VICE Health

All that most people want out of life is to be happy. And yet the pursuit of it has somehow become its own source of misery—an industry of morning routines, optimization stacks, and expensive retreats standing between people and an answer that researchers have had for decades.

A 2025 meta-analysis spanning 145 studies and 28 countries found that certain habits reliably increase well-being regardless of where you’re from or how you were raised. Here are three of them.