My Unified Framework for Happiness
Overview
In this article I lay out my unified framework for happiness. I break it down into strategies to increase moment to moment happiness, strategies to improve your inner dialogue, and strategies that are catalysts for both. To increase moment to moment happiness I focus on physical health, my relationship with technology, and how I spend my time. To improve inner dialogue I focus on setting goals, self-awareness, and letting go. And to improve both I focus on getting good sleep and spending time with people I love.
My Motivation
Unlike many pursuits, happiness lacks a precise definition of success. For this very reason, we often prefer more concrete pursuits instead of the vague “happiness”, such as financial success, attractiveness, a respected job, a strong relationship, etc. Because these pursuits are well defined, lots of effort has been put into understanding them, and lots of value has been placed on achieving them. Unfortunately, the clarity and nobility of these pursuits makes it tempting to believe that they are synonyms for happiness when they are not. The pursuit of happiness operates under its own set of rules, distinct from the rules that predict success in the pursuits mentioned above.
Since our society doesn’t put a premium on happiness, the people that are the happiest are not the most well known. Rarely are stories written about the happiest person, seldom does history remember them. Without success stories ingrained in our culture, we’re left with myths and conventional wisdom. The result is a society that yearns more than anything to be happy but is missing the role models and frameworks to do it. Only by refining the language and frameworks we use to discuss happiness can we as a society move towards understanding it better. That is exactly what I set out to do here.
As happiness is invisible to anybody but the person experiencing it, I cannot convince you that I am happy. But in the same way you’d like to receive financial advice from someone wealthy or fitness advice from someone whose fit, it is wise to receive advice on being happy from someone happy. Hopefully by reading this you’ll be convinced that I’ve at least given the topic some thought, and maybe the effort I’ve put into writing this is proof enough that I genuinely care about the subject. The topic of how to be happy has been my primary focus for the past 6 years, and I have studied the topic relentlessly and applied it to myself constantly. From this as well as observing others I’ve come away with many principles which I have laid out here in an organized framework. It has worked for me, and I hope that it can be of use to you too.
A quick word on how I envision you putting my framework into practice. If you’re feeling unhappy, this framework should serve as a checklist to diagnose why. This framework is not a replacement for professional help. If you are experiencing serious distress, for example suffering from depression or grieving a death, then this framework likely can’t give you what you need. But if you believe you should be happy but aren’t, then this framework should help you out.
Introduction
In a discussion about achieving happiness, one has to establish a working definition of it. As happiness is a difficult feeling to pinpoint, it is easier to start by stating what it is not.
- Happiness is NOT cheap thrills. Cheap thrills are temporary, and leave you wanting more. They will never leave you satisfied.
- Happiness is NOT success. In fact, chasing success can make you focus on the wrong things, and lead to reduced happiness.
- Happiness CANNOT be achieved. It is a state that comes and goes.
Now for an attempt at describing happiness. It is a feeling of contentment, of general optimism, and of having a love for life. It is something that you feel moment to moment.
What we experience as moment to moment happiness is the result of the presence of different chemicals in the brain. That is all. Some people are born with brain chemistry that gives them a low happiness baseline, and others are given a high happiness baseline. In this respect, our moment to moment experienced happiness is largely genetically predetermined. A large component is malleable though, and by changing aspects of our lives we can improve or reduce it.
This emotion of happiness is tough to put a finger on. It can often arise when you’re with close friends laughing and having a good time. In that moment you feel warm and light, and your happiness can be described similarly to love. Whatever was on your mind melts away, and for that time life feels simple. It can also arise when you get lost in your favorite activity, whether it be going on a run, playing video games, cooking, playing piano, or anything else. In these moments you are fully absorbed in the specific details of the activity and getting pleasure from being fully engaged. This state is often described as flow. From these states we can derive characteristics that describe happiness: warm, light, clear, engaged.
Alongside the physical experience of happiness, we have the never-ending dialogue going on inside of our heads. This dialogue is a separate entity from the feeling of happiness, but it is strongly correlated with it and can directly impact it. This dialogue is always keeping track of how we’re doing in life, where we stand in our social circle, what we should be worried about, it is mulling over past events trying to learn from them, and it is looking forward to the future trying to plan for it.
