We all want happiness in our lives, whether it’s with our career, our family or just general happiness. It’s not an easy place to get to, particularly in the United States. According to the U.S. News & World Report, the U.S. is one of the top three richest countries in the world, yet ranked No. 44 in happiness. Finland is No. 1 in that department.
Maybe Americans aren’t getting the message, but Culverhouse alum Jackson Kerchis, who has studied the topic extensively, has a secret recipe with just three ingredients.
First, a little background on Kerchis. After graduating with a commerce and business administration degree from Culverhouse in 2021, Kerchis wanted something more.
“I thought, the measure of success in life really is happiness. I wonder if I could just study that,’” he said. That’s what he did. Through UA’s New College, Kerchis created the school’s first major in happiness and graduated with its first degree in happiness. He even lived as a Zen monk for a few months in San Francisco to learn their mental training.
Kerchis later co-founded Happiness Means Business, motivating groups that include high school students, police departments, lawyers, the U.S. Army, Air Force, Marines, Navy, National Guard, and even special forces units. He’s worked with Coca-Cola, Eastman Chemical, and Vivint Home Security. He recently delivered TEDx Talk at Harvard on “The How of Happiness (and Why it Matters).”
As for the keys for happiness, Kerchis said it boils down to a checklist of three components.
Biology—physical health. “If you’re exercising, eating right, sleeping well, that supports your well-being.”
Psychology – mindset and meaning. “That’s the biggest bucket. You’re actively working toward cultivating more positive emotion, a more positive perspective, and a sense of kind of meaning and life satisfaction.”
Relationships – social connection. “A grant study at Harvard basically said the one thing that matters more than anything for happiness and quality of life is the quality of your relationships.
BPR, as Kerchis calls it, must be learned and put into practice. Just like athletes become better with practice and repetition, people can learn good habits that compound over time to equal a happier life.
Everyone’s BPR path is different, though.
“It can range from things like exercise or maybe it’s a healthier diet (for biology). Maybe it’s your sleep quality. Maybe it’s on the mental health side and going to therapy (for psychology). For relationships, if you study how to create better and stronger relationships and then practice the principles, you ultimately learn to be happier. If you study and learn all the principles, you ultimately learn how to be happier.
“With the field of neuroscience, we can even see some of those things. If you meditate for 10 minutes a day it changes your brain structure. If you do a random act of kindness once a week it changes your brain structure. It looks different for different people but as long as you’re learning, you can learn to be happier.”