"The effort to try to feel happy is often precisely the thing that makes us miserable."

"After several years reporting on the field of psychology as a journalist, I finally realized that there might be [a different possibility for one to reach happiness]. I began to think that something united all those psychologists and philosophers - and even the occasional self-help guru - whose ideas seemed actually to hold water. The startling conclusion at which they all arrived, in different ways, was this: that the effort to try to feel happy is often precisely the thing that makes us miserable. And that it is our constant effort to eliminate the negative - insecurity, uncertainty, failure, or sadness - that is what causes us to feel so insecure, anxious, uncertain, or unhappy. Instead, they argued that it pointed to an alternative approach, a 'negative path' to happiness, that entailed taking a radically different stance towards those things that most of us spend our lives trying hard to avoid. It involved learning to enjoy uncertainty, embracing insecurity, stopping trying to think positively, becoming familiar with familiar, even learning if value death. In short, all these people seemed to agree that in order to be truly happy, we might actually need to be willing to experience more negative emotions - or, at the very least, to learn to stop running quite so hard from them. Which is a bewildering thought, and one that calls into question not just our methods for achieving happiness, but also our assumptions about what 'happiness' really means."

From The Antidote: Happiness for People who Can't Stand Positive Thinking. By Oliver Burkeman.