Welcome to the happiness podcast. I'm Dr. Robert Puff. If you're new to the

happiness podcast, welcome. But I want to give a little bit of a warning here.

This may not be the best episode to start with. You may want to start with episode

one and then go up from there. Because today's episode is going to be a little bit more complex.

We're going to go more deeply into how we can be happy and understand our level of happiness and how to improve

it. So today we're going to talk about self-awareness. How happy are we really? And that's why

I'm calling this episode a test for our happiness.

Unfortunately we can be quite good at deceiving ourselves and not be aware of how we're truly doing inside

but there are instances where we can be quite

aware of how we're doing very quickly. So how does this all work? Think of an extreme example.

Think of someone like is a heroin or crack addict. I mean they can be sleeping on the streets, you know having no food, barely getting by, having sores all over their body body and feel like everything's fine. As long as they have their

drug, everything's fine. I mean that we get, that makes sense to us. This person is very unaware. They seem like everything's going great in

their mind, but in reality their life is awful. But we have to be careful because our lives can

be very much like theirs, more subtle, but like theirs. An example of this

would be perhaps we have a wonderful family, everyone that's doing great, seems like everything's

going perfectly, and then we go to our doctor and we get the

cancer scare.

Or we come home and our spouse is threatening to leave us.

Or one of our kids is experimenting with drugs or one of our parents dies.

These are the threats that happen to us and these threats that happen because they do happen

sometimes can really illuminate us into how well we're doing with life.

And that's what crises do.

...