How we are measuring subjective happiness in the modern day.  And as a population, we can have a crappy morning and still feel like we have a good and happy life.   

Transcript:

Welcome to Everyday Happiness where we create lasting happiness, in 2 minutes a day,  through my signature method of Intentional Margins® (creating harmony between your to-dos and your priorities), happiness science, and musings about life. 

I'm your host Katie Jefcoat and during this course I’m taking on happiness, it got me thinking about just how subjective happiness is, even throughout our own day. I was thinking about my own subjective happiness as I moved through the day. 

 If I were to ask you all, listening today, what happiness is, we will all have different answers. 

What I found to be more exciting though, is that we can have a crappy morning and still feel like we have a good and happy life.   

There are 3 ways that researchers measure happiness: 

The first is overall life evaluation.  They do this through a cognitive life evaluation, like a quiz.

This measures how happy you are with your life overall. This type of evaluation is used by the UN when they rank the happiest countries in the world. This asks people to evaluate their life - as a whole - on a scale from 0 to 10.  

The second way that researchers measure happiness is by Affective happiness. These are your moment-to-moment feelings that can fluctuate during a day. Maybe you are upset that your car wouldn’t start or the train was late for your commute.  This probably doesn’t make you happy in that moment.  This approach is used in the Mappiness study - which mapped out the happiness of people in the UK.  They asked people at different times of day what they were doing and if they were happy.  I think this is where some of the findings that social connection is so important for happiness comes from.  It’s important because it turns out that we can’t really rely on our memories because our experiencing selves (in the moment) and our remembering self perceives happiness differently.  Can you think of a time where your memory of an event feels more happy that it was in the moment?  I know I can.  

The third way that researchers measure happiness is by eudaimonia yüdēˈmōnēə this sense of meaning and purpose in life.  It’s what Aristotle was getting at with his work.  And it’s often considered the missing piece in happiness evaluations.

I think the hardest part of this type of work is finding trends and quantifying something that is innately hard to quantify, but the researches have done an amazing job at bringing the general public along for this work.   In the show notes today, there are links to the studies if you want to dive deeper into understanding how happiness is interpreted in todays modern world. 

If you are enjoying these episodes, subscribe to wherever you listen to podcasts. 

This episode was inspired by The Happy Course

Get Everyday Happiness delivered to your inbox by subscribing at: https://www.katiejefcoat.com/happiness

And, let’s connect on social at @everydayhappinesswithkatie  and join the community on the hashtags #IntentionalMargins and #everydayhappinesswithkatie on Instagram

Links:  https://onamission.bio/everydayhappiness/