Int’l Happiness Day Interview CTV News

– [Scott Laurie] Norway has been named the happiest country on earth.

– [Female 1] I think it’s the work-life balance, and so we have a big safety net. So, we get free education, free health care.

– They were number one despite slipping oil prices. They knocked Denmark out of the top spot. Canada is now ranked seventh. The United States has fallen to 14th. The World Happiness Report ranks 155 countries based on health, economic, and political factors.

Paul Krismer is the Chief Happiness Officer and Founder of The Happiness Experts Company. Paul, thank you very much for joining us.

– [Paul Krismer] My pleasure.

– So, I guess we should be buying tickets to fly to Norway.

– Well, it’s not so bad in Canada, that’s for sure.

– Absolutely, not bad. So, how do you measure something like this? It’s something that it’s so personal and everyone has a different definition.

– The United Nations measure that you just reported on has a number of different factors, but the simplest way is to measure people based on their own self-report of their subjective well-being. That’s really just asking people, “How happy do you feel?”, and I know it sounds silly, but the measure tends to be accurate over time, and we use that all the time in this research.

– Now, what did you make of Canada’s placing seventh on this list?

– Canada’s always up amongst the top nations in the world, and I’m not surprised. We’ve got so many great things going for us, a robust economy, great health care, and of course, I think people feel well in a free democracy like we have.

– What would Canada have to do, and Canadians have to do, to move up? I mean, some of the things that those people in Norway listed as making their country so happy, we have those things as well.

– Well, Canada is very well and so seventh out of 155 is excellent, and there’s not a lot of separation between Canada and those countries that are slightly above us. But one of the key principles for happiness is a strong social relationship. So, in fact, it’s almost a necessity. You can’t really have happiness if you don’t have one or two people in your life that love you and you love them back. So, that’s an essential ingredient.

– Now, we’re talking about happiness as well on a community scale. When you run into someone who is unhappy, what do you tell them that they have to do, that they should do?

– Well, there’s a number of things that we could talk about, but one of the simplest and most effective interventions that we teach is a simple gratitude practice. A gratitude practice is simply reflecting on the things that are going well in one’s own life. And when researchers formally studied this, they not only found that a formal practice of gratitude increased people’s happiness a great deal in just three weeks’ time. But what was really interesting is that these study participants were being paid and almost everybody discontinued the practice once they completed the study. The researchers went back and studied these same people six months later to see how their happiness had changed, and even after six months away from the intervention, people were still happier than their baseline. So, gratitude practice is really, really effective.

– A lot of people focused on the fact that spring has started today. Is some of this seasonal as well? Does our mood totally change once spring arrives?

– We know that people are affected by their external circumstances, so warmth and sunshine definitely helps for sure. So, Canada is coming into the spring thaw, that’s good news.

– Paul Krismer, Chief Happiness Officer and Founder of The Happiness Experts Company in Victoria. Paul, thank you very much for joining us.

– My pleasure.