Welcome to Episode 234 of Live Happy Now.

I'm your host, Paula Phelves, and today we're going to take you on a whirlwind tour of happiness around the globe.

Our guest today is Helen Russell, who took an interesting path to studying happiness.

When she moved to Denmark in 2012, she began studying why the country was ranked

so high on the happiness scale. That led her to write the book, The Year of Living

Danishly, and now she's back with a second book, The Atlas of Happiness, The Global Secrets

of How to Be Happy. This new book looks at happiness practices around the world, so she's here to talk about

how happiness differs from one country to the next, what we can learn from other countries,

and in what ways we're all the same in our pursuit of happiness. Helen, welcome to live

happy now. Thank you so much for having me. It's obviously a natural fit for Live Happy Now to have someone who

wrote The Atlas of Happiness. I wanted to start by finding out where you started studying

happiness. Well, yes, it's an interesting one. This wasn't my field at all. I was actually

working in fashion and for glossy women's magazines. I lived and worked for 12 years in London,

and I had no intention of leaving. We lived the very much typical London life until out of the

blue one wet Wednesday. My husband came home and told me he'd been offered his dream job working

for Lego in Denmark. Oh my gosh. Exactly. As many of your listeners will know, Denmark has many times been voted

the happiest country in the world. And this was back in 2012, where it really was, you know,

without doubt, in survey after survey coming up as the happiest country in the world. And I became

fascinated by this. We'd been trying for a baby for as long as either of us could remember.

We'd had years of fertility treatment,

but we were always so tired and stressed that it never quite happened. And actually, once this

offer, this other life possibility was dangled in front of us, we began to realize that actually

...