Happiness is one of life’s eternal pursuits. But the definition of happiness differs greatly from person to person. And for some people, happiness seems impossible to find or to hold on to. So, the question becomes – is happiness a choice, a feeling, or a result?

Happiness is not a choice. Feelings can come from a variety of stimuli – emotional and physical. But there are key behaviors that happy people engage in that help to elevate their mood and remain happy in the face of adversity. Life strategies can help people live happier, more fulfilled lives. 

Most people have experienced moments of great happiness in their lives. For example, weddings, the birth of children, or successful career moments. But alongside those moments of joy come tremendous low points as well – dealing with illness, death, and financial setbacks. So, answering the question of what happiness is, and where it comes from becomes ever more important, especially in uncertain times.

Is Happiness a Feeling?

Yes, happiness is a feeling. But like so many other emotions, what defines happiness may be very different from one person to the next. Something that gives one person joy may not even register as something positive for another, and vice versa.

The conditions that enable feelings of happiness vary from person to person, as do the stimuli that trigger that elevated emotion. Some people seem to be able to laugh even in the face of great adversity, while others remain gloomy even when everything around them seems rosy.

Because happiness is a feeling, every person experiences it differently. If two people were to recall a time when they were incredibly happy, they both would remember very different physical and mental reactions.

These differences exist because every person is unique. Their life experiences, their coping skills, their mental and physical characteristics, and even the compositions of their brain chemistry – all contribute to a person’s ability to feel happiness, and how they respond to the emotion.

There is baseline for happiness – the feeling is completely subjective and personal to every individual. While this is completely normal and healthy, it makes happiness impossible to predict or even categorize completely.

But happiness is common to human experience, so identifying the commonalities among people who identify themselves as ‘happy’ can lead us to valuable insights.

The Difference Between Happiness and Positivity

It’s important to understand that emotions are fleeting, transitory things, and our experience with them is passive. Emotions happen to us, or within us. You cannot control which emotions you feel, or at what intensity. All you can control is how you choose to react to them.

While some people seek to find a state of ‘perpetual happiness’, this is, in fact, impossible. Some emotions last longer than others, but it is rare to experience a day whose moments are filled with any one emotion.

Even when you are having a terrific day, and everything seems to be going your way, you’re not experiencing the emotions of happiness or joy for every waking moment. A good day or even a great day might only have a few moments of true happiness in it.

The same can be said of negative emotions. Sadness, fear, or loneliness are not constant. Even when you are caught deeply in their grip, you can still experience moments of laughter, hope, or love.

On the other hand, positivity is an active choice. Positive thinking is the conscious decision to focus on the possibility of good results or to seek out the goodness in situations or people, no matter how bad they might appear.

A positive mindset is one of the fundamental keys to how happy people find that emotional state, and remain happy.

Don’t Seek Happiness – Practice Positivity

Happiness is an emotion, and so it is experienced – not found. In fact, actively pursuing it as a goal can negatively affect your overall state of happiness because if you pursue it and fail, you might get frustrated, or feel like a failure.

You cannot simply will yourself to be happy. But positivity – a mindset that is focused on seeking the best in people and situations – can be learned and, more importantly, it can be practiced. No matter what is going on in your life, you can strive to have a positive attitude.

Like many other self-improvement techniques, the key to practicing positive thinking is to remind yourself to do it constantly. This is true of other self-corrective techniques like learning to stop slouching or becoming aware of grinding your teeth.

At first, you may get frustrated by how often you forget to use the technique of positive thinking. But don’t despair – because it is a skill, you can get better at putting yourself into the mode of positive thinking if you find yourself slipping into negative thoughts or emotions. Try not to judge yourself harshly if you do fail. Simply remind yourself that it is a process and that each instance you remember is a step towards self-change.

Because positive thinking is an active process and not a personal, emotional reaction, it is also something that can be understood and shared with others in your life. External reminders from friends or loved ones to try and practice positive thinking can be a powerful tool in helping to refine the practice in ourselves.

