You want to be happier. But what does that actually mean? How can a strong biological drive that can dominate our lives, still remain such an ambiguous and variable concept?
Before we begin to examine ways to increase our happiness we’d better start by trying to nail down some sort of definition.

On the surface of it this may seem like a trivial exercise, but it’s they key to any structured scientific approach to reaching your goals. Mountains have peaks, oceans have beaches.

These are very clear markers to aim at and symbols that definitively identify when you’ve successfully climbed or crossed them.

Without a clear definition of what you’re trying to achieve then of course it’s impossible to reach. How can you finish a task if you never know when it’s complete?

Taking this one step to define happiness is essential, and will have a greater effect on making you happier than any other article in this series.

Defining Happiness

Of course there is a nice biological mechanism that underlies your feelings of happiness, with some big name brain regions and neurotransmitters that have a huge influence on your mood. You’ve probably even heard of a few like dopamine and serotonin. Without this basic scientific understanding of happiness and the brain there would be no Prozac or other anti-depressants.

But despite how far our comprehension has advanced in the last 50 years, our knowledge of how happiness as biochemistry works is as crude as saying the wheels on a car go around and then it goes forward. There are many nuanced processes that occur at the biochemical and molecular levels that add up to dopamine and serotonin being released. As a consequence of this we experience a reinforcement of feeling satisfied or pleasure after taking doing whatever it was that caused us to feel happy.

Alas if this were the whole simple story then the whole self help industry could condense “how to be happy?” into a simple solution: Use lots of heroin. No, the nuanced flavors of happiness are more than the sum of the biochemical reactions in our brain (at least they are more complicated than pure chemistry can solve for us right now). To understand happiness we need to use the next best scientific tools at our disposal: psychology and psychiatry.

This isn’t the whole answer to understanding happiness either – psychological studies are themselves limited and crude, just in different ways than biochemistry. Happiness is a tough thing to study in a laboratory setting – let’s face it, we can’t know with certainty if a lab rat is feeling pleased or annoyed. Therefore the best tools we have for scientifically studying happiness come from simply asking people about what makes them happy.

But that doesn’t mean we are just groping around in the dark here for any self help mumbo jumbo on what happiness is. There are some very sound scientific studies that have examined what makes people happy, even if we don’t know exactly how they make people happy. And perhaps that’s good enough to start with.

Theories of Happiness – Right Now or Here for the Long Run?

The first big theory of what happiness consists of is a nice logical, almost mathematical approach. Schopenhauer was perhaps the first to articulate it as: Happiness is merely an absence of pain, or more stoically: Happiness is minimizing pain and maximizing pleasure.

This definition, known as the hedonistic view, is probably the most familiar to people. It does feel limited in its scope though as it is more heavily weighted to assigning happiness to things with immediacy, those things that are bringing you pleasure right now. That amazing meal you had at that restaurant, which filed your senses with delight and exposed you to amazing new flavors. This can certainly be described as bringing you happiness. But what about that amazing meal you ate 2 years ago, do you even remember that? Perhaps it is a mistake to think of all the happiness in our lives as columns in a ledger book that contains pain and pleasure. Do you even subconsciously total these up to a positive or a negative number at the end of the day, week, or at the end of our lives?

The second view is that happiness is satisfaction in your actions or even more generally with life as a whole. This more nuanced view of happiness can incorporate pain and boredom as elements of happiness rather than the plus and minus seen above. For example, I don’t enjoy washing the dishes, but it does make me feel quite satisfied to see them done and the kitchen orderly and ready to create another meal. Importantly though, happiness and satisfaction are not the same. No one strives to just be satisfied, we seek out ways to be happy. Perhaps then we can expand this definition into happiness is a large quantity and breadth of satisfaction in many aspects of life.

As with most competing scientific theories, perhaps the truth lies in a combination of both. It’s hard to imagine pursuing only those little things that bring you pleasure and avoiding anything that’s unpleasant and then expecting to have a nice home and a long comfortable retirement. Conversely are you really happy if you work in a soul destroying job, hating the 8 hours of every day for 10 years so you can own that comfortable home only when you retire?

While we now have some general guidelines as to how to define what happiness is, it is still something intensely personal. And that means you need to customize the definition to you before you begin to try and increase your levels of happiness.

Realistic Goals and Defined Goals

1) Identify the things in life that currently make you happy. Family, Health, Eating out, Cars, your job etc write them all down no matter how trivial.

2) Write down all the things that you want that you don’t have that you think will make you happy.

3) Be critical. What goals in step 2 would impact on the things that make you happy now? Can you afford that nice sports car – what would you be giving up?

4) Acting on you goals. Two simple choices remain now: Either change your desires/expectations to match the world around you or Change the world around you to match your expectations/desires

Next up in this series on happiness we’ll explore ways to increase your happiness and start realizing the goals in step 4. It sounds like it could be a long journey but the reality is – The hardest part is over!

Once you’ve actually defined what happiness is to you then more often than not this is enough to make it obvious what you need to do next to make your life happier.

To ensure you catch the next in the series try subscribing to the RSS or Email updates. It would certainly make me happier.

Original image by A_of_Doom remixed by Patrick

January 29th, 2009