1 Introduction
Happiness has been proven to be physically beneficial to the human body. A happier person has a lower risk for cardiovascular disease, has lower blood pressure, has a reduced amount of stress, gets better sleep, and generally lives longer than the average person.2
Although there isn’t a perfect formula to attain happiness, there are general trends that one could follow to have a pretty decent chance at increasing one’s happiness. A medically-reviewed paper from PsychCentral says that being driven, achieving long-term goals, and having meaningful relationships usually lead to a significant improvement on a person’s happiness.3
According to Edward Diener, a Senior Scientist who belongs to the Gallup Organization, the scientific term for happiness and general life satisfaction is subjective well-being.4 This is when people think that their life is going well compared to how bad it could be. To Diener, there are internal and external causes for influences a person’s happiness. The internal factors stem from a person’s inborn temperament, personality, and other psychological aspects. The external factors, however, point toward whether a person has sufficient financial resources or not. We will be exploring in detail the external influences through statistical point of view. In this article, we pull data from the World Happiness Report as the basis for our analysis when looking at national levels of happiness.5
The research question we aim to answer is, “What external influences affect happiness and by how much?” Although we can’t give a concrete answer on the pursuit of happiness, we can take a step towards the right direction using statistics.
Referenced Northwestern Medicine↩︎
Referenced PsychCentral↩︎