How to be happy: do things for others, live a purposeful life, set and achieve goals, have good friends, says life coach

Instead, she likens happiness to a state of “well-being, the inner experience of human well-being.”

Salchow knows what leads to lasting happiness. And she has the science to prove it.

“Everything we know from research shows that positive emotions have a strong impact on our well-being,” Salkow says.

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“Looking for positive emotions when you're not feeling well may seem counterintuitive at first. Fundamentally, it's important to allow all emotions and sensations to be present.”

If you want to improve your sense of well-being, it's worth looking back on your day and taking stock of what sparked your interest, what you enjoyed, what made you happy, what made you proud, and what made you feel loved, says Salkow. I recommend it.

As a blueprint, psychologists recommend the “big 10 emotions” studied by positive psychologist Barbara Fredrickson: love, joy, gratitude, tranquility, interest, hope, pride, amusement, inspiration, and awe.

“We know that experiencing positive emotions allows us to perceive and process more stimuli in the short term,” Salchow says.

“As a result, we accumulate new resources that we have access to in the short term, allowing us to cope better with daily life and experience more positive emotions in the long term.”

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Another way to increase your sense of well-being is to reflect on your strengths, coaches say.

Rather than focusing on a specific skill, like being good at math, Salkow recommends thinking about how things go. For example, he may consider himself to be a very careful person or have a good sense of aesthetics.

Experts say knowing our strengths and leveraging them can help improve our well-being in the long run.

Other well-studied positive personality traits include curiosity, judgment, fairness, wisdom, social intelligence, and even humility, Salchow said.

If you want to be happier, coaches say it always helps to be doing things that feel meaningful.

“Research shows that people with a high sense of purpose are happier,” Salkow says. Whether you're at home, at work, or volunteering, try to find something that contributes to the bigger picture, she recommends.

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While to-do lists can be the ultimate depressing thing for many people, “setting and achieving goals can also make you happy,” says Salchow.

When setting goals for yourself, experts say they don't necessarily have to be something special like running a marathon or getting a degree.

“There are things in our lives where just walking out the door once a day already gives us a sense of accomplishment. What's important to our sense of well-being is recognizing this as a goal and an accomplishment.” , so it's important to stop, so to speak, and say, “Look, we did it!''

Harvard University has conducted the world's longest-running study of adult development since 1938, examining psychological variables and biological processes in two groups of men over the past 80 years to understand their effects on health and well-being. doing. late in life.

The US-based study showed that happiness does not depend on having many relationships, Salchow said. “It's enough to have one girlfriend or two guys in our lives that we perceive as supportive.”

We also know that doing things for others and supporting their happiness can make us happier than trying to make ourselves happy, she added. .

So it's up to us to turn our relationships into cooperative ones, which also contributes to our own well-being, Salkow says.

Robert Waldinger, director of research at Harvard University, has co-authored a book about it. The Good Life: Lessons from the world's longest scientific study of happiness.

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In it, he divides happiness into two categories. One is hedonic euphoria, which means “I'm having a good time.''

Eudaimonic well-being means that one's life has meaning and is fundamentally good.

In hedonistic happiness, it is clear that you are enjoying the moment, but in eudaimonic happiness, this is not necessarily the case.

For example, it's often not fun to read the same bedtime story to your child over and over again. “But is it the most meaningful thing you can do in that moment? Yes,” argues Waldinger.

There is often a difference between what brings us immediate pleasure and what we find valuable or meaningful.

Waldinger says everyone needs to experience both.

Happiness experts say you start running into problems when you only pursue hedonic happiness instead of “more mundane but ultimately more meaningful happiness.”