What Is Your Happiness Quotient?

This article appears in the Rich Life Carnival.

(photo by Leah Eggers)

When my son still lived at home I would ask him, “What’s your hunger quotient?”. I didn’t ask him if he was hungry because it wasn't really a yes or no question. If he was fine I could go on with whatever I was doing. If he was feeling a little peckish, I could finish what I was doing but I needed to start moving towards producing a meal. If he was starving, I needed to stop what I was doing and cook. There was also the question of how much food he needed. Would a snack do? Or a sandwich? Or would only a full meal satisfy?

Happiness is sort of like that. Am I happy? It’s a simple question without a simple answer. Ask yourself this question every hour throughout the day and you may come up with a different answer every time you ask. Although most of us are not happy all the time, we seem to feel we deserve to be. Our inability to realize this impossible expectation can lead to unhappiness with our reality. What does it mean to be happy? If you ask one hundred different people what happiness means, you will probably get one hundred different answers. Instead of asking yourself, “Am I happy?”, ask, “What’s my happiness quotient?”. Am I content? Am I feeling productive and purposeful? Am I relieved about a choice I have made or a problem I have solved? Am I slightly down but mostly okay? All of these answers represent different levels of happiness. We need to stop chasing whatever myth of perfect happiness we have created in our minds and find it all around ourselves.

Feeling gratitude for where we are and what we have is the first step on the road towards real true happiness. If you’ve just lost your home or your job or your mate or you are drowning in debt, feeling happy may seem like an impossible mission. “Fake it ‘til you make it” is an expression frequently used in twelve step programs. While you don’t want to “fake it” you should not expect gratitude and ultimately happiness to come without effort. Make a choice in the midst of your sadness or depression to be grateful for something. You may have to work at it, but you will be able to find a target. Perhaps you just looked out the window and saw some kid playing outside. Instead of allowing your thoughts to segue into how unfair it is that you don’t have a child, just enjoy that boy out there laughing. Don’t allow yourself to think of anything else for the few minutes he’s in your line of sight. Now be grateful for that few minutes. Try this exercise for a few minutes out of every hour. At the end of the day you’ll have several small positive experiences you can reflect on. Perhaps the day will not look quite so grim.

This gratitude exercise is just exactly that; an exercise. Think of it as an assignment. As you search for a way to complete it each hour, you will become more aware of the good things around you. You only have to choose to see them. Life is full of these little moments of happiness. Next try smiling at the people around you. Most of them will smile back. It may seem trite but you’ll find it’s true; smiling makes you happy. Smile at the woman behind you in the checkout line at the end of an exhausting day. You’ll both feel better. Smile and thank the kid who loads your groceries into your car. Smile at the dry cleaner, smile at your neighbor. If someone grimaces in return, smile at someone else. All that smiling and gratitude throughout the day represents more little pockets of happiness.

While smiling and being grateful will not magically find you a new love, make you thinner or reduce your credit card debt, it will make you feel more positive. Positive people have an amazing ability to attract other positive people. Feeling more positive will help you see solutions to your problems. Actively working on your problems will build your self confidence and allow you to see the temporary nature of whatever is getting you down. Seeing your problems as temporary will decrease their ability to make you unhappy. Into that void will rush…happiness! That happiness might not take the form of Prince Charming whisking you away to his mortgage-free castle but that’s okay. Dreams are just dreams. In this moment, if you let it, reality can make you happy.

Right now, what is your happiness quotient? What can you do to increase it?