Happiness is neither a feeling nor a goal.  It is a direction in how one approaches life.  We will never be happy all the time. The science of happiness is about doing those things to promote a happier life.  But life’s ups and downs will always be there.

Happiness is about 50% genetic, 40% under self-control and 10% environmental.

Happiness has 4 main components: friends, family, spirituality, and purposeful work. (Note spirituality is not necessarily an organized religion.)

Skills that contribute to being happier are positive emotions, engagement, good relationships, and meaning.

As seen with both emotional intelligence and positive psychology, recognizing, accurately describing, and managing your emotions is an essential element of being happier.

Individuals need to become an expert in understanding and regulation of your own emotions. Metacognition (also mindfulness, emotional self-regulation) is a tool that promotes and uses the gap between feeling an emotion and reacting to it. It is used to both improve focus and enable the brain pre-frontal cortex to engage and manage the response to an emotion.  Our mind wanders about 50% of the time. Improving focus requires practice.

One result of a wandering mind is anxiety - which is unfocused fear.  To manage anxiety, focus the fear.  A tool is to write down the fears.  This enables engaging the pre-frontal cortex (~30 sec.) and allows rational evaluation of the fears.

Working toward happiness does not mean eliminating unhappiness in our life.  Having a mix of both is both normal and essential.  The goal is to tip the “mood balance” so the overall direction is positive and growing.  Mood balance can be measured using the PANAS tool (Positive and Negative Affect Schedule.

Thoughts that ruin happiness:
- Trying to get things that we think will make us happy - we are usually wrong.
- Instead of using objective references to how we are doing we compare ourselves to others
- Hedonic Adaption is when something makes us “happy” but quickly wears off.
But we don’t realize this is happening.
- Impact Bias is when we don’t realize that Hedonic Adaption is happening and we want more of what we wrongly associate with happiness (the Hedonic Treadmill).

Additional Examples of Evidence-Based Tools to Promote Happiness:
- Social connection-physically spend time with other people,
- Doing nice things for other people,
- Change thought patterns from negative to positive emotions,
- Show gratitude for the good stuff,
- Exercise and/or move more.