Positive psychology

In our materialistic, consumer-oriented culture, we generally view happiness as the end-product of a gradual process of accumulating the things and attaining the goals we've set out for ourselves. Only when everything finally falls into place - the right house, the right job, the right relationship, the right stuff - do we feel entitled to call ourselves happy. But experts in the emerging field of positive psychology have found that life circumstances exert only minimal influence on the happiness we experience.

Your happiness baseline

Half our happiness is actually hardwired at birth by what scientists call our emotional set point, our default level of subjective well-being that's determined by heredity and tends to remain more or less constant throughout our lives. Though we may fluctuate up or down to some degree, we inevitably return to this emotional baseline.