It is sometimes argued that we don’t have any control over how happy we are. Some people are just born happy, others aren’t, and even if our happiness changes a little bit in response to the trials and tribulations of life, we always go back to our natural â€˜set point’ of happiness.

What nonsense. To understand why, it is important to first understand what exactly happiness is. Many people talk about happiness without defining what happiness is in the first place, but to become happier we must first know what exactly we're aiming at. To some researchers, happiness is simply a thought or general sense of how well life is going. It is common to ask people how satisfied they are with their lives overall to obtain an indication of their happiness. It is quite difficult, however, to change this part of happiness - that is, how you think. Try not to think about a white bear and most people will anyways, and they will do so even more frequently than if they hadn’t been asked to not to think about a white bear in the first place. Even so, thoughts about how well we think our life is going can be permanently altered by major life events such as unemployment and marriage.

But I do not believe this definition of happiness as thoughts and evaluations about life is really adequate for assessing how well our lives are going. It takes only a few seconds to answer this sort of happiness question, even though it is clear from cognitive psychology that we cannot possibly aggregate all of the information relevant towards judging how well our lives are going in a few seconds. Instead, we rely on ‘anchors’ to proxy our life evaluations - were we just thinking about politics before we answered a question about how satisfied we are with our lives? Did we just find a dime? Is it sunny outside? All of these small things influence how satisfied we report being with our lives overall, even though it doesn't seem as if they should have much of an impact.

A much better definition of happiness is one that reflects our day-to-day experiences of life. To illustrate the difference between our evaluations and experiences, I have now told the story of my friend who used to work at MediaLand to many audiences many times. My friend and I went out to dinner one evening and she spent the whole time complaining about her job: there was something wrong with her commute, colleagues, and boss. At the end of dinner, and without a hint of irony, she said, “Of course, I love working at MediaLand.” There is actually no real contradiction here: she is evaluating her work in one way, positively, but experiencing it negatively. Why wouldn’t she be happy at MediaLand, a prestigious job she has always wanted, and one that others are envious of? But her experiences told quite a different story. I believe we should prioritise how we actually feel rather than how we think we feel or should feel.

Defining happiness as experiences means that we have much more control over our happiness than if it were defined as evaluations. Our experiences are affected by the immediate context of our life - the activities we do, the people we spend time with, and what we pay attention to on a moment-to-moment basis. Our experiences are far less affected by big-picture characteristics, such as whether or not we have our dream job or house. We can change what we do in the moments of our lives, even if it is difficult to change major aspects about our lives and how we think.

One way to judge how happy we are according to our experiences - rather than according to our often-biased evaluations - is by filling out time use diaries. These can reveal how happy we are as we do different activities, such as working, spending time with children, or going for a bike ride. Tracking happiness is important given that our memories are imperfect guides to our past feelings. One of my colleagues, for example, discovered by tracking her happiness that she enjoys talking to strangers far more than she thought she did. Once we know what makes us happy on a moment-to-moment basis, we can then re-organise our lives in ways that make it easier to do the activities we like, as well as to spend time with the people that make us happy. We can move away from chasing things that only improve our snapshot thoughts and evaluations about how well our lives are going, and focus more directly on improving how we actually feel. This is Happiness by Design.

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