happiness is a state of mind do you agree essay

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Essay on Happiness is State of Mind

The happiness that we experience in our lives is not just about what happens to us but how we perceive it. Whether or not people are happy depends on their mental attitude and the choices they make.

What is Happiness?

Happiness is a feeling that’s different for everyone. Some people believe in happiness as an emotion, while others think of it as a state of mind. One thing that can increase your level of happiness is to find your purpose in life and make decisions based on what you want out of life rather than listening to other people or following the status quo. This blog post will explore how one person found their path in life and how they increased their level of happiness by doing so.

Happiness is an abstract idea that we all strive for. The quest to find the perfect balance of work, life and personal happiness can seem overwhelming at times with so many factors involved in our overall well-being. This blog post will explore the definition of happiness and how it varies from person to person.

How to be happy?

In today’s society, we are constantly told that being happy is a worthwhile goal. But in reality, it can be quite difficult to achieve this state of mind. There are many factors that contribute to one’s happiness level: genetics, personality type, and environment among others.

If you want to feel happier more than you feel positive emotions, write down your thoughts. The best way to do this is to fill a notebook and write everything that comes to your mind. It can be conversations with yourself or even journaling. It doesn’t need to be writing that you practice growing. Simply write everything that comes into your mind and try to understand where your thoughts come from. By understanding where your thoughts come from, you learn how to stop them. The purpose of writing down what comes into your mind is to gain functional knowledge which helps stop unwanted or harmful thoughts.

When you see negative emotions you tend to think negative thoughts. It is this negative pattern that manifests itself in your behavior. When you are feeling bad, it is important to stop and think about what’s going on in your life. By practicing mindfulness, compassion, and forgiveness we can learn how to heal wounds from the past by thinking of new ways they happen with a more positive outlook.

When something hurts us deeply or causes pain that never stops no matter what we do there will be times when all feelings seem foggy; but doing things like taking care of ourselves through being mindful while also having an open heart for others helps us see these negative emotions as lessons rather than failures so that eventually our hurtful thoughts may change into lighthearted ones

The benefits of being happy

It’s not always easy to find the time or energy to do things that make us feel happy. However, we know that happiness is a crucial part of life. The happier we are, the better our lives will be. There are many benefits to being happy including:

less stress and worry;
feeling good about yourself;
a healthier heart and mind;
stronger immune system;
higher self-esteem and confidence in your abilities.

Example of being happy in life

Thankfully for us humans, wisdom comes with age. Writing down bad emotions also teaches you how to privilege other’s perspectives. For example, if you are feeling angry with someone, you can remember what the person said during their interaction and the point that you both reached. You may feel insulted but then remember that other people also have prejudices and can think things while being sad.

Learning to privilege other’s perspectives also helps you not believe that everyone thinks in the same manner. Years of reflecting on one’s thoughts and feelings often come with minor changes in thinking which makes us even happier.

Happiness could be described as a state of well-being, contentment, and satisfaction. To be happy requires an understanding of the benefits that come with being happy. We all need to find our own way to stay positive in life; it’s something we should work on every day so that we can enjoy ourselves more often. It may take some time but once you start feeling happier, your worries will become less burdensome and easier to deal with because they won’t consume you anymore. Living without anxiety or stress doesn’t have to feel like a pipe dream – it’s possible if you make changes today!

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Happiness is a state of mind: 8 ways you can achieve it

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Understanding that happiness is a state of mind rather than something to be obtained is a key life lesson. Dee Marques outlines eight ways you can consciously choose to be more joyful.

Happiness is a state of mind: 8 top tips.

True happiness is not a temporary feeling that comes and goes, but rather something that guides our thoughts and our reactions to what happens in our lives. Many of our choices are automatic. This is how our brains work, and thank goodness for that, because otherwise we wouldn’t be able to function. But it’s in our power to make conscious choices to ensure happiness is a state of mind in our everyday lives. Here are eight ways to make that happen.

1. Trick your brain

2. Count your blessings

3. start your day the right way.

Instead of starting the day in a rush, set the alarm 10 or 15 minutes before your usual wake up time and get in the habit of meditating . With some practice, this will give you greater clarity so you can appreciate the best things in life and become stronger in the face of adversity. There are many useful techniques, but mindfulness meditation is particularly good at training your brain to perceive that happiness is a state of mind.

• JOIN US! Share your ideas about happiness with our open and inspired community •

4. Change perspective

Some years ago, I went through a rough patch and hated everything. The gloomy British weather didn’t make things any easier. The lack of colour and sunlight got the worst of me and magnified other problems I was struggling with. One day I got on a plane to visit relatives, and few minutes after taking off we pushed through clouds and suddenly I was floating in a sunny, peaceful space. All I had to do to be in a different world was gain altitude.

“You can trick your brain into thinking that happiness is a state of mind with one single gesture: a smile.”

The metaphor is obvious: looking at things from a different “altitude” can make us perceive the world in a different way . It may take lots of practice, but once you get good at it, you’ll realise that happiness is a state of mind that relies on your perspective.

5. Find and give support

Isolation and loneliness are all around us and can make us feel miserable even when we have reasons to be joyful. We may not feel like socialising when we feel down, but don’t shut the doors to those who care about us. Improving the quality of our interactions with others is a crucial step if you want to truly experience how happiness is a state of mind.

Sharing feelings can help build stronger bonds and feel supported and creates positive feedback loops in yourself and in others. Why not plan exercise or meditation sessions with friends, or take up a new hobby together?

6. Do a kind act a day

A few months ago, a friend of mine was going through a difficult situation, but she didn’t want the circumstances to take over her life. She decided to go out every Tuesday and do something kind for others, even though she didn’t feel like leaving the house. She’s since become known as “Happy Tuesday lady”, and needless to say, her mental health has improved massively! And no wonder. Science shows that the power of kindness is real – being nice is proven to boost your mood, lower stress and reduce anxiety among other benefits. RELATED: Random acts of kindness – 22 ideas to spread happiness

7. Find meaning and purpose

Many people go through life doing what they’re supposed to be doing. Do the things you do bring a you sense of meaning or purpose? If not, you’re missing out on the path to happiness. One of the biggest joys in life is exploring and discovering what we’re here for and what we can contribute to the world – or at least, to those around us.

RELATED: How to find meaning in life: 7 strategies

8. Cut down sources of unhappiness

Round-up: happiness is a state of mind.

I won’t deny it: life's not easy and sometimes it’s plain tough and frustrating. The work towards a happy way of being is constant. It won’t happen overnight and you should be ready to fight setbacks. Facing obstacles along the way doesn’t mean there’s no hope or you’re losing the battle.

Even in tough times, you can build the resources you need to experience that happiness is a state of mind. Like writer and personal development expert Dale Carnegie said, “it isn’t what you have or who you are or where you are or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy, it's what you think about it.” ●

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Posted August 29, 2021

Of course happiness is a state of mind. We can CHOOSE to be happy even when we're not. I love these tips, especially tricking your brain by smiling. Next time you're feeling down, try putting a smile on your face, even if it's forced. Hold it there a moment or two and watch how that forced smile turns into a real smile and changes your mood. I would add a couple more, if I may: Gratitude and a morning routine are absolute game changers for happiness and personal development. And, don't believe everything you think

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Posted August 17, 2021

I definitely agree that happiness is a state of mind, but it is sometimes easier said than done 🌥 It can be difficult to 'find' that state of mind when life is tough and you're going through something challenging, and it might be a real struggle to 'make yourself' feel happy. I do however feel that the thinking that happiness is a state of mind is comforting too, it means I have it within me and somewhat control of my own happiness 🌈

Posted March 4, 2021 (edited)

https://changesareallowed.com/happiness-a-state-of-mind-to-achieve/ I also want to share my thoughts, Buying luxury and making money may make you happiness for some time but it doesn't give you a happy state of mind. The truth is that Happiness lies with you and you just need to unleash it using these methods mentioned in this article.

Posted December 23, 2020

Happiness is a state of mind which comes from within yourself. We all have happiness inside ourselves. But, it is often covered by several layers of negative emotions we take from the situations around us.

Posted October 23, 2020

happiness is about finding harmony and being assertive standing up for yourself stop comparing to other people learn to find your own happiness and find your own destiny

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Last Updated on March 26, 2023 by Mike Robinson

The Power of Perception: Why Happiness is a State of Mind

Happiness is often thought of as an elusive state of being that we can only achieve through external circumstances like wealth, success, or a happy relationship. But what if I told you that happiness is a state of mind that you can cultivate regardless of your circumstances? It all comes down to perception.

What is perception?

Perception is the way we interpret and make sense of the world around us. It’s our subjective experience of reality, shaped by our thoughts, beliefs, and experiences. Our perception is influenced by a range of factors, including our upbringing, culture, environment, and personal biases.

Perception vs. reality

The way we perceive the world is not necessarily the way it really is. In fact, our perceptions can be quite different from reality. For example, imagine you’re walking down a dark alley at night. Your heart is racing, and you feel scared and on edge. Suddenly, a shadow moves, and you jump. But upon closer inspection, you realize that it’s just a stray cat. Your perception of the situation was shaped by your fear and anxiety, making you see danger where there was none.

Perception vs. attention

Attention is another thing that affects our perception of things. Attention is a big part of the difference between what is sensed and what is perceived. Imagine you are at a party where there is music, people talking, and people laughing. You and a friend are having an interesting conversation, so you stop paying attention to everything else. If someone came up to you and asked what song just ended, you probably wouldn’t be able to tell them.

The impact of perception on happiness

Our perception has a significant impact on our emotional well-being. How we perceive ourselves, others, and the world around us can determine whether we feel happy or unhappy. If we have a negative perception of ourselves or our circumstances, we’re likely to feel unhappy, even if, objectively, our lives are going well. On the other hand, if we have a positive perception of ourselves and our circumstances, we’re more likely to feel happy and content, even in the face of adversity.

The science behind perception and happiness

The link between perception and happiness is not just a philosophical concept; it’s also backed by science. Research has shown that our thoughts and beliefs have a direct impact on our brain chemistry and physiology. When we experience positive emotions like joy, gratitude, or love, our brains release neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin, which make us feel good. Conversely, when we experience negative emotions like fear, anger, or sadness, our brains release stress hormones like cortisol, which can have harmful effects on our health over time.

How to change your perception and boost happiness

If perception determines happiness, then it stands to reason that changing our perception can lead to greater happiness. But how do we do that? Here are some practical tips for cultivating a more positive outlook on life:

Techniques for cultivating a positive mindset

One of the most effective ways to change your perception is to cultivate a positive mindset . This involves actively seeking out and focusing on the positive aspects of your life rather than dwelling on the negative. Some techniques for cultivating a positive mindset include:

Practicing gratitude: Take time each day to reflect on the things you’re grateful for, no matter how small they may seem. This can help shift your focus from what you lack to what you have.
Surrounding yourself with positivity: Spend time with people who uplift and inspire you, and avoid those who bring you down. Engage in activities that make you feel happy and fulfilled.
Reframing negative thoughts: When you catch yourself thinking negatively, try to reframe your thoughts in a more positive light. For example, instead of thinking, “I can’t do this,” reframe it as, “I can do this with practice and effort.”

The role of gratitude and mindfulness in perception

Gratitude and mindfulness are two practices that can help shift our perception in a positive direction. Gratitude involves focusing on the things we’re grateful for, while mindfulness involves being present and aware of our thoughts and feelings without judgment. Practicing gratitude and mindfulness can help us cultivate a greater sense of appreciation and awareness, which can lead to greater happiness.

The power of visualization and self-talk

Visualization and self-talk are two powerful tools for changing our perception. Visualization involves imagining yourself in a positive scenario, such as achieving a goal or overcoming a challenge. Self-talk involves using positive affirmations to reprogram your subconscious mind. By visualizing positive outcomes and using positive self-talk, we can train our minds to perceive our lives in a more positive light.

Overcoming negativity bias and cognitive distortions

Finally, it’s important to be aware of negativity bias and cognitive distortions, which can skew our perception in a negative direction. Negativity bias refers to our tendency to focus on negative experiences and ignore positive ones. Cognitive distortions are patterns of thinking that are irrational or inaccurate, such as catastrophizing, all-or-nothing thinking, or jumping to conclusions. By being aware of these biases and distortions, we can learn to challenge and reframe them, leading to a more positive perception of our lives.

Conclusion: Embrace the power of perception for a happier life.

At the end of the day, happiness truly is a state of mind. By changing our perception, we can change our emotional well-being and lead happier, more fulfilling lives. While it’s not always easy to cultivate a positive mindset, the benefits are well worth the effort. So, if you want to unlock the power of perception and experience true happiness, start by focusing on the positive, practicing gratitude and mindfulness, using visualization and self-talk, and challenging negativity bias and cognitive distortions. With time and practice, you can transform your perception and create a happier, more fulfilling life for yourself.

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There are roughly two philosophical literatures on “happiness,” each corresponding to a different sense of the term. One uses ‘happiness’ as a value term, roughly synonymous with well-being or flourishing. The other body of work uses the word as a purely descriptive psychological term, akin to ‘depression’ or ‘tranquility’. An important project in the philosophy of happiness is simply getting clear on what various writers are talking about: what are the important meanings of the term and how do they connect? While the “well-being” sense of happiness receives significant attention in the contemporary literature on well-being, the psychological notion is undergoing a revival as a major focus of philosophical inquiry, following on recent developments in the science of happiness. This entry focuses on the psychological sense of happiness (for the well-being notion, see the entry on well-being ). The main accounts of happiness in this sense are hedonism, the life satisfaction theory, and the emotional state theory. Leaving verbal questions behind, we find that happiness in the psychological sense has always been an important concern of philosophers. Yet the significance of happiness for a good life has been hotly disputed in recent decades. Further questions of contemporary interest concern the relation between the philosophy and science of happiness, as well as the role of happiness in social and political decision-making.

1.1 Two senses of ‘happiness’

1.2 clarifying our inquiry, 2.1 the chief candidates, 2.2 methodology: settling on a theory, 2.3 life satisfaction versus affect-based accounts, 2.4 hedonism versus emotional state, 2.5 hybrid accounts, 3.1 can happiness be measured, 3.2 empirical findings: overview, 3.3 the sources of happiness, 4.1 doubts about the value of happiness, 4.2 restoring happiness to the theory of well-being, 4.3 is happiness overrated, 5.1 normative issues, 5.2 mistakes in the pursuit of happiness, 5.3 the politics of happiness, other internet resources, related entries, 1. the meanings of ‘happiness’.

What is happiness? This question has no straightforward answer, because the meaning of the question itself is unclear. What exactly is being asked? Perhaps you want to know what the word ‘happiness’ means. In that case your inquiry is linguistic. Chances are you had something more interesting in mind: perhaps you want to know about the thing , happiness, itself. Is it pleasure, a life of prosperity, something else? Yet we can’t answer that question until we have some notion of what we mean by the word.

Philosophers who write about “happiness” typically take their subject matter to be either of two things, each corresponding to a different sense of the term:

A state of mind
A life that goes well for the person leading it

In the first case our concern is simply a psychological matter. Just as inquiry about pleasure or depression fundamentally concerns questions of psychology, inquiry about happiness in this sense—call it the (long-term) “psychological sense”—is fundamentally the study of certain mental states. What is this state of mind we call happiness? Typical answers to this question include life satisfaction, pleasure, or a positive emotional condition.

Having answered that question, a further question arises: how valuable is this mental state? Since ‘happiness’ in this sense is just a psychological term, you could intelligibly say that happiness isn’t valuable at all. Perhaps you are a high-achieving intellectual who thinks that only ignoramuses can be happy. On this sort of view, happy people are to be pitied, not envied. The present article will center on happiness in the psychological sense.

In the second case, our subject matter is a kind of value , namely what philosophers nowadays tend to call prudential value —or, more commonly, well-being , welfare , utility or flourishing . (For further discussion, see the entry on well-being . Whether these terms are really equivalent remains a matter of dispute, but this article will usually treat them as interchangeable.) “Happiness” in this sense concerns what benefits a person, is good for her, makes her better off, serves her interests, or is desirable for her for her sake. To be high in well-being is to be faring well, doing well, fortunate, or in an enviable condition. Ill-being, or doing badly, may call for sympathy or pity, whereas we envy or rejoice in the good fortune of others, and feel gratitude for our own. Being good for someone differs from simply being good, period: perhaps it is always good, period, for you to be honest; yet it may not always be good for you , as when it entails self-sacrifice. Not coincidentally, the word ‘happiness’ derives from the term for good fortune, or “good hap,” and indeed the terms used to translate it in other languages often have similar roots. In this sense of the term—call it the “well-being sense”—happiness refers to a life of well-being or flourishing: a life that goes well for you.

Importantly, to ascribe happiness in the well-being sense is to make a value judgment : namely, that the person has whatever it is that benefits a person. [ 1 ] If you and I and have different values, then we may well differ about which lives we consider happy. I might think Genghis Khan had a happy life, because I think what matters for well-being is getting what you want; while you deny this because you think a life of evildoing, however “successful,” is sad and impoverished.

Theories of well-being—and hence of “happiness” in the well-being sense—come in three basic flavors, according to the best-known taxonomy (Parfit 1984): hedonism, desire theories, and objective list theories. Whereas hedonists identify well-being roughly with experiences of pleasure, desire theorists equate it with the satisfaction of one’s desires— actually getting what you want, versus merely having certain experiences. Both hedonism and desire theories are in some sense subjectivist, since they ground well-being in the individual’s subjective states. Objective list theorists, by contrast, think some things benefit us independently of our attitudes or feelings: there are objective prudential goods. Aristotelians are the best-known example: they take well-being ( eudaimonia ) to consist in a life of virtuous activity—or more broadly, the fulfillment of our human capacities. A passive but contented couch potato may be getting what he wants, and he may enjoy it. But he would not, on Aristotelian and other objective list theories, count as doing well, or leading a happy life.

Now we can sharpen the initial question somewhat: when you ask what happiness is, are you asking what sort of life benefits a person? If so, then your question concerns matters of value, namely what is good for people—the sort of thing that ethical theorists are trained to address. Alternatively, perhaps you simply want to know about the nature of a certain state of mind—happiness in the psychological sense. In this case, some sort of psychological inquiry will be needed, either philosophical or scientific. (Laypersons often have neither sort of question in mind, but are really asking about the sources of happiness. Thus it might be claimed, say, that “happiness is being with good friends.” This is not a view about the nature or definition of happiness, but rather a theory about the sorts of things that tend to make us happy. It leaves unanswered, or takes for granted, the question of just what happiness is , such that friends are a good source of it.)

In short, philosophical “theories of happiness” can be about either of at least two different things: well-being, or a state of mind. [ 2 ] Accordingly, there are essentially two bodies of philosophical literature about “happiness” and two sets of debates about its nature, though writers often fail to distinguish them. Such failures have generated much confusion, sometimes yielding bogus disagreements that prove to be merely verbal. [ 3 ] For instance, some psychologists identify “happiness” with attitudes of life satisfaction while remaining neutral on questions of value, or whether Bentham, Mill, Aristotle, or any other thinker about the good life was correct. Such researchers employ the term in the psychological sense. Yet it is sometimes objected against such claims that life satisfaction cannot suffice for “happiness” because other things, like achievement or knowledge, matter for human well-being. The objectors are confused: their opponents have made no claims about well-being at all, and the two “sides,” as it were, are simply using ‘happiness’ to talk about different things. One might just as sensibly object to an economist’s tract on “banks” that it has nothing to say about rivers and streams.

Which use of ‘happiness’ corresponds to the true meaning of the term in contemporary English? Arguably, both. The well-being usage clearly dominates in the historical literature through at least the early modern era, for instance in translations of the ancient Greeks’ ‘ eudaimonia ’ or the Latin ‘ beatitudo ’, though this translation has long been a source of controversy. Jefferson’s famous reference to “the pursuit of happiness” probably employed the well-being sense. Even later writers such as Mill may have used the term in its well-being sense, though it is often difficult to tell since well-being itself is often taken to consist in mental states like pleasure. In ordinary usage, the abstract noun ‘happiness’ often invites a well-being reading. And the locution ‘happy life ’ may not naturally take a psychological interpretation, for the simple reason that lives aren’t normally regarded as psychological entities.

Contrast this with the very different meaning that seems to attach to talk of “ being happy.” Here it is much less clear that we are talking about a property of a person’s life; it seems rather to be a property of the person herself. To be happy, it seems, is just to be in a certain sort of psychological state or condition. Similarly when we say that so-and-so “is happy” (as opposed to saying that he is leading a happy life). This psychological usage, arguably, predominates in the current vernacular. Researchers engaged in the self-described “science of happiness” usually do not take themselves to be making value judgments when they proclaim individuals in their studies to be happy. Nor, when asserting that a life satisfaction study shows Utahans to be happier than New Yorkers, are they committing themselves to the tendentious claim that Utahans are better off . (If they are, then the psychology journals that are publishing this research may need to revise their peer-review protocols to include ethicists among their referees.) And the many recent popular books on happiness, as well as innumerable media accounts of research on happiness, nearly all appear to take it for granted that they are talking about nothing more than a psychological condition.

Henceforth ‘happiness’ will be used in the long-term psychological sense, unless otherwise specified. Note, however, that a number of important books and other works on “happiness” in recent decades have employed the well-being sense of the term. Books of this sort appear to include Almeder 2000, Annas 1993, 2011, Bloomfield 2014, Cahn and Vitrano 2015, Kenny and Kenny 2006, McMahon 2005, McPherson 2020, Noddings 2003, Russell 2013, White 2006, and Vitrano 2014, though again it is not always clear how a given author uses the term. For discussion of the well-being notion, see the entry on well-being . [ 4 ]

2. Theories of happiness

Philosophers have most commonly distinguished two accounts of happiness: hedonism , and the life satisfaction theory. Hedonists identify happiness with the individual’s balance of pleasant over unpleasant experience, in the same way that welfare hedonists do. [ 5 ] The difference is that the hedonist about happiness need not accept the stronger doctrine of welfare hedonism; this emerges clearly in arguments against the classical Utilitarian focus on happiness as the aim of social choice. Such arguments tend to grant the identification of happiness with pleasure, but challenge the idea that this should be our primary or sole concern, and often as well the idea that happiness is all that matters for well-being.

Life satisfaction theories identify happiness with having a favorable attitude toward one’s life as a whole. This basic schema can be filled out in a variety of ways, but typically involves some sort of global judgment: an endorsement or affirmation of one’s life as a whole. This judgment may be more or less explicit, and may involve or accompany some form of affect. It may also involve or accompany some aggregate of judgments about particular items or domains within one’s life. [ 6 ]

A third theory, the emotional state view, departs from hedonism in a different way: instead of identifying happiness with pleasant experience, it identifies happiness with an agent’s emotional condition as a whole, of what is often called “emotional well-being.” [ 7 ] This includes nonexperiential aspects of emotions and moods (or perhaps just moods), and excludes pleasures that don’t directly involve the individual’s emotional state. It might also include a person’s propensity for experiencing various moods, which can vary over time, though several authors have argued against this suggestion (e.g., Hill 2007, Klausen 2015, Rossi 2018). Happiness on such a view is more nearly the opposite of depression or anxiety—a broad psychological condition—whereas hedonistic happiness is simply opposed to unpleasantness. For example, a deeply distressed individual might distract herself enough with constant activity to maintain a mostly pleasant existence—broken only by tearful breakdowns during the odd quiet moment—thus perhaps counting as happy on a hedonistic but not emotional state view. The states involved in happiness, on an emotional state view, can range widely, far more so that the ordinary notion of mood or emotion. On one proposal, happiness involves three broad categories of affective state, including “endorsement” states like joy versus sadness, “engagement” states like flow or a sense of vitality, and “attunement” states like tranquility, emotional expansiveness versus compression, and confidence. Given the departures from commonsensical notions of being in a “good mood,” happiness is characterized in this proposal as “psychic affirmation,” or “psychic flourishing” in pronounced forms.

A fourth family of views, hybrid theories , attempts an irenic solution to our diverse intuitions about happiness: identify happiness with both life satisfaction and pleasure or emotional state, perhaps along with other states such as domain satisfactions. The most obvious candidate here is subjective well-being , which is typically defined as a compound of life satisfaction, domain satisfactions, and positive and negative affect. (Researchers often seem to identify happiness with subjective well-being, sometimes with life satisfaction, and perhaps most commonly with emotional or hedonic state.) The chief appeal of hybrid theories is their inclusiveness: all the components of subjective well-being seem important, and there is probably no component of subjective well-being that does not at times get included in “happiness” in ordinary usage.

