Over the years that I have been working on happiness, I have found that one of the main challenges I run into is the idea of happiness means feeling “good”. The kind of feeling you get when you find a $20 bill. However this goal is an unhelpful one, as it is normally due to random chance and there is little you can do to intentionally replicate the feeling. Positive Psychology often uses the definition “mental wellbeing” as a definition of happiness, because if your mental wellbeing improves you will be happier.
What different ways can happiness be defined? The World Happiness Report uses the “Cantril Ladder” when ranking countries, which addresses mainly the quality of overall life, but there are also equally useful approaches, such as addressing everyday happiness.
The Cantril Ladder:
Quality of overall life.
(The question used by the World Happiness Report world rankings).
Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from 0 at the bottom to 10 at the top. The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you.
On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time?
Alternatively another way to define happiness is by looking at the quality of your life. This means focusing on the day to day feelings you have around happiness by looking at the day to day feelings around happiness, which of course are more prone to daily ups and downs.
Positive Affect:
Quality of your everyday living.
Answer Yes or No to the following:
1. Did you experience enjoyment during a lot of the day yesterday?
2. Did you learn or do something interesting yesterday?
3. Did you smile or laugh a lot yesterday?
The problem with such wide variations of what we mean for one word can and often does lead to confusion. It is too cumbersome to ask someone what they mean by happiness each time they use the word. And we always assume we know what people mean when they use the word happiness.
If I want to clarify what I mean by happiness when I normally say, “I do not mean that feeling of butterflies in your stomach, rather the hard work it takes to keep your mental wellbeing in good shape”. As you can see, one is a fluttering momentary feeling and the other is long term hard work that leads to a stronger, more resilient person. In the same way if you do exercises to increase or maintain your physical health, you can do work (exercise) to manage your happiness, you will increase or increase your mental wellbeing, or in simple terms, be happy.
How do you know when your happiness increases?
If we had a simple generally accepted definition of happiness, it would be easy to know, but the way we know we are increasing our happiness is by managing our stress and looking for the small things that we should be grateful for. For me, practicing gratitude is the most common way people practice building a better, happier life.
