What Makes You Happy

Be Happy

What is your path to happiness?

When we talk about personal happiness, we usually mean our emotions, technically called “affect.” Happiness creates a life-enhancing joyful feedback loop.  Positive emotions contribute to better friendships and partnerships, higher income, better physical health and a longer life. Positive emotions help also help you recover from setbacks and emotional blows. When you are happy, you are more energized, creative and resourceful.

Psychologists and philosophers have identified many roads to happiness. Each of us use different ones or a combination at different stages of life. Which are paths are you taking?

Hedonism is the pursuit of pleasure.   Here, happiness comes from obtaining pleasure and avoiding pain.  Pleasure can include eating, drinking and sex, as well as the pleasures of the mind and spirit, such as moral and ethical acts or worship and other pursuits. Proponents of this approach include Hobbes, de Sade, and the Nobel-prize winner Daniel Kahneman.

Eudemonia happiness comes from a life that actively expresses virtue and excellence, with a sense of meaning and purpose, and with a concern for others.  People who pursue eudaimonic happiness aspire to do good and make a difference.   The resulting sense of fulfillment is also called flourishing. The eudaimonic view of happiness was proposed by Aristotle.

Flow or autotelic happiness comes from living a fully engaged life.  This active pathway to happiness leads to joy by filling life with just the right amount of challenge for one’s skill when doing what you do best.  Flow happiness is enhanced by deep involvement in valued activities and by access to resources such as money, a good social network and intelligence. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is a proponent of flow happiness.

Chaironic happiness comes from a sense of being blessed and feeling grateful.  Chaironic happiness is sense of awe and oneness with God, nature, spirit or a higher power.  This kind of happiness depends on an attitude of openness, on being mindful and attuned to transcendental encounters.The chaironic view of happiness was explored by philosophers and scholars ranging from Thomas Aquinas to Freud.

Here are ways to improve your own or your communities wellbeing:

Material Wellbeing
Physical Health
Time Balance
Psychological Wellbeing
Education and Learning
Cultural Vitality
Environmental Quality
Governance
Community Vitality
Workplace Experience

10 things science says will make you happy
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