Can we choose to be happy? — and what is the difference between joy and hapiness?

Happiness, like love, is more likely when we don’t actively pursue it, but, instead, appreciate the small, frequent, unplanned moments of joy, says Deirdre McArdle

Psychotherapist Jean Young: Naturally, as we play, explore, savour, we are more likely to find moments of joy and we are more inclined to seek out these moments again with more play and adventure. It becomes self-fulfilling

Happiness is elusive and fleeting. And in in today’s consumerist culture, it’s one more thing to commodify. That’s because it’s easy to manipulate and it’s easy to sell, says Jean Young, a psychotherapist and the founder of the Your Best Self programme.

“If you think about happiness, it has these big peaks or times when you’re happy, but, eventually, you will come down again. It’s not sustainable.”

With social media so endemic, happiness has become something to chase, to achieve. Cork-based Young explains how this links in with what she says is the “psychology of wanting”, where we pursue a goal and get a dopamine hit from that pursuit rather than from achieving the goal.

“How many times have you thought, ‘I’ll be happy when’,” asks Young. “I’ll be happy when I buy that outfit. I’ll be happy when I get that new job. I’ll be happy when we go on that dream holiday. But then you get the outfit, or the job, or the holiday, and there’s nothing, no lasting feeling of happiness.”

Psychotherapist Jean Young recommends joy over happiness, because joyous moments are small and frequent, whereas happiness can swing to sadness.

What we glide over, she says, is the subtler feeling of joy. “Joy is a more consistent emotion that we can experience in bursts throughout the day, every day.” In a previous role, as a bereavement therapist, Young spoke with families who’d lost loved ones, and the memories they would recall in the aftermath were simple joys, like their parent reading to them, a family joke they laughed at, or picnics.

It’s the little things...

These everyday moments of simple joy live longer in the brain because they are more frequent, they reactivate our reward circuits, and keep our neural pathways for positive emotion open.

Young encourages people to do something they like for 10 or 15 minutes each day. It could be anything, like going for a walk without their phone, having a long shower, playing with their children. “The key is that they are doing something they like to do, rather than something they want,” she says.

Moments of joy or awe are the key to happiness, says Dacher Kelter, professor of psychology at UC Berkeley and the director of the Greater Good Science Center. He has researched happiness for decades and concluded that joy or awe make life feel meaningful.

Kelter says: “Find those little moments of joy, beauty, laughter, gratitude, awe, even just five minutes a day. It could be a beautiful sunset, a song you love, a good laugh, a moment of gratitude, a meaningful conversation. These small moments can be the most powerful moments in your life to find peace and contentment.”

Psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky, at the University of California, is the author of The How of Happiness and of The Myths of Happiness. Both books focus on the 50-10-40 model, which she devised in 2005, from research she conducted in her Positive Activities and Well-Being Laboratory. She determined that our long-term wellbeing is divided in to 50% genetics (our genetic disposition to be happy), 10% life circumstances (mainly our socioeconomic or geographic status), and 40% intentional activities (things we can do every day).

Lyubomirsky updated her research in 2019. Although reiterating that happiness can be pursued, she writes that “it is not easy” and requires activities that give you purpose, investing time in those activities, and “not doing them in the same way each time”.

Ultimately, she says that true happiness comes from within. “Happiness doesn’t lie in external things, like money, power, fame, beauty, success; it lies inside of you. That’s such a cliché, but it’s true.”

She’s in hallowed company. We’ve been philosophising about happiness for thousands of years, and two of the world’s famed thinkers have come to the same conclusion.

“Happiness is not something ready-made. It comes from your own actions,” says the Dalai Lama.

“Happiness depends upon ourselves,” said Aristotle (322 BC).

But in our search for happiness, we need to know what happiness means to us, because it’s subjective, says Young.

Keltner, in a podcast interview with author Mel Robbins, discussed purpose and suggested that happiness is “if you feel like you’re doing the things in the world that you’re supposed to do”.

