Happiness Explained??

"Change what you can, accept what you cannot and have the wisdom to know the difference"

In the daily muddle of everyday life how many of us can claim to be happy? The problem may not always be that we are unhappy. It may be with the definition of happiness. What does happiness connote to each of us?

Ilona Bloniwell, an academic psychologist and a practitioner, in a recent study based on BBC Two's opinion poll tries to unravel the seemingly complex question. And there are lessons in that.

To the 1000 odd respondents happiness meant any one or more of the following:

• Relationships
• Contentment
• Security & Money
• Health
• Transcendence
• Fulfilment

Quite strangely it differed from what the traditional psychologists who had come up with the magic happiness formula: pleasure + engagement + meaning = happiness. Does this formula look confusing? For me, it did not mean anything.

Rathers the 6 factors above made more sense. Does your happiness index lie somewhere amongst the 6 or outside? Here is my take on each. I asked myself how much each factor was influential in making me happy on a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being most influtiential). Result:

Relationships: 8
Most of the time our life gets defined in terms of the relationships that we strike up with other humans. Its the quality of these relationships that preoccupy our mind and define our days and finally our lives.

Contentment: 10
I am was not too sure about this. Ilona Bloniwell interprets contentment as "mental or emotional satisfaction and foremost, a peace of mind". And she explains it details (find the excerpt below).

Security & Money: 5
The more you interface with world the more you realise you are short of money and security. But how much is enough. Enough is not enough. But in some cases enough is enough. Thats when one should stop pushing the envelope.

Health: 9
"Jaan hain to Jahan hain". My grandfather always says health is the most important thing in life. Everything around you depends on how healthy your are. If you are not you are not left with anything else.

Transcendence: 7
The dictionary defines transcendence as a state of being or existence above and beyond the limits of material experience. Well if that is the case I am fairly out of it. A very important factor with all the peer pressures, mall hopping, flat buying, car loans etc

Fulfilment: 5
An overlap with contentment? Not too sure. May be it talks about the smaller things in life. But it can be also about the bigger achievements.

But all in all it boils down to Contentment.

Here is what Ilona Bloniwell says. I couldnt interpret it a more better manner. Hence copying
the stuff here.

Inner peace

What they have in common, it seems, is not fighting yourself. You are content when the different parts of yourself make friends with each other.

Discontent, on the other hand, is the result of a discrepancy between what you want and what you get.

However, nobody can have everything they want. So does it mean that we can not be content?

Fortunately not. What we want depends on us, rather than the situation, so by changing our perspective we can affect our level of contentment as much, if not more, as we could do by changing the situation.