An overview of positive psychological therapies and interventions for enhancing and sustaining happiness

Everyone wants to be happy. Increasing and sustaining happiness is often the goal that clients express when they come to therapy. Historically, psychotherapy has been based on deficit models and alleviating distress. Positive psychological therapies follow positive psychology's strength-based models to go beyond just alleviating distress to enhancing wellbeing and happiness by improving meaningful relationships, cultivating positive emotions, and more. Positive psychology and therapies/interventions drawing on positive psychology have potential to enhance clients' happiness and help them sustain that in the long term. Positive psychotherapies and interventions can help clients evaluate barriers and discover facilitating factors of living a full-life which can contribute to happiness. This is a brief, introductory article for clinicians to gain some basic knowledge about the empirical effectiveness of positive psychology and positive psychological therapies/interventions for enhancing and sustaining happiness and the associated implications.