‘Being happy is something you have to learn. I often surprise myself by saying “Wow, this is it. I guess I’m happy. I got a home I love. A career that I love. I’m even feeling more and more at peace with myself.” If there’s something else to happiness, let me know. I’m ambitious for that, too.’ Harrison Ford How happy are you?  This begs the question – how do you know how happy you are? Is it something you can measure? Is it something we should measure – and at what level can we measure it or could we measure it, if it’s possible. At an individual level or what about something bigger, like a county or state level or even a national level. How do you know how happy you are? That’s a bit of tricky question isn’t it? Because we don’t really go around measuring how happy we are - do we? We sort of know it don’t we, that’s even if we stop and think about it which we don’t do most of the time.  We just get on with going about our lives until something notable, good or bad happens, or maybe we plan something so we’re looking forward to it and thinking about it makes us feel happy. Happiness is something we have a feeling for. Websters describes it as a "a state of well-being and contentment." We all know the physical effects of happiness; like smiling and laughing. And there’s also physiological reactions when we’re happy, like increased activity in the brain's left prefrontal lobe and decreased amounts of the stress hormone cortisol in our bloodstream. We often think about happiness in terms of the negative or in retrospect. We realise when we’re not feeling happy. Something happens to make us sad and we look back and think that we were happy then, even if we didn’t necessarily think about it at the time. How happy we feel can frequently change depending on the context. As we talked about in episode 56 on ‘What is Happiness?’, this is reflected by the different types of happiness. The short lived experiential happiness of doing things that make us happy and the longer term underlying sense of wellbeing. So you could have a different answer for ‘am I feeling happy today’ to ‘am I happy with my life’.  If we stop and think about it, we sort of know if we’re happy in the moment or not, or with our overall sense of wellbeing – but is there a way to measure happiness for ourselves and wider communities? How to measure happiness It turns out there are lots of ways to measure happiness and quite a lot of psychologists are doing it. In an interview with the Harvard Business Review Harvard, psychology professor Daniel Gilbert said:  “It’s only recently that we realized we could marry one of our oldest questions - “What is the nature of human happiness?” - to our newest way of getting answers: science. Until just a few decades ago, the problem of happiness was mainly in the hands of philosophers and poets. Psychologists have always been interested in emotion, but in the past two decades the study of emotion has exploded, and one of the emotions that psychologists have studied most intensively is happiness. Recently economists and neuroscientists joined the party. All these disciplines have distinct but intersecting interests: Psychologists want to understand what people feel, economists want to know what people value, and neuroscientists want to know how people’s brains respond to rewards. Having three separate disciplines all interested in a single topic has put that topic on the scientific map.” Measuring happiness is mostly done through happiness surveys where people are asked to rate their satisfaction with aspects of their lives. For example, one of the most critical questions asked in the World Values Survey is: "Taking all things together, would you say you are very happy, rather happy, not very happy or not at all happy?" [source: