Train Your Brain to Increase Happiness
If you want to be happy the rest of your life, make sure you keep your brain happy. Why? Because being happy matters more to your brain than you might think. In fact, feeling pleasure can be so stimulating for your brain that it is primed to respond to pleasure in a way that reinforces pleasure.
Negative mood variance disturbs your interaction with your environment, affecting your ability to perceive, remember, and reinforce existing or create new neural connections, while being happy improves your ability to be more cognitively alert and productive. Other than being much more fun to be around, being happy:
- stimulates the growth of nerve connections.
- improves cognition by increasing mental productivity.
- improves your ability to analyze and think.
- affects your view of surroundings.
- increases attentiveness.
- leads to more happy thoughts.
In other words, happy brains are more creative, quicker, and more mentally alert.
Epicurus
For Epicurus, the most pleasant life is one where we abstain from unnecessary desires and achieve an inner tranquility (ataraxia) by being content with simple things, and by choosing the enjoyment of the pursuit of physical pleasures derived from the likes food, drink, and sex.
Happiness is Pleasure!
While we have lost most of Epicurus’ treatises on ethics and happiness, his basic ideas are very clearly outlined in his justly famous Letter to Menoeceus. He begins with a claim familiar from Plato and Aristotle that we all desire happiness as an end in itself, and all other things are desired as a means for producing happiness.
But what is happiness? Epicurus gives a straightforward definition, influenced by Aristippus, a disciple of Socrates and founder of the Cyrenaic school of philosophy:
"Pleasure is our first and kindred good. It is the starting point of every choice and of every aversion, and to it we always come back, inasmuch as we make feeling the rule by which to judge of every good thing."
Epicurus then claimed that there are two self-imposed beliefs that do the most to make our lives unhappy or full of pain. They are first, the belief that we will be punished by the gods for our bad actions, and second, that death is something to be feared. Both of these beliefs produce fear and anxiety, and are completely unnecessary since they are based on fictions. While the gods do indeed exist, being perfect and eternal they do not directly concern themselves with human affairs. As such, we have no need to fear any punishment from them, nor do we need to spend time in laborious acts of pious worship.
As for death, he points out that once sentient experience comes to an end there will be no sensation of pain. As such, the fear of death is completely groundless.
Desires are natural or vain, necessary or unnecessary. Pursuing vain desires like extreme wealth or fame, is difficult, fretful and uncertain. None of the vain desires are necessary, and we never find rest if we pursue them.
There is one desire, however, that Epicurus singles out for special attention, the desire for sexual pleasure. Like the vain desires, the desire for sex is unnecessary for the survival of the individual, yet it is perfectly natural, like thirst or hunger. We are built for sexual reproduction, and a maturing human animal will feel the stirring of sexual desire no matter what. We are hardwired to find sexual attractions in the world.
Live simply and prudently, with self-control and moderation. Seek simple pleasures, those that satisfy natural and necessary desires, chief of which are food, drink, clothing, shelter,friendship and love. (Personal comment: the idea that Epicureanism is tantamount to hedonism and self-indulgence is a myth invented by the early Christians and perpetuated by the Roman Catholic church today).
It has been found that income, marriage, good looks, even winning the lottery only have a small impact on one’s lasting happiness.
Every pleasure in itself is good and every pain is bad, but some pains should be put up with for the sake of future pleasure, and some pleasures should be forgone because they could lead to future pain.
So seek your own pleasure both in doing and being, in journeying and arriving. Do not worry about death and things you cannot change. Happiness is not a private affair: it can be more readily achieved in a society where like-minded individuals band together to help inspire one another’s pursuit of happiness.
The Power of Positive Thoughts
You are what you think you are, and all of your actions proceed from thought. Your inner thoughts will always be reflected in your outer circumstances, because self-generated changes in your life are always preceded by changes in the way you think about something.
As far as your brain, every thought releases brain chemicals. Being focused on negative thoughts effectively saps the brain of its positive forcefulness, slows it down, and can go as far as dimming your brain's ability to function, even creating depression. On the flip side, thinking positive, happy, hopeful, optimistic, joyful thoughts decreases cortisol and produces serotonin, which creates a sense of well-being. This helps your brain function at peak capacity.
Why Optimism Leads to Greater Happiness
Optimism involves highly desirable cognitive, emotional, and motivational components. Optimistic people tend to have better moods, to be more persevering and successful, and to experience better physical health. One factor may be simply that optimists attribute good events to themselves in terms of permanence, citing their traits and abilities as the cause. In addition, optimists:
- Lead happy, rich, fulfilled lives
- Spend the least amount of time alone, and the most time socializing
- Have good relationships
- Have better health habits
- Have stronger immune systems
- Automatically assume setbacks are permanent, pervasive, and due to personal failings.
- Are eight times more likely to be depressed than optimists
- Generally perform worse at school and work
- Have rockier interpersonal relationships
The good news is that you can use your mind to train your brain to tamp down the negative thoughts that lead to pessimism, while ramping up the types of positive thoughts that lead to optimism.
Train Your Brain to Think More Positively
One of the oldest precepts of neuroscience has been that our mental processes (thinking) originate from brain activity: that our brain is in charge when it comes to creating and shaping our mind.
The actions we take can literally expand or contract different regions of the brain, firing up circuits or tamping them down. The more you ask your brain to do, the more cortical space it sets up to handle the new tasks. It responds by forging stronger connections in circuits that underlie the desired behavior or thought and weakening the connections in others. Thus, what you do and what you think, see, or feel is mirrored in the size of your respective brain regions and the connections your brain forms to accommodate your needs.
What does all this mean? It means that what we think, do, and say matters; that it affects who we become on the outside, the inside, and in our brain. Mostly, it means that you can retrain your brain to be more positive.
Start by thinking happy thoughts, looking on the bright side, and refocusing your brain when negative thoughts occur. Your mind has the ability to determine how your brain thinks about what happens in your life. Use it to your own advantage to re-frame events and think positively.
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