James' World 2

Three times a day, my phone pings with a notification telling me that I have a new happiness survey to take. The survey, from TrackYourHappiness.org, asks me a series of questions about what I was doing the moment right before I take it, whether I wanted to be doing it, how focused I was on my task, how productive I was being, and how happy I felt about it all. I measure my emotional levels with a little toggle that slides from “bad” to “good.” Though the trackers’ authors offer a disclaimer that “correlation does not prove causation,” results from thousands of its users published in 2010 suggest that people are happier when they are focused.

After I took 100 surveys over about a month, that’s not what my results told me. I reported the most happiness when I was eating and the least when I was working. I was happier at home than I was outside or anywhere else.

My biggest takeaway, though, is that much of my life consists of things that I don’t particularly want to do, like folding laundry and struggling with the wording of a paragraph. Being reminded that most of my life is obligatory does not exactly spark joy.

As the weeks of survey-taking went by, I had another, more paralyzing thought: that this focus on my feelings was instilling a new kind of anxiety. Rather than just walking one of my kids home from school and contentedly listening to her chatter about sedimentary rocks, I was thinking about the survey’s infernal happiness toggle and where this experience ranked relative to the other moments I had tracked.

The survey is just one example from an increasingly crowded field of tools offering consumers the chance not just to contemplate their happiness but also to measure it, track it, schedule it, and optimize it. Every app store is overflowing with offerings like the Happiness Planner, Happiness 360°, Daylio, and more. Apple’s Health app has a mood tracker (with one of those damn toggles) built into all of its devices, and even my Fitbit offers mood tracking, with some fancy bonus features if I pay to upgrade to premium status.

According to Stephen Schueller, a psychologist who runs the technology and mental health lab at the University of California, Irvine, there are now thousands of these apps — so many that he used to run an entire site that reviewed their credibility, user experience, and transparency. How-to books about boosting your happiness in measurable ways are mainstays on best-seller lists. And there is no end to online courses and expensive products that make similar promises.

The deep attraction to these ideas and products ties together the decline in Americans’ mental health, which leaves many people desperate to find relief, and the mania for the optimized self, which in its most extreme form drives tech barons to spend small fortunes measuring every second of output from all 78 of their organs to maximize every bio function until they die.

But feelings aren’t the same as other kinds of health metrics, like steps and heart rate, and liver function. There is a great deal of disagreement on how even to measure happiness and fairly weak evidence that doing so makes us significantly happier. Less considered is the question: Could tracking happiness make us feel worse?

According to one study published early in the tracking fad, frequent “texting about happiness seemed to be particularly distressing among those with more negative emotional tendencies (depression and neuroticism)” and “may have drawn attention to their typically unpleasant emotional state, thus bearing the potential of perpetuating a downward spiral of satisfaction.”