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Alexei comments on Attention control is critical for changing/increasing/altering motivation - Less Wrong
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Interesting. I wonder if this explains the reason why I'm usually happier when I don't focus/constantly ask myself if I'm happy. The theory would explain it like so: I ask myself if I'm happy, and I notice all the things that are preventing me from being optimally happy. As I keep asking myself, I become better at noticing those things, thus becoming less happy.
At the moment, the balance of evidence supports CBT as the most effective therapeutic approach for depression. And CBT is in large part based on training yourself to pay attention to positive thoughts while ignoring depressive ones.
So, it would appear that you wonder along the right lines here. :)
It would seem to follow that CBT causes patients' ability to read the information conveyed by their depressive ruminations to deteriorate. Are there trade-offs in CBT for depression larger than we're aware of?
That is possible, but note that depression itself is massively bad for, well, anything, including the quality of thoughts.
Certainly that's true of severe depression, but mild depression carries some intellectual benefits. Greater rationality seems to be among them.
My intuition is that you ask whether you are happy because you doubt that you are. So you already start negatively primed.
Instead, try to remember three good things that happened to you recently, and ignore everything else. Even better, write those things on the paper. Every day. (This idea is from the book "Learned Optimism" by Martin Seligman, and this article seems to support it. The theory is: if you focus on something, you remember it better; what you remember guides your next behavior.)