Is Contentment an Underrated Goal in Life?

Many of us seek happiness as a guiding aim in our lives. But what about being content? Are feelings of contentment just a lesser, diluted form of happiness—or something distinct and valuable to pursue on their own?

A recent study aimed to find out.

In the study, emotion researchers first tried to figure out the unique qualities of feeling contentment. To do that, they surveyed different groups of American people, asking them to describe contentment in comparison to other emotions, in general, and positive emotions, specifically.

For example, in one case, participants were asked to write short stories about a time when they felt contentment, happiness, joy, or relief. These stories were later edited to remove specific references to the emotions and then analyzed by people who didn’t know about the experiment, to see how contentment stacked up to the other feelings.

What the researchers found is that contentment is distinct from other emotions in certain ways. Generally, content people feel less “activated” (meaning, calmer rather than excited), are more present-tense-oriented, and have less desire to acquire things, in comparison to people feeling other emotions. For researcher Yang Bai, this indicates that contentment is a unique, positive emotion—not just a lesser form of happiness.

“We are proving that contentment is a positive emotion, and it’s different from prototypical positive emotions, like happiness and joy,” she says. “We think it’s important [to recognize this], because low-activation emotions can also be positive.”

To understand how being content might relate to someone’s well-being, Bai and her team asked another group of participants to rate their levels of various emotions, their overall life satisfaction, and their psychological well-being, measured in terms of their autonomy, personal growth, self-acceptance, positive relationships, purpose in life, and environmental mastery (their ability to use resources around them wisely). They found that people who were more content were also more satisfied with life, more self-accepting, and more purposeful, and had more positive relationships and environmental mastery—even after accounting for their levels of other positive emotions.

To Bai, this suggests that contentment contributes to well-being above and beyond other positive emotions.

“A lot of positive emotions have their unique impact on well-being. But there’s a unique role that contentment is playing here,” says Bai.

What’s special about contentment?

What could explain the unique experience of contentment? To figure that out, Bai and her team tried another experiment.

Three hundred young adults in the U.S. were divided into three groups and randomly assigned to recall and write about an experience of either contentment, pride, or joy (to help induce those feelings). Afterward, they reported how they felt and how self-accepting and satisfied with life they were.

What the researchers found is that people who were content were also more self-accepting than people who felt joy or pride, which seemed to explain their significantly greater life satisfaction.

“Compar[ed] to other positive emotions, contentment makes us more accepting of ourselves,” says Bai, which means “it can bring [people] the strength to accept the good and bad sides of their lives,” she adds.

Interestingly, contentment didn’t seem to lead to more personal growth or autonomy, though. According to Bai, that doesn’t mean contentment has a negative impact on those—just that they didn’t stand out as particular benefits of contentment. It could be that other positive emotions are more likely to help in those areas of well-being, while contentment helps in other ways.

Of course, joy and pride are positive emotions, too, and worthy of cultivating for their own sake. But this study makes a case that calmer emotions, like contentment, are also important. Bai says that people in the U.S. too often equate contentment with being lazy when, in fact, it seems to be a “magic” emotion with an unexpected superpower.

Though her team only studied people living in the United States, and more studies are needed, she’s optimistic that the benefits of feeling content are likely to be universal—and maybe even stronger in countries that already value contentment.

“Low-activating emotions, like contentment, can sometimes bring surprisingly large benefits to our well-being,” she says. “We should all be trying to cultivate it.”