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Measuring Your Happiness Using the Most Important Concept in Positive Psychology
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Subjective well-being
This is the primary way Positive Psychology researchers have defined and measured people's happiness and well-being.
It's defined as your evaluations of your own life and your moods and emotions (that's why it's labeled as "subjective").
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Subjective Well-Being components
It consists of 3 parts: positive affect, negative affect, and life satisfaction.
Positive affect and negative affect are basically your emotions and moods, and life satisfaction refers to the evaluation of your life as a whole (how satisfied you are with your life, what you would change etc).
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Measuring Subjective Well-Being
Tracking your own subjective well-being can be very powerful if you keep alongside a journal of your life's events.
Keep it up for some time and you will see trends emerge. You'll also be able to adjust your activities in order to maximize positive affect and life satisfaction and minimize negative affect.
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SIMILAR ARTICLES & IDEAS:
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Positive Psychology's New Approach
- Due to its fleeting and fickle nature, our levels of happiness cannot be gauged, measured or rated accurately.
- While earlier psychology focused on the bad apples,...
Four Types of Well-Being
To address the disconnect between happiness and deeper levels of satisfaction, researches proposed a model that characterizes people as falling into one of four well-being types.
- Optimizing one’s positive emotions, and denying the reality of their negative experiences.
- Feeling unhappy seeing the complexity of the world around them, and neglecting the positive aspects.
- Having a generally negative view of themselves and the world.
- Having a generally positive and empathetic view of the world.
The Real Meaning Of Happiness
Being happy means more than feeling good. True happiness comes from handling challenging and adverse situations, while collaborating and building lifelong bonds with the people in our lives.
A collective thinking process, where the good of all is considered leads to a level of happiness that cannot be attained by being selfish or self-concerned.
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Happiness
Happiness is when a person feels satisfaction, contentment, and elation in their life. It is a fulfilling feeling to have despite it having varying definitions.
The term is...
The two fundamental components of 'happiness'
- Emotional balance - We all experience positive and negative feelings from time to time. How one handles their emotional state is crucial as to how they radiate this energy towards everything they have going on in their life;
- Life satisfaction - People experience emotions differently whenever an event occurs in their lives. How you feel about your own life - from your relationships to personal achievements - matter to your happiness.
Measuring your happiness
Here are questions you should ask yourself to know if you are happy:
- Do you feel like you have the life you want? Are you working towards the life that you want?
- Does your environment bring you peace of mind?
- Have you accomplished the things you want in your life? Are these goals important to you?
- Are you content as you are right now? What are the things you're doing that is contributing to your happiness?
- Have you stopped and wondered if you feel more positively than you were before?
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Hedonic adaptation
Hedonic adaptation refers to people’s common tendency to return to a determined level of happiness regardless of life’s ups and downs.
Hedonic adaptation is often referred to as “the hedonic ...
Examples of Hedonic Adaptation
- People who win the lottery are likely to revert to their original levels of happiness after the novelty of the win has worn off.
- It is also true for those who are in major accidents. People generally tend to return to their pre-accident levels of happiness after a period.
- Research has found that the first bite of something delicious is experienced as more pleasurable than the subsequent bites.
How Much Control We Have
Researcher Sonja Lyubomirsky has examined this set-point:
A full 50 percent of our happiness set-point is due to genetics. 10 percent is affected primarily by circumstances like where we were born and to whom. 40 percent is subject to our influence.