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My father-in-law, with whom I was very close, spent most of his life on the same working-class street in Barcelona’s El Clot neighborhood. Born in 1929, he saw Spain’s bloody civil war taking place literally in front of his house. His family experienced a lot of suffering. Some died; others spent years in jail or were forced into exile. He himself spent a year in a refugee camp, an experience that affected him for the rest of his life. Every time he wanted to make a point about society or culture, he always started with: “Well, during the civil war …”

One evening, a few months before he died, he read  in his local paper an article of mine about unhappiness. “You have a lot of complicated theories,” he told me, “but the real reason people are unhappy is very simple.” I asked him to elaborate. “They don’t enjoy their dinner,” he responded. I asked him what he meant. “Well, during the civil war, we were always hungry,” he said. “But one day a year—Christmas—we got to eat whatever we wanted, and we were so happy. Today, people snack all day long, are never hungry, don’t enjoy their dinners, and aren’t happy—even on Christmas.”

That is a somewhat reductive hypothesis about global unhappiness, to be sure. But he was not wrong in his main contention: Happiness rises, paradoxically, when you do not get whatever you want, whenever you want it. Rather, well-being requires that you discipline your will and defer your gratifications. Understanding this and taking action to change your habits can make you a much happier person.

[Read: The politics of a long-dead dictator still haunt Spain]

In the behavioral sciences, the most famous study of deferred gratification is the so-called marshmallow experiment undertaken in 1970 by the psychologists Walter Mischel and Ebbe B. Ebbesen. This research project brought 32 young children into a laboratory, where they were offered either animal crackers or pretzel sticks (the marshmallow was an option that came only in later experiments). Before they were allowed to eat the treat, however, the researchers offered an upgrade: If the children could wait by themselves for 15 minutes without eating the snack, they would get a second one. All of the kids accepted the deal, and the researchers left the room and observed each child through a one-way mirror. Ten subjects succeeded in waiting and got the additional snack; 22 of them gave in to their desire and gobbled up the treat before the 15 minutes had elapsed.

Mischel and his colleagues were interested in the long-term differences between kids who were able to defer their gratification and those who weren’t, so they followed the participants as they grew up. In papers published decades later, the psychologists found that the two groups diverged significantly. For example, the ones who waited went on to get significantly higher scores on their SAT exams. Those who didn’t wait used drugs more frequently in adolescence and got less education. The researchers’ conclusion was clear: Being able to defer gratification leads to a more successful—and ultimately more satisfying—life.

As is the case for much research in behavioral science, these conclusions were later contested, by scholars who used larger, more diverse samples of kids and methods that carefully controlled for family background and cognitive ability. For example, one 2018 study concluded that being able to delay gratification has by itself only a weak effect on educational outcomes, and is insignificant in predicting anti-social behavior. Although these revised findings suggest that being able to say no to your immediate desires might not be a universal panacea, newer research has shown that a capacity to defer gratification does consistently deliver one important increase: in well-being. For example, scholars writing in 2014 in the Journal of Personality showed that people who score a high level of self-control enjoy significantly better mood and life satisfaction than those who lack such self-discipline.

One practical example of this happiness effect involves materialistic values and how people spend money: As I have previously written, borrowing money (for discretionary consumption) lowers happiness, whereas saving raises it. You might predict from that finding that people who see money as a sign of success would likely be savers who prefer to delay gratification. Yet on the contrary, two psychologists demonstrated in a 2017 study that people who regard money as the measure of success tend to be spenders: When they have money, they typically use it immediately to acquire things—because they identify having possessions as a source of happiness. The researchers found that these people were less happy than people who didn’t behave this way.

To what degree the ability to defer gratification is down to nature or conditioned by nurture is unclear, but what we do know—because neuroscientists have demonstrated it—is that those who postpone their pleasure exhibit different brain activity when facing temptation from those who want to get their jollies right away. One study, from 2011, showed that people good at delaying indulgence have more activity in the prefrontal cortex (indicating that executive decision-making is taking place) when doing so than people who give in to their desire more easily, who in turn have more activity in the ventral striatum (a region that processes reward). Suggestive also are animal studies that have shown how mice taught to delay a reward enjoy a smoother, more regulated dopamine release than mice without this skill.

