Everyday Happiness - Finding Harmony and Bliss

253-How Trust Affects Happiness: Our 6- Factor Series Part 4 of 6

Welcome to our 6-part series on the 6 categories that affect happiness the most.  Today we dive into category 4 of 6 - trust, so let’s go. 

 

Transcript:

 

Welcome to Everyday Happiness where we create lasting happiness, in 2 minutes a day,  through my signature method of Intentional Margins® (creating harmony between your to-dos and your priorities), happiness science, and musings about life. 

 

I'm your host Katie Jefcoat and the Happiness Research Institute in Denmark has developed factors they think affect someone's happiness. They have 6 factors that they group together, they are: health, relationships, freedom, trust, kindness and money.  Today we’re talking about trust. 

 

Where you feel trust, your happiness levels are high.  In the Nordic, Scandinavian countries, trust levels are high, their population believes they can trust people.  

 

In Scandinavian countries, if you ask them if they think people can be trusted, 3 out of 4 will say yes. 

 

The largest benefit to having trust in your life and even better if you can have it in your community or your entire country, is that trust reduces worry.  It reduces stress and anxiety.  We assume people are good.  

 

On the contrary, you can see how if you don’t have a high level of trust for mankind, for your neighbor, for authority, you are filled with worry and anxiety as a baseline.  

 

Fascinating, right? If you look generally at the United States, you can see how our cultural lack of trust has driven policy and even outrage in today's society.   

 

You can also look at your home, and if you live in a loving home, you can see how trust supports that happiness.  Or even kids going to school, you can see how they trust their school environment, their teachers and how that brings them not only happiness, but less anxiety as they walk into their day. Some of this is blind trust right?  You almost have to give your trust before it is earned and hope for the best. 

 

If we trust that people are good people and they want to help and be kind - it not only  completely changes our perspective, but our mental and physical health.  We don’t have these high levels of anxiety driven hormones that are running through our veins.    

 

One experiment was done all around the world with wallets.  Your wallet not only has money in it, but credit cards and your drivers license and having to replace all of that if you lose your wallet is annoying, to say the least.  So there was a study that asked people, if you lost your wallet, how likely do you think that it would be returned to you?  In this study, they “lost” 12 wallets and 11 wallets were returned in Helsinki and 1 in Lisbon. In New York, they returned 8 out of 12 wallets.  

 

What the research has also found is that breaking social contracts, (like stealing something from someone, or littering on someone else’s property) occurs more between strangers than people who know each other.  

 

So as the Happiness Research Institute suggests, go out and talk to your neighbor and get to know them.      

 

Until next time, remember that kindness is contagious and you get to be a Kindness Crusader by spreading a tiny bit of kindness today. 

 

This episode was inspired by The Happiness Research Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark and their happiness course, The Happy Course.  

 

Get Everyday Happiness delivered to your inbox by subscribing at: https://www.katiejefcoat.com/happiness

 

And, let’s connect on social at @everydayhappinesswithkatie  and join the community on the hashtags #IntentionalMargins and #everydayhappinesswithkatie on Instagram

 

Links:  https://onamission.bio/everydayhappiness/

252-How Freedom And Choice Affect Happiness: Our 6 Factor Series Part 3 of 6

Welcome to our 6-part series on the 6 categories that affect happiness the most.  Today we dive into category 3 of 6 - Freedom and Choice, so let’s go. 

 

Transcript:

 

Welcome to Everyday Happiness where we create lasting happiness, in 2 minutes a day,  through my signature method of Intentional Margins® (creating harmony between your to-dos and your priorities), happiness science, and musings about life. 

 

I'm your host Katie Jefcoat and the Happiness Research Institute in Denmark has developed factors they think affect someone's happiness. They have 6 factors that they group together, they are: health, relationships, freedom, trust, kindness and money.  Today we’re talking about freedom and choice.  Free will so to speak.  

 

One aspect of freedom that is often overlooked is freedom of time.  Episodes 57-64 talk about time affluence and even time confetti and if you haven’t listened to them, I encourage you to do so.  Time can be such a tricky thing - we all have the same amount and there is no hack to gain more time.  

 

The research indicates that regardless of how you spend your time, having control over your time leads to more happiness.   One way to do this is to identify your Intentional Margins®:  How do you want to spend your time?  What priorities are you placing on the activities taking up your time. 

