What is Happiness?

You probably have a pretty good idea of what happiness is, right? It’s when you feel good and not bad. If you want to go a little further, you could say that it’s when you feel enthusiasm, joy, pleasure, contentment, and these feelings are not overwhelmed by feelings of anxiety, sadness, anger, etc. So if we all understand these straightforward definitions of happiness, why do we need this article? First, since the goal here is to spend a fair bit of time over the coming years improving your happiness, I think it’s worth spending a little time at the beginning explaining the two kinds of happiness that psychologists talk about when they discuss happiness. Second, while you know useful definitions of happiness like the ones above, there’s a good chance that you, like most people, make a couple of important errors when thinking about happiness. So basically we’re here to learn a couple of definitions and talk about a couple of errors.

Before I jump into these definitions and errors, I’d like to convince you that it really is possible to bring happiness into your life. Some people believe that happiness is essentially a matter of good fortune, either with the events in your life or with the disposition granted to you by your genes. It is certainly the case that luck plays a large role in our lives—more than many people admit. If you and the people you love are fortunate enough to have good health, economic opportunities that allow you to make a living, and live in safety, these are all factors that promote happiness and are largely or entirely out of your control. And of course if these same factors are negative, they will promote unhappiness. It would be foolish, though you still hear it off enough (and quite often in the personal development world), to say that it’s all about mindset. It’s not. But clearly mindset, perspective, and our behaviors are incredibly important. We do have a remarkable amount of control over how much happiness we experience. So it’s not all in your hands, but neither is it all luck. With happiness as with everything else, we must make the most we can with what we’re given.

Psychologists who study happiness divide it into two groups: happiness in the moment and happiness with your life. Now it’s not much fun devoting years of your life to earning a PhD unless you can use fancy words for things, so they call the momentary happiness “hedonic happiness” and the happy with your life feeling “eudaimonic happiness”. You’re absolutely not required to memorize those names, though I will use them sometimes. You might recognize that “hedonic” is related to the word “hedonism”, which in its general usage suggests a somewhat reckless commitment to pleasure and refusal to engage in serious matters. For psychologists and on this site, there’s no such connotation. The question is just this: how do you feel right now? When you’re relaxing at home, hustling at work, concentrating at school, playing with your kids, walking your dog, or sitting in traffic, are you happy or not? If the answer is that you feel pretty good for lots of moments throughout your day, you’re doing well in terms of hedonic happiness. If most of time you’re experiencing unhappy feelings, you’re not doing so well.

And a point about this happiness in the moment: it’s not trivial. First of all, you live all of your life in the present moment. So if you think that always ignoring how you feel now so that you can one day reach your big goals is a good plan because those goals will, when “one day” arrives, pay off with outrageous happiness, you’re going to miss out on lots of happiness that is available along the way. (You’re also overestimating how good you’re going to feel at the finish line.) Or if you think it’s just trivial for you to think about, talk about, or work on your happiness at all, you’ll have to refer back to the mantra I introduced in What Is This Website: you matter, this work matters, and you can do this work. You matter, so your happiness matters. If you could pick anyone on the street and push a button that increases their daily happiness for the rest of their lives, that would be a wonderful act. In just the same way, it would be wonderful if you could increase your own happiness for the rest of your life. Fortunately you can (unfortunately not with a magic button), so never tell yourself that the work doesn’t matter.

Eudaimonic happiness is not about this moment, but about your overall perspective on your life. To answer the question “Are you happy with your life?” you have to take a step back to consider whether you’re happy with how things are now and where they’re going. With the big aspects of our lives—relationships, finances, what we spend our time doing—are we happy with where we are or believe that we’re on the right track? Eudaimonic happiness fluctuates much less than hedonic happiness. (Anything can happen in the moment to affect hedonic happiness: you can feel great because you received a big compliment in front of your coworkers and then bang your elbow when you get back to your desk.) The upside of this persistence is that the ups and downs of the moment, like banging your elbow, don’t take away the happiness you feel if you think you’re on the right path in life. The downside is that, if you feel unhappy with your life, it can be an experience hard to escape. Importantly, sometimes our eudaimonic happiness changes not with a change of circumstances, but with a change of perspective. We might appreciate our lives more because we realize that we have things better than we thought, or we can lose a sense of confidence or satisfaction that we’ve been carrying around for years if we suddenly see things differently. And further, even if we’re not happy with the conditions of our lives or our achievements, simply making a plan to change things and starting to work on that plan can tremendously increase our eudaimonic happiness because we feel like we’ve switched over to the right path.