[Read: Why rich kids are so good at the marshmallow test]

Although the evidence is mixed on the long-term implications of the marshmallow test, being able to defer gratification is clearly valuable for well-being. Even if some people may be naturally better at postponing rewards, we also have some evidence that the skill can be cultivated from an early age. If this is something you could work on, here are two ways to get started. They may appear contradictory, but done right, they in fact complement each other.

1. Think about the future.
A research-proven approach to improving your capacity for deferred gratification is to imagine yourself in the future. In 2011, a team of researchers interested in how to elicit saving behavior employed digital aging techniques and virtual reality to enable people to interact with elderly versions of themselves. They found that after doing so, the participants were more willing than other people to accept awards of money at a future date rather than immediately.

You can use this finding in creative ways. For example, if you are hankering for a portion of junk-calorie carbohydrates at 4 p.m., have a conversation with a 6 p.m. version of yourself who forwent the snack and is hungry for a good healthy dinner. Or say you are in college and have a big exam tomorrow but have just gotten invited to a party: Have a chat with the unhappy future you who took the exam after partying instead of studying.

2. Don’t think about the future.
Paradoxically, a second technique for delaying gratification is to stop thinking about the future, in the form of purposeful mindfulness, the practice of paying attention nonjudgmentally to the present moment. Scholars in 2018 undertook an experiment in which a group of participants were asked to complete a survey of their willingness to defer rewards. Half of the group were then given an exercise in mindfulness breathing, while the other half (the control group) watched a music video. Afterward, when both groups retook the survey, the mindfulness practitioners were significantly more likely than before to defer rewards (whereas the music-video watchers showed no change).

Despite any initial impression otherwise, this second result is not at odds with the first finding: Its conclusion is that being more conscious when you make decisions will lead you to optimize your choices. So you can bring the two injunctions together and combine them to best effect: Think clearly about what you’re doing right now, and then think clearly about how you will reflect on your action later.

So before you buy that sweater, think about how you are feeling at this moment. Do you really need this sweater, or are you just self-soothing with a bit of retail therapy? Next, imagine yourself looking at the sweater in two months’ time. Does it give you delight or remind you that you have to make a credit-card payment?

[Arthur C. Brooks: Four rules for identifying your life’s work]

My father-in-law was right that deferring gratification leads to greater happiness. The good news is that you don’t need to be in the middle of a civil war to make this skill worth cultivating. But I always wondered whether he was right in his specific example: Does snacking lower well-being by ruining your enjoyment of proper meals? I have been unable to find any studies of this precise curiosity, so I had to triangulate some related research findings to come to a convincing answer.

Researchers who were studying the eating behavior of children reported in 2017 in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior that kids enjoyed food more when they followed structured meal settings—such as eating at the same times each day and dining in a family setting. They also tended to be less fussy about what they were eating. This is broadly supportive of my father-in-law’s theory. And I certainly never saw him eat a snack.

What I did see, however, was his complete unwillingness to save money and a reckless openhandedness about spending it. And this negative example supported his theory even more—though in a sad way, as he constantly ducked creditors and struggled to meet his basic needs in old age. Perhaps the inability to save was also an effect of the privations of his 1930s childhood: If you never know whether you’ve got enough to get through the month, why save the money you have now? Even though he suffered as a result of his spendthrift ways, I took a valuable lesson from his example in this too.

So my seasonal advice: Go to your holiday dinner good and hungry. But don’t buy your holiday feast on credit.

Many friends of mine are pretty deep in the slough of despond. I occasionally plead with them to make their predictions of catastrophe less hopeless and categorical, but with less success than I wish. I respect their points of view but have decided to look elsewhere for advice, and so have turned to a different set of friends—those sitting on my bookshelves.

