• September 9, 2025
• Center for Developmental Psychiatry

The Secret to Happiness

By Jason Dean, MD

 

As a psychiatrist, I spend a lot of time with people struggling with emotional challenges. Most people share the same goal – they want to be happy. Or if I’m seeing their child, they want their child to be happy.

But what does happiness actually mean?

Now, I’m aware that it might be a bit grandiose of me to claim to know the secret to happiness, since people have spent thousands of years trying to figure that out.

I’m not a guru, just a psychiatrist.

But as long as you agree to take this article with a grain of salt, hopefully this perspective will be helpful.

I suggest that the word “happy” is too vague and imprecise. What are we actually trying to say when we say we want to be “happy?”

Is happiness the absence of negative feelings? The lack of depression and anxiety?

No, I don’t think an absence of psychiatric symptoms, by itself, brings happiness.

Unfortunately we live in a world of social media and AI, where everything is meant to be easy, where we are bombarded with constant reminders of how happy everybody else seems to be, and where the world is conspiring to make us believe that we should feel good at all times.

But it’s not actually possible to feel good all the time. This might sound a bit controversial, but I would even argue that it would not necessarily be health to feel good all the time.

I’ll explain.

I once heard a presentation of research that was done at Yale University, where they installed an app on undergraduate students’ phones. The app would ping them from time to time, and they were meant to tell the app how they were feeling in the moment.

The results were dismal. Students were experiencing negative emotions most of the time.

The takeaway of the study was that the students were struggling emotionally and needed help.

Of course there’s no denying that mental health challenges have increased very significantly for teenagers and young adults over the past several years.

But I think that this study was asking the wrong question.

What if, instead of asking how they felt in that moment, they asked whether they were happy they were at Yale? Did they feel optimistic about their future careers? Did they feel passionate about their studies, did they feel connected to their friends, did they have a sense of pride and accomplishment?

Would they do it all over again if they had the chance?

If you pinged Mother Teresa’s phone and asked her if she felt joy at all moments of the day, I’d imagine she might say that caring for the poor and needy was incredibly challenging at times, and maybe even heartbreaking, but I’d also imagine that she felt a tremendous sense of purpose and meaning.

In my opinion, happiness is not just a feeling state. It is a consistent and global attitude and experience of contentment, fulfillment, passion, and optimism, among many other things.

And, importantly, these deeper aspects of life can coexist with negative feeling states, and sometimes negative feeling states are necessary to achieve them.

In terms of psychological theory, I believe that happiness stems from a well-functioning superego. The superego is the part of the mind that deals with morals, principles, and internal standards.

When we feel like a good parent, an accomplished professional, a good friend, a diligent worker, etc., we are tapping in to superego feelings.

Importantly, these feelings are much more stable and long-lasting.

For instance, eating ice cream feels good…for about five seconds. But you can close your eyes and remember a time you did a good deed twenty years ago, and you can still feel good about doing the right thing today.

I believe that when we say we want to be “happy” what we really want is to feel a robust sense of fulfillment, contentment, meaning, and purpose. And we can only attain those feelings through clarifying our values and working diligently toward living in accordance with them.

The secret to happiness is to arrange one’s life in such a way that one derives more pleasure from living in accordance with one’s sense of values, meaning, and purpose than from not doing so.

Practically, what this means is that we will face millions of micro-decisions throughout our lives, where we can choose to do what’s easy and feels good, or we can choose to develop some value that we find important.

Each time we choose to delay gratification and to live in-line with our values, we develop meaning in our lives. The more we grow to appreciate the benefits, we may even develop a sense of passion, optimism, and excitement about facing life’s challenges.

But none of this is easy. It’s hard, and it often feels horrible in the moment.

But when it feels better to be healthy than to eat the ice cream, and better to be a good parent than to vent our anger, then we can achieve a stable sense of fulfillment.

And dare I say…happiness.

 

 

Thanks for reading,

Jason Dean, MD
Clinical Instructor, Yale School of Medicine
Founder, The Center for Developmental Psychiatry