Happy stat: Happines is on the rise, a new poll shows.

RODALE NEWS, EMMAUS, PA—Maybe it's the cheery holiday displays, the smell of chestnuts roasting over an open fire, or simply the realization that hard times, too, shall pass, but Americans are happier now than they've been in two years, according to the results of a nationwide poll.

THE DETAILS: Evidence that we're all smiling a little more these days comes from the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, "Dow Index" of sorts for the country's overall emotional well-being. Every day since January 2008, pollsters from Gallup and Healthways have interviewed 1,000 Americans of all income levels and demographic profiles and asked them questions about six key markers of well-being: emotional health (stress, anger, sadness, and such), physical health (bouts of sicknesses or diseases), healthy behaviors (such as exercise and eating a healthy diet), work environment, access to basic necessities (clean drinking water, safe housing, and health care), and finally, a "life evaluation index," which is basically a 0 to 10 ranking of how an individual views his or her life as it exists today, and how he or she sees it unfolding five years from now (0 being the worst life possible and 10 being the best). Those six subcategories are then averaged out to get a sense of people's overall well-being.

At the end of November, 66.7 percent of those polled were considered to have good overall well-being, which is just shy of the all-time high of 67 percent recorded in February 2008. People's emotional health is at a 17-month high, and the life evaluation index is showing that 52.9 percent of Americans are "thriving," versus 37.4 percent in November 2008. The life evaluation index tends to have the biggest impact on well-being, says Dan Witters, research director at the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, because scores related to the present can fluctuate so widely. But, he says, it also reflects a certain optimism about the future. "Respondents see people laid off around them, they see their pay being cut and the economy going badly," he says. "But their thoughts about life five years from now don't change all that much. The resiliency and the optimism of the American public, even in really bad times, is pretty starkly represented by that," he says.