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  • Careering on your front wheel down something.

  • I get a buzz, I get a really warm feeling inside

  • Jumping around and just constantly laughing.

  • a small flurry of notes

  • ...bouncing your hand off a tree and somehow not ending up on the floor.

  • You take a mental photograph and it kind of embeds into your memory.

  • When everything comes together it just feels easy and you just feel like you can fly almost.

  • Happiness is something that everybody is looking for, and it makes sense because happiness feels good.

  • But happy people are really good for society because they tend to live longer, they are more successful,

  • they outperform people who are unhappy, and they tend to be nicer, more altruistic people.

  • In fact, happy children outperform their peers on all levels.

  • Our work is looking at the scientific study of happiness, trying to understand what causes people to be happy.

  • [Laughing]

  • A sense of belonging.

  • Meeting a lot of people that are from a lot of different places.

  • Family makes me happy.

  • A sense of sharing.

  • When I'm listening to loud music!

  • Happiness can be measured quite easily. It's really a matter of asking people a simple question like,

  • how happy have you been feeling today, or in the last week,

  • and asking them to rate on a scale perhaps from nought to 7 or nought to 10.

  • I would say I'm quite high. I'd say I'm an 8 or a 9.

  • Eight.

  • Ten.

  • Between seven and an eight.

  • I'd say eight and a half.

  • Oh ten! Cool sign. Always 10 man.

  • There are obviously different types of happiness, and really there are two main categories,

  • one being an instant form of happiness which tends to be quite unhealthy,

  • and the other being healthy long-term happiness.

  • Instant happiness tends to come from things like drugs, alcohol,

  • doing things that involve risk and potentially are not that good for us. They give us the highs

  • ... but they tend to have really big lows attached.

  • The second type of happiness is long-term happiness, and that's really what everybody should be striving to achieve.

  • And the way you achieve that is to have great relationships, make sure that you know what you're good at,

  • and make sure that you work at that because it reinforces your self worth.

  • For a long time it was thought that your level of happiness was fixed, and that more or less...

  • whatever happened to you in life, good or bad, you'd always return to about the same level of happiness.

  • But actually that's not the case and there are things that can make a lasting improvement to your happiness.

  • Resilient people are happier people, and by the term 'resilient' I'm talking about somebody's ability

  • to have things go wrong in their life, and pick themselves up and carry on.

  • The art of being resilient means that it's not that you don't fail, but that when you fail that's okay,

  • because you'll have learnt something, and the next time you'll ensure that doesn't happen again.

  • Happiness is more to do with the things you do rather than the things you have.

  • I do martial arts

  • Doing what I love, music, being on stage

  • Volunteer work

  • Racing downhill mountain bikes

  • Yeah, why didn't I say playing guitar, when I'm the happiest, that was foolish, um, sitting by the river... God!

  • The brilliant thing about resilience is you don't have to know it as a child, for example.

  • You can learn it. You can pick up the tips and tricks.

  • Connect with people. In other words try to spend time with people you like, socialising, having fun.

  • The last festival I played was the V Festival last summer.

  • It's like 15 minutes away from my house.

  • So all of my best friends were there, all my family were there,

  • and I'd been the year before as like a camper just to watch it, and I'd no idea that the next year I'd be performing there.

  • It was quite special to me!

  • Keeping learning is really important for keeping interested in life.

  • When I get on a climbing wall and the first time I go on it, it feels impossible, but by practising it,

  • it just feels easy, and you just feel like you can fly almost.

  • Sometimes it's really important just to stop, and take notice of how we feel right now.

  • One of the best, er, occasions I find for meditation is going on the London Underground...

  • ... and you have this moving background noise that wipes out all the distraction,

  • and you are there with free time with nothing else to do, and that's when I find it very, very effective.

  • Being in control of your life, realising that you can make decisions...

  • ...that you're in command and that you can take responsibility for your own happiness.

  • I have been doing Kung Fu and Russian Marshall Arts for 5 years.

  • I started from basic beginners and learnt it up to teaching standard. I'm the only female in my class.

  • I'm a stick. I'm really weak. But like now I've really built myself up and I'm proud of myself.

  • Giving is actually a great way of improving your own happiness.

  • Being nice to somebody, being kind to them, makes you feel great

  • Once a tattoo's finished and I step back from it...

  • ...I relish the accomplishment, but seeing their expression...

  • ...I can actually tell if someone's very happy with the end result.

  • Little by little, you know, it's little pieces of art walking around that have interaction with other people that bring joy to them.

  • The thing about happiness is, yeah, it might sound like it's hard work, but actually the benefits of that work...

  • ...are so joyful that it's worth every bit of that investment.

  • Spend some time thinking about what you really enjoy doing and who you really enjoy doing it with,

  • and then just make plans to keep doing it and doing it as often as you can.

  • Nobody can be happy all the time, and that is a really good thing because the thing about being a human is the range of emotions.

  • And when you feel happy, you know it because it's different from feeling okay, or feeling sad.

  • The reality is that when we get that rush it's a real joyful experience,

  • but at the same time we should always aim for just a consistent feeling of being okay...

  • ...because that's a really good place for anybody to be. And when you get the happiness rush, brilliant.

  • But the rest of the time, it's cool to just be... right here.

Careering on your front wheel down something.

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