What does happiness really mean, and can it be measured?
In this episode, we move from Aristotle’s eudaimonia to brain scans, surveys, big data, and what truly lifts our mood.
It asks why money only helps so much, why social ties matter, and how trust shapes national well-being.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and over the past few weeks, we’ve had quite a few heavy topics: Roman tyrants, hijackings, and American criminals.
[00:00:32] So today we’re talking about something completely different: happiness.
[00:00:38] It’s something we all want to be; it’s something that we all can be, but what does happiness really mean? Can it ever be truly measured, and what, according to the Global Happiness Report, really makes a person happy?.
[00:00:55] OK then, let's talk about happiness.
[00:01:00] Dictionaries are sometimes pretty useless.
[00:01:03] If you look up “happiness” in a dictionary, it’ll probably say something like “the state of being happy”.
[00:01:11] So you look up “happy”, and it’ll say something like “feeling or showing pleasure or contentment”, or “a state of well-being”.
[00:01:20] And there isn’t much reason to look up the definition of “happy”, at least in a monolingual dictionary.
[00:01:28] I know what it means, you know what it means, from an office on the 90th floor of a skyscraper in Tokyo to a Kalahari Bushman, we might have different words for it, but we know what it means.
[00:01:42] It, of course, means different things to different people; different things make different people happy, there are different types of happiness, and something that makes one person happy might make another person sad.
[00:01:57] What is universal is that happiness is something humans, throughout history, have always sought.
[00:02:06] Happiness as a goal in itself might be more of a recent ideal, but it seems reasonable to suppose that even early hunter-gatherer communities tens of thousands of years ago would have pursued activities that would have brought them happiness, whether that was sitting around a fire and eating a roasted rabbit together, or painting animals on the walls of caves and telling stories to their children.
[00:02:35] One can imagine that a caveman, his belly full, his partner and children singing songs around him, his face warmed by the sun setting in the west, and just about to retire to his cave for the evening, might have thought, “life is good”.
[00:02:52] Perhaps he would even have declared something along the lines of “I am happy”.
[00:02:59] Fast forward to the modern era, and we have scientists, statisticians, economists and even governments trying to measure happiness, using it as a yardstick for the well-being of a country, as an alternative to metrics like GDP, Gross Domestic Product.
[00:03:19] So, can happiness really be measured?
[00:03:23] And before we can measure it, we need to ask: what exactly are we measuring?
[00:03:30] Is happiness the fleeting pleasure of a slice of rich chocolate cake, or a glass of wine after a long day at work?
[00:03:39] Is it the satisfaction we might get after completing something difficult? A long run, or having a conversation in English that you might have thought you never could?
[00:03:50] Is it the longer-term satisfaction of a life well lived, someone looking back on their life and thinking, “I am proud of myself”?
[00:03:59] Is it meaning, purpose, joy, contentment, or all of those things?
[00:04:07] Psychologists often distinguish between two broad types of happiness: hedonic happiness, which is about pleasure and the absence of pain, and something called eudaimonic happiness, which is about purpose, growth, and living in line with your values.
[00:04:26] This is actually something that goes all the way back to Aristotle, the 4th-century BC Greek Philosopher who spent considerable time addressing the question of happiness.
[00:04:38] Now, Aristotle didn’t exactly split happiness into two categories the way modern psychologists do. His focus was on eudaimonia, which is often translated as “flourishing”, living a virtuous life in line with your values.
[00:04:56] He did talk about hedone, or pleasure, but he saw it as just one part of a good life, not equal to eudaimonia.
[00:05:07] Modern psychology has borrowed and adapted these ideas into what we now call hedonic and eudaimonic happiness.
[00:05:17] And then there’s an even more modern addition: what researchers call subjective well-being.
[00:05:24] That’s a catch-all term that usually combines three things: how satisfied you are with your life overall, how much positive emotion you experience, and how much negative emotion you experience.
[00:05:38] In other words, it’s to do with how happy you feel.
[00:05:43] Because, at the end of the day, that’s the only thing that matters, your perception of your own happiness.
[00:05:50] The caveman sitting around a fire 50,000 years ago wasn’t thinking, “I wish I had a flat screen TV”, and there are plenty of people today who have plenty of things that theoretically make a person happy–a nice house, a secure job, a loving family–yet for whatever reason, they don’t feel satisfied themselves.
[00:06:14] So, even before we attempt to measure it, defining what we are measuring, what happiness is, is not exactly easy.
[00:06:25] Now, one of the first attempts to measure happiness came in the late 18th century, with the father of the Utilitarian movement, Jeremy Bentham.
[00:06:36] He tried to mathematically calculate happiness, and his equation was based on subtracting painful activities from pleasurable ones.
[00:06:47] It was slightly more complicated than this, and activities were split up into seven factors: Intensity, Duration, Certainty, Proximity, Fecundity, Purity, and Extent.
[00:07:02] Now isn’t the time to go into all of these, and we do actually have a standalone episode on Jeremy Bentham – it’s episode number 116 – but the point is that it was an early attempt to account for the fact that pleasure and pain have different qualities.
[00:07:23] In other words, the pleasure you might get from eating an apple, let’s say, was worth less than the pain of being locked up in prison and tortured for 10 years. And the pleasure of knowing that you had saved the lives of tens of thousands of children was worth more than the pain of stubbing your toe.
[00:07:44] So Bentham was one of the first to dream of quantifying happiness.
