What would bring you more happiness? Go on, I’m asking you. I’m not going to give it to you, but I’d like to know. Serious question: what do you think would make you happier? Is it money? Is it fame? Is pina coladas and getting caught in the rain?

Okay, you can stop talking at the screen now, weirdo. I can’t actually hear what you’re saying. GCHQ did though, so I hope you feel suitably sheepish about whatever you just said. Shame on you.

Most people, most of the time, when I ask this question (I know, I’m a riot at parties) suggest external things: having a better job, more money, less work, a girlfriend/boyfriend, a better girlfriend/boyfriend, etc. I’m not saying any of these things are wrong, I want to suggest an entirely different way of thinking about happiness.

Just to be clear what we’re talking about, happiness, I claim, is experiences of pleasure and meaning over the course of our lives: experiences that just feel good to us when we have them. So I’d say you are happy at a particular time if you are feeling more pleasure and meaning than pain and futility.

Rather than thinking about what makes us feel happy throughout a life time, let’s look at what makes us happy at any particular moment, and see if we can build an answer about how to be happy from there.

Happiness, I suggest, is entirely matter of how we feel about what we pay attention to. That might sound a bit strange, so let me explain the two parts to it.

Happiness is something we experience: things which never form part of our conscious experience over entire lives don’t matter to our happiness. But of all the things we could be focusing on, we are only ever really able to pay attention to a one thing at a time.

For example, let’s say I’m in my car. It’s a new car, I’m stuck in traffic and running late for something, I like the song on the radio, I’ve had an argument with my (imaginary) girlfriend, it’s a hot day and the air con doesn’t work.

Am I happy? Well, I can’t be thinking about all these things at once: humans don’t have enough mental bandwidth for that. I certainly don’t. We need to know what I’m thinking about.

But we also need to know whether whatever I’m thinking about is making me feel good or bad. There’s no fact of the matter about how to view things: to quote Hamlet “nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so.”

I could be thinking about the argument with my (still imaginary, sadly) girlfriend and be worried that we’ll break up, or I could be thinking about how much I’m enjoying listening to Justin Bieber’s latest pop offering. But then I might be glad about the argument because I want to break up, or annoyed with the radio because I liked the previous song more. I could discuss all the options, but you get the point. If we want to know how happy I am, we need to know what I’m paying attention to and how I feel about that thing.

If we want to be happier we have just two options: we either change how we feel or what we pay attention to. In other words, how we think or what we think about. That’s it. As far as I can see, that’s the ‘secret’, if you can call it that, to happiness from which everything else follows.

That might seem a bit, well, ordinary as an explanation for what causes happiness, but I certainly haven’t seen it anywhere else in my research. Philosophy, it’s said, only reminds us of what we knew to be true all along.

I find the idea that happiness is about changing how we feel or what we pay attention to incredibly useful. It provides a simple, guiding principle for the pursuit of happiness, to which everything else can be reduced.

If you want to be happy, you can find bookshelves heaving with advice. I went around Waterstones in Oxford just yesterday and found probably 300 self-help books on happiness. Having read most of the (allegedly) good ones, what frustrates me time and time again is that they don’t try to explain 1. what happiness is or 2. what causes it, which you’d think would be essential. Typically, all you get is advice on what sort of things are associated with higher happiness in the average person (e.g.”get married, have more friends, exercise, eat well, do something meaningful with your job”). And this is without getting into the problem of how most ‘happiness studies’ aren’t measuring experiences of happiness, but other things like report of overall life satisfaction, which are totally different phenomena.

Now we’re armed with an account of what causes happiness in general, we can make sense of whether or not particular things will make us happier, and start to work out what to change to become happier. Will I be happier if I’m richer? Should I change jobs? Should I dump my partner? In each case, what matters if you think the change we get you focus on more pleasant things than you did before.

The crucial concept here, but we rarely think about, is adaptation: will you adapt to the change, or not? The evidence suggests we adapt to most things that happen to us: people who win the lottery or become disabled return to their pre-event level of happiness in about 6 months. In your own life, you can probably think of big events, either positive or negative (a sports victory, getting a job, the death of a family member) and, on reflection, realise that their effect on your happiness didn’t last. We simply don’t feel really big sensations for very long. Which makes evolutionary sense: you need to focus on the changes, not the things that aren’t going to kill you.

Curiously though, we don’t expect to adapt. When we focus on the future we engage in what Dan Gilbert, a Harvard psychologist, calls ‘the failure of affective forecasting.’ Simply, we think we’d be happier if we were richer because when we think about ourselves as richer people we only focus on being rich, and what we could do with that money, and forget that we’d get used to it. Studies show that rich people (those earning over $75,000) have very similar emotions lives to everyone else. Put it this way: I’m sure Mark Zuckerberg was pumped when Facebook took off and he became a billionaire, but do you think he wakes up and thinks about his wealth every day? Of course not: like everyone else, he gets up, has coffee and focuses about what he needs to get done today. Not only do we adapt, but we don’t expect to adapt. This is probably the most important empirical finding in happiness research.

Understanding adaptation matters because adaptation, in happiness terms, means withdrawing attention from something. As happiness is how we feel and what we pay attention to, something will only effect your happiness over the long term if you can’t adapt and keep paying attention to it. So, if you try to become rich in order to be happy, but adapt to your wealth as it increases, your effort to become happier has likely failed.

The patient reader might be wondering when he’s going to get more concrete advice and less theory. The patient reader will be disappointed. Happiness is a very complicated topic and it’s not possible, in a single, short post to give a concrete set of suggestions and explain why those suggestions are good ones. What I will do is identify two approaches to increasing happiness that could work.

I’ve said that happiness is a matter of how we feel about what we pay attention to. In practice, I think that means we should try to change how we think about the world. I’m not suggesting only that we re-train how we evaluative events in our lives, but also that we learn to control our attention better. I’ll write a bigger post explaining this soon.

However, telling people to ‘think positive’ is much easier said that done. Often, a much better suggestion is to try and change what we are actually doing with our time, rather than to re-think it: if your job sucks and your boss is a bastard, you could try to focus on the positives instead. But it might just be easier for you to change jobs and find a boss who isn’t a bastard. Behaviour change is a new and very interesting field on which a lot of good work has been done recently, and I’ll write a bigger post on how we can nudge ourselves into doing things which make us happier another time.

That’s all I want to say today. My goal here has been to make sense of the pursuit of happiness by saying what happiness is, what causes it, and which things matter of the long term: the “teach a man to fish” rather than “give a man a fish” approach to happiness advice. I’ve said happiness is experiences of pleasure and meaning, it’s caused by how we feel about what we pay attention to, and therefore that happiness over the long term requires finding life changes you won’t adapt to. I’ll also explain the research into adaptation at a later time.

But for now Merry Christmas!