The two kinds of happiness can affect each other, but as I’ve said don’t always go hand in hand. You can be having lots of fun today, and even have lots of fun on lots of days, but still be unhappy with important aspects of your life. Or you could be having a terrible day for any number of reasons, but still be quite happy with your family, career, and plans for the future. At times we make some sacrifice in hedonic happiness in order to improve our eudaimonic happiness—basically giving up short term pleasure for long-term gain. (To paraphrase James Clear in Atomic Habits, good habits often feel bad in the moment because the reward comes later, while bad habits feel good in the moment because the cost comes later.) We get up early and go to work rather than staying in bed and watching movies because we’d rather be employed than unemployed. For a variety of reasons, being unemployed would tremendously diminish the happiness we feel with our lives. And for some people these sacrifices become extreme. Doctors have to spend a decade of their early adulthood—when many people are having fun and carry little responsibility—working long and stressful hours in medical school and residency in order to achieve a highly rewarding career (though one that also brings stresses). When you are making such sacrifices, you want both to be as sure as possible that the reward will be worth the sacrifice and to bring yourself as much happiness in the moment as you can while working toward your long term goal. In other words, learn to enjoy and appreciate your time even in the hard years (which is more possible than you might think).

A word about eudaimonic happiness: Aristotle spent a lot of time talking about the idea of eudaimonia and framed it as an achievement of your highest potential, though it doesn’t require you to drive yourself to be the best at everything. I do believe that we feel happier when we are at least in some way working toward our best selves. As I say in What Is Success, I see the advice I give on being more successful as in truth being about happiness because it’s helping you achieve this eudaimonic happiness. And I think a part of that happiness comes not just with having comfort and strong finances and good relationships—though I’m certainly on board with you getting those things—but with intentionally working toward your potential in at least some aspects of your life.

Now let’s talk about the errors in understanding happiness that you are likely carrying around in your head. First is the idea that if you’re a happy person you must be happy all the time—that there are real people out there living that wonderful life. (As it says in the terrific video on Youtube “7 Ways to Maximize Misery”: “Imagine happiness as a happy place where happy people are happy all the time.”) Therefore if you still have frustration with parts of your life and still, no matter how you try, experience unhappy moments every day, you must not in fact be one of the people who really is happy or can be. This idea is wrong, but is one that our brain easily promotes. Even before the days of social media, our minds were good at thinking that other people have things figured out and we don’t—that for some reason we’re people who just can’t get it together. Now social media has given this unhappy belief much more power. We see all of the photos of our friends or friends of friends or celebrities having amazing weddings, going on amazing trips, or cooking a great meal with their families and it all seems so much better than what we experience. We don’t see in their lives all of the things that went wrong when we got married, went on vacation, or cooked for our family last week. But that’s the point: it may be that we don’t get to see the frustrations that other people experience, but they exist. And understand what I’m saying here. I’m not saying that you should feel good about yourself—in some kind of miserable way—because the truth is that everyone has it as crappy as you, or that people are being frauds when they post happy photos (though some clearly do exaggerate for the camera). I’m saying that you’re not a failure because you deal with frustrating parts of your life. Like everyone, you always will. That truth may not thrill you, but it should free you from the belief that there’s something particular about you that won’t let you achieve the happiness that you see in others. In What Is This Website, I encourage you to embrace the idea of incompetence. Understand that you’ll always be imperfect, but you shouldn’t let your imperfection bother you because it won’t prevent your success. Here I’m saying that your inability to realize an unblemished existence does not make you a loser or mean that you can’t achieve real happiness.