Some of these friends have been with me for more than half a century; and they get wiser and more insightful with age. One of the first I turned to is only slightly older than I am: Motivation and Personality, by the academic psychologist Abraham Maslow. The book has a family history: Maslow summered at a lake in Maine in a cabin near one owned by my grandfather, a self-made shoe-factory owner who came to the United States with only the benefit of a grade-school education.

The story goes that Maslow was complaining about his inability to finish writing his magnum opus while surrounded by the clamor of kids and holiday-makers. After a couple of days of this, Sam Cohen turned to him, told him that writing was a job like any other, and that he had set aside an office for him in his factory, and then he ordered (rather than invited) him to go there and finish the book. Maslow did, and I have the author’s inscription on the title page to prove it.

[Read: A mindset for the Trump era]

Maslow thought that psychology had focused excessively on the pathological; he was interested instead in what made for psychological health—a deeper and truer objective, to my mind, than the contemporary quest for happiness, which tends to be ephemeral and occasionally inappropriate to our circumstances.

Here are two relevant bits:

Since for healthy people, the unknown is not frightening, they do not have to spend any time laying the ghost, whistling past the cemetery or otherwise protecting themselves against imagined dangers. They do not neglect the unknown, or deny it, or run away from it, or try to make believe it is really known, nor do they organize, dichotomize, or rubricize it prematurely.

And then this:

They can take the frailties and sins, weaknesses, and evils of human nature in the same unquestioning spirit with which one accepts the characteristics of nature. One does not complain about water because it is wet, or about rocks because they are hard, or about trees because they are green. As the child looks out upon the world with wide, uncritical, undemanding, innocent eyes, simply noting and observing what is the case, without either arguing the matter or demanding that it be otherwise, so does the self-actualizing person tend to look upon human nature in himself and others.

This is, as Maslow says, the stoic style, and one to which a person should aspire in a world where norms are flouted, wild things are done and wilder said, and perils real and imagined loom before us. Maslow’s healthy individual has little inclination to spluttering outrage, which does not mean ignoring unpleasant realities. Just the reverse, in fact.

Having settled into that frame of mind, what about the matter of predicting Trump-administration policies? Another even older friend, George Orwell, speaks to that one.

Political predictions are usually wrong. But even when one makes a correct one, to discover why one was right can be very illuminating. In general, one is only right when either wish or fear coincides with reality.

This, I suspect, is going to be a particular problem in dealing with the world of Donald Trump. Neither widely shared hopes (that he will ignore Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump Jr., for example, and be more or less normal in most respects) nor fears (that he’s going to do whatever he wants and be even crazier than he lets on) will be useful guides. But, being human, we will make judgments constantly distorted by both emotions. Orwell has a solution:

To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle. One thing that helps toward it is to keep a diary, or, at any rate, to keep some kind of record of one’s opinions about important events. Otherwise, when some particularly absurd belief is exploded by events, one may simply forget that one ever held it.

Useful advice from a man who confessed that most of his own predictions during World War II were wrong, although, as I know from experience, his remedy can be a painful corrective.

On what basis, then, should one attempt to predict Trumpian policy? A downright ancient friend comes to the rescue on this one:

Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busybody, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial.

This, from Marcus Aurelius, the last good Roman emperor and a thoughtful Stoic philosopher, is not a bad beginning in looking at an administration that will have a few barbarians in it. He continues:

Whatever man you meet, say to yourself at once: ‘what are the principles this man entertains about human goods and ills?’ For if he has certain principles about pleasure and pain and the sources of these, about honour and dishonour, about death and life, it will not seem surprising or strange to me if he acts in certain ways.  

So much of the contemporary speculation about the administration depends on the distinctive personality of the president-elect and some of his more outré advisers and confidantes. But simply ranting about them does not help one understand what is going on.