 

Freedom of choice to do what you want, get what you want can be great, but there can also be agony of choice.  Have you ever walked into the cereal aisle at the grocery store and stood there for way too long wondering, pondering, deciding what to choose.  There are so many choices.  Too many choices can be debilitating.  

 

The research indicates that having too many choices doesn't make us happier.  We think having 200 different cereals to choose from in the cereal aisle will make us happier, but it doesn’t.  And this goes beyond cereal.  There is a study about jams, where there are two farmers market stands one has 24 jams and the other 6.  What they found was more people purchased from the stand with only 6 jams -- they said when people are faced with too many choices, they can’t make a choice, so the choice is to forego it all for perhaps, something better.    

 

So I invite you to think about how freedoms of time, autonomy and choice play a role in your happiness.  

 

Until next time, smash that subscribe button wherever you like to listen to podcasts, or sign up for text emails delivered right to your inbox at katiejefcoat.com/happiness  

 

This episode was inspired by The Happiness Research Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark and their happiness course, The Happy Course.  

 

Get Everyday Happiness delivered to your inbox by subscribing at: https://www.katiejefcoat.com/happiness

 

And, let’s connect on social at @everydayhappinesswithkatie  and join the community on the hashtags #IntentionalMargins and #everydayhappinesswithkatie on Instagram

 

Links:  https://onamission.bio/everydayhappiness/

251-How Relationships Affect Happiness: Our 6 Factor Series Part 2 of 6

Welcome to our 6-part series on the 6 categories that affect happiness the most.  Today we dive into category 2 of 6 - Relationships, so let’s go. 

 

Transcript:

 

Welcome to Everyday Happiness where we create lasting happiness, in 2 minutes a day,  through my signature method of Intentional Margins® (creating harmony between your to-dos and your priorities), happiness science, and musings about life. 

 

I'm your host Katie Jefcoat and the Happiness Research Institute in Denmark has developed factors they think affect someone's happiness. They have 6 factors that they group together, they are: health, relationships, freedom, trust, kindness and money.  Today we’re talking about relationships.  Now, if you’ve been with me for a hot second, you know that I think and the science supports just how much relationships matter.  

 

Relationships with other humans give us a sense of community, sense of connection, that we belong.  We’re talking about relationships that could be your partner or neighbor or distant friend or acquaintance.  What science tells us is that having close relationships matter.  Relationships can be complex, messy and bring us un-happiness too, but when it comes to happiness, we need positive relationships to thrive. 

 

The Happiness Research Institute did a study in their backyard in a town outside of Copenhagen where they found that if you were dissatisfied in your relationships, you were on the happiness scale of being in poor, troubled regions in the world  and if they were satisfied in your relationships you reported very high levels of happiness.  This down and dirty example indicates just how much relationships matter.   These are all relationships, not just with a partner, but the totality of your close relationships.   

 

What they find is that your happiness in your relationships is a very strong indicator of your overall happiness.  So if you want to know if someone is happy, ask them about their relationships.    

 

In a Harvard Study, they tracked the lives of 724 men for 75 years. It’s the only study in history that takes a snapshot of a whole life in real time and looks at the factors that affect happiness, health, success, and whatever else might constitute a good life.

 

This study concluded, among other findings, that It’s not the number of friends or whether you’re in a committed relationship, but the quality of those relationships. Warm, protective relationships keep people healthy, but high conflict relationships are destructive.

 

We can start this today by spending more time in relationship with people, talking with them, and putting down the screens.  We can say hello to our neighbor.  These are little things that add up to make a big difference for our well-being.  

 

Don’t forget, kindness is contagious, so go out there friends, be a part of the kindness movement.  

 

And if you are enjoying what you are hearing, share this podcast with 3 friends.  Help us be a part of the kindness movement.  

 

This episode was inspired by The Happiness Research Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark and their happiness course, The Happy Course.  

 

Get Everyday Happiness delivered to your inbox by subscribing at: https://www.katiejefcoat.com/happiness

 

And, let’s connect on social at @everydayhappinesswithkatie  and join the community on the hashtags #IntentionalMargins and #everydayhappinesswithkatie on Instagram

 

Links:  https://onamission.bio/everydayhappiness/

250-How Health Affects Happiness: Our 6 Factor Series Part 1 of 6

Welcome to our 6-part series on the 6 categories that affect happiness the most.  Today we dive into Health, so let’s go. 

