Episode 112 - Happiness and the Gross National Happiness Index of Bhutan with Dr. Chencho Lhamu

Newfoundland and Labrador was ranked the happiest province in Canada! That’s good news because quite often we are at the bottom of the scale when it comes to health... but is there a link between happiness and health? And is there an opportunity to leverage our happiness to improve our health. Well to find the answer I had to look halfway around the world.
The Kingdom of Bhutan is a landlocked country in the Eastern Himalayas, located in South Asia between China in the north and India in the south. It is a mountainous country. Less than a million people live in Bhutan but this small nation is making an impact globally when it comes to how we measure health.
Gross National Happiness is something you may not have heard about before, but it was first coined by the 4th king of Bhutan in the 1970s. The premise of gross domestic happiness is that sustainable development should take a holistic approach towards progress in the country and give equal importance to non-economic aspects of wellbeing. For example, in Canada we measure the GDP or gross domestic product and financial scales but don’t consider this holistic view on how we judge our progress. This approach to Gross National Happiness was adopted by the UN a decade ago to help guide other countries achieve what Bhutan has for its people.
The Gross National Happiness Index is a single number index developed from 4 pillars and 9 domains.
Those pillars include good governance, sustainable socio-economic development, cultural preservation, and environmental conservation.
While the nine domains are:
•psychological wellbeing,
•health,
•education,
•time use,
•cultural diversity and resilience,
•good governance,
•community vitality,
•ecological diversity and resilience,
•and living standards.
The domains represents each of the components of wellbeing of the Bhutanese people, and the term wellbeing here refers to fulfilling conditions of a "good life".
When we look at the challenges facing our province, in particular when it comes to the social determinants of health, wellbeing and quality of life - I was intrigued to learn more about this philosophy.
So we reached out to Dr. Chencho Lhamu who is an educator who received her doctorate from my alma mater UNB. Her doctoral thesis focussed on Conceptions of Happiness and she has written articles on educating for happiness. Currently she is the program director for the Bhutan Centre for Media and Democracy. We coordinated our schedules - with the time change and had a call at midnight our time and 9 am her time! This was one of the most interesting interviews we have had on the show so I hope that you enjoy, and it helps shift your perspective that there are other things we should be looking at other than just economic prosperity if we want to live a good life