In Want to Get Rich? Be (Moderately) Happy, Laura Rowley talks about some studies that have revealed surprising downsides to extreme happiness.

What? Surely this is heresy! Supreme happiness is the holy grail that we spend our whole lives looking for. You can never have too much of it, right?

Well, let’s just see.

People were asked to rate themselves on a happiness scale of 1 to 10. The perfect 10s had the most self-confidence, energy, close friends, and time spent dating. That’s not unexpected. Everyone likes happy people. Also, research showed that the 10s were likely to misremember things for the better, to recall being happier in retrospect than they actually reported at the time. This makes it easier for them to see the best in people.

What about the people who were happy but not too happy? The 7s and 8s did the best in terms of grades, class attendance, conscientiousness, income, education, and career. The idea is that moderately happy people receive a lot of benefits from their happiness, but they also harbor a touch of dissatisfaction that pushes them to strive for more. This may be a bit surprising, but it makes sense. If everything is perfect, you get comfortable and stop trying so hard.

It turns out that there’s an even bigger downside to excessive happiness: death. The extremely happy don’t live as long as the moderately happy.

Even the researchers were shocked by this one. They speculate that the reason may be because the super happy don’t pay enough attention to illness, or they don’t recognize the danger of the risks they take. Also, sustained euphoria takes its toll on the body, just like chronic stress. And because people aren’t genetically programmed to be extremely happy all the time, some people turn to drugs as happiness boosters.

University of Illinois psychology professor Ed Diener said, “Happiness, like spirituality, is partially a private pursuit, defined by individuals based on their personal values. Be wary when people tell you to live for the moment, to strive for an exciting life, or that you ought to be happier. Chasing super-happiness is a mistake that can lead you astray and be self-defeating.”

Yes, there’s always a downside to having too much of a good thing, even happiness.

Photo by JasonRogers

What do we really know about the universe? How do we know it? Where did the universe come from, and where is it going? These are some of the questions addressed in A Briefer History of Time by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow.

This is a 2005 rewrite of Hawking’s 1988 classic A Brief History of Time, which amazingly remained on the best-seller list for four years despite attempting to explain complex mathematics to a general audience.

Although the original book contained only one equation (E = mc²) and lots of illustrations, the inherent complexity of the subject matter made many readers say “Well, we love it, but we don’t understand it!”

Therefore, this rewrite removes the purely technical stuff while focusing on a simplified (though certainly not simplistic) treatment of the core concepts. Read it for an entertaining but not overly taxing explanation of curved space, the big bang, black holes, wormholes, relativity, and quantum gravity.

What’s the point of it all? We’re hopefully moving closer and closer to discovering a unified theory, which would basically give us the answer key to the universe. As Hawking says, ”If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason–for then we would know the mind of God.”