Happiness is a state of mind or so philosophy claims it to be and if you were to ask a scientist or a doctor about the same, he would claim that it was but due to a release of endorphins in your cerebral area and therefore, happiness is akin to an induced chemical reaction. The fact that as humans, we would come up with such diverse meanings for the same condition, is by itself quite interesting in the sense it enables us to take a closer look at our own psyche. While everyone wants to be happy, not everyone can be happy all the time and that’s a fact.
So what exactly is happiness? Is it all because of a chemical reaction taking place deep in our brain or is it because of something else? But the better question to ask would be to determine if there was a way by which we can prolong our happiness. Yes, it is true that chemically speaking, the release of endorphins in our brain does cause us to experience the feeling of happiness and each time we are happy, our brain is busy releasing endorphins and other substances in our collective heads. But the fact that we would seek to be happy only underscores our own innate need to love, to be loved, and to be validated in the process. It only points out to the fact that we are all sociable animals, and that we often seek out challenges to overcome, just so that we can feel good about ourselves.
Research shows that our innate need to feel happy is not about transitory or meaningless achievements but about the ones that do actually matter, like your grandson being born, etc. If you want to truly be happy, then all you have to do is to take a hard, deep look into yourself. Soon, you would realize that would truly make you happy. The interesting thing about ‘happiness’ is that once we achieve a certain kind of satisfaction and happiness because of a certain event, we will not achieve any such satisfaction from the event taking place again. Our brain is indeed an interesting organ, that it is able to prevent or constrain the brain from releasing any endorphins at the same event taking place.
The next time you feel happy, you may want to take a closer look at the circumstances causing the same. It would be a good idea to maintain a journal so that you can address some of the key issues that prevent you from being happy. It is important for every human being to feel validated, to feel a certain degree of happiness at having achieved something in his life. This is why you need to make a list, of things that you think would make you happy and store the same carefully. And when you review the list after a few years, you will find that the list has changed over the course of a few years. This indicates, that happiness is indeed a state of mind, one that is both transitory and critical to our well being.
