The Happiness Formula: Using Science to Understand Personal Satisfaction, Human Hope, and Subjective Well-being

A scientific, groundbreaking approach to happiness and personal fulfillment.

In 1979, Dr. Alphonsus Obayuwana was awarded a national research grant and Smith-Kline Medical Perspective Fellowship to develop an instrument for measuring human hope, with the purpose of detecting hopelessness early enough in troubled human individuals so assistance could be offered in time to prevent suicide. The Hope Index Scale (HIS) that resulted from this grant became very popular with Fortune 500 companies and other institutions both in the US and in other countries. This led to the foundation of decades of research that ultimately resulted in this cutting-edge book, The Happiness Formula: Using Science to Understand Personal Satisfaction, Human Hope, and Subjective Well-Being.

Unlike other books about happiness, which are too often filled with dos and don’ts, wishful thinking, and empty aphorisms, The Happiness Formula breaks new ground by introducing a universal unit of measure called the “Personal Happiness Index” or PHI. This makes it possible—for the first time ever—to calculate and assign numerical happiness scores to human individuals by plugging their unique hopes, hungers, assets, and aspirations into an equation.

Despite its title, The Happiness Formula is much more than a mathematical equation for measuring happiness. It is a book about life; the relationship between human hope and happiness; how to find, measure and boost them; and, most interestingly, how to confirm the happiest country in the world and even help identify the happiest living human, or HLH. It challenges the World Happiness Report of 2023, debunks three major happiness myths, and then introduces the Triple-H Equation—the simple but profound formula about what makes life worth living. This is a book for happiness seekers and happiness advocates everywhere.

Alphonsus Obayuwana, MD, PhD, CPC, is a physician-scientist, a happiness coach, and the founder and CEO of Triple-H Project LLC—an entity that trains and certifies happiness coaches. He is a Literary Titan Gold Award-winning author who has published several peer-reviewed articles in the national medical journals about human hope and happiness, including The Hope Index Scale that became widely used at the Coca-Cola company, General Motors, Veterans Administration, and many academic institutions inside and outside the United States. He is also the author of The Five Sources of Human Hope and How to Live a Life of Hope.

After thirty years of relentless research on human hope, he successfully derived the Triple-H Equation that is at the core of this book. Throughout his faculty tenures at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Eastern Virginia Medical School, Ohio University College of Osteopathic Medicine, and the University of Toledo, he has taught and mentored medical students, resident physicians, nurses, and fellows in the art and science of caring and promoting happiness for themselves and their patients.

Dr. Obayuwana is also a retired Major in the US Air Force (Reserve). He is married to Ann Louis, his wife of forty-seven years. Together, they have two sons and three granddaughters. For recreation, he loves to walk, read, listen to music, and play his drum set.

More about Alphonsus can be found at www.triplehproject.com.