[00:07:50] But his calculus stayed mostly theoretical. After all, if we assume that his weightings and calculations were 100% correct, which they surely were not, then the process of calculating individual happiness would have been so long and complicated that it would firstly have been impractical, and secondly would have taken so long that its subject would no doubt have become quite unhappy while it was taking place.
[00:08:21] It wasn’t until the 20th century that psychologists began developing practical tools – surveys, scales, and experiments – to try to measure how happy people really were.
[00:08:35] And the most common tool, even today, is perhaps the simplest: the survey.
[00:08:43] You’ve almost certainly seen questions like these before:
[00:08:46] “On a scale of 1 to 10, how satisfied are you with your life as a whole?”
[00:08:52] “Taking all things together, would you say you are very happy, quite happy, not very happy, or not at all happy?”
[00:09:01] These so-called life satisfaction questions are the backbone of most happiness research.
[00:09:08] They are simple, easy to administer across large populations, and when you add them up, you can start to compare one country to another, or track changes over time.
[00:09:21] Now, surveys like this are neat, but they have a big limitation: they rely on people remembering and summarising their happiness.
[00:09:33] Psychologists know that memory is unreliable: we tend to overemphasise the highs and lows, and undercount the ordinary moments. This is sometimes referred to as the “peak–end rule”: when people recall an experience, they mostly remember the most intense moment, the “peak”, and how it concluded, the “end”.
[00:09:59] You sort of forget the bits in the middle.
[00:10:02] So if you really want to capture happiness more accurately, you need to measure it in the moment, rather than asking people to remember it later.
[00:10:13] Obviously, this is more complicated, but it is possible.
[00:10:18] That’s where a method called Experience Sampling comes in.
[00:10:22] This involves pinging people at random times of the day, with a text, an app notification, or even a beeper back in the 1980s, and asking: “How are you feeling right now? What are you doing? Who are you with?”
[00:10:39] The idea is that, by collecting hundreds or thousands of these little snapshots, you can build up a far more realistic picture of what makes people happy.
[00:10:51] And Experience Sampling studies have found some fascinating patterns.
[00:10:57] People tend to report being happiest when they’re socialising, exercising, or engaged in activities that give them a sense of flow, that feeling of being completely absorbed in what they’re doing.
[00:11:12] The situations in which they tend to be least happy are probably unsurprising: commuting, working in stressful conditions, or when they’re ill.
[00:11:25] If you are listening to this with a cold on a crowded commuter train, well, you’re probably feeling a bit rubbish.
[00:11:33] Now, self-reported happiness surveys, even these ”experience sampling”-style ones, only take us so far.
[00:11:42] Scientists have also looked at physiological measures: heart rate variability, levels of the stress hormone cortisol, and even patterns of brain activity.
[00:11:54] Neuroscientists have found that certain regions of the brain light up when people report feeling happy. When we feel happy, there are clear physiological changes and measuring these kinds of changes is the most accurate way to measure happiness, theoretically speaking, at least.
[00:12:15] But while these methods can be incredibly precise in a lab, they’re expensive, invasive, and not exactly practical for large populations.
[00:12:27] In recent years, researchers have tried a different approach altogether: big data.
[00:12:33] By analysing billions of words on social media, or even the emotional tone of song lyrics, they attempt to track collective happiness in real time.
[00:12:47] One famous study found that people’s tweets tended to be more positive in the morning, dip during the workday, and then rise again in the evening. Hardly surprising, perhaps.
[00:13:01] Another tracked changes in national mood based on how cheerful or gloomy song lyrics became over the course of decades.
[00:13:10] Interesting from the point of view of measuring the happiness of a wider population over time, but not particularly helpful when it comes to more granular measures.
[00:13:22] So from smartphones to surveys, saliva samples to social media, there are now dozens of different ways to try to measure happiness.
[00:13:34] None of these is perfect, but there has been enough research into the subject over the course of several decades that there are some interesting themes and trends that researchers have seen about what makes someone happy, or not.
[00:13:50] Some of these will not be surprising; others might be.
[00:13:54] One of the clearest findings is that money matters, but only up to a point.
[00:14:01] When people are struggling to meet their basic needs, more money reliably increases happiness. The difference between living on two dollars a day and ten dollars is enormous.
[00:14:14] But once you reach a certain level of comfort, the effect flattens out.
[00:14:20] Going from an income of €10,000 a year to €20,000 makes a big difference.
[00:14:28] But going from €100,000 to €200,000? Much less so.
[00:14:34] Another theme is the importance of social connections.
[00:14:39] Time and time again, the research shows that people who feel they can rely on friends, family, or their community report higher levels of happiness.
[00:14:50] Loneliness, on the other hand, is one of the strongest predictors of unhappiness.
[00:14:57] During the Covid-19 pandemic, when isolation was forced on much of the world, surveys found sharp declines in happiness, especially among younger people.
[00:15:10] Spending time with other people, perhaps unsurprisingly, is positively correlated with self-reported happiness. And the worrying thing is that, across much of the world, people are reporting spending more and more time alone.
[00:15:27] One of the markers of this is “eating alone”.
[00:15:31] According to the 2025 World Happiness Report, “In 2023, roughly 1 in 4 Americans reported eating all of their meals alone the previous day – an increase of 53% since 2003.”
[00:15:48] And in the same report, household size is positively correlated with happiness, up to a point at least.