A lot of the time when we are happy, it is because our inner dialogue is satisfied. Recent successes offer easy cures to any doubt that creeps up in our minds. At the same time, when our inner dialogue turns negative, we often start feeling unhappy. Your friends didn’t invite you to a party, and now you’re having thoughts about what’s wrong with you and how nobody gets you. You fail a test, and your whole future plan crumbles in your mind, leaving you confused and afraid. In these moments it is our reaction that governs our happiness, not the situation itself. By carefully managing your inner dialogue you can relate to life events in a healthy way. This is critical to living a happy life.
So now we have two focuses: improving our moment to moment experience of happiness, and improving our relationship with our inner dialogue. These are the measures of happiness that we will be using, and the goal of any advice will be to improve one or both of these things. To improve moment to moment happiness we must focus on our physical health, our relationship to technology, and how we spend our time. To improve our inner dialogue we must set goals, develop self-awareness, and learn to let go. And to improve both and bring it all together we have to get good sleep and spend time with loved ones.
Moment to Moment Happiness
Physical Health
Being physically healthy is how you raise your base level of happiness. It’s an old saying but it’s true — “healthy body, healthy mind”. Your brain is a part of your body, and if you treat your body right, then your brain will benefit as well.
In a very direct way, exercise improves your brain chemistry. It releases endorphins which can help alleviate pain and stress, it releases serotonin and dopamine which are important for mood regulation, and it helps regulate your body’s level of stress hormones.
This is what’s going on behind the scenes, but you will be able to feel all of this happening to you if you pay attention. You’ll notice that on days when you do exercise your mood is simply better. You’re more alert, you have a more positive outlook and react properly to the world around you, and you have more energy. All of this makes lots of sense when you think about how for tens of thousands of years humans evolved to chase down prey and spend most of the day on the move. Movement is what we as humans are meant to do, and our brain rewards us for doing it.
There are so many other ways that being physically healthy leads to a happier you. One way is that it builds self-confidence. Exercise is often painful and uncomfortable. It takes a certain amount of mental effort to get yourself to do it. But every time you get over that hurdle you keep a promise you made to yourself, and this builds self-confidence. Exercising also adds structure and solidity to your day. Regardless of what else is going on, you set aside an hour to sweat it out. It’s a change of scenery, a change of mindset, and that breaks up the monotony that may have plagued the rest of the day. And after the workout you can reset and attack the rest of the day with a sense of renewed clarity.
The last point I’ll make is that being in good shape gives you a tangible and always accessible source of pride. When you’re in the dumps and questioning everything about yourself, being able to look in the mirror and like what you see serves as a reminder of your worth. This may sound shallow to some, but at the end of the day what you look like is a big part of who you are. Liking what you see can go a long way.
Relationship To Technology
An unhealthy relationship with technology can single-handedly undermine all your other efforts to be happy.
The scary part is that it makes you think it’s actually helping. Social media, video games, and videos/movies are optimized to be as pleasurable as possible. They are also designed to keep you engaged for as many hours of the day as possible because the more they have your attention the more money they make.
At first glance this may not seem like a problem; what’s wrong with being entertained? Of course, there’s nothing wrong with being entertained. If these platforms allowed you to engage with them how you intended, then there’d be no problems. But that isn’t reality. Everyone finds themselves losing countless hours mindlessly engaging with these platforms and no longer deriving pleasure. What started with a funny video ends up melting into a binge with no purpose, no end in sight, and leaves you disconnected from whatever your plans were for the day before you started engaging. The sad truth about these platforms is that they don’t allow you to use them how you wish you could.
These platforms ruin your chance at having a healthy mind. For starters, they bombard your brain with large hits of dopamine at a ridiculous rate that would never be achievable in regular life. It breaks the principle that you have to work for rewards. The price you pay is that when you try doing an activity that is less instantly gratifying it will seem endlessly boring by comparison.
