Stephen McGinty: Happiness is all about the moment

THE cherry blossom is out in my garden. For two weeks the boughs will be a cascading flow of a white so virginal we call her "the bride". While her veil will be cast off soon enough, I'm trying to spend five minutes each evening in quiet contemplation of nature's brief show, and last night, as the sun set and turned the sky a burnt ochre, a wave of contentment rolled over me. I was happy.

And you should be, too. For this week, Action for Happiness, a new mass movement, was launched designed to lighten our mood.

In recent years there has been a spate of studies into happiness - with surprising results. Mexico and Nigeria are, reportedly, the happiest nations with what they lack in this life compensated by their citizens' belief in what they will receive in the next. The path to happiness leads in different directions for different nations. In Japan, despite the tsunami of grief it has recently endured, happiness comes from the maintenance of self-discipline and meeting family goals, while in America it is linked to material success.

Multiple questionnaires have confirmed what makes us unhappy and that this is an overt concern with income and social status, with those so afflicted liable to endure higher rates of illness, depression and stress than those for whom it matters less. We also know that the two principal pegs on which happiness hangs her hat are control of one's life and to be appreciated for what one does, which means that a happy society should be free, democratic and with a high degree of job security. Oh well, two out of three isn't bad.

Yet we also appear to have a default level of happiness, with, after two years, both lottery winners and those paralysed in accidents returning to their previous emotional level.

So how can we be happy? The easiest way is to be born happy. Or, at least, within reach of an emotional plateau where on a good day, when the clouds clear you can at least see happiness spread out below. There are those born lower down the emotional spectrum, and I don't mean they are in any way lesser, just that their capacity for contentment is restricted, and who can't, whatever they do, clamber up those slippy slopes.

I've recently finished reading Martin Amis's memoir, Experience, in which he documented his father, the author Kingsley Amis's night terrors, his pathological inability to be alone in a house after dark.

It was a fear of death that he tried to subsume, as a younger man with Herculean bouts of adultery, and, until the end of his life, with the narcotic effect of alcohol. He was once asked by an interviewer if he could imagine being a happier person, and he replied: "Only if I was born a different person."

My friend is of a similar disposition, but without even the comforts of adultery and alcohol. He described his response to those who urged him to cheer up as akin to asking a submarine, once it has reached the surface, to then take flight - "it's just not designed for that purpose". And yet, when gripped by the right comedy, his laughter is explosive, as if happiness, instead of being spread throughout his days, comes in tiny dynamic charges.

There is a logical philosophy to happiness that makes perfect sense, but due to the fact that we are human is difficult to achieve. The first step is acceptance. We have to literally sit down and examine our life as it currently is and "accept it".

This does not mean we accept our faults, or decide not to strive to be better, but for each day accept that this is how our life currently is, because the desire to have a better life, a bigger house, to not only catch up with the Joneses but surpass them leads to discontentment which is an antechamber to unhappiness.

Happiness is also a gift you receive by giving it away. Mark Twain said that the best way to cheer yourself up is to try and cheer someone else up. It's true. By being selfless, and putting the needs of others before ourselves, is to take strident steps towards happiness, because we are moving out from beyond ourselves. If we are thinking about others we are not thinking about ourselves, and when we make others happy it radiates back on us. Neuroscientists have shown how it affects the same part of the brain.

Be in the moment. Just now. This second. Our brains are like neurotic busboys, forever shuttling between past regrets and future fears. We are rarely, if ever, here.

David Foster Wallace, the American novelist, once gave a university address where he tried to bestow upon the graduates the basic tools of a more contented life, something which three years of higher education had not touched, which was how to cope with the oceanic swathes of tedium that stretch out between the pacific atolls of genuine excitement. The answer was mindfulness, to break even a visit to the supermarket down to tiny seconds of being absolutely present in the now.

Look at the milk as it trundles along the conveyor belt and try to concentrate on nothing else. How to cope with boredom is the subject of his posthumous novel, The Pale King, published last week, for unfortunately he killed himself after decades struggling with clinical depression.

It is often the case that the best advice on how to be happier comes not from the happy, but the sad, those who have to struggle to achieve access to those sunny uplands. Abraham Lincoln, for whom black moods were as much an accompaniment to his life as the stove-pipe hat and beard, stated that a man can be as happy as he makes up his mind to be. Happiness, he believed, could be an act of will, a choice.

I've always respected the Greek philosophers who founded the Stoic school of thought, who had the idea that philosophy was medicine for the soul and that if we tried to think about matters in a certain way it would bring us comfort, that strange emotional slip in gear where the low hum of anxiety is replaced by silence and an ease, as if a reassuring hand had been placed on our shoulder.

Seneca, the Roman Stoic philosopher, said: "The happy life is a life that is in harmony with its own nature." He believed that happiness came from personal discipline, from those who had examined their life and activities and, in all matters, acted correctly and with courage and concern for others. His attitude was that happiness, as of itself, was not a matter to pursue, but correct behaviour should be the target with happiness the prize.

(An interesting historical footnote: the uprising of Queen Boudica can be laid at the Stoic's door, for he was said to have lent money to a governor in Britain, who, in an attempt to gather the necessary funds to repay him launched his unfortunate campaign against the Queen.)

Seneca's idea was most eloquently put by AC Grayling, who has argued: "The first lesson of happiness is that the surest way to be unhappy is to think that happiness can be decidedly sought. The fact is that happiness is an epiphenomenon, that is, something that arises, as a by-product of other things, and is only ever a by-product. It comes unconsciously and from the side, it is not and can never be the target. It is like the dot of light in a dark room, which, if looked at directly, is invisible but which comes into view when one directs one's gaze elsewhere."

Which is exactly what I must do, so do excuse me, the bride beckons.