Focus on Small Events, Not the Big Picture

Whatever is happening in your life will affect the levels of your happiness. It is hard to be happy – or to remain happy – if some aspects of your life aren’t going well.

Imagine getting a surprise gift. While the experience might lift your spirits in the short-term, if you are wrestling with other long-term problems, then the boost will only last for a short time until the realities of your troubles reassert themselves.

This inability to generally feel happier (even if things happen that might ordinarily boost our spirits) is completely normal. This is because the emotion of happiness tends to flow from a big-picture view of our state of well-being. It is difficult, or perhaps even impossible, to achieve true happiness when key areas of our lives are uncertain or negative.

But positivity is small-picture and more immediate. The key to positive thinking is focusing on the current moment and determining what positive things you can gain from the experience or interaction that you’re having right now.

An example might be during a walk home, where you are caught in the rain. Rather than focus on the negative aspects of the rain, you could choose to focus on the beauty of the setting, or the solitude, or perhaps recall some other positive event in the day.

You can learn to put aside the big-picture view and focus on the moment, which, in turn, can improve your overall happiness level and better prepare you to face up to the more challenging areas of your life.

More Techniques to Build Happiness

In addition to the skill of developing a positive mindset, there are other techniques that can help to build happiness and satisfaction in your life.

Finding additional tools that can help grow your overall happiness is a very personal process, but it can feel overwhelming, so please – don’t try everything all at once. Instead, read over the suggestions below and pick perhaps one or two techniques that really speak to you, and try them out.

But most importantly, don’t feel discouraged – real change takes time, and it builds upon itself.

Build Your Skills

Life skills can help you tackle the big-picture problem areas that may be contributing to your overall unhappiness. Self-management skills, interpersonal skills, or even career-related skills can all be valuable tools to help you address areas of uncertainty or negativity in your life.

It can help to make a list of the zones of negativity and then make a shortlist of skills that might help to alleviate them. Beyond that, you might find ways to approach building your skills that are fun or personally rewarding. 

How Does Building a Skillset Help?

For example, there was a successful creative professional who had an obvious gap in their skills. This individual came to their field from outside of normal channels, and being self-taught they had never been trained on some of the fundamental software tools of their trade. This person had begun to develop something of a mental block to learning those tools, and their inability to use them proficiently had started to cause significant problems in the workplace. 

Their solution was to come up with a hobby project that involved the software, so they could engage with the learning process on their own terms, giving them the freedom to make mistakes and judge the results of their work in a non-threatening, and fun way.

Your Environment Could Be Conducive to Happier Living

As a final note, when you can, try to put yourself in environments or around people that will increase your probability of happiness. This is easier said than done, but the long-term costs of negative interactions can be debilitating to our happiness and our relationships. 

University of Washington marriage researcher John Gottman suggests that people make a point to avoid negative interactions. His general metric is that relationships require five positive interactions to “offset the emotional damage” of a single bad interaction. 

While his advice is targeted at personal relationships, it can be extrapolated into a general rule of thumb for all sources of negativity. Chaos and disruption make it hard for anyone to feel settled enough to achieve true happiness.

Beyond taking steps to build positive habits or skills, it’s also valuable to catalog the negative influences in your life. It can be difficult, but making an honest list of the situations, influences, or people in your life that affect you negatively can be a useful exercise. 

Once you have your negative list, take some time to jot down simple ideas on how you might go about removing the negative influences on you, or how you might avoid situations that make you more unhappy.

Wired For Trouble

Millions of years of evolution have hard-wired our brains to look for trouble. Negative experiences could be life-threatening, and so tend to stick in our brains much more easily than positive experiences.

This ‘negativity bias’ causes our brains to react to bad news more intensely than compared to how they respond to good news. This was a useful tool for keeping primitive humans alive, but it can also create a tendency for us to focus on the bad, rather than embracing the good.

