Why do individuals tend to be pessimistic? Your brain is built for survival, which is why you can read this book right now. When you think about it, your chances of being born were exceedingly slim. For this miracle to occur, all previous generations had to survive long enough to reproduce. In their struggle for survival and propagation, they must have faced death hundreds, if not thousands, of times. Fortunately, unlike your forefathers, you do not face death every day. In reality, in many parts of the world, life has never been safer. However, your survival mechanism hasn’t changed much. Your brain is still scanning your environment for potential risks.
Some areas of your brain have grown outmoded in numerous ways. While you may not be seconds away from being devoured by a predator, your brain nonetheless assigns negative occurrences much more weight than happy ones. Fear of rejection is one example of a negative bias. In the past, being rejected by your tribe would severely lower your chances of survival. As a result, you learnt to search for signs of rejection, which got programmed in your brain. Nowadays, being rejected has little or no impact on your long-term survival.
Even if you are disliked by the whole world and have a job, a shelter, and enough of food on the table, your brain is still designed to see rejection as a danger to your life. Because of this hardwiring, rejection may be excruciating. While you are aware that most rejections are little, you are nonetheless affected emotionally. If you listen to your thoughts, you might even be able to develop a whole drama around it. You may assume you are unlovable and ruminate on a rejection for days or weeks. Worse, you may develop depression as a result of this rejection.
It’s not uncommon for a single negative opinion to overpower hundreds of good ones. Because of this, an author who has received fifty evaluations rating their work at five stars is likely to feel bad when they get a single review rating their work at one star. The author’s authorial brain can not comprehend the fact that the one-star review does not pose a danger to the author’s continued existence. It is possible that it will read the unfavourable evaluation as a danger to her ego, which will then provoke an emotional response from her. The dread of being rejected might sometimes cause one to exaggerate the significance of occurrences.
If your manager has been critical of you at work, your brain may interpret this as a threat, and you may find yourself wondering things like, “What if my boss fires me?” What would happen if I am unable to obtain work in a timely manner and my wife decides to divorce me? Where does it leave my children? What if I never have the chance to see them again? You are really lucky to possess such an effective survival mechanism; yet, it is also your obligation to differentiate between genuine dangers and imagined ones. If you don’t, you’ll put unneeded suffering and anxiety into your life, which will lower the overall quality of your existence here on earth. You need to retrain your thinking in order to resist this tendency to focus on the negative. The capacity of human beings to mould their own realities via the strength of their own ideas and to get a more positive perspective on the world around them is one of the most impressive aspects of our species. You will learn how to do this task by reading this book.
Why it’s not your brain’s responsibility to make you happy and what that means for you The basic function of your brain is not to secure your happiness but rather to keep you alive. This is its principal task. Therefore, if you want to be happy, rather than assuming that you’ll be happy because that’s your natural condition, you need to actively take control of your emotions and make the decision to do so. In the following paragraphs, we will explain what exactly pleasure is, as well as its mechanisms.
How the neurotransmitter dopamine may play havoc with your happiness
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that, among other roles, plays an important part in the process of rewarding particular actions. When dopamine is released into certain regions of the brain, also known as the pleasure centres, you experience an overwhelming feeling of wellbeing that is comparable to being high. This feeling of well-being is something that may happen when you exercise, gamble, have sexual encounters, or consume delicious cuisine. One of the things that dopamine is responsible for is making sure that you seek for food so that you don’t starve to death and that you look for a spouse so that you may have children. Without dopamine, it is quite possible that our species would have died out by now. It seems to be a rather positive development, doesn’t it? To put it simply, yes and no. This method of giving rewards is, in most contexts, irrelevant in the modern world. Dopamine was formerly inextricably related to our ability to stay alive; these days, however, it may be chemically increased. Social media is a prime illustration of this impact since it exploits psychological principles in order to wring as much time as possible out of its users’ lives.
