This collection of resources on happiness will offer you many lenses, content, and material from around the web.
Our curated collection is frequently being updated, so if you have anything to add, please let us know.
Some important notes about this content:
Resources are organized as pertaining to each happiness Type. Specifically, this page contains resources about Happiness types 1, 2, and 3.
These first 3 Happiness Types refer to “Happiness” in the more Hedonic sense, as opposed to “Joy” in the Eudaimonic sense. Read our page “Happiness vs. Joy” to learn more about that distinction.
You can find similar resources pertaining to Type 4 Happiness (“Joy”) on the Resources for Meaning page.
General / Overview Resources
Links
Articles
General
- How the Science of Well-Being Is Evolving – Researchers explore the complexity of well-being at the 5th World Congress on Positive Psychology.
- How to be Happy – From the New York Times
- Peeling Away the Promise of Desire – Why getting what we crave will not lead to happiness—and what will
- Key Scientific Papers of Positive Psychology – This list, containing a collection of key paper from Pos. Psych., serves as a great overview for the field, and quickly shows the importance of meaning.
On the Nature of Happiness
- Is Happiness Genetic and What Causes It? – This article clarifies the modern science of Genetics’ role in happiness, and even gives a great overview of how to happy. Plenty of detail and expertly written.
- How Much of Your Happiness Is Under Your Control? – The researchers behind the original “happiness pie chart” share what they’ve learned in the past 15 years.
- Easy as (Happiness) Pie? A Critical Evaluation of a Popular Model of the Determinants of Well-Being – This recent, scholarly examination of Lyubomirsky’s ‘Happiness Pie’ highlights the multi-faceted nature of ‘happiness’ and the futility of simplifying it down to a pie chart.
- What Is Philosophy For? – This insightful article echoes the core tenets of this website and the ‘happiness’ section, from the lens of philosophy (the love of wisdom).
Well-Being and the World
- The Legatum Prosperity Index – Clearly better than the World Happiness Report, and perhaps the best global measure of Happiness being currently recorded, this index “analyses the performance of 167 nations across 66 policy-focused elements, measured by almost 300 country-level indicators.”
- Happiness and Wellbeing Indeces – Here is a small collection of alternatives to supplement the world happiness report.
- Lessons in Wellbeing: Looking at the 2017 World Happiness Report – Universal healthcare, free education through college, a strong social safety net, generous paid time off and family leave policies seem to help happiness…
- The New Economics of Happiness – New studies — including a report on the happiest countries on the planet — suggest that building a theory of “happynomics” is harder than you’d think.
- How Working-Class Life Is Killing Americans, in Charts – A visually rich article showing the statistics of well-being for college vs. non-college-educated people in the U.S. Another article on the same topic here.
- Different Cultures Define Happiness Differently – Well-being is far from universal. Here are four models to help you understand the world—and your own mind.
On Work (See Bliss Map)
- Three Surprising Insights about Success and Happiness – The path to a healthy, successful, and meaningful life may not be what we expect.
- You Will Never Find Work-Life Balance – Instead of struggling to balance responsibilities, we need to aim for finding our flow.
- The new approach to work-life balance – These tips and strategies will help you find time for… you.
- How to Choose Goals That Make You Come Alive – Research on the components of well-being can help us choose goals that we’ll stick to.
- How to Pick a Career (That Actually Fits You) – A life-changing article from the always highly recommended Wait But Why.
- Creative Burnout, the Hamster Wheel of Success, and Reclaiming Who We Are from the Workaholic Grip of What We Do
Cutting Through the Fluff
- How to Be Perfectly Unhappy – This visual article from The Oatmeal juxtaposes the idea of ‘happiness’ with the very absurdity of existence, calling for one to simply choose to be ‘happy.’
- We’ve Reached Peak Wellness. Most of It Is Nonsense – “Here’s what actually works.” This article begrudges the overly-complicated and profiteering nature of the ‘wellness industrial complex’ and provides a few simple solutions for living well.
- Nine Scientists Share Their Favorite Happiness Practices – For the International Day of Happiness, here’s some inspiration to help you feel more connected, grateful, and satisfied with your life.
- 19 Cliché Happiness Quotes & The (Lack Of) Science Behind Them – See these common quotes tested for accuracy. The article does a great job of preserving half-truths, and letting happiness be complex (it is).
On the Pursuit Paradox
- Why It’s Time to Stop Pursuing Happiness – Positive thinking and visualizing success can be counterproductive – happily, other strategies for fulfillment are available.
- Is “arrival fallacy” affecting your happiness? – Ticked that major life goal off your list only to find that it didn’t bring the instant happiness, gratification, and contentment you were hoping for? You might have fallen foul of the “arrival fallacy”. Here’s how to get some perspective, so you can learn to live in the moment.
