Maybe you chose your recent vacation destination based on the results of the happy planet index.  And maybe, now that you’re on your way back to a sadder reality, you want to check and see how happy the rest of the nation is.  Thanks to a new Facebook application that counts and graphs the words people use in their status updates, you can actually track this information in the Facebook Gross National Happiness index. 

The program scans all Facebook profiles for status updates and counts selected positive and negative words. The word count and the time of the posts are analyzed to produce an index showing when people are at their happiest. The “when” of course correlates to a day of the week, a holiday or an event.  And results vary. Plan ahead and use this information to attempt to ensure that you are always surrounded by as much happiness as possible. A happy traveler is a healthy traveler!

While you are on Facebook checking this out, visit the Healthy Travel Blog fan page!