Hidden Brain - Why Am I Unhappy?

We often imagine that feelings of unhappiness come from outside us — in our circumstances or the difficult people in our lives. But what if the forces that erode our happiness come from within? Psychologist George Loewenstein joins us to explore why our minds nudge us toward the negative, even when we want to feel happy. He also offers ways to better understand these forces and lessen their power over us. And on Your Questions Answered, psychologist Alison Ledgerwood returns to respond to your questions about our tendency to focus on the negative.

Duration: 1h 43m
Broadcast on: 12 Oct 2026
Audio Format: other

What if your emotions aren't reactions to the world, but predictions that your brain is making? We discuss this mind-bending idea on our YouTube channel. Check it out, and be sure to subscribe so you don't miss any of our upcoming videos!

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This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. In his great novel, Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy spends hundreds of pages describing Count Ronsky's desperate longing to be with Anna, the woman he loves. He risks his reputation, his military career, his standing in society. He endures uncertainty, jealousy, torment. And finally, after all the struggle and sacrifice, he gets what he wants. Anna is his. But almost immediately, something strange happens. The feeling he imagined would satisfy him forever begins to fade. Tolstoy writes, "In spite of the complete fulfillment of what he had so long desired, he was not completely happy. He soon felt that the realization of his longing gave him only one grain of the mountain of bliss he had anticipated. That realization showed him the eternal error men make by imagining that happiness consists in the gratification of their wishes. Many of us make what Tolstoy called the eternal error. We assume that external circumstances, a better job, more money, the right relationship, will finally make us happy. Or we blame our unhappiness on what's happening around us and the people in our lives. But psychologists increasingly believe that the greatest obstacles to happiness are not in external events or the people we encounter. The barriers to happiness lie within us. This week on Hidden Brain, understanding the invisible emotional machinery that keeps lasting fulfillment just out of reach. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Instagram. Instagram teen accounts automatic protections limit who can contact teens, the content they can see, and the time they spend on the app. Teens are automatically placed into teen accounts. Teens under 16 will need a parent's permission to change any of those settings to be less strict. Learn more about teen accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at instagram.com/teenaccounts. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Liberty Mutual Insurance. Making smart decisions includes considering how to protect your car and home and how much you're paying to ensure them. Liberty Mutual customizes your car and home insurance to save you money, because when you've worked hard for something, choosing insurance should be easy. Start your quote at libertymutual.com Support for Hidden Brain comes from Southern New Hampshire University. Science consistently tells us learning starts with motivation. That's why SNHU offers over 200 flexible, affordable online programs to help you get where you want to go. Take classes that spark your curiosity, shape your skillset, and prepare you for what's next. A degree can help move you forward, no matter what motivates you. Start yours at snhu.edu/brain. Most of us think of happiness as something the world gives or withholds. If only I had more money. If only I found the right partner. If only I were able to move to a different city. But what if many of the forces that erode happiness emerge from within, from our own emotional makeup? At Carnegie Mellon University, psychologist George Lowenstein studies these internal saboteurs of happiness. George Lowenstein, welcome to Hidden Brain. Thank you for having me on the show. George, at the very start of your career as a professor, you were finishing up your graduate studies and going on the job market. I understand that your classmates had 10 or 20 job interviews lined up. Did you as well? My degree is actually in economics. I went to the economics meetings, which is where people search for a job and I had no interviews at all, except I had one with a company that wanted to hire me as a brand manager to sell dog food. After this inauspicious start, you ended up landing something off a dream job. Tell me what happened, George. It was really a fluke. I did get a interview at the University of Chicago. I went there and I managed to really blow it. My colleagues there later told me that they had voted not to hire me, but I did have a really fantastic dinner the night before the interview with some senior faculty, including the head of the group named Hilly Einhorn. He liked the dinner so much that he offered me a job over the vote of the group. I just clawed my way into an academic position. You must have been ecstatic. I mean, given the fact that you had relatively few prospects to now land at the University of Chicago, you must have been ecstatic. Did you stay ecstatic, George? I was probably more relieved than ecstatic, but I was happy about it for a few weeks, and my wife and I moved to Chicago, and then I got a whole lot less happy. They put me in probably the worst office in the building. It was in the basement. It had these slit windows, and it was located directly under the dean's bathroom, and there was a huge pipe that came down through the ceiling, and then went off to the side, and every time the dean went to the toilet, I could hear the toilet flushing through this pipe. So it was a pretty miserable beginning, and also I suddenly realized that I had this new hurdle, and that was to get promoted and to get tenure, and actually that was one of the most miserable years of my life, the first year at the University of Chicago. So psychologists have a name for the phenomenon you experienced, the hedonic treadmill. We've talked about this idea many times on Hidden Brain, but in many ways I feel it doesn't quite capture the scale of the phenomenon. What is the hedonic treadmill, George? The hedonic treadmill is the idea that we keep thinking that the next accomplishment, the next goal that we satisfy, the next material object that we crave, if we only get that, if we only accomplish our goal, that we will finally achieve the happiness that has been elusive so far. But of course, as soon as we do achieve these goals or obtain these material things, they recede into the background, and new goals emerge, new wants, and so we're on a treadmill where we always end up in the same place. The capacity to adapt to experiences includes intense experiences, and I understand that at one point, you went canoeing with a friend, Peter Ubel, who's also been a former guest on Hidden Brain. I'm wondering if you can paint a picture for me of the day, and what happened, George? Well, it was in the early 1990s, and it was in the winter, and it rained for several days in a row. In fact, it poured down rain for several days in a row, and I realized that rivers that were ordinarily not navigable would become navigable. And I located a river, it was a tributary of the Cheat River in West Virginia, and Peter and I got up very early, put the canoe on the car, put the bikes on the car, and we drove to this river. We dropped the bikes off at the bottom of the river, put the canoe in at the top, and sure enough, it was an extremely exhilarating day.

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