- Happiness Is Not Enough – Constantly striving for happiness in the face of life’s challenges can be just as bad as being miserable all the time.
- Measuring Your Happiness Can Help Improve It – This article points out how self-assessment can aid in improving happiness, but note that it doesn’t address the pursuit paradox sufficiently.
Organizations & Websites
Organizations and Websites
- Authentic Happiness – An online hub for positive psychology by Dr. Seligman himself.
- Happiness Research Institute – These are folks responsible for the global happiness counts.
- Happify.com – “Our vision is to use cutting-edge science and innovative technology to empower individuals to lead happier, more fulfilling lives.”
- PositiveRoutines.com – A fun blog on happiness and all of its satellites.
- Project Happiness Global – An inspiring project with the aim of reaching 10 million people with their educational curriculums, articles, and products.
- All Articles on The Atlantic by Arthur Brooks – An extensive collection of quality articles covering happiness. Very quality writing and editing, and note that Brooks is a professor of management, and can sometimes take an overly capitalistic view of a well-lived life.
Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center – One of the most informative sources for all things in happiness research and positive psychology.
- Greatest Hits from Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center – This is an excellent collection of articles.
- Four Reasons to Cultivate Zest in Life – According to research, the joyful energy of zest is good for your career and your mental health.
- Three Things I Learned from Teaching Happiness – Emiliana Simon-Thomas shares the key truths about happiness that are most meaningful to learners.
- How the Science of Well-Being Is Evolving – Researchers explore the complexity of well-being at the 5th World Congress on Positive Psychology.
- Why Governments Should Care More About Happiness
- Three Emerging Insights About Happiness – Researchers are exploring how our everyday thoughts and feelings contribute to our well-being.
- What We Can Learn About Happiness from Iceland – Governmental psychologist Dóra Guðmundsdóttir explains what makes a society flourish.
- How to Be Happy: The Fine Print – Positive psychology has identified ways people can increase their happiness. But what happiness habits are right for you?
Videos
My Philosophy for a Happy Life
Sam Berns, who passed away from Progeria shortly after this TED talk, divulges his secrets to living happily.
Why are we Happy? Why Aren’t We Happy? – Dan Gilbert
Dan Gilbert, the author of Stumbling on Happiness, challenges the idea that we’ll be miserable if we don’t get what we want.
Robert Waldinger: What makes a good life? Lessons from the longest study on happiness
What keeps us happy and healthy as we go through life? As the director of a 75-year-old study on adult development, Waldinger has unprecedented access to data on true happiness and satisfaction. In this talk, he shares three important lessons learned from the study as well as some practical, old-as-the-hills wisdom on how to build a fulfilling, long life.
Books
**The 5 books below are our favorite all-around books on well-being. These would be the books to read if you wanted to cover a lot of ground and cover it well.
And, there are SO MANY books with priceless insights on well-being. For a more comprehensive list of books by category, check out the ‘Happiness’ Books page.
Flourish by Martin Seligman
Seligman, the founder of modern positive psychology, wrote this book as a revision/follow-up to his groundbreaking Authentic Happiness. And this book is even better.
If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Happy? by Raj Raghunathan
One of the most comprehensively researched books on well-being, it nevertheless presents unique ideas. Especially geared toward those who have prioritized success yet not found ‘happiness.’
The How of Happiness by Sonja Lyubomirsky
Though the statement on its cover has since been refuted, Lyubomirsky provides one of the most comprehensive-yet-practical overviews on well-being in this book.
Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization
When psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman first discovered Maslow’s unfinished theory of transcendence, sprinkled throughout a cache of unpublished journals, lectures, and essays, he felt a deep resonance with his own work and life. In this groundbreaking book, Kaufman picks up where Maslow left off, unraveling the mysteries of his unfinished theory, and integrating these ideas with the latest research on attachment, connection, creativity, love, purpose, and other building blocks of a life well-lived.
Flourishing: Positive Psychology and the Life Well-Lived
Distinguished scholars apply scientific analyses to study the good life, expanding the scope of social and psychological research to include happiness, well-being, courage, citizenship, play, and the satisfactions of healthy work and healthy relationships. This book reads like a decent synopsis of positive psychology research, written by some of the foremost leaders in the field.
Movies
The Pursuit
A documentary following the work of Arthur Brooks, who travels the world asking people how we lift up the well-being of ourselves and each other. You can watch the full film on youtube here.
Podcasts
- How to Build a Happy Life – Arthur C. Brooks seeks to uncover how we can live more joyful lives. You can see the articles he writes for the Atlantic and NYT here.
