Hey there, Steven Dubner. Happy New Year. How happy will it be? Well, that depends

at least a little bit on where you live. The Scandinavian countries, for instance, seem

to be particularly good at producing happiness. How does that work? That's the question we

seek to answer in this episode, which is called How to Be Happy. We first released it last

year, but happiness being an ongoing pursuit, we thought you wouldn't mind a refresher. We'll

be back next week with new episodes. Thanks as always for listening, and again, Happy New Year.

Until a few years ago, Helen Russell was leading a seemingly happy life in London,

working as an editor for the Fashion Magazine Marie Claire. True, she did feel restless at times.

Also true, she and her husband had been struggling with fertility treatments. That said, she had no

intention of leaving the UK. Until out of the blue one wet Wednesday, my husband came home and told

me he'd been offered his dream job working for Lego in Denmark. And we knew nothing about the

country as many people in other countries are fairly ignorant of Scandinavia. We couldn't really

have pinpointed it on a map. They decided to go for it. But as soon as they arrived in a small town

in the rural hinterlands of Denmark, in the dead of winter, she had regrets. My husband left to go

to work at 7.30 a.m. I didn't know anyone, I didn't speak the language. I was in this freezing

cold dark country all by myself. I did a lot of howling at the moon thinking I'd made the biggest

mistake ever and I did a lot of eating Danish pastries because as a repressed Brit, I liked to eat

my emotions. But Russell had heard, as you may have heard, that Denmark is routinely at or near

the very top of the annual happiness ranking compiled by the United Nations. In the other Nordic

countries, Norway, Sweden, Iceland and Finland pretty much dominate the top 10.

Russell naturally wondered why, what are the causes and consequences of this alleged happiness

epidemic? Was it for real? What are the downsides? She set out to answer these questions in a book

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