Happiness...

What would you like from therapy? How would you like life to look different?
Its an important question I ask my clients when they first come to see me. We need to establish some direction, and to check if that direction is realistic.
 
The most common answer?  ‘I just want to be happy’.

Happiness is  a subjective emotional state. When studied, humans are notoriously poor at predicting what makes us happy.
 
The World Happiness Report looks at 6 factors which contribute to our life evaluations. These are: GDP per capita, social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom, generosity, and absence of corruption. These factors appear to influence an individual’s evaluation of their own happiness. If you want to move to the happiest country on earth, book yourself a ticket to Finland (the top 7 are all held by northern European countries). Australia ranks 12th on these dimensions. Not bad. Pipped at the post by our cousins in New Zealand who come in strong at 8th place.
 
Ancient Greeks had two concepts for happiness… Hedonic happiness (happiness derived from pleasure), and Eudiamonic happiness (happiness derived from meaning and purpose). My interest is in the Greek concept of Eudaimonic happiness.

​Meaning and purpose doesn’t need to be an all-encompassing passion… you don’t need to write a novel or solve a major world problem. Some days, my meaning and purpose is very granular and simple… I was kind to that person, or I shared my resources in a helpful way. By no means am I dismissive of hedonic happiness. Pleasurable activities, play and spontaneity are part of a well-balanced life, essential ingredients for emotional wellbeing. However, if our goal is to achieve a sense of hedonic happiness most of the time, our expectations may fall short… the reality is, if you check out a feelings wheel, we are simply far too emotionally complicated to sustain a happy emotion all the time.
 
Typically, we measure happiness by checking how satisfied a person is with their life. Knowing your values and making decisions based on those values may be one protective factor in being able to score highly when someone next asks you how satisfied you are with life. For me, a healthy goal would be to maintain a sense of peace in life, regardless of where the happiness needle spins to on your feelings wheel.