Do You Say “I Just Want to Be Happy”? Here’s How

For most people, happiness means the same thing as subjective well-being (Sheldon & Lyubomirsky, 2006). Basically, if we feel good emotionally and mentally, we are happy. But happiness can also be broken down into two parts: hedonia (e.g., pleasure, enjoyment, comfort, absence of distress) and eudaimonia (e.g., growth, meaning, authenticity, excellence) (Huta & Waterman, 2014). If you’re saying. “I just want to be happy”, you probably want both of these parts of happiness. So we’ll talk here about strategies for developing both of them.

There are so many strategies you can use when you just want to be happy. Keep in mind that these strategies take time to make meaningful positive impacts on your life. They are also not always easy to continue doing. But growing your happiness is very much like growing muscles. You have to work at it and continue to strengthen your “happiness muscles” over time. Only when you do this will happiness come automatically with little effort at all (just like when you get strong and can lift things easily). This is exactly what our happiness program shows you how to do.

To increase our happiness, there are two distinct things we have control over: our thoughts and our behaviors. Both of these affect our emotions. For some of us, changing our thoughts may be harder. For others, changing our behaviors may be harder. That’s why it’s important to experiment to find out which strategies work best for you. Here are some examples of how thoughts and behaviors can be modified to increase happiness.

Our thoughts:

• We can transform negative thoughts into positive thoughts
• We can notice positive things in our lives
• We can challenge negativity (Bekhet & Zauszniewski, 2013)

Our behaviors: 

• We can do things that make us feel happier
• We can build skills that make it easier to be happy
• We can avoid things that make us unhappy

Gratitude is about noticing and appreciating the positive things in our lives. Gratitude is strongly related to happiness  (Wood, Froh, & Geraghty, 2010). Luckily, gratitude is something anyone can practice and we can even get better at gratitude over time. Some ways to practice gratitude are with a gratitude journal or by writing gratitude notes, or words of appreciation for specific people. If you want to try a gratitude note, ask yourself:

• Who is someone that you are grateful for?
• What might you say to them to express your gratitude?

Once you know your answers, write out a note to this person.

Positive reappraisal is a thinking strategy where we look for the good things in difficult or hard situations. The goal is to try and find the hidden opportunities or benefits in our challenges. We can also reappraise by reminding ourselves that no matter how bad our situation is, it could be worse and often is worse for others. This thinking strategy has been shown to help us buffer ourselves from the negative effects of stress (Troy, Wilhelm, Shallcross, & Mauss, 2010).

Sometimes the reason we say, “I just want to be happy” is because we’re not happy with ourselves. If this is the case for you, it can be helpful to practice self-compassion. There are many ways to build self-compassion. One way is to write a self-compassion letter, or a letter where you talk to yourself kindly and give yourself the support you need (Shapira & Mongrain, 2010).

Meditating can shift your mood and help you stay in the present moment. Meditating regularly can contribute to long-lasting increases in happiness by way of decreasing depression and anxiety (Khoury et al., 2013). Here’s some of my favorite calming music below for a meditation. 

Below are some of the best books on how to be happy. You may also want to check out my book, Outsmart Your Smartphone, on how to develop a relationship with technology that boosts happiness, and our Happiness Skills Workbook, with a bunch of happiness exercises. 

Through conversations, stories, and meditations, the Dalai Lama shows us how to defeat day-to-day anxiety, insecurity, anger, and discouragement. Together with Dr. Howard Cutler, he explores many facets of everyday life, including relationships, loss, and the pursuit of wealth, to illustrate how to ride through life’s obstacles on a deep and abiding source of inner peace. 

Check prices on Amazon.

This book helps empower you with positive thinking through quick and digestible affirmations based on positive psychology, neuroscience, and personal development. Spanning one full year, these daily prompts guide you by helping you visualize and live your best life.

Check prices on Amazon.

