Thank you for joining us for episode 538 of Live Happy Now. Could practicing happiness be as simple as learning your ABCs?

Well, thanks to this week's guest, now it is. I'm your host, Paula Phelps, and this week I'm talking with

Claudia Matura, a work psychologist, host of the Happiness Challenge podcast,

and a certified chief happiness officer. In her quest for happiness, Claudia set out to

personally test drive the best happiness hacks that science has to offer, and that led to her new

book, The Alphabet of Happiness. In this episode, she tells what launched this journey,

how listeners can create their own happiness

experiments, and what cold showers have to do with it. Let's have a listen. Well, Claudia, thank you

so much for joining us on Live Happy Now. Thank you so much for having me. I'm very excited.

From the moment I got an email about you, I was really excited to talk to you. And I got more excited as I spent time on your website.

So I love, like, anybody who listens knows that I love a good origin story.

So let's start by talking about how you decided to become a happiness expert.

How did you start studying it?

I think the beginning for me was really simple that life hit me very hard and I actually found

out really for myself that I actually don't know how to be happy and what happiness is.

So I was in this situation during pandemic, which of course was so difficult for everyone

as a global experience, but during the time, I lost my job, my wedding

needed to be pushed back in time. I couldn't travel to my country. So I live in London,

UK, but I'm from Poland. And my father got diagnosed with a lung cancer. It all happened

in a space of a week. And then, of course, when you're dealing with those circumstances,

and then we have a global pandemic, when you're dealing with those different circumstances,

you kind of start wondering what life is about. And I very quickly realized that, you know,

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