- BeingWell Podcast – A podcast on all things well-being, from Rick Hanson.
- The Science of Happiness Podcast – From the Greater Good Science Center in Berkeley, this is an overall podcast on research-tested strategies for a happier, more meaningful life.
Episode Highlights
- Tal Ben-Shahar on the Science of Happiness – Ben-Shahar talks about his research in happiness, and his model, SPIRE for ‘wholebeing.’
- Arthur Brooks – Love Your Enemies – Brooks discusses a range of topics with Kaufman, including fear as the opposite of love and the difference between empathy and compassion.
- The Need to Matter – Isaac Prilleltensky chats with Scott Barry Kaufman on mattering’s role in well-being.
Apps
- Monthly Action Calendars for Happiness – This app offers daily ideas for living well in the form of themed calendars.
Element #1: Ephemeral Pleasures
#1 Links & Articles
Letting Things Be Simple
- Valuable Things – This article from theminimalists.com offers some insight on what makes things truly worth keeping.
- What does ‘living fully’ mean? Welcome to the age of pseudo-profound nonsense – Inspirational quotes of dubious provenance are just one of the ways in which social media sells a warped vision of ‘living fully.’
- My Year of Saying Yes to Everything – A fascinating TED talk showing the power of positive experiences in the broad sense.
- Improving Ourselves to Death – What the self-help gurus and their critics reveal about our times.
- These So-Called Vices are Good for Your Health – Simple pleasures can go a long way to increasing well-being.
On Hygge (checkout the page HERE)
- The Grim Secret of Nordic Happiness – It’s not hygge, the welfare state, or drinking. It’s reasonable expectations.
- We’re Learning the Wrong Lessons From the World’s Happiest Countries – Hygge alone will not save us. This article details some easy misconceptions we can take away from the global happiness indexes.
- What Is Hygge, and How to Make Your Holidays Super Memorable This Year – Another overview of Hygge, through a lens of parenting.
Understanding Pleasure
- The Pleasure/Happiness Gap – Wise words from Seth Godin. His dissociation between these two concepts parallels our between Happiness and Joy.
- How to Think About Pleasure – An in-depth look at pleasure and values, and how they intersect.
- Happiness Is Not Enough – Why a Life Without Meaning Will Make You Sick
On Stuff
- Stuff in life – A meditation on what you really want from the minimalists.com
- Surroundings as Instigators of Joy – What are some of the things around us that seem to make us happy, and why?
- How Much Land Does a Man Need? – A classic story from Leo Tolstoy, it illustrates our insatiable desire for more stuff, at our own demise.
- The Hedonic Treadmill – A short article explaining why happiness isn’t just about marriage, a big house, and kids.
More on Ephemeral Pleasures
- 16 Scientifically-Backed Ways to Boost your Happiness Almost Instantly – A fun grab bag of helpful tips.
- Where Joy Hides and How to Find It – An insightful TED talk about finding Joy in every day.
- How to Make Everyday Moments Extraordinary – A new book suggests ways we can infuse more peak experiences into our work and everyday lives.
- Ready for the roaring 20s? It’s time to re-learn how to have fun, says happiness professor – A short article about consciously cultivating fun.
- Happiness Box Subscriptions – Here are a few fun services that send you boxes of fun: Box Fox, Happy Box, and Crate Joy.
#1 Videos
In-Shadow: A Modern Odyssey
A visually rich art piece that begs to confront life deeper than the surface level, even if it’s hard.
#1 Books
The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again
If you’re not having fun, you’re not fully living. The author of How to Break Up with Your Phone makes the case that, far from being frivolous, fun is actually critical to our well-being—and shows us how to have more of it.
The Gift of Nothing
A simple yet insightful children’s book story. You can see a reading of it on youtube here.
#1 Quotes
“Whoever dies with the most toys wins” — bumper sticker
“He who is not contented with what he has, would not be contented with what he would like to have.” – Socrates
“It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly.” – Henry David Thoreau
“Possessions are usually diminished by possession.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
“When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy.’ They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life.” -John Lennon“We are nourished by novelty. Too much sameness and the world goes gray.” – Melissa Kirsch, New York Times
“If you look at what you have in life, you’ll always have more. If you look at what you don’t have in life, you’ll never have enough.” -Oprah Winfrey
“If you win the rat race, you’re still a rat.” – Anonymous
“Every seeming end we seek — love, money, purpose, the perfect cappuccino — we seek as a means to happiness, and yet happiness defies the usual laws of effort and achievement: The more ferociously we try to attain it, the more it eludes us.” – Agnes Martin
“A sailboat without a sail might float. For a long time, in fact. But without a sail, it can’t go anywhere, can’t fulfill its function. Floating is insufficient.” – Seth Godin
“On the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much — the wheel, New York, wars and so on — whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time.
