The Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast Episode #322 - Alphonsus Obayuwana

TRANSCRIPT

Alphonsus Obayuwana
When I studied hope and hunger together, I discovered that they are the true determinant of happiness. There are three kinds of people in any court that I have tested.

People with very high hope and low hunger. People with moderate hope and average hunger. And people with low hope and intensive hunger and high hunger.

Melanie Avalon
Welcome to the Melanie Avalon biohacking podcast, where we meet the world's top experts to explore the secrets of health, mindset, longevity, and so much more. Are you ready to take charge of your existence and biohack your life? This show is for you. Please keep in mind, we're not dispensing medical advice and are not responsible for any outcomes you may experience from implementing the tactics lying herein. So friends, are you ready to join me? Let's do this!

Welcome back to the Melanie Avalon biohacking podcast. Friends, you are in for a happy conversation today. It was such an honor to have Alfonsis on the show for his incredible work, including his book, The Happiness Formula. It's a fascinating conversation on what actually is happiness. And in particular, how does hope and hunger relate to happiness? In today's show, we talk about the inborn hunger theory, the connection between money and happiness, problems with the happiest country study, problems with happiness polls, the role of our perception and happiness, how to boost your happiness, and so much more.

The show notes for today's show will be at melanieavalon.com slash happiness. Those show notes will have a full transcript as well as links to everything that we talked about, so definitely check that out. I can't wait to hear what you guys think. Definitely let me know in my Facebook group, IF biohackers, intermittent fasting plus real foods plus life, comment something you learned or something that resonated with you on the pinned post to enter to win something that I love, and then check out my Instagram, find the Friday announcement post, and again, comment there to enter to win something that I love. All right, without further ado, please enjoy this fabulous conversation with Alfonsis Obayuwana.

Hi friends, welcome back to the show. I am so incredibly excited and honored about the conversation I'm about to have. So on this show, we talk a lot about mindset and emotions and feelings, and often it comes from a biohacking perspective or we talk about the health effects and things like that. And today's guest, I am just overwhelmingly fascinated with his work, so he does have multiple books. He is a physician scientist, a happiness coach, and the founder and CEO of Triple H Project LLC. His name is Alfonsis Obayuwana, and he has a few books, but his newest book that we're talking about today is called The Happiness Formula, a scientific groundbreaking approach to happiness and personal fulfillment. And I was immediately intrigued by this concept, especially because I've always identified as a happy, optimistic person. And so I was really intrigued by this idea of an actual mathematical formula to calculate happiness. And we're going to talk all about this in today's show, but Alfonsis' work, he's created something called the Hope Index Scale. It's been used widely at companies like Coca-Cola and General Motors and the Veterans Administration and a lot of academic institutions.

Melanie Avalon
He's had a lot of work published, but his formula actually involves the relationship between hope and hunger. And in the book, he talks all about what hope is, what these hungers are that we have in life, how they are kind of like a flip side of a coin and how together they can actually create this measurable concept of happiness, which we're going to have to define.

Alfonsis, thank you so much for your work and thank you so much for being here. Thank you.

Alphonsus Obayuwana
having me on please

Melanie Avalon
Oh, and I forgot to mention you're also a retired major in the US Air Force. So thank you for your service and you just have such an amazing resume.

Okay. I have so many questions for you. So actually I mentioned in my intro just now that I have always felt like I've been an optimist in my life. Have you always felt like an optimist or how do you identify with the optimism pessimism thing and like, if you always felt like a happy person, what has been your personal relationship with happiness? And we can talk more about what it is, but just, just like in your life, how has that felt?

Alphonsus Obayuwana
Okay, now that I know more about happiness over the years I've been doing research on hope and happiness, I regard myself as a happy person. And I actually got into this research when I encountered two patients. As a medical student, I was rotating through psychiatry department and I helped take care of two patients that we admitted for having attempted suicide. And when I talked with them, I was so taken aback and it transformed me into an enthusiast of studying human hope. Since hope is what is said to be lost, assumed to be lost, when people try to take their own life, I wanted to have a way to measure hope so that people who are low in hope could be identified and timely attended to before they have suicide ideation in any way.

This is how I started and I got a national research grant to do a study on human hope. And that is how the hope in this scale came about. It was the product of that research. The research was supposed to take two years. I didn't know it was going to take the rest of my life. It is from there that then I studied where human desires come from and got the concept of hunger, which we define as any compelling desire is a hunger. When I studied hope and hunger together, I discovered that they are the true determinant of happiness. And of course, that was later on in my research.

Melanie Avalon
You even say in the book with the hope that nobody has zero hope that's alive. When you were intrigued by this concept of hope and how it was related to people who were suicidal and then you got your grant to do your study, did you know how you were going to go about studying it? How did you decide to figure out what hope is? Because I think we struggle with vague, seemingly vague concepts like hope and happiness. So how did you actually go about studying it?

Alphonsus Obayuwana
Your question is so important because the fact is that after I got the grant, I had a problem finding out exactly how to do what I wanted to do. And because very little had been written about hope. Psychologists generally were disease focused. They were interested in anxiety, depression, anything that had to do with hope was not really in their books.

