Are you happy? How do you think you will feel a month or two from now?

Predicting whether we will be happy or not in the future is something that the vast majority of us would like to understand better. After all, if we could make changes today that we knew would make us happier tomorrow, we would act.

For a lot of people, achieving happiness is about getting rid of the negative parts of life: if only we could be free from stress, boredom, illness, loneliness or financial hardship, then we’d be more content and more satisfied with our lot.

If you knew what made you happy tomorrow, you’d make changes today (Credit: Getty Images)

But what if there was more to it than that? Is happiness just the absence of problems, or is it something more? “We don’t know if people are happy because they got rid of all the negative factors in their life or whether they need to do something more positive and active to build happiness,” says Peter Kinderman, professor of psychology at the University of Liverpool in the UK.

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