How do we determine which theory is correct? Traditional philosophical methods of conceptual or linguistic analysis can give us some guidance, indicating that some accounts offer a better fit with the ordinary concept of happiness. Thus it has been argued that hedonism is false to the concept of happiness as we know it; the intuitions taken to support hedonism point instead to an emotional state view (Haybron 2001). And some have argued that life satisfaction is compatible with profoundly negative emotional states like depression—a suffering artist might not value emotional matters much, and wholeheartedly affirm her life (Carson 1981, Davis 1981b, Haybron 2005, Feldman 2010). Yet it might seem counterintuitive to deem such a person happy. At the same time, people do sometimes use ‘happiness’ to denote states of life satisfaction: life satisfaction theories do seem faithful to some ordinary uses of ‘happiness’. The trouble is that HAPPINESS appears to be a “mongrel concept,” as Ned Block (1995) called the concept of consciousness: the ordinary notion is something of a mess. We use the term to denote different things in different contexts, and often have no clear notion of what we are referring to. This suggests that accounts of happiness must be somewhat revisionary, and that we must assess theories on grounds other than simple fidelity to the lay concept of happiness—“descriptive adequacy,” in Sumner’s (1996) terms. One candidate is practical utility: which conception of happiness best answers to our interests in the notion? We talk about happiness because we care about it. The question is why we care about it, and which psychological states within the extension of the ordinary term make the most sense of this concern. Even if there is no simple answer to the question what happiness is, it may well turn out that our interests in happiness cluster so strongly around a particular psychological kind that happiness can best, or most profitably, be understood in terms of that type of state (Haybron 2003). Alternatively, we may choose to distinguish different varieties of happiness. It will be less important how we use the word, however, than that we be clear about the nature and significance of the phenomena that interest us.

The debate over theories of happiness falls along a couple of lines. The most interesting questions concern the choice between life satisfaction and affect-based views like hedonism and the emotional state theory. [ 8 ] Proponents of life satisfaction see two major advantages to their account. First, life satisfaction is holistic , ranging over the whole of one’s life, or the totality of one’s life over a certain period of time. It reflects not just the aggregate of moments in one’s life, but also the global quality of one’s life taken as a whole (but see Raibley 2010). And we seem to care not just about the total quantity of good in our lives, but about its distribution—a happy ending, say, counts for more than a happy middle (Slote 1982, Velleman 1991). Second, life satisfaction seems more closely linked to our priorities than affect is, as the suffering artist case illustrates. While a focus on affect makes sense insofar as we care about such matters, most people care about other things as well, and how their lives are going relative to their priorities may not be fully mirrored in their affective states. Life satisfaction theories thus seem to fit more closely with liberal ideals of individual sovereignty, on which how well my life is going for me is for me to decide. My satisfaction with my life seems to embody that judgment. Of course a theory of happiness need not capture everything that matters for well-being; the point is that a life satisfaction view might explain why we should care so much about happiness, and so enjoy substantive as well as intuitive support. [ 9 ]

But several objections have been raised against life satisfaction views. The most common complaint has already been noted, namely that a person could apparently be satisfied with her life even while leading a highly unpleasant or emotionally distressed existence, and it can seem counterintuitive to regard such a person as happy (see section 2.2). Some life satisfaction theorists deny that such cases are possible (Benditt 1978), but it could also be argued that such possibilities are part and parcel of life satisfaction’s appeal: some people may not get much pleasure out of life because they don’t care particularly about affective matters, and a life satisfaction theory allows that they can, in their own fashion, be happy.

Two other objections are more substantive, raising questions about whether life satisfaction has the right sort of importance. One concern is whether people often enough have well-grounded attitudes of life satisfaction or dissatisfaction. Evaluating one’s life as a whole can be a complicated business, and there is some question whether people typically have well-defined attitudes toward their lives that accurately reflect how well their lives measure up relative to their priorities. Some research, for instance, suggests that life satisfaction reports tend to reflect judgments made on the spot, drawing on whatever information comes readily to mind, with substantial influences by transient contextual factors like the weather, finding a dime, etc. (Schwarz and Strack 1999). Debate persists over whether this work undermines the significance of life satisfaction judgments, but it does raise a question whether life satisfaction attitudes tend to be well-enough grounded to have the kind of importance that people normally ascribe to happiness.

The third objection is somewhat intricate, so it will require some explaining. The claim is that a wide range of life satisfaction attitudes might be consistent with individuals’ perceptions of how well their lives are going relative to what they care about, raising doubts about the importance of life satisfaction (Haybron 2016). You might reasonably be satisfied when getting very little of what you want, or dissatisfied when getting most of what you want. One reason for this is that people tend to have many incommensurable values, leaving it open how to add them up. Looking at the various ups and downs of your life, it may be arbitrary whether to rate your life a four out of ten, or a seven. A second reason is that life satisfaction attitudes are not merely assessments of subjective success or personal welfare: they involve assessments of whether one’s life is good enough —satisfactory. Yet people’s values may radically underdetermine where they should set the bar for a “good enough” life, again rendering the judgment somewhat arbitrary. Given your values, you might reasonably be satisfied with a two, or require a nine to be satisfied. While it may seem important how well people see their lives going relative to what they care about, it is not obviously so important whether people see their lives going well enough that they are willing to judge them satisfactory.

If life satisfaction attitudes are substantially arbitrary relative to subjective success, then people might reasonably base those attitudes on other factors, such as ethical ideals (e.g., valuing gratitude or noncomplacency) or pragmatic concerns (e.g., comforting oneself). Shifts in perspective might also reasonably alter life satisfaction attitudes. After the funeral, you might be highly satisfied with your life, whereas the high school reunion leaves you dissatisfied; yet neither judgment need be mistaken, or less authoritative.

As a result, life satisfaction attitudes may be poor indicators of well-being, even from the individual’s own point of view. That people in a given country register high levels of life satisfaction may reflect nothing more than that they set the bar extremely low; they might be satisfied with anything short of pure agony. Another country’s citizens might be dissatisfied with their lives, but only because they set the bar much higher. Relative to what they care about, people in the dissatisfied nation could be better off than those in the satisfied nation. To take another example, a cancer patient might be more satisfied with his life than he was before the diagnosis, for he now looks at his life from a different perspective and emphasizes different virtues like fortitude and gratitude as opposed to (say) humility and non-complacency. Yet he need not think himself better off at all: he might believe himself worse off than he was when he was less satisfied. Neither judgment need seem to him or us to be mistaken: it’s just that he now looks at his life differently. Indeed, he might think he’s doing badly, even as he is satisfied with his life: he endorses it, warts and all, and is grateful just have his not-so-good life rather than some of the much worse alternatives.

For present purposes, the worry is that life satisfaction may not have the kind of significance happiness is normally thought to have. This may pose a difficulty for the identification of life satisfaction with happiness: for people frequently seem to use happiness as a proxy for well-being, a reasonably concrete and value-free stand-in that facilitates quick-and-dirty assessments of welfare. Given the discovery that someone is happy, we might infer that he is doing well; if we learn that someone is unhappy, we may conclude that she is doing poorly. Such inferences are defeasible: if we later find that the happy Ned’s wife and friends secretly hate him, we need not decide that he isn’t happy after all; we simply withdraw the conclusion that he is doing well. So long as happiness tracks well-being well enough in most cases, this sort of practice is perfectly respectable. But if we identify happiness with life satisfaction, then we may have a problem: maybe Sally is satisfied only because she values being grateful for the good things in life. This sort of case may not be merely a theoretical possibility: perhaps the very high rates of self-reported life satisfaction in the United States and many other places substantially reflects a broad acceptance of norms of gratitude and a general tendency to emphasize the positives, or perhaps a sense that not to endorse your life amounts to a lack of self-regard. It is not implausible that most people, even those enduring great hardship, can readily find grounds for satisfaction with their lives. Life may have to be pretty hard for a person to be incapable of affirming it.

Despite these concerns there is significant intuitive appeal in the idea that to be happy is to be satisfied with one’s life. Perhaps a different way of conceiving life satisfaction, for instance dispensing with the global judgment and aggregating particular satisfactions and dissatisfactions, would lessen the force of these objections. Alternatively, it is possible that idealized or qualified forms of life satisfaction would mitigate these concerns for some purposes, such as a theory of well-being. [ 10 ]

A second set of issues concerns the differences between the two affect-based views, hedonism and emotional state. The appeal of hedonism is fairly obvious: the pleasantness of our experience is plainly a matter of great significance; many have claimed it to be the only thing that matters. What, by contrast, motivates the emotional state account, which bears obvious similarities to hedonism yet excludes many pleasures from happiness? The question of motivation appears to be the chief worry facing the emotional state theory: what’s to be gained by focusing on emotional state rather than pleasure?

One argument for taking such a view is intuitive: some find it implausible to think that psychologically superficial pleasures invariably make a difference in how happy one is—the typical pleasure of eating a cracker, say, or even the intense pleasure of an orgasm that nonetheless fails to move one, as can happen with meaningless sexual activity. The intuitive distinction seems akin to distinctions made by some ancient philosophers; consider, for instance, the following passage from Epictetus’s Discourses :

‘I have a headache.’ Well, do not say ‘Alas!’ ‘I have an earache.’ Do not say ‘Alas!’ And I am not saying that it is not permissible to groan, only do not groan in the centre of your being . ( Discourses , 1.18.19, emphasis added).

The Stoics did not expect us never to feel unpleasant sensations, which would plainly be impossible; rather, the idea was not to let such things get to us , to impact our emotional conditions.

Why should anyone care to press such a distinction in characterizing happiness? For most people, the hedonic difference between happiness on an emotional state versus a hedonistic view is probably minimal. But while little will be lost, what will be gained? One possibility is that the more “central” affects involving our emotional conditions may bear a special relation to the person or the self , whereas more “peripheral” affects, like the pleasantness of eating a cracker, might pertain to the subpersonal aspects of our psychologies. Since well-being is commonly linked to ideas of self-fulfillment, this sort of distinction might signal a difference in the importance of these states. Another reason to focus on emotional condition rather than experience alone may be the greater psychological depth of the former: its impact on our mental lives, physiology, and behavior is arguably deeper and more pervasive. This enhances the explanatory and predictive significance of happiness, and more importantly its desirability: happiness on this view is not merely pleasant, but a major source of pleasure and other good outcomes (Fredrickson 2004, Lyubomirsky, King et al . 2005). Compare health on this score: while many think it matters chiefly or entirely because of its connection with pleasure, there are few skeptics about the importance of health. As well, emotional state views may capture the idea that happiness concerns the individual’s psychological orientation or disposition : to be happy, on an emotional state theory, is not just to be subjected to a certain sequence of experiences, but for one’s very being to manifest a favorable orientation toward the conditions of one’s life—a kind of psychic affirmation of one’s life. This reflects a point of similarity with life satisfaction views of happiness: contra hedonism, both views take happiness to be substantially dispositional, involving some sort of favorable orientation toward one’s life. But life satisfaction views tend to emphasize reflective or rational endorsement, whereas emotional state views emphasize the verdicts of our emotional natures.

While hedonism and emotional state theories are major contenders in the contemporary literature, all affect-based theories confront the worries, noted earlier, that motivate life satisfaction views—notably, their looser connection with people’s priorities, as well as their limited ability to reflect the quality of people’s lives taken as a whole.

Given the limitations of narrower theories of happiness, a hybrid account such as a subjective well-being theory may seem an attractive solution. This strategy has not been fully explored in the philosophical literature, though Sumner’s “life satisfaction” theory may best be classified as a hybrid (1996; see also Martin 2012). In any event, a hybrid approach draws objections of its own. If we arrive at a hybrid theory by this route, it could seem like either the marriage of two unpromising accounts, or of a promising account with an unpromising one. Such a union may not yield wholesome results. Second, people have different intuitions about what counts as happiness, so that no theory can accommodate all of them. Any theory that tries to thus risks pleasing no one. A third concern is that the various components of any hybrid are liable to matter for quite different reasons, so that happiness, thus understood, might fail to answer to any coherent set of concerns. Ascriptions of happiness could be relatively uninformative if they cast their net too widely.

3. The science of happiness

With the explosive rise of empirical research on happiness, a central question is how far, and how, happiness might be measured. [ 11 ] There seems to be no in-principle barrier to the idea of measuring, at least roughly, how happy people are. Investigators may never enjoy the precision of the “hedonimeter” once envisaged by Edgeworth to show just how happy a person is (Edgeworth 1881). Indeed, such a device might be impossible even in principle, since happiness might involve multiple dimensions that either cannot be precisely quantified or summed together. If so, it could still be feasible to develop approximate measures of happiness, or at least its various dimensions. Similarly, depression may not admit of precise quantification in a single number, yet many useful if imprecise measures of depression exist. In the case of happiness, it is plausible that even current measures provide information about how anxious, cheerful, satisfied, etc. people are, and thus tell us something about their happiness. Even the simplest self-report measures used in the literature have been found to correlate well with many intuitively relevant variables, such as friends’ reports, smiling, physiological measures, health, longevity, and so forth (Pavot 2008).

Importantly, most scientific research needs only to discern patterns across large numbers of individuals—to take an easy case, determining whether widows tend to be less happy than newlyweds—and this is compatible with substantial unreliability in assessing individual happiness. Similarly, an inaccurate thermometer might be a poor guide to the temperature, but readings from many such thermometers could correlate fairly well with actual temperatures—telling us, for instance, that Minnesota is colder than Florida.

This point reveals an important caveat: measures of happiness could correlate well with how happy people are, thus telling us which groups of people tend to be happier, while being completely wrong about absolute levels of happiness. Self-reports of happiness, for instance, might correctly indicate that unemployed people are considerably less happy than those with jobs. But every one of those reports could be wrong, say if everyone is unhappy yet claims to be happy, or vice-versa, so long as the unemployed report lower happiness than the employed. Similarly, bad thermometers may show that Minnesota is colder than Florida without giving the correct temperature.

Two morals emerge from these reflections. First, self-report measures of happiness could be reliable guides to relative happiness, though telling us little about how happy, in absolute terms, people are. We may know who is happier, that is, but not whether people are in fact happy. Second, even comparisons of relative happiness will be inaccurate if the groups being compared systematically bias their reports in different ways. This worry is particularly acute for cross-cultural comparisons of happiness, where differing norms about happiness may undermine the comparability of self-reports. The French might report lower happiness than Americans, for instance, not because their lives are less satisfying or pleasant, but because they tend to put a less positive spin on things. For this reason it may be useful to employ instruments, including narrower questions or physiological measures, that are less prone to cultural biasing. [ 12 ]

The discussion thus far has assumed that people can be wrong about how happy they are. Is this plausible? Some have argued that (sincerely) self-reported happiness cannot, even in principle, be mistaken. If you think you’re happy, goes a common sentiment, then you are happy. This claim is not plausible on a hedonistic or emotional state view of happiness, since those theories take judgments of happiness to encompass not just how one is feeling at the moment but also past states, and memories of those can obviously be spurious. Further, it has been argued that even judgments of how one feels at the present moment may often be mistaken, particularly regarding moods like anxiety. [ 13 ]

The idea that sincere self-reports of happiness are incorrigible can only be correct, it seems, given a quite specific conception of happiness—a kind of life satisfaction theory of happiness on which people count as satisfied with their lives so long as they are disposed to judge explicitly that they are satisfied with their lives on the whole. Also assumed here is that self-reports of happiness are in fact wholly grounded in life satisfaction judgments like these—that is, that people take questions about “happiness” to be questions about life satisfaction. Given these assumptions, we can plausibly conclude that self-reports of happiness are incorrigible. One question is whether happiness, thus conceived, is very important. As well, it is unlikely that respondents invariably interpret happiness questions as being about life satisfaction. At any rate, even life satisfaction theorists might balk at this variant of the account, since life satisfaction is sometimes taken to involve, not just explicit global judgments of life satisfaction, but also our responses to the particular things or domains we care about. Some will hesitate to deem satisfied people who hate many of the important things in their lives, however satisfied they claim to be with their lives as a whole.

In a similar vein, the common practice of measuring happiness simply by asking people to report explicitly on how “happy” they are is sometimes defended on the grounds that it lets people decide for themselves what happiness is. The reasoning again seems to presuppose, controversially, that self-reports of happiness employ a life satisfaction view of happiness, the idea being that whether you are satisfied (“happy”) will depend on what you care about. Alternatively, the point might be literally to leave it up to the respondent to decide whether ‘happy’ means hedonic state, emotional state, life satisfaction, or something else. Thus one respondent’s “I’m happy” might mean “my experience is generally pleasant,” while another’s might mean “I am satisfied with my life as a whole.” It is not clear, however, that asking ambiguous questions of this sort is a useful enterprise, since different respondents will in effect be answering different questions.

To measure happiness through self-reports, then, it may be wiser to employ terms other than ‘happiness’ and its cognates—terms whose meaning is relatively well-known and fixed. In other words, researchers should decide in advance what they want to measure—be it life satisfaction, hedonic state, emotional state, or something else—and then ask questions that refer unambiguously to those states. [ 14 ] This stratagem may be all the more necessary in cross-cultural work, where finding suitable translations of ‘happy’ can be daunting—particularly when the English meaning of the term remains a matter of contention (Wierzbicka 2004).

This entry focuses on subjective well-being studies, since that work is standardly deemed “happiness” research. But psychological research on well-being can take other forms, notably in the “eudaimonic”—commonly opposed to “hedonic”—literature, which assesses a broader range of indicators taken to represent objective human needs, such as meaning, personal growth, relatedness, autonomy, competence, etc. [ 15 ] (The assimilation of subjective well-being to the “hedonic” realm may be misleading, since life satisfaction seems primarily to be a non -hedonic value, as noted earlier.) Other well-being instruments may not clearly fall under either the “happiness” or eudaimonic rubrics, for instance extending subjective well-being measures by adding questions about the extent to which activities are seen as meaningful or worthwhile (White and Dolan 2009). An important question going forward is how far well-being research needs to incorporate indicators beyond subjective well-being.

The scientific literature on happiness has grown to proportions far too large for this article to do more than briefly touch on a few highlights. [ 16 ] Here is a sampling of oft-cited claims:

Most people are happy
People adapt to most changes, tending to return over time to their happiness “set point”
People are prone to make serious mistakes in assessing and pursuing happiness
Material prosperity has a surprisingly modest impact on happiness

The first claim, that most people are happy, appears to be a consensus position among subjective well-being researchers (for a seminal argument, see Diener and Diener 1996). The contention reflects three lines of evidence: most people, in most places, report being happy; most people report being satisfied with their lives; and most people experience more positive affect than negative. On any of the major theories of happiness, then, the evidence seems to show that most people are, indeed, happy. Yet this conclusion might be resisted, on a couple of grounds. First, life satisfaction theorists might question whether self-reports of life satisfaction suffice to establish that people are in fact satisfied with their lives. Perhaps self-reports can be mistaken, say if the individual believes herself satisfied yet shows many signs of dissatisfaction in her behavior, for instance complaining about or striving to change important things in her life. Second, defenders of affect-based theories—hedonistic and emotional state views—might reject the notion that a bare majority of positive affect suffices for happiness. While the traditional view among hedonists has indeed been that happiness requires no more than a >1:1 ratio of positive to negative affect, this contention has received little defense and has been disputed in the recent literature. Some investigators have claimed that “flourishing” requires greater than a 3:1 ratio of positive to negative affect, as this ratio might represent a threshold for broadly favorable psychological functioning (e.g., Larsen and Prizmic 2008). While the evidence for any specific ratio is highly controversial, if anything like this proportion were adopted as the threshold for happiness, on a hedonistic or emotional state theory, then some of the evidence taken to show that people are happy could in fact show the opposite. In any event, the empirical claim relies heavily on nontrivial philosophical views about the nature of happiness, illustrating one way in which philosophical work on happiness can inform scientific research.

The second claim, regarding adaptation and set points, reflects well-known findings that many major life events, like being disabled in an accident or winning the lottery, appear strongly to impact happiness only for a relatively brief period, after which individuals may return to a level of happiness not very different from before. [ 17 ] As well, twin studies have found that subjective well-being is substantially heritable, with .50 being a commonly accepted figure. Consequently many researchers have posited that each individual has a characteristic “set point” level of happiness, toward which he tends to gravitate over time. Such claims have caused some consternation over whether the pursuit and promotion of happiness are largely futile enterprises (Lykken and Tellegen 1996; Millgram 2000). However, the dominant view now seems to be that the early claims about extreme adaptation and set points were exaggerated: while adaptation is a very real phenomenon, many factors—including disability—can have substantial, and lasting, effects on how happy people are. [ 18 ] This point was already apparent from the literature on correlates and causes of happiness, discussed below: if things like relationships and engaging work are important for happiness, then happiness is probably not simply a matter of personality or temperament. As well, the large cross-national differences in measured happiness are unlikely to be entirely an artifact of personality variables. Note that even highly heritable traits can be strongly susceptible to improvement. Better living conditions have raised the stature of men in the Netherlands by eight inches—going from short (five foot four) to tall (over six feet)—in the last 150 years (Fogel 2005). Yet height is considered much more heritable than happiness, with typical heritability estimates ranging from .60 to over .90 (e.g., Silventoinen, Sammalisto et al . 2003). [ 19 ]

The question of mistakes will be taken up in section 5.2. But the last claim—that material prosperity has relatively modest impacts on happiness—has lately become the subject of heated debate. For some time the standard view among subjective well-being researchers was that, beyond a low threshold where basic needs are met, economic gains have only a small impact on happiness levels. According to the well-known “Easterlin Paradox,” for instance, wealthier people do tend to be happier within nations, but richer nations are little happier than less prosperous counterparts, and—most strikingly—economic growth has virtually no impact (Easterlin 1974). In the U.S., for example, measured happiness has not increased significantly since at least 1947, despite massive increases in wealth and income. In short, once you’re out of poverty, absolute levels of wealth and income make little difference in how happy people are.

Against these claims, some authors have argued that absolute income has a large impact on happiness across the income spectrum (e.g., Stevenson and Wolfers 2008). The question continues to be much debated, but in 2010 a pair of large-scale studies using Gallup data sets, including improved measures of life satisfaction and affect, suggested that both sides may be partly right (Kahneman and Deaton 2010; Diener, Ng et al . 2010). Surveying large numbers of Americans in one case, and what is claimed to be the first globally representative sample of humanity in the other, these studies found that income does indeed correlate substantially (.44 in the global sample), at all levels, with life satisfaction—strictly speaking, a “life evaluation” measure that asks respondents to rate their lives without saying whether they are satisfied. Yet the correlation of household income with the affect measures is far weaker: globally, .17 for positive affect, –.09 for negative affect; and in the United States, essentially zero above $75,000 (though quite strong at low income levels). For more recent discussions of empirical work, see Jebb et al. 2018 along with relevant chapters in Diener et al. 2018 and the annual World Happiness Reports from 2012 onward (Helliwell et al. 2012). Research on the complex money-happiness relationship resists simple characterization, but a crude summary is that the connection tends to be positive and substantial, strong at lower income levels while modest to weak or even negative at higher incomes, and stronger and less prone to satiation for life evaluation than emotional well-being metrics. But again, these are very rough generalizations that gloss over a variety of important factors and admit of many exceptions across both individuals and societies.

In short, the relationship between money and happiness may depend on which theory of happiness we accept: on a life satisfaction view, the relationship may be strong; whereas affect-based views may yield a much weaker connection, again above some modest threshold. Here, again, philosophical views about the nature and significance of happiness may play an important role in understanding empirical results and their practical upshot. Economic growth, for instance, has long been a top priority for governments, and findings about its impact on human well-being may have substantial implications for policy.

It is important to note that studies of this nature focus on generic trends, not specific cases, and there is no dispute that significant exceptions exist—notably, populations that enjoy high levels of happiness amid low levels of material prosperity. Among others, a number of Latin American countries, Maasai herders, Inughuit hunter-gatherers, and Amish communities have registered highly positive results in subjective well-being studies, sometimes higher than those in many affluent nations, and numerous informal accounts accord with the data. [ 20 ] Such “positive outliers” suggest that some societies can support high levels of happiness with extremely modest material holdings. The importance of money for happiness may depend strongly on what kind of society one inhabits. An interesting question, particularly in light of common environmental concerns, is how far the lessons of such societies can, or should, be transferred to other social forms, where material attainment and happiness are presently more tightly coupled. Perhaps some degree of decoupling of happiness and money would be desirable.

So the role of money in happiness appears, at this juncture, to be a mixed bag, depending heavily on how we conceive of happiness and what range of societies we are considering. What (else), then, does matter most for happiness? There is no definitive list of the main sources of happiness in the literature, partly because it is not clear how to divide them up. But the following items seem generally to be accepted as among the chief correlates of happiness: supportive relationships, engagement in interesting and challenging activities, material and physical security, a sense of meaning or purpose, a positive outlook, and autonomy or control. [ 21 ] Significant correlates may also include—among many others—religion, good governance, trust, helping others, values (e.g., having non-materialistic values), achieving goals, not being unemployed, and connection with the natural environment. [ 22 ]

An illustrative study of the correlates of happiness from a global perspective is the Gallup World Poll study noted earlier (Diener, Ng et al . 2010; see also Jebb et al. 2020). In that study, the life satisfaction measure was more strongly related to material prosperity, as noted above: household income, along with possession of luxury conveniences and satisfaction with standard of living. The affect measures, by contrast, correlated most strongly with what the authors call “psychosocial prosperity”: whether people reported being treated with respect in the last day, having family and friends to count on, learning something new, doing what they do best, and choosing how their time was spent.