So the money at that time, looking back, that was a lot of money. It wasn't given to me. It was given to the dean of the college. And we had dispensed as it was needed. The first thing we did was try to search in the literature. And we got very little, mostly philosophical, expression of hope and discretion of hope. But we wanted to measure it. And so we wanted to know where does hope come from. And so we started to randomly call people. And this time there were no cell phones. I'm talking about 1979, 78, 79. And there were huge metropolitan telephone directories at those times. And we hired and some people volunteered to make the calls, just asking people in one word, what does hope mean to you? In one word. And people started to say, your money, my children, spouse, income, Jesus Christ, Allah. After we got all of this and the response was very, very, very encouraging. That's how we started to know what hope mean to people and putting it all together and searching it, trying to categorize them. That's how we came up with five sources of human hope.

Melanie Avalon
Oh, wow. Was there the potential issue that the people who would or who are willing to answer might be more hopeful people?

Like I imagine some people just hung up on you. Did it. So does that kind of skew the people who are answering the poll?

Alphonsus Obayuwana
No, we actually told the people we are taking the calls, we are making the calls, if somebody declined and they say a reason why they declined, please note it. And that gave us another source of information, what the priorities of people are, that they cannot defer to do something as answering the question.

And we, in the book, we had a session about that called the SOCKS, SOCKS Phenomena, S-O-R-O-K-S Phenomena. That's how we discovered that. But, yes, it was this happening when people declined, but we have enough responses that we were able to find what we wanted to find. So that's what we started to measure, since we found the sources of human hope, then we coined questions to try to determine the degree of that present in an individual.

Melanie Avalon
Gotcha. Yeah. And we can talk more about the SORCS thing, but basically it was the different reasons people had for not being able to engage. So like their priorities in life.

Exactly. What did you find for the criteria of hope?

Alphonsus Obayuwana
We found that there were five essential human assets that all human beings have. These are intrinsic assets, human family assets, economic assets, educational assets, and spiritual assets. These assets may be real or potential, but we all have them. The thing we call hope, these are the five sources of that thing we call human hope.

So human hope comes from our intrinsic assets, our human family assets, educational assets, economic assets, and spiritual assets, which we tease out too to find out, and those we are the things we are measuring. For instance, intrinsic assets are your ego strength, your self-esteem, and your genetics, your other virtuous attributes, signature strength, and other characteristics. Those are your intrinsic assets. Then your human family assets are the love, help, support, assistance, understanding that others around you provide to you that you perceive, and they are your human family assets that contribute to your hope. Economic assets, your income, savings, material possessions, and most importantly, your overall sense of material sufficiency or resource adequacy. Those are your economic assets, and your hope comes from that. Educational assets, your intellect, awareness, skills, knowledge, curiosity, those are your educational assets. Spiritual assets are the benefits and dividends of your faith, religious belief, your notion of man versus God, your notion of right versus wrong, your notion of life versus death. Those, the benefits and dividends of those notions of yours about these things are your spiritual assets, and your hope comes from them. So when we are measuring hope, we are coining carefully structured questions to find out how much of that you have.

Melanie Avalon
And for those, because you say how much of it that you have,

Alphonsus Obayuwana
How much of each? Yes.

Melanie Avalon
Yes so so what is the role of the objective amount that you have versus your perception of how much you have. Because some people might you know like with money some people might feel abundant at a much lower income than somebody at a higher and somebody else might need a lot of money to feel secure with their money.

Alphonsus Obayuwana
Very true. We were measuring both. For instance, someone with high economic assets, it's not just how much they have in the bank, or in their savings, or even their own income, is their perceived and generous sense of financial sufficiency and resource adequacy. If you are a millionaire and you have $3 million in the bank, but you really want to become a billionaire, you are farther away from your goal than a grandmother who is getting $500 dollars every two weeks to live on and enjoying a room in the basement of the oldest son or daughter, and she worries less about money than the millionaire. So in fact, she in this scale would rate higher in the economic assets because she has less worry about money than the millionaire.

So we've heard of about happy peasants and miserable millionaires. So you are very right. It's how you feel. That's what we are tapping. Even your human family assets is how you feel. You may have a lot of people around you, but if you don't feel the support, you don't perceive a sense of belonging, assistance, understanding, you will be low in human family assets. So it's the same as spiritual assets. Just going to church is not it. It's the benefits you get from your relationship with what you believe in that is larger than you or your belief in nature, Allah, Yahweh, et cetera, et cetera. So it is your belief and your feeling about this that is important.

Melanie Avalon
Did you find any slightly objective markers like so going back to the finance one, even with people having different perspectives, did you find that there was some sort of number that if people made that they tended to have more hope or was it really individual?

Alphonsus Obayuwana
is individual. I have seen some reports in the literature at $75,000 a year.

Well, you know, my research, I focus on what is applicable to everybody across national boundaries, regardless of GDP of that country, the language spoken, the culture. There are many people that cannot tell you what their annual income is in many cultures. And there are also people who make less than $75,000 a year that would be doing well in terms of economic assets and the measurement or worse.

Melanie Avalon
Yeah, that's so interesting, because I've seen that number thrown around, so I was really curious. Here's a kind of random question.

You're relating this hope potential to happiness, and yet we have this phrase, don't get your hopes up, and sometimes people will proactively not try to be hopeful, presumably in order to be happier, because they think if they get their hopes up, they'll be unhappy. So what's happening there? Like, where people protect themselves by not having hope.

