The Happiness Scale

This Blog should really be called "The Happiness Hypothesis." That's the real focus. I didn't realize that it would be. But, it is.

Here's what I've worked out about the 1-10 Happiness scale I'm using to rate my state from wake-up time to beddy-bye.

10- Absolutely, perfectly happy. Like I was on my wedding day, or the day Sweetie surprised me with a hot air balloon ride on my birthday. I feel incredibly lucky, and like things just couldn't be any better.

9- Joyful. A strong radiant feeling of being blessed. A deep awareness that anything that seems "wrong" in my life, is small and unimportant and is either actually ok, or doesn't really matter.

8- Content. Pleased with my life. This is the lowest degree of happiness that I will accept as an average rating for my future life. Anything lower than this isn't worth striving for.

7- Feeling optimistic and hopeful. Knowing that everything is going to work out. Calm about whatever my struggles are. Able to really take joy and pleasure in the things that are going right.

6- Feeling pretty neutral about things, like my life isn't especially good or especially bad, but having a positive outlook. Able to look forward to things.

5- Feeling completely neutral. And absence of any strong positive or negative feelings. The important thing about a 5 rating, is that I am still very able to do things and function normally.

4- This is where feelings of sadness, discontent, hopelessness start to outweigh any positive feelings I might have. It takes extra effort to force myself to do things that I otherwise enjoy...like cooking, shopping, taking the dog for an outing and riding my bike.

3- This can be a kind of agony and aching of despair or anxiety that feels like it's eating away at the center or my. The bad feelings begin to have a physical effect on me. Either like a black hole in the pit of my stomach, or a weight coming down on me.

2- This is a zombie kind of state. I'm still able to kind of go through the most important motions of life, but it's like moving through a fog. Every activity feels like it's performed against the weight of heavy feelings.

1- This is about as bad as a person can feel without feeling suicidal. It's coupled with a complete inability to function normally. For reference, I think about how I felt when I was going through my last bad break-up, and at the same time reeling from the news that my father had recently killed himself.

0- Zero is reserved for feeling suicidal. I know what that feels like because I spent most of my 16th year feeling like the only way to escape feeling bad would be to kill myself. But, I haven't felt like that since my teens. I hope I never do again. I don't expect to, despite the family history.

Boy, after writing that it seems like no wonder that I'm motivated to do this project. I was in the hospital at age 15 for suicide attempts. My dad took a lethal dose of morphine on purpose just a few years ago. I've never really put those two things together before to view the worrisome picture that they make.

Of course, I'm not worried, because I think of my teen depression as a developmental stage. And, because I think my father made a calm rational decision based on his level of advancing illness and recent diagnosis of a new disease, Parkinson's. But, maybe he was depressed. Maybe the medical stuff was just an excuse; a rationalization. Maybe my problems growing up weren't just a result of fluctuating hormones and undeveloped cognitive capacity.

It is impossible to say. But thinking about myself and my father in this way just make me more motivated to continue with the experiment and learn as much as I can about the relationship between my health and my feelings. I guess you could say it makes me even happier to do it.