But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man — for precisely the same reasons.” – Douglas Adams
#1 Snippets
Element #2: Flow & Engagement
#2 Links & Articles
What Is Flow:
- In the Flow – How to master your brain’s peak productivity.
- Flow and the Psychology of Peak Performance – “If your company policy is you have to respond to any email in 15 minutes, you’re out of your mind.”
Flow with Happiness
- Your Life Circumstances May Have a Lot Less To Do With Your Happiness
- Does Mind-Wandering Make You Unhappy? – Researcher says we’re happiest when we stay in the moment.
- You Will Never Find Work/Life Balance – Instead of struggling to balance responsibilities, we need to aim for finding our flow.
- How to Make Everyday Moments Extraordinary – A new book suggests ways we can infuse more peak experiences into our work and everyday lives.
- You Aren’t Lazy, You’re Disinterested – “You’re not lazy, you just don’t love what you do.”
Organizations:
- Flow Genome Project – “We are running the largest open-sourced, citizen science project in optimal well-being. Using research from the world’s leading universities and institutions, we design trainings to advance the science and application of Flow.”
On Productivity & Focus
- The Disease of Being Busy – Being busy / occupied and thus not focused on meaning/purpose.
- Overwhelmed is a Choice – A short, insightful blog post on information saturation from Seth Godin.
- Productivity Isn’t About Time Management. It’s About Attention Management. – From the New York Times.
- This Will Take Two Hours – An insightful statement by Seth Godin on our lack of formats for focused attention.
- The Attention Diet – “In the time it took me to outline this article I checked Twitter three times and my email twice. I responded to four emails. I checked Slack once and sent text messages to two people. I went down a rabbit hole of YouTube videos once, costing me about 30 minutes of productivity, and I probably checked my books’ ranks on Amazon roughly 3,172 times.”
- On the Pleasures and Sorrows of Life Without Screens – On the balance of minimizing screen time for better focus and time management.
- Learn How To Avoid Distraction In A World That Is Full Of It – Four useful strategies for becoming indistractable.
- Why You Never Seem to Have Enough Time – We feel pressed for time due to our own psychology, not just the tyranny of the clock.
#2 Videos
Insight and Explanation from the psychologist behind Flow research, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
How to stop languishing and start finding flow
Have you found yourself staying up late, joylessly bingeing TV shows and doomscrolling through the news, or simply navigating your day uninspired and aimless? Chances are you’re languishing, says organizational psychologist Adam Grant.
#2 Books
Element #3: Perspective
#3 Links & Articles
On the Nature of Happiness:
- What is Happiness to You? Insights From Our Community – In honor of Happiness Happens Month, Positive Routines decided to leave the more official definitions in the dust and find out what happiness really means—to real people living real lives.
- This is what you’re getting wrong about your pursuit of happiness – Most of our beliefs about how to pursue happiness are wrong, says Fast Company.
- Can Intelligence Buy You Happiness? – New research suggests that IQ leads to greater well-being by enabling one to acquire the financial and educational means necessary to live a better life.
- How Cultural Differences Shape Your Happiness – Researcher William Tov explains why cultural differences matter for well-being.
- Is It Possible to Become Happier? (And If So, How?) – A fascinating and comprehensive study with a set of perspective-based solutions from Sonja Lyubomirsky.
- There Is No One Way to Live a Good Life – Humanistic psychology is an uplifting, compassionate view of humanity.
- How Much of Your Happiness Is Under Your Control? – The researchers behind the original “happiness pie chart” share what they’ve learned in the past 15 years.
On Practice and Over-Practice:
- Improving Ourselves to Death – What the self-help gurus and their critics reveal about our times.
- Stop Trying to Be Happy – If you have to try to be cool, you will never be cool. If you have to try to be happy, then you will never be happy. The key to finding happiness is to stop looking for it.
- 7 Ways to Know If Your Sacrifices Are Worth It – Some practical matters of perspective.
- Happiness Is Practice, Not Pleasure – Matthieu Ricard is helping us redefine happiness in a culture convinced that it’s a passive experience.
- Are You Living Life or Just Planning Your Biography? – One of the most startling findings of modern psychology is how bad we are at guessing what will make us happy. Not only are we lousy at predicting what will satisfy us, we often misremember our happiness in the past.
- The happiness ruse – How did feeling good become a matter of relentless, competitive work; a never-to-be-attained goal which makes us miserable?