Alphonsus Obayuwana
Well, that is, I wouldn't advise anybody to do that. And also hope, you cannot have too much hope sincerely.

Hope is the feeling and the belief that your desires and aspirations are achievable. That's the belief. If you don't think they are achievable, then that's not a part of your hope, okay? So that is all it is, your belief and feeling that your desire is attainable. It has to be real for you. It has to be real. You cannot just believe anything, but if you believe that what you desire, you have a desire and you believe that it's achievable, then your hope is up. And so we stayed very well, very religiously, I might say, to the definitions. So I've seen some books where they talk about bad hope and good hope, negative hope and positive hope. Hope is hope. It's the feeling and the belief that all will be well, that your desire, any particular desire or desires are achievable, okay? And you cannot, everybody has hope, even those who are at the brink of committing suicide. People who are trying to take their life, they are not totally hopeless. There has to be hope there for them to want to do something. See, they are at least, they are hoping for a better life or a better existence, okay? So I'm glad that you said your audience, they are tuned to nuances, and that's one nuance I wanted to put out there. And if you don't have hope at all, you won't do anything.

Melanie Avalon
So to die from lack of hope, and I think this is a little bit dark, but somebody would basically just not do anything, and then...

Alphonsus Obayuwana
It's a very low hope when you are trying to take your life. It's low hope, very low hope.

Melanie Avalon
And if a person just laid there and then wasted away and died from starvation with that be dying from lack of hope because they literally did nothing.

Alphonsus Obayuwana
Well, if someone has no hope, they are not going to do anything.

Melanie Avalon
anything. Yeah. Wow. Okay.

Alphonsus Obayuwana
So after we studied the hope, then we know how to measure it and all of that. Then the question was, where do desires come from? If hope is the belief and feeling that one's desires and aspirations are achievable, where do desires come from? So this was the second major research that subsequently I was faced with.

And in that, we studied babies right from the moment they come out of the womb. As a physician, a family physician, and a researcher, I was lucky to have that opportunity. As babies are delivered, we start studying them. And through the nursery, and we organize for observers in the form of pediatricians, parents, nannies, siblings to record what their primal desires are that we have discovered. We are not taught, but very primal and therefore inborn. The five hungers that we found that are inborn in human beings. Hunger meaning any compelling desire is a hunger. So there are such five hungers.

Hunger for inclusion and acknowledgment. That was one. The hunger for intimacy and trusted companionship. That was two. Hunger for food and comfort, followed by hunger for information and answers. And at the end, the fifth, hunger for continuity and certainty. And you know, when babies are born, we all are born unhappy, by the way. If you have ever been in the delivery room, no baby comes out and being thankful for being delivered. In fact, they don't feel delivered. They feel tortured.

Being evicted from the womb, where you are surrounded by warm water, everything is quiet, and food is flowing through the umbilical cord without any effort. And all of a sudden, you are evicted without preparation or notice. And they're crying. And how do we stop the crying? Babies wiped dry, covered with warm blanket, coddled, and giving milk. And they stop crying. Although they have not verbally asked for it, they stop crying when this is done. In the nursery, when we get to the nursery, if there are five babies in the nursery, and baby number three is crying, it's one of two things. Either it's wet or it's hungry, food and comfort. And when you change those, change that situation, go back to sleep. All right, so we know that food and comfort is an important human desire.

Now, following kids, you will see young kids in terms of inclusion and acknowledgment. Whether you are a parent or not, we all know kids want to be included. In kindergarten, the worst punishment is time out when they are sitting away from everybody else. It's time out. And so they want to be included and acknowledge, mommy, mommy, look at me. See what I'm doing. See how strong I am. So the hunger for inclusion and acknowledgment is very apparent.

So is the hunger for food and comfort. And also, the moment they start verbalizing, even before that, you put a rattle in front of them. They try to reach out for it. They're looking around. When they can now talk. many questions. What is this? What is that? Why? So the hunger for information and answers is inborn. And then also young children, children are young children, they have preferred and trusted companions in the form of an older sibling or grandparent or a nanny or mom, usually.

Alphonsus Obayuwana
So in a family reunion, for instance, or in a picnic, the baby is crying and is passing from hand to hand until he gets to the hand of the person in whose hands he or she feels comfortable, intimate, and trusting, doesn't stop crying. So that's how we found the five inborn human hungers. And they stay with us all through our life, just not only in children. After all, we are still looking for answers and information as adults.

Food and comfort is why we are working and looking for jobs and ways to have other things. Hunger for intimacy and trusted companionship, of course, is there. That's why we have friends and get married and have children. Hunger for inclusion and acknowledgement. Of course, even for hardened criminals, the worst punishment is solitary confinement. So inclusion and acknowledgement is important for true life.

And children can be very unforgiving when you break your promise. And daddy bought you promised. Mommy bought you promised. And they love continuity. They love ankles. Let's do it again, grandad. Let's do it again, mommy. If you play peekaboo with a one or two year old, it could take forever if the adult would only cooperate. So continuity and certainty, very important.

