In early May, 2015, news services reported that Denmark would allow retailers to only offer card payment and allow them to ban cash as a means of transaction.

For quite a while, Scandinavia has been all about a cashless society. Sweden has taken it one step further with a vein scanner, where consumers can pay for their coffee by entering the last four digits of their mobile phone number into a sensor that scans their veins – presumably to see if they have Black, Platinum, Gold, Silver, or just boring old red blood.

But, will we ever see Australia go completely cashless?

I don’t think so. While Australians are also pretty good at adopting new technology, we are also pretty good at not giving up the old stuff. Prospect theory, which tells us that we value losses more than we value gains, would suggest that we are unlikely to give up the perceived usefulness of cash, at least in the short-term.

That said, at an incremental level, we are using our cards more and more, particularly in relation to the swipe and go PayWave and PayPass technology. According to a Westpac forecast made in 2014, there would be almost $3 billion in contactless transacations in Australia in 2015.

But, there are other reasons why we should be hesitant to give up cash totally, and these tend to be directly related to the hip-pocket nerve – well, kind of.

Research in psychology and neuroscience has suggested that there is a kind of emotional competition between the immediate pleasure of buying something, and an equally immediate pain of paying for that something.

A 2007 study published in the journal Neuron, found that the region of the brain associated with pain processing (the bilateral insula) activated when participants saw prices that were too high.

In the study, people were placed in an fMRI machine, given $20 cash and given the opportunity to buy something. What the researchers found was that the handing over of cash caused a sense of pain for them, or at least that’s what was observed happening in the brain.

We already know a lot of this from psychological experiments which show we have a tendency to “couple” or clump bits of information together in our minds. So, when we buy something with cash, we know straight away how much that thing is going to cost us. We also know that we no longer have that amount of money in our wallet or purse.

But when we use a plastic card, we are, ostensibly handing over something quite abstract. Whether it’s debit or credit, there is a degree of psychological and temporal distance. Most people don’t know exactly how much they have in their savings or credit account; they might have a general idea, but you can see that it is not the same as cash. It requires effort to check your credit or debit card balance, but looking in your wallet, as you are paying, requires next to no cognitive effort.

So, when you hand over your card, you don’t see the money disappear from your account (at least in any concrete way), and therefore, feel like you’ve lost anything. You’re also creating a kind of abstract distance between the payment of the bill, and the usage of the money that you have. And that is sometimes extended even more if you don’t actually get the bill for months after you have spent the money and consumed the product.

In addition, research tells us that people are more likely to buy unhealthy food, on average, when they pay using cards, as opposed to using cash. A study published in the Journal of Consumer Research in 2010 analysed the shopping behaviour of 1,000 households over a period of six months and found that using debit and credit cards led to a small, but statistically significant, increase in impulsive purchases of unhealthy products.

In one of the experiments, participants spent 40% more on “vice” product (such as chocolate biscuits or frozen cheesecakes) when they were using credit cards, than cash. The mode of payment didn’t affect the amount spent on “virtue” products (such as rolled oats).

The researchers even classified different types of spenders as “tightwads” and “spendthrifts”, and found that “tightwads” were likely to spend 56% more on impulse products when they used credit, than when they used cash. They also found that participants also thought “less” about their product when they chose vice products.

But, there is nuance in these broad findings. A different study found that if people were buying indulgent food such as chocolate cake for immediate consumption, the pain of using cash was offset by the excitement and anticipation of eating the delicious, exciting food.

So, the greater the pain of payment, the more we were to choose foods that we wouldn’t normally consider as part of a healthy diet, but only if we plan to eat them straight-away.

In one of the experiments, the researchers created a cafe afternoon snack menu, and found that people who paid with cash consumed close to 80 more calories than those who used a card. People who paid with cash consumed products higher in total fat (3g, or 15% more), salt (130 mg, or 17%), carbs (8g, or 13%) and sugar (1.5g or 6%), than those who used a card to pay.

Which returns us to the earlier idea that paying for something causes a sense of “pain”, and paying with cash hurts more than paying with a card. People are offsetting that pain by treating themselves to make themselves feel good after the trauma of spending money.