Some examples of negativity bias include:

• The fact that we remember insults more than we remember praise.
• The brain is hard-wired to be ever-vigilant and wary of threats.
• For positive experiences to resonate or form meaningful memories, they have to occur more often than negative ones.
• Our brains physically react more strongly to negative stimuli than to positive stimuli. For example, there is more electrical activity in the neurons of the brain if a subject sees a negative image (like a picture of a dead animal) than if they see a positive picture (like a picture of a flower).
• If something good and something bad both happen to you on the same day, you have a greater likelihood of reacting to the negative event, rather than the positive one.
• When your mind wanders, you are more likely to remember something that made you angry than you are to remember something that made you happy or filled you with pride.

But it is possible to counter the brain’s negativity bias by consciously focusing and lingering on the small, positive moments in our lives. Try taking a ‘mental snapshot’ of moments of happiness, or positivity. Consciously mark them in your mind, with the simple promise that ‘I’m going to remember this moment.’ You’ll find that, in time, those moments will become a permanent touchstone in your memory.

Smiling Can Help

One secret to boosting your mood can be as simple as making yourself smile. A 2011 Michigan State University study found that people who smiled as a result of cultivating positive thoughts exhibited an improved mood. 

Try finding a source of entertainment that you can enjoy on your own. Perhaps it is a podcast, a video game, a song, or even a series of videos on the web. Let yourself absorb it and try smiling. It can be great practice for finding the joy in the things that you appreciate and can also help you become acclimated to instinctively smiling in public.

Just be aware that fake smiling resulted in worse moods and emotional withdrawal. If you can – smile. Just don’t try and fake it!

Cultivate Thankfulness

It has been scientifically proven that cultivating thankfulness is a way to improve your overall happiness. Personally speaking, I believe that meditating and practicing gratitude daily is what contributed the most to a high baseline of my happiness level.

According to a report in the Journal of Social Behavior and Personality, grateful people tend to appreciate simple pleasures in their lives. The study defined simple pleasures as ‘those pleasures in life that are available to most people.’

To make thankfulness into a habit, it’s recommended that you find a regular time for it in your day. For example, you could start by finding three things to be grateful for over breakfast every day.

You might start your practice by making a list of the simple pleasures that you enjoy. They differ from person to person, but here is a short list that could apply to just about anyone, anywhere:

A walk

Sunshine

Pets

Friendship

Exercise

Hobbies

Food

Music

Movies

Cooking

A warm bed

A cool pillow

Holding hands

A hug

Children

Your spouse

In addition to thinking about the simple pleasures in your life, turn your attention to yourself. We often overlook our own positive characteristics, taking them as ‘given’ when we calculate how happy we are. You might ask – what are three things that I can be thankful for about myself? 

Sometimes making a list of your own positive characteristics, or the things that you’re thankful for about yourself can be a powerful tool for self-affirmation. 

Next, consider the people around you. Who are three people that you are thankful to have in your life? Remembering who is important to you, and why can help you stay mindful of your blessings, and grounded. 

The things we get used to having can become things we take for granted, but not everyone in the world has access to them. That revelation can be a powerful starting place for developing a thankful mindset.

Don’t Live With Regret

As we grow older there is a marked transition that happens in life.  When you are young, time seems infinite. But as you pass certain thresholds, especially when you lose someone you love dearly, the realization that we are all mortal, and all lives end in the grave becomes much more personal.

The slow fade of physical and mental capabilities can also lead to a general increase in uncertainty and loss of agency. Fear of death or debilitating illness are very real sources of unhappiness in the elderly, as are fears that once-independent people might become ‘burdens’ on their loved-ones.

These combined factors can lead to the conclusion that things that you have put off thinking, “I can always do them tomorrow” are actually much more pressing concerns.

Bronnie Ware is a palliative care nurse who spent years working with older adults on their deathbeds. She was also the author of a blog post entitled The Top Five Regrets of the Dying. In her post, Ware said that,

“Many (elderly patients) did not realize until the end that happiness is a choice. They had stayed stuck in old patterns and habits. The so-called ‘comfort’ of familiarity overflowed into their emotions, as well as their physical lives. Fear of change had them pretending to others, and to their selves, that they were content. When deep within, they longed to laugh properly and have silliness in their life again … Life is a choice. It is YOUR life. Choose consciously, choose wisely, choose honestly. Choose happiness.”

