Welcome to Episode 185 of Live Happy Now.

This is your host, Paula Phelps, thanking you for joining us once again.

This week, we're hacking our way to happiness with journalist and author Alex Palmer.

Alex is a New York Times best-selling author who has a penchant for finding obscure facts.

In his book, Happiness Hacks, he compiled an impressive

number of science-based facts on what it takes to make us happy. Live Happy Zone, Chris Libby sat down with

Alex to find out more. So thank you again for joining us, Alex. And in your previous work,

you focus a lot on fascinating facts and maybe some of the bizarre or curious things

in our lives. But this time, you decided with your latest book to focus on happiness. What was

the inspiration for you to write happiness hacks? Yeah. I mean, obviously, it's something that is

of concern for everybody, something we're very familiar with. And there's been so much information out there.

You see shelves after shelves at the bookstore or the library or on, you know, television,

all these suggestions of different ways to improve your happiness.

So something that was just out there that obviously is of top concern for everybody.

But I thought, similar to other books I've written, there's also a lot of misinformation

or a lot of info that kind of gets a game of telephone where it'll be something that's

substantive and fact that then kind of gets morphed, especially through all the online websites and things like that, can kind of end up getting inaccurate or sort of loses its basis in fact. So I thought it would be interesting to kind of dig into the topic of happiness, find out what are these actual scientifically proven ways to improve happiness, whether it's just a little small incremental ways or really major transformational ways?

But the top interest in writing it was, let's find what the actual scientific basis is of these self-help suggestions or tips and both large and small find ones

that really have a basis in science. And I'm glad you brought up the scientific part approach to this

because all the tips are based on research drawing on different fields from psychology, biology,

even interior design. Why was it

important for you to keep the focus on this science? Yeah. For me, I love a good, you know,

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