What Makes Us Happy – Some Surveys

Watching Revolutionary Road, my latest Netflix arrival, last night precipitated my need to write this entry today. Just as April Wheeler desperately looked to create a “life worth living”, happiness is still, 50, 60 years later – has always been-  our most sought-after emotion. Yet it is so often so elusive.

So, that’s why I thought that this new little iPhone app was so interesting. The TrackYourHappiness.org is actually a volunteer experiment done through iPhone surveys. It was developed by Matt Killingsworth as doctoral research at Harvard University. You can read more about it here . Essentially, respondents answer a series of questions that gauge various happiness-making markers at more or less random moments in the day. Of course, I am always happy to contribute to science, so I did “volunteer” but, more selfishly, I enjoy receiving the surveys as they are excellent barometers of where I stand with my happiness level at certain moments in the day.

I’m a believer in the fact that we can choose happiness as we can choose our reactions to the events in our lives. Uh, more or less, right… Still, the TrackYourHappiness surveys has you answer alternating and new questions about things like the amount and quality of your sleep, if you are doing what you WANT to be doing at the moment, if you are alone or interacting with anyone,whether you are outdoors or in… So, it certainly makes one hyper aware of how each daily action influences happiness levels. At the end of a determined amount of filled out survey samples I’ll get my Happiness Report. And TrackYourHappiness will get some darn confusing data for their research.

So far, I know that my happiness level spiked on the day that I answered the survey while at the beach. Go figure.

But, if you’re really into finding out what makes you happy, and you enjoy surveys – or they call them questionnaires in this case -  I invite you to Dr. Martin Seligman’s (founder of Positive Psychology) website Authentic Happiness. A good friend and mentor turned my on to Dr. Seligman’s books. I like their clinical approach to a very emotional subject. It’s clinical, and measured but not dry and it is oh-so insightful. My takeaway from Authentic Happiness, in a very tiny capsule, is that happiness is based on gratification and that we can most easily find gratification and fulfillment by using our strengths. And guess what, there is a survey for that!!!  And then there is the gratitude survey and many more that can reveal much about our personal psyche.

So, I’d say, go ahead, get HAPPY!