Change can be hard, and this is especially true for the elderly for whom routine means predictability and safety.

But if you muster the courage to change patterns in your life that may have trapped you in unhappy situations or personal relationships, you may avoid looking back with regrets.

Mental is Chemical

In any discussion of positive thinking, or of the pursuit of happiness, it is critical to note that many people experience physiological and chemical deficits in their brain chemistry that can make it impossible for them to feel happier.

This can be a terrible trap, as the person suffering from depression or anxiety strives to force themselves to ‘feel better’ or to ‘be happy’ only to fail. This cycle can lead to self-loathing and self-destructive behavior.

Positive thinking can still be a useful tool for anyone suffering from these forms of mental illness if only to give them self-diagnostic tools to better understand their own reactions to the events in their lives.

If a person with depression tries to practice positive thinking but cannot find a way to focus on the positive things in the events and people around them, it can be a powerful indicator that they should seek clinical help.

Plan For Fun

One interesting behavior that researchers have discovered is that people tend to put off having fun when they feel unhappy.

It’s an easy cycle to imagine – when we’re feeling unhappy, the prospect of pleasurable activity often sounds like the last thing we want to do. Instead, we are much more likely to postpone, preferring to put it off until we ‘feel better’.

But for a person stuck in this rut, this creates a vicious cycle where they continue to delay having fun until they ‘feel better’, which leads to them continuing to feel bad, which causes them to sink ever-lower into despair while continuing to delay activities that might bring them some happiness.

The answer is to become aware of the cycle, and then actively break it by forcing yourself to pursue activities that you used to find pleasurable.

This simple act can often have a profound impact on your mood, helping you to find more happiness and reverse the pattern of a downward spiral.

Can Happiness Be a Result?

There is a school of thought that teaches that the best path to happiness is one of purpose. 

Living a life dedicated to particular goals gives a person a number of powerful tools that can enable them to address areas of chaos and uncertainty in their lives.

Purpose can give you clear metrics for success. For example, if you make strides towards achieving your purpose, that growth can be immensely rewarding and satisfying to your sense of self.

To achieve purpose, one must be disciplined. A purpose-filled life can help you to become more structured in your personal or professional habits, which has the add-on effect of eliminating chaos, which can help to raise your overall happiness.

A purpose-filled life can be a high calling, for example, working for social, political, or environmental causes. But it can also be highly personal. Being a dedicated parent and giving all of your attention and focus to providing the best possible environment and opportunities for your family and children can also be a highly purpose-driven life.

Living a Life of Purpose

Researches in the field of positive psychology – which is the study of good or positive brain function rather than dysfunction – discovered that individuals who feel “meaningfulness” or a clear purpose in their lives reported less pain and lower anxiety over a six-month period than volunteer subjects who scored lower for meaning in their lives.

Other studies showed that purpose in life could significantly reduce stress, reduce episodes of depression and, in turn, discourage related substance abuse behavior.

Richard J. Leider is an author and the CEO of the Inventure Group, a Minneapolis-based consulting firm that works with executives and organizations to help them find purpose and calling. 

Leider created a checklist of everyday exercises to help clients discover a deeper meaning and purpose to their lives and work, including the following items:

Reflection – At the end of every day, review which activities have been “life-giving” and which are “life draining.”

Meditation – Meditation, especially if it gives you a break from technology or the internet, can give you a restorative period of peace and quiet. It has a ton of other important benefits as well. Highly recommend you incorporate it into your life as well! You can learn more about ‘meditation for happiness’ and how to do it properly in my blog post here.

Journaling – Leider recommends that his clients write about their daily experiences – especially cataloging those which they considered life-giving or life-draining.

Prayer – Studies by the University of Minnesota Center for Spirituality and Healing show that regular prayer, however it is practiced, can help people reach a clear-headed state more frequently and more reliably.

In Conclusion

As we have learned, happiness is an emotion – a feeling. But there are skills and techniques that we can master to improve our opportunities to be happy. And beyond that, there are choices that we can make to arrange the elements of our lives in ways that are proven to improve happiness and satisfaction.