[00:15:57] According to the report, “In Mexico and Europe, a household size of four to five predicts the highest levels of happiness. Couples who live with at least one child, or couples who live with children and members of their extended family, have especially high average life satisfaction.”
[00:16:17] But the report goes on to acknowledge that people who live in very large households do report lower levels of happiness, but this is probably due to lower levels of economic satisfaction. Or to put it another way, it might be nice to live with lots of people, but not if you have to queue for 1 hour for a shower every day and there’s only one loaf of bread to feed 15 people.
[00:16:45] There’s also the role of trust.
[00:16:48] Countries where people believe that others can be trusted, that institutions are fair, and that corruption is relatively low, tend to report higher levels of wellbeing. It isn’t just about how much money a country has, but about how fair and safe life feels.
[00:17:10] To give you a personal example, I live in Sweden, a country that is always towards the top of these happiness reports.
[00:17:20] A few months ago, I was coming back from a swimming lesson with my son, and we, or rather I, accidentally left his favourite Spider-Man rucksack on the tram. He was very sad, but I went to the lost and found office the following day, and found that someone had handed it in. I had to pay a very small administration fee, and I got it back.
[00:17:45] This made me happy temporarily, and him very happy when I returned it to him, but it also made me happy on a deeper, more permanent level to think that I live in a place where someone will do that.
[00:18:01] Of course, it might not have been returned, which might have made me unhappy, so if I had been asked if I was happy immediately after I’d been told “sorry, nobody has handed that in”, this might have clouded my mood, which highlights a problem with this self-reporting sampling method.
[00:18:19] But it is a real-life, single data point.
[00:18:24] And in fact, this year’s Global Happiness Report made this sensation a core focus.
[00:18:30] One of the things they tracked was almost exactly this: how likely respondents believed it was that a dropped wallet would be returned, depending on whether it was found by a neighbour, a stranger, or a police officer.
[00:18:46] What they found was a definite trend: the more likely someone thought someone else was to do them a good deed, such as returning their lost wallet, the more likely they were to say that they were happy.
[00:19:00] There were exceptions, of course. Costa Rica is the sixth-happiest country in the world, on a self-reported basis, but comes 128th in terms of trust in a stranger to return a wallet.
[00:19:15] And Iran is the 99th happiest country in the world, so towards the bottom of the scale, but Iranians were the 2nd most likely people to say that a stranger would return their wallet.
[00:19:29] There are exceptions, but there was a strong overall trend.
[00:19:35] And interestingly enough, this report compared the data on expected wallet return with data on other acts of “caring” for fellow citizens, such as donating to charity, volunteering, or helping a stranger.
[00:19:52] There was a general trend whereby people in countries ranked higher on these “caregiving” scores reported having higher levels of happiness.
[00:20:02] But the trend was much more defined for the countries that ranked highest on the “care receiving” metrics.
[00:20:12] To put it another way, yes, caring for others tends to have a positive effect on happiness, but the effect isn’t as great as living in a country where you expect others to care for you.
[00:20:27] Interesting, right?
[00:20:29] Now, to wrap things up, there is unquestionably more to happiness than believing a stranger is going to return your wallet, or in my case, your son’s Spider-Man rucksack.
[00:20:41] Happiness is messy, complicated, and impossible to pin down with complete precision.
[00:20:48] We can try, and we have got better and better at it.
[00:20:52] And we should keep on trying.
[00:20:55] After all, to quote one of the original thinkers on the concept of happiness, Aristotle, “Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence”.
[00:21:10] OK, that is it for today's episode on the science of happiness.
[00:21:14] I hope it's been an interesting one and that you've learnt something new.
[00:21:17] I’ll put a link to the Global Happiness Report in the show notes, if you’d like to check that out yourself.
[00:21:23] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:21:28] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and over the past few weeks, we’ve had quite a few heavy topics: Roman tyrants, hijackings, and American criminals.
[00:00:32] So today we’re talking about something completely different: happiness.
[00:00:38] It’s something we all want to be; it’s something that we all can be, but what does happiness really mean? Can it ever be truly measured, and what, according to the Global Happiness Report, really makes a person happy?.
[00:00:55] OK then, let's talk about happiness.
[00:01:00] Dictionaries are sometimes pretty useless.
[00:01:03] If you look up “happiness” in a dictionary, it’ll probably say something like “the state of being happy”.
[00:01:11] So you look up “happy”, and it’ll say something like “feeling or showing pleasure or contentment”, or “a state of well-being”.
[00:01:20] And there isn’t much reason to look up the definition of “happy”, at least in a monolingual dictionary.
[00:01:28] I know what it means, you know what it means, from an office on the 90th floor of a skyscraper in Tokyo to a Kalahari Bushman, we might have different words for it, but we know what it means.
[00:01:42] It, of course, means different things to different people; different things make different people happy, there are different types of happiness, and something that makes one person happy might make another person sad.
[00:01:57] What is universal is that happiness is something humans, throughout history, have always sought.
[00:02:06] Happiness as a goal in itself might be more of a recent ideal, but it seems reasonable to suppose that even early hunter-gatherer communities tens of thousands of years ago would have pursued activities that would have brought them happiness, whether that was sitting around a fire and eating a roasted rabbit together, or painting animals on the walls of caves and telling stories to their children.
[00:02:35] One can imagine that a caveman, his belly full, his partner and children singing songs around him, his face warmed by the sun setting in the west, and just about to retire to his cave for the evening, might have thought, “life is good”.
