As I said you are changing your characters stats, the problem is that's not what the numbers up top measure. They measure the average of those stats across all your students.trying to change my own stats thats it
If you want to check you characters stats then hover over your name in the bottom left. A box will pop up showing your character and the boxes there will list all of your characters stats that have an in game effect. Your protagonists happiness has no in game effect as shown by the fact it doesn't show up on that character sheet, it is only tracked in the debug menu because all characters need to have the stat even ones that don't use it for anything. Same with stuff like corruption or lust they effect NPC behaviour only so have no effect on the protagonist.
If you want to change the numbers at the top of the screen, you need to change the relevant stat of your students either by going through each students stat sheets in debug and changing them one by one, or just playing the game normally.