It is important to find the right balance in everyday life.”Īnd that brings us right back to the struggle so many people face: finding time for self-care. “Our research shows that both are important and can complement each other in achieving well-being and good health. “The pursuit of hedonic and long-term goals needn’t be in conflict with one another,” said Bernecker. The key to our happiness is not dumping self-control and going wild, it’s about understanding that both self-indulgence and self-discipline are important.
This led the researchers to conclude that “hedonic goal pursuit represents a largely neglected but adaptive aspect of self-regulation.” In other words, not everything is about grit. Even more importantly, people with a higher hedonic capacity were also less likely to suffer from depression and anxiety. People who were able to fully enjoy themselves when pursuing enjoyment tended to have a higher sense of well-being in both the short and long term. In studies 4 and 5, the researchers demonstrated that “trait hedonic capacity predicts successful hedonic goal pursuit in everyday life.” So people who are better at enjoying themselves are also more likely to make enjoying themselves a goal. “Those thoughts about conflicting long-term goals undermine the immediate need to relax.” “For example, when lying on the couch you might keep thinking of the sport you are not doing,” said Daniela Becker of Radboud University in the press release. In study 3, The researcher set out to confirm that the reason some people didn't enjoy hedonic success, or feeling like they really enjoyed themselves, was indeed because of being distracted. Those who could do that reported greater happiness and well-being, as they found in the second study. The idea was to see how people differ in their ability to simply indulge in relaxation or enjoyment. In the first, the researchers measured hedonic capacity, or the ability of a person to enjoy pleasure without being bothered by intruding thoughts. The paper reports on a total of five studies.
How good are you at experiencing pleasure? And that's important, because this study found that our ability to experience pleasure, our hedonism, is just as important to our happiness in life as our self-control. In other words, these happy people aren't so busy worrying about what they should be doing that they can't enjoy the pleasurable thing they are doing. They can just do something they enjoy and be fully in the moment with it. People who are living happy and satisfied lives are able to experience pleasure without being distracted by intrusive thoughts. By hedonism, the researchers are referring to our ability to enjoy ourselves.
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