The second error—and this is the really big one so please pay attention—is that you probably think the way to achieve happiness is to go get more happy moments. This belief is a natural enough mistake to make, but it will entirely mislead you in your efforts to become happier. If I ask you to tell me about the happiest times in your life, of course you’re going to think of great moments: your wedding, a terrific vacation, winning a tournament, that time when you were a kid that you and your friends laughed for an hour. It’s the happy moments that come to mind. Now I’m not here to ruin any of those experiences for you by saying that you weren’t actually happy then. You were, but the problem is the conclusion we draw from these memories: we should get more of these experiences, or at least get that great feeling that came with them as often as possible.

What’s wrong with this plan? A couple of things. First, great events and memorable moments just aren’t going to happen every day, and don’t you want to be happy every day? Second, chasing those moments is instead going to create lots of frustration and disappointment in your life, and you’ll end up with a net negative effect. We see this clearly when we look at our phone time (since our electronics are where we so often turn for enjoyment these days). How many hours do we spend scrolling through Youtube videos, Instagram reels, etc., in an effort to find something that makes us really laugh or feel excited, and how much of that time is actually rewarded? Yes, we sometimes find gold, like Mark Rober’s squirrel obstacle course on Youtube, but panning for that gold requires that you spend a large chunk of your life on mediocre junk. You’re at least as likely to end up bored, disappointed, and frustrated with yourself for wasting so much time. (And the truth is that you have been wasting time, but, as I explain in Self Compassion, it’s best to give yourself a break instead of beating yourself up about it.)

I also enjoy laughs from great videos, but spending time seeking fun and exciting moments form any source is an ineffective way to become happy. As the Buddhist monk Sayadaw U Pandita said, “We mistake excitement of the mind for happiness.” The plan is all wrong because you’re not doing anything about the real cause of your unhappiness: the large amount of time you spend in the grip of negative thoughts and feelings. The key to your happiness is to reduce the amount of time you spend caught up in anger, anxiety, shame, frustration, regret, envy, and many other stressful emotions. The more you can achieve this reduction, the happier you’ll be. So big moments can be fun and certainly memorable, but accumulating them is not the key to our happiness.

Our key to improving our happiness is reducing the amount of time we spend with negative emotions running our minds. If right now you spend two hours a day being anxious about what’s coming later in the day, tomorrow, or next month, let’s get that down to an hour. If you spend thirty minutes of your day furious at politicians, let’s get that down to fifteen minutes. Now I know that you don’t use a stopwatch to measure the amount of time you spend anxious and angry, so totaling this time is not as easy as tracking your spending, but that doesn’t actually make fixing the problem harder. Let’s say you’re driving to work in the morning and you’re stressed out about something you have to do this evening. That stress will go away or at least take a back seat when it gets interrupted—perhaps in twenty-five minutes when you get to work. If you can learn to let that stress go or just stop dominating your mind in only twenty, fifteen, or ten minutes, you will be reducing five, ten, or fifteen minutes of unhappiness in your life.

We get the same effect when we can reduce the amount of time we spend in disappointment over something enjoyable we’ve missed out on, anger at someone treating us badly, or regret when we think of something we did ten years ago. The longer we dwell on these feelings—the longer they control our mood—the less happy we’ll be. The sooner we can stop letting these feeling guide us—the sooner we can stop cycling through the same unhappy thoughts again and again—the sooner we can feel good. Please notice that I’m not saying “when you finally stop having anger in your life.” You’re human and will always have negative thoughts, but you can learn to give them much less dominance than they currently enjoy.

You might think this plan is disappointing or perhaps a bit pessimistic. It might seem impossible that you’ll make yourself happier without compiling more good times in your life—by subtracting, not adding. But this technique has a couple of things going for it. First, it works, while trying to fill your life with moments of pleasure doesn’t. Second, the fact that you can find happiness by reducing the intrusion of unhappy thoughts implies that your baseline—what you’ll feel when you aren’t being pushed around by those unhappy thoughts—is in fact positive. You can take some comfort in this truth about your mind. The problem with using the happiest moments we can think of as a guide for becoming happy overall is that they don’t tell us the big truth: happiness is largely created by a feeling of equanimity.