 

Transcript:

 

Welcome to Everyday Happiness where we create lasting happiness, in 2 minutes a day,  through my signature method of Intentional Margins® (creating harmony between your to-dos and your priorities), happiness science, and musings about life. 

 

I'm your host Katie Jefcoat and it’s our 250th episode and we’re starting a week-long series on what categories affect our happiness the most. 

 

The Happiness Research Institute in Denmark has developed factors they think affect someone's happiness. They have 6 factors that they group together, they are: health, relationships, freedom, trust, kindness and money.  Fascinating they said money and if you’ve been with me for a while, you know we don’t think we can buy happiness, but this is a different take.  They freely admit that money is really complex and has a lot of nuance, but money does matter in their findings, so we’ll get into the money discussion in a later episode. 

 

So today we are talking about health and the research indicates that health matters for happiness.  If you are sick, you are less happy.  If we are caring for a loved one that is sick, we are less happy -- we all know that, right?  There is an argument that the Danish rank so high on the happiness scale because they have a lot of physical activity.  In fact, 75% of Danish citizens cycle to work all year long.  There are 5x more bikes in Copenhagen than cars.  

 

The Happiness Research Institute says in their Happiness Course, that “Just 15 minutes of light exercise (even walking to work) in the morning will put your brain in a much happier place. Make a small habit of daily exercise and it will pay dividends in the long-run.”  

 

So there you have it.  Even a brisk walk can increase your happiness.  

 

This episode was inspired by The Happiness Research Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark and their happiness course, The Happy Course.  

 

 

 

Get Everyday Happiness delivered to your inbox by subscribing at: https://www.katiejefcoat.com/happiness

 

And, let’s connect on social at @everydayhappinesswithkatie  and join the community on the hashtags #IntentionalMargins and #everydayhappinesswithkatie on Instagram

 

Links:  https://onamission.bio/everydayhappiness/

249-What Is The Percentage Of Happiness We Get To Control?

There is a certain amount of happiness that is completely out of our control.  Actually the majority of our happiness is out of our control.  But what can we control?  How much can we control?  That’s what we dive into today. 

 

Transcript:

 

Welcome to Everyday Happiness where we create lasting happiness, in 2 minutes a day,  through my signature method of Intentional Margins® (creating harmony between your to-dos and your priorities), happiness science, and musings about life. 

 

I'm your host Katie Jefcoat and I subscribe to this school of thought that there is a certain amount of our happiness we get to control.   Arthur Brooks, a researcher, prolific writer and professor at the Harvard School of Business identifies three categories that are well established in the happiness and quantitative well-being space.  He didn’t come up with these buckets, but his way of articulating this is what got me interested in this research. 

 

He, and others, say that happiness is composed of 3 buckets: genetics (50%), circumstances (25%) and what we can control (25%), like habits.   On the Everyday Happiness show we dive into the 25% of what we can control by relying on scientific research and life experiences. Some researchers give this 25% bucket a little more or a little less, but there is no disagreement that part of our happiness is absolutely within our control.   

 

As a recovering trial lawyer, I knew I needed proof that this stuff worked.  I couldn’t just get on board with the next fad without  some evidence that gratitude boosts my happiness, for example. I’d want to roll my eyes all day long.  But once I discovered the science behind it, I started to open my eyes a bit wider and explore happiness - which is what I want for you.  To hear something and think, ok, I get it, I can get on board with that.  Or, think, oooh, I want to learn more and jump into the show notes for links and additional insights. 

 

Everyday Happiness is a curated body of knowledge from researchers and experts about focusing on that 25% of the happiness equation we get to control, and building a life that is a little bit happier, more balanced, and more intentional that allows us to live in our priorities and experience fulfilled happiness.  

 

Until next time, be kind and be part of the ripple effect of kindness. 

 

 

 

 

Get Everyday Happiness delivered to your inbox by subscribing at: https://www.katiejefcoat.com/happiness

 

And, let’s connect on social at @everydayhappinesswithkatie  and join the community on the hashtags #IntentionalMargins and #everydayhappinesswithkatie on Instagram

 

Links:  https://onamission.bio/everydayhappiness/

248-Collective Happiness: The Happiest Places To Live

Would you want to live where people are happy?   

