Happiness Formula Explained For Dummies: H = S + C + V

What makes you happy, and what doesn’t: Explained for dummies

In the 20th century, psychology primarily focused on pathology, victimology, and mental illness. For every one hundred published articles on mental illness, there was only one published on mental health. This led to a great understanding of negative aspects of human behavior, such as depression, anxiety, bipolar disease, schizophrenia, and learned helplessness.

Unfortunately, it also led to only a little progress on positive aspects of human behavior, such as happiness, optimism, resilience, and empathy.

Basically, the traditional psychologists were pretty good at taking someone from -8 to -4 to 0 on a scale of well-being. But they weren’t very skilled at getting someone from 0 to +4 to +8.

Enter: Martin Seligman.

In the year 2000, Seligman and his colleagues decided to aggressively start the study of the positive elements of human living, such as what is happiness, what makes a life meaningful, and how some people bounce back stronger from failures.

They created a new branch of mental health research and called it Positive Psychology. Rather than focusing on the problems and fixing them, positive psychology focused on what makes life worth living and building on top of it.

In one of the earliest studies in that field, Ed Diener and Martin Seligman discovered students with the highest levels of happiness and fewest signs of depression had strong links to their friends and family.

Two years later, in 2002, Martin Seligman published a book on happiness called Authentic Happiness. The book, full of self-tests, distills years of research into practical and easy guidelines for living a happier life. In it, Seligman explains how each of us possesses at least five of the 24 character strengths, and how we can develop them to boost our wellbeing.

Seligman’s positive psychology gave the world its first authentic formula for happiness.

The Happiness Formula:

H = S + C + V

In that formula, H stands for happiness, which is the sum of three factors: S is one’s genetic set-range for happiness, C is their life circumstances, and V is for factors under …

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