How to measure happiness?

As I principally focus this web site on the topic of happiness I occasionally do some poking around the internet on the subject. I have periodically come across such things as Happiness Tests and Happiness Quiz’s. I took a few of them and decided that I would do something a little different.

It seemed that once you took the test they lacked any real tools to improve your score. They may make suggestions that you should change your thoughts or change your thinking on issues, but don’t tell you how to do that. In my work I’ve noticed that adding the new thought, “stop thinking that way” doesn’t delete the previous thought. Sometimes it causes more stress because now we judge ourselves for thinking the original thought. I think the part of how to create these changes in a practical way is pretty important, that’s why I include them in my self mastery audio program.

The really odd thing about some of the happiness tests is that you can use it to compare your self to other people. I find this odd because I think we would want to increase our happiness, not use a test to judge our self and put ourselves down.

Because of odd things like this I decided to develop my own happiness test. Mind you it’s not really a quiz. It’s more of an evaluation or study. You see most tests have multiple choice questions that you answer in an academic fashion about your day, activities, how you feel about success, hope for the future, the meaning of life, and things like that. Personally I feel that the happiness of our lives deserves a bit more than a few minutes of internet surfing before we rush off to the next hyperlink. For people who don’t have emotional well being and happiness as a priority in their life, this article and test is not for you.