You're going to be. Welcome to the happiness podcast. I'm Dr. Robert Puff. The focus of this podcast is about how to be happy.

But how do we know that we're happy? That may sound like a silly question, but today we're going to explore

what is happiness and how do we know that we're really happy. Because I'm sure we've all met people,

many people who say they're happy, and yet when we look at their

lives and we see how they treat other people or how their lives are going, we think they can't be

happy. They're saying they're happy, but they can't be happy.

There's no way.

But I don't want this to be about judging other people.

That isn't the road to happiness.

But I want to share a story that can help illustrate the difference between happiness and doing the best that we can.

Many, many years ago, when I was doing my internship at the VA hospital in Sepulveda.

I for one year did the intake on every person that came into the psychiatric hospital

for that year.

I would interview them, find out their history, and just discover why they were there and what they needed help with.

During that year I had an eye-opening experience happen.

Every single one of them would share me their stories, and their stories were dark.

They were living on the streets, they were homeless, they were in and out of prison,

there were drug addicts or alcoholics. They were at the nadir or the lowest points of their

life in our culture. They had reached the bottom, and I had gone in there expecting that they

would be very repentant, very sorry, and really see the errors of their

ways.

I was familiar with more normal people, in quotes, coming up with reasons why things weren't

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