Happiness is a daily decision, according to author and cartoonist Andrew Matthews.
Responsible for the books Happiness Now, Being Happy!, Happiness in a Nutshell and Follow Your Heart, Andrew has spent many years looking at the best methods of being happy.
"I remember waiting for my life to get easier," he said. "I thought 'When I have less problems, then I'll be happy.'
"Then I noticed something fascinating. The happiest people I knew had more problems than I did."
In the 1990s, researcher Ronald Inglehart published the results of a happiness survey involving 170,000 people from 16 countries, assessing the link between age and happiness.
In every single age bracket, going from the teen years through to the over-65s, about 80 per cent were satisfied with life. No matter what the age, the results were almost identical.
"It's not about your age, it's about your attitude," Andrew said. "People who seem to get the most out of life have often had it tough.
"They have lost loved ones, they've gone broke, they've suffered major illnesses – and most likely, they still have big problems.
"But they are happy because at some point they decided 'happy' is the only way to live.
Happiness doesn't just happen to you like some accident. You make the choice.
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