One day late last spring I was hiking in Norway. For much of the afternoon, we climbed a rocky trail to a 2,200-foot lookout point. Two tributary fjords split from the main fjord, all lined by expansive walls of striated granite, forest, scree, and moss. A massive waterfall cascaded down a rock face, and we took turns hanging our heads over the side to see how far the drop would be. Being in such propinquity to death gave a moment of morbid thrill, a rush to supplement the high, the exquisite happiness, that each of us, I'm sure, felt.

"Norwegians have the world's highest suicide rate," someone said. That I'm not sure who said it is due, I think, to having heard many people say it. It just seemed to delight people to hear about miserable Norwegians. The conventional wisdom was that blame lay with the long periods of darkness in winter and unremitting stretches of rain. What else were people to do but kill themselves? It's a strange thing for people to be proud of, and I suspect it came up because we looked down.

"Bhutan doesn't have a gross national product. It has a gross happiness product," said our alleged leader. (I won't name him; let's just call him "Phil.")

Phil had already established himself as a purveyor of dubious factoids. He had told us, for example, goats lack anal sphincters, so that if they go into the water they bloat like tics and die. Even so, the idea of a "national gross happiness product" had appeal.

How, after all, do you measure happiness? How does it become a national priority, or a crisis? How, most importantly, do you understand and try to manage your own?

On work and happiness
Happiness has become a trendy topic, with recent cover stories in magazines including Time, the Economist, Harvard Magazine, and Psychology Today, among others. The happiness movement, a.k.a. positive psychology, began in 1999 when a University of Pennsylvania psychologist named Martin Seligman gathered colleagues and pointed out that more than a century of trying to fix what was wrong with people hadn't produced such great results. Seligman, who made his mark studying learned helplessness, won followers who wanted to plumb the depths of happiness.

Seligman notes three aspects: the pleasant life, the meaningful life, and the engaged life. It's an emotional state, a feeling, but it's also a condition, and we inherit about half of our "happiness predisposition." The other half comes from external factors, including health and relationships.

Work matters, too, and happiness there depends on matching skills, interests, abilities, and a sense of purpose. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi ("chick-sent-me-high"), a towering figure in the positive psychology movement, pioneered the idea of flow, the mental state you're in when you hit the balance of skills, abilities, interest, and sense of purpose.

Some research also reinforces old saws. Money, for example, does not buy happiness, at least once you've reached a certain economic level, according to a study by economists last year. People's happiness rises sharply as income moves from $5,000/year to $50,000/year. But between $50,000 and $250,000, there's not a discernible move. Turn it around, though, and you find that happy people tend to have more money. They're more productive and enjoy better health.

And money, even once you are securely settled in the middle class, does matter. Rather than buying power, though, its weight is symbolic--as an expression of value. "Artists, for example, tend to be disgruntled because they have a hard time getting people to value their work," says Stephen Shapiro, author of Goal-Free Living.

Some research is counterintuitive. Happiness may be desirable for everyone, but not everyone benefits from it the same way. In fact, it may even be a disadvantage in certain fields.

"Lawyers and accountants do better if they're mildly depressed," says Carol Kauffman, assistant professor at the Harvard Medical School in Cambridge, Mass. "It hones their focus skills. It's tricky to be in flow with numbers and happy. With lawyers, there's a correlation with pessimism. You have to see what can go wrong."

Likewise, being positive is not always so, well, positive. Ideally, good relationships, which are a component of happiness, thrive with a degree of negativity. One workplace study showed that business teams who had a three-to-one positive-to-negative ratio of interactions did best. Those who were ten-to-one were as ineffective as teams who were disproportionately negative.

"Love without criticism," the sages of the Talmud warned, "is no love at all."

New objective: Lose the goals
Shapiro, who reinvented his career after 15 years as a consultant for a Fortune 500 company, argues that working toward objectives is a path to misery.

"Thirty-six percent of the country says that the more goals they set for themselves, the more stressed out they become; 52% say that one of their goals is to reduce the amount of stress in their lives," he says, citing results of a random telephone survey by Goalfree.com, with assistance of Opinion Research Corporation of Princeton, New Jersey.

One common mistake, Shapiro says, is that people get locked into their habits and unsatisfying routines, and they're conditioned to meet goals. Instead, he says, they should be open to new experiences.

"People bust their butts all the way to retirement--and drop dead soon after," Shapiro adds. "If you defer your happiness in the belief that you'll be happy later, you're fooling yourself. It doesn't mean being irresponsible, but you need to take action and take risks for real happiness."

People have developed happiness metrics--hedonimeters is the word coined by economists--and you can test your own (www.viastrengths.org or try www.authentichappiness.com). I scored an 82% among people in my community, and if the research holds, the bump I probably got in Norway will settle back to my reasonably merry norm.

For the record, Norway is not a world leader in suicide; it's 44th in the world. And with apologies to Phil, it's true that Bhutan has a Gross National Happiness Index but it isn't in the top ten. It's number 13 according to the Happy Planet Index, a survey ranking national happiness by the New Economic Foundation and Friends of the Earth, which measured longevity, environmental friendliness, and "human wellbeing."

Number one on that list is Vanuatu. That, in case you're wondering, is in the South Pacific, and no, I'd never heard of it, either.

Todd Pitock (todd@toddpitock.com) is a regular, and happy, contributor to Juggle. He has also written for ForbesLife, Discover, Salon and the Travel Channel, among others.