Yesterday, Andrew sat down with the team at Zappos.com to talk about using happier.com as a personal trainer for your happiness.
Melissa, who blogs for Zappos, chatted with us about the site and our team. You can watch the full video below. Please leave comments on the Zappos blog if you’re a fan! Thanks!
“As a neuroscientist, I really like the idea of the program….” – a user review
Measure your happiness. Track Your progress. And record what goes well each day.
Daily awareness and tracking of emotions is one of the first steps toward lasting, sustainable happiness
Two decades of research show that focusing on what goes well, and why, helps you build your life around authentic sources of happiness
Application includes an introductory video from Prof. Martin Seligman, of the University of Pennsylvania
Our Mission: We inspire people to be happier.
happier.com inspires people to be happier and more resilient every day. Through assessments and exercises to measure, track and improve happiness, thousands of users have experienced a meaningful improvement. Easy-to-use applications, both online and for the iPhone, provide users with the tools they need to be happier.
Everything we offer is based on leading research. We partner with psychologists including Dr. Martin Seligman, author of “Learned Optimism” and “Authentic Happiness” and the founder of the field of positive psychology.
A new survey indicates that life satisfaction is mostly a matter of perception — but a ready supply of cash doesn’t hurt.
Meghan Daum
March 14, 2009
Oh, no. Here comes another study about happiness. We can’t seem to do enough of these paeans to cheerfulness. In the last few months alone, the British Medical Journal suggested that having a happy close friend boosts our own odds of being happy by 25%; the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological
Sciences pointed to evidence that optimism and pessimism are genetically determined; and the website happier.com, which, according to its mission statement, “measures, tracks and improves happiness,” launched an iPhone application that allows users to keep a mobile “gratitude journal” (just don’t be grateful while driving).
The latest installment comes in the form of the Gallup Healthways Well-Being Index, a huge poll (it used a random sample of 355,000 Americans) designed to measure people’s daily well-being and describe its correlation to where they live and work. The survey revealed which U.S. states (and, indeed, which congressional districts within those states) were the healthiest and happiest in six categories: life satisfaction, work quality, healthy behavior, physical health, emotional health and basic access to necessities such as food and shelter.
The big winner was Utah, followed by Hawaii, Wyoming, Colorado and Minnesota. The state with the worst sense of well-being was West Virginia. Michigan, Ohio, Mississippi and Kentucky filled out the list of the five worst states.
What are we to conclude from this? Well, let’s see: Utah happens to have an unemployment rate of 4.6%, versus the national average of 7.6% (according to January numbers). West Virginia, for its part, has one of the weakest state economies in the country. As for the congressional districts, California’s 14th, which includes the lush, plush Silicon Valley cities of Palo Alto and Mountain View, ranked first. The losers: the coal-mining country of Kentucky’s 5th District and New York’s 16th District, which includes the famously blighted South Bronx.
The study was concerned in large part with quality-of-life issues such as access to outdoor recreation (hence the high marks for Utah and Hawaii) and access to affordable housing and healthcare. But even though spokesmen for the poll may not want to put that fine a point on it — an Associated Press report said a Gallup researcher was “reluctant to explain regional differences without more study, but suspected that some of the variations are explained by income” — it appears that Randy Newman may have been right when he sang “it’s money that matters.” Or, perhaps more accurately, it’s that Puff Daddy’s lyric, “young, black and famous, with money hangin out the anus,” was an encomium to inner peace.
In either case, the current economic calamity has most of us poised for some serious unhappiness. Even if we’re lucky enough to have avoided unhappy friends or pessimistic genes (not so for me; when I was small, my father sat me down and told me “happiness is an illusion” — he then offered me a cherry Life Saver), chances are most of us are suffering some measure of financial anxiety. So does that doom us to West Virginia levels of misery?
Possibly. When I submitted to an assessment on happier.com, which asked questions such as how often I felt proud of myself and what kind of mood I was in most of the time, I scored a rather grim 65 out of a possible 100 (though I guess if I weren’t a pessimist, I’d see 65 as a passing grade). It then suggested I do an online exercise on “controlling negative thoughts,” in which I was asked to quickly solve a series of anagrams and then record how I felt about myself as I attempted to do so.
As it happened, the test made me feel terrible about myself. Then I learned that all but two of the anagrams were unsolvable and that the exercise was developed to help me “gain more control” of my “thinking styles” and “identify the adversity” I was experiencing.”
In other words, I shouldn’t have been so hard on myself for erroneously surmising that “godapoo” was almost an anagram for “dog poo.” I then went back and retook the happiness test and scored a 70.
Of course, even if I were one of the few people who appear to be thriving in this economy — like oil company executives and, rather Dickensianly, shoe repairers (people are getting their shoes fixed rather than buying new ones) — I’d probably still get a middling score on that test. And that’s not just because the well-being index ranked my congressional district 416th out of 435 (I attribute that entirely to the overcrowded parking lot at Trader Joe’s). It’s because ultimately my father was right.
If we believe the results of many of these studies, which suggest that life satisfaction is mostly a matter of perception, then happiness is an illusion. It also happens to be an illusion that can seem a lot more real when paired with cash. Now excuse me while I drop $200 on an iPhone so I can start that mobile gratitude journal.
Happier.com, a Web site created to help users measure, track and improve their level of happiness, has released a mobile application for the iPhone.
Users of happier.com’s Gratitude Journal are directed to make a daily entry of three positive events that happen each day. A simple 24-question assessment then informs the users of their happiness score. “The strategy behind the iPhone app is to help people measure, track and improve their happiness using their mobile device,” said Andrew J. Rosenthal, vice president of Happier.com. “Happier.com works with top scientists, drawing on discoveries from the field of positive psychology.
“Through simple Web-based exercises, users are able to improve the amount of positive emotion, engagement and meaning in their lives,” he said. “Over 10,000 people have begun using Happier.com, and from the Philippines to Philadelphia, the response has been fantastic.
The new Happier.com mobile application includes an introduction by internationally-renowned happiness expert and University of Pennsylvania professor, Dr. Martin Seligman. Users can track milestones and increase their happiness over time using the Gratitude Journal.
“The way humans are wired, when things go well, we tend to forget them. When things go badly we remember them,” Dr. Seligman said in a statement. “The more you pay attention to things going well, by writing them down as in the gratitude journal, the more positive emotions you’ll experience.”
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The Gratitude Journal guides each user through features that measure current happiness, display the six most recent happiness scores and create a journal including a summary of happiness milestones and achievements.
The application can be downloaded from the iTunes AppStore onto either an iPhone or iTouch device.
“Additionally, we’ve found that many people are discovering happier.com after downloading the iPhone app,” Mr. Rosenthal said. “From a business perspective, the app is both a service to our users and a marketing tool to reach potential users.”
According to research, almost 70 percent of people report that they want to be happier.
“Today, we are all under increased pressures and stress,” Mr. Rosenthal said. “We are looking to improve the things we still have under our control such as our relationships, our emotions and our ability to enjoy the smaller things in life.
“Happier.com gives people the tools to better confront adversities and be resilience in the face of everyday challenges,” he said. “The site is being used by over 10,000 people from around the world. Many users are well-educated women aged 30-55, with an interest in self-improvement and science.”
Associate Editor Giselle Abramovich covers ad networks, advertising, content, email, media, messaging, legal/privacy, search, social networks, television and video. Reach her at giselle@mobilemarketer.com.
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