How do you become the happiest country in the world?
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Hello, it's Hannah Gelbart here and you're listening to What in the World from the BBC World Service. For eight years in a row, Finland has been named the happiest country in the annual World Happiness Report. It's followed closely by its Nordic neighbours Denmark and Iceland. And this year, Costa Rica and Mexico also got into the top ten for the first time. So what is it that makes Finns such happy people and what can we learn from them?

Well, we are lucky to have our very own Finnish representative here in the studio with me is Emilia Jansson from the What In The World team. Hello. Hello. So what is it about Finland then? Like when you're back there, obviously you live here in London, work here. When you're back in Finland, can you tell that people are happier?

Not necessarily on the surface. I would say that people at home seem more content with their lives. So obviously when I meet my friends, there are things we complain about, like the cost of food and the cost of coffee that's gone up a lot. But overall, I would say my friends at home and my family, they're pretty happy with their lives. I think Finns are quiet.

quite content with a little we don't need that much to be happy we just need our families to you know be healthy and to have a house to live in and to be near nature Finns aren't very expressive they're not the people who will use these like big words and you know big gestures to say how happy they are in fact I think a Finn who smiles is basically having the best day of his life so

So it's lower those expectations and then you might be happier when you achieve them. Want a bit less from life? Could that be a lesson? I don't think it's about wanting less. I think it's more about accepting that life isn't always going to be amazing and life will be hard, but that's simply part of it. Not necessarily needing the biggest car or the biggest house. I think it's more about appreciating what you have.

It's interesting that you say Finns aren't the smiliest people because Finland is, of course, known for being very dark. It's quite cold. Yeah.

Do those conditions affect people's happiness? Of course. Living somewhere where it's dark for the majority of the day is very difficult and seasonal depression is definitely a thing. I think what helps if you're living in a country like Finland is that you have easy access to nature, for example. You have snow, you can go skiing, cross-country skiing, downhill skiing, you can go ice skating, and it's all free and available for you. It's not all about the

The individual though, is it Finland also has an excellent welfare state? Definitely. I think Finns trust that the welfare state will help them if they ever need it. Finland has some of the highest taxes in Europe, but I don't really hear people complaining about that. Finns trust their politicians and institutions very highly. I think we have some of the highest trust in Europe and

Finns expect their politicians to do the decent thing, to do the right thing for the country, to do the right thing for the people. They expect institutions to take care of them. There is very minimal bureaucracy in Finland. Things are sorted very easily. I never have to stress about bureaucracy in the way I've done in other countries. It's all just sorted for you and it's very smooth, it's easy and it just makes your life easier as well. What about people? Do people tend to do the right thing? Do people trust people? Are there lower crime rates?

Absolutely. I think the example in the happiness index was the classic, if you left your wallet somewhere, would it be returned? And I have no stress when I'm in Finland and I leave something on public transport. I 100% believe it will be returned. I'd be very surprised if I didn't get my item back, to be honest, because Finnish people want to believe that.

that everyone is looking out for each other. We want to trust the stranger next to us that they have our best interest at heart. Scandinavian countries are all top of the list in the World Happiness Report. What is it about life in these countries that hits so highly on that index?

I think they all share the similar values. So high trust in institutions, high trust in each other, lots of social community and emphasis on having those communities around you, stable welfare states that will take care of you in case something happens and a willingness to contribute to those welfare states as well because you believe that if you give to someone else, you will also receive it. Amelia, thank you. Thank you.

Let's hear from someone in Sweden now about what makes her happy. This is Mira. There are a lot of things that I really like about Sweden. One thing that comes to mind is our Swedish mentality. For being like a quote-unquote Western country, it's still quite more about the group than the I. It's not a lot about individualism.

We have a very strong welfare state, which means that we have really, really good benefits with like childcare and parental leave and healthcare. It's really like uncomparable and I'm super grateful for it. I also really love our own holidays, Midsummer and Lucia and...

Sweden is beautiful in the summer and it's really dark in the winter and we really do the most of it by celebrating the summer. And in the winter when it's dark we celebrate the light and darkness. Of course there are also many things that I dislike. There's always things you dislike about your country. If you can't see anything wrong with your country you're not really looking.

And here, as in a lot of the places over the world, we do see a lot of right-wing extremism blossoming up and then there's a lot more like divisions, social and economic. We see that all over and I think that's really sad. On a lighter note, I also really, really dislike our airport in Stockholm. It's a total scam. Everything is super expensive there and they charge you like 20 pounds just to enter the airport, which is absolutely ridiculous. ♪

Let's find out more now about the science of happiness. I'm joined by Sarah Gelbert, who teaches a course on the science of happiness at the University of Bristol. Hi, Sarah. Hi, thanks for having me. It's great to have you on.

