We all want to be happy. Every day, we do countless things to make ourselves feel good, either in the short term or to prepare for the future. The problem is, according to science, we are pretty bad at predicting what is going to make us happy, either because we just don’t know what’s good for us, or because we do, but we’re too lazy to follow through.

For example, research suggests that just 20 minutes of exercise can boost your mood, but it isn’t exactly something we want to do every day (or at all). So does getting enough sleep, but I’m lucky if I get to bed by midnight. Even when we do go through with the things that we think will bring us happiness, we tend to overestimate how happy these things will actually make us. For example, studies show that college football fans overestimate how happy they will be when their team wins (Hsee & Hastie, 2006). Likewise, in my own life, I worked hard to get my Ph.D., then to get a job, and then to get tenure, all of which I thought would make me ecstatic, but when I finally achieved these goals, instead of feeling a burst of joy, it was more like a flutter of relief.

Does this mean we’ll never be truly happy? Not quite. In fact, most people are happy most of the time. But if you’re looking to inject a bit more happiness into your life this winter, researchers have invested a lot of time into figuring out what things make us the happiest. Here’s what they found out.

It’s probably not a shock to learn that the happiest people tend to have the strongest interpersonal relationships, and they also get the most support from their friends and families (Card & Skakoon-Sparling, 2023). Indeed, researchers have consistently shown that there is a strong positive relationship between happiness and interacting with friends and family members. This is true for both extroverts (who get energized by other people) and introverts (who don’t), but extroverts tend to spend more time engaged in social activities, and they report more happiness overall (Lucas et al., 2008). This is true for both adults and children, particularly teenagers (Cheng & Furnham, 2002). Some researchers have even suggested that the relationship between happiness and social interactions works like a feedback loop, where engaging with others makes us happier, and then being happier in turn motivates us to engage more with others. This might help explain why extroverts are happier in general, since they tend to be more motivated to interact with others in the first place. But it’s important to note that........

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