The Recipe for Happiness

By Carl Chinn, LMHC/LPC · Licensed therapist since 2012 · Reviewed September 2026

The pursuit of happiness, or at least of consistently feeling good, is about as old as culture itself. Every era has offered a recipe. Some say happiness is found in living a simple life. Others speculate that you have to be rich. Others yet say it’s an eternal pursuit of balance. Who’s right?

They share a problem. Each one asks you to take something on faith and then wait years to find out whether it worked. Live simply and see. Get rich and see. Chase balance and see. This one doesn’t work that way. There’s an actual formula, and you can check it against your own past before you spend a single day on it.

The formula

The logotherapists helped shine a light on what the formula is. All of our positive feelings, happiness, strength, pride, confidence, enthusiasm, motivation, you name it, are lagging indicators of value.

Lagging indicator is a term borrowed from economics: a number that tells you what already happened, not what’s about to. It confirms; it doesn’t forecast. Your feelings work the same way. They report on something that already occurred.

What they report on is whether you were value aligned. A good feeling is the readout saying that the thing you just did was one of your things.

You can check this against your own past

The forgiving part of this formula is that you can likely see it running through everything behind you.

If you value discipline, the stretches where you made real sacrifices for a future version of yourself are probably the stretches you remember feeling great in. If you value openness, the good feelings likely showed up when you had space and freedom to go explore something. Same person, different value, nearly opposite conditions.

That’s the catch worth naming: everyone has their own values. The recipe is identical, the ingredients are not. What’s valuable to one person may register as nothing to another, and the recipe shifts accordingly. It’s also why so much general happiness advice lands flat when you try it. You were handed someone else’s ingredient list.

You can test this on yourself in about 10 minutes. Pick 3 stretches of your life when you felt genuinely good for a sustained period, a good season rather than a good day. Then ask two questions about each one. What were you doing? What were you responsible for? The overlap between those 3 answers is real data about you, and it cost you nothing to collect.

Why the other recipes need faith and this one doesn’t

Look again at the three old recipes. Live simply. Get rich. Chase balance. They all have the same shape: adopt a whole lifestyle, wait a long time, then check whether you feel better.

And every one of them comes with an escape hatch. If it didn’t work, you didn’t live simply enough. You’re not rich enough yet. Your balance is still off somewhere. There’s no way to run the experiment and get a clean answer back, which is precisely what makes them survive for millennia and precisely what makes them useless to you on a Tuesday.

The value formula can be checked against a Tuesday. That’s the whole difference.

Feelings are indicators, and only indicators

So where does this go wrong? Almost always in the same place.

Positive emotions are indicators. That’s the whole job. We cannot do something value aligned, take on a discipline, say, or finally give ourselves some room, feel good about it, and then drop the discipline or the room in order to keep the feeling. Hold onto the feeling and stop doing the value, and you’ve kicked the legs out from under the thing that was telling you you were headed the right way. It’s the same argument as focusing on the process rather than the result, run in a different key: aim at the byproduct and you lose the thing producing it.

The umbrella paradox

It’s raining. You’re walking down the street with an umbrella up, staying dry. Your arm gets tired. You think to yourself: I’m dry, so I’ll put the umbrella away. You do, and you promptly aren’t dry anymore, with the rain still coming down.

The dryness was never a thing you acquired. It was a condition, held in place by the umbrella, for exactly as long as the umbrella was up.

Our values work the same way. We can end up wanting the feeling of them more than the acting on them. When we do, we betray them, and they withdraw their indicators. Most suffering happens right at that seam: we go to work on the feelings while overlooking the middle step, which is what our values are actually doing.

This shows up in the research, too

Iris Mauss and colleagues found something uncomfortable in a 2011 study in the journal Emotion: the more people valued happiness as a goal, the less happy they tended to be, and the effect was strongest in exactly the low stress conditions where you’d expect someone to feel fine. Wanting the feeling was associated with getting less of it.

Viktor Frankl put it more bluntly decades earlier in Man’s Search for Meaning: success, like happiness, cannot be pursued. It has to ensue, as the side effect of a dedication to something other than the pursuit itself.

Both are describing the umbrella. Aim at dry, lower the umbrella. Aim at the umbrella, get dry.

What this doesn’t mean

This isn’t a claim that every low mood is a values problem. Depression, grief, burnout, chronic pain, thyroid conditions, sleep debt, and plenty of other things flatten mood no matter how well aligned your week was. The formula describes a real relationship between values and positive feeling. It doesn’t replace an assessment. If the flatness has been sitting on you for weeks and doesn’t budge when your week changes, that’s worth taking to a professional rather than to a framework, and it’s worth knowing what therapy actually does before you go.

It also isn’t a promise of permanent good feeling. Nobody gets that, and the people selling it are selling the leap of faith again.

The practical version

When the mood dips, the reflex is to go looking for what’s wrong with you. Try a different question first: what did I stop doing?

Often enough to be worth checking, something that mattered to you quietly fell off the calendar a few weeks back, and the mood followed it out the door. Not because you’re broken. Because the umbrella went down.

There’s a second failure worth flagging, and it’s sneakier. Sometimes people act on a value faithfully, for months, and feel nothing. Usually the value was inherited rather than chosen. It belongs to a parent, a church, a former version of themselves, or a person they were trying to be for somebody else. A borrowed value produces obligation, and obligation has its own distinct feeling, which is not any of the ones on the list above.

So if doing the thing reliably produces relief that it’s over, rather than pride or enthusiasm or any of the rest, that’s information too. It may simply not be yours. That’s not a character flaw, and it’s a much better problem to have than the one you thought you had.

If you’re proactively making sure your values are present in your life, you feel positive more consistently. Not permanently. Consistently. That’s the entire recipe. It’s less romantic than the alternatives, which is probably why it holds up.

Which leaves the obvious question, and it’s a real one. How do you find your values? How do you know what they even are?

That’s the next article in this series. Stay tuned!

About the author
Carl Chinn, LMHC/LPC is a licensed therapist who has practiced since 2012. He writes about therapy, attention, and decision-making at Become The Way. Read Carl’s full bio.

Become The Way is a directory of independent licensed therapists. If you want help sorting out which values are actually yours, you can browse therapists and book directly.

This article is for general information and educational purposes only. It is not a substitute for professional mental health care, and reading it does not establish a therapist-client relationship. If you are in crisis or having thoughts of harming yourself, please contact the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline (US, 24/7 by call or text), your local crisis line if outside the US, or call 911 if in immediate danger.