

If you enjoyed this episode, please leave my mommy a five-star review. And don't forget to hit the subscribe button.

SPEAKER_01 25:58

Thanks so much for tuning in to Vital Balance with Jess. If you loved this episode, it would mean the world if you would leave a review, share it with a friend, or hit subscribe so you never miss a dose of real talk on women's health. Remember, you have more control over your health than you've been told, and sustainable change is possible. Keep listening to your body and showing up for yourself. I'll see you next time.