Gardening: Has a positive effect on your happiness which doesn't diminish over time.
So: The Secret of Happiness
If you want to be happy for a few hours - get drunk.
If you want to be happy for a few years - get married.
If you want to be happy for life - get a garden.
I thank you.
Oh, and while you're here, today is POAD's first birthday.
Having Children: Contrary to what you'd expect, the graph is negative when they're very young. There are little happy spikes along the way*, but the effect on your overall happiness is bad**, until they start to develop into interesting individuals - like JP and Tiddler.
*beyond my graph-making capabilities
** no sleep, no social life, just endless pee, poo and puke.
Getting married: The bad news from the research is that the year in the run up to your wedding is the happiest! So if you're engaged right now - make the most of it.
Of course there are some gluttons for punishment...
Getting Drunk: A brief peak at the point of being roaring drunk, followed by the crash into hangover on the negative axis. Not sure if the hangover dip shouldn't be sharper than the happiness peak, but I suppose that depends how much Guinness has been consumed. 
I told you on my birthday that I would share the secret of happiness with you and now the day has come.
The theory comes via Richard Reeves of Making Slough Happy fame.
If you're Salvadore Vincent, you can make genius diagrams of this. I will have an amateur go and make it last over a few days.
On the vertical axis you have degrees of happiness and on the horizontal axis you have elapsed time. The research asked people what made them happy and how long did it last and the results were then plotted.
You get graphs that look like this:
Winning the lottery: You get an initial uplift in happiness, but then it levels out and might even tail off. Money can't buy you happiness, but it can buy some of the things that will contribute.
More tomorrow.