One of the troubles with the anti-Trump camp is the tendency simply to demonize. Some demonic characters may roam about the administration, but we would be better off trying to figure out what makes Trump tick. In particular, that phrase about honor and dishonor is worth pondering. For a man in his eighth decade with remarkable political success to his credit, who has just survived two assassination attempts, honor in Marcus Aurelius’s sense is probably something beyond “owning the libs.” More likely, Trump is looking to record enduring accomplishments, including a peace deal in Ukraine. Figuring out what he would like those to be, and in what way, is probably the best method of figuring out how to influence him, to the extent that anyone can.

[Jonathan Chait: The bizarre normalcy of Trump 2.0]

Let us say that we get better at training our judgments and anticipating what the administration will do and why. There may still be plenty of things to brood about—the possibilities of tariff wars, betrayals of allies, mass deportations, attempts to prosecute deep-state denizens, and more. Even if Trump himself may be considerably less destructive than some fear, the MAGA movement will be out there: acolytes looking for opportunities to exit NATO, ban abortion entirely, make getting vaccines through Medicare impossible, sabotage the institutions that guarantee free and fair elections, or simply grift and corrupt their way through ambassadorships and other high government offices.

For that, something more spiritual is indicated, and I find it in the Library of America edition of one of the previous century’s deep thinkers, Reinhold Niebuhr.

God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.

Serenity will be something we will need in the years ahead. If you ask me, a well-stocked library will be of more help getting there than tranquilizers, wide-eyed staring at one’s mobile phone, or scrambling to find out if an Irish ancestor qualifies you for a European Union passport.

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A few weeks ago, I wrote about happiness and music but didn’t mention perhaps the most famously joyful work ever written: Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, composed in 1824, which ends with the famous anthem “Ode to Joy,” based on Friedrich Schiller’s poem “An die Freude.” In the symphony’s fourth movement, with the orchestra playing at full volume, a huge choir belts out these famous lyrics: “Freude, schöner Götterfunken / Tochter aus Elysium / Wir betreten feuertrunken / Himmlische, dein Heiligtum!” In English: “Joy, thou shining spark of God / Daughter of Elysium / With fiery rapture, goddess / We approach thy shrine!”

You might assume that Beethoven, whose 254th birthday classical-music fans will celebrate this coming week, was a characteristically joyful man. You would be incorrect in that assumption. He was well known among his contemporaries as an irascible, melancholic, hypercritical grouch. He never sustained a romantic relationship that led to marriage, was mercurial in his friendships, and was sly about his professional obligations.

Perhaps all of that seems only natural, given the fact that Beethoven progressively lost his hearing and was therefore deaf when he wrote his later works (including the Ninth Symphony). But we have ample evidence that his unhappy personality predated his deafness. Even before his hearing loss set in, for example, he complained bitterly about his music’s shortcomings, as he saw them. He is said to have reviled what was probably his most popular early composition, the Septet in E-flat Major, as “that damned thing! I wish [the score] were burned!”

At the same time, he clearly saw—and regretted—the effects of his unhappy personality. “I can easily imagine what you must think of me,” he wrote to an “esteemed friend” in 1787, “and I cannot deny that you have too good grounds for an unfavorable opinion.”

Perhaps you can relate to Beethoven: You recognize that you have some unhappy personality traits—and, like him, you regret that. If you would like to know how to change and acquire a happier personality, here’s how.

[Read: Beethoven’s punk-rock 8th symphony]

Personality is a focus for many social scientists, myself included, and I have written about it in several different columns. The most common way to measure personality is by using the so-called Big Five Personality Traits, which can be remembered via the acronym OCEAN: openness (to experience), conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. You can take this test yourself online and see how you rank on each dimension, compared with the overall population of test-takers.

Scholars have used the Big Five assessment in novel ways. For example, they have found that high conscientiousness is a good predictor of job performance, academic performance, and longevity. Extroversion, openness, and neuroticism are predictive of higher-than-average social-media use; the first two of these (but not the third) also correlate with leadership effectiveness. Risk-taking behavior is associated with high openness and low conscientiousness. Creativity is most related to openness—which makes sense, because a willingness to experiment and try new things is typically part of a creative process.

