The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want

by Sonja Lyubomirsky

You are in control and can influence your life from this day forward in a significant and meaningful way. This is where you can begin.

becoming lastingly happier demands making some permanent changes that require effort and commitment every day of your life.

you’re not happy today, then you won’t be happy tomorrow unless you take things into your own hands and take action.

Happiness is not out there for us to find. The reason that it’s not out there is that it’s inside us.

materialism may distract people from relatively more meaningful and joyful aspects of their lives, such as nurturing their relationships with family and friends, enjoying the present, and contributing to their communities.

He consciously remembers to say, “I love you,” to bring her flowers, to initiate plans, trips, and hobbies, to take an interest in his wife’s challenges, successes, and feelings.

and I make a conscious decision to take a moment and look at the beach and the mountains in the distance more attentively, to breathe extra deeply the salty air.

“The beginning for me was to look into the mirror and say (in Barbra Streisand’s accent): ‘Hellooo, gorgeous!’ I kept saying it until I didn’t burst into laughter every time I said it.” This may seem easy or trivial, but it’s not when you appear ugly and worthless to yourself. “I also worked very hard,” Judith told me, “to stop the negative thoughts (I called them the bad thoughts) by simply saying in my mind, STOP! and then I would say to myself, You are okay right now.”

Judith has risen above both her circumstances and her nature by striving for a life-transforming goal—to change how she thought about herself and the world around her, to build her self-esteem and nurture optimistic thinking—by choosing to be happy.

Any major life-changing endeavor must be accompanied by considerable sustained effort, and I would speculate that the majority of people do not or cannot continue putting out that kind of effort.

all new happiness-enhancing or health-boosting strategies have something in common; each one bestows on the person a specific goal, something to do and to look forward. Moreover, as I explain later on, having goals in and of themselves is strongly associated with happiness and life satisfaction. That’s why—at least for a time—any new happiness strategy does work!

fountain of happiness can be found in how you behave, what you think, and what goals you set every day of your life. “There is no happiness without action.”63 If feelings of passivity and futility overcome you whenever you face up to your happiness set point or to your circumstances, you must know that a genuine and abiding happiness is indeed with...

Different men seek after happiness in different ways and by different means, and so make for themselves different modes of life. . . . —Aristotle

It goes without saying that a person needs to make an honest effort in trying a new strategy in order to achieve any benefit.

“Happy people are all alike; every unhappy person is unhappy in his or her own way.”

Indeed, different people can attain happiness in different ways, so it makes sense that some of us should focus on a particular set of happiness-increasing activities, while others should focus on an entirely different set of activities.

you can tailor the happiness strategies to fit your personality and your way of life. There are probably as many ways to achieve happiness as there are to lose it.

the practice of gratitude involves a focus on the present moment, on appreciating your life as it is today and what has made it so.

All these research findings, however, are correlational, meaning that we cannot know conclusively whether being grateful actually causes all those good things (or inhibits bad things), or whether possessing traits like hopefulness, helpfulness, and religiosity simply makes people feel grateful.

It’s true that depression is different—it seems to be a disorder of emotion rather than an organ of the body, like the heart or kidney—but in truth, depression is a disorder of the brain. When a drug begins to relieve the suffering of the depressed individual, only then can she begin to confront her pain.