 

Transcript:

 

Welcome to Everyday Happiness where we create lasting happiness, in 2 minutes a day,  through my signature method of Intentional Margins® (creating harmony between your to-dos and your priorities), happiness science, and musings about life. 

 

I'm your host Katie Jefcoat and yesterday we talked about individual happiness, but what happens when we rank ourselves collectively.  One of the ways researchers determine happiness is by a cognitive evaluation.  We talked about this yesterday and those findings determine the UN ranking of happiest countries in the world. So what countries are the happiest, where does the US fall in this comparison? 

 

Robert F. Kennedy said, GDP measures everything except that which makes life worth living. So, some countries started measuring the things that do make life worth living. 

 

Countries, taking the lead from the UN are actually working to measure the happiness of their citizens.   It’s fascinating.  The world is starting to move in the direction of happiness goals on a massive scale.   Apparently those reports on the “happiest place to live” actually mean something and researches and governments are using this data to enhance well-being.  

 

Denmark usually ranks number one in these happiness reports, they mostly look at the average of life satisfaction.  

 

The most fascinating question is why do some countries consistently rank high and others consistently low.  Well, the low countries usually have high levels of poverty, political unrest, lack of stability.   The countries that consistently rank high are the Nordic countries, and the research seems to indicate that those countries have a good free education system, and usually healthcare as well.  It also seems like they trust their government and their fellow citizens.  In Denmark, you’ll find some of the highest taxes in the world, but they look at it not as extortion,but contributing to the common good and they seem to think more as a society than as an individual, so they tend to think that their government protects them from so many social and physical risks and the taxes are worth it.   I would hypothesize this is the exact opposite of the US, although the US is not ranked in the bottom, it was 19 out of 146 countries on this list in 2021.   

 

So what can we learn from this type of research?  Move to a Nordic country?  Maybe?  Not being a social scientist, I would argue that the main difference is that one population -Denmark - sees themselves more as a unit, as a society all rowing in the same direction, and the other - the US - sees themselves as individuals.  

 

Maybe this doesn’t change anything, but I’d like to think as a society we can make small changes in our neighborhood and in our communities to better mimic some of the happiest places to live around the world. 

 

If you are enjoying these episodes, subscribe to wherever you listen to podcasts. 

 

World Happiness Report:  https://worldhappiness.report/ed/2021/ 

 

This episode was inspired by The Happy Course

 

 

Get Everyday Happiness delivered to your inbox by subscribing at: https://www.katiejefcoat.com/happiness

 

And, let’s connect on social at @everydayhappinesswithkatie  and join the community on the hashtags #IntentionalMargins and #everydayhappinesswithkatie on Instagram

 

Links:  https://onamission.bio/everydayhappiness/

247-Happiness is Subjective So How Do We Measure It?

How we are measuring subjective happiness in the modern day.  And as a population, we can have a crappy morning and still feel like we have a good and happy life.   

 

Transcript:

 

Welcome to Everyday Happiness where we create lasting happiness, in 2 minutes a day,  through my signature method of Intentional Margins® (creating harmony between your to-dos and your priorities), happiness science, and musings about life. 

 

I'm your host Katie Jefcoat and during this course I’m taking on happiness, it got me thinking about just how subjective happiness is, even throughout our own day. I was thinking about my own subjective happiness as I moved through the day. 

 

 If I were to ask you all, listening today, what happiness is, we will all have different answers. 

 

What I found to be more exciting though, is that we can have a crappy morning and still feel like we have a good and happy life.   

 

There are 3 ways that researchers measure happiness: 

 

The first is overall life evaluation.  They do this through a cognitive life evaluation, like a quiz.

This measures how happy you are with your life overall. This type of evaluation is used by the UN when they rank the happiest countries in the world. This asks people to evaluate their life - as a whole - on a scale from 0 to 10.  

