AM I happy? Why can’t I be happy? Shouldn’t I be happier? Questions like these are often uppermost in our mind. That’s the paradox. We’ve never had it so good and yet we seem to stay less happy than our parents or grandparents. How many people are happy — and why? Can social scientists measure something as hard to pinpoint as human happiness? Most researchers in this field have to content themselves with simply asking people to reflect on their happiness with life — or what psychologists call "subjective well-being".

American psychologists, David G, Myers (author of The Pursuit of Happiness: Who is Happy and Why (William Morrow) and Edward Diener are in the forefront of what they term as the science of happiness. For 30 years they have been examining the life patterns of happy people; asking through researchers more than a million people across the world—a representative sample of the human race—to reflect on their happiness and life satisfaction. The idea is that some of the patterns discovered in the research may offer clues for transforming circumstances and behaviour that work against well-being into ones that promote it.

Based on these self-reports, the two psychologists have arrived at a few findings of human happiness.

No time in life is notably happier or unhappier. The common impression that times of "mid-life crisis" or declining years are unhappier doesn’t seem to hold true. In fact, the old as a group may have more "life satisfaction" than the young — "the minds of the young are full of things they want to achieve and have not, whereas most of the elderly have either achieved what they wanted or made their peace with the fact that they never will".

Gender again gives no clues to subjective well-being. Neither men with their higher earning power nor women with their greater capacity for intimacy register any happier than their opposite-sex counterparts.

Does wealth predict happiness? Wealth, it seems, is like health. Although its utter absence can breed misery, possessing it is no guarantee of happiness. As a person’s income rises, his or her sense of well-being rises as well. But once basic material needs are met, income decouples from happiness. A survey among Forbes’ 100 wealthiest Americans showed them "only slightly happier" than the average American — some kind of "nature’s revenge" law that denies extra contentment to the wealthy. Several studies have revealed that big winners of lotteries were not appreciably happier after a year or two of their win.

Marriage seems to prevent people from becoming unhappy as well as actively promoting their happiness. And the association of marital happiness and overall happiness is even greater for married women than for their husbands.

We may feel euphoria or misery over an event, but soon we revert to our usual self: the discontented remain glum; the sunny-natured continue cheerful. The change in circumstances merely causes a blip in the predictable graph of our lives. Studies show individuals rate themselves almost as happy as they were before within one year of losing a leg or arm in an accident.

It seems nature has supplied us with an in-built mechanism to swiftly habituate ourselves to many extreme circumstances, whether good or bad, and this return to normalcy motivates us to pick ourselves up and make progress in our lives. We have this ability to adapt.

Recent research on the interaction between depressed mothers and their newborn babies shows that a baby becomes aware when a mother does not respond in the way the baby wants. After repeated attempts to attract the mother’s attention, the baby gives up trying and becomes
distressed.

A couple of things that clearly militate against happiness are excessive anger and prolonged grief. "For every minute you’re angry, you lose sixty seconds of happiness," someone said. It is extremely important to ask ourselves whether the strength of our anger is really justified; you could get wildly angry over something you would ordinarily find mildly irritating. Again an attitude of forgiveness promotes happiness; bitterness only harms the person who harbours it.

Some persons grieve over a death too long. According to one professor of psychiatry, the appropriate length to mourn over one’s parents or a spouse is two years. Any longer mourning is the symptom of depression known as "irrational grief".

What can you do to promote happiness? Experts are agreed that the best recipe is to keep busy. When people say they are happy, they are almost always busy, and caught up in activity — they are too busy to be miserable. "To fill the hour—that is happiness," says Emerson.

"Our human brain," says Nick Boyle, who teaches Positive Psychology at Cambridge University, "has evolved to be a rapacious problem-solver. Now, living in a danger-free environment, it has a lot of spare capacity. And that’s why a positive state of mind is achieved when your skill and energy levels match the tasks you’re engaged in. Doing such work, your time will pass unmeasured in a warm and lasting glow of satisfaction. You feel invigorated than drained by doing activities in which you excel, whether it’s gardening, cooking or repairing things."

Busy people, anyway, have less time for introspection and it’s introspection that often chases away happiness; more so the kind of introspection that slips into self-deprecation. "No man is happy who does not think himself so," said Marcus Aurelius, the philosopher-emperor many centuries ago. Myers and his colleague go a step further. In their view, acting happy is likely to make you happy.