According to The 2012 Gallup Healthways Well-Being Index, Hawaii residents and Hawaii itself ranked number 1 for the fourth year in a row when it comes to being the happiest and healthiest state in the nation. According to the survey, most residents in Hawaii even enjoy work.
The national survey, which was released this week by Gallup Healthways, also reported that Hawaii residents admit they have the best sense of satisfaction with life, emotional health, and work environment. We ranked second in healthy behavior and physical health. We ranked 14th, still in the top half of the nation, in basic access to food, shelter, health care and a safe and satisfying place to live.
This Well-being index, which is released every year, seems to have Hawaii at the top all the time. This is proven by the four straight years our state has led the pack. This is just one of the many national polls that Hawaii ranks high in.
The ranking is based on daily surveys conducted over the course of a year with more than 353,000 respondents. A little less than a thousand people were surveyed in Hawaii.
How to Gallup Healthways Well Being Index Works
They studied more than 10 million geotagged tweets, and if Twitter is an indication of happiness, lucky you live Hawaii.
The researchers assigned happiness values to words in tweets from Hawaii.
The result: Hawaii has the happiest tweets, followed by Maine, Nevada, Utah and Vermont. On the opposite end of the social media happiness scale, Louisiana, Mississippi, Maryland, Delaware and Georgia are the saddest states.
The study notes that Hawaii has a slight advantage over other states because the abbreviation for Hawaii is ‘HI,” which has a high happiness word value. There are also more beach- and food-related words in Hawaii tweets, which are also happier tweets.
But the researchers note, “The rich variety of happy words occurring in Hawaii paints a convincing picture of it as a happy state regardless of this small bias.”
Hawaii’s overall score in the index was 71.1 out of a possible 100, up from 70.2 in 2011.
You can’t really argue what the poll says, as you would find it pretty hard to talk to someone who isn’t positive about Hawaii. Perhaps one of our biggest issues is cost of living, which is apparently the price you pay to live in paradise.
Other top states in 2012 included Colorado, Minnesota, Utah and Vermont. West Virginia, Kentucky, Mississippi, Tennessee and Arkansas rounded out the bottom of the survey.
Hawaii is definitely an amazing place to live and most of us feel blessed to enjoy life in the islands. With all the sunshine, how can you not love Hawaii?
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