Everyone wants happiness but how do we achieve it? Some ask, is it even possible? In much the same way that it is getting harder and harder to find anyone really healthy, it seems to be getting harder and harder to find people who are truly happy. Maybe, first of all, we should ask ourselves what exactly is happiness?

Many people believe happiness comes from ‘doing the things we like doing, and being with people we like being with’. But I suggest we have to take a slightly deeper dive into the subject to really understand happiness and exactly how to achieve and maintain it.

I propose that we can all be happy and I offer the insights below from my experience, my research into personal development, from talking to people, and from deconstructing and reverse engineering my own happiness.

What is happiness?

Happiness is the ultimate goal in life. We would probably all agree that a miserable life would not be worth living. Happiness is experienced as an emotion. We feel happy. But why? In philosophy, happiness translates from the Greek concept of Eudaimonia, and refers more to the comprehensive good life, or flourishing, rather than simply being an emotion (Wikipedia). This suggests happiness is the reward for right living, and when we consider how illusive happiness is for many people today in the context of examining just how such lives are being lived. Let’s dig a little deeper and expand our understanding of the concept of happiness and the principles behind it so as to ultimately arrive at a useful definition and a framework for achieving it.

Happiness is not pleasure

Pleasure and happiness both feel good, but they are not the same. There are a number of important distinctions between the two, and the achievement of happiness requires us to know the difference.

Pleasure is short-term – Happiness is long term

Pleasure is felt in the moment, but happiness is the long-term view, the sum of a life across time. Happiness is a ‘how-goes-it?’ assessment of our life or circumstances. We feel good if we are on track to realising our goals, we don’t feel good if we are not on track, or if we have no self-initiated goals.

The concept of happiness is independent from the peaks and troughs of daily life. It is the mental equivalent of a graphic indication of trend as opposed to the individual highs and lows of specific events and temporary circumstances. This is why a genuinely happy person can easily weather the storms of misfortune or circumstances outside of their control, so long as the course being pursued is right and is on target.

This does not mean that a happy person will never feel down. It means that a happy person has a broader and more positive context within which they experience their daily circumstances and emotional highs and lows. The positive quality of the context is born out of having goals and being engaged with life. Where are we headed? What are we doing? Where are we aiming to end up?

Pleasure is sensory and in the body – Happiness is psychological/emotional and in the mind

Pleasure is experienced primarily in the body and is largely sensory, where as happiness is good feelings in the mind. Pleasure can also have an emotional component, but this comes from the extent to which one has realised a value in experiencing that particular pleasure. For example, if eating ice cream was a significant value in one’s life, then the experience of eating it would illicit an emotional response associated with achieving that particular value as well as the physical pleasure of it’s taste.

But happiness, in essence, is a psychological and emotional state as distinct from a purely physical sensation. Emotions do have a physical component, but happiness is not felt in the body in the same way as feeling sick ...