Thanks for the exploration. "The scientific method to find out how to be happy is to gather as many happy people as possible and look for what they have in com

Thanks for the exploration. "The scientific method to find out how to be happy is to gather as many happy people as possible and look for what they have in common." Wouldn't the scientific method be more like randomly assigning people to different treatments? At least you should also gather the unhappy people and compare the two groups. Otherwise, maybe you're just picking out things that are common to all people. I guess you do do comparisons in what follows though. I seems like the stress + release pattern does not match all instances of happiness. Some activities seem to lead directly to happiness without the stress: Looking at something beautiful, exercising, taking certain drugs, reading a good story. There's no build-up. The effect is practically instant and continuous. Also, isn't stress inherently negative? The "build-up"s in some of your examples do not seem like instances of stress to me because they are not necessarily unpleasant in themselves.