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Perryburg, Ohio — As a physician-scientist and happiness coach, Dr. Alphonsus Obayuwana has made it his mission to support the well-being of others, and he has created a groundbreaking, five-minute tool that objectively and subjectively quantifies personal happiness — simultaneously.

“It is useful to have a happiness score because no one can effectively improve what cannot be accurately measured,” Dr. Obayuwana said in a recent interview. “Your happiness score tells you where you are on the happiness spectrum and where you would rather be.”

In his new book, The Happiness Formula: A Scientific, Groundbreaking Approach to Happiness and Personal Fulfillment, Dr. Obayuwana introduces a universal unit of measure called the “Personal Happiness Index” or PHI. This PHI, according to Dr. Obayuwana, makes it possible, for the first time ever, to calculate and assign numerical happiness scores to human individuals by plugging their unique hopes, hungers, assets, and aspirations into an equation.

But Dr. Obayuwana is quick to point out that The Happiness Formula is much more than a mathematical equation for measuring happiness.

“It is a book about life, the relationship between human hope and hunger, and one’s overall feeling of personal satisfaction and subjective well-being,” Dr. Obayuwana explained.

The Happiness Formula challenges the findings published in the World Happiness Report of 2023, debunks three major happiness myths, and then introduces the Triple-H Equation — the simple but profound formula about what makes life worth living.

Dr. Obayuwana’s discovery offers individuals a simple but scientific way to self-assess their levels of fulfillment; provides happiness seekers with a proven routine for achieving and sustaining a flourishing life; and offers a strong theoretical basis and a firm practical structure for happiness coaches.

In 1979, Dr. Obayuwana (then a medical student) was awarded a national research grant and Smith-Kline Medical Perspective Fellowship to develop an instrument for measuring human hope, with the purpose of detecting hopelessness in time to prevent suicide. The result was the widely used and often cited Hope Index Scale (HIS). This progressed into decades of research that ultimately resulted in The Happiness Formula.

“For full disclosure, my own PHI is 2.923, and that means I am a ‘very happy’ person but not yet ‘flourishing’ by definition,” Dr. Obayuwana added.

“Like everybody else, I could be happier, and with the formula revealed in this book, I now know where I am compared to anyone else in the world — who also knows his or her PHI.”