You’d think it’s easy to define a happy life. Surely, a happy life is one we’re happy most of the time.

Not so says Tal Ben-Shahar. Tal is a bestselling author and former psychology professor at Harvard and later Columbia. He’s also the co-founder of the Happiness Studies Academy.

Tal describes himself as both a teacher and student of happiness, and for him, learning to accept – and even embrace painful emotions – is an important part of a happier life.

Adopting and adapting Nassim Taleb’s original concept of anti-fragility to happiness, Tal says anti-fragility is resilience 2.0. Resilience 1.0 is a system that has the ability to bounce back to its original form and condition after stress has been applied.

Resilience 2.0 – that is, anti-fragility – goes further grows past its original form and becomes stronger after stress. The example Tal uses is our muscles which develop as we workout.

But there’s a paradox – the singular pursuit of happiness can cause more harm than good. The example Tal uses is like sunlight. Sunshine is essential for our health and enjoyable to experience, however we can’t look directly at it. Instead, we engage with the sun indirectly.

And like any good academic, Tal has an acronym to help us think of the indirect elements of happiness just as sunlight is the sum of its constituents.

That acronym is SPIRE – spiritual, physical, intellectual, relational, and emotional wellbeing, which sounds a lot like Switched ON Living and our three dimensions of physical, intellectual, and emotional wellbeing.

Tal’s message just goes to show us once again how universal is the road to wellbeing; the centrality of meaning and purpose in our lives; engaging the world with a curious and questioning mind; actively avoiding stress and pursuing rest and recovery; spending quality time with our nearest and dearest.

We can think of these qualities as the tools we need to make us more anti-fragile, to reset and flourish after any of the inevitable setbacks that life has planned for us. Or we can think of SPIRE and anti-fragile as the ingredients to be Switched ON.