How do we measure happiness?
How happy are you?
Are you 7 out of 10 happy? Or are you 5 out of 10 happy? Are you ‘very’ happy? Or just 'somewhat’ happy? Does your happiness fluctuate? How often does it fluctuate? How do you know when your happiness is high? How do you know when your happiness is at 'moderate'? Do you just feel it? What’s the difference between 5 out of 10 and 7 out of 10 of happiness? What’s the difference between moderately happy and very happy?
This week I’ve been thinking a lot about how we measure happiness. Is it by the number of times we smile? Or by how many ‘good days’ we have? Like with many other aspects of our life, like our productivity, our fitness, our skills - there is a range of online advice targeted at ‘making us happier’ or ‘improving our happiness’. Youtubers do enjoy a nice baited video title along the lines of ‘The routine that changed my life’, enticing us in to learn their secrets to happiness.
The easy answer here is that happiness is different for everyone, and the answers will vary dependent on who you are asking. Some routines or ‘tricks’ for happiness will work for some, while they will prove meaningless to others. I am less interested in what we do that makes us happy this week, rather our own internal measurement of happiness.
A useful question to ask ourselves here is “What does a happy day look like for me?”. Picturing ourselves happy or at our happiest in our head can help us determine what it is that's important in our lives for achieving happiness. For me, a happy day involves:
A chance to do the activities I enjoy; running, exercising and spending time outside;
A chance to spend time with the people I care about, doing anything from having coffee to simply having a catch-up with friends;
Being well rested and recovering, often with good quality food;
An opportunity to be creative in some form, whether it is writing, brainstorming or designing
If I can have a day doing all of the above, I am confident I would be happy. My day to day happiness therefore could be measured via my social interactions and relationships, the maintenance of my own health, my connection to nature and being outside, and taking my day at a slower pace to enjoy the simple pleasures in life; coffee and food.
However, there is a difference between daily happiness and overall happiness. This is the challenge in measuring our happiness, because when measured by certain parameters, happiness fluctuates on a daily basis. As with many others, because of my job, I often do not get a chance to do the above tasks that would make up my ideal happy day. Does this mean that I am not happy? Is my happiness solely based on my ability to have a happy day through these activities?
This is where we come on to the questions of “Am I happy right now?” versus “Am I happy overall”?. We can replace ‘in overall’ with terms such as ‘generally’, ‘in life’ and so on. For me, what determines the answers to the latter question are the larger themes and aspects of life: a sense of purpose, meaningful work, strong relationships, confidence in identity and so on.
Even if I had a day where I was able to be outside, drink coffee with my friends, exercise and spend some time being creative - if I was struggling with my own sense of identity, if I didn't know what I was doing or where I was going in life, and if the relationships with my friends were thin at best - would I be at my happiest? Would I be happy at all?
One could argue that as we are able to do our 'happy activities', our levels could scrape us by in this instance as they mean we are distracted from the lack of answers we have with regards to our purpose, identity and so on. But as I said - with this funny thing called work, rarely do we have the opportunity to spend the 'ideal' happy day doing everything we want. Some are lucky to get even one of these a week, if not less frequently.
Having the larger themes in life cemented in ourselves is therefore vitally important for maintaining our overall happiness. The state of these parameters is a good marker or measure for our happiness - even though things like our ‘purpose’ or ‘identity’ do not immediately draw the brain to the term happiness. This is because happiness is not necessarily a parameter we 'achieve' (depending on who you ask), rather it is a state we find ourselves in as a result of a complex amalgamation of other parameters.
What are the key larger themes to happiness that we can measure then? Is it always purpose, meaning, identity and social relationships? This is where the argument starts to vary. The answer depends on which theory you align with, or simply just your opinion. Different happiness theories are obviously backed by research and evidence, but we can't always let these dictate our life.
I personally align with the 'PERMA' theory of Wellbeing, by positive psychologist Martin Seligman. This model stands for:
Positive emotion
Engagement
Relationships
Meaning
Accomplishments
The simplified argument with this model is that these themes together are a good marker of our happiness, or as Seligman puts it, our 'wellbeing'. Of course, some of these categories are purposely broad. Positive emotion could rise from a wide range of different sources, from drinking coffee to running in the sun. Meaning could come from your work, your identity or even your place on Earth.
While we could spend hours and hours arguing which aspects are better, what each theme really measures, or even which happiness theory is best, I believe here lies a great opportunity. If you are interested in this topic, as I hope many of us would be interested in maximizing our happiness, then there is an opportunity to find out what happiness means to you.
So many of us meander our way through each week, rarely spending any dedicated time to understand what happiness means to us. We all will have a good idea that we enjoy some beers on a Friday, or we enjoy seeing our friends on the weekend. We may have a good idea of our strong and weak relationships, but how many of us spend time thinking about our purpose? How many of us spend time asking ourselves what level of meaning we have in our life?
We will know that people tell us to “do the things we love” to make us happy. We will know that being around loved ones is a good determinant for happiness. We will know that doing activities that make us feel good and elicit positive emotions will aid us on our quest to be happier, particularly if these outweigh the activities that elicit negative emotions. But if we have no context for the wider measures of happiness, we risk being stuck at an 'ok' level in our lives, coasting along as we follow what we are told we should do to be happy.
Regardless of what theory or themes sits well in your head, it is worth exploring what happiness means to you. We need to poke questions, propose scenarios and direct the magnifying glass internally to understand what it is that guides our happiness. If you don't know, find out. And if you do know, then spend as much time and effort as you possibly can into understanding these measures, and what you can do to improve them.
Because at the end of the day, if we're not trying to be happy - in whatever form that is for you - then what are we doing on this bloody planet?