How to Know if You’re Happy…

Is it possible to measure happiness? To know exactly when or if you are happy?

Whoa, let’s take that a step further back… what even is happiness?

If this decade has taught us anything, it is to question life.

Beginning with a global pandemic and moving through a Black Lives Matter protest that taught us how very little progress we’d made in dismantling systemic racism, to facing incessant increases in basic costs of living, to watch the climate crisis deepen into two of the deadliest summers we’ve ever recorded, to watch the humanitarian consequences of war in both Ukraine and Palestine.

Concurrent with those years, I have personally dealt with launching my book career during a pandemic, the bullying of my child when she returned to school following homeschooling, the breakdown of a long-term relationship, separation from my partner and building a co-parenting lifestyle, the shock of my ex’s suicide, being plunged into solo parenting and fighting a legal battle to protect our child from his own family. I’ve watched friends and family lose their loved ones and battle mental health and career devastation.

It’s been a lot for all of us.

A LOT.

How do you begin to quantify personal happiness against a global backdrop like this?

It’s a good question.

And it’s not a new one. In the midst of our own generational horrors, it’s easy to think we invented the wheel of human suffering. That those who came before us haven’t known their own iterations of these fights. For health, equality, peace and prosperity in a wholesome, natural world.

But the question really lies in the word we’re trying to measure.

What even is happiness?

What contributes to the sum of happiness?

Is happiness the sum of our emotions or the singularity of a temporary mental state?

Unpacking the difference between emotions and states/moods is a whole other post. But, to give you the meat of what you need, let’s take this away from my very long fall down the rabbit hole that is the American Psychological Association and the USA National Library of Medicine:

Happiness is a state of being that encompasses multiple aspects of your life; “a composite of life satisfaction, coping resources, and positive emotions” (from Happiness Unpacked: Positive Emotions Increase Life Satisfaction by Building Resilience, co-authored by Michael A. Cohn, Barbara L. Fredrickson, Stephanie L. Brown, Joseph A. Mikels, and Anne M. Conway)

Whereas emotions are a complex gut-level response mechanism that tell you something important; “a complex reaction pattern, involving experiential, behavioural, and physiological elements, by which an individual attempts to deal with a personally significant matter or event.” In short, emotional experiences have three components: a subjective experience, a physiological response and a behavioural or expressive response. Simple emotions are one-dimensional, complex emotions connect two or more in a singular situation.

In other words, happiness is a sum.

Your success and sense of satisfaction toward your ideals, combined with your mental, physical and environmental coping resources for stress, combined with the balance of positive emotions being greater than negative ones in your daily life.

But you can’t add up your happiness without understanding that balance in your emotional state. It’s like trying to do algebra without knowing what x, y and z stand for.

Emotions have clear messages to give us in understanding our life happiness, and those messages come readily coded with headings. You can name an emotion. You may need to work out what that emotion is there to tell you to do in the circumstances. But the emotion itself is clearly labelled.

There are a few key ways in which we understand emotions:

Emotions range. They slide up and and down or from one side to the other of a scale. Or they sit opposite each other on a wheel. You can use negative or positive to idealise these oppositions, as I have until now in this article, and that is a common way of labelling emotions.

I prefer the terms survive and thrive.

All emotions have a function. When you are thrown into a survival crisis, you need something strong to keep you alive. Each emotion has a message to deliver. And emotions at both extremes of the spectrum are the most powerful in their impact.

Emotions are interconnected to our external experience of life. They aren’t just independently coloured, they colour our perception of the world around us. Understanding the interconnectedness of our emotional response helps us make informed decisions about our overall state of being to achieve a relative equilibrium. Otherwise you are living in a rapidly vacillating emotional maelstrom (think Young Love).

Emotions are, a bit like Thanos, inevitable. You cannot escape them. With really, really intense practice (and definitely no children) you can disconnect from them to a state of enlightenment. But they will still happen. You’ve just got a PhD in ignoring them and a really cool off-shoulder robe.

There is no simple answer to a complex question.

In my own quest to manage the power of survival emotions and quantify my own life satisfaction I went down two tracks.

The quest of ‘What the actual hell is happening to me?’ took me down the Emotional Register track. Emotional naming and shaming helped me sort out the morass of overwhelming survival instincts that were kicking my butt during the trauma phase of dealing with suicide loss.

I valued this because I’m a writer.

Having the correct word for something makes a huge difference in my ability to understand its impact.