Here are some more practices that can help you increase your happiness:

• Savoring. By learning to savor the moment, we lengthen and extend our positive emotions.
• Imagining happiness. By mentally visualizing what happiness feels like we can start activating these regions of the brain and creating the emotions we seek.
• Identify your strengths. When we explore our strengths, we can more easily capitalize on these strengths to reach our life goals.
• Positive qualities. By knowing our good personality traits, we can feel better about ourselves.
• Positive memory. By activating the networks in our brains for positive information, we can potentially strengthen these regions and make it easier to draw up positive information in our daily lives. 
• Positive attention. Studies have shown that training our attention away from negative things and onto positive things improves our well-being (Wadlinger & Isaacowitz, 2008).

If we just want to be happy, we’re probably not only feeling unhappy but also feeling stuck. It may feel more natural and comfortable for us to think negative thoughts and have negative emotions. To undo these habits, it can be helpful to question our thought processes directly. Here are some things to take a look at:
​

• Catastrophizing. When we catastrophize we focus on the worst possible outcome of whatever the situation is. To stop, we need to realize this is what we’re doing and mentally explore outcomes that might not be so bad or might even be great.
• Minimization. When we minimize we downplay the good stuff while overhyping the bad stuff. For example, that pimple on your nose might completely ruin your day even though you also won a major award that day. To undo minimizing, it can be helpful to celebrate wins and try to be non-judgmental when something goes wrong.
• Overgeneralization. When we overgeneralize we often use all or nothing language. For example, if someone broke our heart, we take that to mean everyone will break our heart. Or if we fail at getting a job, we take that to mean we’ll never get a job. To stop overgeneralizing, it’s important to remember that one situation doesn’t mean that all future situations will be the same.

If you identify any of these aspects of negativity, they may be what’s keeping you from being as happy as you might want.

Here are a few more articles that you may be interested in:

If you want to be happier, you can be. But just because it’s possible doesn’t mean it’s easy. It takes time to build the skills that generate happiness, and as challenges come and go in your life, there will be times when happiness is easier or harder to come by. Still, if you practice these strategies presented here, you’ll find over time that you feel a bit better and have a bit more control over your happiness & well-being.

• Bekhet, A. K., & Zauszniewski, J. A. (2013). Measuring use of positive thinking skills: Psychometric testing of a new scale. Western Journal of Nursing Research, 35(8), 1074-1093.​​
• Huta, V., & Waterman, A. S. (2014). Eudaimonia and its distinction from hedonia: Developing a classification and terminology for understanding conceptual and operational definitions. Journal of Happiness Studies, 15(6), 1425-1456.
• Khoury, B., Lecomte, T., Fortin, G., Masse, M., Therien, P., Bouchard, V., … & Hofmann, S. G. (2013). Mindfulness-based therapy: a comprehensive meta-analysis. Clinical psychology review, 33(6), 763-771.
• ​​Rohde, P., N.C. Feeny, and M. Robins, Characteristics and components of the TADS CBT approach. Cognitive and behavioral practice, 2005. 12(2): p. 186-197.
• Shapira, L. B., & Mongrain, M. (2010). The benefits of self-compassion and optimism exercises for individuals vulnerable to depression. Journal of Positive Psychology, 5, 377-389.
• Sheldon, K. M., & Lyubomirsky, S. (2006). Achieving sustainable gains in happiness: Change your actions, not your circumstances. Journal of happiness studies, 7(1), 55-86.
• Troy, A. S., Wilhelm, F. H., Shallcross, A. J., & Mauss, I. B. (2010). Seeing the silver lining: cognitive reappraisal ability moderates the relationship between stress and depressive symptoms. Emotion, 10(6), 783.​
• Wadlinger, H. A., & Isaacowitz, D. M. (2008). Looking happy: The experimental manipulation of a positive visual attention bias. Emotion, 8(1), 121.
• Wood, A. M., Froh, J. J., & Geraghty, A. W. (2010). Gratitude and well-being: A review and theoretical integration. Clinical psychology review, 30(7), 890-905.