What are some of the main things that you have learned on your research in the science of happiness? So lots of different things, but the things that I find most interesting are about kindness and social connection. A huge amount about what makes us happy is our relationships with other people, which can be our close relationships, but it can also be people that we just pass in the street.

that having a conversation with a stranger can make you so much happier than we expect. It's one of these things that we think will be horrible, but actually the research suggests if we engage with strangers, if we view other people positively, if we interact with them, that this can be a huge benefit to our happiness. What are the indicators that are used to measure happiness levels in a population?

So it's one of these words that can be used to mean a few different things. So we can use the word happiness to just mean this fleeting emotion. Like, I feel happy right now. I feel joyful. I feel contented.

or the things that psychologists and other researchers are really interested in, we might not necessarily use the word happiness. We might use the term psychological well-being. So a more general sense of how do you feel that your life is going? Someone who's got high levels of psychological well-being would have these like happy emotions, but they might

also have a high sense of life satisfaction, that they generally feel good about how their life is progressing. They aren't feeling too stressed. They're able to deal with problems when they arise. So it's actually quite a big concept.

What we'd normally do as psychologists is ask people to complete a short survey. We give them a few different questions about their thoughts or their happiness or their emotions. And if you line that up with what other people might say about them, if you line that with other types of cognitive measures, there tends to be good consistency. I think we can sometimes think that

particularly for thinking about other people. And we get these sort of shiny, rosy views from social media or people that maybe we just don't know what's going on behind the scenes. We get this sense that, oh, a happy person is someone who's happy all the time.

And of course, that's not the case. We have all these different emotions for a good reason. But someone who's got really good levels of psychological well-being is able to be quite resilient, who can accept their feelings, can notice when they're feeling sad. They're not necessarily trying to push it away or say that they're never allowed to feel sad or angry or any of these things. They're useful emotions.

but they're able to manage that and deal with it in a healthy way that it doesn't overall shake their sense of self. Have global happiness levels changed then in the past 10 years, say? We used to think that happiness had this U-shaped function, which what I mean by that is that people were happiest when they were quite young, so sort of adolescence, and then also happiest when they're older. So in later life, people are

quite happy. But in the middle, we see a dip in happiness. What we see now is that people, when they're older, still seem to be happier. So there seems to be this growing trend that people get happier with age. However, we don't see good levels of happiness amongst the young. And this, I think, is a real shame. I think it's an area that is also tied out when we look at things like mental health diagnoses or signs of symptoms about anxiety and depression.

that there do seem to be real issues facing young people today, which means that they aren't necessarily as a cohort as happy as they have been in previous generations.

What are the main reasons for this? Things to do with security, things to do with imagining the prospects that you've got in life. But also we might be throwing things in like social media and isolation that people are spending much more time alone now than we have done in the past because we've got other ways of connecting. You can work from home. You can order food from home. You can entertain yourself from home.

But actually, doing these things alone in our houses is isolating us from other people. And this might be most severe in the young. People who've got strong social connections, who feel supported by people around them, are not only happier, they also live longer.

less likely to get colds, the whole range of positive benefits from feeling connected to other people. One of the other things that's highlighted in this World Happiness Report is about eating meals with other people. So this might be particularly prominent in Mexico, Costa Rica, some of these other countries that you've mentioned.

The more people are having communal meals, the happier people tend to be. And if we look at something like the US or the UK, more and more people are eating a lot of their meals alone. Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast. Thank you. Thanks. Lovely to speak to you. You too.

Sarah mentioned Costa Rica, which is sixth on the list of the world's happiest countries. So let's hear from someone there about why she thinks it ranks so highly. Hi, my name is Ana Maria Murillo. I am 20 years old and I am from Costa Rica. What makes me happiest about my country is our nature. The fact that I can be at the beach swimming in these crystal clear waters.

And in a couple hours, I can be walking through a ginormous rainforest with these trees and see monkeys and birds and a variety of animals. It makes me so proud. And what tips can I share to be happier? My number one tip would be to do something for others. Even if it's hard, even if sometimes it's challenging, even if sometimes we don't want to.

helping someone who is in need, doing something for Mother Nature, for example, planting a tree or taking care of your flowers or recycling. Those small acts can really help better our world and overall make us happier.

I hope that today's episode has brought you some joy or at least given you some ideas on how to improve your own happiness levels wherever you are in the world. Thank you so much for joining us. I'm Hannah Gelbart and you've been listening to What In The World from the BBC World Service.

I'm Zing Singh. And I'm Simon Jack. And together we host Good Bad Billionaire. The podcast exploring the lives of some of the world's richest people. In the new season, we're setting our sights on some big names. Yep, LeBron James and Martha Stewart, to name just a few. And as always, Simon and I are trying to decide whether we think they're good, bad or just another billionaire. That's Good Bad Billionaire from the BBC World Service. Listen now wherever you get your BBC podcasts.