What does happiness mean to you? I know what it means to me: love, family, work, Cadbury's Chocolate Fingers, dancing, a whole night uninterrupted by insomnia, and unexpected weight loss.

Tomorrow sees the launch of TopTips.com's Campaign for Happiness. TopTips.com is the community website I founded two years ago which allows people to post their problems and everybody else to pile in with their solutions.

The troubles range from the prosaic (how to get red wine out of the sofa) to the profound (how to cope with bereavement) and most have inspired three or four people to post tips in response. However, the problem “How to be happy?” provoked an outpouring of solutions.

We know people want the answer as it's one of our most searched tips but the sheer number of responses means it's the one issue about which most people feel they have some little grain of goodness to share.

So the Campaign for Happiness is all about reminding people that we're here for a good time, not just a long time, by bringing them TopTips for contentment.

We are also using it to raise funds for Cancer Research UK — just think of the happiness one person experiences on being given the all-clear.

Every day we'll publish a simple Act of Happiness for the nation to take part in, and ask for feedback and more suggestions.

We'll be asking for more TopTips on how to be happy, for pictures and videos of things that make people happy, and pictures of their happy faces.

The best contributors will win prizes and a chosen few will be awarded the “I'm Happy, press here for details” badges which will bring more prizes and discounts, as well as recognition for being a Happiness Hero.

In trying to define the art of happiness I turned to philosopher Alain de Botton. The author of The Architecture of Happiness, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, Status Anxiety, The Consolations of Philosophy and How Proust Can Change Your Life, he is clearly a man who knows a great deal about such things.

“Happiness is normally seen as the outcome of success in certain areas: in love, work, friendships, your environment and the feeling that your society is moving in roughly the right direction,” he says.

“But if we drill beneath that, what is it about love that is supposed to be so happiness-inducing? I think it's partly about being understood, for the things that you feel the need to be understood, and that is quite tricky to understand.

Someone might say to you: I love you', and you might ask, What for?' So you want to be loved for the things about you that you think are most significant, important and perhaps slightly unrecognised. And similarly there's a mutual pleasure in doing that for somebody else.”

The happiness that our work can bring is hugely under-reported. For the Campaign for Happiness we have been photographing Londoners holding a whiteboard on which they have written what makes them happy.

“My beautiful girlfriend”, “chocolate” and “high heels” have been typical of the replies. Not one person has written “my work”. Even I wrote “being very tidy”, but on reflection my work makes me significantly happier than my regimented sock drawer.

De Botton continues: “What makes work satisfying is the feeling that you're able to bring to bear on the world something that is very special to you, and that you're able to mould events, things or the world some way to your liking.

That might mean making a pot, steering a company or making a dress, but you're somehow managing to make a bit of the world in your image. It's almost like creating something that's better than you are. People find their work almost redemptive, because it's a chance to do something better.”

But what about all the bad things in life, not least death? “Happiness partly means being able to shut some things out,” he says.

“It's about being selective in your attention, being able to distract yourself in fruitful ways, not playing video games, but somehow managing to keep at bay all sorts of thoughts, not least about your mortality and the mortality of those you love.”

So is it all about the famous “living in the now?” “What stops us living in the now' is the feeling that then' will be better. In one view, there's a kind of resignation in accepting now', it's like: You want me to accept this?'

It's not necessarily pure joy, there's a certain amount of saying It could get a lot worse.' Which is why people who have just had a near-fatal accident tend to go: Well actually, now's pretty good, so let's stop thinking about the future, we don't know what's going to happen.'

Spooking yourself a little bit about things like death and accidents can be quite a vital part of being happy. Knowing how to selectively frighten yourself is sort of dancing on the edge between terror and a kind of naive optimism which drains life of it's significance.”

De Botton is particularly interesting on our perception of others' happiness. “When two friends meet it's deeply annoying if one of them says: My life's going great, everything's fine, my relationship is brilliant.' That's seen as putting up a barrier.

Intimacy is built out of shared problems, so if you simply arrive at the lunch table and say I'm completely happy,' really you're saying I don't need anybody — I don't need you.' Whereas if you have a problem, automatically you're letting someone into your life, you're saying I'm dissatisfied.' If you said I don't know where the train station is' or I'm lost in my work, will you help me?' you are immediately creating space for another person.”

He continues: “Some of the most boring people, people you don't really know what to do with, just don't tell you anything that's wrong with their lives.

A lot of people who are charming selectively reveal their insecurities. I don't think it's calculated but it's really very effective because it creates a role.

“One of the things we like to do is to hear other people's problems and try to solve them — after all, that is what TopTips is about. That's what makes people very, very happy — to be able to solve other people's unhappiness.

We want to give our advice, we want to feel that we can make a difference to other people's lives and that we've got something to say.”

What about TopTips' specific Acts of Happiness, which we will encourage people to commit, such as counting your blessings or paying for the person behind you in the newspaper queue?

“One of the interesting things about your idea is that we might need to be quite structured about our attempts to be happy,” says de Botton.

“Rather than leaving it all to chance, we might need to undertake exercises of particular sorts. We're used to taking exercise physically but we're not used to taking exercise mentally.

Religions, especially Buddhism, are very concerned with putting us through exercises: You have to meditate at this time, you have to pray at this time ...'

“But I suppose there's an idea that you might need to count your blessings regularly, even if you're not religious; you might need to do some of those things which are quasi-religious; leave aside a set amount of time in the day, think about something. Such exercises feel very artificial, but the art of it is that they might be beneficial.”

What makes us happy

“What makes me happy? A glass of Jack Daniel's at the end of a mad week... Wakeboarding behind a speedboat. Being massaged by someone with firm hands, and sitting on a beach as the sun goes down watching my kids play — I wish I was enjoying either of those now!” - Jo Whiley

“I follow Mma Ramotswe's advice on the subject of happiness. She is quite clear on this. She says that the surest way to be happy is to cause happiness in others and then to enjoy it oneself. I think she is right” - Alexander McCall Smith

“Wear a fabulous smile, great jewellery and know
that you are totally and utterly in control!” - Donatella Versace

“Being with my sons. Finishing a book. Starting a book. Jameson's on the rocks. The Uffizi Museum. The company of friends. Watching Roger Federer play tennis. Kindness. New York. Bombay” - Salman Rushdie

“Swimming at dawn off an empty Cornish beach” - David Cameron

“Peanut butter and jam on toast” - Nick Clegg

“As Joseph Campbell said, Follow your bliss'” - Peter Gabriel

“Create something” - Luke Johnson

“There's a Chinese proverb: Those the Gods hate, they satisfy their ambitions'. I find that comforting because it implies that ultimately happiness is in the striving, not the succeeding” - Jemima Khan

For more happiness go to www.TopTips.com