Do you know what makes you happy and by how much ? If you don’t know then you are in very good company. Because most other people also don’t know.
A research on happiness by social scientists for over 10 years has come up with some fantastic results. This is so important that everyone in the world should know about it. This knowledge would put you on a roadmap for remaining happy most of your life. Read this article very carefully because this may change your life forever.
The cartoon shows that all of us are in search of happiness most of the time. Research in the last few decades has been digging into this question and social scientists have now come up with an explanation backed up by solid research and data.
There is now scientific evidence which tells us what % of our happiness comes from what. This shatters many of our beliefs of what happiness is all about. Let me present here one of the most widely accepted outcome from this research.
This is a Happiness Pie Chart by Dr Sonja Lyubomirsky from University of California, USA. This is a result of 10 years of her research on the subject of Happiness. I have given a name to this Pie-Chart and Called it “Sukhad-Chakra”. It has three percentages. 10%, 40% and 50%. Let us see what they mean.
The research says that only 10% of your happiness is affected by external factors which are not in your control. Your happiness level will not change by more than 10% because of your circumstances whether you are rich or poor, healthy or unhealthy, beautiful or plain, married or divorced. This is quite a surprising number.
But the amazing number is this 50%. The decades of research has established that 50% of your happiness is from your genes ie it is in your DNA. This is what you get from your parents. This is set in stone and permanent. You will always have this level of happiness – regardless what happens in life.
This is terrific news because now one knows that even though there would be tough times in life but you will always get back this happiness level of yours. Nothing can keep you down from being this happy.
But the biggest cheer should go to the 40% number. This is the percentage which is 100% in our control and depends on our behavior and our actions.
This is fantastic because this means that we can raise our level of happiness to the next level – regardless of what happiness we have in our DNA and whatever else may have happened in our life. This is a “Eureka” moment for all of us as this 40% is really the MASTER KEY to our happiness.
THE TAKEAWAY
As seen in the Sukhad-Chakra, We can only work on 40% part of our happiness since the rest is out of our control. But 40% is a big number. What this means is that if on a scale of 10 you are today 6 out of 10, you can raise it to 8 out of 10 by certain scientifically proven steps and actions.
I have given a name to these Happiness tips & activities. They are called “SukhadKriyas”. By doing them you can raise the level of your happiness – regardless of your current status.
Having understood the elements of happiness, it becomes easier for us to tackle the challenges of life and get the hope that all happiness is not gone.
Regardless of the hand that life may have dealt to you, we need to hang on till we can get our happiness back through our own actions from that 40% magic number. All the best.