It saps your motivation. It sets the bar way too high for what’s enjoyable and pleasurable. Everything is now compared to the high you feel on these platforms, and most things in life lose. Healthy food tastes bad, schoolwork is boring, exercise is too difficult, your friends are annoying, and normal conversations aren’t juicy enough. You get used to things happening immediately and without effort, and as a result you become detached from how the real world operates. Nobody consciously thinks about these sacrifices when they use social media but that’s exactly what’s happening. To me, the price of social media just isn’t worth it.
The path to a healthy relationship with technology begins by reflecting on the effect it has on you. Ask yourself these questions. Am I in control of my technology usage, or is it controlling me? Is it making me happier? If I used technology less, what would happen? What would be the benefits of using technology less, and what would be the downsides? Do the pros outweigh the cons? The most important thing is to give your use of technology conscious thought.
I’ll share two strategies that helped me get over technology addiction: removing the problem and planning ahead. In high school I struggled with controlling my YouTube and Facebook usage. So I deleted both apps off my phone and got chrome extensions that stop YouTube recommended videos and remove the news feed on Facebook. I also noticed that as soon as I got home from school I’d immediately hop on one of these platforms; I was too tired to decide to do something else. To break this pattern I planned something else to do ahead of time for when I got home. This successfully eliminated my trigger and resulted in a dramatic reduction of my YouTube and Facebook usage. These strategies worked for me and may work for you too. But it all starts with recognizing the negative impact technology is having on your life, and deciding to change your relationship with it.
How You Spend Your Time
Put simply, if you spend most of the day doing the things you enjoy doing, then you will live a happy life. In a study done by Daniel Kahneman, a distinguished behavioral psychologist famous for his classic book Thinking Fast and Slow, he compared the happiness across countries in Europe. He found that the only predictor of happiness was how much time people spent doing things they enjoy. Can it really be that simple?
If there is one principle for maximizing happiness, it is this one. By spending your time doing the things you enjoy doing, you are guaranteeing yourself a baseline level of happiness. If we define one’s level of happiness as the percentage of time that they are experiencing the moment to moment happiness I described earlier, then this strategy will do very well.
The only reason you can’t apply it blindly is that it isn’t practical to spend all of your day doing what you enjoy doing. The reality is that we all have responsibilities, and that we have to do things we don’t like to maintain our lifestyles. But we can’t let these tasks swallow up all of our time. If most of your day is taken up with things that you don’t enjoy, you are fighting an uphill battle to make it a happy day. You can apply all the mindfulness techniques you want and try to make the work as enjoyable as possible, but at the end of the day, it is still work. Even if the work is your passion, all work has a component to it that is unenjoyable.
The quickest way you can become happier tomorrow is by scheduling enjoyable activities into your plan and doing them. Everybody has activities that energize them and that make their worries go away. Seeing “relax” in your schedule is one of the best feelings. You’ll find that it makes working more effective because you know you’ll be rewarded for it, and it makes the break better because you can actually do something fun instead of pretending like you’re still working. The truth is that if we don’t plan time for fun activities, life has a way of filling that time for you. Don’t let it. Plan for happiness.
The previous three principles focused on maximizing moment to moment happiness. As I said in the introduction, that is only one part of the equation. Equally important is reigning in the ceaseless dialogue that is going on in each of our heads. The first principle I’ll share to support this venture is goal setting.
Inner Dialogue
Setting Goals
We need an answer to the question “what am I doing?”. We also need our lives to align with the answer to that question. Goal setting is the tool that allows us to do this.
So much of the time when we are caught up in our heads it is because we are suffering from a lack of clarity. We don’t know how to allocate our time, we don’t know what’s worth doing and what isn’t, we don’t have a basis for making decisions. We make ourselves vulnerable to be pulled in every direction. What we need is an answer when our mind asks us “what am I doing?”.
The answer has to be simple. If it isn’t simple then we’ll start ruminating about why we chose it in the first place, which does not end the internal dialogue. Giving a clear answer to that question is a chief purpose of goal setting and one that goes a long way. Simplicity isn’t enough though; your goals must also be measurable. A goal is useless if there is no objective way of assessing one’s progress towards it. The feeling of progression is what keeps you going, so make sure your goal is easily trackable. If you have these two aspects, clarity and measurability, then your goal will serve you well.
