THE BIOLOGY OF PAIN AND PLEASURE.
The moment we shift focus from happiness, happiness happens. “
Anand Gandhi’s films and their approach towards unfolding the abstract emotion of happiness have always inspired me to investigate this idea a bit further. Over the years, various people, throughout the ages have penned down their own musings and theories to try and unveil this mystery. Bill Gates, once said,
“For a month of happiness, travel across cities and walk through uncharted territories. To taste year-long happiness, get married. However, if you are looking for sustainable mental well-being, you need to fall in love with the work you have pursued.”
The gullible senses of the homo sapiens sapiens, almost always dulled by self-imposed mediocrity, has made it think of life in terms of strings of immutable cycles, discrediting its heterogeneous nature. We’ve forgotten that we can travel into nature and hear the symphonic cries of innumerable birds and animals, and stare at wonder and amazement as they lead their lives, bound by no laws other than those of nature. We can learn from them, to experience happiness outside of the trappings of the artificial creations of man.
Through the words of my blog, I intend not only to answer questions of a metaphysical nature about happiness, but also discuss the biological reasoning behind every solution.
Let us begin by defining the heads and tails of the coin called life: Suffering and Happiness.
An in-depth analysis of suffering shows us that its quantitative unit is ‘stress’. ‘Stress’ is any response to the information being received by the body as potentially dangerous or problematic. A constant signaling of a lack of resources or potential fatality is perceived by the body as stress. A sustained state of this emergency can affect the neurons associated with memory, as well as inhibit the release of certain hormones, the absence of which can cause depression, which in turn translates into suffering. The problem is, this signaling is wrong a majority of the time. Evolution has designed this signal in a way, such that it’ll be wrong six out of ten times, but the four times that it is correct, it’s probably saving your life. Over the course of time, we have used this response to deal with difficult situations and flee from predators- and so the brain has learned to prioritize it and pull the trigger at the slightest of provocations. As such, ‘false alarms’ are frequent, and these ‘false alarms’ are what cause mental health disorders. We experience the emotion of anxiety sometimes even when there is no cause. This makes for a little bit of evolutionary irony- The same smoke alarm which saves your life, is causes you distress because the credibility of the symptoms of danger can’t always be determined with certainty.
On the other hand, Happiness is the exact opposite of Suffering. It’s a reward mechanism that our body is designed to have, for doing anything that is life-sustaining. When you gobble up your favorite pizza, you feel happiness. That is the body’s way of rewarding you for undergoing the process of eating. This reward mechanism works throughout our lives, falling into action each time we do something that the body perceives as life sustaining. A healthy diet and a sense of companionship are a couple of other keys to unlock this reward.
The most promising idea behind unlocking happiness is the concept of a flow state, which talks about the transition of chaos into continuum.
To elaborate, let us take an example of a dancer seated in a crowd, waiting for her name to be called out for her appearance on stage. Very much unsettled and wobbling with nervous twitches of restlessness, she is experiencing internal chaos. As she goes up to the stage and starts going through her steps and swinging her arms, she continues to be in a state of heightened chaos. The energy of the audience reverberates through her. She falls behind the beat at times. However, she does not fall victim to anxiousness- she corrects herself and catches up once again, and as soon as she does this, she starts transcending from the state of chaos to a state of continuum. This what is regarded as a “flow state”- when you are completely immersed in the thing that you are doing at that moment, and not thinking about or being distracted by anything else. Your ego dissolves and you become part of what you are doing. As Csikszentmihalyi asserts in his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, flow is “the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter, the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.” There is no instant recipe for finding happiness, but the one key ingredient is the ability to reach the state of flow and, through this state, to have an “optimal experience” and get your mind in “order”.
Although the concept of a flow state seems to be a guaranteed ticket to a happy life, there remains a flaw even in this idea. We human beings cannot stay static in and we evolve every day. Everything starting from our taste in movies, political opinions, and all other interests grow over time. We tend to grow out of love with the work that used to help us attain the flow state. One thing cannot make us happy after a certain period. The place where we used to find the “happiness” one day, is replaced by something else on the next.
What is happiness then? As Anand Gandhi would sum up, “Happiness is a reward tool that evolution has created to tell you what is good for you, and that tool can easily be twigged and hacked into. However, wellness, or a long-term sense of well-being, is a reliable tool.. Hence, avoiding temporary happiness for long-term well-being is the only secret ingredient to the recipe for a healthy sustainable life.