What these results show depends partly on the reliability of the measures. One possible source of error is that this study might exaggerate the relationship between life satisfaction and material attainments through the use of a “ladder” scale for life evaluation, ladders being associated with material aspirations. Errors might also arise through salience biases whereby material concerns might be more easily recalled than other important values, such as whether one has succeeded in having children; or through differences in positivity biases across income levels (perhaps wealthier people tend to be more “positive-responding” than poorer individuals). Another question is whether the affect measures adequately track the various dimensions of people’s emotional lives. However, the results are roughly consonant with other research, so they are unlikely to be entirely an artifact of the instruments used in this study. [ 23 ] A further point of uncertainty is the causal story behind the correlations—whether the correlates, like psychosocial prosperity, cause happiness; whether happiness causes them; whether other factors cause both; or, as is likely, some combination of the three.

Such concerns duly noted, the research plausibly suggests that, on average, material progress has some tendency to help people to better get what they want in life, as found in the life satisfaction measures, while relationships and engaging activities are more important for people’s emotional lives. What this means for happiness depends on which view of happiness is correct.

4. The importance of happiness

Were you to survey public attitudes about the value of happiness, at least in liberal Western democracies, you would likely find considerable support for the proposition that happiness is all that really matters for human well-being. Many philosophers over the ages have likewise endorsed such a view, typically assuming a hedonistic account of happiness. (A few, like Almeder 2000, have identified well-being with happiness understood as life satisfaction.)

Most philosophers, however, have rejected hedonistic and other mental state accounts of well-being, and with them the idea that happiness could suffice for well-being. [ 24 ] (See the entry on well-being .) Objections to mental state theories of well-being tend to cluster around two sets of concerns. First, it is widely believed that the non-mental conditions of our lives matter for well-being: whether our families really love us, whether our putative achievements are genuine, whether the things we care about actually obtain. The most influential objection of this sort is Robert Nozick’s experience machine case, wherein we are asked to imagine a virtual reality device that can perfectly simulate any reality for its user, who will think the experience is genuine (Nozick 1974). Would you plug in to such a machine for life? Most people would not, and the case is widely taken to vitiate mental state theories of well-being. Beyond having positive mental states, it seems to matter both that our lives go well and that our state of mind is appropriately related to how things are. [ 25 ]

A second set of objections concerns various ways in which a happy person might nonetheless seem intuitively to be leading an impoverished or stunted life. The most influential of these worries involves adaptation , where individuals facing oppressive circumstances scale back their expectations and find contentment in “small mercies,” as Sen put it. [ 26 ] Even a slave might come to internalize the values of his oppressors and be happy, and this strikes most as an unenviable life indeed. Related worries involve people with diminished capacities (blindness, Down Syndrome), or choosing to lead narrow and cramped or simpleminded lives (e.g., counting blades of grass). Worries about impoverished lives are a prime motivator of Aristotelian theories of well-being, which emphasize the full and proper exercise of our human capacities.

In the face of these and other objections most commentators have concluded that neither happiness nor any other mental state can suffice for well-being. Philosophical interest in happiness has consequently flagged, since its theoretical importance becomes unclear if it does not play a starring role in our account of the good.

Even as happiness might fail to suffice for well-being, well-being itself may be only one component of a good life , and not the most important one at that. Here ‘good life’ means a life that is good all things considered, taking account of all the values that matter in life, whether they benefit the individual or not. Kant, for example, considered both morality and well-being to be important but distinct elements of a good life. Yet morality should be our first priority, never to be sacrificed for personal happiness.

In fact there is a broad consensus, or near-consensus, among ethical theorists on a doctrine we might call the priority of virtue : broadly and crudely speaking, the demands of virtue or morality trump other values in life. [ 27 ] We ought above all to act and live well, or at least not badly or wrongly. This view need not take the strong form of insisting that we must always act as virtuously as possible, or that moral reasons always take precedence. But it does mean, at least, that when being happy requires acting badly, one’s happiness must be sacrificed. If it would be wrong to leave your family, in which you are unhappy, then you must remain unhappy, or find more acceptable ways to seek happiness.

The mainstream views in all three of the major approaches to ethical theory—consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics—agree on some form of the priority of virtue. Where these views chiefly differ is not on the importance of being good, but on whether being good necessarily benefits us. Virtue ethicists tend to answer in the affirmative, the other two schools in the negative. Building virtue into well-being, as Aristotelians do, may seem to yield a more demanding ethics, and in some ways it does. Yet many deontologists and consequentialists—notably Kant—advocate sterner, more starkly moralistic visions of the good life than Aristotle would ever have dreamt of (e.g., Singer 1972).

Happiness, in short, is believed by most philosophers to be insufficient for well-being, and still less important for the good life. These points may seem to vitiate any substantial role for happiness in ethical thought. However, well-being itself is still regarded as a central concept in ethical thought, denoting one of the chief elements of a good life even if not the sole element. And there are reasons for thinking happiness important, both practically and theoretically, despite the worries noted above.

Even if happiness does not suffice for well-being—a point that not all philosophers would accept—it might still rate a privileged spot in theories of well-being. This could happen in either of two ways.

First, happiness could be a major component of a theory of well-being. Objective list theories of well-being sometimes include happiness or related mental states such as enjoyment among the fundamental constituents of well-being. A more ambitious proposal, originated by L.W. Sumner, identifies well-being with authentic happiness —happiness that is authentic in the sense of being both informed and autonomous (Sumner 1996). The root idea is that well-being involves being happy, where one’s happiness is a response of one’s own (autonomous), to a life that genuinely is one’s own (informed). The authenticity constraint is meant to address both experience machine-type worries and “happy slave” objections relating to adaptation, where happiness may be non-autonomous, depending on manipulation or the uncritical acceptance of oppressive values. Since these have been the most influential objections to mental state accounts of well-being, Sumner’s approach promises to considerably strengthen the position of happiness-centered approaches to well-being, and several philosophers have developed variants or close relations of the authentic happiness theory (Brülde 2007, Haybron 2008a, Tiberius and Plakias 2010, Višak 2015). The approach remains fairly new, however, so its long-term prospects remain unclear. [ 28 ]

A second strategy forsakes the project of giving a unitary theory of well-being, recognizing instead a family of two or more kinds of prudential value. Happiness could be central to, or even exhaustive of, one of those values. Shelly Kagan, for instance, has suggested that welfare hedonism could be correct as a theory of how well a person is doing, but not of how well a person’s life is going, which should perhaps be regarded as a distinct value (Kagan 1992, 1994). In short, we might distinguish narrow and wide well-being concepts. An experience machine user might be doing well in the narrow sense, but not the wide—she is doing well, though her life is quite sad. Happiness might, then, suffice for well-being, but only in the narrow sense. Others have made similar points, but uptake has been limited, perhaps because distinguishing multiple concepts of prudential value makes the already difficult job of giving a theory of well-being much harder, as Kagan pointedly observes. [ 29 ] An interesting possibility is that the locution ‘happy life’, and the corresponding well-being sense of happiness, actually refers to a specific variety of well-being—perhaps well-being in the wide sense just suggested, or well-being taken as an ideal state, an ultimate goal of deliberation. This might explain the continued use of ‘happiness’ for the well-being notion in the philosophical literature, rather than the more standard ‘wellbeing.’

The preceding section discussed ways that happiness might figure prominently even in non-mental state theories of well-being. The question there concerned the role of happiness in theories of well-being. This is a different question from how important happiness is for well-being itself. Even a theory of well-being that includes no mention at all of happiness can allow that happiness is nonetheless a major component or contributor to well-being, because of its relation to the things that ultimately constitute well-being. If you hold a desire theory of well-being, for instance, you will very likely allow that, for most people, happiness is a central aspect of well-being, since most people very much desire to be happy. Indeed, some desire theorists have argued that the account actually yields a form of hedonism, on the grounds that people ultimately desire nothing else but happiness or pleasure (Sidgwick 1907 [1966], Brandt 1979, 1989).

Happiness may be thought important even on theories normally believed to take a dismissive view of it. Aristotelians identify well-being with virtuous activity, yet Aristotle plainly takes this to be a highly pleasant condition, indeed the most pleasant kind of life there is (see, e.g., NE , Bk. I 8; Bk. VII 13). You cannot flourish, on Aristotelian terms, without being happy, and unhappiness is clearly incompatible with well-being. Even the Stoics, who notoriously regard all but a virtuous inner state as at best indifferent, would still assign happiness a kind of importance: at the very least, to be unhappy would be unvirtuous; and virtue itself arguably entails a kind of happiness, namely a pleasant state of tranquility. As well, happiness would likely be a preferred indifferent in most cases, to be chosen over unhappiness. To be sure, both Aristotelian and Stoic accounts are clear that happiness alone does not suffice for well-being, that its significance is not what common opinion takes it to be, and that some kinds of happiness can be worthless or even bad. But neither denies that happiness is somehow quite important for human well-being.

In fact it is questionable whether any major school of philosophical thought denies outright the importance of happiness, at least on one of the plausible accounts of the matter. Doubts about its significance probably owe to several factors. Some skeptics, for example, focus on relatively weak conceptions of happiness, such as the idea that it is little more than the simple emotion of feeling happy—an idea that few hedonists or emotional state theorists would accept. Or, alternatively, assuming that a concern for happiness has only to do with positive states. Yet ‘happiness’ also serves as a blanket term for a domain of concern that involves both positive and negative states, namely the kinds of mental states involved in being happy or unhappy. Just as “health” care tends to focus mainly on ill health, so might happiness researchers choose to focus much of their effort on the study and alleviation of unhappiness—depression, suffering, anxiety, and other conditions whose importance is uncontroversial. The study of happiness need be no more concerned with smiles than with frowns.

5. The pursuit and promotion of happiness

The last set of questions we will examine centers on the pursuit of happiness, both individual and collective. Most of the popular literature on happiness discusses how to make oneself happier, with little attention given to whether this is an appropriate goal, or how various means of pursuing happiness measure up from an ethical standpoint. More broadly, how if at all should one pursue happiness as part of a good life?

We saw earlier that most philosophers regard happiness as secondary to morality in a good life. The individual pursuit of happiness may be subject to nonmoral norms as well, prudence being the most obvious among them. Prudential norms need not be as plain as “don’t shoot yourself in the foot.” On Sumner’s authentic happiness view of well-being, for instance, we stand to gain little by pursuing happiness in inauthentic ways, for instance through self-deception or powerful drugs like Huxley’s soma , which guarantees happiness come what may (Huxley 1932 [2005]). The view raises interesting questions about the benefits of less extreme pharmaceuticals, such as the therapeutic use of antidepressants; such medications can make life more pleasant, but many people worry whether they pose a threat to authenticity, perhaps undercutting their benefits. It is possible that such drugs involve prudential tradeoffs, promoting well-being in some ways while undermining it in others; whether the tradeoffs are worth it will depend on how, in a given case, the balance is struck. Another possibility is that such drugs sometimes promote authenticity, if for instance a depressive disorder prevents a person from being “himself.”

Looking to more broadly ethical, but not yet moral, norms, it may be possible to act badly without acting either immorally or imprudently. While Aristotle himself regarded acting badly as inherently imprudent, his catalogue of virtues is instructive, as many of them (wit, friendliness, etc.) are not what we normally regard as moral virtues. Some morally permissible methods of pursuing happiness may nonetheless be inappropriate because they conflict with such “ethical” virtues. They might, for instance, be undignified or imbecilic.

Outwardly virtuous conduct undertaken in the name of personal happiness might, if wrongly motivated, be incompatible with genuine virtue. One might, for instance, engage in philanthropy solely to make oneself happier, and indeed work hard at fine-tuning one’s assistance to maximize the hedonic payoff. This sort of conduct would not obviously instantiate the virtue of compassion or kindness, and indeed might be reasonably deemed contemptible. Similarly, it might be admirable, morally or otherwise, to be grateful for the good things in one’s life. Yet the virtue of gratitude might be undermined by certain kinds of gratitude intervention, whereby one tries to become happier by focusing on the things one is grateful for. If expressions of gratitude become phony or purely instrumental, the sole reason for giving thanks being to become happy—and not that one actually has something to be thankful for—then the “gratitude” might cease to be admirable, and may indeed be unvirtuous. [ 30 ]

A different question is what means of pursuing happiness are most effective . This is fundamentally an empirical question, but there are some in-principle issues that philosophical reflection might inform. One oft-heard claim, commonly called the “paradox of hedonism,” is that the pursuit of happiness is self-defeating; to be happy, don’t pursue happiness. It is not clear how to interpret this dictum, however, so that it is both interesting and true. It is plainly imprudent to make happiness one’s focus at every moment, but doubtful that this has often been denied. Yet never considering happiness also seems an improbable strategy for becoming happier. If you are choosing among several equally worthwhile occupations, and have good evidence that some of them will make you miserable, while one of them is likely to be highly fulfilling, it would not seem imprudent to take that information into account. Yet to do so just is to pursue happiness. The so-called paradox of hedonism is perhaps best seen as a vague caution against focusing too much on making oneself happy, not a blanket dismissal of the prospects for expressly seeking happiness—and for this modest point there is good empirical evidence (Schooler, Ariely et al . 2003, Lyubomirsky 2007).

That happiness is sometimes worth seeking does not mean we will always do a good job of it (Haybron 2008b). In recent decades a massive body of empirical evidence has gathered on various ways in which people seem systematically prone to make mistakes in the pursuit of their interests, including happiness. Such tendencies have been suggested in several domains relating to the pursuit of happiness, including (with recent surveys cited):

Assessing how happy we are, or were in the past (Haybron 2007)
Predicting (“forecasting”) what will make us happy (Gilbert 2006)
Choosing rationally (Kahneman and Tversky 2000, Gilovitch, Griffin et al . 2002, Hsee and Hastie 2006)

A related body of literature explores the costs and benefits of (ostensibly) making it easier to pursue happiness by increasing people’s options; it turns out that having more choices might often make people less happy, for instance by increasing the burdens of deliberation or the likelihood of regret (Schwartz 2004). Less discussed in this context, but highly relevant, is the large body of research indicating that human psychology and behavior are remarkably prone to unconscious social and other situational influences, most infamously reported in the Milgram obedience experiments (Doris 2002, 2015, Haybron 2014). Human functioning, and the pursuit of happiness, may be more profoundly social than many commentators have assumed. [ 31 ]

Taken together, this research bears heavily on two central questions in the philosophical literature: first, the broad character of human nature (e.g., in what sense are we rational animals? How should we conceive of human autonomy?); second, the philosophical ideals of the good society and good government.

Just a decade ago the idea of happiness policy was something of a novelty. While it remains on the fringes in some locales, notably the United States, in much of the world there has been a surge of interest in making happiness an explicit target of policy consideration. Attention has largely shifted, however, to a broader focus on well-being to reflect not just happiness but also other welfare concerns of citizens, and dozens of governments now incorporate well-being metrics in their national statistics. [ 32 ]

Let’s consider the rationale for policies aimed at promoting well-being. In political thought, the modern liberal tradition has tended to assume an optimistic view of human nature and the individual’s capacities for prudent choice. Partly for this reason, the preservation and expansion of individual freedoms, including people’s options, is widely taken to be a central goal, if not the goal, of legitimate governments. People should be freed to seek the good life as they see it, and beyond that the state should, by and large, stay out of the well-being-promotion business.

This vision of the good society rests on empirical assumptions that have been the subject of considerable debate. If it turns out that people systematically and predictably err in the pursuit of their interests, then it may be possible for governments to devise policies that correct for such mistakes. [ 33 ] Of course, government intervention can introduce other sorts of mistakes, and there is some debate about whether such measures are likely to do more harm than good (e.g., Glaeser 2006).

But even if governments cannot effectively counteract human imprudence, it may still be that people fare better in social forms that influence or even constrain choices in ways that make serious mistakes less likely. (Food culture and its impact on health may be an instructive example here.) The idea that people tend to fare best when their lives are substantially constrained or guided by their social and physical context has recently been dubbed contextualism ; the contrary view, that people do best when their lives are, as much as possible, determined by the individuals themselves, is individualism (Haybron 2008b). Recent contextualists include communitarians and many perfectionists, though contextualism is not a political doctrine and is compatible with liberalism and even libertarian political morality. Contextualism about the promotion of well-being is related to recent work in moral psychology that emphasizes the social character of human agency, such as situationism and social intuitionism. [ 34 ]

Quite apart from matters of efficacy, there are moral questions about the state promotion of happiness, which has been a major subject of debate, both because of the literature on mistakes and research suggesting that the traditional focus of state efforts to promote well-being, economic growth, has a surprisingly modest impact on happiness. One concern is paternalism : does happiness-based policy infringe too much on personal liberty? Some fear a politics that may too closely approximate Huxley’s Brave New World, where the state ensures a drug-induced happiness for all (Huxley 1932 [2005]). Extant policy suggestions, however, have been more modest. Efforts to steer choice, for instance in favor of retirement savings, may be paternalistic, but advocates argue that such policies can be sufficiently light-handed that no one should object to them, in some cases even going so far as to deem it “libertarian paternalism” (Thaler and Sunstein 2008). [ 35 ] The idea is that gentle “nudges,” like setting default options on hiring forms to setting aside money for retirement, interfere only trivially with choice, imposing little or no cost for those who wish to choose differently, and would very likely be welcomed by most of those targeted.

Also relatively light-handed, and perhaps not paternalistic at all, are state efforts to promote happiness directly through social policy, for instance by prioritizing unemployment over economic growth on the grounds that the former has a larger impact on happiness. Other policies might include trying to reduce commute times, or making walkable neighborhoods and green space a priority in urban planning, again on happiness grounds. Some may deem such measures paternalistic insofar as they trade freedom (in the form of economic prosperity) for a substantive good, happiness, that people value unevenly, though it has also been argued that refusing to take citizens’ values like happiness into consideration in policy deliberation on their behalf can amount to paternalism (Haybron and Alexandrova 2013).

A related sort of objection to happiness-based policy argues that happiness, or even well-being, is simply the wrong object of policy, which ought instead to focus on the promotion of resources or capabilities (Rawls 1971, Nussbaum 2000, Quong 2011, Sen 2009). Several reasons have been cited for this sort of view, one being that policies aimed at promoting happiness or well-being violate commonly accepted requirements of “liberal neutrality,” according to which policy must be neutral among conceptions of the good. According to this constraint, governments must not promote any view of the good life, and happiness-based policy might be argued to flout it. Worries about paternalism also surface here, the idea being that states should only focus on affording people the option to be happy or whatever, leaving the actual achievement of well-being up to the autonomous individual. As we just saw, however, it is not clear how far happiness policy initiatives actually infringe on personal liberty or autonomy. A further worry is that, happiness isn’t really, or primarily, what matters for human well-being (Nussbaum 2008).

But a major motivation for thinking happiness the wrong object of policy is that neither happiness nor well-being are the appropriate focus of a theory of justice . What justice requires of society, on this view, is not that it make us happy; we do not have a right to be happy. Rather, justice demands only that each has sufficient opportunity (in the form of resources or capabilities, say) to achieve a good life, or that each gets a fair share of the benefits of social cooperation. However plausible such points may be, it is not clear how far they apply to many proposals for happiness-based policy, save the strongest claims that happiness should be the sole aim of policy: many policy decisions are not primarily concerned with questions of social justice, nor with constitutional fundamentals, the focus of some theories of justice. Happiness could be a poor candidate for the “currency” of justice, yet still remain a major policy concern. Indeed, the chief target of happiness policy advocates has been, not theories of justice, but governments’ overwhelming emphasis on promoting GDP and other indices of economic growth. This is not, in the main, a debate about justice, and as of yet the philosophical literature has not extensively engaged with it.

However, the push for happiness-based policy is a recent development. In coming years, such questions will likely receive considerably more attention in the philosophical literature.

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How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

World Database of Happiness , Erasmus University of Rotterdam.
Positive Psychology Center , University of Pennsylvania.
The Happiness and Well-Being Project , with Suggested Readings and links to Funded Research , Saint Louis University.

Acknowledgments

For helpful comments, many thanks are due to Anna Alexandrova, Robert Biswas-Diener, Thomas Carson, Irwin Goldstein, Richard Lucas, Jason Raibley, Eric Schwitzgebel, Stephen Schueller, Adam Shriver, Edward Zalta, and an anonymous referee for the SEP. Portions of Section 2 are adapted from Haybron 2008, “Philosophy and the Science of Subjective Well-Being,” in Eid and Larsen, The Science of Subjective Well-Being , and used with kind permission of Guilford Press.

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Happiness is a state of mind: the science of being contented and free of trouble.

In our pursuit of happiness, we often fall into the trap of seeking it outside of ourselves. We believe that material possessions, social status, or relationships will bring us the joy and contentment we crave. However, the truth is that happiness is a state of mind, and it’s something that we have the power to cultivate within ourselves.

What does happiness mean to you? Is it a destination to reach, a feeling to chase, or a state of mind to cultivate? The truth is, happiness is subjective and multifaceted, and it can take many forms in our lives. But, if there’s one thing we know for sure, it’s that happiness is a state of mind that we can all achieve.

Despite what the media, society, or our own minds may tell us, happiness is not something that we can buy, achieve, or be given. It’s an inner state of being that we can create and maintain regardless of our external circumstances.

while it’s true that life can be tough and unpredictable, we have the power to control our thoughts and emotions, and thus, our level of happiness. So, if you’re ready to shift your mindset and discover the happiness that already exists within you, keep reading.

Definition of happiness and its importance – Happiness Is a State of Mind

Happiness is a complex and subjective emotion that can be described as a feeling of joy, contentment, and satisfaction. It’s a positive emotional state that arises when we experience pleasure, fulfilment, and a sense of purpose in our lives.

Happiness is an essential human need, as it contributes to our overall well-being and quality of life. It’s not just a desirable state of mind (Happiness Is a State of Mind), but an important one for our physical, mental, and social health .

“Happiness is not the absence of sadness or pain, but the ability to find joy and peace in spite of them.”

Research has shown that happiness can improve our immune system, lower stress and anxiety levels , and reduce the risk of chronic diseases such as heart disease, diabetes, and obesity. Additionally, being happy can enhance our relationships, increase our creativity, and boost our productivity and success in various areas of life.

In short, happiness is not only important for our individual well-being, but it also has a positive impact on our communities and society as a whole.

Happiness as an Emotion

Happiness is a complex emotional state that can be influenced by a variety of factors, including genetics, environment, and individual experiences. The concept of happiness can be broken down into two types: hedonic happiness and eudaimonic happiness.

Hedonic happiness is often described as pleasure-seeking happiness. It’s a type of happiness that’s associated with immediate gratification, such as feeling happy after eating a delicious meal, watching a funny movie, or buying a new pair of shoes. This type of happiness is often short-lived and dependent on external circumstances.

On the other hand, eudaimonic happiness is a deeper and more enduring type of happiness. It’s associated with a sense of purpose, meaning, and fulfillment in life. This type of happiness is not dependent on external circumstances and is more closely related to our internal state of being.

Eudaimonic happiness is often achieved through pursuing activities and goals that align with our values, using our strengths and talents, and making meaningful connections with others.

The role of mindset in happiness

The role of mindset in happiness is significant as our thoughts and beliefs directly impact our emotions and behaviors. A positive mindset can contribute to greater happiness and well-being, while a negative mindset can lead to increased stress, anxiety, and even depression.

Our mindset shapes the way we interpret and react to events in our lives, and it can influence our perceptions of our own abilities, potential, and self-worth . By cultivating a positive mindset, we can reframe negative situations, focus on our strengths and abilities, and practice gratitude for the positive things in our lives.

Ultimately, our mindset is a powerful tool for creating and maintaining happiness, as it enables us to shift our perspective, cope with challenges, and find joy and fulfillment in our daily lives.

1. How our mindset affects our happiness

Our mindset plays a significant role in our happiness because it directly affects the way we perceive and respond to the events and circumstances in our lives. Our thoughts and beliefs influence our emotions, behavior, and overall well-being.

A negative mindset, characterized by thoughts of self-doubt , pessimism, and hopelessness, can lead to feelings of stress , anxiety , and depression. On the other hand, a positive mindset, characterized by thoughts of self-confidence, optimism, and gratitude, can lead to greater happiness and well-being.

For example, if we tend to focus on the negative aspects of a situation, we may become more anxious and stressed, whereas if we focus on the positive aspects, we may feel more content and optimistic.

Similarly, if we have a fixed mindset that believes our abilities are limited and unchangeable, we may feel discouraged and unhappy, whereas if we have a growth mindset that believes in our ability to learn and improve, we may feel more confident and fulfilled.

Our mindset also affects the way we approach and cope with challenges. With a positive mindset, we can view challenges as opportunities for growth and learning, whereas a negative mindset may view them as insurmountable obstacles.

By cultivating a positive mindset through practices such as mindfulness, positive self-talk, and gratitude, we can improve our overall happiness and well-being.

2. The power of positive thinking and gratitude

The power of positive thinking and gratitude lies in their ability to shift our mindset and perspective, which can lead to greater happiness and well-being.

Positive thinking involves focusing on positive thoughts and beliefs, which can help to re-frame negative situations and boost our mood . Gratitude involves focusing on the things we are thankful for in our lives, which can foster feelings of contentment and satisfaction.

Positive thinking and gratitude have been linked to numerous benefits for our mental and physical health. Studies have shown that people who practice positive thinking and gratitude tend to have lower levels of stress and depression, better sleep, and stronger social connections. Additionally, practicing positive thinking and gratitude can help to improve our resilience, motivation, and overall quality of life.

