Dr. Mercola October 30 2007 110,634 views
(Watch this video: 21 minutes, 20 seconds)
Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert says that you ‘synthesize’ your happiness. That you have a ‘psychological immune system’ that helps you change your views about your world, in order to feel better about the world in which you find yourself.
Not only that, he also maintains that when we imagine what could make us happy, such as new clothes or winning the lottery our brains are invariably wrong in advising us that those things will make us happy. In fact, statistics show that paraplegics are just as happy as lottery winners one year after the event of either becoming injured, or winning the lottery!
We tend to think that getting things such as a job, a new car, or a trip around the world is what will make us happy. However, studies have shown that we make ourselves happy by simply imagining that we are happy. So getting what we want doesn’t actually have anything to do with being happy.
Why is this?
Your prefrontal cortex works as an experience simulator, which means you can imagine an experience in your head before you try it out in real life. This ability is essentially what brought humankind out of the trees and into shopping malls – it allows you to desire things and events, imagining they will make you feel a certain way. The problem is that your simulator works rather poorly. In reality, gaining or losing something turns out to have far less impact and duration than you expect them to have. After about three months, the event (or item) has virtually no impact on your happiness…
So, your ability to create “synthetic” happiness is in fact your key to sustained happiness. Which, by the way, is very real, even though it is not “natural.” Synthetic happiness is a choice you make when you don’t get what you want, whereas natural happiness is what you feel when you do get what you want. However, you often don’t get exactly what you want.
Additionally, your belief that being able to change your mind will increase your happiness turns out to be completely false. Your ‘psychological immune system’ actually works best when you’re totally stuck, when there’s no turning back and making other choices, because that is when your mind can find a way to be happy with your reality.
This is vitally important, beyond the obvious fact that being happy feels better than being unhappy. In fact, there is little doubt about the powerful effects positive emotions can have on your physical health and well-being. At the same time, there is equally little doubt about the effects that negative emotions can have on you.
Happiness will not only protect your body from stressors that can lead to coronary heart disease, but it can even boost your immune system‘s ability to fight off the common cold.
Unfortunately, “happiness” can be a rather nebulous term. For most people, it is virtually impossible to define what truly makes you happy. So I want to reiterate a definition that nearly everyone can grasp and apply with greater ease.
Happiness can more accurately be identified by your brain as “whatever gets you excited.” Happiness is that which makes you jump out of bed in the morning with eager anticipation to start your day. Once you identify that activity, whatever it is, you can start focusing your mind around that so you can structure you life to do more of it.
Personally, my happiness is tied to my mission to catalyze the change of the entire fatally flawed health paradigm. This is what makes me somersault out of bed each morning, and it is the driving force that allows me to truly enjoy the many, many hours of my “work” weeks.
Being able to manifest positive emotions and happiness is perhaps one of the greatest gifts you have been given as a human being. And, interestingly enough, Gilbert’s talk resonates along the same lines as a previous article I wrote about how limiting choices can increase your happiness, which is quite fascinating, because most of us live with the false belief that more choices mean greater chances of finding contentment and happiness.
It also resonates with the fundamental rules of optimal health… You don’t need ten pills a day to get healthy. It’s a false belief, manufactured by the pharmaceutical industry through the mass media. In reality, you only need to focus on a few very basic things to optimize your health:
Health, like happiness, can be optimized by limiting your options to that which is natural, and realizing there’s no “magic pill.”
I agree with you (alaskadude)....I have learned that there is a big difference between happiness and being centred and content. Happiness too often equated with being elated and excited and with the universe always striving for balance, being too elated means being depressed is right around the corner. The master sees the crisis in the blessing and the blessing in the crisis. It is the recognition that the state of love and gratitude (in any circumstance) has greater long term impact than the fleeting emotions of "happy" and "sad". Far greater futility and consumption of energy awaits those who are always being "upbeat, positive and happy". Be authentic....we all own every personality trait in some form or fashion.
This is a very interesting video which I missed the first time around. The experiments are fascinating.
But with all due respect, I think Dr. Mercola’s example misses the mark just a bit. Dr. Mercola has a successful business tied to his mission which makes it that much easier to jump out of bed in the morning excited about the possibilities. But all of us have “those issues” that could otherwise keep us in bed if we thought about them the wrong way. We have family stresses, financial stresses, health stresses, some more than others, some issues bigger now than they were five years ago. And the real story is how we handle those.
I went through a very bad season nearly a year ago now. We lost a dozen people in the previous year (more like nine months) and we lost about six in a two month period. With my history of mental illness I had to respond to the circumstance in some healthy way just to survive and stay out of a massive down cycle. I did. I posted about this here before I am sure. Inspired by the law of attraction info that was hitting the press big time then, I focused on what I was, on my core strengths, rather than the deficits in our lives. I post about it on my blog now and then, but the first is called “Rugged Mountain Woman.”
www.rebuild-from-depression.com/.../rugged_mountain_woman_back_fro.html
What’s interesting about the “mountain” part of this story is that it fits dead-on with Dan Gilbert’s research. We live in an extremely secluded place and discuss rather regularly whether we should move to civilization. But for a lot of reasons moving would be a bad idea now, so I work hard to take in every bit of the mountains I can. I don’t know when we’ll move. We may never move. But I am not going to let the fact that I haven’t seen a movie in a movie theatre in about two years keep me from enjoying living in the Sequoia National Forest. As a result, I enjoy living in the Sequoia National Forest all that much more.
Amanda
I do not like excessive gratitute. The idea of 'other people have it worse' is taking pleasure in other people's suffering, and makes us ignore that we can better our situations. We should think 'I don't have it best, so I can improve'.
I knew the very last guy on the list. He was my brother and he died from ALS.
T G I F I'm happy! :)
To have a blessing, one must BE a blessing.
Be a positive influence on someone and the good it does will return to you, whether you see the final result or not. This brings not only happiness, but a modicum of peace. Love is not just a feeling- it is also a consciencious act. The feeling often follows the deed. I always look forward to making someone else happy, then I feel my own happiness.