So that's how we got the five inborn human hungers. So I was under this impression that hope, low hope is what makes life worth living. High hope is what makes life worth living. And low hope is what is making people, some people to take their own lives. And then when positive psychology movement came, they were talking about happiness. That happiness is the center of the world, is the purpose of human living, of human being alive. And my question was, especially after studying hope all the while, why are psychologists, positive psychologists, not mentioning hope?

What is then the difference between hope and happiness? Can you have happiness without hope? And so again, I did international interviews, trying to find out, tell people to give stories of situations, occasions, and moments when in their life they have been happy. And we got several. We got several. And after looking at all of these, we found that there are five major triggers of happiness. Five major triggers of happiness. Number one was personal achievements, victories, and accomplishments was one category of trigger for happiness, make people happy. Example was 17-year-old American by the name of Allen, who got a perfect score on the SAT and was very happy. Another category of telling us the trigger of happiness was advancement or enhancement in personal relationships. Human family connection or connectedness. Any advancement or enhancement in that area is a trigger of happiness. And example was a Nigerian teacher, because we did some study in Nigeria. Nigerian teacher, 28 years old, who got a marriage proposal and an engagement ring on her 28th birthday and was very happy.

Alphonsus Obayuwana
That was an advancement or enhancement in personal relationship. Human family connection or connectedness. The third one was an increase in income, material possession and personal comfort. For example, since we're dealing with international Iranians, it was Marcus who lived in Costa Rica, who was a night supervisor at a production company and was promoted to become a vice president of the company with substantial increase in salary. Marcus was very happy.

So an increase in income, material possession and personal comfort. The fourth one was an acquired new knowledge, new skill, expertise or capacity. Seem to make people happy. Example, since we're dealing with international audience, it was, example was Helen. Helen was a Canadian attorney, 36 years old, who has been taking lessons to become, to be able to fly a plane. And finally got a license to fly a plane without supervision. So that was an acquired new knowledge or new skill. And she was very happy.

The third was an American nurse who went to Israel on a pilgrimage. And while being there, a pastor baptized her in the biblical Riva Jordan. And when she came back, she was so happy.

Her name is Virginia. So looking at all these examples and looking at the hungers, the inborn hungers and the five sources of human hope, that is how I found the relationship that was striking. These findings separately were made many years apart. And I was not looking for a way to measure happiness. I was just trying to find out how happiness is related to hope. And the relationship that I found, I could best most precisely explain by a mathematical formula that said, hope over hunger equals happiness. And this is the equation that I later dubbed the Triple H equation. H1 over H2 equals H3. Where H1 is hope, H2 is hunger and H3 is happiness. And this is at the core of my book.

Melanie Avalon
Wow. So basically, you did these three separate explorations of hope, hunger, and happiness, and you found these five criteria for each that aligned pretty well.

The five of the hope and the five of the hunger, the five of the hope relieve the hungers, right? So if you have a lot of hunger on the economic side of things, that would be fulfilled by something similarly on the hope side of like relieved by it. And if you have a deficit,

Alphonsus Obayuwana
Yes, you are ahead of me, actually. Because when I was looking at it, when I lined them up and I saw that hope seemed, was looking at hope and hunger, there was this very strong suggestion of positive correlation. And hunger was just the opposite. And putting it together, that's why I had hope over hunger equals happiness. Now, when the hope, when this equation was deconstructed, that's where you are now, that's where you are. And you can see how they relate. When you need hope to be high and hunger to be low for you to be happy. High hope, low hunger brings happiness.

When hunger is higher than hope, you cannot be happy. And so, this is, just looking at it, what we call face validity. It seems to make sense. But then I went to the literature. And there is the beautiful work done by Plijin, Berger, and Van Exel, where they found that hope is highly correlated to happiness. And the gentleman by the name Everett Matt Wharton found that, confirm this, that people who are hopeful are happier and they are healthier.

And in the literature again, Chris Hitwood, in his theory of achieve desires, hypothesis theory, shows that happiness has to do with achieved desires. So, in looking at it, from that, from the standpoint of face validity, and also collaboration from literature, and experientially, we all know, you cannot be happy when you are very hungry or have overwhelming hunger. When your hope is high, it dapples your hunger. When hunger is very high, it dapples your hope. And of course, happiness only ensues when hope is higher than hunger. That was a moment of eureka for me, because this is not what I set out to look for. And so now, we know how to measure hope, we know how to measure hunger. And we can now measure happiness. And I report it in a unit called Personal Happiness Index, which ranges from one to eight. When people are below one, they are defined as unhappy. When the ratio of hope to hunger is lower than one, the individual is unhappy. When it's higher than one, the individual is happy. And that is the core, the core of my book, The Happiness Formula.

Melanie Avalon
Yeah, this is so, so fascinating. And I have a question actually about one of the questions. So we're talking about this formula. And for listeners, when you read the book, there's questions that Alphonse just asks and you give yourself a rating on one to eight for each one. And then you get your hope score, your hunger score, and then you can do that math equation to get your happiness score.

