What brings the most happiness to people’s life? You guessed it right, sex! According to new research, sex is ranked as the most enjoyable human activity.

Researchers at University of Canterbury in New Zealand used text messaging to build up a map of what activities people routinely rated as bringing the most and least happiness to their daily lives.

They found that sex ranked first in all three categories measured in the survey: pleasure, meaning and engagement.

So far governments around the world and media have focused mainly on life satisfaction in the discussion about well-being; it turns out happiness is a far more complicated topic.

According to the lead researcher 'psychologists have proposed that individuals may seek to increase their well-being through three main behavioural orientations; via pleasure, via engagement, and via meaning.

'Endorsing pleasure as a way to happiness means you enjoy 'eating dessert first' or you focus on feeling good and enjoying sensory pleasures.

'Engagement is what you experience when you’re totally absorbed in what you’re doing; either skiing down a hill or being immersed in your work. People call this experience a state of flow and this may be a dominant orientation to happiness for some people.

'Having meaning in a person’s life was a way to pursue happiness; being part of something bigger and contributing to the greater good.'

Researchers used mobile-phone text-messaging to collect data on what people did during the day and how they felt about it, a technique called 'experience sampling'.

Having sex is highest on all measures of happiness and surprisingly using Facebook and doing housework both ranked low on the happiness scale.

From The Daily Mail