What Is Happiness?

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A while back, I reread a journal I had been keeping called “Progress Notes.” In the journal, I recorded the small steps my patients had taken towards resolving problems with their jobs, their health, their marriages —whatever was keeping them from feeling happy. Yet as I read, I realized that finding happiness is an individualized process, so what works for one person may not work for another. Two people who have lost their jobs, for example, or suffered through a divorce, may work their way towards equanimity in radically different ways.

So, while there are domains of happiness (like work and love) that most people recognize, the journey is still uniquely personal. Granted, there are some longstanding nostrums: Demonstrate gratitude! Be optimistic! But even the sages who expound these truisms will acknowledge that no one can tell anyone how to be happy, at least without risking cookie-cutter, top-down impersonality.

Humans are too diverse. My experience as a psychiatrist led me to realize that I could best help one person at a time find their own solutions based on their own circumstances. I hit on the serial assumptions that if we can observe how others find happiness; if we can test out the approaches that they tested; then after a while, some element of their approach may work for us.

Nothing that I tell patients is a one-size-fits-all solution. I do cite some basic principles, but not as if they were mantras. That would not represent reality or be useful in practice. Rather, we discover our own paths towards happiness, often by trial and error, always by hard work. That work is never over, since our lives keep changing—even as we age —and we must keep calibrating our efforts to where we find ourselves.

There are various core aspects of life (work, love, health, friendships, family) where pursuing happiness matters deeply. We usually focus on one or another at a time. However, all these areas of life form an intertwining skein. They closely involve each other. Ideally, resolving issues in one will make issues in the others less urgent— if you achieve a degree of wellness and personal growth, you’re more likely to function better as a friend, a lover, or a colleague at work. Thus, while we can’t approach “happiness” initially as some general condition, we can see how the various moving parts finally fall into place (or, more or less in place, with some scraggly edges never perfectly aligned). Nothing about happiness is simple, but it has a kind of logic that becomes apparent in your own evolving experience.

Likewise, because the various aspects of life are ultimately connected, you can apply what you’ve learned, say, in your work relationships to your relations with family, lovers, and friends. For example, your journey to self-forgiveness in your professional capacity might implicate how you’d forgive yourself if you hurt someone whom you loved. If nothing about happiness is simple, then neither is it isolated in some corner of our lives, out of touch with the rest of what bothers, obsesses, or suddenly grabs us. Your efforts in one area have broader implications.

Most people encounter family rivalries, conflicts at work, relationship issues. Most people find that aging slows them down and that it challenges their sense of continued usefulness. It’s possible to think about these situations from multiple perspectives. The human experience is so complex. What matters, I think, is that we work at the same issues often at different stages in our lives, with different considerations rising and falling in importance.

So, how do you know that you are making progress? I think happiness is a lagging indicator. That is, many times we’re actually putting pieces into place, but we don’t yet see the pattern. So, while we’re no longer stuck, we may still think we are. We realize only retrospectively that we’re in a better place, even if we are a work in progress.

Still, it can be a slow-motion process. After all, feeling happy is not especially useful unless you’re aware of how you feel. It sounds almost paradoxical to be gaining on happiness but still unaware of your progress, but it happens all the time. Often, we ease into (or un-self-consciously approach) happiness. What does this emerging ease seem like? Maybe it’s a reduced level of conflict with others, maybe just less tension about whether you’re fit for some line of work. Often, it involves a shift in a state of mind: more comfort with yourself, greater equanimity, increased acceptance.

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Ideally, you feel a growing sense of contentment. You may even begin to like yourself, when you haven’t felt that way in years.

But even as a kind of happiness dawns on us, it can fade. Think of happiness as suspended in a state of perpetual flux. Happiness can be contingent, intermittent, subject to change without notice. It can be here today, then gone through no fault of our own. We must accept happiness as it is, find it in ourselves when and where we can. We can’t corral it, put a stamp on it, and claim it as a permanent possession. We can take steps to ensure that it persists, but there are no guarantees. All we can do is work within its limits, and follow its changing demands. In this sense, the desire for happiness can leave us feeling vulnerable, liable to be knocked off our perch. But that’s okay. We can always try to climb on again.

We still have power to affect how we experience the world. If we bring a tragic perspective to everything, then everything will be tragic. But we can literally, through the operation of our will, turn things around—that is, finding and appreciating what makes life bearable, interesting, sometimes even happy. How we see things makes a difference (is the glass half full or half empty?).

Of course, no one should delude themselves. But we can project onto the world a sense that possibility exists, and that (through adjusting our perspective) it is what we make of it. We can sense possibility, and believe in it. In that way, possibility becomes as real as our latest bad break. Reality is as much about our mental state as it is empirical. Thus, the belief in possibility can be uplifting. It can make us happier. I am talking about mental work which, in a way, is the beginning and end of happiness.