The Science Of Happiness

Posted on February 07, 2024 by Faith Feuer, One of Thousands of Life Coaches on Noomii.

So the book that I’m reading at the moment is called “The Science Of Happiness” by Stefan Klein and it’s been quite an experience! The book, as you might have guessed from the title, is pretty scientific. The author gets into the nitty gritty neuroscience-y aspect of the complicated emotion of happiness. He explains all of the chemicals and brain mechanisms involved in the experience of happiness and although it requires a bit of concentration, it’s a fascinating read. Because I’ve learned so much, I wanted to pick out a few interesting points to share with you guys today. One of the coolest parts of the book, in my opinion, is the chapter about positive vs. negative feelings. First let me backtrack for a minute and make the distinction that the author himself makes between feelings and emotions. Whereas emotions are unconscious experiences, feelings are our conscious perception of them. Emotions were an evolutionary necessity, designed to literally put us into MOTION, if we were being chased by a predator, for example. Feelings don’t come into play unless we are aware of them. That being said, Klein states that

“Our systems are skewed more to the experience of unhappiness than to the enjoyment of pleasure, and we perceive annoyance and discouragement more quickly and strongly than we do joy. This inheritance of evolution, as vital as it may be in critical situations, explains many tragedies, large and small…Unhappiness comes on its own, but we have to work for happiness. While fear, anger and sadness are responses to dangers from the external world, our feelings of pleasure have been developed by nature to lure us into desirable situations”

So that last line was a little confusing for me. What it means is that nature created our enjoyment of things to encourage us to willingly do things that are good for us as humans. For example, we love eating. We evolved a superior sense of taste and our enjoyment of eating a good meal came about because nature needed us to consume as much as we could in order to survive in prehistoric times. If we liked doing it, we would do it and that would keep us alive enough to propagate the species. As for the rest of the passage that I cited, I find it so true but so SAD, don’t you?? Our negativity bias, as much as we may have needed it in the Stone Age, has kinda ruined it for us post-modern humans. We are quick to feel negativity, and feel it intensely, because we were designed to protect ourselves from dangerous external circumstances. Happiness, on the other hand, turns out to be a hard sell for us. Although happiness is obviously preferable to unhappiness, we not only have to work harder for it than naturally occurring unhappiness, but we feel it less intensely than negative feelings!! Unbelievable, right?

The second really cool part of the positive vs. negative chapter is the section discussing the right and left sides of the brain. Those with more brain activity on the left side tend to have an optimistic, sunny disposition, whereas those with more activity on the right side tend more toward the melancholy. Unfortunately, this predisposition is genetic, as is evidenced by a study done involving ten-month-old babies. At this young age, external factors, or “nurture”, could not have influenced a positive or negative affect that much. The babies were divided into two groups according to whether more brain waves were present in the right or left side of the brain. The “left brained” babies did not cry when their mothers left the room and were content to crawl around the room and explore. The “right brained” babies, on the other hand, began to cry and immediately show signs of distress as soon as their mothers exited. Cheerfulness or lack thereof seems to be determined by our genes, at least to start. However, you may be pleased to learn that those same ten-month-old babies were tested again years later as school-age children and the results proved to be, in some cases, the complete opposite. Those who had previously exhibited stronger right brain activity now showed increased activity on the left, and vice-versa. These discrepancies must in part be due to experience and upbringing. So, the moral of the story is, I personally believe we CAN change and even our brains can change, either throughout the course of time and as a result of what kind of lives we lead, or through our own intervention.

Another intriguing argument that the author makes concerns the discussion of desire, enjoyment and anticipation. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never bothered to think about the distinction between desire and enjoyment because they usually lead to the same conclusion, right? However, Klein suggests that these two states can actually be opposites. According to him, “To be in a state of desire means not enjoying the present to the fullest. And to reach and enjoy one’s goal is also experience the extinction of desire, at least for the moment”. And this is why, he continues, so many of us prefer to remain in a state of perpetual anticipation…so often the waiting and hoping for something is so much more fun and exciting than the actual something, wouldn’t you agree?