How to spot unhealthy ideas that stop true happiness | Johann Hari

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Johann Hari: Of the nine causes of depression and anxiety I learned about for my book Lost Connections, there were a few that were really challenging for me because I realized how much I recognized them in myself. So one of the hardest – I have to tell you a story about something else first, but when I was, in 2009 on Christmas Eve—it makes it even sadder that this story happened on Christmas Eve. So I use to live on junk food. I used to eat appallingly.
And on Christmas Eve 2009 I went into my local KFC at lunchtime and I turned up and I gave my order—which is so disgusting I won’t even repeat it.
And the guy behind the counter said “Oh Johann, I’m so glad you’re here! Wait a minute.”
I was like, “Okay….”
So he walked off and he came back with all the other staff and they’d bought me a massive Christmas card. And they’d written in it “To our best customer.”
And so I was looking at this and my clogged heart sank. I thought, “This isn’t even the fried chicken shop I come to the most.” It was a very unfortunate low point.
But we all know, right, junk food has taken over our diets. Not admittedly to the extreme that I was, but junk food is increasingly dominating our diets and it’s making us physically sick.
One of the things that really shocked me in the research is that there’s really good evidence that something similar has happened with our minds. Our kind of junk values have taken over our minds and they’ve made us mentally sick.
So for thousands of years now philosophers have said, if you think life is about, you know, money and status and showing off you’re going to feel terrible, right? From Confucius on down, people have been warning us of that. But weirdly nobody had actually scientifically investigated it, until an incredible man I got to know called Professor Tim Kasser who’s at Knox University in Illinois.
So Professor Kasser knew when it comes to human motivation there’s basically—to put it crudely—two kinds of human motivation, right.
Imagine you play the piano. If you play the piano in the morning because you love it and it gives you joy, that’s an intrinsic motivation. You’re not doing it to get something out of it. You’re just doing it because that thing gives you joy, right?
Okay, now imagine you play the piano not because it gives you joy, but in a dive bar to pay the rent or because your parents are really pressuring you to be a piano maestro, or to impress a man, maybe some weird piano fetishist, right? That would be an extrinsic reason to play the piano. You’re not doing it for the experience itself. You’re doing it to get something out of it. You’re doing it one removed. You’re doing it to get something out of the experience.
Now we’re all a mixture of intrinsic and extrinsic values obviously, and we change throughout our lives. But Professor Kasser discovered some really fascinating things. The first thing is, the more your life is dominated by extrinsic values—the more you’re doing things not because you think they’re important but because of how you’ll look to other people, how you’ll seem on the outside—the more likely you are to become depressed and anxious. It’s a quite significant effect that’s been found in 22 studies with depression and 14 studies with anxiety.