Many people believe that happiness is having fun at a party, the excitement of new experiences, or the delights of a fine meal. These are all wonderful experiences to be cherished and cultivated but they are not happiness.

Pleasure is fleeting and must be if it is to continue to please us because if we have these joyful experiences all the time, our brains would adapt and turn pleasure into routine. Once that happens, it takes even more to make us feel good again. Chasing pleasure is not happiness.

So, if happiness is not the same thing as pleasure, then what is happiness?

In other words, happiness comes when you feel satisfied and fulfilled. Happiness is a feeling of contentment, that life is just as it should be. Perfect happiness, enlightenment, comes when you have all of your needs satisfied. While the perfect happiness of enlightenment may be hard to achieve, and even harder to maintain, there are nearly limitless degrees of happiness between the bliss of enlightenment and the despair of depression. Most of us fall somewhere between, closer to the middle than the edges.

Happiness is important, it’s fun and it feels good.

Junior Cody Allison explained, “you will finally be happy when your mind allows yourself to be.” Similar to a quote by Abraham Lincoln which reads, “Folks are usually about as happy as they make their minds up to be.” Which many people agree with. In simplistic words you can only be happy if you allow yourself to be. Which isn’t always easy. It is shown to be that being happy isn’t a choice. It is hard to forget pain, but it is even harder to remember happiness. We have no scar to show for happiness.

Happiness is when you feel so content that you don’t want to change anything about your life. You make the best out of everything you do, even if you don’t like it. Senior Kira Braun characterizes her definition of happiness as “knowing you’re loved, protected and wanted.”

“Happiness is when you smile and you have that feeling like you can do anything,” said senior Miles Foucault. “Happiness is when the people you love would do anything for you, no matter the cost.” The people around you really influence your behavior and emotions. If the people around you love you and give off a positive vibe then you will feel happier emotions. But with those dark days you are taught and reminded on how you want to feel. “It’s ones choice to be happy. Like I’m happy no matter how I’m feeling. You choose to let things take control of your emotions,” Foucault ends with.

What is your definition of happiness?

Happiness has been said to relate to life satisfaction, appreciation of life, moments of pleasure, but overall it has to do with the positive experience of emotions. “Research in the field of positive psychology and happiness often define a happy person as someone who experiences frequent positive emotions, such as joy, interest, and pride, and infrequent (though not absent) negative emotions, such as sadness, anxiety and anger.” The key to these definitions is that positive emotions do not indicate the absence of negative emotions. A “happy person” experiences the spectrum of emotions just like anybody else, but the frequency by which they experience the negative ones may be different. It could be that “happy people” don’t experience as much negative emotions or know a more positive coping mechanism because they process it differently. They may find meaning in a way others have not “because all people experience negative emotion but not all people handle them well,” stated junior Melanie Nicholson. In fact, using the phrase “happy person” is incorrect because it assumes that people are naturally happy or that positive things happen to them more often. Nobody is immune to life’s stressors, but the question is whether you see those stressors as moments of opposition or moments of opportunity.

Happy; It’s probably one of the first words that we ever learned in order to express our emotions. Happy might mean a world of different things to each of us, but I’m pretty sure your five-year-old self was feeling similar things to mine when we used the word to say we enjoyed the birthday party we had just attended. Whatever happiness looks like, whatever form it takes, and whoever it resembles if that is indeed the case, it cannot be overall defined.

Most of us probably don’t believe we need a formal definition of happiness; we know it when we feel it, and we often use the term to describe a range of positive emotions, including joy, pride, contentment, and gratitude. But to understand the causes and effects of happiness, it’s important to understand the reasons why we are not happy and question them because sometimes we don’t feel good enough or we feel to be below the standards created by our society, so in this case, they are not our reasons. We have in our mind how things should be, a sense of perfection which has been created over the years by absorbing it from people around us, from the media, from our society and so much more. So if we don’t reach these standards that we have in our mind, then we think we are not good enough and so we are not happy. That’s why is very important to learn to question our reasons and our beliefs.

Anger is an emotion associated with a thought about something that happened in the past. We need to let it go, it belongs to the past, to be happy we need to live the present. Sometimes it might not be so easy to be positive, especially when things go wrong and we are stuck with some negative thoughts that are buzzing in our mind. Even a little problem can make us end up in a negative state, have you noticed that a thought attracts another thought, it’s like a chain, a bit like the domino effect continues. A positive thought attracts a positive thought, and a negative thought attracts a negative thought.

Obviously, not everyone can stay positive and happy all the time, it’s quite normal sometimes to feel angry, sad, worried etc. These are all negative emotions that we can not avoid but what we can do about it is not to dwell on these negative emotions.

Of course, being happy is not some magical cure-all. Happy people still get sick and lose loved ones – and not all happy people are efficient, creative or generous. But, other things being equal, happiness brings substantial advantages.

Perhaps the most powerful insight of all comes, not from the research, but from the responses I’ve heard from many hundreds of parents when asking them what they want above all for their children. Nearly all say something like: “I really just want them to be happy.”

Happiness is the thing we want most for the people we love the most. That’s why it matters so much.