So, the moral to all of these stories? Put a freeze on your cards (maybe literally – stick your cards in the freezer for month and see how much you spend), don’t go shopping when you are in an fMRI machine, and eat more chocolate biscuits (well, that’s my interpretation of the findings).

This article is part of a series, On Happiness, examining what it means and how it might be achieved in the 21st century.

To pose the question of whether we can love happiness in today’s world feels a bit like asking whether the Pope is Catholic. Most of us believe we not only can love happiness, but that we should! Unfortunately, it is this very love of happiness that is leading many of us to experience more sadness.

Why, I hear you ask? Well let me start with an example. Imagine you have a goal and it is to become smarter. You decide to enrol in an science degree and major in astrophysics (being an astrophysicist is clearly going to make you smarter), you spend every spare minute playing Sudoku and purchase the latest “get smart quick” brainpower gimmick.

Over time you notice that indeed you are becoming smarter. You are winning more often at Scrabble and Trivial Pursuit and can amaze your friends with complex theories of black holes and dark energy.

Yet, you would still like to be smarter. You feel slightly disappointed that you are not as smart as you thought you might be. This feeling of disappointment motivates you to learn more and try harder until eventually you reach your goal.

Now imagine that your goal is to be happy. You buy the latest books on how to be happy, repeat positive sentiments to yourself in the mirror each morning and spend at least ten minutes a day holding a pencil between your teeth (it’s true, it actually does work!).

Upon reflection, however, you are not as happy as you would like to be. Now, the feeling of disappointment, rather than motivating you to try hard, tends to make you feel less happy. As a result, you are now further removed from your desired state of happiness.

The nature of goal pursuit itself predicts this ironic outcome. Aiming for a goal often involves feelings of disappointment along the way, which means that trying to be happy may be counter-productive.

The aim of this illustration is to show that the very act of trying to be happy ironically pushes happiness further away. The most powerful strategy for achieving happiness is to give up trying to be happy.

Living in a world of laughing clowns

Consistent with the above insights, current approaches within psychotherapy have begun to challenge how people relate to their own emotions. People walk out of these sessions more accepting of their negative emotions and holding less tightly to the need to be happy.

As they walk out of the therapist’s door, however, they are confronted with a world that is beset by happiness. From advertising on billboards and television screens to national campaigns designed to raise national levels of happiness, the value of happiness is promoted everywhere.

On the flip side, our Western world values sadness very differently. In some cases even everyday malaise is quickly pathologised and medicalised, and treated with drugs designed to return people to “normality”.

Indeed, there is an eerie similarity between our current approaches to our emotional worlds and the kind of dystopian society that Aldous Huxley envisaged in his book Brave New World.

Our own research has begun to highlight the possibility that “happiness cultures” may be responsible for reducing life satisfaction and increasing depression. This is especially true when people experience high levels of negative emotion and feel that these emotional states are socially devalued.

Experiencing this mismatch between our own emotional states and those that are considered valuable by the cultures that we live in may even leave us feeling lonely and socially disconnected.

So should we hate happiness?

I am certainly not suggesting we should all dress in black and revel in our shared despair. Being happy is a good thing and it is exactly this state that we are all so keen to achieve.

The point is that we often go about this in the wrong way. We fail to value negative experiences along the way and think that striving for more and more pleasure and enjoyment is the best way to achieve our happiness goals.

The fact is that endless pleasure, and endless happiness, quickly becomes very dull and even painful. For true well-being we need contrasts. Our negative experiences and negative feelings give meaning and context to happiness: they make us happier overall. As our own research suggests, pain has many positive consequences and experiencing pain is often a critical pathway to flourishing in life.

So can we love happiness? I think we can. It is not so much our love of happiness, but our dislike of sadness, the tendency to run away from pain and suffering and to see these experiences as a sign of failure, that leads to the problems I describe above.

Perhaps our problem with happiness comes about because we live in a world where we believe we can control everything in our lives. From our temperature-controlled homes to our capacity to insure against every possible risk, we believe we should have the same level of control over our emotional lives.

There is an oft-quoted saying (commonly found on a wall calendar at your grandmother’s house), “If you love something set it free”. Perhaps that is how we should be thinking about happiness?

This article is based on an essay in the collection On Happiness: New Ideas for the Twenty-First Century (UWA Publishing, June 2015).

You can read other articles in the series here.