[00:02:52] Perhaps he would even have declared something along the lines of “I am happy”.
[00:02:59] Fast forward to the modern era, and we have scientists, statisticians, economists and even governments trying to measure happiness, using it as a yardstick for the well-being of a country, as an alternative to metrics like GDP, Gross Domestic Product.
[00:03:19] So, can happiness really be measured?
[00:03:23] And before we can measure it, we need to ask: what exactly are we measuring?
[00:03:30] Is happiness the fleeting pleasure of a slice of rich chocolate cake, or a glass of wine after a long day at work?
[00:03:39] Is it the satisfaction we might get after completing something difficult? A long run, or having a conversation in English that you might have thought you never could?
[00:03:50] Is it the longer-term satisfaction of a life well lived, someone looking back on their life and thinking, “I am proud of myself”?
[00:03:59] Is it meaning, purpose, joy, contentment, or all of those things?
[00:04:07] Psychologists often distinguish between two broad types of happiness: hedonic happiness, which is about pleasure and the absence of pain, and something called eudaimonic happiness, which is about purpose, growth, and living in line with your values.
[00:04:26] This is actually something that goes all the way back to Aristotle, the 4th-century BC Greek Philosopher who spent considerable time addressing the question of happiness.
[00:04:38] Now, Aristotle didn’t exactly split happiness into two categories the way modern psychologists do. His focus was on eudaimonia, which is often translated as “flourishing”, living a virtuous life in line with your values.
[00:04:56] He did talk about hedone, or pleasure, but he saw it as just one part of a good life, not equal to eudaimonia.
[00:05:07] Modern psychology has borrowed and adapted these ideas into what we now call hedonic and eudaimonic happiness.
[00:05:17] And then there’s an even more modern addition: what researchers call subjective well-being.
[00:05:24] That’s a catch-all term that usually combines three things: how satisfied you are with your life overall, how much positive emotion you experience, and how much negative emotion you experience.
[00:05:38] In other words, it’s to do with how happy you feel.
[00:05:43] Because, at the end of the day, that’s the only thing that matters, your perception of your own happiness.
[00:05:50] The caveman sitting around a fire 50,000 years ago wasn’t thinking, “I wish I had a flat screen TV”, and there are plenty of people today who have plenty of things that theoretically make a person happy–a nice house, a secure job, a loving family–yet for whatever reason, they don’t feel satisfied themselves.
[00:06:14] So, even before we attempt to measure it, defining what we are measuring, what happiness is, is not exactly easy.
[00:06:25] Now, one of the first attempts to measure happiness came in the late 18th century, with the father of the Utilitarian movement, Jeremy Bentham.
[00:06:36] He tried to mathematically calculate happiness, and his equation was based on subtracting painful activities from pleasurable ones.
[00:06:47] It was slightly more complicated than this, and activities were split up into seven factors: Intensity, Duration, Certainty, Proximity, Fecundity, Purity, and Extent.
[00:07:02] Now isn’t the time to go into all of these, and we do actually have a standalone episode on Jeremy Bentham – it’s episode number 116 – but the point is that it was an early attempt to account for the fact that pleasure and pain have different qualities.
[00:07:23] In other words, the pleasure you might get from eating an apple, let’s say, was worth less than the pain of being locked up in prison and tortured for 10 years. And the pleasure of knowing that you had saved the lives of tens of thousands of children was worth more than the pain of stubbing your toe.
[00:07:44] So Bentham was one of the first to dream of quantifying happiness.
[00:07:50] But his calculus stayed mostly theoretical. After all, if we assume that his weightings and calculations were 100% correct, which they surely were not, then the process of calculating individual happiness would have been so long and complicated that it would firstly have been impractical, and secondly would have taken so long that its subject would no doubt have become quite unhappy while it was taking place.
[00:08:21] It wasn’t until the 20th century that psychologists began developing practical tools – surveys, scales, and experiments – to try to measure how happy people really were.
[00:08:35] And the most common tool, even today, is perhaps the simplest: the survey.
[00:08:43] You’ve almost certainly seen questions like these before:
[00:08:46] “On a scale of 1 to 10, how satisfied are you with your life as a whole?”
[00:08:52] “Taking all things together, would you say you are very happy, quite happy, not very happy, or not at all happy?”
[00:09:01] These so-called life satisfaction questions are the backbone of most happiness research.
[00:09:08] They are simple, easy to administer across large populations, and when you add them up, you can start to compare one country to another, or track changes over time.
[00:09:21] Now, surveys like this are neat, but they have a big limitation: they rely on people remembering and summarising their happiness.
[00:09:33] Psychologists know that memory is unreliable: we tend to overemphasise the highs and lows, and undercount the ordinary moments. This is sometimes referred to as the “peak–end rule”: when people recall an experience, they mostly remember the most intense moment, the “peak”, and how it concluded, the “end”.
[00:09:59] You sort of forget the bits in the middle.
[00:10:02] So if you really want to capture happiness more accurately, you need to measure it in the moment, rather than asking people to remember it later.
[00:10:13] Obviously, this is more complicated, but it is possible.
[00:10:18] That’s where a method called Experience Sampling comes in.
[00:10:22] This involves pinging people at random times of the day, with a text, an app notification, or even a beeper back in the 1980s, and asking: “How are you feeling right now? What are you doing? Who are you with?”
