You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas and conversations to spark your curiosity every day.

I'm your host, Elise Hugh.

It might be one of humanity's most sought-after emotions.

Happiness.

And yet the journey toward this universally shared feeling can often feel out of reach.

In her talk, happiness scientist Sonia Lubomirsky shares her number one hack for unlocking

the potential for happiness within ourselves.

And hint, it actually has a lot more to do with others than we might think.

Afterward, I sat down with Sonia to get beyond her talk.

Stick around after for our conversation.

I'm a happiness scientist, and I've been a happiness scientist for 36 years.

For my entire professional career, I've been obsessed with learning the secrets to being a happy person with trying to answer the question, can anyone become happier?

Now, how do we even study something like that? Well, in 1998, my lab pioneered what we call happiness interventions.

Happiness interventions are experiments with human participants.

Over the years, we've done dozens of these experiments,

testing with their practices like expressing gratitude,

or doing acts of kindness,

or simply acting like an extrovert, made people happier.

And they do under the right conditions.

My students and I spent decades doing these experiments.

This work made my career.

And yet I realized that I hadn't really been listening to what the data were trying to tell me.

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