When observed in psychological studies, people who have spent a large part of their lives meditating are generally found to be surprisingly happy. Why? Not because they’re spending their lives chasing fun and excitement, but because they’re better than most of us at freeing themselves from the grip of unpleasant thoughts. When they let those thoughts go, they get to spend their time in the equanimity that’s left behind. Now I’m not telling you that you need to become a yogi to learn how to be happy. I do meditate, but I’ve never spent a single day on retreat (yet). You can learn this skill of freeing yourself from your negative thoughts while living your modern, busy life. All of the articles and podcast episodes on the happiness side of the site work on this skill in some way, with the first three—Gratitude, Self Compassion, and Be Here Now—carrying perhaps the most important techniques. Let me be completely clear that I’m not telling you that you shouldn’t have fun: you shouldn’t have dinner with your friends or go on trips to amazing places. I’m telling you that you’re going to spend the large majority of your life not doing those things and you will make that life much happier if you learn to reduce the grip of your negative thoughts.

To repeat myself, as I will do, you don’t need to achieve perfection to make yourself much happier, which is good news because you never will achieve perfection. Imagine that someone insults you and you spend an hour stewing in a mixture of anger at the person, criticism of yourself, and anxiety about future interactions—all while distractedly going about your tasks at work, at home, etc. This is a miserable way to spend an hour. If you can get that down to thirty minutes, you’ll save yourself half an hour of grief in a single instance and more half hours each time it happens (though I hope you don’t get insulted too often). What if through continued work you can get it down to fifteen minutes? What if you can get it down to five? I’m telling you now that if you can make it so that you never get caught in the grip of anger or other negative feelings for more than five minutes, you will be one of the happiest people you’ve ever met. You’ll never need to reach zero minutes. And you can achieve that goal of less and less time engaged in those feelings through consistent practice.

I’ll talk about one more error here that’s not exactly about happiness, but about motivation. Some people think that you need to experience misery in order to have motivation. The thought is that people happy with their lives sit around being happy instead of getting up to do stuff. This belief simply isn’t true. People who have lots of happy moments in their day and who are happy with their lives still have motivation to achieve goals, improve their lives, and improve the lives of others. Often their motivation is stronger, and nearly always of longer duration, than that of people motivated by anger, envy, a feeling of inferiority, etc. I’m not saying that reducing the hold negative emotions have over you will never take away motivation. It will if your motivation is entirely negative to start with. If you’re striving for some goal—let’s say you’re putting in years of effort to achieve a career that earns you $500,000—because all you can think of is proving yourself to people who have criticized you, then releasing the grip of that emotion will probably make you rethink that goal and all that work you’re putting in. But that would be a good thing, right? You don’t want negative emotions running your day, so you certainly don’t want them running your life. You should have total confidence that there are many positive motivations in life that will make you get off the couch.

It’s important to learn never to feel embarrassed if you’re not happy—do not stigmatize your emotions. That goes for anything from a diagnosis of depression to simply a feeling that pursuing your goals hasn’t brought you where you thought it would. Because you’re human, you know what unhappiness feels like. There’s no reason to make yourself feel ashamed that you do, and of course embarrassment or shame will only add to your unhappiness. Again, I’ve said that we shouldn’t be embarrassed by the label of incompetence. The same certainly goes for unhappiness, whether it’s for a minute or a month. If you’ve come here for help with unhappiness, I will give you the best advice I can. If you need more help from therapy or other resources, get it without feeling embarrassed about it. A willingness to do so on your part will help not only you, but others as well.

Okay, we’re almost done, so let’s reintroduce the mantra from the first article (which I touched upon a little while ago): you matter, this work matters, and you can do this work. You have value right now—you don’t have to earn it through accomplishing goals or winning the respect of others. Your happiness matters—it’s not trivial or selfish for you to spend your time working on it. And, wherever you’re starting from, you can make yourself happier because you can adjust your behaviors. Maybe you can adjust them quickly or maybe it will be slow, but with persistence you can make large and important changes that make you happier.

That’s it. Congratulations on getting through a long article. After you take a breath, you can move on to What Is Success, which is shorter, or, if you want to focus on happiness, you can jump to the first real piece of advice on that front: Gratitude—A Half Step from Happiness (which for better or worse is not shorter). Thanks for reading!