This report summarises the finding of 48 meta-analyses on the most effective ways individuals can improve their own subjective wellbeing. Through this review, we found that mindfulness, the Best Possible Self intervention, and compassion interventions were among the most effective interventions. This article collects a wealth of advice and resources, so we suggest you read the summary and then focus on exploring what seems most useful to you. Note that a substantially modified version of this article is scheduled for publication in the upcoming edition of the journal Flourish.

Summary

This Effective Self-Help report is intended to help you improve your subjective wellbeing (SWB), by sharing key actionable findings from happiness research, and presenting you a ranked list of the best interventions you can follow to be happier.
We start with a general discussion on improving SWB to give an overview of some of the most effective ways to improve it.
- What we mean by subjective wellbeing is “the extent to which a person believes or feels that their life is going well, from the perspective of their own evaluation of the quality of their life”.
- High levels of SWB are associated with better health, relationships, work performance, and fewer mental health problems.
- A few broad factors seem particularly important to explain how happy we are: genetic predispositions, fulfilment of fundamental physical, psychological and social needs, and living in a prosperous community. More specifically, it matters a lot for SWB to have good physical health, no mental health problems, as well as having satisfying employment and intimate relationships.
While this article focuses less on them directly, we consider the following broad general recommendations for improving your SWB to be of primary importance: 1) take care of your mental health, 2) develop a healthy lifestyle, 3) build positive relationships, and 4) focus on making progress on well-chosen goals.
Our research methodology, of which we give a detailed account further down, led us to review 48 meta-analyses and systematic reviews on the effectiveness of 20 different happiness interventions.
After some brief advice on how to implement them, we describe the 20 interventions, that we divided in four categories based on their promisingness and evidence base:
- The most promising interventions with a str

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Effective Self Help