- A Better Way to Pursue Happiness – Trying to be happy can be a recipe for unhappiness. But researcher Lahnna Catalino explains how to go about it effectively.
- Four Ways Happiness Can Hurt You – Can feeling good ever be bad? New research says yes—and points the way to a healthier, more balanced life.
On Identity:
- 3 Steps To Achieve Personal Freedom – For the biggest part of my adult life, I was unfree in a free world. I could do whatever I wanted but I didn’t use that freedom. Unwanted obligations and invisible expectations were holding me back.
- Seven Ways to Feel More in Control of Your Life – Developing greater agency can help you make important life decisions and feel less overwhelmed, stuck, and lost.
- Accept and Value Yourself: 11 Ways to Embrace Who You Are – Tiny Buddha shares some perspective-centered tips on happiness.
- Keep Your Identity Small – A sideways look at attachment.
- Accept and Value Yourself – 11 Ways to Embrace Who You Are
More on Perspective
- A mentalist’s guide to being happy – The illusionist Derren Brown has studied the philosophy and psychology of happiness – and he argues that many of us could take a radical new approach to improving our wellbeing.
- Always look on the bright side of life – How a positive outlook may buffer us from stress and ward off health problems.
- Glad to be sad, and other examples of benign masochism – “A fascinating scientific paper: “”We provide systematic evidence for the range and importance of hedonic reversals as a major source of pleasure, and incorporate these findings into the theory of benign masochism.”
- Rats and happiness and human connection – Insights from studies on rats about addiction, and more.
- Dostoyevsky, Just After His Death Sentence Was Repealed, on the Meaning of Life – “To be a human being among people and to remain one forever, no matter in what circumstances, not to grow despondent and not to lose heart — that’s what life is all about, that’s its task.”
- Doing Something Is Better Than Doing Nothing – Some research has shown that many of us simply aren’t comfortable in our own heads.
- People who live in small towns and rural areas are happier than everyone else, researchers say – Heaven is wide open spaces — at least, it is for most people, according to a massive new data set of happiness in Canada.
- Eastern vs Western Views of Happiness – A quick article pointing out the importance of perspective through the lens of Eastern views on happiness.
- Awareness/Self-Awareness – Language is part of emotional intelligence. Do you feel something less strongly if you don’t have a word for it?
#3 Videos
How to Practice Vipassana Meditation – A straight-forward instructional video on how to practice Vipassana meditation.
Vipassana Meditation and Body Sensation – A straight-forward instructional video on how to practice Vipassana meditation.
Vipassana, Happiness, and the Art of Living – A bit more information about Vipassana: the method, some history, and real-world stories.
A deeper materialism: Michael Stone at TEDxToronto – Michael Stone, Canadian Yoga and meditation teacher, reigns in spirituality as material and utilitarian, offering tools like meditation for our own well-being.
30 Minute Restorative Yoga and Meditation – A quick follow-along video of yoga and meditation to set your mind and body at ease. Enjoy!
The Power of Cutting Off & Letting Go – A lengthy classic lecture from renowned monk Thich Nhat Hanh on the reasons for, practice of, and effects from letting go.
5 Ways to Misery – Effective strategies for getting the worst out of life.
Happiness is all in your mind: Gen Kelsang Nyema – “Happiness is all in your mind” says this monk, who gives the why’s and how’s for this essential aspect of Buddhism.
#3 Books
#3 Quotes
“The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.” – Marcus Aurelius
“Happiness is pervasive.
It is everywhere… When we are unhappy it is because something is covering our minds and we are not able to be aware of happiness. When the difficulty is past we find happiness again.
It is not that happiness is all around us. That is not it at all. It is not this or that or in this or that.
It is an abstract thing.
Happiness is unattached. Always the same. It does not appear and disappear. It is not sometimes more and sometimes less. It is our awareness of happiness that goes up and down.
Happiness is our real condition.” – Agnes Martin, Paintings, Writings, Remembrances
“We are shaped by our thoughts. We become what we think. When the mind is pure, joy follows like shadow that never leaves.” – Buddha
“My opinion is that you never find happiness until you stop looking for it.” – Chang Tzu
“The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.” – Henry David Thoreau
#3 Snippets
No End to the Wisdom…
We live in an interesting time: a person today can, if they wish, access and collect more information about the world in a single hour than a medieval human could hope to in a lifetime.
Thus, our task as modern humans seeking wisdom is often one of discernment rather than collection.
There is plenty of wisdom out there. We need only to choose it…wisely.
That’s where we come in. And you can help. If you have more fun findings to contribute to pages like this, please let us know.
And check back from time to time. We will add more to this page and other resource pages consistently.