Scholars have also studied the role personality plays in happiness. Two psychologists writing in the Journal of Personality in 2024 found that up to 54 percent of well-being is explained by the combination that a person has of these personality traits. Researchers have also looked at what causes unhappiness; they identify high neuroticism (which typically makes people feel misunderstood), low extroversion (which can reduce people’s sense of excitement about life), and low conscientiousness (which tends to make a person indecisive).

Thanks to such studies, we can also break down life satisfaction into three components and see how different personality traits affect our happiness in various ways. For example, relationship satisfaction (with an intimate partner) is best predicted by high agreeableness, extroversion, and conscientiousness, and low neuroticism. Meanwhile, high conscientiousness best predicts work satisfaction, while agreeableness and extroversion are associated with highest social satisfaction. Very conscientious people tend to have good marriages and jobs; very agreeable people tend to have plenty of good friends.

Based on all of this, we can reconstruct a personality portrait of Beethoven. We know that he was generally unhappy, struggled with intimate relationships and close friendships, was intensely creative, and was passionate about his work, but unreliable and dissatisfied with it. So he probably scored very high in openness, fairly low in conscientiousness, low in extroversion, very low in agreeableness, and extremely high in neuroticism.

[From the March 2022 issue: I gave myself three months to change my personality]

What does your own personality profile say about your well-being? Mine is an accurate predictor of high happiness—though also of moderately high unhappiness. This is because I rate near the top in openness, conscientiousness, and extroversion, but am in the middle in agreeableness and neuroticism.

If, like my colleague Olga Khazan, who tried to change her personality, you suspect that your personality is keeping you from living your best life, you may want to accentuate the positive elements and dial down the negative parts. The research on this is clear: With targeted effort, you can do so.

To begin with, realize that what you do matters a lot more than what you feel. For example, just because you feel disagreeable doesn’t mean that you must inevitably behave disagreeably. To do so is to hand management of your life over to your limbic system (which processes emotions) rather than your prefrontal cortex (which enables you to make conscious decisions).

Being ruled by the limbic system is how your dog lives. You can do better.

Feelings aside, make a resolution to behave as a happier person would—someone who enjoys a good intimate relationship, close friendships, and their work. To follow that model, scholars recommend such habits and practices as taking an interest in others and engaging in acts of kindness, counting your blessings and savoring good moments, committing to goals, learning to worry less, increasing your faith or meditation practice, forgiving others, and taking positive steps to get physically healthier.

Easy, right? You don’t, in fact, need to do all of these things, but the research shows that happier people do many of them. And that effect can hold true regardless of your attitude toward doing them: You may feel no desire to do any of them, but if you can manage it anyway, that will probably make you happier.

Amazingly enough, getting happier in this way can change your personality, emphasizing the traits that make happiness easier to achieve and initiating an upward spiral. Researchers writing in the Journal of Personality in 2015 showed that people who score higher in well-being tend over time to become more conscientious, emotionally stable, and agreeable—all of which in turn makes happiness more available to them. Curiously, happiness also tends to make people less extroverted: I’d posit that this simply means that as satisfied people age, they prefer to stay home with loved ones and do their own thing.

[Billy Collins: Ode to joy]

We have no data on Beethoven’s happiness level as he grew older, nor about how his personality changed. A pleasing notion is that perhaps he followed something like the program I suggest above: To become happier, he chose to do something a happier composer might do and write an “Ode to Joy.”

He may even have succeeded. On May 7, 1824, he conducted the premiere to a packed house in Vienna. (In case you are wondering how a deaf man could conduct an orchestra, Beethoven had, standing behind him, another maestro whom the orchestra and chorus could follow.) At the end of the performance—culminating in what was the last movement of the last symphony he ever composed—the audience was jubilant. The attendees rose five times to give Beethoven a standing ovation, and threw their hats in the air, which the composer saw only when the musicians physically turned him around to face the audience.

There Beethoven stood, with an expression of amazement and, for a moment at least, of real happiness.

A shortlist of six contenders has been announced for the 2024 BBC Sports Personality of the Year award.