Happiness Isn't Something That Happens to You

I've been working my way through Dr. Laurie Santos's lectures on happiness. Santos is a professor of psychology at Yale, where her course Psychology and the Good Life became the most popular class in the university's 300-year history. She later turned it into a free online course, The Science of Well-Being, which millions of people have now taken, and she also hosts a podcast called The Happiness Lab.

Near the start of her course she says something worth repeating: she didn't build it purely as an academic exercise. Part of why she teaches it is that she needed the reminder herself. She knew the research and wasn't living it.

It reminded me of Albert Ellis, the American psychologist who founded rational emotive behaviour therapy, or REBT, in the 1950s and remains one of the most influential figures in the history of psychotherapy. Ellis talked about what he called responsible hedonism: the idea that a good life comes from weighing up short-term pleasure against your longer-term goals, rather than chasing whatever feels good right now. He also placed a lot of weight on self-direction, on taking responsibility for your own decisions and your own emotional life instead of waiting for someone else to guide you, validate you, or rescue you from where you are. Different decades, different vocabulary, but he and Santos are circling the same point: happiness isn't something that happens to you. It's something you have to keep choosing, deliberately, often against the grain of what's easiest.

I see this in the therapy room more than almost anything else. Someone can understand perfectly well that comparing themselves to others is making them miserable, or that they've spent years prioritising other people's approval over their own direction, and still wake up the next day and do exactly the same thing. Insight tells you where the pattern is. It doesn't move you out of it. That takes an ongoing decision, and Ellis was blunt about how much discipline that decision requires, especially when the short-term pull is strong and the long-term benefit is slow and invisible.

This connects to something I think about a lot in my work: how much of the difficulty isn't feeling okay to be who you are. Sometimes that's loud and obvious. More often it's quieter, closer to drifting through a life shaped by other people's expectations and assuming that understanding yourself better will eventually be enough to change it. It rarely is on its own. At some point you have to decide, actively, to live differently, and keep deciding, because the pull back to the familiar pattern doesn't disappear just because you've named it.

What I like about Santos admitting she needed her own course, and about Ellis insisting that self-direction takes real effort, is that neither pretends there's a version of this that becomes automatic. You don't arrive at happiness and stay there. You keep choosing it, in small, unglamorous ways, week after week.

So if any of this lands with you, it might be worth asking not what would make you happier in the abstract, but what one thing, this week, you could actually choose to do differently.

Further reading and listening

• Laurie Santos, The Science of Well-Being (free course, Coursera)
• The Happiness Lab podcast
• The Albert Ellis Institute, founded by Albert Ellis, for more on REBT

← Back to blog