While the quest of ‘How the actual hell do I do something about it?’ took me down the Wellbeing Wheel route. Wellbeing therapists will ask you to ‘rate’ your life in different areas in order to identify what you want to begin working on. In the depths of a life turned upside down, knowing where to start rebuilding was the difference between swimming and drowning for me.

I like the ethos of Wellbeing, that you ‘score’ your life in different areas according to your emotional response to them. But I was also frustrated. Emotions are fickle, elusive things to capture with a number. And I’m a writer, not a mathematician.

If you ask me how I’m feeling, I’ll rarely answer with a number. I’ll use a word.

How are you feeling Marianne?

Fine.

I’m joking. Actually no, not fine. Angry. Sad. Hopeful. Frustrated. Guilty.

or…

How are you feeling Marianne?

I’m 5.

See what I mean?

One random day in May, I happened to have the Emotional Register alongside the Wellbeing Wheel and my meticulously ND-coded brain combined with my writing sixth sense for words and asked…

What if you assigned a number to each emotional label and used that numerical value on the wheel of wellbeing?

Oh, and the emotional register has ten labels. And the wellbeing wheel I use has ten segments. That means you could quantify the life satisfaction you feel into a percentage.

AM I THE ONLY ONE EXCITED HERE?

Ok, indoor voice, am I the only ND excited here?

No? Excellent. Because that is what I spent the next six weeks doing.

Welcome to the Wheel of Emotional Resonance….

A bitesize approach to overwhelm.

The Wheel of Emotional Resonance takes the circumference of life and narrows it down into separate areas.

It is often true that our whole life is not unhappy and yet there is an element of dissatisfaction that can bleed into good areas. But when I linked this system to the emotional register, assigning numerical value to exact emotional states, I really began to notice where the overall emotional value of my life was being sabotaged by survival emotions. And that, by using the true emotional labels, I was having to face a much more honest picture of my life than I was giving it when I ‘rated’ it loosely.

Survival emotions are very strong, they demand a response. That really is their raison d’etre. Respond or die.

If you have one or more segments of your life in survival mode it can have a much greater impact on your overall life than you realise. And, during a global situation such as we are currently facing, there is a genuine connection to those survival emotions. Since the start of the decade we have literally been fighting for our lives. Against a global pandemic, against cost of living, against mental health, against war and climate catastrophe. A sense of powerlessness can shut us off from feeling that we can thrive.

I also began to notice those areas that were in comfort mode. It may surprise you to know that contentment is in the middle of the emotional register, right next to boredom. They form the multi-sided neck of the emotion funnel.

The Emotional Register

Stay too long in comfort mode and you risk slipping into dissatisfaction. Thinking I was doing okay meant accepting I was not actually thriving. I was simply out of survival mode.

But how can this help you?

Well first, I’ve put the Wheel together with the Emotional Register and a created a free download for you to do. This will allow you to rate your overall life happiness by a clear percentage.

I was at below 40% when I first did this. Over the space of one year I put that up to 62% overall.

In my lowest scoring life segment, I increased my percentage from 30% to 60%.

On a day to day basis I can tell what my life happiness score is.

I’m not going to sugar-coat it, this guide can really make you sit up and take a long hard look at your life. And while that isn’t easy, it can also help you understand where the true problem lies.

You can’t fix what you can’t see. You just know there’s a problem.

And the ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ solution isn’t really working too well for us these days is it?

Let’s face it, life is a little bit broken.

And as a writer, I hate to tell you this, but no one is coming to rescue you. You are the hero of your own story.

The free download will give you the tools to look at your life and work out where you currently are. These are the first three steps toward finding happiness.

Beyond the first three steps which are on the free download, I’ve created a full digital product that takes you on the next nine steps toward action. The same action process I took to make change myself. The download is £11

If you don’t find the first three steps illuminating, then you know you won’t benefit from the rest of the steps and you haven’t spent a penny.

If you have read this far, I know that something in this article has resonated with you. So click on the button below and access the free download immediately. There are clear instructions on what to do and I know it will give you some valuable insight.

Good luck, M x

Disclaimer: The Wheel of Emotional Resonance combines my personal experience from wellbeing practice with my training as a journal coach. It is set out as a tool to use at the start of a journaling practice. In isolation, you may find it useful, you may not. If you find any of the process distressing, please seek referral to a qualified mental health professional.

The Wheel of Emotional Resonance is copyrighted to Marianne Rosen. You can not resell the free download.