[00:10:39] The idea is that, by collecting hundreds or thousands of these little snapshots, you can build up a far more realistic picture of what makes people happy.
[00:10:51] And Experience Sampling studies have found some fascinating patterns.
[00:10:57] People tend to report being happiest when they’re socialising, exercising, or engaged in activities that give them a sense of flow, that feeling of being completely absorbed in what they’re doing.
[00:11:12] The situations in which they tend to be least happy are probably unsurprising: commuting, working in stressful conditions, or when they’re ill.
[00:11:25] If you are listening to this with a cold on a crowded commuter train, well, you’re probably feeling a bit rubbish.
[00:11:33] Now, self-reported happiness surveys, even these ”experience sampling”-style ones, only take us so far.
[00:11:42] Scientists have also looked at physiological measures: heart rate variability, levels of the stress hormone cortisol, and even patterns of brain activity.
[00:11:54] Neuroscientists have found that certain regions of the brain light up when people report feeling happy. When we feel happy, there are clear physiological changes and measuring these kinds of changes is the most accurate way to measure happiness, theoretically speaking, at least.
[00:12:15] But while these methods can be incredibly precise in a lab, they’re expensive, invasive, and not exactly practical for large populations.
[00:12:27] In recent years, researchers have tried a different approach altogether: big data.
[00:12:33] By analysing billions of words on social media, or even the emotional tone of song lyrics, they attempt to track collective happiness in real time.
[00:12:47] One famous study found that people’s tweets tended to be more positive in the morning, dip during the workday, and then rise again in the evening. Hardly surprising, perhaps.
[00:13:01] Another tracked changes in national mood based on how cheerful or gloomy song lyrics became over the course of decades.
[00:13:10] Interesting from the point of view of measuring the happiness of a wider population over time, but not particularly helpful when it comes to more granular measures.
[00:13:22] So from smartphones to surveys, saliva samples to social media, there are now dozens of different ways to try to measure happiness.
[00:13:34] None of these is perfect, but there has been enough research into the subject over the course of several decades that there are some interesting themes and trends that researchers have seen about what makes someone happy, or not.
[00:13:50] Some of these will not be surprising; others might be.
[00:13:54] One of the clearest findings is that money matters, but only up to a point.
[00:14:01] When people are struggling to meet their basic needs, more money reliably increases happiness. The difference between living on two dollars a day and ten dollars is enormous.
[00:14:14] But once you reach a certain level of comfort, the effect flattens out.
[00:14:20] Going from an income of €10,000 a year to €20,000 makes a big difference.
[00:14:28] But going from €100,000 to €200,000? Much less so.
[00:14:34] Another theme is the importance of social connections.
[00:14:39] Time and time again, the research shows that people who feel they can rely on friends, family, or their community report higher levels of happiness.
[00:14:50] Loneliness, on the other hand, is one of the strongest predictors of unhappiness.
[00:14:57] During the Covid-19 pandemic, when isolation was forced on much of the world, surveys found sharp declines in happiness, especially among younger people.
[00:15:10] Spending time with other people, perhaps unsurprisingly, is positively correlated with self-reported happiness. And the worrying thing is that, across much of the world, people are reporting spending more and more time alone.
[00:15:27] One of the markers of this is “eating alone”.
[00:15:31] According to the 2025 World Happiness Report, “In 2023, roughly 1 in 4 Americans reported eating all of their meals alone the previous day – an increase of 53% since 2003.”
[00:15:48] And in the same report, household size is positively correlated with happiness, up to a point at least.
[00:15:57] According to the report, “In Mexico and Europe, a household size of four to five predicts the highest levels of happiness. Couples who live with at least one child, or couples who live with children and members of their extended family, have especially high average life satisfaction.”
[00:16:17] But the report goes on to acknowledge that people who live in very large households do report lower levels of happiness, but this is probably due to lower levels of economic satisfaction. Or to put it another way, it might be nice to live with lots of people, but not if you have to queue for 1 hour for a shower every day and there’s only one loaf of bread to feed 15 people.
[00:16:45] There’s also the role of trust.
[00:16:48] Countries where people believe that others can be trusted, that institutions are fair, and that corruption is relatively low, tend to report higher levels of wellbeing. It isn’t just about how much money a country has, but about how fair and safe life feels.
[00:17:10] To give you a personal example, I live in Sweden, a country that is always towards the top of these happiness reports.
[00:17:20] A few months ago, I was coming back from a swimming lesson with my son, and we, or rather I, accidentally left his favourite Spider-Man rucksack on the tram. He was very sad, but I went to the lost and found office the following day, and found that someone had handed it in. I had to pay a very small administration fee, and I got it back.
[00:17:45] This made me happy temporarily, and him very happy when I returned it to him, but it also made me happy on a deeper, more permanent level to think that I live in a place where someone will do that.
[00:18:01] Of course, it might not have been returned, which might have made me unhappy, so if I had been asked if I was happy immediately after I’d been told “sorry, nobody has handed that in”, this might have clouded my mood, which highlights a problem with this self-reporting sampling method.
[00:18:19] But it is a real-life, single data point.
[00:18:24] And in fact, this year’s Global Happiness Report made this sensation a core focus.
[00:18:30] One of the things they tracked was almost exactly this: how likely respondents believed it was that a dropped wallet would be returned, depending on whether it was found by a neighbour, a stranger, or a police officer.
