The Four Determinants of Happiness

Happiness is something no man can deny wanting. Everything we do in our lives, we do to reach the end goal- making ourselves happy. It makes sense. Being happy feels good and we were literally wired to chase happiness and avoid pain. But unfortunately for us, the more we chase happiness, the further it gets away from us. This holds true for most things in life. The more badly you want something, the more your brain starts to hyperfocus on the lack of it. Which then causes you to notice what you do not have instead of what you do have. In short, you fall into the pessimistic cycle. I've myself made this mistake in the past as a hedonist and it made me deeply unhappy. I made it my ultimate goal to find the answer to lasting happiness. I did ended up finding it. Not when circumstances were perfect, but rather during an incredibly challenging time in my life. And from this experience and after a lot of careful analysis over the years, I realized that there are four things that determine happiness.

1. Your idea of happiness and the kind of happiness you want to achieve.

When you wish for happiness, what's the exact feeling that you desire? Is it a sense of fulfillment that you desire, or an intense high? When most people say they want to be happy, the kind of happiness they are talking of is the intense kind of happiness we feel due to occasional external events. The kind of rush that you feel when you go on vacation, buy new clothes, or get into a new relationship. Desiring to feel this sort of happiness all the time will lead you only to disappointment, as this happiness is designed to wear out after some time. The rush you experience is caused by a flood of dopamine, and dopamine is supposed to balance itself out (given that you have a healthy brain) using what's called the pleasure pain balance. Basically, if you get a surge of dopamine and you feel really good, your brain will produce dopamine way lesser than the baseline level to keep up the balance, causing you to feel down. This is also why we experience post concert depression. You have this intense high for a few hours and when you get home after having the time of your life, your dopamine drops below it's normal levels, making you feel really down.

In philosophy, there's also the concept of the hedonistic treadmill. This view states that after the high of an exciting event passes, we quickly go back to our baseline level of happiness. So the key is to increase your baseline level of happiness. This can be done by aiming for a general sense of calm and satisfaction. This calmer happiness is born from and maintained by doing the hard things and keeping promises to ourselves. It lasts long and it is the level we will always go back to. Cultivating this happiness is completely in our control as it largely depends on our actions, unlike the intense high.

In Denmark, one of the happiest countries in the world, the difference between the two kinds of happiness is clearly recognized. In Danish, the fleeting, intense joy we experience as a result of exciting events is called glad, and the long lasting feeling of fulfillment is called lykke. The more you chase glad, the worse you will feel. Because you are chasing something that is designed to be fleeting. But because it feels more intense than lykke, we keep chasing it. When we procrastinate on work to watch tiktoks, hit snooze and wake up late, eat fries instead of a salad, in the moment it feels really good as a huge amount of dopamine is released. But by the end of the day, we will hate yourself and your mood tends to get worse. This addiction to dopamine is why we keep doing things that are bad for us. Some take it too far by doing drugs to find more of that high. The way to true happiness is to focus on lykke instead of glad, to focus on serotonin instead of dopamine. Dopamine is released immediately, mostly when you choose the easier option in the moment. It creates a high that doesn't last. Serotonin takes its sweet time to make its presence known. It is released slower than dopamine, when you do choose the harder option, when you do what's good and beneficial for you. Serotonin creates a mellow, calm state of happiness that lasts much longer, even if it doesn't hit like dopamine might. So, the first step begins with realizing that it is simply not humanly possible to be the intense kind of happy all the time. What you should desire is fulfillment. But you shouldn't get caught up in it either. Again, happiness is the result of consistently doing the hard thing and keeping up promises to yourself. Happiness is not the goal. The goal is to do the said hard things.

2. How realistic you are about life.

Even if you were to do everything right and create a really fulfilling life, you have to accept that as humans, we simply cannot be happy all of the time. Most of the time? Yes. All of the time? No. You will fall sick, loved ones will pass away, issues will arise in close relationships and it is impossible to remain completely unaffected by it all. I am not implying that you cannot be happy through difficult times in life. What I mean is, to be happy in the long run, it is important to realize that sometimes you are going to be sad. And that's okay. It is just part of being human. It will disappoint you greatly if you wish to be happy everyday for the rest of your life because that's not possible. The key is to be able to deal with the challenges of life, mourn when you have to and come back to that sense of calm eventually.

3. Presence of challenges in life.

Two summers ago, our university gave us the longest summer break we'd ever had. That particular semester had been very stressful and we had a massive workload. I was so excited to be done with it all, that I made three page long list of all the things I'd do once break began. In the middle of April, our vacations finally began. I was beaming with joy. I woke up everyday, incredibly happy, knowing I had the freedom to do as I pleased without anything getting in the way. I slept a lot, played music, cooked new dishes, binge watched Seinfeld, re-did my room. I also completed most tasks from my list within the first 20 days. Not all, but most. I still had some left to do. Then, all of a sudden, I lost all the excitement. I felt quite depressed for the rest of summer to be honest. And it didn't make any sense. I was incredibly happy, everything was going my way and I had so much freedom.

I can sometimes be greedy, but that summer, I really felt like there was nothing more that I could possibly wish for. I was that fulfilled with everything I had. And yet, I was in the lowest mood I'd ever experienced. Soon, I even started missing the very everyday classes I'd spent hating before summer began. But there were still two more months of summer left and I felt incredibly frustrated because nothing interested me anymore. Doing difficult tasks was out of the question when I didn't even want to do the things that I once enjoyed. But I knew from experience that that's where the solution lay. I made a new list. It was full of things I struggled with doing. But I started doing them one by one, and guess what? I slowly stopped feeling bored to death and my brain hit the reset button. I soon went back to feeling happy and motivated again.

This experience made me realize that everything being perfect will actually make us really sad rather than happy. Because we eventually get bored with the things we enjoy and only doing difficult tasks can stimulate our brains. It also has to do with the fact that we were meant to do hard things, we evolved in such a way. Realizing this was really ironic because we usually blame our unhappiness on the challenges we face in our life. But the truth is that those challenges are what make life exciting. A complete absence of challenge can be genuinely depressing. Luckily for us, we never run out of things we struggle with. But we often do refuse to struggle. So if you are generally doing everything right and still feel unhappy, it might be because you are refusing to participate in difficult things. Happiness cannot exist without suffering because suffering provides the contrast that creates happiness.

4. Willingness to heal.

We all have trauma and pain. It influences our inner world and everything we do. It is useless to talk about happiness without considering trauma and other past experiences, because to create the kind of life and mindset that allows for happiness to exist, you should be able to see past the irrationality that is caused by past negative experiences. It is incredibly important to try and become more self aware so you can see what part of you is hurt, question what caused the hurt, and start to heal. This doesn't mean that you cannot be happy until you are perfectly healed from everything you struggle from. It can happen in a parallel manner. But if you want long term happiness, you have to know what beliefs don't serve you, what still subconsciously hurts you, and what causes you to do things that you know aren't good for you. It's not that you can't be happy until you've healed, you just cannot be happy if you constantly ignore the pain that causes you to believe and act in unhelpful ways. And like I mentioned before, having a challenge in life is a determinant of happiness. What better challenge to work on than yourself?