There are several ways to cultivate positive thinking and gratitude in our daily lives. One way is to practice positive self-talk, by reframing negative thoughts and focusing on our strengths and accomplishments.

Another way is to keep a gratitude journal, where we can write down the things we are thankful for each day. We can also practice mindfulness, which involves being present and aware of our thoughts and feelings without judgment.

In summary, the power of positive thinking and gratitude lies in their ability to help us cultivate a more positive mindset, which can lead to greater happiness and well-being. By incorporating these practices into our daily lives, we can improve our mental and physical health, and experience more joy and fulfillment in our lives.

3. How to cultivate a positive mindset for happiness

Cultivating a positive mindset is a powerful tool for achieving greater happiness and well-being. Here are some strategies that can help to cultivate a positive mindset:

Practice mindfulness: Mindfulness involves being present and aware of our thoughts and feelings without judgment. By practicing mindfulness regularly, we can learn to observe our thoughts and emotions with greater clarity and perspective, which can help us to reframe negative thoughts and cultivate a more positive outlook.
Reframe negative thoughts: Reframing negative thoughts involves consciously shifting our perspective to focus on the positive aspects of a situation. This can involve asking ourselves questions such as “what can I learn from this experience?” or “what opportunities does this situation present?” By focusing on the positive aspects of a situation, we can reframe our thoughts in a more positive light, which can help to reduce stress and anxiety.
Practice gratitude: Practicing gratitude involves focusing on the things we are thankful for in our lives. This can involve keeping a gratitude journal, where we write down the things we are grateful for each day, or simply taking a few moments each day to reflect on the positive aspects of our lives. By focusing on the positive aspects of our lives, we can cultivate a greater sense of contentment and fulfillment.
Surround yourself with positivity: Surrounding ourselves with positive people, messages, and environments can help to reinforce a positive mindset. This can involve seeking out positive role models, reading uplifting books or articles, or spending time in nature.
Set achievable goals: Setting achievable goals can help to build a sense of accomplishment and self-efficacy, which can contribute to a more positive mindset. By setting goals that are realistic and achievable, we can build momentum and confidence, which can help to create a positive feedback loop of motivation and success.

Strategies for achieving happiness

There are many strategies that can help to achieve greater happiness and well-being. One strategy is to cultivate positive relationships with friends, family, and loved ones.

Building and maintaining strong social connections can help to foster a sense of belonging and support, which can contribute to greater happiness and resilience. Another strategy is to prioritize self-care, by engaging in activities that promote physical and emotional well-being, such as exercise, mindfulness, and healthy eating.

Additionally, setting achievable goals and focusing on personal growth and development can help to build a sense of purpose and accomplishment, which can contribute to greater happiness and fulfillment. By incorporating these strategies into our daily lives, we can work towards achieving greater happiness and well-being, and experience more joy and fulfillment in our lives.

1. Daily habits for boosting happiness, such as exercise and mindfulness practices

Daily habits such as exercise and mindfulness practices can have a significant impact on our happiness and well-being. Exercise is a powerful tool for improving our physical health and mental well-being , and can help to reduce symptoms of depression and anxiety. Engaging in regular physical activity can also help to boost our energy levels, improve our mood, and reduce stress and tension.

Mindfulness practices, such as meditation or deep breathing exercises, can help to cultivate a greater sense of calm and relaxation. By practicing mindfulness regularly, we can learn to observe our thoughts and emotions without judgment, which can help to reduce stress and anxiety.

Mindfulness can also help to cultivate a greater sense of gratitude and contentment, as we learn to appreciate the present moment and the positive aspects of our lives.

Other daily habits that can help to boost happiness include engaging in activities that bring us joy and fulfillment, such as spending time with loved ones, pursuing hobbies or interests, or volunteering in our community. Additionally, prioritizing self-care by getting enough sleep, eating a healthy diet, and managing stress can help to improve our overall well-being and happiness.

2. Surrounding yourself with positive people and relationships

Surrounding ourselves with positive people and relationships can have a significant impact on our happiness and well-being. Positive relationships can provide us with emotional support, encouragement, and a sense of belonging and connection, which can contribute to greater happiness and resilience.

By building and maintaining strong social connections with friends, family, and loved ones, we can experience a greater sense of fulfillment and joy in our lives.

Positive relationships can also help to boost our mood and emotional well-being. When we spend time with people who are positive and uplifting, we are more likely to feel happy and optimistic ourselves.

On the other hand, spending time with people who are negative or critical can have the opposite effect, and can contribute to feelings of stress, anxiety, and low mood.

Building positive relationships can involve being intentional about the people we choose to spend time with, and prioritizing relationships that are supportive, nurturing, and positive. This can involve seeking out people who share our values and interests, and who are supportive and encouraging.

Additionally, it can involve investing time and energy into maintaining strong relationships, by staying in touch, expressing appreciation and gratitude, and being present and attentive in our interactions.

3. Pursuing activities and hobbies that bring joy and fulfillment

Pursuing activities and hobbies that bring joy and fulfillment can have a significant impact on our happiness and well-being . Engaging in activities that we enjoy can provide a sense of purpose, accomplishment, and satisfaction, which can contribute to greater happiness and fulfillment.

Additionally, pursuing hobbies and interests can help to reduce stress and anxiety, and promote a greater sense of relaxation and calm.

Pursuing activities and hobbies that bring joy and fulfillment can also provide a sense of balance and perspective in our lives. By engaging in activities that we enjoy, we can cultivate a greater sense of pleasure and contentment, and take a break from the stress and demands of daily life.

This can help to promote greater resilience and well-being, and can contribute to a greater sense of overall happiness and fulfillment.

To pursue activities and hobbies that bring joy and fulfillment, it can be helpful to identify the activities that we enjoy and find meaningful. This may involve trying new things, exploring our interests and passions, and experimenting with different activities and hobbies.

Additionally, it can be helpful to prioritize the activities that bring us the most joy and fulfillment, and to make time for these activities in our daily lives.

4. Embracing life’s challenges and reframing negative situations

Embracing life’s challenges and reframing negative situations can be an effective strategy for promoting happiness and well-being. Life is full of challenges and setbacks, and how we respond to these challenges can have a significant impact on our happiness and overall well-being.

By embracing challenges and reframing negative situations, we can cultivate a greater sense of resilience, optimism, and adaptability.

Embracing life’s challenges involves adopting a growth mindset, and recognizing that challenges and setbacks are opportunities for learning, growth, and self-improvement.

Rather than seeing challenges as obstacles, we can view them as opportunities to develop new skills, knowledge, and experience, and to become more resilient and adaptable in the face of adversity.

Reframing negative situations involves looking for the positive aspects of a situation, and adopting a more optimistic and hopeful perspective. This can involve focusing on the opportunities and possibilities that exist within a situation, rather than dwelling on the negatives.

For example, if we experience a setback or failure, we can look for the lessons that can be learned from the experience, and use it as an opportunity to grow and improve.

To embrace life’s challenges and reframe negative situations, it can be helpful to adopt a positive and optimistic mindset, and to practice gratitude and mindfulness . This can involve focusing on the present moment, and cultivating a greater sense of appreciation for the good things in our lives.

Additionally, it can involve seeking support and guidance from others, and being open to new experiences and opportunities for growth and learning.

Common obstacles to happiness

Common obstacles to happiness can include a range of internal and external factors that can interfere with our ability to experience happiness and well-being. Three of the most common obstacles include the impact of external factors, such as stress and anxiety , negative self-talk and limiting beliefs, and lack of self-care and self-compassion.

External factors such as stress and anxiety can have a significant impact on our ability to experience happiness and well-being. These factors can cause us to feel overwhelmed, exhausted, and depleted, making it difficult to experience positive emotions and maintain a positive mindset. Additionally, external factors such as financial problems, relationship issues, and work stress can contribute to feelings of unhappiness, anxiety, and depression.
Negative self-talk and limiting beliefs can also hinder our ability to experience happiness and well-being. These patterns of thought can contribute to a negative self-image, low self-esteem, and feelings of hopelessness or helplessness. These beliefs can be particularly damaging when they become self-fulfilling prophecies, as they can limit our ability to achieve our goals and pursue our dreams.
Lack of self-care and self-compassion is another obstacle to happiness. Many people fail to prioritize their own well-being, neglecting important practices such as exercise, healthy eating, and adequate sleep. Additionally, many people are overly critical of themselves, failing to show themselves the same compassion and understanding that they would extend to others.
Strategies for overcoming these obstacles and maintaining a positive mindset can include a range of practices, such as practicing mindfulness and self-compassion, seeking support and guidance from others, and cultivating a greater sense of gratitude and appreciation for the good things in our lives. Additionally, it can be helpful to challenge negative self-talk and limiting beliefs, and to adopt a more growth-oriented mindset that is focused on learning, growth, and self-improvement. By taking active steps to overcome these obstacles, we can cultivate greater happiness, well-being, and fulfillment in our lives.

In conclusion, happiness is a state of mind that can be achieved by cultivating a positive and growth-oriented mindset . While external factors such as stress and anxiety can present obstacles to our happiness, it is ultimately our own thoughts and beliefs that determine our level of well-being and fulfillment.

By adopting strategies such as mindfulness, positive thinking, and gratitude, we can overcome these obstacles and achieve a greater sense of happiness and contentment in our lives.

What is happiness?

Happiness is a positive emotional state characterized by contentment, joy, and satisfaction with life.

Is happiness a choice?

Yes, to some extent, happiness is a choice. We have the power to choose our thoughts and attitudes towards circumstances.

Is happiness the same for everyone?

No, happiness is subjective and can vary from person to person depending on individual values, priorities, and life circumstances.

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Cogut Institute for the Humanities

10. happiness in psychology and philosophy.

Meeting Street

Meeting Street: Conversations in the Humanities

Podcast host Amanda Anderson explores topics of vital societal interest through conversations with scholars and writers whose voices have helped define issues and shape debates.

Is pleasure the measure of happiness? Does happiness make life meaningful? How does it factor in economic and political life?

The boom of contemporary research on happiness has been driven by psychologists, though historically philosophy has long examined the subject. What happens when philosophy and psychology enter into conversation?

While happiness may be found through a walk in the woods with a friend, happiness research also illuminates social and public issues ranging from social media to authoritarianism. In this episode of Meeting Street, psychologist Joachim Krueger and philosopher Bernard Reginster explore with host Amanda Anderson the factors that contribute to or impact happiness and the ways in which happiness and meaningfulness can diverge. They talk about the benefits of conducting and teaching happiness research together and discuss how collaboration could shed light on related topics like social status.

Music and production: Jacob Sokolov-Gonzalez. Administrative support: Damien Mahiet and Gregory Kimbrell.

You can also listen to Meeting Street on Amazon Music , Apple Podcast , Google Podcast , Radio Public , Player FM , Spotify , and Stitcher .

Go to the show’s main page.

Amanda Anderson: From the Cogut Institute for the Humanities at Brown University, this is Meeting Street. I’m Amanda Anderson, the show’s host and director of the institute. In today’s episode, I’m joined by two scholars — one, a social psychologist, and the other, a philosopher — who have several times partnered to teach a course here at Brown on the philosophy and psychology of happiness. The most recent iteration of the course was offered under the aegis of a collaborative humanities initiative that promotes research-based, team-taught courses on important cultural topics. The aim is to see what happens when a humanities perspective is brought into conversation with a disciplinary perspective outside of the humanities.

One striking fact about the boom in happiness research over the past couple of decades is that it has largely been driven by the field of psychology, a social science, even though historically philosophy, a core humanities discipline, has had much to say about the topic. So I’m very excited to speak with my two guests today. Let me now introduce them.

Joachim Krueger is professor of cognitive and behavioral sciences. He studies topics in social judgment and decision-making, such as self-perception, strategic interpersonal behavior, and inter-group relations. He has published widely on these research topics and also has a vibrant blog hosted by Psychology Today. His more occasional writings on happiness have been collected in the book The Quest for Happiness in 31 Essays , published in 2016.

Bernard Reginster is a professor in the philosophy department. His research areas include ethics and moral psychology in 19th-century European philosophy and psychoanalytic theory. He is the author of The Affirmation of Life , published in 2006, and The Will to Nothingness: An Essay on Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality, published in 2021. Bernard is also the founder and director of the Program for Ethical Inquiry at Brown. Joachim and Bernard, welcome to Meeting Street.

Joachim Krueger: Thank you. It’s great to be here.

Bernard Reginster: It’s great to be here, Amanda. Thank you for having us.

Amanda Anderson: So, as I mentioned in the intro, the past few decades have seen a large increase in research on happiness, much of it within psychology, although ideas from the history of philosophy certainly exert an influence on happiness studies. Your course explores the question of happiness by means of an encounter between the two disciplines. Why do you think an approach that juxtaposes the two disciplinary frameworks of psychology and philosophy is important or useful? Joachim, as the psychologist, perhaps you could begin.

Joachim Krueger: Yeah, thank you. It’s an encounter all right, both for the instructors and for the students. And it’s fun. And it’s also educational because disciplines have different modes of thinking and different paradigms and differences in how they do their scholarship, and we bring that into the same room in our course. So we can tell the students, we can share with the students what we’ve learned about the differences in our theoretical pre-commitments, conceptualization of the issues, and the methods that we use in our efforts to find answers to the questions that we care about.

Amanda Anderson: Bernard, how would you answer the same question?

Bernard Reginster: Well, I mean, I agree with what Joachim just said about the confrontation of different methods, different approaches, right? And I can give a specific example if you’d like. So one of the things that philosophers do is that they emphasize the importance of conceptual analysis. So they try to understand what the concept of happiness really is, what it covers, what it doesn’t cover, and so on and so forth.

But from the point of view of a psychologist — and I learned that of course by talking to Joachim about this — is that what philosophers first called conceptual analysis looks very much like armchair psychology, and perhaps we would be better served by a rigorous empirical investigation of what’s really going on in the minds of people who describe themselves as happy.

Well, as it turns out, on reflection, both of these approaches are equally indispensable. On the one hand, the empirical investigation of a topic like happiness is only going to be as good as the initial conceptualization that frames the hypothesis that guides the inquiry. If you ask the wrong questions, obviously the answers you get are not going to be very helpful. But on the other hand, if the empirical hypothesis your initial conceptualization supplied [is] not confirmed by the empirical inquiries, then your initial conceptualization probably missed something and you need to revise it.

The other thing that I want to say is that, precisely because, as you noted in your introduction, the study of happiness has been mostly done by empirical psychologists, it makes it incumbent on philosophers to find out what psychologists have to say and see whether the empirical investigations might in some way force us to revise our concept of happiness. One of the things that’s been very striking to me is the way in which the psychological study of happiness has made it necessary for philosophers to become very careful in the way in which they, so to speak, map out the conceptual territory.

So when psychologists study happiness, obviously they will by trade define it as a state of mind of one sort or another. So the main views here are that happiness is a preponderance of positive over negative affect, or happiness is a sense of satisfaction with your life, things of that nature. But in any event, they define it as a state of mind.

Now in philosophy, happiness has been used virtually as synonymous for the good life in the sense of the life that’s good for the person living it. As philosophers tend to talk about it, it’s been synonymous with wellbeing. But it’s a real question, when you think about it, whether all that matters to your life going well for you is that you be in a certain state of mind. OK. And so philosophers had already started to talk about this kind of issue, but the prevalence of psychological research has really put it front and center. Is being in a certain state of mind all that really matters to your life going well for you?

“ [I]n philosophy, happiness has been used virtually as synonymous for the good life in the sense of the life that’s good for the person living it. As philosophers tend to talk about it, it’s been synonymous with wellbeing. But it’s a real question, when you think about it, whether all that matters to your life going well for you is that you be in a certain state of mind [...] ”

Amanda Anderson: Yes, let me press on this a little bit by asking Joachim what precisely are the different conceptions of happiness at play in happiness research? And what do you think some of the major contributions of happiness studies and positive psychology have been? I mean, Bernard has been stressing state of mind, or what we might call self-report, but one thing I would be really curious to hear is how happiness is conceived, apart from the question of whether or not the subject is saying that they feel happiness.

Joachim Krueger: Right, yeah. So what we tell our students, we give them some distinctions that are heuristic and useful, but they’re not categorically true, but they’re helpful for us to think about the issues. And one distinction is between the normative and the descriptive, and we say that by and large philosophers tend to gravitate to normative questions, and normative has a feeling of “Now we have a fix on how things should be or what happiness really is.”

And psychologists tend to shy away from that because then you get to judge people. So if we have a normative standard, we can judge people — or ourselves: “Am I as happy as I should be, or am I thinking about happiness in the correct way?” And so we lay it out for the students that psychologists are empirically working on a descriptive game and philosophers on a normative game, but there is overlap and we need to talk to one another. But it’s not categorically 100% true because there are, of course, many psychological enterprises that are normative.

So for example, when we study judgment and decision-making or choice, we use normative models. So it’s not entirely descriptive and that’s the end of the story. And likewise in the study of happiness and subjective wellbeing, once we’ve discovered, or we have empirical and theoretical grounds, that certain things are better for us and our wellbeing, then we have one foot in the normative territory: “Should you be doing this? Shouldn’t you be exposing yourself more to nature and give pro-socially and hang out more with your friends, because we know it will be good for you?” So the descriptive and the normative are continually in a dance with one another, and we hope we make progress by dancing the dance and understanding where we’re headed.

“ [T]he descriptive and the normative are continually in a dance with one another, and we hope we make progress by dancing the dance and understanding where we’re headed. ”

Amanda Anderson: Is part of what is at stake here between the normative and, let’s just say, the state of mind orientation competing temporal perspectives, where happiness can be the report of a state of mind in a kind of punctual sense, but the good life can only be known over the course of longer spans of time, or even perhaps the course of a life? I mean, I guess I would pose that question to Bernard.

Bernard Reginster: When psychologists talk about happiness, they talk about a state of mind, but they tend to talk about a long-term state of mind. So a moment of pleasure does not happiness make, right? On one of the models there’s got to be a preponderance of pleasure over pain, presumably over a certain period of time. I mean, it doesn’t have to cover your entire life, but it has to cover a protracted period of it.

The other point I would make in connection to the previous discussion is that it may very well be that there is something that psychologists call happiness and that is in fact good for you. The question, and I guess it has something to do with the normative question, is that, while it’s very likely to be good for you, is that the only way in which your life can go well for you? Or is this what you should be aiming at? Or are there other things that you might, and perhaps should, aim at if you want to have a life that’s really going well for you?

Amanda Anderson: Right. I mean, I think it comes down to value commitments, right? I mean, what are one’s primary value commitments? And certain forms of believing one’s life to be meaningful and important might not foreground feelings of pleasure and happiness. Joachim, did you want to speak to that?

Joachim Krueger: Yeah, I haven’t really answered your question on the state of mind, and that’s the orientation that psychologists take. And again, by and large, that’s true, but not entirely. So it’s not entirely true that this is all — as psychologists — what we think of as states of mind. And some are fleeting, some are longer lasting, but at the end of the day, we want to integrate them and have a whole of how happy the life has been. It’s actually the case that in psychology there’s a long tradition of also talking about deeper psychological constructs that are not states of mind, but whatever it is that gives rise to the state of mind. And that, of course, we know from the study of attitudes.

So you may have a strong ecological attitude — wanting to be green and wanting to do the necessary things — and from time to time, at the right conditions, things will pop into consciousness. But we assume, from what we see in people’s behavior and what they tell us and how they seem to be feeling, that there’s a latent state that gives rise to it, and this latent state or entity we can’t really see. It’s a hypothetical construct that we use to explain what we do see. So in that sense, we have much more common ground with the philosophers who are particularly interested in the deep, the ontology, what is happiness aside from the phenomena that we get to experience and witness in everyday life.

Bernard Reginster: Yeah, yeah. So to give you an example, I mean, one of the things that we discuss in the course is the question of whether the state of mind that is supposed to [be] considered happiness is an experiential state, a conscious experience, or something that underlies conscious experience, that’s still a condition of the mind — something like emotional health, for example — that is manifest in experience, but is not simply reducible to it.

Amanda Anderson: That’s very helpful. Joachim, what do you think made you particularly open to working with a humanities scholar on this particular topic?

Joachim Krueger: It has a lot to do with how Bernard, my friend and colleague, approached me to collaborate on this. So he kicked in the door, but the door was half open anyway, because I’ve always felt in my scholarly work that interdisciplinary thinking and interdisciplinary contacts are vital for — actually for my own happiness. When thinking is fun, you look for inspiration, and one way to get inspired in scholarship is to look beyond the confines of your little silo or discipline. So I’ve always read widely. I’ve never taken a philosophy course in my life, but I’m self-educated — and then to see the opportunity to work with a liked and loved and respected colleague, and to bring that attitude of excitement and inspiration to the students, how could I have said no?

Amanda Anderson: Bernard, what aspects of your own research or intellectual commitments or academic history drew you to this collaboration?

Bernard Reginster: Well, first of all, I have one of my undergraduate degrees in psychology, so I already have a separate interest in it. I was also very struck by the increasing interaction between philosophy, my discipline, and the social sciences and how that interaction proved to be very fruitful. And then, I discovered, and that was a bit unexpected, that in fact Joachim is a kind of a closet philosopher himself. So even though he never took a philosophy [course] in his life, he clearly has a bent towards it. So that really helped, but the interaction between the two disciplines can be amazingly fruitful, which is why philosophers engage in it.

So psychologists, for example, expose correlations, and sometimes those correlations can be quite eye-opening and striking and they merit consideration. If you want a couple of examples, one of the striking correlations is between positive affect, or happiness in that sense, and pro-social giving, when you spend more of your money on other people than on yourself, which goes against, of course, you know, what people tend to believe. And also more recently, the correlation established by some psychologists between the attraction towards authoritarianism and a sense of meaningfulness in life. So those, when they are well documented — these correlations cannot be dismissed, and they cry out for exploration.

“ [P]sychologists, for example, expose correlations, and sometimes those correlations can be quite eye-opening and striking and they merit consideration. [... O]ne of the striking correlations is between positive affect, or happiness in that sense, and pro-social giving, when you spend more of your money on other people than on yourself, which goes against, of course, you know, what people tend to believe. ”

Amanda Anderson: Bernard, let me follow that up by asking you, why do you think positive psychology and happiness research emerged when it did and has enjoyed such success? Do you have any thoughts about that from a cultural, or historical, or disciplinary perspective?

Bernard Reginster: Well, the emergence of that trend in the field of social psychology is something that I will let Joachim address, but I can say a few words about why it’s been so influential and successful. Certainly one reason for this is the fact that, at least in the 20th century and at least in the English-speaking world, the study of happiness was in some disrepute in my own discipline. So it was not really examined very much, and as a result there was a vacuum. And I think that the studies of happiness by social psychologists basically took over in this way. Increasingly then the psychological study of happiness has replaced philosophy, but also non-scientific [sic] self-help, as the go-to place where people who seek practical guidance will go in their quest for happiness.

Amanda Anderson: Joachim, how would you account for the rise of the field?

Joachim Krueger: Well, the term “positive psychology” was coined deliberately about 20 years ago by the president of the American Psychological Association at the time [Martin Seligman]. That was 1999, and that was kind of a heyday. Culturally and economically, the United States was the only superpower, everybody was happy already, but we can be even happier, and how do we go about it?

And the claim was that the discipline of psychology had ignored happiness, not necessarily about being negative psychology, clinical, but just having this blind spot on: “Can we be happier? And if we can, doesn’t psychology have an obligation to help us find out how?” But we live in quite a different world now [from] 20 years ago. Climate change is now climate crisis, the infrastructure is crumbling in this country, the democratic institution is under duress, and I can tell that our young students can feel that. That’s a different crowd of students than we had 20 years ago.

And I’m not ready to conclude that happiness can be studied only under the best of times — but also under the worst of times, or when times are more challenging, and that’s where we are now. And now, perhaps even more so we have an obligation to do our best to find our way forward.

You might think there is a tendency or risk that the study of happiness becomes overly individualized: Here is this person, and this person wants to be happy, and that’s the end of that. But the happiness of people, individual people, is embedded in a social context. And that’s another one of the major lessons we have for our students, that we are social creatures, and we are not islands or unto ourselves, but our happiness is something that we see and try to optimize within a social context in which we live.

“ You might think there is a tendency or risk that the study of happiness becomes overly individualized: Here is this person, and this person wants to be happy, and that’s the end of that. But the happiness of people, individual people, is embedded in a social context. And that’s another one of the major lessons we have for our students, that we are social creatures, and we are not islands or unto ourselves, but our happiness is something that we see and try to optimize within a social context in which we live. ”

Amanda Anderson: This connects to my very next question which is to ask the two of you to both talk a little bit about what role larger economic and social factors play in individual happiness. For instance, there are reports about how income inequality or social media negatively affect happiness, but happiness research, as you’re just saying, Joachim, often stresses more immediate factors such as close relations with others or the cultivation of certain practices of affirmation or compassion. So how do larger structural conditions affect happiness or interact with these individual or small-scale practices? Joachim?

