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A persistent interest of mine is the problematic excercise of defining “happiness“, and then figuring out we go about getting it. That “happiness is not a fish you can catch” seems self-evident, but what can we go about doing in order to be happy?
Science has two voices on the isse. One comes from neurochemistry and the other from psychology. Although they are taught and studied as different disciplines, they have quite a lot to say to one another. Neurochemistry tells us that many of our feelings, from hunger to disillusionment, are governed by neurotransmitters within the brain – primarily seratonin, norepinephrin, and dopamine. These chemicals help you feel good. Most recreational drugs and as well as anti-depressents target these chemical regulatory complexes.
Psychology can correlate happiness and temperament. Temperament could be defined as the ability a person has to calm him or herself down. Infants show temperaments between 6 months and a year that last into adulthood. Adults with mild temperaments tend to be happier because on average they experience less stress. However, a cross-section of high achievers might show a disproportionate number of variant temperaments, because higher ranges of emotion are typical of the “type A” personalities that dominate the business world.
Let’s look at what we can do about those two things. Neurochemically, we have a massive control over the way our brains regulate themselves. I don’t mean pharmaceutically. Do you know why you feel better when you eat well, sleep 8 hours, and exercise 3x a week? Can you guess? Your body produces neurotransmitters in response to neurological and phsyical stimulus, so thinking and exercising help your happiness. Also, your body needs energy and very specific nutrients to synthesize those neurotransmitters, so your diet has a big impact.
Buddhism makes some precise definitional judgments when it uses the word happiness. Ultimately, happiness must be distinguished from pleasure. Heroin addicts experience a tremendous amount of pleasure (and neuroscientists would agree) but rarely claim to be happy overall. Buddhism makes the distinction by defining Happiness as unattached, not sticky. In other words, happiness is origin-less philosophically. One cannot take happiness from anything that exists – it must arise independent of the conditions. For example, if your girlfriend cheats on you, you will end the relationship. Thus, your love and happiness are conditional. Disattachment is the key to true happiness, and this is only achieved by the destruction of the self.
Buddhism 101 – there is no self. Your frame of reference, “me,” “I”, “my soul” is a convenient fabrication that has gotten out of hand. Science agrees. Human beings are not just individual organisms – they are ecosystems for bacteria, aggregates of organs, and each person is a cooperative part of a larger population. Let’s extrapolate this – If you are just a biological machine and not a spirit, than who you are what people think of you is not important – what is important is the direct results of your actions for the positive or negative. These actions affect you as an individual, and all the systems you are integrated with, so that your actions surpass the conditions of your existence in significance. In other words, if “you” exist at all it is only in relation what you’ve done – the conversations you’ve had, the times you’ve helped, the times you’ve hurt, the times you’ve done nothing.
If people exist principally in terms of their actions, happiness is not something that is gained at all. It is something that is created collaboratively. Destroying or disacknowledging the self isn’t nihilistic but holistic.
Think about this in terms of psychological temperament. Self-soothing procedures in infants and adults are self-focused because they develop in the self-focused stage of infancy – in other words primary emotions such as anger and sadness might be conditional in that they arise from a stimulus, but the stimulus has no responsibility for the reaction. People get angry at red stop lights, but that has nothing to do with the stop light. It doesn’t have any feelings. When an adult (like a child) throws a small temper tantrum in response to an argument or a statement, the anger stems visibly from an ego-wound. “How dare you say that about me”, “I’ve never ever done anything like that,” “You never think about me,” etc. Passionate discussions of politics or religion ultimately come down to each person’s personal investment of self into an institution. A religious argument might seem like it’s about “Christianty vs. Islam”, but it’s really about “who I am” vs. “who you are”.
The disacknowledgment of the self is the only real way to get happiness. Psychologically, it is the process of maturing. Adults must put aside their own wants and needs for their children, or their careers, or simply for the needs of others, and they are consequently happier because this releases their self-interest which is the source of some pain (this is a generalization about a multifaceted process). It is easy to see that Buddhism’s “not-self” philosophy can be considered analagous to healthy temperament in adults. If people stop focusing on getting happiness via pleasure and undermine their self-focus, they have an easier time regulating stress in their lives and generally report more happiness. What’s more, their happiness is less conditional and more secure (although not unconditional in a Buddhist sense.
If you want to be happy, eat well, exercise, and be nice to people. Shocking but true, in 500BC or 2010AD.
