Self-Help Happiness Blog

Joyce Brothers has come out with a Happiness Quiz.  Nothing startling there, but still a good little quiz to start your day off right.  Or end it right. 

Jeanne Malmgren tries to define happiness, but she finds it’s not that easy.  The article raises some interesting questions about why certain countries rank higher in happiness than others.  But in the end, she answers her own questions: “But you and I both know that happiness isn’t really about where you are.” 

That’s right.  One time I thought I could never be happy if I could not see a tree outside my window, but it was in our tiny Toronto Condo, where all you could see from the window was concrete, glass and bricks, that I wrote my book about happiness.  

In real estate, it might be location, location, location, but when it comes to happiness, it is all about you, you, you.

By the way, about the title to this blog post…I did not say that homelessness is happiness. 

Say what you want about Franc e, but it has just become the first Western nation to seriously consider a “happiness index”.

“We must change the way we measure growth,” President Sarkozy says of his plans to engage two Nobel prize winning economists in the effort to build an alternative to gross national product (GNP), which might look a bit like gross national happiness . 

Read the whole story here.

The things you appreciate and are grateful for should be an ongoing list. Do not let anything get by you! These are the things that bring true happiness and mental contentment. Use this list, too: if there are people on it, take time to let them know how you feel – like send a letter of appreciation. If there is an organization on the list, you could send a letter to the editor in your community. Keep adding to the list. At first, your list will seem “simple” but gradually it will increase in detail as you experience gratefulness for ever smaller things. This is practice in being thankful that you can appreciate what the day brings. Every day say, “I am awake and grateful to be alive!” Whatever the day brings, there is always something to be happy about.

This is an excerpt from Barbara Ann Kipfer’s blog http://www.thingstobehappyabout.com/blog/.  She is the author of 14,000 things to be happy about and the website is http://www.thingstobehappyabout.com.

The third annual World Conference on Gross National Happiness has just finished a couple months ago, and I just came across this interesting report on the conference.  I like this article, contrasting Western and Eastern values.  I can also refer you to a somewhate dated but much more detailed NY Times article on the topic. 

Here is a map of Gross National Happiness among nations:

Gross National Happiness Map