Joachim Krueger: That’s a very delicate thing because we can, of course, study the larger context, and we do, so there’s another interdisciplinary frontier with sociology, political science, and economics. So we try to think and understand things globally, but we have to act locally because that’s all we can do. So we tell our students about the research that we see on the correlations between wealth and income inequality, and inequality and life satisfaction.

The data are pretty clear now: If you have extreme inequality in wealth and income, it leaves a footprint on average happiness. What is probably the most provocative findings within this literature is that these extreme discrepancies are not even good for those who have the most money, and that will probably be the hardest to see for them, that it’s not actually in their higher-order interest to maximize even more, to soak up even more, of a nation’s or global wealth within a few hands.

But hey, what can we do about that? Not that much. So that might require another course or another type of scholarship to go there, but what we can do is put that on the radar screen for ourselves and for our students.

Amanda Anderson: Bernard, would you like to add anything?

Bernard Reginster: Well, I might say that that’s true: We can’t do much about macro-economical conditions. But we did have a segment on happiness and social media, the use of social media, especially in young people, which was truly frightening. There’s a correlation between the number of times you spent on social media and suicidal tendencies. So that was problematic. But I would say that, you know, even though we cannot intervene necessarily, we can clarify what the issues are.

And another interesting example, I think, is the fact that some countries — I mean, it started in the country of Bhutan, but now the British government does it and other countries as well — started to sort of switch to a way of assessing the success and therefore the viability of a particular type of social organization, not in economic measures such as the gross domestic product for example, but in terms of something that is being called global national happiness.

I have to mention, again, something that I just found out recently about this, is that when it comes to the viability of the type of social organization under which we operate, some interesting research that just came out [is] showing that there’s actually a strong negative correlation between happiness, or positive affect, and the inclination towards authoritarianism.

So the people who are inclined towards authoritarianism tend to be very unhappy, but at the same time, there is also some research that shows that the inclination towards authoritarianism is not strongly correlated with low economic standing. So, of course, that might suggest that then we have political reason to care for the global national happiness as much as for the GDP since the very survival of our democratic political system seems to depend upon it.

But it turns out that things are even more complicated than this, because the same research that I mentioned a moment ago also shows a positive correlation between the inclination towards authoritarianism and meaningfulness. And that might suggest that the deep political problem is not that we don’t care enough about happiness. The deep political problem might be that we don’t care enough about meaningfulness, and that the survival of our republic depends upon that. So these are the kinds of concern, we can’t do anything about them, but at least we can expose them, bring them to the right.

“ [T]he deep political problem is not that we don’t care enough about happiness. The deep political problem might be that we don’t care enough about meaningfulness, and that the survival of our republic depends upon that. ”

Amanda Anderson: That’s fascinating. You’ve both talked about how your two approaches complement one another and are both necessary for the study of happiness. But let me also ask you, were there substantive disagreements between the two of you in your approach to the topic of happiness, and have there been cases in which those disagreements were productive for the course or for the collaboration? Bernard?

Bernard Reginster: One disagreement that we have had for some time now is about hedonism, which is the view that happiness consists of a preponderance of pleasure over pain. Joachim has been inclined towards it. I have been more skeptical. But the interesting thing is that once you start looking closely, you realize that the disagreement might be more apparent than real. So two examples: One is that when Joachim talks about happiness, of course what he has in mind is happiness in the fairly restricted psychological sense, and it may well be that happiness in that sense consists of pleasure. But when I talk about happiness, I talk about a broader concept of wellbeing, and there, there are reasons to think that maybe while pleasure may be part of it, it’s not the whole of it.

But another issue is that sometimes it looks as though a disagreement over hedonism is a disagreement about the importance of pleasure in happiness, and in fact, we don’t disagree about that. I mean, it would be insane of me to disagree that pleasure is an important, common, maybe even necessary part of happiness. The question really is, you know, what this means — the fact that pleasure and happiness are strongly correlated, what it means about our understanding of happiness. And there, there might be room for disagreement, right? I mean, so I tend to believe that happiness doesn’t consist of pleasure, but that pleasure is an indication of a state, which is a state of happiness, or that being happy tends to produce more pleasure than being unhappy, for example, and maybe Joachim disagrees with that.

Joachim Krueger: Yeah [chuckles]. It’s an unfolding story. We’ve taught the course now four times, and when I listened to my colleague, Bernard, I noticed all the critiques on hedonism, and so I found myself resisting that: “Come on, we can’t throw the baby out of the bath water. There’s something to be said for pleasure. Would you really? I mean, more pleasure is good, right? More pleasure, less pain, yes, sign me up.” And the question is rather, is that all that people want?

And so I find myself — yes, pleasure, and more pleasure, less pain, that fits my definition of happiness. But of course, when we ask, “What do people want and need?” this conception of happiness doesn’t exhaust it. And I’m reminded of my favorite book review that I ever read. It was published in 1940, it was one paragraph, and it was George Orwell’s review of an English translation of Hitler’s Mein Kampf . And Orwell didn’t really go into critiquing the book, which could have gone on for pages.

He made one point, and the point was that Hitler understood that the Enlightenment idea of happiness is not the only thing that drives people. That as a dictator, as a tyrant, as a populist, you can actually exploit other needs that people have and their willingness to actually accept pain or suffering. And that is a very deep lesson, and that’s an ongoing question in our course: happiness — yes, pleasure, less pain, but what else is going on? And so some of our disagreements about how we frame [the course] was the domain that we look at. Do we include meaning, let’s say, into our definition of subjective wellbeing or not? And that’s arguable.

Amanda Anderson: Joachim, are there things that you feel that you learned from the students, particularly through the group projects or the collaborative dimensions of the course?

Joachim Krueger: Yes, I did, at two levels. So the last time we taught the course, we introduced group work. We had over 200 students and we had over 30 groups of eight, and they were told to generate a hypothesis and a tractable empirical problem, and collect data, analyze them, and write a report. And they did, and I was just amazed how well that went. There was not a single group out of the 32 groups that imploded or collapsed.

And what I learned was a) the students can do it and most of them like it, and [b)] their reports were very good, addressing a lot of problems of our current time — there were many projects addressed to COVID-related issues and social media related issues. I learned, we learned, that the students got into it and they were not defensive or resistant, and that they embraced this opportunity to study, to themselves do some study and grow with that, and that was delightful.

Amanda Anderson: I mean, it’s interesting. You did teach the course during what many people would describe as a distinctly unhappy time, which is to say during the second spring of COVID-19, and that’s striking that it informed some of the group projects. And I know you talked earlier in the interview about how the cultural context for happiness studies is very different from the moment historically in which it emerged. I’m just wondering, Bernard, do you have thoughts on teaching the course and thinking about the topic of happiness during the pandemic? Do you feel that that affected the course in significant ways?

Bernard Reginster: I only have a few anecdotes from some individual students I’ve spoken with, so I don’t have any sort of a general sense of how the students fared. Part of the issue for us, I think, is that because we were teaching the course as the pandemic was happening, we didn’t have the distance that’s necessary to be able to assess the impact of such a massive event on the happiness of people.

I mean, we know now that obviously it wasn’t good in many respects, but we don’t know yet, for example, whether the changes that it will bring, for example, in the way in which people conceive of the place of work in their lives, will in fact be beneficial. They could well be, or maybe simply the fact that people recognize that getting along, you know, having social interaction with people, is actually quite important to your happiness and that the self-imposed isolation of COVID made that very clear to them. So there could still be beneficial effects, but we have to wait and see.

Amanda Anderson: Those are very interesting reflections. It is fascinating to think about how important it’s going to be to allow some time to pass before we can really assess the last couple of years. So as a last question, I’d like to ask you: This has been such a fruitful collaboration for the two of you, I can tell. I mean, even when you talk about disagreement within the conversation itself, during this interview, there was a dynamism and a kind of a rethinking in relation to the other person’s position. Is there another topic that you think might profit from collaboration between a psychologist and a philosopher? Joachim?

Joachim Krueger: Yeah, I’d love to answer that, but I can’t resist going back to the previous question really quickly. And that is, times change, cultures change, and our challenges change, but also some things are timeless. And students have never asked me point blank, "Professor, what’s the secret to happiness?" — I’m still waiting for somebody to ask me that because I have an answer, and I told them anyway, and I’m going to tell you now.

There is no “the secret,” but there are a number of little secrets. And one is — if I have one sentence to give one piece of advice is — it’s this: Go take a walk in the woods with a friend. Because you get three for one: The walk is good because the body likes to move. You get physiological benefits. We do know that people feel better when exposed and within nature as opposed to a human-made environment. And somebody you love, or like. That’s pro-sociality.

“ Go take a walk in the woods with a friend. Because you get three for one: The walk is good because the body likes to move. You get physiological benefits. We do know that people feel better when exposed and within nature as opposed to a human-made environment. And somebody you love, or like. That’s pro-sociality. ”

Joachim Krueger: As to other topics, there are many. Now Bernard and I are both interested in social life, the social world and how people navigate it, and one particularly intriguing concept on which we both have our perspectives is social status — which is something most people want, it’s very difficult to get, it’s easy to lose, and it has a dialectical challenge because, as you gain status, you go above others in your group, so you have a reduction of that kind of affinity or closeness when everybody’s equal. Yet most of us want to be better in some ways. So, that’s a balance we have to find, and I think that’s a topic where we can both take a look using psychological and philosophical concepts and methods.

Amanda Anderson: Bernard, do you have thoughts about that question?

Bernard Reginster: I would love to collaborate on the issue of social status. My interest in social status is that I understand status as the fact of enjoying a certain kind of social respect or esteem. You know, you want to be valued by your group or by significant others in your group. And I find it fascinating to understand why. And the standard view in social psychology, which I’ve learned from Joachim, is that the esteem of others is valued as a condition of your own self-esteem, but I just don’t think that’s ... I mean, that may be true in some cases, it’s certainly not true in all cases.

I mean, in many cases you want the esteem of others because you firmly believe, and you have no doubt about that, that you deserve it. And the question is, why is it so important to us? What is it that we want when we want the esteem of others if it’s not simply to bolster or validate one’s self-esteem? So that’s a fascinating question to me, and I know that Joachim has written a lot about this, so I would likely learn very much from him on this particular topic.

Another topic of collaboration on which I have a longstanding interest would be the importance of meaningfulness in a good life. What is it? Psychologists have started to talk about this. They have started to realize that the psychological markers for meaningfulness are different from the psychological markers for happiness, so there’s a budding science of meaningfulness in psychology, but philosophers, of course, have long been interested in that, and so that would be interesting as well.

Amanda Anderson: Could you just say a little bit more about what the different markers are for meaningfulness versus happiness?

Bernard Reginster: Well, for instance, I mean, the research I mentioned earlier shows that the marker for meaningfulness is a preponderance of negative affect over positive affect, and the marker for happiness is exactly the opposite. So it shows that meaningfulness and happiness can really diverge. They don’t need to. The argument can be made that if you are happy, your chances of having a life that’s also meaningful are greater. But they can also diverge. I mean, it makes sense for people to say that they are willing to sacrifice their happiness for a meaningful cause.

But the interesting fact is that both happiness and meaningfulness are part of what makes a life good for you. Your having a meaningful life doesn’t make the world better, doesn’t benefit the world. It benefits you. Likewise, your being happy doesn’t necessarily benefit the world. It benefits you primarily. And so you have this strange sort of a shape of the territory of wellbeing that you have these different components of it that can pull in different directions. So part of my motivation for studying meaningfulness in collaboration with Joachim would be to explore that peculiar fact.

Amanda Anderson: That’s fascinating. I want to thank both of you so much for taking the time to talk today. This has been a wonderful conversation. Thanks so much for being on the show.

Bernard Reginster: Thank you, Amanda. Thank you very much.

Joachim Krueger: Thank you, Amanda. It was a pleasure and no pain. Thank you.

Amanda Anderson: Meeting Street explores some of the most important and creative work being done in the humanities today through conversations with scholars and thinkers who are extending the boundaries of their respective fields. The show is produced by the Cogut Institute for the Humanities at Brown University. Damien Mahiet is our production manager. Our sound editor is Jake Sokolov-Gonzalez. If you enjoyed this week’s episode of Meeting Street, please leave a review wherever you listen to your favorite podcast.

1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology

Philosophy, One Thousand Words at a Time

Happiness: What is it to be Happy?

Author: Kiki Berk Category: Ethics , Phenomenology and Existentialism Words: 992

Listen here

Do you want to be happy? If you’re like most people, then yes, you do.

But what is happiness? What does it mean to be “happy”? [1]

This essay discusses four major philosophical theories of happiness. [2]

1. Hedonism

According to hedonism, happiness is simply the experience of pleasure. [3] A happy person has a lot more pleasure than displeasure (pain) in her life. To be happy, then, is just to feel good. In other words, there’s no difference between being happy and feeling happy.

Famous hedonists include the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus and the modern English philosophers Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. [4] These philosophers all took happiness to include intellectual pleasures (such as reading a book) in addition to physical pleasures (such as having sex).

Although we associate being happy with feeling good, many philosophers think that hedonism is mistaken.

First, it’s possible to be happy without feeling good (such as when a happy person has a toothache), and it’s also possible to feel good without being happy (such as when an unhappy person gets a massage). Since happiness and pleasure can come apart, they can’t be the same thing.

Second, happiness and pleasure seem to have different properties. Pleasures are often fleeting, simple, and superficial (think of the pleasure involved in eating ice cream), whereas happiness is supposed to be lasting, complex, and profound. Things with different properties can’t be identical, so happiness can’t be the same thing as pleasure.

These arguments suggest that happiness and pleasure aren’t identical. That being said, it’s hard to imagine a happy person who never feels good. So, perhaps happiness involves pleasure without being identical to it.

2. Virtue Theory

According to virtue theory, happiness is the result of cultivating the virtues—both moral and intellectual—such as wisdom, courage, temperance, and patience. A happy person must be sufficiently virtuous. To be happy, then, is to cultivate excellence and to flourish as a result. This view is famously held by Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. [5]

Linking happiness to virtue has the advantage of treating happiness as a lasting, complex, and profound phenomenon. It also explains how happiness and pleasure can come apart, since a person can be virtuous without feeling good, and a person can feel good without being virtuous.

In spite of these advantages, however, virtue theory is questionable. An important part of being virtuous is being morally good. But are immoral people always unhappy? Arguably not. Many bad people seem happy in spite of—or even because of—their unsavory actions. And a similar point can be made about intellectual virtue: unwise or irrational people aren’t always unhappy, either. In fact, some of these people seem happy as a direct result of their intellectual deficiencies. “Ignorance is bliss,” the saying goes!

But virtue theorists have a response here. Maybe some immoral people seem happy, on the surface; but that doesn’t mean that they are truly happy, at some deeper level. And the same thing can be said about people who lack the intellectual virtues: ignorance may lead to bliss, but that bliss isn’t true happiness. So, there seems to be some room for debate on these issues.

3. Desire Satisfaction Theory

According to the desire satisfaction theory, happiness consists in getting what you want—whatever that happens to be. A happy person has many of her desires satisfied; and the more her desires are satisfied, the happier she is.

Even though getting what you want can be a source of happiness, identifying happiness with desire satisfaction is problematic.

To start, this implies that the only way to become happier is by satisfying a desire. This seems wrong. Sometimes our happiness is increased by getting something we didn’t previously want—such as a surprise birthday party or getting stuck taking care of a neighbor’s cat. This implies that desire satisfaction is not necessary for happiness.

Desire satisfaction is not always sufficient for happiness, either. Unfortunately, it is common for people to feel disappointed when they get what they want. Many accomplishments, such as earning a degree or winning a tournament, simply don’t bring the long-lasting happiness that we expect. [6]

So, even if getting what we want sometimes makes us happy, these counterexamples suggest that happiness does not consist in desire satisfaction. [7]

4. Life Satisfaction Theory

According to the life satisfaction theory, happiness consists in being satisfied with your life. A happy person has a positive impression of her life in general, even though she might not be happy about every single aspect of it. To be happy, then, means to be content with your life as a whole.

It’s controversial whether life satisfaction is affective (a feeling) or cognitive (a belief). On the one hand, life satisfaction certainly comes with positive feelings. On the other hand, it’s possible to step back, reflect on your life, and realize that it’s good, even when you’re feeling down. [8]

One problem for this theory is that it’s difficult for people to distinguish how they feel in the moment from how they feel about their lives overall. Studies have shown that people report feeling more satisfied with their lives when the weather is good, even though this shouldn’t make that much of a difference. But measuring life satisfaction is complicated, so perhaps such studies should be taken with a grain of salt. [9]

5. Conclusion

Understanding what happiness is should enable you to become happier.

First, decide which theory of happiness you think is true, based on the arguments.

Second, pursue whatever happiness is according to that theory: seek pleasure and try to avoid pain (hedonism), cultivate moral and intellectual virtue (virtue theory), decide what you really want and do your best to get it (desire satisfaction theory), or change your life (or your attitude about it) so you feel (or believe) that it’s going well (life satisfaction theory).

And if you’re not sure which theory of happiness is true, then you could always try pursuing all of these things. 😊

[1] This might seem like an empirical (scientific) question rather than a philosophical one. However, this essay asks the conceptual question of what happiness is, and conceptual questions belong to philosophy, not to science.

[2] Happiness is commonly distinguished from “well-being,” i.e., the state of a life that is worth living. Whether or not happiness is the same thing as well-being is an open question, but most philosophers think it isn’t. See, for example, Haybron (2020).

[3] The word “hedonism” has different uses in philosophy. In this paper, it means that happiness is the same thing as pleasure (hedonism about happiness). But sometimes it is used to mean that happiness is the only thing that has intrinsic value (hedonism about value) or that humans are always and only motivated by pleasure (psychological hedonism). It’s important not to confuse these different uses of the word.

[4] For more on Epicurus and happiness, see Konstan (2018). For more on Bentham and Mill on happiness, see Driver (2014), as well as John Stuart Mill on The Good Life: Higher-Quality Pleasures by Dale E. Miller and Consequentialism by Shane Gronholz

[5] For more on Plato and happiness, see Frede (2017); for more on Aristotle and happiness, see Kraut (2018), and on the Stoics and happiness, see Baltzly (2019).

[6] For a discussion of the phenomenon of disappointment in this context see, for example, Ben Shahar (2007).

[7] For more objections to the desire satisfaction theory, see Shafer-Landau (2018) and Vitrano (2013).

[8] If happiness is life satisfaction, then happiness seems to be “subjective” in the sense that a person cannot be mistaken about whether or not she is happy. Whether happiness is subjective in this sense is controversial, and a person who thinks that a person can be mistaken about whether or not she is happy will probably favor a different theory of happiness.

[9] See Weimann, Knabe and Schob (2015) and Berk (2018).

Baltzly, Dirk, “Stoicism”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2019 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2019/entries/stoicism/>.

Berk, Kiki (2018). “Does Money Make Us Happy? The Prospects and Problems of Happiness Research in Economics,” in Journal of Happiness Studies, 19, 1241-1245.

Ben-Shahar, Tal (2007). Happier . New York: McGraw-Hill.

Driver, Julia, “The History of Utilitarianism”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2014 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2014/entries/utilitarianism-history/>.

Frede, Dorothea, “Plato’s Ethics: An Overview”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2017/entries/plato-ethics/>.

Haybron, Dan, “Happiness”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2020 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2020/entries/happiness/>.

Konstan, David, “Epicurus”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2018 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2018/entries/epicurus/>.

Kraut, Richard, “Aristotle’s Ethics”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2018 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2018/entries/aristotle-ethics/>.

Shafer-Landau, Russ (2018). The Ethical Life: Fundamental Readings in Ethics and Moral Problems. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Vitrano, Christine (2013). The Nature and Value of Happiness. Boulder: Westview Press.

Weimann, Joachim, Andreas Knabe, and Ronnie Schob (2015). Measuring Happiness . Cambridge: The MIT Press.

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About the Author

Dr. Kiki Berk is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Southern New Hampshire University. She received her Ph.D. in Philosophy from the VU University Amsterdam in 2010. Her research focuses on Beauvoir’s and Sartre’s philosophies of death and meaning in life.

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What Is Happiness?

Reviewed by Psychology Today Staff

Happiness is an electrifying and elusive state. Philosophers, theologians, psychologists, and even economists have long sought to define it. And since the 1990s, a whole branch of psychology— positive psychology —has been dedicated to pinning it down. More than simply positive mood, happiness is a state of well-being that encompasses living a good life, one with a sense of meaning and deep contentment.

Feeling joyful has its health perks as well. A growing body of research also suggests that happiness can improve your physical health; feelings of positivity and fulfillment seem to benefit cardiovascular health, the immune system, inflammation levels, and blood pressure, among other things. Happiness has even been linked to a longer lifespan as well as a higher quality of life and well-being.

Attaining happiness is a global pursuit. Researchers find that people from every corner of the world rate happiness more important than other desirable personal outcomes, such as obtaining wealth, acquiring material goods, and getting into heaven.

Happiness is not the result of bouncing from one joy to the next; researchers find that achieving happiness typically involves times of considerable dis comfort. Genetic makeup, life circumstances, achievements, marital status, social relationships, even your neighbors—all influence how happy you are. Or can be. So do individual ways of thinking and expressing feelings. Research shows that much of happiness is under personal control.

Regularly indulging in small pleasures, getting absorbed in challenging activities, setting and meeting goals , maintaining close social ties, and finding purpose beyond oneself all increase life satisfaction. It isn't happiness per se that promotes well-being, it’s the actual pursuit that’s key.

For more, see How to Find Happiness.

Happy people live with purpose. They find joy in lasting relationships, working toward their goals, and living according to their values. The happy person is not enamored with material goods or luxury vacations. This person is fine with the simple pleasures of life—petting a dog, sitting under a tree, enjoying a cup of tea. Here are a few of the outward signs that someone is content.

Is open to learning new things
Is high in humility and patience
Smiles and laughs readily
Goes with the flow
Practices compassion
Is often grateful
Exercises self-care
Enjoys healthy relationships
Is happy for other people
Gives and receives without torment
Lives with meaning and purpose
Does not feel entitled and has fewer expectations
Is not spiteful or insulting
Does not hold grudges
Does not register small annoyances
Does not angst over yesterday and tomorrow
Does not play games
Is not a martyr or victim
Is not stingy with their happiness

For more, see How To Find Happiness.

Misperceptions abound when it comes to what we think will make us happy. People often believe that happiness will be achieved once they reach a certain milestone, such as finding the perfect partner or landing a particular salary.

Humans, however, are excellent at adapting to new circumstances, which means that people will habituate to their new relationship or wealth, return to a baseline level of happiness, and seek out the next milestone. Fortunately, the same principle applies to setbacks—we are resilient and will most likely find happiness again.

Regarding finances specifically, research shows that the sweet spot for yearly income is between $60,000 and $95,000 a year, not a million-dollar salary. Earnings above $95,000 do not equate to increased well-being; a person earning $150,000 a year will not necessarily be as happy as a person earning a lot less.

The type of thoughts below exemplify these misconceptions about happiness:

"I’ll be happy when I’m rich and successful."
"I’ll be happy when I’m married to the right person."
"Landing my dream job will make me happy."
"I can’t be happy when my relationship has fallen apart."
"I will never recover from this diagnosis."
"The best years of my life are over."

For more, see The Science of Happiness.

Positive psychology is the branch of psychology that explores human flourishing. It asks how individuals can experience positive emotions, develop authentic relationships, find flow, achieve their goals, and build a meaningful life.

Propelled by University of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin Seligman , the movement emerged from the desire for a fundamental shift in psychology—from revolving around disease and distress to providing the knowledge and skills to cultivate growth, meaning, and fulfillment. For more, see Positive Psychology.

Every person has unique life experiences, and therefore unique experiences of happiness. That being said, when scientists examine the average trajectory of happiness over the lifespan, some patterns tend to emerge. Happiness and satisfaction begin relatively high, decrease from adolescence to midlife , and rise throughout older adulthood.

What makes someone happy in their 20s may not spark joy in their 80s, and joy in someone’s 80s may have seemed irrelevant in their 20s. It’s valuable for people to continue observing and revising what makes them happy at a given time to continue striving for fulfillment throughout their lifetime.

For more, see Happiness Over the Lifespan.

Health and happiness are completely intertwined. That’s not to say that people with illnesses can’t be happy, but that attending to one’s health is an important—and perhaps underappreciated—component of well-being.

Researchers have identified many links between health and happiness—including a longer lifespan—but it’s difficult to distinguish which factor causes the other. Making changes to diet , exercise, sleep, and more can help everyone feel more content.

For more, see Happiness and Health .

How this essential brain chemical works and why it’s important for your health.

In life, there's always going to be someone with more. Jealousy and envy only make you feel worse. Fortunately, sympathetic joy offers a better path forward for you and others.

Quid-pro-quo kindness can be damaging to a relationship. Here's how to avoid it.

If any society seriously wishes to improve levels of wellbeing and overall harmony, the best place to start is childhood.

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Discover how challenges that are not fun in the moment—but rewarding in retrospect—can grow resilience, deepen life satisfaction, and lead to transformative personal growth.

Having a supportive partner can encourage you to take creative risks and look for opportunities to continue to learn and grow.

There are lessons to be learned about our approach to life from how we play poker.

A new study suggests that happiness among singles and those in couples is similar.