Structure is what grows out of deciding to pursue a goal, giving us alignment. To achieve a goal you have to consistently make time in the day for it. This forces you to look at what in your life is important and should be kept, and what is unimportant and should be discarded. From the set of infinite possibilities, you start drilling down into what you are going to be concerned with. This exercise itself should improve the clarity of what you want to do.
“Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony” said Mahatma Gandhi. By setting goals and structuring your life to support them you create alignment. You create a safety net for your bad days which otherwise would have been aimless. If you’re after consistent happiness, then you need a dependable system that doesn’t rely on your mind being optimal every day. In my experience, setting goals and structuring days around them has been a proven method for lending consistency to happiness.
Self-Awareness
There is a difference between reality and the dialogue going on in our heads. In belief systems such as Buddhism, practitioners learn to separate themselves from their thoughts. This allows one to see their own thoughts from a more detached perspective, opening the door for honest self-reflection.
Many mindfulness practices offer ways to work on this. For me, Buddhist meditation using the app Headspace has been incredible and has given me a clearer mind. It has allowed me to observe what works and what doesn’t. I’ve discovered what situations predictably put me in a good mood and which ones do the opposite. I’ve learned what relationships are healthy and which ones steal from me. How your mind reacts is feedback telling you about your nature.
Awareness is also the first step to letting go. The reason is simple; you can’t come up with a solution when you haven’t identified the problem. By taking an honest look at your mind you’ll be able to determine which thought patterns serve you and which don’t and go from there. But until you turn the spotlight inwards, you will continue with your same thought patterns regardless of whether or not they’re benefiting you.
Letting Go
Imagine you’re sitting by a shore watching waves go up and down. As the wave approaches, you start wanting it to crest. You want, want, want, and then it finally crests — and starts to crash. You feel despair as it crashes, remembering how beautiful it was when the wave was cresting. Then the next wave comes along.
Without knowing it, we fall into this pattern. We spend most of our time either wanting to have more or bemoaning having too little. The key insight to gain here is that the problem lies in the emotion of “wanting”. If we can turn down that emotion and spend more time feeling satisfied, then we can live much happier lives.
How can we go about doing this? What helps me is asking myself if upon getting any of the things I wanted, I stopped wanting. The answer is obviously not. This helps me see that “wanting” is the problem. I then remind myself that happiness isn’t something one obtains but something experienced moment to moment, and I start applying the strategies I have to be happy moment to moment.
An issue that arises with this approach is that you can’t drop all your “wants”. If you don’t want anything, then you’ll never do anything, and that can’t be right. How I’ve resolved this problem is by differentiating between good vs bad things to want. Good things satisfy you: walking in nature, listening to music, spending time with friends, reading, doing fulfilling work. Bad things only make you crave more: sugar, drugs, approval, social media. While all “wants” are negative if we attach our happiness to them, wanting good things is justified because they actually contribute to our happiness in a healthy way. Wanting bad things easily becomes a craving, which is the polar opposite of happiness.
In my own life I have applied letting go to successfully combat social anxiety as well as technology addiction. I am a believer that confronting your demons and learning to let go of them is a fundamental way of overcoming many mental issues. But in the same way you shouldn’t apply home remedies when facing a serious physical sickness, you shouldn’t apply self-help philosophies when facing a serious mental sickness. If you’re facing a serious mental illness, please seek professional help.
Self-awareness coupled with letting go have been my two pillars for clearing up my mind. They are at once incredibly simple concepts, but slippery as hell to put into practice. No investment I have made has been as fruitful as the time I’ve dedicated to honing these practices. If you are looking to be more at peace with your mind, I would start here.
Catalysts for Both
Getting Good Sleep
This is the first of two habits that can be catalysts for all of your happiness-related endeavors. Science is slowly uncovering the benefits of getting good sleep, but it is playing catch up to what we have known for a very long time.
When you are caught up on sleep the performance of your mind is radically improved. Your thoughts are clearer and you are much less susceptible to falling into destructive thought patterns. Your willpower is way stronger, allowing you to resist temptations and focus on important activities. Your emotional regulation is working properly, giving you the ability to respond appropriately in difficult situations. Overall, your mood is elevated and you have the mental resources to be the best version of yourself.
