But what exactly are we talking about when we are talking about happiness? What is

it? Again, it's a great question because it does seem almost absurdly obvious because it's a word that everyone uses, as you said, almost in a daily conversation.

But it's often not what we think or it can be much more complex and complicated than we think.

And in fact...

As a psychologist, not a medical doctor, if you look into the research, psychologists have multiple definitions of happiness and the philosophers have multiple definitions of happiness.

And I think too often we make the mistake of just focusing on one aspect, which might still be important, but we ignore the other.

So to try to keep it simple, there's at least two ways we can think about it.

A

What, what does that look like in action?

Yeah, that's a really good question, um, because optimism, well, optimism and hope, which are, which are slightly different but similar constructs within positive- well, within psychology, um, are two of the most important, arguably two of the most important constructs that contribute to, uh, not just happiness, but wellbeing more generally, life satisfaction, and even, even things like longevity.

Um, you know, optimists actually live longer than pessimists.

So, um, so these are super, super important, but they're also highly misunderstood.

Um, and the misunderstanding often lies in the fact that people think optimism is the same as positive thinking or what's sometimes called toxic positivity.

Um, and that's actually not helpful.

Um, saying everything's fantastic, everything's all right, when in fact it's not, uh, doesn't help, um.

How can I reconcile these two feelings?"

Talk to me about gratitude as a practice.

Yeah.

Well, um, the, the, the simplest version of that, um, that many of your listeners might have heard of is called a gratitude journal or, uh... there's several versions of that, or the three good things exercise.

So it's, look, it's easy for us, um, and, and I'm, I'm guilty of this myself, [laughs] fall into this trap myself, to, um, get bogged down in the negative news cycle, um, uh, which is... and it's easier than ever now with, um, you know, with social media and algorithms and the way they all work for those, um, you know, catastrophic headlines to overwhelm us and to overwhelm all of what we consume.

Um, and I'm not in any way suggesting those things or some of those things aren't real.

You know, as you said in the introduction, there, there are some pretty bad things happening.

There, there are some very stressful things in all of our lives at the moment and have been for several years now.

How can I reconcile these two feelings?"