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What Is Happiness and Why Is It Important? (+ Definition)

It seems like an odd question, but is it? Do you know how to define happiness? Do you think happiness is the same thing to you as it is to others?

What’s the point of it all? Does it even make a difference in our lives?

In fact, happiness does have a pretty important role in our lives, and it can have a huge impact on the way we live our lives. Although researchers have yet to pin down the definition or an agreed-upon framework for happiness, there’s a lot we have learned in the last few decades.

This article will dive into the science of happiness, what it actually is, and why it matters.

Before you continue, we thought you might like to download our three Happiness & Subjective Wellbeing Exercises for free . These detailed, science-based exercises will help you or your clients identify sources of authentic happiness and strategies to boost wellbeing.

This Article Contains:

A Look at the Oxford English Dictionary’s Definition of Happiness

What is the Meaning of Happiness in Positive Psychology?

The psychology behind human happiness, 8 examples that describe what a happy life looks like, why is happiness so important, 6 videos that explain happiness, a take-home message, a look at the oxford english dictionary ‘s definition of happiness.

First, let’s take a look at the definition of happiness so we’re all on the same page. Oxford English Dictionary ’s definition of “happiness” is a simple one: “ The state of being happy .”

Not exactly what we were looking for, was it? Perhaps we need to dive a little deeper. Oxford English Dictionary ’s definition of “happy” is a little more helpful: “ Feeling or showing pleasure or contentment .”

That’s better! So, happiness is the state of feeling or showing pleasure or contentment. From this definition, we can glean a few important points about happiness:

Happiness is a state, not a trait; in other words, it isn’t a long-lasting, permanent feature or personality trait, but a more fleeting, changeable state.
Happiness is equated with feeling pleasure or contentment, meaning that happiness is not to be confused with joy, ecstasy, bliss, or other more intense feelings.
Happiness can be either feeling or showing, meaning that happiness is not necessarily an internal or external experience, but can be both.

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The meaning of happiness in Positive Psychology really depends on who you ask.

Happiness is often known by another name in positive psychology research: subjective wellbeing, or SWB.

Some believe happiness is one of the core components of SWB, while others believe happiness is SWB. Regardless, you’ll frequently find SWB used as a shorthand for happiness in the literature.

And speaking of the literature, you will find references to SWB everywhere. A quick Google search for the word “happiness” offers over 2 million results (as of January 6th, 2019). Further, a scan for the same term in two of psychology’s biggest online databases (PsycINFO and PsycARTICLES) returns 19,139 results from academic and other journals, books, dissertations, and more.

Is it difficult to define scientifically?

With so many takes on happiness, it’s no wonder that happiness is a little difficult to define scientifically; there is certainly disagreement about what, exactly, happiness is.

According to researchers Chu Kim-Prieto, Ed Diener, and their colleagues (2005), there are three main ways that happiness has been approached in positive psychology:

Happiness as a global assessment of life and all its facets;
Happiness as a recollection of past emotional experiences;
Happiness as an aggregation of multiple emotional reactions across time (Kim-Prieto, Diener, Tamir, Scollon, & Diener, 2005).

Although they generally all agree on what happiness feels like—being satisfied with life, in a good mood, feeling positive emotions , feeling enjoyment, etc.—researchers have found it difficult to agree on the scope of happiness.

However, for our purposes in this piece, it’s enough to work off of a basic definition that melds the OED ‘s definition with that of positive psychologists: happiness is a state characterized by contentment and general satisfaction with one’s current situation.

Pleasure vs. happiness

Couples and Happiness as a Social Component.

The association between the two makes sense, and it’s common to hear the two words used interchangeably outside of the literature; however, when it comes to the science of positive psychology, it is important to make a distinction between the two.

Happiness, as we described above, is a state characterized by feelings of contentment and satisfaction with one’s life or current situation. On the other hand, pleasure is a more visceral, in-the-moment experience. It often refers to the sensory-based feelings we get from experiences like eating good food, getting a massage, receiving a compliment, or having sex.

Happiness , while not a permanent state, is a more stable state than pleasure. Happiness generally sticks around for longer than a few moments at a time, whereas pleasure can come and go in seconds (Paul, 2015).

Pleasure can contribute to happiness, and happiness can enhance or deepen feelings of pleasure, but the two can also be completely mutually exclusive. For example, you can feel a sense of happiness based on meaning and engagement that has nothing to do with pleasure, or you could feel pleasure but also struggle with guilt because of it, keeping you from feeling happy at the same time.

Happiness vs. meaning

Happiness and meaning have an even more distinct line between the two. Rarely are happiness and meaning confused or used interchangeably, and for good reason—they describe two very different experiences.

Humans may resemble many other creatures in their striving for happiness, but the quest for meaning is a key part of what makes us human, and uniquely so.

Roy Baumeister et al. (2013)

Unlike happiness, meaning is not a fleeting state that drifts throughout the day; it’s a more comprehensive sense of purpose and feeling of contributing to something greater than yourself.

As the quote from Baumeister and colleagues (2013) suggests, there are important distinctions between the methods of searching for and the benefits of experiencing happiness and meaning. Scott Barry Kaufman at Scientific American (2016) outlines these distinctions that Baumeister and his fellow researchers found between the two:

Finding one’s life easy or difficult was related to happiness, but not meaning;
Feeling healthy was related to happiness, but not meaning;
Feeling good was related to happiness, not meaning;
Scarcity of money reduced happiness more than meaning;
People with more meaningful lives agreed that “relationships are more important than achievements;”
Helping people in need was linked to meaning but not happiness;
Expecting to do a lot of deep thinking was positively related to meaningfulness, but negatively with happiness;
Happiness was related more to being a taker rather than a giver, whereas meaning was related more to being a giver than a taker;
The more people felt their activities were consistent with the core themes and values of their self, the greater meaning they reported in their activities;
Seeing oneself as wise, creative, and even anxious were all linked to meaning but had no relationship (and in some cases, even showed a negative relationship) to happiness (Kaufman, 2016).

Basically, although the two overlaps and each can contribute to the experience of the other, the two can be mutually exclusive (Baumeister et al., 2013).

Relevant reading: 19 Cliché Happiness Quotes & The (Lack Of) Science Behind Them

The origins and etymology of happiness (Incl. root words)

According to Etymology Online (n.d.), the word for “happy” in most languages came from the word for “lucky.” This suggests an interesting trend—perhaps our ancestors believed that happiness was largely a by-product of luck?

It also points to a possible difference of general opinion between earlier generations and our own 20th and 21st-century generations: that happiness was not a vital factor in a good life, but essentially a bonus that some lucky individuals got to experience.

Here’s what author Darrin McMahon writes about the origins and root words of the word “happiness:”

“It is a striking fact that in every Indo-European language, without exception, going all the way back to ancient Greek, the word for happiness is a cognate with the word for luck. Hap is the Old Norse and Old English root of happiness, and it just means luck or chance, as did the Old French heur, giving us bonheur, good fortune or happiness. German gives us the word Gluck, which to this day means both happiness and chance.”

(McMahon, 2006)

What does self-happiness mean?

Although the term is not used very often, “self-happiness” refers to a sense of happiness or satisfaction with one’s self. It is often associated with self-confidence, self-esteem, and other concepts that marry “the self” with feeling content and happy.

In general, it means that you are pleased with yourself and your choices, and with the person that you are.

Happiness can be defined as an enduring state of mind consisting not only of feelings of joy, contentment, and other positive emotions, but also of a sense that one’s life is meaningful and valued (Lyubomirsky, 2001).

Happiness energizes us and is a highly sought after state of being. But, what components make up happiness?

Martin Seligman (2002) argued that happiness has three dimensions that can be cultivated:

The regular experience of pleasantness (the pleasant life)
The frequent engagement in satisfying activities (the engaged life)
The experience of a sense of connectedness to a greater whole (the meaningful life)

Although each dimension is important, the happiest people tend to be those who pursue the full life— they infuse their life with pleasure, engagement, and meaning (Seligman et al., 2005).

Building on Seligman’s three dimensions of happiness, Sirgy and Wu (2009) added the balanced life dimension.

According to these authors, balance in life is another key factor contributing to happiness because the amount of satisfaction derived from a single life domain is limited. One needs to be involved in multiple domains to satisfy the broad spectrum of human needs. As a result, cultivating a sense of balance is crucial for juggling these life domains.

Now that we know what happiness is, let’s dive a little deeper. What does psychology have to tell us about happiness?

There are many different theories of happiness, but they generally fall into one of two categories based on how they conceptualize happiness (or well-being):

Hedonic happiness/well-being is happiness conceptualized as experiencing more pleasure and less pain; it is composed of an affective component (high positive affect and low negative affect) and a cognitive component (satisfaction with one’s life);
Eudaimonic happiness/well-being conceptualizes happiness as the result of the pursuit and attainment of life purpose, meaning, challenge, and personal growth; happiness is based on reaching one’s full potential and operating at full functioning (AIPC, 2011).

Some theories see happiness as a by-product of other, more important pursuits in life, while others see happiness as the end-goal for humans. Some theories state that pursuing happiness is pointless (although pursuing other important experiences and feelings may contribute to greater happiness), and some assume that happiness can be purposefully increased or enhanced.

Although they differ on the specifics, these theories generally agree on a few points:

It’s good to be happy, and people like being happy;
Happiness is neither a totally fleeting, momentary experience nor a stable, long-term trait;
At least some portion of our happiness is set by our genetics, but the amount varies from about 10% up to 50%;
The pursuit and attainment of pleasure will rarely lead to happiness;
There are many sources that contribute to or compose happiness (AIPC, 2011).

What sources create true personal happiness?

Taking together all the various theories and findings on happiness, we know that there are at least a few factors that are very important for overall happiness:

Individual income;
Labor market status;
Physical health;
Social relationships;
Moral values;
Experience of positive emotions (AIPC, 2011).

All of these factors can contribute to a happy life, but research has found that good relationships are a vital ingredient (Waldinger & Schulz, 2010).

When we are happy in our most important relationships (usually our spouse or significant other, our children and/or our parents, other close family members, and our closest friends), we tend to be happier.

We have some control over how our relationships go, so that leads us to an interesting and important question: can we increase our own happiness?

Can individuals learn how to be happy?

The answer from numerous studies is a resounding YES—you CAN learn how to be happier.

The degree to which you can increase your happiness will vary widely by which theory you subscribe to, but there are no credible theories that allow absolutely no room for individual improvement. To improve your overall happiness, the most effective method is to look at the list of sources above and work on enhancing the quality of your experiences in each one of them.

For example, you can work on getting a higher salary (although a higher salary will only work up to about $75,000 USD a year), improve your health , work on developing and maintaining high-quality relationships, and overall, find ways to incorporate more positive feelings into your daily life. This does assume basic access to safety as well as social equality.

Of course, what it looks like will depend on the individual—a happy life for one person may be another’s nightmare!

However, there are a few examples that can display a wide range of lives that can be conducive to happiness:

A woman who lives alone, has excellent relationships with her nieces and nephews, gives to charity, and finds meaning in her work;
A man who is happily married with three healthy children and a relatively low-paying job;
A widow who enjoys regular visits with her children and grandchildren, along with volunteering for local charities;
A cancer patient who has a wonderful support system and finds meaning in helping others make it through chemotherapy;
A social worker who works 70-hour weeks with no overtime pay, to ensure the children on her caseload are in good hands;
An unmarried man in a monastery who has no earthly possessions and no salary to speak of, but finds meaning in communing with his god;
A teenager in a foster home who has several close friends and enjoys playing football on his school’s team;
A man who lives with several pets, enjoys a high salary, and loves his job.

Each of these was pulled from real-world examples of people who are happy. They may not seem like they have it all, but they all have at least one of the ingredients from the list of sources mentioned earlier. We don’t need to have everything we want in order to be happy—true happiness can be obtained by finding joy in what we already have, however much or little that may seem.

What are some visions you associate with happiness? Are there any similarities with these dreams?

You might be wondering why happiness is considered such an important aspect of life, as there are many components of a meaningful life.

In some ways, science would agree with you. It appears that life satisfaction , meaning, and well-being can be linked with happiness, but happiness is not necessarily the overarching goal for everyone in life. It is still important because it has some undeniably positive benefits and co-occurring factors.

June Silny at Happify outlines 14 answers to the question, “ What’s so great about happiness, anyway? ”

Happy people are more successful in multiple life domains, including marriage, friendship, income, work performance, and health.
Happy people get sick less often and experience fewer symptoms when they do get sick.
Happy people have more friends and a better support system.
Happy people donate more to charity (and giving money to charity makes you happy, too).
Happy people are more helpful and more likely to volunteer—which also makes you happier!
Happy people have an easier time navigating through life since optimism eases pain, sadness, and grief.
Happy people have a positive influence on others and encourage them to seek happiness as well, which can act as reinforcement.
Happy people engage in deeper and more meaningful conversations.
Happy people smile more, which is beneficial to your health.
Happy people exercise more often and eat more healthily.
Happy people are happy with what they have rather than being jealous of others.
Happy people are healthier all around and more likely to be healthy in the future.
Happy people live longer than those who are not as happy.
Happy people are more productive and more creative, and this effect extends to all those experiencing positive emotions.

The relationship between mental health and happiness

As you can probably assume from the list above, there is a strong relationship between mental health and happiness! When happy people are healthier, have better relationships, make friends more easily, and find more success in life, it’s easy to see why happiness and mental health are related.

The sources that contribute to happiness are the same as those that provide people with a buffer or protection against mental illness, which explains the close relationship between the two.

A recent study explored the association between happiness and mental health in college students and found that a relatively strong, positive correlation connects the two factors (Shafiq, Nas, Ansar, Nasrulla, Bushra, & Imam, 2015). This correlation held, even when gender and socio-demographic variables were added to the mix.

The close tie between mental health and happiness is reason enough to make happiness an important priority for parents, educators, researchers, and medical professionals alike, along with the simple fact that we all like to feel happy!

17 Exercises To Increase Happiness and Wellbeing

Add these 17 Happiness & Subjective Well-Being Exercises [PDF] to your toolkit and help others experience greater purpose, meaning, and positive emotions.

Created by Experts. 100% Science-based.

If you’re interested in learning more about happiness from a scientific perspective, there are a few videos you might want to check out, including:

Positive Psychology: The Science of Happiness by Professor Tal Ben-Shahar from WGBH Forum.

Shawn Achor – The Happiness Advantage: Linking Positive Brains to Performance TEDTalk from TEDx Talks

Positive Psychology – Happier by Professor Tal Ben-Shahar, Ph.D. from FightMediocrity

How to be Happy – The Science of Happiness and Feeling Positive in Life from Memorize Academy

The Surprising Science of Happiness TED Talk by Dan Gilbert from TED

How to Be Happy – The Secret of Authentic Happiness – Martin Seligman from Practical Psychology

I hope this piece was helpful and informative for you, and that you learned something new about the scientific study of happiness. It’s a fascinating area of research, and new findings are coming out all the time. Make sure you stay up to date on the happiness literature , as the findings can be of great use in helping you to live your best life!

What are your thoughts on happiness? Would you define it differently? What do you find is the most important ingredient for your own happiness? Let us know in the comments section below!

Thanks for reading, I hope you are all finding happiness in all your life journeys.

We hope you enjoyed reading this article. Don’t forget to download our three Happiness Exercises for free .

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Lyubomirsky, S. (2001). Why are some people happier than others? The role of cognitive and motivational processes in well-being. American Psychologist, 56(3) , 239.
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Seligman, M. E. (2002). Authentic happiness: Using the new positive psychology to realize your potential for lasting fulfillment . Simon and Schuster.
Seligman, M. E., Steen, T. A., Park, N., & Peterson, C. (2005). Positive psychology progress: empirical validation of interventions. American Psychologist, 60(5) , 410.
Shafiq, S., Naz, R. A., Ansar, M., Nasrulla, T., Bushra, M., & Imam, S. (2015). Happiness as related to mental health among university students. International Journal of Humanities and Social Science, 5 , 124-132.
Silny, J. (n.d.). What’s so great about happiness, anyway? (The answer: plenty!). Happify Daily . Retrieved from https://www.happify.com/hd/whats-so-great-about-happiness/
Waldinger, R. J., & Schulz, M. S. (2010). What’s love got to do with it?: Social functioning, perceived health, and daily happiness in married octogenarians. Psychology and Aging, 25 , 422-431.

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What our readers think.

His article was extremely helpful and enabled me to grasp the concept of the confusing question of what it means to be happy and the general meaning of happiness. I’m so glad I found this article to be honest.

I disagree with your comment that ‘Happiness is not a state but a trait.’ I see happiness as a purely internal construct. I choose to be happy regardless of the people or things going on around me. Those people who look for happiness in others, outside of themselves, bounce back and forth between some fleeting form of happiness and unhappiness. If they would instead see happiness as an internal construct, man vs himself, they wouldn’t be dependent on someone else for their personal feelings of happiness. Because really, you don’t have the power to change others… But you do have all the power you need to change how you choose to see and react to what’s around you. The ball of your happiness is 100% in your court.

The article was very helpful and informative

Just finished your article on happiness, or SWB and meaning . As stated in your article, happiness is fleeting and subject to feel good material goods and personal objectives. Having sex, kids, buying a new car, an opioid response. However, I thought life was supposed to have meaning that would contribute to my happiness. I chose a career based on what I thought I could contribute to my own and others lives. Rather naïve on my behalf and futile at this stage. I’m 72 years old and understand less now about the world as it is than ever before. I’ve seen the horrors of war and have moved forward from those days to marrying, having a family and building a career, the dopamine response, however I’ve lost the meaning of life and find myself unhappy, angry, reclusive and frustrated. I have done drugs, tried meditation and read books searching for meaning and happiness, which has been elusive at times. Your article helped put certain expectations of others and myself in perspective and what I need to do to achieve happiness and meaning. Thank you!

Thanks for this article. Nowadays, i do gratitude exercice in the morning, midday and before sleep. It’s help me stay more in positive thoughts. I like soo much.

I write: I am grateful for … ( 10x )

Thank you so much for this very insightful article. It really taught me a lot.

Thank you very much for the article. I think it will help me a lot. It has given me clear ideas of how I can try and attain some degree of happiness, and hence greater contentment. Happiness is important in individuals – I believe it is a key to tolerance and a stable society.

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What Is Happiness Essay

What is happiness? We can ask hundreds of people, and each of them would probably give different answers. One would say that happiness is to be with a loved one, the second would say that happiness is the stability, and the third, on the contrary, would say that happiness is the unpredictability. For someone, to be happy is to have a lot of money while for others – to be popular. All in all, there are plenty of different understandings of happiness.

Personally, I consider happiness as simplicity and peace when my family and friends are healthy and happy as well. I recognize that they all are dear to me and able to understand what is going on inside me. I know that they will support me in any situation doing everything that depends on them. In return, I am also ready to do much for them. What we do for others, helping them when they need our help, advice, or support and obtaining appreciation, is happiness because helping others, we are doing something very significant and necessary.

What does it mean to be happy? I think it is, primarily, a state of mind, it means to have harmony with yourself and the people around. Happiness is multi-faceted. Perhaps, the word “love” is the most appropriate one to describe my happiness as love is driven by our world. People create wonderful things concerning their job, hobby, or family. Love is life, and I am happy when I realize that I live up to the hilt.

However, some people might be unhappy even though they should be. For example, teenagers who have everything to live a happy life, including healthy family, close friends, and enough money to satisfy basic needs, ask their parents to buy the latest model of IPhone. In the case, parents could not afford it, some teenagers tend to feel unhappy. After all, one can be a successful leader and have millions as well as prestige, but do not have a loving family and emotional harmony.

In my opinion, material values are not a true measure of happiness. Happiness is the ability to be optimistic in spite of difficulties and the ability to overcome them successfully. Finally, challenges should be taken as the lessons that life presents us. Even the negative things teach something, give a new experience, or refer to the correct direction.

I believe that happiness is not a gift and not a given right as every person has its own happiness inside. Moreover, it is never too late to become happy. We can inspire and motivate ourselves and others to be happy. A stranger’s passing smile, warm rays of the sun penetrating the window, or a cup of freshly brewed coffee – happiness is in detail. Everyone chooses and prefers different sources. It is of great importance for people to enjoy moments of life, even the most insignificant ones.

We need to appreciate every moment in our lives remembering that happiness is within us. After all, time passes, and we are getting hurt by the fact that we did not appreciate the time when we had a chance. Therefore, living in peace and harmony with others, helping those who need your help, and avoiding things that you would regret about in future are paramount ways to find happiness and make others happy.

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What Is Happiness?

Defining Happiness, and How to Become Happier

Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

Rachel Goldman, PhD FTOS, is a licensed psychologist, clinical assistant professor, speaker, wellness expert specializing in eating behaviors, stress management, and health behavior change.

Verywell/ Jiaqi Zhou

How to Cultivate Happiness

How to be a happier person.

Happiness is something that people seek to find, yet what defines happiness can vary from one person to the next. Typically, happiness is an emotional state characterized by feelings of joy, satisfaction, contentment, and fulfillment. While happiness has many different definitions, it is often described as involving positive emotions and life satisfaction.

When most people talk about the true meaning of happiness, they might be talking about how they feel in the present moment or referring to a more general sense of how they feel about life overall.

Because happiness tends to be such a broadly defined term, psychologists and other social scientists typically use the term ' subjective well-being ' when they talk about this emotional state. Just as it sounds, subjective well-being tends to focus on an individual's overall personal feelings about their life in the present.

Two key components of happiness (or subjective well-being) are:

The balance of emotions: Everyone experiences both positive and negative emotions, feelings, and moods. Happiness is generally linked to experiencing more positive feelings than negative ones.
Life satisfaction: This relates to how satisfied you feel with different areas of your life including your relationships, work, achievements, and other things that you consider important.

Another definition of happiness comes from the ancient philosopher Aristotle, who suggested that happiness is the one human desire, and all other human desires exist as a way to obtain happiness. He believed that there were four levels of happiness: happiness from immediate gratification, from comparison and achievement, from making positive contributions, and from achieving fulfillment.

Happiness, Aristotle suggested, could be achieved through the golden mean, which involves finding a balance between deficiency and excess.

Signs of Happiness

While perceptions of happiness may be different from one person to the next, there are some key signs that psychologists look for when measuring and assessing happiness.

Some key signs of happiness include:

Feeling like you are living the life you wanted
Going with the flow and a willingness to take life as it comes
Feeling that the conditions of your life are good
Enjoying positive, healthy relationships with other people
Feeling that you have accomplished (or will accomplish) what you want in life
Feeling satisfied with your life
Feeling positive more than negative
Being open to new ideas and experiences
Practicing self-care and treating yourself with kindness and compassion
Experiencing gratitude
Feeling that you are living life with a sense of meaning and purpose
Wanting to share your happiness and joy with others

One important thing to remember is that happiness isn't a state of constant euphoria . Instead, happiness is an overall sense of experiencing more positive emotions than negative ones.

Happy people still feel the whole range of human emotions—anger, frustrastion, boredom, loneliness, and even sadness—from time to time. But even when faced with discomfort, they have an underlying sense of optimism that things will get better, that they can deal with what is happening, and that they will be able to feel happy again.

Types of Happiness

There are many different ways of thinking about happiness. For example, the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle made a distinction between two different kinds of happiness: hedonia and eudaimonia.

Hedonia: Hedonic happiness is derived from pleasure. It is most often associated with doing what feels good, self-care, fulfilling desires, experiencing enjoyment, and feeling a sense of satisfaction.
Eudaimonia: This type of happiness is derived from seeking virtue and meaning. Important components of eudaimonic well-being including feeling that your life has meaning, value, and purpose. It is associated more with fulfilling responsibilities, investing in long-term goals, concern for the welfare of other people, and living up to personal ideals.

Hedonia and eudemonia are more commonly known today in psychology as pleasure and meaning, respectively. More recently, psychologists have suggested the addition of the third component that relates to engagement . These are feelings of commitment and participation in different areas of life.

Research suggests that happy people tend to rank pretty high on eudaimonic life satisfaction and better than average on their hedonic life satisfaction.

All of these can play an important role in the overall experience of happiness, although the relative value of each can be highly subjective. Some activities may be both pleasurable and meaningful, while others might skew more one way or the other.

For example, volunteering for a cause you believe in might be more meaningful than pleasurable. Watching your favorite tv show, on the other hand, might rank lower in meaning and higher on pleasure.

Some types of happiness that may fall under these three main categories include:

Joy: A often relatively brief feeling that is felt in the present moment
Excitement: A happy feeling that involves looking forward to something with positive anticipation
Gratitude: A positive emotion that involves being thankful and appreciative
Pride: A feeling of satisfaction in something that you have accomplished
Optimism: This is a way of looking at life with a positive, upbeat outlook
Contentment: This type of happiness involves a sense of satisfaction

While some people just tend to be naturally happier, there are things that you can do to cultivate your sense of happiness.

Pursue Intrinsic Goals

Achieving goals that you are intrinsically motivated to pursue, particularly ones that are focused on personal growth and community, can help boost happiness. Research suggests that pursuing these types of intrinsically-motivated goals can increase happiness more than pursuing extrinsic goals like gaining money or status.

Enjoy the Moment

Studies have found that people tend to over earn—they become so focused on accumulating things that they lose track of actually enjoying what they are doing.

