On the outside, Gretchen Rubin had it all--a good marriage, healthy children and a successful career--but something was missing. Determined to end that nagging feeling, she set out on a year-long quest to learn how to better enjoy the life she already had. Each month, Gretchen pursued a different set of resolutions--go to sleep earlier, tackle a nagging task, bring people together, take time to be silly. She read everything from classical philosophy...

In a world obsessed by happiness, this is the first book to look thoroughly at what happiness is and how it works. Bringing together insights from psychiatry, psychology, and philosophy, psychologist Nettle examines whether people are basically happy or unhappy, whether success can make us happy, what sort of remedies to unhappiness work, why some people are happier than others, and much more. We discover the evolutionary reason why negative thoughts...