H.A.P.P.Y. L.I.F.E. - Positivity Matters | Hope to Flourish | H.A.P.P.Y. L.I.F.E.

Condensed H.A.P.P.Y. L.I.F.E.

Elaborated H.A.P.P.Y. L.I.F.E.:

Health – physical and mental wellbeing.
Aesthetic experience – a feeling of delight, wonder, awe, reverence etc., that accompanies our evaluation that something is beautiful (natural or created) or sublime.
Play – a type of mental and/or embodied activity typically initiated by a desire for the interesting, drives such as curiosity and creativity, and expressed through games, humor, good conversation, the humanities, arts, and sciences, etc., where the activity at hand is seen as being valuable for its own sake, regardless of whether any practical outcomes ensue or not.
Pleasure – the sensation of ‘liking’ is pleasure. Positive emotions can be thought of as evaluations of experience in light of our implicit and explicitly held values and liking the alignment between our values and the experience being evaluated.
Yes-saying – What values do we say yes to? Values are chosen qualities of being and doing, and values are the foundational elements from which hope, purpose, and meaning are built.

Life – our love of and need for connectedness to the web of life.
Information – the goodness of knowledge and its pursuit.
Friendship – a type of close relationship that contributes to social health where both persons characterize the nature of their bond with statements such as:
- We enjoy each others company.
- We are there for each other (emotional connection + knowing you have each others backs).
- We bring out the best in each other.
Engagement – a scale of absorption that ranges from being interested in an activity to being in the state of flow (being in the zone).

The H.A.P.P.Y. L.I.F.E. framework is an aggregation and distillation of many models of wellbeing: 5 Psychological Vitamins – Corey Keyes, 5 Elements of Well-Being – Gallup, PERMA – Martin Seligman, PERMA+4 – Stewart Donaldson, 10 Keys to Happier Living – Action for Happiness, Workplace Mental Well-Being – Vivek Murthy, the U.S. Surgeon General, NIRSA’s 8 Factor Wellbeing Wheel, The Greater Good Science Center’s Keys to Well-Being, 6 Stages of Successful Adulthood – George Vaillant, and Self-Determination Theory – Edward Deci and Richard Ryan. We removed instrumental goods (like economic wellbeing, since money is not valuable in and of itself) and distilled the remaining goods down to H.A.P.P.Y. L.I.F.E.’s nine broad themes. The H.A.P.P.Y. L.I.F.E. framework is a tool to give people a broad overview of wellbeing science in a memorable way. Click- here – for a YouTube playlist themed around the H.A.P.P.Y. L.I.F.E. framework.