So, rather than falling into the trap of mindlessly accumulating to the detriment of your own happiness, focus on practicing gratitude for the things you have and enjoying the process as you go.

Reframe Negative Thoughts

When you find yourself stuck in a pessimistic outlook or experiencing negativity, look for ways that you can reframe your thoughts in a more positive way.

People have a natural negativity bias , or a tendency to pay more attention to bad things than to good things. This can have an impact on everything from how you make decisions to how you form impressions of other people. Discounting the positive—a cognitive distortion where people focus on the negative and ignore the positive—can also contribute to negative thoughts.

Reframing these negative perceptions isn't about ignoring the bad. Instead, it means trying to take a more balanced, realistic look at events. It allows you to notice patterns in your thinking and then challenge negative thoughts.

Impact of Happiness

Why is happiness so important? Happiness has been shown to predict positive outcomes in many different areas of life including mental well-being, physical health, and overall longevity.

Positive emotions increase satisfaction with life.
Happiness helps people build stronger coping skills and emotional resources.
Positive emotions are linked to better health and longevity. One study found that people who experienced more positive emotions than negative ones were more likely to have survived over a 13 year period.
Positive feelings increase resilience. Resilience helps people better manage stress and bounce back better when faced with setbacks. For example, one study found that happier people tend to have lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol and that these benefits tend to persist over time.
People who report having a positive state of well-being are more likely to engage in healthy behaviors such as eating fruits and vegetables and engaging in regular physical exercise.
Being happy may make help you get sick less often. Happier mental states are linked to increased immunity.

Some people seem to have a naturally higher baseline for happiness—one large-scale study of more than 2,000 twins suggested that around 50% of overall life satisfaction was due to genetics, 10% to external events, and 40% to individual activities.

So while you might not be able to control what your “base level” of happiness is, there are things that you can do to make your life happier and more fulfilling. Even the happiest of individuals can feel down from time to time and happiness is something that all people need to consciously pursue.

Cultivate Strong Relationships

Social support is an essential part of well-being. Research has found that good social relationships are the strongest predictor of happiness. Having positive and supportive connections with people you care about can provide a buffer against stress, improve your health, and help you become a happier person.

In the Harvard Study of Adult Development, a longitudinal study that looked at participants over 80 years, researchers found that relationships and how happy people are in those relationships strongly impacted overall health.

So if you are trying to improve your happiness, cultivating solid social connections is a great place to start. Consider deepening your existing relationships and explore ways to make new friends.

Get Regular Exercise

Exercise is good for both your body and mind. Physical activity is linked to a range of physical and psychological benefits including improved mood. Numerous studies have shown that regular exercise may play a role in warding off symptoms of depression, but evidence also suggests that it may also help make people happier, too.

In one analysis of past research on the connection between physical activity and happiness, researchers found a consistent positive link.

Even a little bit of exercise produces a happiness boost—people who were physically active for as little as 10 minutes a day or who worked out only once a week had higher levels of happiness than people who never exercised.

Show Gratitude

In one study, participants were asked to engage in a writing exercise for 10 to 20 minutes each night before bed. Some were instructed to write about daily hassles, some about neutral events, and some about things they were grateful for. The results found that people who had written about gratitude had increase positive emotions, increased subjective happiness, and improve life satisfaction.

As the authors of the study suggest, keeping a gratitude list is a relatively easy, affordable, simple, and pleasant way to boost your mood. Try setting aside a few minutes each night to write down or think about things in your life that you are grateful for.

Find a Sense of Purpose

Research has found that people who feel like they have a purpose have better well-being and feel more fulfilled. A sense of purpose involves seeing your life as having goals, direction, and meaning. It may help improve happiness by promoting healthier behaviors.

Some things you can do to help find a sense of purpose include:

Explore your interests and passions
Engage in prosocial and altruistic causes
Work to address injustices
Look for new things you might want to learn more about

This sense of purpose is influenced by a variety of factors, but it is also something that you can cultivate. It involves finding a goal that you care deeply about that will lead you to engage in productive, positive actions in order to work toward that goal.

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Hosted by therapist Amy Morin, LCSW, this episode of The Verywell Mind Podcast , featuring best-selling author Dave Hollis, shares how to create your best life. Click below to listen now.

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Challenges of Finding Happiness

While seeking happiness is important, there are times when the pursuit of life satisfaction falls short. Some challenges to watch for include:

Valuing the Wrong Things

Money may not be able to buy happiness, but there is research that spending money on things like experiences can make you happier than spending it on material possessions.

One study, for example, found that spending money on things that buy time—such as spending money on time-saving services—can increase happiness and life satisfaction.

Rather than overvaluing things such as money, status, or material possessions, pursuing goals that result in more free time or enjoyable experiences may have a higher happiness reward.

Not Seeking Social Support

Social support means having friends and loved ones that you can turn to for support. Research has found that perceived social support plays an important role in subjective well-being. For example, one study found that perceptions of social support were responsible for 43% of a person's level of happiness.

It is important to remember that when it comes to social support, quality is more important than quantity. Having just a few very close and trusted friends will have a greater impact on your overall happiness than having many casual acquaintances.

Thinking of Happiness as an Endpoint

Happiness isn’t a goal that you can simply reach and be done with. It is a constant pursuit that requires continual nurturing and sustenance.

One study found that people who tend to value happiness most also tended to feel the least satisfied with their lives. Essentially, happiness becomes such a lofty goal that it becomes virtually unattainable.

“Valuing happiness could be self-defeating because the more people value happiness, the more likely they will feel disappointed,” suggest the authors of the study.

Perhaps the lesson is to not make something as broadly defined as “happiness” your goal. Instead, focus on building and cultivating the sort of life and relationships that bring fulfillment and satisfaction to your life.

It is also important to consider how you personally define happiness. Happiness is a broad term that means different things to different people. Rather than looking at happiness as an endpoint, it can be more helpful to think about what happiness really means to you and then work on small things that will help you become happier. This can make achieving these goals more manageable and less overwhelming.

History of Happiness

Happiness has long been recognized as a critical part of health and well-being. The "pursuit of happiness" is even given as an inalienable right in the U.S. Declaration of Independence. Our understanding of what will bring happiness, however, has shifted over time.

Psychologists have also proposed a number of different theories to explain how people experience and pursue happiness. These theories include:

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

The hierarchy of needs suggests that people are motivated to pursue increasingly complex needs. Once more basic needs are fulfilled, people are then motivated by more psychological and emotional needs.

At the peak of the hierarchy is the need for self-actualization, or the need to achieve one's full potential. The theory also stresses the importance of peak experiences or transcendent moments in which a person feels deep understanding, happiness, and joy.

Positive Psychology

The pursuit of happiness is central to the field of positive psychology . Psychologists who study positive psychology are interested in learning ways to increase positivity and helping people live happier, more satisfying lives.

Rather than focusing on mental pathologies, the field instead strives to find ways to help people, communities, and societies improve positive emotions and achieve greater happiness.

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By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

Happiness Is a State of Mind

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Happiness according to aristotle.

Citation with persistent identifier: Reece, Bryan C. “Happiness According to Aristotle.” CHS Research Bulletin 7 (2019). http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hlnc.essay:ReeceB.Happiness_According_to_Aristotle.2019

Aristotle thinks that questions about how we should live as individuals and as communities must be answered with reference to a more fundamental question: What is the happy life for a human being? This question about happiness thus holds the key for the entire Aristotelian system of moral and political philosophy. Unfortunately, while the centrality of Aristotle’s theory of happiness is uncontroversial, there is no agreement about the content of his theory. Particularly controversial are his remarks on the relationship between, and especially the relative importance of, theoretical and practical activity in the ideal human life. I here give an outline sketch of a new interpretation of Aristotle’s remarks on this relationship and its ramifications for human happiness.

How should we live? Aristotle proposes to address this fundamental philosophical question by giving interrelated answers to two further questions: What kinds of activities are the best expressions of distinctively human identity? What is the proper balance of theoretical and practical activity in the ideal human life?

Aristotle’s answers have generated abiding interest, but also lingering puzzlement. He thinks that humans are distinctively rational, having the ability to reason theoretically and practically. The best activities for them to perform, and therefore the activities that constitute their happiness (which Aristotle thinks is itself an activity), are virtuous (excellent) rational activities ( Nicomachean Ethics 1.7, 1098 a 16–17): manifestations of reliable practical dispositions like courage, justice, generosity, and self-control, which are exercises of practical wisdom, as well as of reliable theoretical dispositions such as insightfulness, understanding, and theoretical wisdom. The manifestation of theoretical wisdom ( sophia ) turns out to be especially important for Aristotle. He says that this activity, theoretical contemplation ( theôria ), is what human happiness is ( NE 10.8, 1178 b 32). This is surprising, for if human happiness simply consists in theoretical contemplation, we might well wonder what role Aristotle envisions for the practical activities to which he devotes far more space in his ethical and political works than he does to contemplation.

Interpreters have struggled with the problem of reconciling Aristotle’s assignment of preeminent status in his theory of happiness to theoretical contemplation and the natural thought, encouraged by the flow of his discussions of virtuous behavior, that practical activities are permissible and valuable features of happy human lives. [1] I call this ‘the Standard Problem of Happiness.’ But there is an even more difficult version of this interpretive problem, which I call ‘the Hard Problem of Happiness.’ That problem is to explain how Aristotle could have thought that happiness is theoretical contemplation while also affirming that a reliable pattern of virtuous practical activity is non-optional and not coherently regrettable for happy humans. I here offer a very brief outline of my way of addressing this problem. [2]

A major obstacle to solving the Hard Problem is an assumption about the relationship between theoretical wisdom, which is manifested in theoretical contemplation, and practical wisdom, which is manifested in virtuous practical activities. The standard view is that Aristotle thinks that human beings can have and reliably manifest theoretical wisdom without having and reliably manifesting practical wisdom. That view is based on a passage apparently claiming that two pre-Socratic philosophers, Anaxagoras and Thales, had theoretical but not practical wisdom ( NE 6.7, 1141 b 2–16). The evidential value of this passage fades away on closer inspection. It is a report of others’ opinions that Aristotle does not fully endorse, but the appeal of which he explains. Thus, the purported textual evidence for the standard view does not support it. In fact, Aristotle gives strong reasons for thinking that having and reliably manifesting practical wisdom is necessary for having and reliably manifesting theoretical wisdom: only the continual, reliable exercise of practical wisdom, in activities that express such virtues as self-control and justice, makes it behaviorally feasible for embodied, socially situated, choice-making beings like us to develop and exercise theoretical wisdom. This means that a life of theoretical contemplation, in Aristotle’s strict sense, cannot be successfully lived without the level of virtuous public engagement that practical wisdom dictates in each circumstance. This interpretation solves a major problem for the standard view: it is on that view, wrongly, an open question whether any particular instance of theoretical contemplation is performed in the right way, at the right time, and for the right reasons. One who is a contemplator in Aristotle’s strict sense also has practical wisdom, and practical wisdom guarantees that one reliably chooses to act in the right way, at the right time, and for the right reasons.

This interpretation requires, as any solution to the Hard Problem does, that theoretical contemplation and virtuous practical activities are included in one and the same happy life. But Aristotle appears to claim at NE 10. 7, 1178 a 2 – 10. 8, 1178 a 14 that there are two kinds of happy life: one in accordance with theoretical contemplation, the other with virtuous practical activity. This claim is notoriously problematic. Properly interpreted, though, Aristotle does not here distinguish between two kinds of happiness, but rather between two ways of being proper to human beings that apply within one and the same happy life. [3] Theoretical contemplation is proper to humans in one way, virtuous practical activity in another.

But many interpreters see a problem for the idea that theoretical contemplation is proper to human beings: Aristotle also says that divine beings contemplate ( Metaph . 12.7, 1072 b 13–30, NE 10.8, 1178 b 7–32). [4] It would initially appear, then, that Aristotle is committed both to affirming and to denying that theoretical contemplation is proper to humans. However, careful scrutiny of his descriptions of the nature of divine and human contemplation reveals them to be type-distinct activities. On his view, human contemplation, but not divine contemplation, is a manifestation of theoretical wisdom, a virtue that includes two further virtues: a particular sort of nous , the developed capacity to grasp first principles intuitively as first principles, and epistêmê , the developed capacity for scientific demonstration from first principles ( NE 6.7, 1141 a 18–20, 6.3, 1139 b 31–32). So, Aristotle’s claim that divine beings contemplate does not conflict with his view that theoretical contemplation, understood as the manifestation of theoretical wisdom, is proper to human beings.

On the account so far sketched, theoretical contemplation and virtuous practical activities are necessary parts of human happiness, and only happy human beings engage in these activities. So, theoretical contemplation and virtuous practical activities are necessary parts of human happiness and are also unique to it. In short, they are proper to human happiness. But they are not each proper to human happiness in the same way. Theoretical contemplation is necessary for and unique to happiness as what happiness is , whereas virtuous practical activities are necessary and unique parts of happiness in a different, and secondary, way. Aristotle often distinguishes between primary and secondary ways of being proper: one is the essence ( ousia ) and the other is a unique, necessary property ( idion , pl. idia ). Aristotle relies on the theory on which this distinction between two ways of being proper is based in articulating his view of happiness in the Nicomachean Ethics , for he seeks an essence-specifying definition of human happiness from which the unique, necessary parts of happiness can be deduced. Theoretical contemplation is the essence of human happiness, the activity that makes it what it is. That is why Aristotle says that happiness is theoretical contemplation. (This addresses the first half of the Hard Problem.) Virtuous activities are unique, necessary properties of human happiness. Even though they are not what happiness is, Aristotle thinks that they are non-optional and non-regrettable parts of happiness. (This addresses the second half of the Hard Problem). It would be incoherent to wish that happiness did not require engaging in virtuous practical activities, just as it would be incoherent to wish that one were another sort of being without the features that follow from the human essence ( NE 9.4, 1166 a 20–22 and 8.7, 1159 a 5–12).

This solution to the Hard Problem shows Aristotle’s account of happiness to be a distinctive answer to the question of how we ought to balance theoretical and practical activity in our pursuit of the ideal human life.

Bibliography

Annas, Julia. 1993. The Morality of Happiness. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Aufderheide, Joachim. 2015. “The Content of Happiness: A New Case for Theôria.” In The Highest Good in Aristotle and Kant , ed. Joachim Aufderheide and Ralf M. Bader, 36–59. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Charles, David. 2017. “Aristotle on Virtue and Happiness.” In The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Ethics , ed. Christopher Bobonich, 105–123. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Cooper, John. 1975. Reason and Human Good in Aristotle. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Devereux, Daniel. 1981. “Aristotle on the Essence of Happiness.” In Studies in Aristotle , ed. Dominic J. O’Meara, 247–260. Washington: Catholic University of America Press.

Gauthier, René Antoine. 1958. La Morale d’ Aristote. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

Gigon, Olof. 1975. “Phronêsis und Sophia in der Nicomachischen Ethik des Aristoteles.” In Kephalaion: Studies in Greek Philosophy and its Continuation offered to Professor C. J. de Vogel , ed. Jaap Mansfeld and L. M. de Rijk, 91–104. Assen: Van Gorcum.

Gottlieb, Paula. 1994. “Aristotle on Dividing the Soul and Uniting the Virtues.” Phronesis 39:275–290.

Irwin, Terence. 1980. “The Metaphysical and Psychological Basis of Aristotle’s Ethics.” In Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics , ed. Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, 35–53. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Kenny, Anthony. 1992. Aristotle on the Perfect Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Keyt, David. 1983. “Intellectualism in Aristotle .” In Essays in Ancient Greek Philosophy , vol. 2, ed. John P. Anton and Anthony Preus, 364–387. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Kosman, Aryeh. 2000. “ Metaphysics Λ 9: Divine Thought.” In Aristotle’s Metaphysics Lambda: Symposium Aristotelicum , ed. Michael Frede and David Charles, 307–326. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kraut, Richard. 1989. Aristotle on the Human Good. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Laks, André. 2000. “ Metaphysics Λ 7.” In Aristotle’s Metaphysics Lambda: Symposium Aristotelicum , ed. Michael Frede and David Charles, 207–243. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lear, Gabriel Richardson. 2004. Happy Lives and the Highest Good: An Essay on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics . Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Natali, Carlo. 1989. La Saggezza di Aristotele. Naples: Bibliopolis.

Nightingale, Andrea Wilson. 2004. Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy: Theoria in its Cultural Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Price, Anthony W. 2011. Virtue and Reason in Plato and Aristotle. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Reece, Bryan C. forthcoming. “Are There Really Two Kinds of Happiness in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics ?” Classical Philology.

Scott, Dominic. 1999. “Primary and Secondary Eudaimonia.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 73:225–242.

* My research on this topic has been generously supported by The Center for Hellenic Studies. I am grateful to everyone involved with the CHS, especially to Gregory Nagy, Mark Schiefsky, Richard Martin, and the library staff: Erika Bainbridge, Sophie Boisseau, Lanah Koelle, Michael Strickland, and Temple Wright.

[1] Many have offered interpretations of Aristotle’s remarks on practical and intellectual virtue, or their relationship to each other or to happiness. I list only a few here: (Annas 1993), (Aufderheide 2015), (Charles 2017), (Cooper 1975), (Devereux 1981), (Gauthier 1958), (Gigon 1975), (Gottlieb 1994), (Irwin 1980), (Kenny 1992), (Keyt 1983), (Kraut 1989), (Lear 2004), (Natali 1989), (Nightingale 2004), (Price 2011), (Scott 1999).

[2] The paragraphs that follow summarize parts of this research project that I drafted or revised during my fellowship at The Center for Hellenic Studies. The project as a whole is under contract with Cambridge University Press as a monograph called Aristotle on Happiness, Virtue, and Wisdom .

[3] I give a detailed defense of this interpretation in (Reece forthcoming).

[4] There are many who discuss the nature of divine contemplation, including (Kosman 2000) and (Laks 2000), as well as the problem that it initially appears to pose for Aristotle’s account of human happiness, including (Charles 2017), (Keyt 1983), (Kraut 1989, 312–319), and (Lear 2004, 189–193).

Essay on Happiness

Students are often asked to write an essay on Happiness in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Happiness

Understanding happiness.

Happiness is a feeling of joy, satisfaction, and contentment. It can come from many sources, like spending time with loved ones or achieving a goal.

The Source of Happiness

Happiness is not about how much we have, but how we perceive what we have. It’s about appreciating small things and finding joy in every situation.

Happiness and Health

Happiness is important for our health. It reduces stress and can even help us live longer. So, always try to find happiness in everything you do.

In conclusion, happiness is a state of mind. It is about finding joy in the little things and being content with what we have.

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250 Words Essay on Happiness

Happiness is a complex, multifaceted phenomenon that is often subjectively defined. It is a state of wellbeing that encompasses living a good life—one that fosters feelings of contentment, joy, and fulfillment. Happiness is not merely the absence of suffering, but rather a state of flourishing that involves the whole person.

The Pursuit of Happiness

The pursuit of happiness has been a universal human endeavor since time immemorial. Philosophers, psychologists, and spiritual leaders have proposed various paths to achieve it. Some argue that happiness is derived from a virtuous life, others believe it is found in the pursuit of personal goals and ambitions, while some suggest that it is the result of meaningful relationships and connections.

Happiness and Subjectivity

Happiness is highly subjective and can vary greatly from person to person. What makes one person happy may not necessarily bring the same joy to another. This subjectivity makes it challenging to define and measure happiness. Yet, it is this very subjectivity that makes the pursuit of happiness a personal journey, unique to each individual.

In conclusion, happiness is a deeply personal and subjective experience. It is a state of wellbeing that transcends mere joy and contentment, involving a sense of fulfillment and purpose. The pursuit of happiness is a universal human endeavor, with various paths proposed to achieve it. Regardless of the path chosen, the pursuit of happiness remains a deeply personal journey, unique to each individual.

500 Words Essay on Happiness

Introduction.

Happiness, a ubiquitous and yet elusive concept, is a state of mind that everyone strives to achieve. It is a complex amalgamation of satisfaction, joy, and contentment, often perceived as the pinnacle of human emotions. However, the interpretation of happiness varies across individuals, cultures, and societies, making it a multifaceted and subjective phenomenon.

The Subjectivity of Happiness

Happiness is a highly subjective experience, contingent on personal values, desires, and circumstances. What brings joy to one person might be insignificant to another. This subjectivity is influenced by a multitude of factors, including our genetic makeup, upbringing, socio-economic status, and cultural background. For instance, while one person might derive happiness from accumulating wealth, another might find it in the simplicity of life or in altruistic acts. This diversity in perceptions underscores the importance of self-awareness and introspection in understanding our unique definition of happiness.

Happiness and Well-being

The relationship between happiness and well-being is a significant aspect of psychological studies. Happiness is not merely the absence of distress or suffering but is closely linked to a state of well-being. It encompasses physical health, mental resilience, strong relationships, and a sense of purpose in life. Studies have shown that happier individuals tend to live longer, healthier lives, demonstrating the profound impact of happiness on our overall well-being.

The Hedonic Treadmill

The concept of the ‘Hedonic Treadmill’ suggests that our level of happiness tends to return to a baseline level, regardless of positive or negative events in our lives. This theory explains why even after achieving significant milestones or facing adversities, our happiness level eventually reverts to its original state. It implies that a constant pursuit of happiness might be futile and emphasizes the importance of contentment and acceptance.

Happiness in a Collective Context

While happiness is a personal experience, it is also a collective phenomenon, deeply embedded in our social fabric. It is influenced by our relationships, societal values, and cultural norms. Communities with strong social bonds, mutual respect, and shared values often report higher levels of happiness. Moreover, acts of kindness and cooperation can induce a state of happiness, reinforcing the idea that happiness is not just an individual pursuit but a collective endeavor.

In conclusion, happiness is a complex, multifaceted emotion that is deeply personal yet profoundly collective. It is a subjective experience influenced by various factors, including personal circumstances, societal values, and cultural norms. While the pursuit of happiness is a universal human endeavor, it is crucial to understand that it is not merely a destination but a journey. It is about finding contentment in the present, fostering strong relationships, and leading a fulfilling life. The path to happiness might not always be straightforward, but it is a journey worth undertaking.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

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Happiness as a State of Mind: 5 Key Points Highlighting the Nature of Happiness

Happiness is often considered a state of mind. It is a subjective experience and can vary from person to person.

Everything in life is state-dependent. Because the things you are experiencing in life are just your state of mind. So happiness is. Yes, happiness is a state of mind. Like some people feel sadness in a situation, and in the same situation, some feel happiness. Because it depends on their state of mind. To understand this understand what is state and how we create a state.

Table of Contents

Nature of Happiness as a State of Mind

Here are a few key points highlighting the nature of happiness as a state of mind:

1. Perception and Mindset

Happiness is influenced by our perception of the world and our mindset. It is not solely dependent on external circumstances or material possessions, but rather how we interpret and respond to those factors. It involves cultivating a positive outlook, focusing on gratitude, and embracing an optimistic attitude.

2. Internal Well-Being

True happiness stems from inner contentment and a sense of well-being. It involves nurturing positive emotions, such as joy, love, compassion, and peace while managing negative emotions effectively. Cultivating qualities like resilience, self-compassion, and mindfulness can contribute to a happier state of mind.

3. Perspective and Gratitude

Happiness can be cultivated by shifting perspective and focusing on the present moment. Practicing gratitude and acknowledging the positive aspects of life can foster a greater sense of happiness and fulfillment.

4. Personal Values and Purpose

Aligning our actions and lifestyle with our personal values and sense of purpose contributes to lasting happiness. When we live by our core values, engage in meaningful activities, and pursue goals that are personally significant, we are more likely to experience a deep sense of satisfaction and fulfillment.

5. Connection and Relationships

Meaningful connections with others and nurturing healthy relationships play a vital role in happiness. Social interactions, support networks, and a sense of belonging can significantly contribute to one’s overall well-being and happiness.

While happiness is influenced by external circumstances to some extent, it is ultimately an internal state of mind that can be cultivated and nurtured. By adopting positive perspectives, prioritizing well-being, embracing gratitude, and fostering meaningful connections, individuals can enhance their experience of happiness and lead more fulfilling lives.

What is State?

The state is the sum total of thoughts, emotions, and physical energy at any given moment. It is our way of being at any moment. Whatever you are experiencing right now or experience in any situation is just an event. For example; you are reading this blog is an event for you and I am writing this blog is an event for me. The whole day when you wake up and till you sleep you experience events only. These events create a state for you.

How We Create a State?

As I told you above whatever you are experiencing right now or experiencing in any situation is just an event. You perceive any event through the five senses. In other words, any event is going in your mind or in your memory through the five senses.

Five Senses

Eyes: You perceive any event by seeing it. That is also called visual learning. You will see many memories of yours have visuals.

Ear : If any event has a sound you perceive it by its sound. Like you are talking to anyone, in that case, you perceive by your ear. This is called Auditory learning. Many memories of yours have sounds.

Skin : Many things you perceive by skin only. Like, the temperature and texture of anything. In psychology, it is also called kinesthetic learning.

Nose : You perceive some things by their smell. Like, you can not see the gas, even if you can’t hear or feel the gas. But you can identify it by its smell. In psychology, it is also called Olfactory learning.

