How To Find Your Happy Place

In Kingdom of denmark, finding happiness tin be as easy every bit riding a bike.

When TODAY correspondent Cynthia McFadden and National Geographic author and explorer Dan Buettner ventured to the Danish urban center of Copenhagen to discover out why information technology has ranked as one of the happiest places on earth for 40 years, they institute a place full of ii-wheeled transportation.

Half the city gets around via bicycle, and that plays a role in the general good feelings of its citizens.

"It'southward not a coincidence that people are happy here," Buettner said on TODAY Monday. "The happiest people in the world are interacting confront to face 6 to seven hours a day. You can't exercise that when you're in a machine."

Personal interaction is merely one of the reasons for happiness that Buettner has institute in his travels around the world for National Geographic.

"When I recollect of happiness, I remember of three qualities,'' he said. "How much pleasure you lot have in your life, how much pride y'all have with your life, and living with a sense of purpose."

Buettner and McFadden institute the embodiment of those qualities in Alan Christensen, a garbage man in Copenhagen who works five hours a day simply earns the same as a schoolhouse teacher.

Read National Geographic'south full report: The World's Happiest Places

They even watched as some other truck got in his mode, and he calmly got out of his own truck and asked the person to motility instead of the usual road rage found in many cities.

"I feel happy,'' Christensen said. "I take a overnice life. (On a 1-ten scale of happiness) I would probably say (I'k) an 8."

"He's a garbage human. He's as well gay. Simply he's also completely accepted,'' Buettner said. "He said non once in his life has he ever been made to experience bad about his profession or sexual orientation.

"And 1 of the key elements of happiness, no thing where you go and find happy people, is a identify where people can alive out their values no affair what their values are. Here is a place where you lot can exist gay and a garbage man and be celebrated."

The average work week in Denmark is 37 hours, compared to studies that show more 50 is the norm in America.

"In Kingdom of denmark, appetite is not celebrated as it would be for example in Los Angeles,'' Buettner said. "No matter what you're doing, you're no better than anybody else. This is a place where people can pursue things they enjoy nearly without letting the rat race suck them in."

Other staples of life in Denmark include a year off with pay for new mothers, free healthcare, free education through higher and a comfortable retirement. The taxes are very loftier, just there is a strong trust in the authorities.

"Where you discover happy places it's non simply a coincidence,'' Buettner said. "There's e'er a genesis. And it'south usually between 100 and 150 years agone some aware leaders made some decisions which set up off an upward screw concatenation of events that has created a happy population today.

"Most of the fourth dimension these enlightened leaders have taken the focus off of just economical growth and focused on, number one, education, and, number 2, public health."

Denmark also features co-housing communities called bofelleskap, where large communal dinners happen frequently and neighbors go along an eye out for one another.

"I retrieve it's arguably one of the best ways to alive because I believe they can count on this support (from each other),'' Buettner said. "Trust is even more important than wealth when it comes to happiness. And there's a feeling here in Kingdom of denmark that nada as well bad will ever happen to you."

The Blue Zones of Happiness: Lessons from the World's Happiest People, $17, Amazon

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