Welcome to the happiness podcast, I'm Dr. Robert Puff. When I was in seventh grade many years ago,

I took my first typing keyboard class. I had worked with a typewriter before, what they used to be called are now keyboards, and I had gotten used to using my two fingers.

Well, when I entered the class, they said, now we're going to start using all 10 fingers and guess what?

At first I was not very good at it because I had gotten quite good at using two

fingers and now all of a sudden I had to use all 10. It was quite a challenge to change my habits.

But with time and effort, I actually got quite good at it and over the years I've become quite a proficient

tipper and I can go quite quickly with all 10 fingers because that's what I've now been

trained to do. I reset myself to use 10 fingers instead of just two. Well in

today's episode we're going to talk about resetting our happiness gauge. Our internal

gauge basically says how happy we're going to be no matter what's happening externally. Because what we've learned as therapists and researchers

is that people have what's called a set point for happiness.

What is that?

Our psyches, our internal happiness gauge, is much like this. Our

internal happiness gauge is much like this. It says, okay, this is a level of

happiness you're going to reside at throughout your life.

So when things happen, I'm going to bring you back to your level of

happiness, whether that happiness is very low,

so we're sad all the time, or that happiness is quite high.

So much doesn't get us down and we tend to live a pretty good life. But it's set, it's set pretty strongly, and no matter

what happens, it's going to go back to that point of happiness. For example, let's say we work

four years in the university to get a really good degree

because we want to do a certain specialty and get out there and make a difference in the world.

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