It’s great to be happy. Everyone wants to be happy. And that’s part of the problem. According to a study in Emotion, the quest for happiness may not be what it seems. People in the study who placed a great emphasis on being happy ended up feeling far fewer positive emotions than those who put less of an emphasis on it. The issue was that by focusing so much on happiness, people ended up just wallowing in negative emotions and the things that stopped them from being happy. As previous research has noted, the better approach is to accept both the good and the bad—and don’t let the bad drag you down (read our next item).