And I have a specific just a nuanced question, which is for the in the hungers. Number four is the hunger for information and answers. And I when I was doing the my own quiz, I gave myself two different numbers for that because I'm wondering because if I just if it's just hunger for information and answers, I am always asking questions. And I'm always looking for information and answers. It's like what drives me. It's why I have a podcast, but I don't get any from what I perceive a negative feeling from that hunger, like I just really enjoy looking for information. So my question was because if I were if it were just hunger for information and answers, that would be like an eight for me. But if it was hunger for information and answers, that distresses me. So like feeling feeling like I'm need the answer, and I'm stressed out about it, that would be a different number for me.

Alphonsus Obayuwana
Beautiful, beautiful, very important question. But the thing is, we are trying to measure your hunger and trying to measure your hope. And whatever that answer is for you, you just put it down. That is why it is so different from other tools. Nobody is asking you about happiness here, in the question here. Nobody.

We are not asking whether you are married, how much you make. Now, we are just measuring your hope and your hunger. Remember now, hope generates positive emotions and hunger generates negative emotions. For instance, when you have hope, joy, exhilaration, anticipation, excitement, enthusiasm, interest are generated from hope. And for hunger, you have anger, annoyance, anxiety, apathy, fear, sadness.

But to the question, how high is your hunger for information and answer? You just answer it as it is. Remember now, we are also measuring your hope. And that's not the only question there. It's a lot of questions. And at the end, I can tell you my own score. I don't know whether you want to mention your score publicly. But at the end, your score, your score at the end, do you find your PHI to be lower than what you think you should have?

Melanie Avalon
Well, I gave myself two scores because I answered it two different ways, that hunger question. So if I do the, if I make it so that hunger for information answers is not distressing to me, then if I rate it that way.

Alphonsus Obayuwana
We are not saying distressing, see, we're just talking about the hunger. Do you have hunger for information and answers?

Melanie Avalon
Yes.

Alphonsus Obayuwana
Okay, you do. And is it very true? Is it somewhat true? That's what the question is asking.

Melanie Avalon
Yeah, I mean, it's it's very.

Alphonsus Obayuwana
It's very true then you put a seven or eight that's it. Yeah, you put a seven on

Melanie Avalon
Okay.

Well, yeah, that was my first version of taking it.

And then I changed it to a one because I was like, well, it doesn't distress me out.

It doesn't stress me out the hunger for it.

Yeah.

So if I did, if I make it an eight, then my PHI score was a 1.65. If I make it a lower, like a one for that, then it was a 2.26.

Alphonsus Obayuwana
Okay. I think, inside as it is, first of all congratulations because you are a happy person. Most of us are between one and two.

Melanie Avalon
Okay, that's interesting.

Alphonsus Obayuwana
two and above is very happy, okay, four and above is flourishing, my score is 2.934. I'm very happy but I'm not flourishing yet and I'm working on it.

See now you know where you are and in the book there is a explain there how you can raise your score and when you raise your score you will see the changes in your PHI. See until now, Melanie, until now people do exercises about happiness but they don't have a way of measuring where they are before they start the exercise or afterwards they don't know what progress they have made, you see, and just imagine you're going to physical fitness class and the instructor has given you exercises to do and you start the exercises without knowing how much you weigh in the beginning, how much you weigh now so you have no idea where you are going, where you're coming from, what the progress you have made is. That's how it is all this time when we've been finding out how we how happy we are by guesswork but now we know, okay, so this is and I have found nothing in the literature that this equation contradicts any accepted facts, accepted facts found in the literature that this equation contradicts whereas Pema, the philosophical writings, economic writers, spiritual writers, they all seem to agree on this equation. It is an equation that has summarized the happiness, human happiness narrative and condensed it into a very simple but profound mathematical equation.

Melanie Avalon
Yeah, I'm looking at the questions. And again, for listeners, you can definitely get the book and take this quiz for yourself.

I guess what I'm thinking about, because basically when I did the questions, the majority of my hope was very high, a lot of it. Oh, and I actually had a question about hope question, but I'll come back to that. The hungers were on the flip side because let's see, one is not true, eight is true. Okay, so the hungers were somewhere higher, somewhere lower. And I guess what I feel like I can't escape with this is that as long as I'm experiencing that I have a lot of questions, that's gonna be negatively affecting my happiness. But my perception of that is that that adds to my happiness.

Alphonsus Obayuwana
We are not saying that. We are not saying that.

Melanie Avalon
The ironic thing is I'm asking a question.

Alphonsus Obayuwana
What about question 11?

Melanie Avalon
Yeah, so that that one is where I'm I'm saying like if I I mean, yes.

Alphonsus Obayuwana
You have so many unanswered questions. OK, and your answer was very true. Right? OK, and that's true for you.

Melanie Avalon
OK.

Alphonsus Obayuwana
See, don't just in your everyday experience is that you have many unanswered questions, you're just describing what is true for you. Okay, so we are removing, we are removing the chance for social desirability effect of these questions. We are not answering them to be correct, to be appealing or unappealing.

We are asking them to be correctly representative, correctly true, correctly and true about our everyday experience. You see.

Melanie Avalon
Yeah, I guess so like if I go through the others, so I'm currently under a lot of stress that that makes me feel like that that concept makes me feel, you know, negative, or I do not get the respect that I deserve. I feel negative.

I have no trusted or intimate.

Alphonsus Obayuwana
But is it true for you? You see, generally speaking, I'm an optimist. Is that very true or somewhat true or not true at all?

