What Exactly is Happiness?

Happiness seems to come from not having expectations of People, Events, or expecting certain outcomes from one's efforts... I have heard it said we are in the "Efforts business... not the Results business." Leaving it up to God seems to be good for The Brain according to the Dopamine Doctors and Accountants...

In another session, Harvard University researcher Daniel Gilbert showed one photo of a lottery winner and another of someone who was paralyzed in an accident. One year after their life-changing events, his studies show, both were equally happy.

Why? Gilbert explained that humans can synthesize happiness. Even after a disaster, most people return to a kind of happiness set point, which other studies say is genetically determined. We rationalize, we find new ways to be happy - whatever it takes. It's what my mother called "making do." It's why someone can look back on getting laid off and say it turned out for the best. Even if pain or anger lingers, we can be happy.

More of the science is explained in a new book, Mind Wide Open, by Steven Johnson. He gets into new research about dopamine, a chemical that acts as a reward accountant in your brain. It makes you feel good or bad depending on your expectation of what will happen.

For example, if you expect the sex to be great and it's not, you might feel down even though you got to have sex. If you expect a night of monkish chastity and get one good tonsil-rocking kiss, you might be ecstatic. With dopamine, it's all relative.

That gets back to why money doesn't necessarily make someone happy long term.

If you've built a business and you own a boat and a horse farm and lots of people want to bow at your feet, your brain comes to expect every day to be like that. If that's exactly what happens, you don't get any special dopamine reward.

Because dopamine is released based on expectations, you only get a dopamine cocktail if something better than what you expected happens. Your dopamine accountant's expectations constantly readjust to your new circumstances. That tends to make you just as happy or unhappy now as you were back when you worked in the mailroom and drove a Ford Pinto.

This might help explain why a Martha Stewart or Bernie Ebbers kept clawing for more money even after they had made millions, made headlines and gained power. They were really desperate for more dopamine, and they thought the next level of money, fame or success would get it. But their dopamine accountants readjusted and the high didn't last. Essentially, they overdosed on money and power for much the same reason Janis Joplin overdosed on heroin.

Now, as Johnson points out, there's an interesting tangent to this. Brain researchers found that activity in your prefrontal cortices - located behind your forehead, about where you feel a Jaegermeister hangover - signifies idea generation and lively thought. Sadness decreases prefrontal cortical activity, while happiness increases it.

If you tease that out, it means that happy people are more likely to have good ideas and think quickly, which often leads to success and thus to increased wealth. So it's entirely possible that while money can't get you happiness, happiness can get you money.

So perhaps the TED attendees are successful in the technology industry because they're happy, which could explain why they don't seem to feel badly about learning that money won't buy happiness. When I asked, many said they found the conference's message uplifting.

Any way you slice it, we are good at locking onto a happiness set point. Assuming Stewart is out of jail a few years from now, she probably will look back on her conviction and say it was the best thing that could've happened

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2. Ken's rap:

Thank you for the excellent article on happiness. Instead of "Where's my dope?" we should be asking "Where's dopa-mine?" Albert Einstein's words to my mentor come to mind: "It is most important to change our thinking, to change the heart of man. We must create a cosmic man, a man ruled by his conscience." [p.133, Einstein and the Poet - In Search of the Cosmic Man by William Hermanns (1983 Branden) - available through Ken.Norton@stanfordalumni.org]

The article points to that quality of thinking that realizes happiness (bliss, ananda, joy) is valuable and even a prerequisite of thinking itself. The Declaration of Independence considered the "Pursuit of Happiness" to be an inalienable right given by our Creator. Inalienable means it cannot be transferred - it cannot be bought or sold. Those with 7 for an Enneagram have reminded us constantly of its importance. But like the article reports, we have looked to the attainment of goals as a prerequisite for happiness, when happiness itself is vital to the process that actually attains the goals. I recently saw that Bobby Ferrin's song "Don't worry. Be happy" made the Worst 10 songs of history by one reviewer. Yet, he is really right on, along with Norman Cousins who healed himself with laughter. I liked Bobby's beat (happiness upon hearing) and Bobby used his own body as a percussion instrument - his own body served as a process of happiness. The song encouraged me to process with happiness as I tapped my own body to the song's rhythm.

The danger is becoming a Pollyanna to ignore information that produces "unhappy" feelings. Perhaps the lesson here is to ask why some information produces unhappiness in me. It could be a thought from a "belief of certainty" which is being jeopardized by the new information. In this case assumptions up to this point have worked (winning formula) but now the general application of the assumptions fail in the instance the information dealt with. A holding to "be happy" could cause one to ignore or fight the information to defend the assumptions of the belief of certainty. Here the stable reliance on a belief is equated with happiness - much like a Christian evangelical's happiness is equated with belief that Jesus has saved him or her for a happy heaven after death, or Rush Limbaugh equating his happiness to scoring more and more Oxycontin, or Barry Bonds his homers, or Kenny Lay's friends in high places. As pointed out in the article, dopamine is released when expectations are surpassed. I would add that the element of surprise is an important element of surpassing an expectation. My experiences with entheogenic substances were happiest when surprise played a major role, which most often occurred on the virgin voyage. If my body got used to such a substance after repeated use and became expectant of certain feelings, the happiness of the experience was dampened or even inverted. As I make the Mystery of this moment My-story, there is a thrill of adventure that can be felt as an anxiety. If happiness is kept as a goal, an object to be obtained outside of myself, then the felt anxiety is translated into a fear of losing or not attaining happiness and my solutions are limited to fight for the production of more happiness or flight from something that prevents happiness.

The key is seeing happiness as an essential component of a process, rather than as a goal. Happiness is a state of being, not a result of an action. Happiness is not a heaven to achieve after earthly schooling and death, it is heaven lived as a process of creative thinking and acting in an attitude of happiness. Knowing that happiness is a state of being that encourages thinking and is vital to our creative response to the anxiety opens the possibilities up to whatever is churned in the prefrontal cortices buzzing with dopamine. I can feel an anxiety with the surprise Mystery hands to me and I can still be happy. I notice the awe and happy wonder of children, no doubt due to the constant surprises of their interacting with a new world. With this key, happiness is a component of conscience, since the process to achieve goals includes relationships with human beings and other aspects of Nature. Also with happiness as process and not as goal, I can better realize the happiness as a general creative value shared by all humans and maybe all creation. It appears our little terrier Freya works with happiness in this way.

Thanks for drawing my attention to happiness.

Ken Norton

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