10 Tips from Happy People

Are you happy? It's a simple question, but with numerous variables underlying it. What makes someone happy? Is there more than one route to happiness and more than one way to measure it?

If you're an economist or a social scientist, you may conduct scientific surveys that try to gauge levels of contentment or satisfaction. If you're a religious leader, you may wonder if someone feels spiritually fulfilled, connected to a community and in touch with his or her chosen deity. Being married often boosts happiness, as does a genetic basis for a sunnier disposition. Older women become less happy than their male counterparts, who report increased levels of happiness as they age [source: Holt].

In the end, happiness may come down to what you're looking for in life and how you define this nebulous term. In different societies throughout history, happiness has been equated with sheer luck or the certitude of religious belief. Others have thought that happiness means being a good person or being able to live a life of pleasure and leisure.

Just as definitions of happiness change, so too does our ability to handle adversity. Numerous tales exist of people undergoing tremendous hardships -- cancer, losing a job, a bad breakup -- and finding themselves in the end as happy as or happier than ever. Despite the difficulty in pinning down what happiness is and how to achieve it, we're going to take a stab at it in this article, in which we offer 10 key tips. We'll start with a few that might seem more obvious and then move on to some unusual recommendations for boosting happiness.

10. Live in a Happy Country

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Sure living in a happy country can't hurt, but education also may make you more positive.

Many different studies have examined happiness in various countries. These studies generally rely on extensive surveys of inhabitants and their stated level of happiness. One, the Happy Planet Index, considers happiness in tandem with a country's environmental impact and carbon footprint.

The Day Reconstruction Method asks subjects to rank activities they performed on an "enjoyment scale" [source: Stehr]. The survey aims to be more accurate than previous ones by soliciting opinions about people's daily lives immediately following the events in question, rather than taking a holistic, long-term view of their overall contentment. The U.N. Human Development Index uses a mixture of data about gross domestic product (GDP), education and health to produce a measure of a country's success.

Unfortunately, broad studies on societal happiness are notoriously fraught with problems. From the phrasing of questions to the weather on the day that a survey is performed (respondents are generally more upbeat on days that are literally sunnier), numerous variables can be difficult to account for.

Even within a relatively happy country, like the United States, you can have a high level of "happiness inequality" among different social groups. However, a study published in July 2008 showed that, at least in the United States, the happiness inequality gap among people surveyed had decreased over the last few decades but that happiness inequality was increasing based on education level. More educated subjects reported higher levels of happiness than those who were less educated, which coincided with a growing income disparity in the country. But the happiness inequality between men and women and among different races had also lessened, the study found