 

The second way that researchers measure happiness is by Affective happiness. These are your moment-to-moment feelings that can fluctuate during a day. Maybe you are upset that your car wouldn’t start or the train was late for your commute.  This probably doesn’t make you happy in that moment.  This approach is used in the Mappiness study - which mapped out the happiness of people in the UK.  They asked people at different times of day what they were doing and if they were happy.  I think this is where some of the findings that social connection is so important for happiness comes from.  It’s important because it turns out that we can’t really rely on our memories because our experiencing selves (in the moment) and our remembering self perceives happiness differently.  Can you think of a time where your memory of an event feels more happy that it was in the moment?  I know I can.  

 

The third way that researchers measure happiness is by eudaimonia yüdēˈmōnēə this sense of meaning and purpose in life.  It’s what Aristotle was getting at with his work.  And it’s often considered the missing piece in happiness evaluations.

 

I think the hardest part of this type of work is finding trends and quantifying something that is innately hard to quantify, but the researches have done an amazing job at bringing the general public along for this work.   In the show notes today, there are links to the studies if you want to dive deeper into understanding how happiness is interpreted in todays modern world. 

 

If you are enjoying these episodes, subscribe to wherever you listen to podcasts. 

 

This episode was inspired by The Happy Course

 

Get Everyday Happiness delivered to your inbox by subscribing at: https://www.katiejefcoat.com/happiness

 

And, let’s connect on social at @everydayhappinesswithkatie  and join the community on the hashtags #IntentionalMargins and #everydayhappinesswithkatie on Instagram

 

Links:  https://onamission.bio/everydayhappiness/

246-Epicurus-v- Aristotle: The Happiness Debate

The differences between the happiness philosophies of Epicurus and Aristotle are striking.  But perhaps, both views have a place in modern day happiness philosophy. 

 

Transcript:

 

Welcome to Everyday Happiness where we create lasting happiness, in 2 minutes a day,  through my signature method of Intentional Margins® (creating harmony between your to-dos and your priorities), happiness science, and musings about life. 

 

I'm your host Katie Jefcoat and yesterday was an introduction to happiness 2,000 years ago and how, for the great majority of people (not the super rich), happiness relied almost exclusively on safety and staying alive.   

 

Two philosophers during this time had two very different ways of defining happiness.  

 

Epicurus was what we’d now call a hedonist and he believed that the good life lies in pleasure, pleasure, pleasure and the absence of pain.

 

According to Aristotle, “happiness does not consist in pastimes and amusements, but in virtuous activities.” This ancient version of happiness is called Eudaimonia, and it refers more to a sense of purpose and meaning in life.  This is doing things for others.  

 

Where do you think you swing on the Epicurus-v-Aristotle pendulum?  

 

Throughout modern day research, it seems as though happiness is somewhere in between.  The definition I often refer to, as explained by Arthur Brooks, Sonja Lyubomirsky (LU-BO-MER-SKE) and others, is that it’s two parts.  First, happiness emotions, joy, contentment, love, positive emotions with the second part of satisfaction and purpose.  Together, you get well-rounded, fulfilled happiness.   

 

The researchers have melded the visions of happiness from Epicurus and Aristotle into what I think is a brilliant modern day approach greatly influenced by great philosophers.  What could be better. 

 

What do you think?  How do you think about happiness?

 

Get Everyday Happiness delivered to your inbox by subscribing at: https://www.katiejefcoat.com/happiness

 

And, let’s connect on social at @everydayhappinesswithkatie  and join the community on the hashtags #IntentionalMargins and #everydayhappinesswithkatie on Instagram

 

Links:  https://onamission.bio/everydayhappiness/

245-The Philosophical Roots of Happiness

The root of happiness, what we humans consider happiness, is founded in the teachings of two great philosophers, Epicurus and Aristotle.

 

Transcript:

 

Welcome to Everyday Happiness where we create lasting happiness, in 2 minutes a day,  through my signature method of Intentional Margins® (creating harmony between your to-dos and your priorities), happiness science, and musings about life. 

 

I'm your host Katie Jefcoat and I was taking a course on happiness and the instructor, from The Happiness Research Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark was lecturing on this idea that we’ve always been talking about happiness, in some form or another and in fact 2,000 years ago two great philosophers had two different approaches to happiness.  Both of which we see in todays world.  In the next show, we’ll talk about these two different philosophies and perhaps you will be able to see if you lean more toward one or the other.  

