If you want more happiness in your life, ask yourself this simple question

What is happiness? Is it feeling good all the time? Having a sunny disposition? Feeling like you are where you want to be in life?

People who want to be happier often think about what it means, says Gretchen Rubin, author of several books on the subject, including The Happiness Project and Happier at Home, and host of the podcast Happier. But the emotion can be hard to describe.

Instead, Rubin says to ask yourself: “Will this make me happier?” People usually have a lot more clarity on the answer. Making choices that can make you happier in the long or short run can move you “in the right direction” toward a life filled with more joy and contentment.

If you’re not sure how to answer that question, Rubin, who has a book coming out in April, Secrets of Adulthood, is here to help. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You have to have a pretty good idea of who you are to know whether something will make you happy. Why is that? 

Often, when we’re trying to make our lives happier, we might be following a new habit, like reading more, going to sleep on time, exercising or cutting back on doomscrolling. Or we might be pushing ourselves to do something we don’t want to do but could make us happier in the long run, like start a book club or join a hiking group.

When we know ourselves, we can think about things that make it harder [to achieve those goals] and ways to make it easier.

Some people love familiarity, and some people love novelty. So let’s say you’re trying to exercise more. If you know you love novelty, you might think: “Let me think of different ways I could exercise. I could join a gym that has many options.” If you love familiarity, you might say: “I want to get comfortable in one place. That’s going to make it easier and more pleasant for me to exercise.”

Different circumstances appeal to different people, and you want to take yourself into account as you’re setting things up to pursue whatever it is to make your life happier.

You developed and wrote a book about a framework called the Four Tendencies to help people understand their personality type and what might make them happy. Tell me about the concept. 

The Four Tendencies looks at whether you meet or resist outer expectations, like a work deadline, and inner expectations, like my own desire to keep a New Year’s resolution.

Depending on whether you meet or resist outer and inner expectations, that makes you an upholder, a questioner, an obliger or a rebel.

Upholders are people who readily meet both outer and inner expectations. So they meet the work deadline and keep the New Year’s resolution without much fuss.

Questioners question all expectations. They’ll do something if they think it makes sense.

Obligers readily meet outer expectations, but they struggle to meet inner expectations. So these are people who can keep their promises to other people, but they struggle to keep promises to themselves.

Rebels resist all expectations, outer and inner alike. They want to do what they want to do in their own way, in their own time.

If you know you’re an upholder, a questioner, obliger or rebel, it will give you a lot of clues about how to follow through on [things you’re trying to do to make yourself happier].

I think a lot of folks imagine that if they make a big change in their lives — get a new job, get married or have a baby — then maybe then they’ll finally be happy.

We overestimate how much these big things will change our lives. But by the time they come about, we’ve already incorporated those changes into our worldview. So they don’t give us the huge boost we think they might.

At the same time, if you’re at a job you really dislike and then switch to a job you do like, that is going to make a big difference.

Sometimes we get energy from very small things. On the Happier podcast, I often talk about something called the “one-minute rule.” This is the idea that if you can do something in a minute without delay, you should just go ahead and do it. It gets rid of the clutter that’s on the surface of life. And sometimes getting that little stuff out of the way makes you feel more prepared to take on the big stuff.

What are some other things people do because they think it’ll make them happy?

Thinking there’s one right way to go about making our lives happier, that there’s a magic, one-size-fits-all solution. The fact is, no tool fits every hand. Each of us needs to figure out what is right for us.

That’s where self-knowledge comes in. For example, many people swear by meditation. I have tried meditation. Doesn’t work for me. I also tried keeping a gratitude journal. [Some scientific evidence shows keeping one can improve well-being.] I was deeply annoyed by it. But for some people, it’s an important tool.

You write in Secrets of Adulthood that happiness doesn’t always make us feel happy. What do you mean by that?

Sometimes we do things that might make us feel bad, but make us feel right. You might visit a sick friend in the hospital, even though you hate hospitals. Yet you think, “Well, to be a good friend, I should visit them in the hospital.”

It serves your happiness because it’s a way of feeling right — your life reflects your values.

The producer is Sam Yellowhorse Kesler. This digital story was edited by Malaka Gharib. The visual editor is Beck Harlan. We’d love to hear from you. Leave us a voicemail at 202-216-9823, or email us at LifeKit@npr.org.

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