Being happy with where and how we live is not only a matter of sufficient heating, good light and a lot of space, it is also about how we feel and express ourselves through our homes. The Happiness Research Institute's GoodHome report has identified five core emotions, and here we examine how they relate to our overall happiness and happiness with our homes. Of these five core emotions, pride is the most important, but also the rarest.
Five core emotions
From the study, independent research, and interviews with experts in psychology, anthropology, and social sciences, the many feelings we have about our home are limited to five core emotions. These are:pride, comfort, identity, security and control. The Happy Home Score is derived from the question:on a scale from 0 to 10, how happy are you with your home? An "unhappy at home" or a "less happy at home" is a score of 6 or lower. A 'happy home' is a score of 7 or higher.
These five core emotions were chosen because they cover many of our basic human needs and together largely explain whether we feel happy about our homes. Below we analyze them one by one based on how important they are to feeling happy about your home.
Proud
Pride is about our own achievements. In the current context, these achievements can include all kinds of home improvements and other achievements related to the home. Pride can also be derived from qualities or possessions that we have in our home. Pride is by far the most important emotion of the five core emotions. It alone accounts for 44% of the emotions that explain how happy we are with our home.
Comfort Comfort accounts for 25% of the emotions that explain how happy we are with our home, and therefore comes as the second most important factor. We define the feeling of comfort as a mental state:it is the feeling of being mentally at home and the feeling of having a home that is a stress-free safe haven, where we have the opportunity to isolate ourselves from the rest of the world, if necessary.
Identity
This is the sense that our home is a place that is an integral part of ourselves. It represents who we are and how we want the world to see us. We can express our personality through our home through the choices we make regarding style. But our personal preferences are also reflected by decoration, color, furniture and the personal items we display. These can be photos of people we love or souvenirs from vacations that help us remember who we are and where and with whom we feel we belong. All five core emotions are interrelated, but identity and pride in particular are intertwined in the quantitative data analysis:when we strongly identify with our home, we also feel proud of how and where we live. Identity accounts for 17% of the emotions that explain how happy we are with our home and comes in as the third most important emotion.
Safety
Safety is a feeling of being physically safe in our home. We define it as the absence of threats to our physical body. But the feeling of being unsafe can also be related to threats related to the basic condition of our home. For example, if a roof leaks continuously when it rains, it can lead to water damage, mold or dry rot. Physical threats can also arise from poor sanitation or structural problems related to the building itself. Safety accounts for 10% of the emotions that best explain how happy we are with our home.
Control
Control is a mental state, a sense of choice about ourselves, our finances and decisions about how and where we live. It is a feeling of being “on top of things” and in charge of decisions made about the house. This could be influenced by how high the rent or mortgage is, or the extent to which renovations are allowed to meet the needs of the family or the people living in the house. We define control as the degree to which we can decide what happens to and in our home. Control accounts for 4% of the emotions that best explain how happy we are with our home.
Country Comparisons:Where Are the Happiest Homes?
In the GoodHome report, we see that what unites us is greater than what separates us when it comes to what makes us happy with our home. However, we see some important differences in how happy people are with their homes in different countries.
The Dutch are happiest with their homes
In the GoodHome report, each of the 13,489 people who participated in the survey were asked how happy they were with their home. An average “Happy Home Score” for each country was then calculated. In the survey, the Dutch came out on top:on a scale from 0 to 10, the Dutch Happy Home Score is 7.69. The Dutch are closely followed by the Germans with a score of 7.60 and Denmark is third with a score of 7.47.
