Individual Index of Happiness:
With the above values assigned to the positive and negative elements contributing to happiness, each one of us can sit down every night, just before going to bed, and complete the Happinometry Table provided. To do this, choose a number between 0 and the maximum value suggested for each element, a number that you believe best describes your condition relative to that element. For example, if today you felt good about your job, were satisfied with your work, and felt a sense of accomplishment (even though it may not have been the best you hoped for, or had experienced before), you may want to give yourself a grade of 4 (out of 6) in accomplishment. You may wish to consider other factors that contribute to the value of accomplishment. For example, feeling good about purchasing something you have always wanted and needed, making changes in your home, moving to a new place of living, or discovering, inventing, or simply learning new things, can all be considered as part of the element of accomplishment. Depending on the joy you derive from these accomplishments, you can choose a number, between 0 and 6, that best describes your feelings of accomplishment. When there is anything that gives you real joy and contentment, you may give yourself a grade 4(out of 4) for contentment. Many activities and variables can be considered in this area and, as you begin to work with the Happinometry index over a period of time, you will undoubtedly discover many activities that give you satisfaction (or misery) of which you had not previously been fully appreciative or aware. Grading yourself in the values will become relatively easy after a while. Similarly, if there are still people in your life whom you need to forgive, but you did not do so today, you must give yourself a grade 0 for forgiveness.

On the negative side of happiness, the emotional miseries (E), if you did not feel angry, jealous, or guilty, and did not worry about how events in your life are going to shape up, give yourself zero for each of these terms. On the other hand, if you had a chance to visit a friend and gossip (as we all love to do) about somebody or something (for example, talking about how bad everything is in our society today, without planning to take any action to correct it), then you can give yourself a grade 4 for gossip.

Exercise: If the Happinometry Table as I have outlined it does not satisfy your belief as to which elements contribute to happiness, make a table of your own. However, if you disagree only with emotional misery elements or the values I have arbitrarily assigned to these terms, you can use Table 2.

Try going through Table 1 or Table 2, considering each of the elements in the table. Find out how you felt or behaved today with respect to that particular factor of happiness or misery. Then choose a number (from the suggested range) that best describes your condition, and write it in the place provided. Then move to the next item and do the same thing. Lastly, perform the little arithmetic asked for in the table, in order to evaluate J, F, E, and, finally, H, or, if you do not prefer to use the table, and you, or a member of your family is a computer whiz, you can develop a menu- driven computer program of your own to do the arithmetic for you and keep a good record of your daily evaluations. However, you will still need to sit down in front of the terminal every night, evaluate each of the positive and negative elements of happiness, and input them into the computer. Just like the name I chose for the table, you can call this program your own Happinometry Computer Program.

An advantage of using the Happinometry Table is the ability to appraise our behavior every day. If, for example, for one day the sum of all these elements, or H, became a positive number, we could then say that during that particular day, we were happy. If it were negative, we might say that we were miserable or unhappy. By comparing our daily values obtained for H over a period of time, we can then decide how happy we have been during that period. We can take a good look at the numbers we have given ourselves to see if there is any particular area that we need to change. Then we can start doing what is needed to increase H, our happiness. A few suggestions as to how to increase H are made in Chapter 10 and 11, in Ref…

If we did this evaluation every day of our lives, we could then add up results and arrive at weekly, monthly, yearly or even life- time values. I would like to call the annual value of each person’s happiness, determined from the above equation, the Individual Index of Happiness, or IIH.