“Really think about what you like to do. And not what your kids like to do, or your partner. It might not seem like a big deal, and we will often think, ‘If my kids are happy, I’m happy’, but if we don’t know what makes us happy, we can quickly start to lose our sense of identity. It could be something as simple as making your favourite foods for dinner, instead of catering to others. And what you’re doing is you’re bringing your attention back to yourself.”

Young suggests that we play around with what joy or happiness mean for us. Sit down and really think about it. Understanding what makes us joyful or happy is the first step to finding those tiny moments every day, and that’s important, says Young.

Because the more you experience joy, the more joy you can experience. Young tells me about psychologist Barbara Frederickson’s broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions, which says that positive emotions, like joy and curiosity, broaden a person’s thought-action response.

“Naturally, as we play, explore, savour, we are more likely to find moments of joy and we are more inclined to seek out these moments again with more play and adventure. It becomes self-fulfilling,” says Young.

And the opposite is also true, she warns. “If you’re stressed or angry or scared, these emotions tend to shrink your world. They make us overthink things and we withdraw further into ourselves.”

In Lyubomirsky’s model, 40% of our quest for happiness comes from intentional activities, and Lyubomirsky stresses the importance of forming connections. She tells me that the single most effective “happiness intervention” that we could start today is to “have a 15-minute conversation with someone, and not small talk”.

These so-called happiness interventions are experiments Lyubomirsky has conducted with people in her lab over the past three decades. She says that after all these experiments, it dawned on her that almost all of the interventions that made us happier worked, because they helped us feel more connected or loved by someone.

But connecting with someone isn’t always easy, particularly today, as we struggle with time and the shift towards a more digital life. That’s why, says Lyubomirsky, in-person conversations are so important; they are an opportunity to connect with others in a meaningful, deep way.

Her five-minute TED Talk, released earlier this year, goes into more detail about how we should approach these conversations. She suggests we share more detail about ourselves; it doesn’t need to be your “deepest trauma, something honest is OK”.

It could be as simple as telling someone you had a rough start to the day. By listening more actively to the other person, you can help them to lower their walls, says Lyubomirsky. “Try to listen like there’s going to be a quiz tomorrow” and then ask one more question than you would normally ask.

Lyubomirsky believes if we feel known, we feel more loved, and if we feel truly loved for who we are, we are more likely to feel happy.

An attitude of gratitude

There is no planning or timetable with happiness, though. In fact, in my experience, joy or happiness that creeps up on you in an unguarded moment can often feel magnified because of its unexpectedness: A chance meeting with someone you haven’t seen in a while, a belly laugh when something unpredictable happens, a wrong turn that leads to a beautiful, hidden beach.

“There’s a freedom there to experience happiness in your own time, instead of sticking to a timetable,” says Young.

When we try too hard to chase happiness or make it happen, it can backfire. Research suggests that those who value happiness and try to attain it set higher standards of what that happiness should look like. Young gives an example. She was planning a family holiday and was determined it was going to be a great holiday, where they would all — she and her husband have two children — be happy.

“I scheduled nearly every hour of the day with fun activities. I thought all of these things would be great for the kids, we’d all have a wonderful time, and we’d be so happy.

“But what actually happened was we were completely stressed and irritable, running from one thing to the next.

“I had been so determined to create lasting memories that I lost sight of what actually mattered: Just being together.”

That’s where gratitude can help. Young and are Lyubomirsky are united in how much they value gratitude — whether that’s keeping a journal or marking a joyful moment in another way.

It’s good to take the time to stop and ask, ‘What am I grateful for today?’, says Young, and Lyubomirsky says it’s a key lesson she’s learned from her years of happiness research.

Research from the IE the Center for Health & Well-Being in Madrid shows that gratitude rewires your brain, and with enough practice helps us to see the world through a different, happier lens.

So while you might not be able to wake up one day and choose to be happy, you can make small shifts in your life to welcome happiness and joy in to it. And the more you open yourself up to those moments of joy, the more your brain recognises them.