Eva Bradley: Just make other people happy

'You Made My Day - Hawke's Bay - NZ' has 1500 members.

How to be happy? It's a big question. If you reflect on it for a moment, you might even consider it the biggest question we face both individually and collectively. And even though it seems quite simple, solving that particular chestnut is right up there with world hunger and climate change.

This week while waiting for a flight I reached for a self-help book instead of the usual mind-numbing Woman's Day, and unlike every other self-help book I've ever purchased with high expectations I actually started reading it. Even better - it was good!

It was called The Happiness Project and documents the journey one fairly typical first world woman travels to identify and achieve happiness.

I'm only up to chapter one and this is an opinion column not a book review, so I won't go into details, other than to say I'm excited ... and that makes me feel happy. Not a bad result so far.

This week something else unusual also happened to me. Instead of rushing out of my studio for a takeaway coffee and keeping my head down to avoid being delayed by bumping into people I know, I sat outside a new cafe and sipped my coffee languidly in the winter sunshine with my head held high.

As a result I saw a friend and fellow photographer come out of the same cafe, a smile spanning right across his face and a lightness in his step which I hadn't seen before.

He'd just paid for three coffees and told the barista to give them away to whoever came in after him. It was all part of a pay-it-forward idea that had been started by his gorgeous wife a few days earlier when she decided we all needed to be nicer to each other - even if it was in the smallest of ways.

A week on, and the Facebook page she set up called "You Made My Day - Hawke's Bay - NZ" has 1500 members and dozens of people and businesses offering everything from a bag of limes from the tree out back to a free massage or haircut for someone who needs a break.

She's continued the community-based concept nationwide (just look up your own region), and it seems set to generate small and random acts of kindness right across New Zealand. According to my friend, it's making people happy. But what was even more interesting to me was how happy it was making him.

In the pursuit of happiness, most of us naturally assume such things as more time or more money will get us over the line. In reality it seemed that giving away both of these things to other people - strangers even - was giving my friend, and the many others who were joining in, that rare and precious thing that you just can't buy: happiness.

This isn't a new idea or a stunning innovation. Most of us know that helping others generates a feel-good factor you don't get when buying a new pair of shoes. But the difference is in actually doing something about it.

And so here's a challenge for you: make yourself happy today by putting someone else first. Help a little old lady cross the street, let someone else in line before you at the checkout, mow your neighbour's lawn. Then sit back and enjoy what my mum always called the "warm fuzzies"- that feeling of goodwill that spreads through you like warm milk enjoyed on a cold day and is as close to the pure definition of happiness as you're ever likely to get.

-Eva Bradley is a columnist and photographer.