Tongue : Eatable things you perceive by their taste. Food is sweet or bitter, you can’t identify it by its visuals, its sound its texture, or by its smell. You can identify it by its taste only. In psychology, it is also called Gustatory learning.

A large part of your memory has visuals, sounds, or feelings and their combination only. There is very little role for smelling and tasting in memory. The eyes, ears, and nose create the state.

Filtration of an Event

You don’t perceive any event as it is. like, you are reading this blog and this is an event 1 for you. But did not perceive the above text as it is. You deleted many words, and distort them accordingly. Then later you will generalize it. Another example; is when you go from one point to another point you delete many things that came your way. You distort a few things only and Generalize. This is also DDG(Delete, Distort, and Generalization) filtration. After filtration, event 1 becomes Event 2.

DDG Filtration

Think you can retain anything that you see, hear and feel. Our mind can retain only certain things and delete many things. Like you have deleted any data that you have read and remembered only a few. This is the deletion process.

After deletion, you save things in mind accordingly. This is not necessary for everyone to save the same thing. Suppose you are attending a lecture with 100 students. So, 100 students will distort the lecture by their own understanding. That’s why everyone’s perception of anything is different. This process is called distortion.

Generalization

After distortion, many people generalize a few events. Understand it by example. Suppose a person is traveling on a bus and a thief steals his wallet. After a few days, his wallet was again stolen by a thief on the bus. After these events, people say everyone on the bus is a thief and that traveling on the bus is not safe. So this is his generalization, not the fact. Fact is those which is true for everyone. Like 2+2 = 4, the earth is rotating around the sun, etc. These are the same for everyone.

There are two types of Generalization; Universal truth or facts and Random Opinion.

Universal Truth: As I told universal truth are those which is true for all. That we call fact also. Like the earth is round, the moon is rotating around the earth, gravity, etc. This universal truth will not change for anyone.

Random Opinions: People generally have random opinions. These are not true for everyone. Some random opinions; life is uncertain, money is not good, love hurts, all happiness is in money only, and many more examples. These can be true for a particular person but not for everyone. Someone will not find happiness in money, for his nature or hanging with his family member is happiness. So happiness is a state of mind.

State of Mind

After the filtration process of Event 1, event 2 is created. The event created after filtration is the programming of your subconscious mind. You can say your memory. So people have only event 2 in their mind. This is also called the state of mind. The state is also known as perception, mood, zone, form, etc. That’s the reason we generally say I am not in a good mood today or I am in a good mood today. Who decides your mood, your state of mind?

There are two types of State of mind; a Positive State of mind and a Negative State of mind.

Positive State of Mind

This state is also known as a Resourceful state. Here resourceful means that when you are in these states, you can get access to the inner resources that you have. You have also felt that when you are in a positive state of mind you see your future clearly and find many ways for your future. You feel happy and joyful. That’s how Happiness is a State of Mind.

A positive state is a state of Confidence, happiness, delightfulness, concentration, ecstasy, decision-making, love, flexibility, playfulness, mindfulness, etc.

Negative State of Mind

This state is also known as an Unresourceful state. It means that though you have all the resources because of these states, you can’t get access to your resources. This is the state of sadness, guilt, fear, phobia, discomfort, confusion, depression, frustration, etc.

Now, it is clear how the state creates and how everything just depends on the state of mind.

You act according to your state of mind. If you will act in a negative state or unresourceful state your life will be negative and if you will act in a positive state or resourceful state your life will be positive and full of resources.

How do change the State of Mind?

To change your state from negative to positive, NLP can help. Basically, NLP is a technique that helps you to change your event 2. In other languages, NLP helps in reprogramming the subconscious mind. So that you can come into a positive state of mind.

Pattern Breaking

An easy technique that you can use to change your state of mind is Pattern Breaking.

Whenever you find yourself in a negative state of mind notice your physiology, breathing, facial expression, and internal voice. Generally, during a negative state, these 4 things changed. Your shoulder gets down, you start taking shallow breaths, the facial expression of sadness no smile on your face, and an internal voice full of negativity. You feel unconfident.

In such a situation just change your physiology, up to your shoulders, and broaden your chest. Take a deep breath, and make your breath normal. Change your facial expression, and bring a smile to your face. And change your inner voice, say to yourself you are confident and everything is fine. After changing these 4 things your state will change automatically into a positive state.

Flow chart for a state of mind of extreme happiness –

After reading this now you have understood that’s why Happiness is a State of Mind. So, be in a positive state of mind and be in a resourceful state.

Some more strategies to help change your state of mind:

Changing your state of mind involves intentionally shifting your thoughts, emotions, and perspectives to create a more positive and productive mental state. Here are some strategies to help change your state of mind:

Practice Mindfulness: Engage in mindfulness techniques such as meditation, deep breathing, or body scanning to bring awareness to the present moment and observe your thoughts and emotions without judgment. Mindfulness can help you detach from negative or unhelpful thinking patterns and cultivate a more positive mindset.

Challenge Negative Thoughts: Recognize negative or self-defeating thoughts and consciously challenge them with more realistic and positive alternatives. Replace negative self-talk with affirmations and constructive thoughts that support your well-being and growth.

Reframe Situations: Train yourself to reframe challenging or negative situations in a more positive light. Look for lessons or opportunities for personal growth in difficult circumstances. Focus on the things you can control and find solutions or silver linings in challenging situations.

Surround Yourself with Positivity: Seek out positive influences, whether it’s spending time with supportive and uplifting people, reading inspiring books, or consuming uplifting content. Surrounding yourself with positivity can have a significant impact on your state of mind.

Engage in Self-Care: Prioritize self-care activities that nurture your mental and emotional well-being. Take breaks, engage in activities you enjoy, practice relaxation techniques, and make time for hobbies and interests that bring you joy and fulfillment.

Set Goals and Focus on Progress: Set realistic goals and break them down into manageable steps. Working towards meaningful objectives can provide a sense of purpose and motivation. Celebrate your progress along the way, no matter how small, to maintain a positive outlook.

Practice Gratitude: Cultivate a daily gratitude practice by acknowledging and appreciating the positive aspects of your life. This can shift your focus towards what is going well and increase feelings of contentment and happiness.

Seek Support: If you’re struggling to change your state of mind, don’t hesitate to seek support from friends, family, or professionals. Therapy, coaching, or counseling can provide valuable guidance and tools to help shift your mindset effectively.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

A: Yes, happiness is considered a state of mind. It is a subjective experience influenced by perception, mindset, and internal well-being. The way we interpret and respond to events plays a significant role in our happiness.
A: Perception and mindset play a crucial role in influencing happiness. It is not solely dependent on external circumstances but is shaped by how we perceive the world and our overall mindset. Cultivating a positive outlook and embracing optimism contribute to a happier state of mind.
A: Happiness as a state of mind involves internal well-being, perspective, gratitude, personal values, and meaningful connections. It is not only about external factors but also about nurturing positive emotions, managing negative emotions, and aligning actions with personal values.
A: Yes, the state of mind can be changed from negative to positive. Techniques such as pattern-breaking and practices like mindfulness, challenging negative thoughts, and surrounding oneself with positivity can contribute to a positive shift in the state of mind.
A: NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) is a technique that helps in reprogramming the subconscious mind, contributing to a positive state of mind. It involves changing the patterns of thoughts, emotions, and behaviors to create a more resourceful and positive mindset.

Contact Brain Soul & You to change your state of mind.

Read also The Power Of Positive Affirmations , What is NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) , NLP Anchoring Technique , Master your Mind by Subconscious Mind Programming

Saurabh Goel

He is the Founder and CEO of the Training and Counselling Company ‘Brain Soul & You’. He is an NLP Wellness Coach, Life Coach, Brain analyst, and Trainer for Education, Corporate, and Entrepreneurship. For more than 7 years, he delivered presentations on entrepreneurship, mind programming, and motivation. He did his B.tech in IT and later choose to be a successful psychologist. He is helping people in various ways through his counseling and training sessions.

Course details

Happiness: the state of mind.

This is an Online course which requires your attendance to weekly meetings which take place online using Microsoft Teams meetings.

This short course will combine pre-recorded lectures with live, weekly, online meetings where discussion and debate will take place between students and the tutor. Visit our How our WOW courses work page for full details.

This course will close for enrolment 7 days prior to its start date.

Happiness has been commonly described as anything from the feeling of joy, flourishing, tranquillity, a state of attunement, a sense of accomplishment, to an endorsement of life – the feeling that life is positively good.

In a different sense happiness is as Kant tells us, something we should be worthy of, or as Aristotle points out, our proper purpose or end in life, or as J. S. Mill suggests, while happiness amounts to pleasure and freedom from pain, it ought to involve noble feelings characteristic of humans such as the pleasures of the intellect and of morality.

There is a third sense of happiness we will also be discussing in this course: a philosophically interesting, albeit puzzling, fact that our mind, or a particular state of mind, is not closed off from the world. We cannot plausibly call happiness the state of being plugged into a happy machine! There is something about the way the world is, but also about our sense of freedom, self-respect and integrity, which make us agree with Mill that it is better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.

We will be engaging with many interesting questions that happiness raises, such as its subjective nature, our emotional perception and knowledge about the world, and our efforts and activities that can contribute to the good life. Along the way, we will be introduced to the familiar philosophical literature on happiness, classical as well as contemporary, this including the emotional state, the life satisfaction and value theories and will be critically reflecting on the reasons we have for being happy and how to be responsive to such reasons.

Programme details

Courses starts: 18 Sep 2023

Week 0: Course Orientation

Week 1: Happiness as the highest good : Aristotle's Eudaimonia

Week 2: Becoming worthy of happiness: Kant's ethics

Week 3: Is it better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied? - J. S. Mill's utilitarianist approach to happiness

Week 4: Happiness as a state of attunement (Hybron, D.M. 2013)

Week 5: Happiness as an activity - enjoying one's life

Week 6: The feeling that the life is good

Week 7: Happiness, pleasures and emotions (Rossi, M. 2018)

Week 8: What is this things called happiness? (Feldman, F. 2012)

Week 9: Happiness, the world, and self-understanding

Week 10: Reflecting on the reasons we have for being happy

Certification

Students who register for CATS points will receive a Record of CATS points on successful completion of their course assessment.

To earn credit (CATS points) you will need to register and pay an additional £10 fee per course. You can do this by ticking the relevant box at the bottom of the enrolment form or when enrolling online.

Coursework is an integral part of all weekly classes and everyone enrolled will be expected to do coursework in order to benefit fully from the course. Only those who have registered for credit will be awarded CATS points for completing work at the required standard.

Students who do not register for CATS points during the enrolment process can either register for CATS points prior to the start of their course or retrospectively from the January 1st after the current full academic year has been completed. If you are enrolled on the Certificate of Higher Education you need to indicate this on the enrolment form but there is no additional registration fee.

If you are in receipt of a UK state benefit, you are a full-time student in the UK or a student on a low income, you may be eligible for a reduction of 50% of tuition fees. Please see the below link for full details:

Concessionary fees for short courses

Dr Amna Whiston

Dr Whiston is a philosopher specialising in ethics and the philosophy of mind and have a particular interest in the philosophy of emotions. I currently work as a philosophy tutor at the University of Oxford, Department for Continuing Education, where I teach a range of online and in-class courses.

Course aims

To introduce the participants to the key philosophical texts, classical as well as contemporary, on happiness in advance of stimulating the discussion about the philosophically and practically interesting questions raised by happiness.

Course Objectives:

To broaden the participants' understanding about different meanings of happiness as discussed in the philosophical literature, including the nature of happiness and its normative dimension, and to enable them to think critically and independently about the reasons we have or ought to have for being happy.

Teaching methods

The course will consist of a one hour, pre-recorded, weekly lecture to be viewed prior to the one hour weekly TEAMS seminar. The students will also be expected to familiarise themselves with the suggested philosophical literature. Most of the course content will feature in the lecture with the seminar intended to discuss the reading material and go over key elements of the weekly readings.

Learning outcomes

By the end of the course students will be expected to:

have a good understanding of the philosophical literature on happiness;
be able to reflect philosophically on the nature and meaning of happiness.

Assessment methods

1 essay - 1500 words, to be completed before the end of the course, feedback to be given by the end of week 10. Alternatively, 3-4 500 word essays throughout the course (questions to be given at the start of the course), feedback given a week after submission.

Students must submit a completed Declaration of Authorship form at the end of term when submitting your final piece of work. CATS points cannot be awarded without the aforementioned form - Declaration of Authorship form

Application

We will close for enrolments 7 days prior to the start date to allow us to complete the course set up. We will email you at that time (7 days before the course begins) with further information and joining instructions. As always, students will want to check spam and junk folders during this period to ensure that these emails are received.

To earn credit (CATS points) for your course you will need to register and pay an additional £10 fee per course. You can do this by ticking the relevant box at the bottom of the enrolment form or when enrolling online.

Please use the 'Book' or 'Apply' button on this page. Alternatively, please complete an enrolment form (Word) or enrolment form (Pdf) .

Level and demands

The course is aimed at beginners and the students need not have any prior understanding of the subject.

Most of the Department's weekly classes have 10 or 20 CATS points assigned to them. 10 CATS points at FHEQ Level 4 usually consist of ten 2-hour sessions. 20 CATS points at FHEQ Level 4 usually consist of twenty 2-hour sessions. It is expected that, for every 2 hours of tuition you are given, you will engage in eight hours of private study.

Credit Accumulation and Transfer Scheme (CATS)

Terms & conditions for applicants and students

Information on financial support

Why Happiness Is A State Of Mind

What’s the one common goal everyone hopes to achieve during his or her lifetime? Let me guess: happiness. This is a tricky situation because happiness isn’t just one state of being; it’s a mentality. It’s the ability to take what life has given you and to personalize it in a way that benefits you. If you work at happiness, maybe (just maybe), you will find something that satisfies you temporarily. Honestly, happiness is simply a by-product of living a loving, meaningful life.

There is no guide, no rules, no manual that will teach you how to live a “happy” life. There is advice, however, that can teach you how to approach certain situations to gain the best result.

“Happiness is not determined by what’s happening around you, but rather what’s happening inside you. Most people depend on others to gain happiness, but the truth is, it always comes from within.” - Anonymous

True happiness comes from surrounding yourself with people whom you love and love you in return. If the people you surround yourself with are bringing you down, then it's time to trim the fat. I guarantee once you eliminate the negative people in your life, you will be that much happier. Why would you choose to spend time with people that are holding you back when you can surround yourself with people that can elevate you?

One of the biggest challenges in life is learning to accept people for who they truly are. Once you realize that your expectations cannot change people, the better off you will be. The problem will arise when the expectations do not materialize. If you find that you are going out of your way much more than the people you surround yourself with, it may be time to make some adjustments.

“I am determined to be cheerful and happy in whatever situation I may find myself. For I have learned that the greater part of our misery or unhappiness is determined not by our circumstance but by our disposition.” – Martha Washington

It is so hard to make real progress in your life when you are stumbling over old roadblocks. Look around at your immediate surroundings. If there is something that is not bringing value and meaning to your life, then get rid of it. Do not feel obligated to hold on to something that is only making you miserable. You owe it to yourself to lead the best possible life you can.

You, and only you, are in control of your happiness and when you choose to expand your mind and to focus on the good, you will be happier. It is different for everyone, but once you stop looking for excuses as to why you cannot be happy, you will find so many reasons as to why you can. People make these justifications to prevent themselves from achieving greatness. This is a horrible mistake to make in life because all you are doing is sabotaging yourself.

“I do not fix problems. I fix my thinking. Then problems fix themselves.” - Louise Hay

Everything you experience throughout the course of your life is unique to you, since your perception is what is shaping your reality. Expectation is what lies at the root of all heartache. Why? Because you falsely assumed someone’s behavior would match your expectations. What happens when you realize the complete and utter error of your ways? You grow increasingly upset because you cannot wrap your mind around why someone would behave in this manner. That's because you could never do something like that, so it’s difficult to understand the reasoning behind someone else’s actions.

You can do things that will make you happy in the sense by gauging a situation. If circumstances will upset you, then you need to avoid them; actively realize what brings you joy and what brings you sadness. This is a way to ensure a happy existence. There is virtually no simpler way to recognize this. Something either brings you pain or pleasure and the things that bring you pleasure are what you should dedicate your time to.

“The trick is to enjoy life. Don’t wish away your days waiting for better ones ahead.” -Marjorie Pay Hinckley

The journey is where you will achieve the happiness you think you are searching for, not the destination. Once you achieve this “goal,” then what? You have it and it's over. Relish in this accomplishment, but it will mostly likely be short-lived. Good things come to those who go out and f*cking earn it. Happiness is not something that will be delivered to your doorstep. Embrace the journey and the lessons you will learn from it.

Focusing on the present moment is crucial; if you spend your time wallowing in the past or worrying about the future, you are only going to stress yourself out. Actively engage yourself in what you are currently doing and immerse yourself fully. Appreciate the fact that you are able to do whatever it is you are doing and realize how fortunate you are in shaping your own life.

“Our greatest happiness does not depend on the condition of life in which chance has placed us, but is always the result of a good conscience, good health, occupation, and freedom in all just pursuits.” - Thomas Jefferson

Learn to depend on yourself rather than others to bring you fulfillment. Only once you are happy on your own, can you hope to share your happiness with others. If you don’t, your unhappiness will resurface and manifest itself in destructive ways. You cannot hope to have any sort of successful relationship, whether it’s in the platonic sense, romantic sense or business sense. If you aren’t comfortable with yourself, how do you ever expect any relationship to flourish?

Photos courtesy d1scount tumblr

COMMENTS

Essay on Happiness is State of Mind
Happiness is a feeling that's different for everyone. Some people believe in happiness as an emotion, while others think of it as a state of mind. One thing that can increase your level of happiness is to find your purpose in life and make decisions based on what you want out of life rather than listening to other people or following the ...
Happiness is a state of mind: 8 ways you can achieve it
Here are eight ways to make that happen. 1. Trick your brain. You can trick your brain into thinking that happiness is a state of mind with one single gesture: a smile. Indeed, there are several studies showing that smiling sends positive feedback to the brain, even when you're forcing it!
Why Happiness is a State of Mind
Conclusion: Embrace the power of perception for a happier life. At the end of the day, happiness truly is a state of mind. By changing our perception, we can change our emotional well-being and lead happier, more fulfilling lives. While it's not always easy to cultivate a positive mindset, the benefits are well worth the effort.
The Philosophy of Happiness in Life (+ Aristotle's View)
Modern psychology describes happiness as subjective wellbeing, or " people's evaluations of their lives and encompasses both cognitive judgments of satisfaction and affective appraisals of moods and emotions " (Kesebir & Diener, 2008, p. 118). The key components of subjective wellbeing are: Life satisfaction.
Happiness
There are roughly two philosophical literatures on "happiness," each corresponding to a different sense of the term. One uses 'happiness' as a value term, roughly synonymous with well-being or flourishing. The other body of work uses the word as a purely descriptive psychological term, akin to 'depression' or 'tranquility'.
Happiness Is A State Of Mind: The Science Of Happiness
Happiness as an Emotion. Happiness is a complex emotional state that can be influenced by a variety of factors, including genetics, environment, and individual experiences. The concept of happiness can be broken down into two types: hedonic happiness and eudaimonic happiness. Hedonic happiness is often described as pleasure-seeking happiness.
10. Happiness in Psychology and Philosophy
So when psychologists study happiness, obviously they will by trade define it as a state of mind of one sort or another. So the main views here are that happiness is a preponderance of positive over negative affect, or happiness is a sense of satisfaction with your life, things of that nature.
Happiness: What is it to be Happy?
According to virtue theory, happiness is the result of cultivating the virtues—both moral and intellectual—such as wisdom, courage, temperance, and patience. A happy person must be sufficiently virtuous. To be happy, then, is to cultivate excellence and to flourish as a result. This view is famously held by Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics.
Psychology of Happiness: A Summary of the Theory & Research
Affective state theory. To recap, this theory of happiness proposes that happiness is the result of one's overall emotional state. Bradburn (1969) put forward the argument that happiness is made up of two separate components that are quite independent and uncorrelated: positive affect and negative affect.
Choosing Happiness
Happy people are content being alone. Happy people often influence others to seek happiness. Happy people engage in deep, meaningful conversations. Happy people smile and laugh more. Happy people ...
Happiness
Happiness is an electrifying and elusive state. Philosophers, theologians, psychologists, and even economists have long sought to define it. And since the 1990s, a whole branch of psychology ...
What Is Happiness and Why Is It Important? (+ Definition)
The three dimensions of happiness. Happiness can be defined as an enduring state of mind consisting not only of feelings of joy, contentment, and other positive emotions, but also of a sense that one's life is meaningful and valued (Lyubomirsky, 2001). Happiness energizes us and is a highly sought after state of being.
What Is Happiness Essay
One would say that happiness is to be with a loved one, the second would say that happiness is the stability, and the third, on the contrary, would say that happiness is the unpredictability. For someone, to be happy is to have a lot of money while for others - to be popular. All in all, there are plenty of different understandings of happiness.
What Is Happiness and How Can You Become Happier?
Two key components of happiness (or subjective well-being) are: The balance of emotions: Everyone experiences both positive and negative emotions, feelings, and moods. Happiness is generally linked to experiencing more positive feelings than negative ones. Life satisfaction: This relates to how satisfied you feel with different areas of your ...
Happiness Is a State of Mind
The power of our thoughts. If happiness is a state of mind, then your thoughts are the main actors. Your emotions or circumstances often motivate them. Also, they often don't follow the script in favor of your interests. However, the good news is that you can intervene in that script. You just need to observe your thoughts.
Happiness According to Aristotle
Theoretical contemplation is the essence of human happiness, the activity that makes it what it is. That is why Aristotle says that happiness is theoretical contemplation. (This addresses the first half of the Hard Problem.) Virtuous activities are unique, necessary properties of human happiness.
Essay on Happiness
In conclusion, happiness is a deeply personal and subjective experience. It is a state of wellbeing that transcends mere joy and contentment, involving a sense of fulfillment and purpose. The pursuit of happiness is a universal human endeavor, with various paths proposed to achieve it. Regardless of the path chosen, the pursuit of happiness ...
Happiness as a State of Mind: 5 Key Points ...
It involves nurturing positive emotions, such as joy, love, compassion, and peace while managing negative emotions effectively. Cultivating qualities like resilience, self-compassion, and mindfulness can contribute to a happier state of mind. 3. Perspective and Gratitude.
Happiness
happiness, in psychology, a state of emotional well-being that a person experiences either in a narrow sense, when good things happen in a specific moment, or more broadly, as a positive evaluation of one's life and accomplishments overall—that is, subjective well-being. Happiness can be distinguished both from negative emotions (such as sadness, fear, and anger) and also from other ...
Happiness: The State of Mind
Happiness has been commonly described as anything from the feeling of joy, flourishing, tranquillity, a state of attunement, a sense of accomplishment, to an endorsement of life - the feeling that life is positively good. In a different sense happiness is as Kant tells us, something we should be worthy of, or as Aristotle points out, our ...
Why Happiness Is A State Of Mind
This is a tricky situation because happiness isn't just one state of being; it's a mentality. It's the ability to take what life has given you and to personalize it in a way that benefits ...
Main Answer Writing Practice
Start with the concept of happiness as given by Epicurean. Discuss what happiness means to you. Conclude suitably. Introduction. Epicurus regarded pursuit of happiness as the chief aim of life. Happiness is an end by itself, and it is the only good. Pain is the only evil. For Epicureans, morality becomes an activity which gives pleasure.
Happiness
Discuss. (200 Words) The source of happiness is the mind that directs a person to be happy even in circumstances that are difficult and obstacles that may seem insurmountable to some. It is rightly said that happiness is a state of mind. The people who manage to stay happy despite calamity are the ones who have most of the following traits.

Essay on Happiness is State of Mind

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Happiness is a state of mind: 8 ways you can achieve it

Understanding that happiness is a state of mind rather than something to be obtained is a key life lesson. Dee Marques outlines eight ways you can consciously choose to be more joyful.

1. Trick your brain

2. Count your blessings

4. Change perspective

5. Find and give support

6. Do a kind act a day

7. Find meaning and purpose

8. Cut down sources of unhappiness

happiness.com | The fine art of being: learn, practise, share

Written by Dee Marques

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HAPPINESS AND ITS BENEFITS

Happiness.com » Magazine » INSPIRATION & SPIRITUALITY » Happiness is a state of mind: 8 ways you can achieve it

ITS PSYCHOLOGY

Why Happiness is a State of Mind

The Power of Perception: Why Happiness is a State of Mind

What is perception?

Perception vs. reality

Perception vs. attention

The impact of perception on happiness

The science behind perception and happiness

How to change your perception and boost happiness

Techniques for cultivating a positive mindset

The role of gratitude and mindfulness in perception

The power of visualization and self-talk

Overcoming negativity bias and cognitive distortions

Conclusion: Embrace the power of perception for a happier life.

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Bibliography

1.1 Two senses of ‘happiness’

2. Theories of happiness

3. The science of happiness

4. The importance of happiness

5. The pursuit and promotion of happiness

Acknowledgments