THIS TEST WILL TELL YOU WHO TO JETTISON

WE ALL have people around us with whom we can most be ourselves and with whom we feel happiest.

Those people aren’t the external cause of our happiness, but they are the ones with whom it’s easier to access the happiness within us.

Others have the opposite effect, and that’s why it is so important to conduct a happiness audit. It will help you to spend time with the people who allow you to access your inner happiness with the greatest ease.

So, ruthless as this sounds, it’s time to work out who falls into which camp.

Start by flicking through the contacts on your phone and ask yourself: ‘Who takes my energy up?’ and ‘Who takes my energy down?’

This is so that you can identify the Energy Vampires who are draining happiness out of your life.

Really think about this. There will be some people who have taken you down only on occasion — such as when they needed you to help them through a bad patch. You don’t want to ditch a good pal who, because they have been struggling through some crisis, has at times taken more from you than they give.

Rather, you need to pinpoint the ones who continually leave you feeling drained; those who, when their name pops up on your phone, make you inwardly groan and think: ‘What now?’

They are the ones you need to consciously decide to spend less time with.

Over time you might even decide life feels easier, less draining, without them in it and you’ll simply stop arranging to see them at all.

Then work out who the people are who lift you up and make it easier for you to access your inner happiness. These are the people to spend more time with.

By putting more effort into those relationships, and placing more value on their company, happy feelings will permeate your everyday life.

The strongest connections we make are with the people who make life feel richer.

A few years ago, I was living in Hollywood, but I decided to leave it all behind for one simple reason — our true friends live here, in the UK.

What helped me to make that decision was carrying out the following exercise, called the Circles of Connection. It’s deceptively simple, but for me provided a major wake-up call.

You draw three circles. The first is really big and within it you write down your acquaintances.

The next is smaller, and that holds your friendship circle.

The smallest one of all is for your real friends — that intimate circle of people who you know for certain will always be there for you, and that you will similarly be there for them no matter what.

After I did it, I thought: ‘Crikey, I have been spending a lot of my time with acquaintances and not with my real friends.’

It made me realise that I’ve got far more real friends than I thought, the majority of whom were in the UK and Europe. I decided on the spot to move back to Britain. As a result, I became much happier.

I love how this exercise gets to the heart of the quality of your relationships. It will help you work out who your people truly are.

By prioritising them — making them a bigger part of your life — happiness will be much easier to access.

As well as working for people, the happiness audit works for the places where you access your inner happiness most easily. Think of them as your happy places and you can choose as many as you like.

It could be sea and sunshine or pottering in the garden. Once you isolate them, you can focus on spending more of your time there.

While we all have to work, you can consciously immerse yourself in your happy places when you have free time. By mindfully deciding where to spend that time — and actively choosing places that speak to you in a positive way — your general contentment will grow.