Melanie Avalon
Oh, very true for optimist, yes.

Alphonsus Obayuwana
for you okay it's a seven or eight which one will you put

Melanie Avalon
I would say an eight. I'm pretty optimistic.

Alphonsus Obayuwana
I do not believe I have some, I do believe that I have something to offer to others in this life.

Oh yeah, that's an eight. That's an eight, okay. In case of an emergency, I have someone I can count on. Also an eight. Okay. When I need answers, I'm usually successful finding them.

Melanie Avalon
Yeah, usually. I said an 8 before, but maybe a 7 now that I'm doing it.

Alphonsus Obayuwana
Okay, seven. Considering the resources available to me, I am more fortunate than many.

Melanie Avalon
I feel very fortunate, yes, so eight.

Alphonsus Obayuwana
When I think about my relationship with God, I feel reassured and less afraid. And the word God there meaning Jehovah, Allah, Yahweh, or any other omnipotent cosmic force, or even nature. When I think about my relationship with God, I feel reassured and less afraid.

Melanie Avalon
Yeah, that's interesting because I was raised very religious so God has a different meaning to me like it's evolved through my life and now I just feel more at peace spiritually.

Alphonsus Obayuwana
So your answer would be.

Melanie Avalon
I guess I'd put that in the middle like a-

Alphonsus Obayuwana
Lucky for okay okay so this is your score the full score is 48 in the the highest you can get in the hope score is 48 and now here you have 43 all right

Melanie Avalon
Mm-hmm, yes.

Alphonsus Obayuwana
Now, going to the hunger, number one of hunger is I am currently under a lot of stress.

Melanie Avalon
Yes, I would stay put a seven. I do feel stressed. Yeah.

Alphonsus Obayuwana
Okay? You're just expressing what it is, your everyday experience. Okay? Number, the next one is, I do not get the respect that I deserve.

Melanie Avalon
I don't really feel that generally, maybe occasionally, so I'd say a two.

Alphonsus Obayuwana
I do not get the respect that I deserve, so it's a two, which means it will be not true at all, but a two in those two options. Then I have no trusted or intimate companion. That's a one.

Lack of enough money is a constant worry of mine. It's been fluctuating with things. No more true, very true, not true at all. In the middle, so four. I have so many unanswered questions.

Melanie Avalon
That's the one we're getting to. Yeah, so that's.

Alphonsus Obayuwana
Just answer it as it is!

Melanie Avalon
Yep, I mean an eight then.

Alphonsus Obayuwana
Yeah, the last one is I am worried about my future.

Melanie Avalon
Probably, I feel like I'm answering this different than I did before. So one is not at all, eight is a lot. I mean, a little bit, but not a ton.

Alphonsus Obayuwana
8708 is very true. 102, not true at all.

Melanie Avalon
I'll say last time, last time I said a four, but I feel like a three. I feel, I feel better now, a three.

Alphonsus Obayuwana
Okay, three. Now if we add us together, all those together, that is seven plus two, that's a nine, plus one, that is a 10, plus four, that is 14, plus eight, that is 20, that's 24.

Okay, 43 over 24. If you have the calculator there, you can do that to three, 43 over 24.

Melanie Avalon
This actually speaks to your point about how you can see it changed because I answered it a little bit different than last night. So I guess I'm a little bit happier today than last night, 1.79.

Alphonsus Obayuwana
1.79.

Melanie Avalon
Interesting how it fluctuates, although you say in the book, it doesn't tend to massively fluctuate with people, right?

Alphonsus Obayuwana
No, it doesn't it doesn't fluctuate, but this is your score Now the one yesterday is probably not your accurate score But this is your score now because you are answering it as you see your life every day Okay So you have some Some points to go to become very happy, but you are not there yet But congratulations you are a happy person people have asked me. Oh, we are sure you are you are seven or eight No just because I found the formula doesn't mean i'm going to score high My score is 2.932 And i'm happy I'm a very happy person by classification, but i'm not flourishing yet So I have more to go I have i'm working on that and That is what is practical about this When you have your score you can work on it and improve it And when you improve it, you will know it subjectively And see it objectively

Melanie Avalon
So if a person basically, if they had an 8 for every single hunger question, so they basically had the highest hunger for each category, but they also had the highest hope for each category, so they also had an 8 for all the hope questions, their score would be a 1.

Alphonsus Obayuwana
Yeah, that is not quite possible. The answer would be a one, but that is the actual example you gave.

Melanie Avalon
There's not going to be a person like that.

Alphonsus Obayuwana
yeah now so i can have a score of one from moderate hope and moderate hunger scores but you cannot have the highest hope score and the highest hunger score

Melanie Avalon
That's not possible. For some of them, they can match up, but not for all of them, right?

Alphonsus Obayuwana
No, but in my testing all these years, I've never seen that. A perfect score, a perfect score, maximum score in Hope and maximum score in Hogger. I have never seen that.

Melanie Avalon
How did this align? Because when you open the book, you talk about the happiest country study and the problems with that.

So how did this align with those findings and with other findings about happiness?

Alphonsus Obayuwana
Yeah, you know, there are three, in all the testing I've done, everywhere, there are three kinds of people in any cohort that I've tested. People with very high hope and low hunger. People with moderate hope and average hunger. And people with low hope and intensive hunger and high hunger.

