Are there different levels of happiness? Does it start with sort of happy and go all the way to very happy? Or is happiness binary – either you’re happy or not happy? Can you even measure happiness?
There are all kinds of studies and tests – some of them on the internet – that claim to tell you how happy you are. You can be ‘Kind of Happy,’ or 7.4 happy or 85% happy. Some studies even claim you can’t measure happiness.
There are some very well documented and researched approaches to measuring happiness. Most don’t attempt to measure how happy you are at this moment. They tend to measure your ‘subjective wellbeing’ or ‘happiness quotient’ or ‘likelihood of happiness.’ None of these measures come close to measuring what we know and feel as happiness.
Happiness is something you feel in the moment. It is highly subjective – meaning you can define it. You are either happy now, or you aren’t. You can have levels of happiness in the moment. A nice pleasant smile feels different from laughing so hard you have tears running down your face. The difference is nice and does matter, but what matters, even more, is if you are happy or not. It’s either yes or no. In other words, it is binary.
So, if we are either happy or not at any given time, we have a very easy way of measuring happiness. We just need to get an estimate of the amount of time you are happy. Your Happiness Ratio is the percentage of your waking time when you are happy. Remember, you are happy whenever you say you are happy – the time you have that happy feeling you get when you smile – the feeling we talked about in the last blog post.
In the next post, we will talk about how to measure your happiness ratio.