[00:18:46] What they found was a definite trend: the more likely someone thought someone else was to do them a good deed, such as returning their lost wallet, the more likely they were to say that they were happy.
[00:19:00] There were exceptions, of course. Costa Rica is the sixth-happiest country in the world, on a self-reported basis, but comes 128th in terms of trust in a stranger to return a wallet.
[00:19:15] And Iran is the 99th happiest country in the world, so towards the bottom of the scale, but Iranians were the 2nd most likely people to say that a stranger would return their wallet.
[00:19:29] There are exceptions, but there was a strong overall trend.
[00:19:35] And interestingly enough, this report compared the data on expected wallet return with data on other acts of “caring” for fellow citizens, such as donating to charity, volunteering, or helping a stranger.
[00:19:52] There was a general trend whereby people in countries ranked higher on these “caregiving” scores reported having higher levels of happiness.
[00:20:02] But the trend was much more defined for the countries that ranked highest on the “care receiving” metrics.
[00:20:12] To put it another way, yes, caring for others tends to have a positive effect on happiness, but the effect isn’t as great as living in a country where you expect others to care for you.
[00:20:27] Interesting, right?
[00:20:29] Now, to wrap things up, there is unquestionably more to happiness than believing a stranger is going to return your wallet, or in my case, your son’s Spider-Man rucksack.
[00:20:41] Happiness is messy, complicated, and impossible to pin down with complete precision.
[00:20:48] We can try, and we have got better and better at it.
[00:20:52] And we should keep on trying.
[00:20:55] After all, to quote one of the original thinkers on the concept of happiness, Aristotle, “Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence”.
[00:21:10] OK, that is it for today's episode on the science of happiness.
[00:21:14] I hope it's been an interesting one and that you've learnt something new.
[00:21:17] I’ll put a link to the Global Happiness Report in the show notes, if you’d like to check that out yourself.
[00:21:23] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:21:28] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and over the past few weeks, we’ve had quite a few heavy topics: Roman tyrants, hijackings, and American criminals.
[00:00:32] So today we’re talking about something completely different: happiness.
[00:00:38] It’s something we all want to be; it’s something that we all can be, but what does happiness really mean? Can it ever be truly measured, and what, according to the Global Happiness Report, really makes a person happy?.
[00:00:55] OK then, let's talk about happiness.
[00:01:00] Dictionaries are sometimes pretty useless.
[00:01:03] If you look up “happiness” in a dictionary, it’ll probably say something like “the state of being happy”.
[00:01:11] So you look up “happy”, and it’ll say something like “feeling or showing pleasure or contentment”, or “a state of well-being”.
[00:01:20] And there isn’t much reason to look up the definition of “happy”, at least in a monolingual dictionary.
[00:01:28] I know what it means, you know what it means, from an office on the 90th floor of a skyscraper in Tokyo to a Kalahari Bushman, we might have different words for it, but we know what it means.
[00:01:42] It, of course, means different things to different people; different things make different people happy, there are different types of happiness, and something that makes one person happy might make another person sad.
[00:01:57] What is universal is that happiness is something humans, throughout history, have always sought.
[00:02:06] Happiness as a goal in itself might be more of a recent ideal, but it seems reasonable to suppose that even early hunter-gatherer communities tens of thousands of years ago would have pursued activities that would have brought them happiness, whether that was sitting around a fire and eating a roasted rabbit together, or painting animals on the walls of caves and telling stories to their children.
[00:02:35] One can imagine that a caveman, his belly full, his partner and children singing songs around him, his face warmed by the sun setting in the west, and just about to retire to his cave for the evening, might have thought, “life is good”.
[00:02:52] Perhaps he would even have declared something along the lines of “I am happy”.
[00:02:59] Fast forward to the modern era, and we have scientists, statisticians, economists and even governments trying to measure happiness, using it as a yardstick for the well-being of a country, as an alternative to metrics like GDP, Gross Domestic Product.
[00:03:19] So, can happiness really be measured?
[00:03:23] And before we can measure it, we need to ask: what exactly are we measuring?
[00:03:30] Is happiness the fleeting pleasure of a slice of rich chocolate cake, or a glass of wine after a long day at work?
[00:03:39] Is it the satisfaction we might get after completing something difficult? A long run, or having a conversation in English that you might have thought you never could?
[00:03:50] Is it the longer-term satisfaction of a life well lived, someone looking back on their life and thinking, “I am proud of myself”?
[00:03:59] Is it meaning, purpose, joy, contentment, or all of those things?
[00:04:07] Psychologists often distinguish between two broad types of happiness: hedonic happiness, which is about pleasure and the absence of pain, and something called eudaimonic happiness, which is about purpose, growth, and living in line with your values.
[00:04:26] This is actually something that goes all the way back to Aristotle, the 4th-century BC Greek Philosopher who spent considerable time addressing the question of happiness.
[00:04:38] Now, Aristotle didn’t exactly split happiness into two categories the way modern psychologists do. His focus was on eudaimonia, which is often translated as “flourishing”, living a virtuous life in line with your values.
[00:04:56] He did talk about hedone, or pleasure, but he saw it as just one part of a good life, not equal to eudaimonia.
[00:05:07] Modern psychology has borrowed and adapted these ideas into what we now call hedonic and eudaimonic happiness.
[00:05:17] And then there’s an even more modern addition: what researchers call subjective well-being.