So zone A people have high hope and low hunger. Zone C people have low hope and high hunger. And zone B people have moderate hope or moderate hunger. That's where most people are in zone B. And you are close to the top of zone B now.

Melanie Avalon
I have high hope, right? But moderate hunger? Yes. And that was which zone? Zone B?

Alphonsus Obayuwana
Your eyes will be, yes.

Melanie Avalon
So the happiest country study, they found, what was the happiest country, Denmark?

Alphonsus Obayuwana
Finland. Finland for the past seven, eight years has been the happiest. They are not measuring the right. And I have written to the authors, but they will listen to me because what they are doing is much easier for them to do.

But in the interest of good science, I told them, you are not measuring happiness. You're not. Because Finland, for instance, is a very small country, okay, about 500,000 square miles. The population is about 5.5 million, very cold, and several months in a year, there's no sunrise. The suicide rate is high.

How can you be the happiest country in the world with a high suicide rate? Okay. So I told them there are many things they are missing. Okay. So again, the use of anti-depressant is very high in Finland. How can you be the happiest country? And the citizens are heavily using anti-depressants. Okay. And also the question they ask is, how satisfied with your life are you? That's the only question they are asking. They are not using anything else. They give the impression that they are using GDP. They are using how helpful the neighbors are. They are not using any of those. Okay. But they give the impression that that's what they are doing. And I have written to them, and they are doing the disservice to humanity when they are doing this. It's not good science at all.

It's not good science. And the sad, seasonal affective disorder is very endemic there. Very, very endemic. And their suicide rate is high. I mean, how can you be the highest? So if you have the happiest country, most of their citizens will be in Zone A. Most of their citizens will be in Zone A, and the least of their citizens will be in Zone B. To find the unhappiest country, they will have most of their citizens in Zone C, and very little or none in Zone A.

That's what you do. But they are just, for instance, when you ask people, how happy are you? Some people take that as a political statement. Okay. If you love your country, you know, we're not talking about your happiness. If you love your country, you might put in eight or nine. Okay. If you don't, it'd be four or five. Look at the US now. You ask any Democrat, how satisfied are you with your life? You think they're going to put in nine or 10? Okay. So, but people in MAGA may do that. So they are not measuring happiness. They are not measuring happiness. So that rating is very flawed. It's very flawed.

Melanie Avalon
Yeah, I imagine there's a big problem if you're if you're trying to find the happiest country, because countries speak different languages, even if you were using as close to the same word as possible in each country. People language is not the same, the same. So people are going to that word is going to mean different things in different countries based on the culture, the language.

Alphonsus Obayuwana
There are books, many books are translated into different languages and the meaning still stay the same. But you've got to be using something that is applicable to everybody.

Hope is applicable to all humans. Hunger is applicable to all humans. And happiness is applicable to all humans. Happiness anywhere in any language is the feeling of joy, delight, satisfaction, fulfillment, or contentment that you feel momentarily or maybe somehow sustained to different degrees of length of time. But I always hear people say happiness means differently to different people.

Melanie Avalon
No, he doesn't. Does every culture have a word for it? Yeah.

Alphonsus Obayuwana
Every culture has a word for happiness. Every culture has a word for hope. Every culture has a word for hunger. And so it has to be something applicable to all human beings.

Melanie Avalon
So like the concept of unhappiness and sadness, is that its own entity or is that just a lack of happiness?

Alphonsus Obayuwana
I do not understand your question, please.

Melanie Avalon
unhappiness or sadness? So a lack of happiness.

Do you think that's its own thing? Or is it just that a person is not happy? Kind of like people will say with light and darkness, people will debate is darkness just an absence of light?

Alphonsus Obayuwana
Unhappiness means that you have less hope than hunger. You are higher, you are hungrier than you are hopeful. That's unhappiness.

You are hungrier than you are hopeful. Let me just quickly talk about a situation where the whole world was unhappy. COVID-19, okay? Globally, we are all unhappy. Why? Remember what I told you about hope? Economic assets, we are decreased because people stopped working. Transportation was cut down. Very little marketing, person-to-person interaction. Human family assets also decreased. Grandchildren couldn't see their grandparents because grandparents were very susceptible. There was six feet distance. There were no parties. There were no in-person conferences. Even church and synagogue and mosque were closed. Spiritual assets, educational assets, schools were closed, all right? And there was very little learning. Library was closed. So when you look at that, you will see that hope is what decreased. Hope was decreased. That's why everybody was happy.

In terms of questions, a lot of questions, okay? So our hunger, we are intensified, okay? We are hungry for information and answers because we didn't know how long COVID was going to last. We did not know what cures it. When is the immunization going to be ready, okay? Hunger for food and comfort also intensified, okay? Hunger for intimacy and trusted companions. Even people were restricted from visiting members of the family. We are hospitalized, okay? When you look at it, hope was decreased. Our hungars were intensified. And that's why we have all happiness in terms of when COVID happened.

That actually is an incidental human experiment. It was an incidental human experiment that proves the whole thing.

Melanie Avalon
So ever since coming up with this score, have you been surveying people with it and getting more and more data?