Have you taken note of the many alerts that keep popping up on your screen? They are utilised to stimulate the release of dopamine in your brain so that you remain connected, and the longer you remain connected, the more money the services earn off of you. Dopamine is released while engaging in activities such as watching pornography or gambling, both of which may lead to a high level of addiction. We are fortunate in that we do not have to take action every time our brain produces dopamine. For instance, we don’t have to regularly check the newsfeeds on our Facebook accounts simply because doing so provides us with a delightful hit of dopamine. We are being sold a form of happiness that might really make us less content in today’s culture. We have mostly gotten hooked to dopamine as a result of marketers who have discovered successful techniques to take advantage of our brains. Throughout the day, we are given repeated doses of dopamine, and we really like it. But does it mean the same thing as being happy?
Even worse than that, dopamine may actually cause addictions, which can have serious repercussions for our health. When allowed to self-stimulate their pleasure centres, participants in a study that was carried out at Tulane University did so an average of forty times per minute when given the opportunity to do so. They prioritised the stimulation of their pleasure centre above food, going so far as to refuse to eat even when they were starving. A person that exemplifies this condition to an extreme degree is Lee Seung Seop, who is Korean. In 2005, Mr. Lee passed away after playing a computer game for fifty-eight hours in a row without taking breaks, consuming very little food or drink, and getting very little sleep. The ensuing inquiry came to the conclusion that the cause of death was heart failure brought on by a combination of tiredness and dehydration.
He was young, barely twenty-eight years old at the time. To have a handle on your feelings, you need to have an understanding of how dopamine works in your brain and how it contributes to your level of pleasure. Are you completely dependent on your phone? Have you become a slave to your television? Or maybe you spend an unhealthy amount of time playing video games. The majority of us are dependent on one thing or another. Some individuals have little trouble understanding it, while others may need more time to get it. You may, for example, be hooked to the act of thinking. Your addictions are something you need to acknowledge and bring into the light if you want to have greater control over your feelings. This is because your addictions may take away the joy in your life.
The urban legend that “one day I shall”
Do you think that one day you will be able to accomplish your goal and realise your happiness? It is quite improbable that it will occur. You could be successful in what you set out to do, and I really hope that you are, but even if you are, your story won’t end with “happily ever after.” This thought is only another deception that your mind is playing on you. Your mind is able to swiftly adjust to new circumstances, which is presumably the product of evolution and our need to adapt constantly in order to continue existing and reproducing. Acclimatization is perhaps another reason why getting the new automobile or home you desire will only make you joyful for a short period of time. As soon as the novelty of the situation has worn off, you will start looking forward to the next interesting event. This psychological process is referred to as “hedonic adaptation.”
The workings of hedonic adaptation
Permit me to provide an intriguing research that, I believe, will shift your perspective on what constitutes happy. For me, this research that was done in 1978 on those who had won the lottery and paraplegics was quite illuminating. The study examined the impact on a person’s level of enjoyment of various life events, such as winning the lotto or becoming paraplegic. According to the findings of the research, both groups were equally satisfied with their lives one year after the traumatic occurrence. Yes, just as joyful (or unhappy). It’s possible that you think you’ll finally find fulfilment in life after you’ve “made it.” However, contrary to what was concluded in the aforementioned research on happiness, this is not the case. It doesn’t matter what happens to you; the way your mind works, it always brings you back to the same degree of enjoyment after you’ve adjusted to the new circumstance. Does it imply that you can never feel any happier than you do right now? No. What this implies is that, in the grand scheme of things, outside factors don’t have a significant bearing on how happy you are.
The How of Pleasure, asserts that genetics account for just ten percent of the total influence on an individual’s level of happiness, while internal and external influences each contribute forty percent. These are examples of things that are beyond of our control, and they include our marital status, wealth, and other aspects of our social environment. You should definitely give the impact of external circumstances a far lower priority than you do now. The most important factor in determining your level of pleasure is the perspective you take on life; not the circumstances in which you find yourself. You should now be aware of the negative effects that your survival mechanism has on your feelings and how they impede you from experiencing more pleasure and happiness in your life. In the next paragraph, we’ll get some information on the ego.
