Reasons for popularity

• The level of positive emotions. This includes pride, joy, contentment, and curiosity we experience on a day-to-day basis. How happy you are on an immediate basis fluctuates by the day or even the hour.
• The overarching sense of contentment. How happy you are overall, generally remains the same. When you rate your happiness on a 10-point scale, if you are a seven kind of person, you will often stay around seven.

Buying time by outsourcing unpleasant or disliked tasks can benefit our well-being. 

Unfortunately, we're not great at valuing time over money. To change our spending habits, it helps to value time more than money. It could mean that we seek a job for its flexibility rather than the salary and prestige.

Being open to emotional experiences and being able to tolerate discomfort can allow us to move towards a more meaningful existence.

The way we respond to the circumstances of our lives has more influence on our happiness than the events themselves.

• Hedonistic: in order to live a happy life we must maximize pleasure and avoid pain. This view is often short-lived.

• Eudaimonic approach: it takes the long view and argues that we should live authentically and for the greater good. We should pursue meaning and potential through kindness, justice, honesty, and courage.

To address the disconnect between happiness and deeper levels of satisfaction, researches proposed a model that characterizes people as falling into one of four well-being types.

1. Optimizing one’s positive emotions, and denying the reality of their negative experiences.
2. Feeling unhappy seeing the complexity of the world around them, and neglecting the positive aspects.
3. Having a generally negative view of themselves and the world.
4. Having a generally positive and empathetic view of the world.

Being happy means more than feeling good. True happiness comes from handling challenging and adverse situations, while collaborating and building lifelong bonds with the people in our lives.

A collective thinking process, where the good of all is considered leads to a level of happiness that cannot be attained by being selfish or self-concerned.

• They surround themselves with other happy people.
• They cultivate resilience.
• They appreciate simple pleasures.
• They devote some of their time to giving.
• They get immersed in activities that bring joy.
• They nix the small talk for deeper conversations. 
• They make a point to listen. 
• They look on the bright side.
• They make exercise a priority.
• They listen to good music.
• They spend time in nature.
• They laugh a lot.

Self-Reliance is the topic (and title) of an 1841 essay from US philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson.

He argues strongly that self-reliance, self-trust, and individualism, amongst other things, are ways that we can avoid the conformity imposed upon us.

• Thinking independently: The ability to think autonomously goes hand in hand with trusting your own instinct.
• Embracing your individuality.
• Striving towards your own goals, bravely.

It’s important to remember that self-reliance is not about cutting yourself off from everybody.

In determining our pathway to wellbeing, it doesn’t just matter how physically active we are but how active (how energetic, vigorous, and vital) we feel.

Even though our predictions aren’t always accurate, the simple act of contemplating the future might be a key to well-being.

It usually is a 2-steps process: first, we dream big and imagine fantasy outcomes; then, we “get real” and come up with pragmatic plans.

Happiness has always been difficult to quantify because it is subjective, depending on if you have a short- or a long-term outlook on life. Recently, researchers have started to distinguish between two types of happiness: 

• Hedonic happiness that provides a mental high;
• Eudaimonic happiness, a sense of well-being which involves a life well-lived.

People will always be happy when they see their children prosper when they feel loved, secure, and well-fed.

But, this formula for happiness is so obvious that most people dismiss it. They would rather look for a secret ingredient. The answer is that there is no secret.

It consists of 3 parts: positive affect, negative affect, and life satisfaction.

Positive affect and negative affect are basically your emotions and moods, and life satisfaction refers to the evaluation of your life as a whole (how satisfied you are with your life, what you would change etc).

Tracking your own subjective well-being can be very powerful if you keep alongside a journal of your life's events. 

Keep it up for some time and you will see trends emerge. You'll also be able to adjust your activities in order to maximize positive affect and life satisfaction and minimize negative affect.

A Victim Complex sufferer is a person who has difficulties when dealing with trauma, in any shape that this can take. 

Among the most common traits, we can often find the refusal to accept responsibility when handling their issues, the difficulty to move on from a tragic situation or a tendency to be both pessimistic and critical when talking about others.

Persons who suffer from the Victim Complex tend to manipulate their partners, in order to hide their own lack of responsibility and maturity. 

Therefore, it is very often that these relationships end up after having become extremely tenuous.

• People who win the lottery are likely to revert to their original levels of happiness after the novelty of the win has worn off.
• It is also true for those who are in major accidents. People generally tend to return to their pre-accident levels of happiness after a period.
• Research has found that the first bite of something delicious is experienced as more pleasurable than the subsequent bites.

Researcher Sonja Lyubomirsky has examined this set-point:

A full 50 percent of our happiness set-point is due to genetics. 10 percent is affected primarily by circumstances like where we were born and to whom. 40 percent is subject to our influence.