The Science of Happiness

The question of what makes a person happy is no longer a philosophical conundrum. Many now see "life satisfaction" as a metric, and there are countless books, apps and pods pledging to up your score. But with more resources than ever, why are we still so confused, asks Stuart Heritage? Can happiness really be taught?

- By Stuart Heritage

IF you've ever seen something called the happiness U-curve, you'll have every right to feel a bit despondent. This chart, which tracks human satisfaction by age, does not make for especially cheerful reading. From the mid-teens to the late forties or early fifties, the chart plots a steady descent. True, it does then begin to tick back upwards. But until then, on average, every year of your life will be a little less happy than the one before it.

It isn't hard to see why. Everything is a struggle. Maybe you're battling with the pressures of work, or money, or kids, or health, or your elderly parents, or all of these at the same time. We might all want to be happier, but knowing how is the hard bit.

Some happiness hacks are pretty much agreed upon, if not always easy. (More time outdoors; fewer hours zombified in front of a laptop.) Others are questionable. (Should you get up at 5am to meditate? Start a gratitude journal? Wouldn't an extra hour in bed make you more grateful?) What you really need is someone to test them all, and report back.

Well, good news! As a father of two currently riding the downwards slope of the U-curve while working in a dying industry during a gruelling cost of living crisis, I'm ideally placed to be your guinea pig. What's more, I really wanted to find a way to make my day-to-day a bit nicer. So, over the course of a month, I practised as many of these scientifically backed strategies as I could to see what would stick. Here's my crash course in contentment.

Experiment 01

Satisfaction, Gamified