What Is Happiness?

Coming up with a formal definition of happiness can be tricky. After all, shouldn’t we just know it when we feel it? In fact, we often use the term to describe a range of positive emotions, including amusement, joy, pride, and contentment.

For most, the term happiness is interchangeable with “subjective well-being”, which is typically measured by asking people about how satisfied they feel with their lives (evaluative), how much positive and negative emotion they tend to feel (affective), and their sense of meaning and purpose (eudaimonic). In her 2007 book The How of Happiness, positive psychology researcher Sonja Lyubomirsky elaborates, describing happiness as “the experience of joy, contentment, or positive well-being, combined with a sense that one’s life is good, meaningful, and worthwhile.”

Social and cultural factors also influence how we think about happiness. For example, people from cultures that embrace more collectivist ideals think about happiness more in terms of harmony and contentment, while more individualistic-minded people connect it to feelings of exuberance and joy. Happiness levels are also shaped by social groups, like families; happier people increase the happiness of people around them.

12 Steps to Happiness

Here are a dozen research-tested happiness activities you can start practicing today, to find ones that work best for you:

1. Do more activities that truly engage you.At home and at work, seek out more challenging and absorbing experiences in which you “lose yourself,” experiencing what researchers call “a state of flow.”  
2. Savour life’s joys. Pay close attention to life’s momentary pleasures and wonders through thinking, writing, or drawing, or by sharing them with others. 
3. Learn to forgive.Keep a journal or write a letter in which you work on letting go of anger and resentment toward someone who has hurt or wronged you.
4. Practice acts of kindness.Do good things for others—whether friends or strangers, directly or anonymously, spontaneously or planned. 
5. Nurture relationships.Pick a relationship in need of strengthening, and invest time and energy in healing, cultivating, affirming, and enjoying it.
6. Cultivate Keep a journal in which you imagine and write about the best possible future for yourself, or practice looking at the bright side of every situation. 
7. Avoid over-thinking and social comparison.Use strategies (such as distraction) to cut down on how often you dwell on your problems, and guard against comparing yourself to others.
8. Develop strategies for coping.Practice ways to endure or surmount a recent stress, hardship, or trauma.  Reach out to others for support.
9. Count your blessings.Express gratitude for what you have—either privately, through contemplation or journaling, or to someone else—or convey your appreciation to people whom you’ve never properly thanked. 
10. Strengthen your spiritual connections. Religious and spiritual people are generally happier, perhaps because of the social connections they get through their community.
11. Commit to your goals.Pick one, two, or three significant goals that are meaningful to you, and devote time and effort to pursuing them. 
12. Take care of your body.This could mean exercise, of course, but also meditating, smiling, or laughing.

The above article has many free resources available for you to access, such as goal-setting sheets, identifying your strengths, developing optimism and many more.  Click on the link below to access these; you may like to do this activity with your children and learn together.  Here’s to cultivating more happiness in our lives and who doesn’t want that?

12 Steps to Happiness | Greater Good (berkeley.edu)

“Definition of Happiness” by Greater Good in Education Oct issue 2022

“12 Steps to Happiness” by Stacy Kennelly / August 9, 2012

Aundraea Stevens
Convenor of the Mental Health and Wellbeing Committee