[00:05:24] That’s a catch-all term that usually combines three things: how satisfied you are with your life overall, how much positive emotion you experience, and how much negative emotion you experience.
[00:05:38] In other words, it’s to do with how happy you feel.
[00:05:43] Because, at the end of the day, that’s the only thing that matters, your perception of your own happiness.
[00:05:50] The caveman sitting around a fire 50,000 years ago wasn’t thinking, “I wish I had a flat screen TV”, and there are plenty of people today who have plenty of things that theoretically make a person happy–a nice house, a secure job, a loving family–yet for whatever reason, they don’t feel satisfied themselves.
[00:06:14] So, even before we attempt to measure it, defining what we are measuring, what happiness is, is not exactly easy.
[00:06:25] Now, one of the first attempts to measure happiness came in the late 18th century, with the father of the Utilitarian movement, Jeremy Bentham.
[00:06:36] He tried to mathematically calculate happiness, and his equation was based on subtracting painful activities from pleasurable ones.
[00:06:47] It was slightly more complicated than this, and activities were split up into seven factors: Intensity, Duration, Certainty, Proximity, Fecundity, Purity, and Extent.
[00:07:02] Now isn’t the time to go into all of these, and we do actually have a standalone episode on Jeremy Bentham – it’s episode number 116 – but the point is that it was an early attempt to account for the fact that pleasure and pain have different qualities.
[00:07:23] In other words, the pleasure you might get from eating an apple, let’s say, was worth less than the pain of being locked up in prison and tortured for 10 years. And the pleasure of knowing that you had saved the lives of tens of thousands of children was worth more than the pain of stubbing your toe.
[00:07:44] So Bentham was one of the first to dream of quantifying happiness.
[00:07:50] But his calculus stayed mostly theoretical. After all, if we assume that his weightings and calculations were 100% correct, which they surely were not, then the process of calculating individual happiness would have been so long and complicated that it would firstly have been impractical, and secondly would have taken so long that its subject would no doubt have become quite unhappy while it was taking place.
[00:08:21] It wasn’t until the 20th century that psychologists began developing practical tools – surveys, scales, and experiments – to try to measure how happy people really were.
[00:08:35] And the most common tool, even today, is perhaps the simplest: the survey.
[00:08:43] You’ve almost certainly seen questions like these before:
[00:08:46] “On a scale of 1 to 10, how satisfied are you with your life as a whole?”
[00:08:52] “Taking all things together, would you say you are very happy, quite happy, not very happy, or not at all happy?”
[00:09:01] These so-called life satisfaction questions are the backbone of most happiness research.
[00:09:08] They are simple, easy to administer across large populations, and when you add them up, you can start to compare one country to another, or track changes over time.
[00:09:21] Now, surveys like this are neat, but they have a big limitation: they rely on people remembering and summarising their happiness.
[00:09:33] Psychologists know that memory is unreliable: we tend to overemphasise the highs and lows, and undercount the ordinary moments. This is sometimes referred to as the “peak–end rule”: when people recall an experience, they mostly remember the most intense moment, the “peak”, and how it concluded, the “end”.
[00:09:59] You sort of forget the bits in the middle.
[00:10:02] So if you really want to capture happiness more accurately, you need to measure it in the moment, rather than asking people to remember it later.
[00:10:13] Obviously, this is more complicated, but it is possible.
[00:10:18] That’s where a method called Experience Sampling comes in.
[00:10:22] This involves pinging people at random times of the day, with a text, an app notification, or even a beeper back in the 1980s, and asking: “How are you feeling right now? What are you doing? Who are you with?”
[00:10:39] The idea is that, by collecting hundreds or thousands of these little snapshots, you can build up a far more realistic picture of what makes people happy.
[00:10:51] And Experience Sampling studies have found some fascinating patterns.
[00:10:57] People tend to report being happiest when they’re socialising, exercising, or engaged in activities that give them a sense of flow, that feeling of being completely absorbed in what they’re doing.
[00:11:12] The situations in which they tend to be least happy are probably unsurprising: commuting, working in stressful conditions, or when they’re ill.
[00:11:25] If you are listening to this with a cold on a crowded commuter train, well, you’re probably feeling a bit rubbish.
[00:11:33] Now, self-reported happiness surveys, even these ”experience sampling”-style ones, only take us so far.
[00:11:42] Scientists have also looked at physiological measures: heart rate variability, levels of the stress hormone cortisol, and even patterns of brain activity.
[00:11:54] Neuroscientists have found that certain regions of the brain light up when people report feeling happy. When we feel happy, there are clear physiological changes and measuring these kinds of changes is the most accurate way to measure happiness, theoretically speaking, at least.
[00:12:15] But while these methods can be incredibly precise in a lab, they’re expensive, invasive, and not exactly practical for large populations.
[00:12:27] In recent years, researchers have tried a different approach altogether: big data.
[00:12:33] By analysing billions of words on social media, or even the emotional tone of song lyrics, they attempt to track collective happiness in real time.
[00:12:47] One famous study found that people’s tweets tended to be more positive in the morning, dip during the workday, and then rise again in the evening. Hardly surprising, perhaps.
[00:13:01] Another tracked changes in national mood based on how cheerful or gloomy song lyrics became over the course of decades.
[00:13:10] Interesting from the point of view of measuring the happiness of a wider population over time, but not particularly helpful when it comes to more granular measures.
