Impact of Childhood Happiness on Adulthood Anxiety

But here's the thing about optimizing for happiness in childhood.

I firmly believe, and I've seen it over and over,

that the more you optimize for happiness in childhood,

the more you actually wire for anxiety in adulthood.

And so in the name of kind of making our kid happy,

what we really do is we develop a whole range of emotions

our kids learn are intolerable.

And if we think about what anxiety is later on,

kind of, okay, so let's say this kid later on.

Again, this is not one intervention.

This would be many, many patterns, right?

But whenever a kid is upset,

optimize for happiness,

optimize for happiness.

I think the thing we realize at a certain age,

it's different for everyone, 14, 18, 30, 50, whatever it is,

is when I'm really upset about something and something doesn't go my way,

there actually isn't always an off ramp to happy.

Like when I get fired from my job,

I'm not going to be happy in an hour.

I mean, and I mean this, I mean it,

but seriously, I guess maybe if I go to drugs,

I'll be happy right away.

I mean, maybe if I have something else, but feelings don't work that way.

And there's no one, I don't think,

who's just giving me a new job.

And so by the time I get to those hard moments in adult life,

either I've developed the ability to cope with feelings,

or I'm so accustomed to always expecting happiness that ironically,

the way I feel my distress is even more intense because

the gap is so big, right?

It's kind of like the light goes on of distress,

and I've always expected it to go totally off.

I don't even have a dimmer switch anymore.

It's just on is horrible, and I need it to go off.