Chances are you’ve taken a test that measures your happiness and well-being. But let’s be frank: very few of these tests are actually rooted in science, and rarely do they provide any kind of meaningful advice. Now there is a new free online quiz by a nonprofit organization called ClearerThinking that seeks to overcome both shortcomings.
If you want to just skip ahead and take the Tactics for Happier Living quiz, click here.
Called Tactics for Happier Living, the new quiz (launched today) has a short and long version. It combines a number of scientifically valid scales for measuring happiness. These measurements are then used to generate a highly detailed and customized report with concrete suggestions for how you can live a happier life. It also includes your greatest strengths and weakness as it relates to your score, and compares it to population averages.
A sample question (ClearerThinking.org)
“Everyone’s strengths and weaknesses are different, and we set about to design a happiness tool that takes these differences into account,” explains Spencer Greenberg, a team member at ClearerThinking, a not-for-profit that develops decision-making tools. “Our tool analyzes your greatest sources of both happiness and unhappiness to provide custom recommendations of things you can do to improve your life.”
Greenberg says that scientists have developed many approaches to measuring happiness by looking at diverse factors, such as meaning, resilience, engagement, emotions, and accomplishment. Drawing on this work, his team was able to combine 23 different ways of analyzing happiness into a single test.
After taking the test myself, I learned that I was fairly average across the board. Which wasn’t necessarily what I wanted to hear. Good thing the report offered some tips and examples of what I should do to make an “average” situation even better. This one in particular struck a chord:
Greenberg points out that nearly everyone wants to feel happier. “A great starting point is to know where you stand,” he told Gizmodo. “What are your biggest sources of happiness and unhappiness? Is it your work? Your environment? Your social life? Your view of yourself? From there you can identify concrete actions to try that build on the things that make you most happy, and improve what makes you most unhappy.”
You can take the test right here.