Find Your Happy

Product Information

Try to make at least one person happy every day. If you cannot do a kind deed, speak a kind word. If you cannot speak a kind word, think a kind thought. Count up, if you can, the treasure of happiness that you would dispense in a week, in a year, in a lifetime.” Diener, E. D., Emmons, R. A., Larsen, R. J., & Griffin, S. (1985). The satisfaction with life scale. Journal of Personality Assessment, 49(1), 71-75. For instance, if you discover that your lowest-scoring need is competence, you might consider whether you can engage in work or hobbies that better utilize your skills, enabling you to derive a greater sense of competence from daily activities.

In an interview, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the researcher credited with having popularized the concept of flow, explained that those in a state of flow are: To answer this question, philosophers and psychologists have been turning to neuroscience to better understand what happiness looks like in the brain. Third is oxytocin, which is the hormone associated with love, bonding, and close connection. This hormone is boosted primarily through physical touch and closeness with others, meaning that hugs, cuddling, and even simply spending time with others can significantly increase our happiness (Breuning, 2015; Uvnäs-Moberg, Handlin & Petersson, 2015). Joseph, S. (2019). What is eudaimonic happiness? How and why positive psychologists are learning from Aristotle. Psychology Today. Retrieved from https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/blog/what-doesnt-kill-us/201901/what-is-eudaimonic-happiness The remainder of this article will outline scientifically evidenced pathways to cultivating each of these three forms of happiness.Often, regular meditation will lie at the core of mindfulness practice. However, other approaches to developing mindfulness can include journaling and yoga. Listen to your heart. You are the only one who knows what fills you up. Your family and friends may think you’d be great at something that really doesn’t float your boat. It can be complicated following your bliss. Just be smart, and keep your day job for the time being. Baer, R. A. (2003). Mindfulness training as a clinical intervention: A conceptual and empirical review. Clinical psychology: Science and Practice, 10(2), 125-143. Lally, P., van Jaarsveld, C. H., Potts, H. W., & Wardle, J. (2010). How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40(6), 998-1009. For another useful tool that attempts to reconcile the hedonic and eudaimonic perspectives of happiness, take a look at Hervás and Vázquez’s (2013) Pemberton Happiness Index (PHI).

For a simple assessment to determine your overall satisfaction of core needs within your life, consider completing the 21-item Basic Needs Satisfaction in General Scale (BNSG-S; Gagné, 2003). Rather, happiness can be achieved by cultivating present-moment awareness and self-transcendence. In other words, these arguments suggest that it is possible to give up the search for happiness and commit oneself to finding contentment in what is happening right now. She's an author, international speaker, entrepreneur mentor, life coach, travel writer, and teacher, who left her job in advertising several years ago to follow her heart and become a writer. The third step is to practice looking inwards, with a view to discover happiness from within you. This is an activity that takes time and effort, but makes for a worthwhile habit.Sekiguchi, T. (2004). Person-organization fit and person-job fit in employee selection: A review of the literature. Osaka Keidai Ronshu, 54(6), 179-196. Upon recognizing that existing assessments of happiness measured either hedonic or eudaimonic conceptualizations of happiness, these scholars sought to design and validate a brief, comprehensive measure that assessed both. Want to find your happiness? Start with these thought-full quotes: “Plenty of people miss their share of happiness, not because they never found it, but because they didn’t stop to enjoy it.” Do things you love. Maybe you can’t skydive every day or take vacations every season, but as long as you get to do the things you love every once in a while, you will find greater happiness.

Ryff, C. D. (1989b). Happiness is everything, or is it? Explorations on the meaning of psychological well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 57(6), 1069-1081. These KS1 resources have been produced to be fully in line with the Learning Outcomes and Core Themes outlined in the PSHE Association Programme of Study which is widely used by schools in England and is recommended and referred to by the DfE in all key documentation relating to PSHE provision in schools. What other wellbeing resources can I use? In line with this, we can think about the eudaimonic perspective as being about reaching one’s true potential and living in congruence with one’s values and true self. It also involves developing one’s talents and strengthening relationships with those for whom we care. By living in this way, one should feel deeply engaged and fully alive (Waterman, 1993). The ability to resist social pressures, regulate behavior from within, and evaluate oneself based on personal standards. To a believer of hedonism, happiness would likely represent the moment you bite into the taco and delight in its flavors on your tongue.Overall, happiness is likely to look different for different people. As an individual or practitioner, you may find the most value in considering how all three of these conceptualizations factor into you or your client’s life as a first step toward cultivating enduring happiness. Grant, A. (2013). Does trying to be happy make us unhappy? Psychology Today. Retrieved from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/give-and-take/201305/does-trying-be-happy-make-us-unhappy As for assessing happiness flowing from conceptualizations in mindfulness, many researchers have administered short scales that capture momentary changes in emotions via diary study. For instance, if you discover that one of your core values is growth, you might then consider the different ways to enact this value in day-to-day life. This could involve registering for a night class or pursuing new intellectual pursuits through reading. A next important step in the search for happiness is to work toward securing the basic necessities for wellbeing and development, or what Aristotle called real goods.

This Happiness Worksheet is one of our brilliant selection of teacher-made resources that you can use to teach children all about wellbeing topics. Our resources are all expertly crafted by our talented team of experienced teachers, so you can be assured of their high quality. They argued that these approaches were too data-driven and not rooted in theory or lived experience. Therefore, these scholars designed and validated a measure based on responses from a representative sample of telephone interviews (Ryff & Keyes, 1995). Confidence of expression is important for our mental health and wellbeing. This Happiness Worksheet is a great way to encourage children to express themselves. You can use our Happiness Worksheet as part of your Be Yourself lessons for PSHE. This activity is taken from our Be Yourself PSHE and Citizenship KS1 Unit. We've designed this PSHE worksheet tomotivate children to discuss their feelings and celebrate what makes them happy. Real goods satisfy the natural needs of our bodies, such as our needs for warmth and sustenance. Examples of such real goods include food, clothing, health, shelter, and safety (Moss, 2012).Educators, especially those who love and engage with all things reading, may be aware of Emily Coxhead as the founder of The Happy Newspaper; a quarterly subscription newspaper filled with only the most positive news from around the world. I receive these papers for my classroom and would certainly agree that Find Your Happy feels like an attempt at the extension of positivity Coxhead is trying to sprinkle around the world. Finally, and at the core of the mindfulness-based approach to finding happiness is the practice of mindfulness itself. In sum, these examples indicate that searching for one ‘true’ source of happiness may be feeding into a fallacy. Rather, there appear to be several pathways to pursuing different sources of happiness.