Alphonsus Obayuwana
Oh, definitely. Definitely. I just have tested in Africa, mostly Nigeria and Ghana. I've tested in the Caribbean, Central America, Canada, U.S.,

Melanie Avalon
So what country have you found to be the happiest?

Alphonsus Obayuwana
No, I'm not I couldn't it to find the happiest country I have to test the whole the whole country which I don't have the resources to do and Gallup You know and the and the authors of the world happiness report have not Taking I'm not taking my offer. They think the way they are doing it is fine You know asking people how satisfied are you with your life?

Melanie Avalon
Wow and that's something else you talk about in the book is how people can find their purpose and their mission and have you found that and you also talk about these different levels of missions like going up to the consummate mission have you found that how a person views their their purpose and their mission aligns with their happiness score?

Alphonsus Obayuwana
No, I'm not doing any research on that. See, in the book, let's your audience know that all these things I'm talking about are in the book.

How to measure your score and how to improve your score is in the book. And in terms of research, I have tested in many countries and this instrument, this tool had been found to have, as statisticians call it, had good internet consistency, okay, with an alpha value of 0.88, which is high.

Melanie Avalon
What does that mean? The alpha value?

Alphonsus Obayuwana
It's in statistics, statisticians use that to find the internal consistency of a scale or a questionnaire. The alpha value is 0.88.

There's something they call VCR, validity ratio, CVR, content validity ratio. It was found to be 0.85.

Test, retest, reliability was 0.95, which means this scale, the ado questionnaire, which is what we've been talking about, this scale called the ado questionnaire, is actually measuring happiness.

Melanie Avalon
Wow, okay. And how did you come up with because in the book you provide, you know, the book isn't just the mathematical formula, you also provide like you were saying, ways people can increase their score.

How did you go about coming up with those different ways to help people?

Alphonsus Obayuwana
Oh, because I'm a happiness coach.

Melanie Avalon
Yes, and what's a happiness coach?

Alphonsus Obayuwana
A happiness coach is someone who has knowledge of the science and the arts of happiness and has learned how to help people, how to help himself or herself increase the happiness goal or help other people increase their happiness goal.

Melanie Avalon
When people get the book, are those the tenants that you work with with people, ways that they can do that, increase their hope and decrease their hunger?

Alphonsus Obayuwana
Yeah, when you buy the book, everything is there. What to do to increase your hope and how to do it, they are all there.

But I train, actually, I train happiness coaches. OK, that's what I do. I train happiness coaches. And sometimes, people who need happiness coaching, I take one-on-one clients, seldom. But for the most part, I train happiness coaches. I teach people how to help others increase their score.

Melanie Avalon
Awesome. So how can people how can people get the book? How can they get a happiness coach? If you are taking clients, like you said

Alphonsus Obayuwana
The book is available in all bookstores. Book A Million, Barnes and Noble. The quicker way is probably to get it on Amazon, just order it on Amazon. That's how.

And if you need a happiness coach, you can go to www.hhprojet.com.

Melanie Avalon
Awesome. And then people can sign up and work with a happiness coach there. Awesome. Super cool.

So we'll put all of that in the show notes. So www.triple.h-t-r-i-p-l-e-h project.com Awesome. Well, thank you Alphonse. This has been so so intriguing and amazing and um, like I said we talk about We talk about happiness a lot on the show, but it's been very vague and this has been incredible And so eye-opening and lightning for people to actually you know, get their actual score make change It's really incredible the work you're doing.

Are you are you currently doing? What are you working on now primarily? Are you gonna write another book or?

Alphonsus Obayuwana
No, no, I'm not. This is this actually a product of 35 years of research.

Okay, so I'm not, I'm not, I give lectures, and I train happiness coaches. And if there are people that that have loose cause, and want to improve their score, and they need some help, they need my help, I will offer. And I help the human resource directors to increase the happiness of employees, because in the in the workplace, where the employees are happy, productivity is increased, absenteeism declines, innovations saw retention is much improved, cooperation, vitality and viability, and all employee management, cooperation, and interaction, they are all improved. You know, so many companies do send their employees to happiness workshops.

Melanie Avalon
I'm so grateful for everything that you're doing. I can't think of a better mission for humanity. Honestly, it's really, really incredible work.

Actually, to that point, the last question that I ask every single guest on this show, and it's just because I realize every single day how important gratitude is. So what is something that you're grateful for?

Alphonsus Obayuwana
I am grateful that I have many things to be grateful for, but I'm grateful that I'm well and happy.

Melanie Avalon
Amazing. Well, thank you so much, Alphonse. This has been such an honor. I am just so grateful for everything that you're doing. And just thank you.

This was really, really wonderful. And I can't wait for listeners to hear it.

Alphonsus Obayuwana
Thank you very much.

Melanie Avalon
All right. Well, thank you so, so much. I again, I really appreciate this and would love to have you on again in the future. And just thank you for all that you do.

Alphonsus Obayuwana
Bye-bye.

Melanie Avalon
Bye. Thank you so much for listening to the Melanie Avalon biohacking podcast.

For more information and resources, you can check out my book, What Win Wine, as well as my supplement line, Avalon X. Please visit MelanieAvalon.com to learn more about today's guest. And always feel free to contact me at contact at MelanieAvalon.com. And always remember, you got this.