Did you know there is a difference between a happy feeling and happiness? You feel happy when you do something pleasant, like eating ice cream on a hot day.
Happiness, on the other hand, is how you feel about your life. It is also called Subjective wellbeing.
Wellbeing is about the whole person.
There's more to life than just money. Life is also about feeling connected to others, curiosity, being motivated, experiencing awe, and so much more.
All these different feelings, states of mind, and thoughts connect to every other feeling, state of mind, and thought that you have to produce a whole, single state - your wellbeing.
Your Wellbeing is made up of 3 components:
Scientists have found that 40% of your subjective wellbeing – the tendency of your personality to express happiness - can be explained by your genes.
But your genes aren't your destiny. Science shows that better wellbeing is possible, above and beyond your genes.
Improvements in wellbeing happen due to the connections between non-genetic wellbeing factors. These factors can influence each other, in a two-way flow. Here are a few examples:
MAP is a unique and scientifically validated happiness assessment tool because it can improve your wellbeing by assessing, measuring, tracking, and influencing many different factors.
Let's be clear. Better wellbeing is not a cure-all for your life. People who are happy do get sick and lose friends.
Yet the science clearly shows that - all other things being equal such as genetics - you improve the likelihood of having a better life when you have better wellbeing. Learn more about The Science.
But at the same time, better wellbeing is not based on feeling extreme bliss or being happy all the time.
Instead, the research shows that an optimal degree of happiness tends to achieve the benefits of better wellbeing. This means feeling mildly to moderately positive most of the time, with occasional negative emotions in inevitable situations like during an argument or when we feel socially isolated.
At MAP, we believe that the easiest and most effective way to be happy is to create balance and be centered in your life. See How MAP works
"There is a paradox at the heart of our lives…as societies become richer, they do not become happier.
All the evidence shows that on average people have grown no happier in the last fifty years, even as average incomes have more than doubled.
What is going on?
Professor Richard Layard asked this question in his 2006 book Happiness - Lessons from a New Science. Layard is Director of the Well-being Programme at the London School of Economics.
The fact that a leading Professor like Richard is asking this question shows how far the world has come with wellbeing.
GDP (Gross Domestic Product) was developed in the 1930s to measure economic production. For decades it was incorrectly used, under the title of ‘living standards’, to also indicate progress of our wellbeing, when clearly GDP is an objective wellbeing measure.
About 20 years ago attention to subjective wellbeing started to grow. Now it is a rich field of interest and insight. Funds from around the world have been invested to measure and understand wellbeing by universities, private companies, and governments .
Some leading contributors include:
Happiness and Wellbeing are rapidly growing fields.
Now there are at least 60 subjective wellbeing measurement tools used in research alone. Many strategies and courses are also available to help improve happiness. Many of them focus on positive psychology, which magnifies the positive aspects of the human experience that make a life worth living, increase mental health, life-satisfaction, resilience and focuses on wellbeing at both the individual and social level.
MAP is a unique program because it:
People like you made MAP possible. People in 38 countries, and counting, used the free wellbeing assessment tool and contributed to the discovery of a new paradigm for mental health and psychological wellbeing. The finding and discoveries of this groundbreaking research were published in 2018 in Frontiers in Psychology – Clinical and Health Psychology. Because MAP is committed to open science, you can read it online or download it. The discoveries have only just begun, so please join us in this exploration of the new frontier of wellbeing and take the free happiness assessment tool today.