So many days where our mind is a chaotic tornado the culprit is a lack of sleep. You can find yourself diagnosing all sorts of problems in your life and rethinking your most basic assumptions when really all you have to do is string together a couple of days of quality sleep. If there is a single factor that leads to productive and fulfilling days it is good sleep. If you’re looking for a single step to put into practice tomorrow to improve your happiness, then getting good sleep should be it.
Spending Time With People You Love
In the groundbreaking book Civilized to Death, the author Christopher Ryan cited research that shows a sense of community is the best predictor of happiness. This is a bold claim, but for me a simple test verifies it. When I think back on the best times in my life, I was consistently in a tribe-like group. One of those times is playing on sports teams in high school. Another was in my second year of university where I was rolling with the same people from class to class and doing fun things together after class. The most recent is during quarantine, where I’ve been spending all day in a house with my friends. In all of these instances, I felt deeply fulfilled. The thought of what my purpose was didn’t cross my mind. The relationships and group dynamic gave me everything I needed. If not for external pressure and having to progress to sustain my lifestyle, I would’ve been happy with continuing on the rest of my life doing that.
If you think about the hunter-gatherer lifestyle that humans lived for the majority of our evolutionary history, we spent our entire lives with our small tribes. Existential angst and emptiness weren’t emotions they experienced frequently. We are social creatures, and the relationships we have are meant to be our primary sources for fulfillment and meaning. Find me a society that values community, and I’ll show you a society that is deeply satisfied.
In the section on sleep, I mentioned how often when your mind is in disarray the solution isn’t to reconsider your life but to get some good sleep. I find spending time with people to be healing in a similar way. When we don’t have a group where we feel loved and accepted, all sorts of mental dysfunction can start to set in. We all have a fundamental need to be accepted, and if that need isn’t filled, we can develop all sorts of destructive ways to compensate.
Once you find your people, make sure to spend time with them often. When we’re on our own we have a tendency to make things complicated and let life get twisted. Rumination leads to more rumination, and seemingly out of nothing we can summon a catastrophe. Think back to the darkest times in your life: were you spending lots of time alone? For myself, the answer is a resounding yes. When we’re around people we love, problems in our heads have a way of fading away. Something about the pure joy of honest camaraderie puts things in perspective and gives you the assurance that everything will be okay. So often all we need is a little bit of space away from our thoughts, and when we’re with people we can get that space.
To be clear, I am not saying there aren’t benefits to alone time. As an introvert, I am tremendously energized by doing independent activities. And it goes without saying that productive work is usually done alone. But when you’re done with your work and it is time to relax, putting in the effort to do something fun with friends is a great investment to make. We so often opt to have a solo night in, and I think the reason is usually that it takes effort to plan something to do with friends. Consistently putting in that effort is one of the single best decisions you can make to improve your happiness.
Conclusion
Each of us has our own personal algorithm which results in us being happy. What I have laid out is a playbook for what I’ve found to work for myself and for a lot of people. You might find that some of the ingredients I’ve discussed are more impactful for you while others aren’t as important. What is critical is that you reflect on your own life, and keep a pulse on what is contributing to your happiness, and what is taking away from it. Only through relentless self-reflection will you continue to refine your understanding of what makes you tick.
Every single person is on the same journey as you. There will be people who try to impose their idea of happiness on you because they are insecure about themselves. Empathize with them, but don’t let them knock you off your path. The only thing that matters when it comes to happiness, and I mean the ONLY thing that matters, is doing what makes YOU happy. You have to honestly look at your life and assess what is working and what isn’t. You have to look your insecurities in the face, and muster up the courage to confront them. If you do this time and time again, then you will slowly but surely work towards a happier life. It isn’t glamorous, but it works.
Books that influenced my thinking about happiness
Awareness, by Anthony de Mello
Thinking Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman
Stumbling on Happiness, by Daniel Gilbert
Civilized to Death, by Christopher Ryan
The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins
Principles, by Ray Dalio
The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
Man’s Search for Meaning, by Viktor Frankl
Thank you Ilya Kreynin and Jason Loi for editing.
