What is happiness and why do we all strive to own it?
Happiness tends to be defined as an emotional state characterized by feelings of joy, satisfaction, contentment, and fulfillment. While happiness has many different definitions, it tends to be described as involving positive emotions and life satisfaction... But what does that mean?
When we look on happiness through the eyes of science, it is an outcome of pleasure detected in our brain. In psychology, the relationship between these two has a long history. Sigmund Freud, for example, emphasized this link in his writings when he stated that humans "strive after happiness; they want to become happy and remain happy." Well, of course we do!
Good food, favorite music, hobbies and activities, spending time with people we love. Those moments happen to trigger significant processes in our control center, aka the brain.
Checking on what is happening in the brain during such times scientists figured that the brain is being like; OH, JOY! THAT'S SOME GOOD STUFF! This message needs to be passed on from cell to cell and that happens to be a job of neurotransmitters, chemical messengers passing on the message. In a positive and happy moments specific neurotransmitters, dopamine and serotonin, are released. These besties have a significant role in our lives. They take care of some extra stuff too, but we mostly rely on them when the brain feels rewarded, satisfied and content = Happy, happy, happy!!
Dopamine plays an integral role in the reward system, a group of brain processes that control motivation, desire, and cravings. While creating positive feelings associated with reward or reinforcement that motivate us to continue with a beneficial (or not, in the worse cases) task or activity, it plays an important role in how we feel pleasure. It's a big part of our unique human ability to think about the recent future, consider different scenarios and choose our actions. It helps us strive. But we have to be very cautious around dopamine. Its deficiency is linked to depression and its symptoms, when we have too much of it colocated with negative behaviors, we become addicted. That is why raising dopamine levels has a great impact on our happiness, but we shouldn't overdo it.
Serotonin is a multitasker taking care of several tasks of huge importance. In the context of the wellbeing, serotonin takes place of a mood regulator, controlling levels of happiness or, contrarily the anxiety. Similarly to dopamine, we don't want to lack this man as it can lead to sadness, worthlessness of blue moods.
Thus, keeping stable and sufficient level of serotonin and dopamine is a great way to start with. These may seem hard to measure, but trust me, once you know how, it is not a rocket science. Anyways, that is all being taken care of inside our heads. Our job to provide the "joyous inputs", because one moment of happiness doesn't guarantee a happy life, life satisfaction or well-being.
An easy way to put this is by repeatedly acting in a way that pleases us, until we get used to doing it and making such behavior rather automatic and natural. That is simply because we can get used to things and stick to them pretty easily - we form a certain type of routine behaviors. In general, our brain makes habits out of any repetitive actions. And this is exactly where we are getting to the breaking point - what do we choose to repeat?
Easier said than done, that's for sure. But let me show you some life hacks that can make this process much easier.
...in the next Let's Talk.
- Lucia
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