Todd Kashdan believes it's misguided to search for the elusive state of happiness. After years of working as a clinical psychologist he says that the missing ingredient to a fulfilling life is curiosity. The greatest opportunities for joy, meaning and personal growth come when we are mindful, curious and embrace uncertainty—within limits.
The pressure to cultivate emotional states – happiness, lust, optimism – is to many as much a stress as the issues those states are supposed to remedy.
It’s no surprise then that happiness itself has been the subject of withering attacks over the years like Barbara Ehrenreich's broadside on the pink ribbon movement Smile or Die, and Robert Reynolds' essay 'Dangerous Sorrows' from the Best Australian Essays 2005.
But if not happiness, them what are we to aim for?
After years of working as a clinical psychologist Todd Kashdan, Professor of Psychology at George Mason University in Virginia, says cultivating curiosity rather than questing after a state of hollow bliss is the key to wellbeing.
‘Sometimes when we are doing things that we care most about we experience a lot of pain,’ he says. ‘It’s not enough just to get rid of loneliness and depression and anxiety problems, that’s not going to make us have happy, meaningful lives.’
Professor Kashdan says his definition of curiosity goes beyond the idea of embracing novelty, and is about accepting and relishing the unknown.
‘The really boring Oxford English Dictionary definition would be it’s about recognising and seeking out new information and experiences.’
‘We think that curiosity is just about something new and mysterious walking into our field of vision. But there’s another part of curiosity that people miss... We need to believe that we can handle that novelty and that uncertainty, and if we don’t feel that we can handle it we’re not going to feel curious; we’re going to feel confused or we’re going to feel threatened.’
‘And often the reason people don’t feel this sense of wonder is because they don’t feel like they can handle or tolerate any of the tension that comes with the unknown.’
Overcoming fear, however, is not always something that comes naturally or even seems beneficial. Indeed, there’s a peculiar mix in human psychology of fear as a legitimate protective mechanism, balanced against the powerful adaptive role curiosity plays in allowing us to learn about our environment and perpetuate our genetics.
‘We are evolutionary designed to survive, have as much sex as possible, pass on our genes,’ Professor Kashdan says. ‘We are not designed to have profound meaning and gratitude and awe, our genes were not designed that way through evolution. It’s a cultural development, it’s just in the past few thousands of years that we’ve gained understanding that we can intentionally modify the way we approach the world. But this is not an evolutionary design.’
‘It’s adaptive to be both anxious and intrigued. You want to be anxious because you want to recognise quickly that something is threatening but you also want to be curious because in order to grow and develop a knowledge base of which berries are healthy, which ones are poisonous, how do I seduce somebody... you need to have curiosity.’
Professor Kashdan preaches spending five minutes every day being curious, which involves choosing an activity and interrogating it without preconceptions, ‘being open minded to whatever comes out there and resisting the temptation to look smart, to sound intelligent, to try to disagree with people.’
But what about people with anxiety, with mental illness, or other experiences which have taught them to be circumspect, reserved and cautious? Professor Kashdan admits there are definitely ‘boundary conditions’ where stress can make the dropping of defences impossible and even foolish.
‘[Curiosity] is a strength that is available to almost everyone at almost any given point in time except extremely stressful moments when we have to really focus on trying to get our way out of a jam. Other than that we can enter into this mindset at any time. What’s difficult is holding on to this mindset for one period of time, because by nature we tend to be quick at categorising and judging people because we want to use very little cognitive and mental energy. Our brains like to save energy for a rainy day when we’re in trouble.’
But of course, like any positive psychology, there are points at which people can go overboard, and transform an adaptive behaviour, an exercise in self development, into a narcissistic personal project that irritates everyone around them.
‘We’ve all been at cocktail parties where we get bombarded with nonstop questions and it feels as if we’re being interrogated. You can definitely take curiosity too far in terms of probing too deeply, too quickly.’
‘There’s a guy that I used to know who lived in my block who was obsessed with civil war paraphernalia, I mean to the point where this was almost all that he talked about, his entire basement you’ve got flags, you’ve got Civil War Digest magazine—which by the way I cannot believe still exists in 2013, there is an actual magazine called Civil War Digest. It’s obsessive and it’s not surprising that he’s been divorced before, this is a very weird hobby to have, it’s curiosity that’s so extreme in one domain that nobody can go for the ride with you, it’s almost like painful for people to do anything else. The way I deal with the pain and stress of daily life we all face is I put all my curiosity into this one thing. Well that’s not really the best strategy for a rich, full, meaningful life.’
And as we get older, the quest to remain curious (within limits) becomes ever more important. Research into degenerative brain diseases like Alzheimer’s has shown on numerous occasions that remaining young at heart keeps you young in mind, Professor Kashdan says.
‘Older adults that show and are exploring a new terrain, that are trying on different social roles right, they’re interacting with younger adults, they’re taking college classes. They don’t show the same decline in white matter in their brains than people who develop the same routines and habits over the course of time. Seeking novelty is one of these strategies: novelty, exercise, omega-3 fatty acids and a healthy social network—you put those four together and you’re talking about a really simple strategy to reduce the risk of degenerative brain diseases.’
Listen to the full interview with Professor Kashdan on All in the Mind.