Happiness according to clinical psychology

Introduction

I watched a wholesome explanation of happiness, based on clinical psychology, a summary follows

Definition

Imagine you have a life goal and you see meaning in it. When you take actions that get you closer to the goal, the brain interprets your actions as “success” , strengthens the neural pathways that support these actions (the sub-process of strenghtening is called reenforcement), and produces chemicals, which science broadly associates with the feelings of happiness.

Happiness is literally the pursuit of a meaningful goal

Disclaimer on oversimplification

The definition above is obviously an oversimplification of a complex and not fully understood chemical process, but for the purposes of brevity and simplicity, we will ignore the clinical details. They obviously matter a lot, but they are not the subject of this article.

Implications

The definition above carries many interesting implications that we will examine below

Meaning is critical

You need to see meaning in your goal. If your subconscience thinks the goal is meaningless, it is not worth pursuing and rewarding and the process does not work

Achievable

Your goal needs to be realistic and achievable. If not, again, like with meaninglessness, your subconscience will disregard the goals as not worth pursuing and rewarding.

This means that absurdly difficult goals (like make the world fair) or perfect ideals (be perfect, find the perfect partner) are a lot more likely to make you miserable than happy

No goal

Pursuit of meaningful goal is the only way your brain produces these chemicals

Depression happens when your brain has a considerable lack of these chеmicals. This is why it is so similar to the feeling of aimlessness

You may even have a comfortable life, but without a goal, the comfort does not mean much and you will still be miserable

This is very obvious in developed countries. We have resolved most of the dangers to our survival and procreation and have built quality of life improvements. In this environment many young people struggle to find goals that are both meaningful and achievable, which leads to aimlessness and depression

Multiple goals

The mechanism works best when you have multiple goals that complement each other, for example being useful and reliable in your job and building a family.

Implicit goals

We already have goals that we do not think about, so we do not explicitly consider them as goals. They are stil valid, although their weight varies heavily from person to person. For example be independent, be proficient and / or knowledgeable in something you see as meaningful, support and connect to people close to your heart, solve problems, etc

Contradicting goals

Sometimes goals can compromise each other. For example in order to pursue your own private business you may need to take risks that endanger your financial security. Your brain rewards you for getting closer to one goal and in the same time punishes you for getting away from another. So obviously, in the long run, goals that fight with each other do not work

Journey, not destination

When you achieve a goal and it is over, your brain will no longer reward you for it. So you will need to find another goal

Conscience vs subconscience

The goal that you think you want and the goal that your subconscience really wants are not always the same things.

Let us imagine your goal is to be rich. But why ? Maybe you want money because of the luxury it brings. This means that your real goal is pleasure. The next section examines why that is not the best idea, so let us ignore it for now. But maybe you want money, because of the freedom and independence it brings. Alternatively money may make you feel secure. These 2 goals are different and it is very easy to sabotage yourself by chasing the wrong goal.

Pleasure

Physical pleasure follows the same process of reenforcement and reward, so we often chase it, but it is not the same as happiness. Pleasure involves different chemicals, it cannot serve as replacement.

Pleasure is usually triggered by mechanisms and activities related to basic survival, like food, sex, obtaining resources, etc. The hypothesis is that reenforcement on basic survival happened over our evolution history, it is genetically inherited and pleasure is the chemical reward for basic survival.

The problem with pleasures in modern life is obviously that we have found ways to cheat our biology, get massive quantities of the reward without the value it is supposed to be a reward for. We go all in on junk food, sugar, alcohol, drugs, porn, without the need for them. When your brain get oversaturated on the pleasure chemicals, it gets desensitized to them, they stop working well, and in the long run you get addicted (because of desensitization) and feel miserable.