Hello and welcome to Happy Place. I'm Fern Cotton and this is the show that wonders if we might be looking for happiness in all the wrong places.

Today I'm meeting Bob Waldinger.

The messages are that we'll be happy if we are rich, if we're famous, if we achieve a huge amount of work and what we find in our study.

We had wealthy, famous, high achieving people but they weren't any more happy than the people who led regular lives including people from the poor families in Boston's inner city.

Those people were no less happy than the fancy Harvard families.

And that's what's really important that what we found was that if you want to predict who's going to be happiest, look to people's relationships.

A psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and Zen priest, Bob Waldinger has literally written the book on happiness.

Along with his colleague, fellow director of Harvard's Study of Human Development, Mark Schultz, he's written The Good Life, lessons from the world's longest scientific study of happiness.

This book, like I read a lot of books and this book was game-changing for me.

I, as you'll hear when I speak to Bob, at times put my, I guess, efforts and priorities in the wrong places when trying to seek happiness or contentment or just some sort of sense of balance.

I learned a lot from this book and it's really changed the way that I do things.

I loved hearing about all of Bob's work because instead of looking at all the things that can go wrong in life, the things we maybe need less of in order to be happy, he looks at what really makes us thrive.

I cannot wait for you to hear this.

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For this episode of Happy Place, we partnered with Heritage by Julux.

Heritage Velvet Mat has a luxury, soft-to-touch paint finish that stands up to the demands of a busy modern home.

Available in a beautifully timeless colour palette that allows us to fill our homes with whichever rich feelings we please.

I've got a pot of an utterly gorgeous rich shade called Deep Ultra Marine right here.

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