Happiness is good. That’s the first thing we were taught in life. It’s something we should chase after in life so that we don’t end up doing something that slowly chips away at us. Every lifestyle influencer on the internet now says to “protect your peace” and put yourself first.
Now, happiness eclipses everything in today’s society. The belief is that we should strive for happiness, help others to do the same, and the government should be in full support of its people as they work to reach this goal. But what happens when happiness starts to be let go for the sake of success? Can they co-exist in one lifestyle and outcome?
Around August is when students of all ages all around the world start to feel the pressure set in. The school air motivates most students to strive for success, academic validation, and satisfaction of their goals. Although this mindset - albeit inspiring - can also be draining for others as the line between academics and life outside of academics starts to blur indefinitely.
I, myself, am a victim of this. Like most students, I strive for success. The “Rory Gilmore, High achieving, striving in their extracurriculars, iced coffee studying at starbucks” pinterest board. My goal was never valedictorian, but the academic validation latched onto me without realisation until I was 7 months into my High School career.
It’s well known information that this is common for most HS students. Constantly striving for the next full mark on the test, the next main role in the school production, starter on a sports team. We’ll get stuck in this constant cycle to work towards the next goal, without ever looking back to see how far we’ve come. Even though most students don’t like to acknowledge it, this is what slowly chips away at us. The amount of time and work that students invest into their success will completely outweigh how much credit they give themselves for these achievements.
The theories of happiness is a collection of different theories in psychology that research how well happiness can be achieved. Although these theories are not flawless, they’re a great tool to explain and understand how different people will “digest” happiness and positive emotions differently, specifically how these emotions (or lack thereof) can explain the source of burnout for different students.
Theory 1: Positive Psychology
This theory focuses on how happiness is not just a state of emotion where negative emotions don’t exist, rather the engagement of positive emotions, actions, relationships, and events that make happiness what it is for each person. Emphasising on the enhancement of happiness, since it’s relatively unrealistic for a student to cut out everything that brings them negative emotion in their lives - especially when a student’s lifestyle is mostly out of their control.
Theory 2: Adaptation Level-Theory
According to this theory, each person has a different “default” state of happiness that completely disregards the state of negative emotions in that time too. This default state of happiness is measured up against a current or past state of happiness to judge whether or not this event is “good” or not. This theory explains academic burnout to a tea. If getting consistent full marks on a test has been normalised and become the default state of happiness in a person, the brain would judge getting good grades as a normal event, and nothing to consider a significant achievement. This leads students to gloss over all achievements of any size that were made, since we stopped recognizing them as achievements in the first place.
Theory 3: Flow theory
This last theory (out of the many happiness theories that exist in psychology) believe that happiness is produced when people are doing an activity that fully engages their passions and interests. “Flow” is identified for this theory as a state of intense concentration, where people lose a sense of time and self-consciousness because of how deeply they’re absorbed into these activities.
Although these theories are entirely contradicting each other at times, I like to compile them to use as a method to my madness. When a semester starts to come to an end and teachers suddenly start giving out written assessments every hour to cram into a singular week, I’ll use these techniques of self care and self help to avoid burnout and signs of apathy.
Self care utilising these theories can look like romanticising academic life to further motivate oneself to study, engaging in activities that support one’s passion and interests, practising gratitude - the “Glass half-full” mindset, and most importantly - celebrating achievements as they come. As a high school student in an academically rigorous school setting, I’ve learnt that there isn’t ever going to be a perfect time to celebrate all achievements that fall into your lap. We have to take them as they come. Irregardless of any theory that psychology may produce; humans need a sense of validation to keep going, to associate an achievement with a positive memory so that the brain can want more of it - producing its own motivation to work harder for the next one.
One of the biggest methods that I’ve found to help manage a reaction to a bad grade and my mental health regarding academics during my freshman year of high school was to challenge negative self-talk. Why do I choose to put myself down when these events are out of my control? Is the blame that I put on myself justified or does this come from a place of anxiety and low self confidence? The most important thing is to be honest with yourself.
It’s essential to remember in today’s society, with such high expectations placed upon children who are still developing and going through this process of self searching, figuring out what they want to do for the rest of their lives, that it’s okay to pause, breathe, and look back at what you’ve already accomplished, since this can become a later source of inspiration and motivation as we go onwards into the transition to adulthood.
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