[00:13:22] So from smartphones to surveys, saliva samples to social media, there are now dozens of different ways to try to measure happiness.
[00:13:34] None of these is perfect, but there has been enough research into the subject over the course of several decades that there are some interesting themes and trends that researchers have seen about what makes someone happy, or not.
[00:13:50] Some of these will not be surprising; others might be.
[00:13:54] One of the clearest findings is that money matters, but only up to a point.
[00:14:01] When people are struggling to meet their basic needs, more money reliably increases happiness. The difference between living on two dollars a day and ten dollars is enormous.
[00:14:14] But once you reach a certain level of comfort, the effect flattens out.
[00:14:20] Going from an income of €10,000 a year to €20,000 makes a big difference.
[00:14:28] But going from €100,000 to €200,000? Much less so.
[00:14:34] Another theme is the importance of social connections.
[00:14:39] Time and time again, the research shows that people who feel they can rely on friends, family, or their community report higher levels of happiness.
[00:14:50] Loneliness, on the other hand, is one of the strongest predictors of unhappiness.
[00:14:57] During the Covid-19 pandemic, when isolation was forced on much of the world, surveys found sharp declines in happiness, especially among younger people.
[00:15:10] Spending time with other people, perhaps unsurprisingly, is positively correlated with self-reported happiness. And the worrying thing is that, across much of the world, people are reporting spending more and more time alone.
[00:15:27] One of the markers of this is “eating alone”.
[00:15:31] According to the 2025 World Happiness Report, “In 2023, roughly 1 in 4 Americans reported eating all of their meals alone the previous day – an increase of 53% since 2003.”
[00:15:48] And in the same report, household size is positively correlated with happiness, up to a point at least.
[00:15:57] According to the report, “In Mexico and Europe, a household size of four to five predicts the highest levels of happiness. Couples who live with at least one child, or couples who live with children and members of their extended family, have especially high average life satisfaction.”
[00:16:17] But the report goes on to acknowledge that people who live in very large households do report lower levels of happiness, but this is probably due to lower levels of economic satisfaction. Or to put it another way, it might be nice to live with lots of people, but not if you have to queue for 1 hour for a shower every day and there’s only one loaf of bread to feed 15 people.
[00:16:45] There’s also the role of trust.
[00:16:48] Countries where people believe that others can be trusted, that institutions are fair, and that corruption is relatively low, tend to report higher levels of wellbeing. It isn’t just about how much money a country has, but about how fair and safe life feels.
[00:17:10] To give you a personal example, I live in Sweden, a country that is always towards the top of these happiness reports.
[00:17:20] A few months ago, I was coming back from a swimming lesson with my son, and we, or rather I, accidentally left his favourite Spider-Man rucksack on the tram. He was very sad, but I went to the lost and found office the following day, and found that someone had handed it in. I had to pay a very small administration fee, and I got it back.
[00:17:45] This made me happy temporarily, and him very happy when I returned it to him, but it also made me happy on a deeper, more permanent level to think that I live in a place where someone will do that.
[00:18:01] Of course, it might not have been returned, which might have made me unhappy, so if I had been asked if I was happy immediately after I’d been told “sorry, nobody has handed that in”, this might have clouded my mood, which highlights a problem with this self-reporting sampling method.
[00:18:19] But it is a real-life, single data point.
[00:18:24] And in fact, this year’s Global Happiness Report made this sensation a core focus.
[00:18:30] One of the things they tracked was almost exactly this: how likely respondents believed it was that a dropped wallet would be returned, depending on whether it was found by a neighbour, a stranger, or a police officer.
[00:18:46] What they found was a definite trend: the more likely someone thought someone else was to do them a good deed, such as returning their lost wallet, the more likely they were to say that they were happy.
[00:19:00] There were exceptions, of course. Costa Rica is the sixth-happiest country in the world, on a self-reported basis, but comes 128th in terms of trust in a stranger to return a wallet.
[00:19:15] And Iran is the 99th happiest country in the world, so towards the bottom of the scale, but Iranians were the 2nd most likely people to say that a stranger would return their wallet.
[00:19:29] There are exceptions, but there was a strong overall trend.
[00:19:35] And interestingly enough, this report compared the data on expected wallet return with data on other acts of “caring” for fellow citizens, such as donating to charity, volunteering, or helping a stranger.
[00:19:52] There was a general trend whereby people in countries ranked higher on these “caregiving” scores reported having higher levels of happiness.
[00:20:02] But the trend was much more defined for the countries that ranked highest on the “care receiving” metrics.
[00:20:12] To put it another way, yes, caring for others tends to have a positive effect on happiness, but the effect isn’t as great as living in a country where you expect others to care for you.
[00:20:27] Interesting, right?
[00:20:29] Now, to wrap things up, there is unquestionably more to happiness than believing a stranger is going to return your wallet, or in my case, your son’s Spider-Man rucksack.
[00:20:41] Happiness is messy, complicated, and impossible to pin down with complete precision.
[00:20:48] We can try, and we have got better and better at it.
[00:20:52] And we should keep on trying.
[00:20:55] After all, to quote one of the original thinkers on the concept of happiness, Aristotle, “Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence”.
[00:21:10] OK, that is it for today's episode on the science of happiness.
[00:21:14] I hope it's been an interesting one and that you've learnt something new.
[00:21:17] I’ll put a link to the Global Happiness Report in the show notes, if you’d like to check that out yourself.
[00:21:23] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:21:28] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
