Are You Happy?

And what is happiness? A surge of pleasure because something good happened to you? How long does it last?

We love moments of happiness but no one can sustain happy feelings over time. Moreover, do we want just occasional episodes of happiness, or an overriding sense of contentment, with life, with ourselves?

Social psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky classified causes of happiness into three major categories: life circumstances, genetics, and behavior. Furthermore, her research shows that only about 10 percent of people's happiness is due to their life circumstances - such as health, getting a raise  at work, buying a new house, or getting married. However that's what most of us focus on and try to change to make us happier, or more precisely, to imagine us being happier in the future with those changes. Those changes might make you happy, but perhaps they don't make you as happy as you think they do, or for as long as you imagine.

Most people think that they will be happier if they had more money. Well, it's hard to be truly happy if you live in poverty, below a certain income level.

However, researchers at Princeton University found that after people have somewhere between $60,000 and $75,000 (in 2010), there's no relationship between income and happiness.

So, what makes you happy? Or maybe we should ask, how do we make ourselves happier, for longer?