Rewiring Your Brain for Happiness
Have you ever noticed that some people seem to be naturally happy while others struggle to think positively? Studies indicate that what you’re observing is not just your imagination. Each of us has a happiness “set point” that determines how happy we tend to be.1
That’s obviously good news if you’ve been a generally happy person up to this point in your life. A person who is “happy” will most likely continue to be so in the future, even amidst challenges and temporary setbacks in life.
If, however, you’re one of the less fortunate folks who struggle with happiness, you are not doomed to live at the suboptimal level of happiness that you’ve experienced up to this point in your life.
Research has shown that even though we each have a natural set point for happiness, each of us also has the ability to alter that set point towards greater happiness. It’s simply a matter of understanding how our brains work and then cooperating with our minds rather than fighting against them.
Psychologist Rick Hanson often says that our minds are “velcro for the bad and teflon for the good.” Our minds have adapted to recognizing everything that is even slightly “dangerous” in our surroundings because our ancestors’ lives literally depended on that skill.
Our ancestors needed to identify, say, a tiger in the bushes in favor of finding their favorite berries. If they didn’t find the sweet berries today, they could search again tomorrow, but if they failed to see the tiger, they would be dead and nothing else — including the berries — would matter at that point.
Today most of us live in a much less deadly environment than our ancestors did, but our brains haven’t quite caught up yet. We still see danger everywhere — even when we aren’t in mortal danger — and this constant scanning for danger prevents us from focusing on what is ‘good’ in our lives. Recognizing the ‘good’ in our lives is how we can raise our happiness set point and become happier overall.
Essentially, what I intend to teach you is how to “rewire” your brain for happiness. Yes, it’s completely possible and probably simpler than you realize. My goal for now is just to get you started and to make small but discernible progress in a short time.
Down the road I’ll address more advanced and nuanced topics but in the beginning, I’ll keep it simple. Your job is to keep an open mind and give it a try, even if sometimes what I’m asking you to do seems silly or pointless.
I can’t promise that the journey will always be mentally and emotionally easy, but the concepts are simple to understand and the actions are simple to do.
The best part about doing the work to raise your happiness set point is that once you’ve raised it, your new set point becomes your default level. You can (and probably will) still experience rough days and go through difficult periods, but your mind will automatically want to reset back to that new, higher set point without any noticeable effort on your part.
Kinda cool, huh? ;)
Our happiness set point is similar to our physical metabolism set point. You know how some people have a hard time losing weight while others can lose weight easily? It’s kind of like that. :)