Get to Your Happy Place With These 3 Wishes

The desire to feel happy shapes much of our activity. Most people would rather feel happy than unhappy, and most people also would like to know how to achieve this desired state. A new idea that has emerged in happiness research is that of “essentialist beliefs” about happiness. These are, in short, ideas about whether you can will yourself to be happy or whether you’re stuck with the level of happiness you’re born with, never to get out of the unhappiness rut.

Debbie describes herself as a kind of “sad sack” who’s always felt that happiness is just outside of her reach. She compares herself to her friends who lead a carefree life, one she feels can never be hers. Worse still, she’s pretty much given up on feeling anything but glum and pessimistic, leading her to dread her future, persevere in negative thoughts about the past, and feel that her present level of happiness is about a 3 on a 10-point scale. She's the perfect example of an essentialist.

Essentialist Beliefs about Happiness (EBH)

How do your views about happiness contrast with Debbie’s? According to a new study by Seoul National University’s Xyle Ku and colleagues (2026), “Happiness essentialists endorse the idea that happiness has a biological basis and thus has unchanging qualities, while non-essentialists see happiness as more malleable and subject to external influences” (p. 499).

If you’ve never pondered this concept before, or at least not in so many words, where do you think you stand on the issue? Maybe you’ve always considered yourself, unlike Debbie, someone who can derive pleasure out of even the smallest experience. You share a little joke with your 12-year-old niece, and a good feeling sweeps over you like a wave. But where do you think your high happiness baseline level comes from? Did you inherit it, or have you cultivated it?

Testing EBH’s Role in Buffering Life Events

The Seoul U. research team believed that there are individual differences in EBH that can be documented but, in addition, beliefs in happiness can become self-fulfilling prophecies. To test the idea that EBH could play a role in affecting how much happiness or sadness people experience in relation to life events, the author team designed four separate studies within their investigation (total sample size= 7,364) to see how people high and low in this quality would respond to positive and negative life events.

The EBH scale used in this study contains three dimensions. See how you would score on each:

Biological basis:

• Happiness is genetically determined.
• One’s level of happiness can largely be explained by one’s genetic makeup.
• The biological and genetic characteristics of happy people are more conducive to happiness than are those of unhappy people.

Effort constructivism (all reverse-coded):

• Anyone can become happy with practice and effort.
• One can change one’s overall level of happiness through force of will.
• Happiness depends on your perspective.

Immutability

• In general, a person’s happiness level does not change much throughout one’s lifetime.
• The extent to which one feels happy can temporarily increase or decrease, but it does not change much overall for most people.
• How happy one will be is predetermined for the most part.

On a 7-point scale for each item, the average was slightly less than 3, indicating that people tend more toward the unessentialist view of happiness; if you think you would score more than 4 or less than 2, you would be out of range of the average person in the Ku et al. sample.

Turning now to the prediction that EBH would predict changes in happiness in response to external events, the authors presented participants with a hypothetical event that would predict positive or negative emotions. People with high EBH, in fact, saw themselves as remaining relatively stable in happiness, especially if the events were negatively tinged.

Next, the authors tested how those high and low in EBH differed in response to actual historical events; namely, the COVID-19 pandemic and presidential elections in Korea. The same pattern emerged, with high EBH predictive of fewer negative reactions.

However, you might ask yourself, is it that those with high EBH actually are less happy than those who don’t see happiness as a fixed entity? Testing this idea out, the authors concluded that, yes, people high in EBH are also less happy overall. However, there was a silver lining in high EBH: “this belief may also protect them from experiencing a downward spiral in well-being when facing negative life events” (p. 511), conclude the authors. Over time, though, the coping mechanisms of those high in EBH are impaired by their fatalistic attitudes, and they can become more vulnerable to negative life events.

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The Three EBH Lessons to Be Learned

To avoid the kind of rumination the authors suggest may be at the root of the unhappiness experienced by those high in EBH, it can be beneficial to unpack your own essentialist beliefs, as revealed in those sample items. Like Debbie, perhaps you are convinced that happiness will remain an elusive quality in your life. You figure you can’t possibly change because your belief in the unchangeability of this quality is hard-wired into you.

To get out of this self-fulfilling situation, ask yourself where your fatalistic belief in the chase for happiness came from. Were your early experiences shaped by essentialist people? Did you hear a lot of naysaying around the household? Even more to the point, were there times your optimism about a possible desired outcome was crushed by these same people? Or did you, on your own, decide it was “bad luck” to hope for happiness?

To sum up, finding your own pathway to happiness may involve challenging some of your deepest but untested convictions about the possibility for change. Some tweaking of your fatalistic beliefs may be all that’s needed to bring your happiness more in line with your reality.