This is a pretty exciting moment for me since this is the first time I am writing to you. And I thought what better topic than Happiness! But before I get into that, I want to remind you that TickTalkTo, in partnership with the Kanoria college, is providing you FREE mental wellbeing support and counselling all year long.

So what is happiness? Kind of challenging to define. Right? But we all know it when we feel it. In today’s newsletter, I am not only going to help you define happiness but also share with you a tool to measure your happiness!

A good starting point to define happiness is to look at its linguistic origins. Strikingly, in every Indo-European language, without exception, going all the way back to ancient Greek, the word for happiness is a cognate with the word for luck. Hap is the Old Norse and Old English root of happiness, and it just means luck or chance. So for a good many ancient people, happiness was not something you could control.

There were, of course, other ways of thinking about happiness. For Greek and Roman Classical philosophers, happiness could be earned. It was a function of living good lives, lives that will almost certainly include a good deal of pain. “Happiness is a life lived according to virtue,” Aristotle famously says.

Enter the 17th and 18th centuries, when a revolution in human expectations overthrew these old ideas of happiness. Suffering was no longer the path to happiness and indulging in pleasure was no longer considered a sin. Pleasure was good. Pain was bad. This was a liberating perspective. It gave everyone the right to be happy!

But something of value may have been lost or forgotten in our transition to these modern ideas of happiness. Happiness was increasingly about feeling good rather than being good.

Today, science is rediscovering happiness. Stronger connections of happiness with hope, gratitude, forgiving and altruism are emerging. Science is reminding us how important non-materialistic, spiritual cultivation is to our happiness and well-being.

So how do we define happiness? I would quote psychology researcher Sonja Lyubomirsky to define happiness as the experience of joy, contentment, or positive well-being, combined with a sense that one's life is good, meaningful, and worthwhile.

I know I promised to share a tool to measure happiness. Psychologists use psychometric assessments to measure happiness. Reach out to your happiness coach on TickTalkTo and ask for the Satisfaction With Life Scale. Again all services for students are completely free.

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