 

2,000 years ago, and for most of the time we humans have been alive, we have been trying to just stay alive.  This goes back to the caveman days and this feeling of fight or flight.  Someone had to keep guard in the night to watch for lions for fear of being eaten in our sleep.   

 

Now, today, we don’t worry if we’ll be eaten by a lion in our sleep, but that DNA has been passed down to us.  

 

The great majority of the population was trying to stay alive, except for a select few of humans who were very rich, and didn’t have the daily struggle of trying not to die, either because of safety, food or other basic needs. 

 

And then, more recently, we had the industrial revolution.  Ordinary people started to feel like their daily needs were met.  They were not scared of dying of hunger or safety.  And yet, they were still not as happy as they thought they should be. 

 

And we come to the present time, with excess in parts of the world and basic needs are a given in most of the world and yet, as a human population we are still asking ourselves:  Are we happy? Is this it? 

 

So our present selves look back to the teachings 2,000 years ago by two great philosophers: Epicurus and Aristotle.  Tomorrow, we’ll discuss their differences and how we come to what we think of happiness in today's world. 

Get Everyday Happiness delivered to your inbox by subscribing at: https://www.katiejefcoat.com/happiness

 

And, let’s connect on social at @everydayhappinesswithkatie  and join the community on the hashtags #IntentionalMargins and #everydayhappinesswithkatie on Instagram

 

Links:  https://onamission.bio/everydayhappiness/

244-Happier In The Office Or At Home?

We are at a curious time in our history when so many workers desperately wanted to work from home. Then, in March 2020, a large number of us were forced to work from home.  Almost two years later, we’re asking ourselves:  is it all it’s cracked up to be?  

 

Transcript:

 

Welcome to Everyday Happiness where we create lasting happiness, in 2 minutes a day,  through my signature method of Intentional Margins® (creating harmony between your to-dos and your priorities), happiness science, and musings about life. 

 

I'm your host Katie Jefcoat and I think we are in a curious time in our US history, maybe even globally, where a lot of jobs abruptly pivoted to home telework in March 2020.  At the time of this recording in January 2022, almost 2 years later, a lot of people are still working from home in the US.  If not 100% of the time, a significant portion of their week. 

 

There is this dialog around work-life balance.  Is it balanced when you wear the same athleisure to work at home as you do when you are not working at home?  Are we more tied to our work because we can’t have that separation? 

 

There is no question, in general, we are learning to adapt at home.  We have make-shift offices, some at the dining room table. 

 

I was curious about how our commute or lack of commute impacts our happiness.  People say it’s great to not have to go into the office, to get back that time that would otherwise be spent on the commute.  But I wonder if working from home is actually making people happier.  As happy as they thought they would be.  

 

Now, the science is still new on this, and not quantitative enough to make any findings but there is a growing school of thought that people still need human connection and that the benefits from working from home do not outweigh the benefits from going into the office, where you engage with your colleagues, you see them at the coffee machine, you can pop into their office to ask them a question that is less rigid than an email.   

 

Of course, this only works with social offices and somewhat social people.  Some people can go into the office and still not see or talk to anyone.  I’m not sure how much their happiness is boosted in this context.  

 

But the separation of the commute (if it is a reasonable time) - super long commutes lead to unhappiness too. But that transition time often helps us close those mind loops from work and open to what is waiting for us at home.  

 

A report in the USA suggested that getting rid of a one hour commute is the happiness equivalent of getting a $40,000 raise!

 

Interestingly, all the research shows that once your commute reaches three hours or more, then the negative effects wear off.  

 

If you were one of the millions who pivoted and started working from home, I invite you to look at your day and your happiness levels.  Are you as happy or happier as you thought you would be, working from home, having a little more autonomy in your day.  Or has the hedonic treadmill caught up with you and you’ve reached your baseline again, now it’s just a new baseline, the one where working from home is the constant.  

 

You can dive into the research in the show notes. 

https://www.happinessresearchinstitute.com/ and https://www.42courses.com/courses/happiness 

 

 

Get Everyday Happiness delivered to your inbox by subscribing at: https://www.katiejefcoat.com/happiness

 

And, let’s connect on social at @everydayhappinesswithkatie  and join the community on the hashtags #IntentionalMargins and #everydayhappinesswithkatie on Instagram

 

Links:  https://onamission.bio/everydayhappiness/