What does it mean to be happy?

The answer to this question once seemed obvious to me. To be happy is to be satisfied with your life. If you want to find out how happy someone is, you ask him a question like, “Taking all things together, how satisfied are you with your life as a whole?”

Over the past 30 years or so, as the field of happiness studies has emerged from social psychology, economics and other disciplines, many researchers have had the same thought. Indeed this “life satisfaction” view of happiness lies behind most of the happiness studies you’ve read about. Happiness embodies your judgment about your life, and what matters for your happiness is something for you to decide.

This is an appealing view. But I have come to believe that it is probably wrong. Or at least, it can’t do justice to our everyday concerns about happiness.

I do not mean to suggest that life satisfaction studies can’t give us useful information about how people are doing. But I am suggesting that it is misleading to equate satisfaction with happiness, even if it is perfectly ordinary to talk that way at times.

So how else might we define happiness? There is another approach popular among researchers — one that focuses on feelings. If you feel good, and not bad, you’re happy. Feeling good may not be all that matters, but it certainly sounds like a more suitable candidate for happiness than a judgment that your life is good enough. Evidently, those Egyptians do not feel good, and that has a lot to do with why it seems unnatural to say that they are happy.

But I have come to believe that this approach is also probably wrong. When you look at the way researchers study this kind of happiness, you’ll notice something peculiar: Their questionnaires almost always ask about emotions and mood states, and rarely ask directly about pleasure, pain or suffering. In fact, you might have thought that if happiness researchers were really interested in pleasure and pain, among their queries would be questions aboutpain (“Do you suffer from chronic pain?” and so on). Such pains make a tremendous difference in how pleasant our lives are, yet happiness surveys rarely ask about them

I would suggest that when we talk about happiness, we are actually referring, much of the time, to a complex emotional phenomenon. Call it emotional well-being. Happiness as emotional well-being concerns your emotions and moods, more broadly your emotional condition as a whole. To be happy is to inhabit a favorable emotional state.

On this view, we can think of happiness, loosely, as the opposite of anxiety and depression. Being in good spirits, quick to laugh and slow to anger, at peace and untroubled, confident and comfortable in your own skin, engaged, energetic and full of life. To measure happiness, we might use extended versions of existing questionnaires for anxiety and depression from the mental-health literature. Already, such diagnostics often ask questions about positive states like laughter and cheerfulness, or your ability to enjoy things.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/13/happiness-and-its-discontents/?hp&rref=opinion