This kind of pressure might seem inconceivable to us; after all, we probably aren’t Olympic athletes. But have you ever anchored your happiness in some way to a far-off goal that you could attain only at significant personal cost, that you thought would deliver to you the satisfaction you...

Here’s an existential riddle: What’s usually first prize in a pie-eating contest? Answer: More pie. So I hope you like pie.

The point of a good goal is to improve your quality of life by changing your day-to-day for the better, not to limp across the finish line and...

Dreams and goals are important because they give us a metric against which to measure progress; you don’t care if you’re getting closer to Rome unless you are trying to get to Rome. But what brings us true happiness is progress, not meeting a goal. Progress consistently b...

A little voice in your head always tells you that your very special dream, whether it’s Olympic gold or winning the presidency, will bring you bliss, so a lot of misery in pursuit of it is worthwhile. But that isn’t true, and the more emphasis you put on the end state, the more emotional ...

Researchers have found that frequent, small achievements tend to start a cycle of success and happiness much more than infrequent, big ones. Make sure you can break your long-term goals into smaller chunks—even into goals for individual days, if possible. You can have a victory each day a...

Worse than feeling nothing, you might subject yourself to what the self-improvement writer Stephanie Rose Zoccatelli calls the “post-achievement hangover”, a feeling of restlessness and mild depression in the days after a major milestone, such as graduating from college or gettin...

To pursue one big goal in the hope of attaining happiness is, ironically, to set yourself up for unhappiness. Buddhists see such goals as just another kind of worldly attachment that creates a cycle of craving and clinging. This principle is at the heart of Buddhism’s first noble...

Just as a wildly hypothetical example, say that, as a young child, someone told you that you could win a gold medal in figure skating and your life would be wonderful forever. But the journey is onerous, and a few years down the line, you realize that you don’t want the life of a professional ska...

Anti-anticipation potentially explains a lot of paradoxical behavior, such as why New Year’s resolutions usually fail in the long run, even after initial success. The imagined sustained bliss after, say, saving more money is a mirage; your prize for success is saving money, forever. The p...

Goal attainment can even bring problems. Some researchers have argued that when a goal is a true end point for progress, the cessation of forward motion can lead to a feeling of emptiness