Diana Balyko

16.09.2014 | 270

Each of us wants to be happy. But not everyone knows how to do it. Maybe the whole point is how we relate to the concept of happiness? Let's try to figure out what a person really needs to be happy.

What is happiness?

Books, articles, trainings about happiness - the sea. But “not all yogurts are the same”!

And if, leafing through a book, reading an article or skimming through an advertisement for the next training, you stumble upon strange, unsubstantiated statements like: “You are truly happy every minute of your life; your only problem is that you don't always realize it", or "A powerful medicine is a selfless pursuit of happiness" - feel free to throw this information into the trash. But not in the consumer, but in the garbage!

For such slogans impose a ban on the recognition of misfortune as such. There is a feeling: if you feel bad, if you are upset and sad, then you are the last loser and you have no place in the world of happy people. But it's not!

Happiness is not debt!

You don't have to be happy all the time. It's simple, but it's true. If you think you are unhappy, you are really unhappy. And this is not bad, not good, not a problem, not ashamed, not a disease, not your fault and not a problem - this is a fact. And he's neutral.

You have the right to be sad, cry, worry, get upset and generally be yourself. Be happy on your own. And believe me: life is no better for others! It's just that most people say they're happy. The key word here is "say".

A huge number of couples claim to be very happy in marriage, while half of them get divorced. What does it say? They are just actively engaged in self-deception! Relax and be happy on your own.

Theories of happiness

Many conventional theories of happiness turn out to be wrong. British psychologist Michael Argyle said: “Admittedly, some of the implications are fairly obvious—for example, the fact that unemployment or divorce makes a person unhappy. At the same time, without experimental studies of these issues, the details remain unknown: let's say which people these shocks plunge into misfortune, and which ones do not.

Simply put, there are statistics, and there is a unique personal experience. And there is you. And, perhaps, a divorce or non-renewal of an employment contract is for you a blessing, not a grief.

Even D. Defoe noted: “In every situation, something comforting will be found, if you look well.” So stop fooling yourself with all sorts of beautiful stories.

Paul Watzlawick, in his book How to Become Unhappy Without Help, poses the question point-blank: “What would we all come to and what would we become if we didn’t have our misfortunes?” and offers to look at the animals in the zoo, where they are not in danger of starvation, they are reliably protected from dangers and any diseases, including even toothache. As a result of all these worries, many animals are not happy at all - they have turned into similarities of human psychopaths and neurasthenics.

I want to save you from the naive belief that everything in life should be smooth. We need our misfortunes. Thanks to difficulties, defeats, falls and failures, which are only a natural part of life, a person grows and matures, and therefore becomes a person in the full sense of the word.

How to become a happy person?

Take a pen and a blank sheet of paper, or create a new file on your computer and write down all the qualities of yourself that make you successful and enjoy every day.

If it will be difficult for you to complete it, ask for help from people who know you well, let them tell you. An outside view - feedback from the world - is always very useful.

Intelligence, a sense of humor, the ability to achieve goals, self-confidence, charisma, the ability to communicate and influence others, the talent of a speaker, endurance, patience ... What else is needed for happiness?

Made a list? Now every day, build on your strengths and build on them.

What difference does it make what they think of you? If you are happy with the decisions you have made, then you have made the right choice, no matter what others say. Imagine how much effort you spend trying to read other people's minds, and still do not guess.

Listen to advice - please, but do not let others decide how you live.

2. Anger and resentment

The next time you catch yourself feeling this way, think about this: “Would I like to be the person I envy?” Certainly not, you love yourself (even if somewhere very deep inside).

You are looking at someone else's life that you do not know. You have no idea what this person is thinking. Maybe when he dives into the pool of his private house, he hates himself or is wildly afraid of something? Maybe you, walking through the forest on a sunny day, experience much more pleasure than he does, basking on the snow-white sand in the Maldives?

Stop looking at others. If you feel good now, then everything is right. If not, make it good.

16. Uncertainty

Happy people tend to have self-esteem (just don't confuse it with an inflated ego). They are pleased with themselves and exude confidence.

There is no reason to doubt yourself. If you have traits that you hate, there are two ways: accept them or change them. In every person there is everything at once: a libertine, and a puritan, and a lying bastard, and a gentleman. You choose who you will be.

17. Dependence on others

No one will fill the void within you. No one will make you positive and self-sufficient if you are unhappy with your fate. To share your happiness with someone else, you must first become happy yourself. So do not even hope that your success is in the wrong hands. Only in yours.

18. Past

Living in the past means burying your present. There were mistakes - okay, who didn't? Arrange a magnificent funeral for your memories, remember only the lessons and.

19. Total control

Sometimes you just need to relax and let life take its course. You can't control everything and you have to deal with it. Otherwise, you will be constantly nervous, but in the end you still won’t change anything. There are just things that are out of your control. They must be accepted as they are.

20. Expectations

People think that others should live up to their expectations. That's bullshit. Nobody owes you anything, and you don't owe anything either. No one should be polite, attentive, accurate, honest, pleasant in communication, clean, after all. Nothing should be perfect, amazing, unforgettable, but it can be. If it does, great, if not, don't worry. Be ready to accept everything that life sends you, and you will find happiness.

Research teams at Harvard and California Universities believe that happiness is a virus that lives by all the laws of an infectious disease. According to them, if there are friendly and smiling people around a person, then this attitude is transmitted to him. In particular, a person's chance of becoming happy is increased by 25% if their best friend is happy.

But physiologists believe that happiness depends on hormones - endorphin, serotonin and dopamine. Serotonin eliminates depression, improves mental abilities, is useful for internal organs, improves the functioning of the gastrointestinal tract. But serotonin works in close conjunction with dopamine, the hormone of pleasure, and with GABA, which is responsible for the relaxation process.

The lack of even one of these substances is reflected in the mood, depriving a person of a sense of happiness. To prevent this from happening, small adjustments can be made to the diet by increasing the doses of certain foods:

• Serotonin- found in eggs, low-fat cheeses, poultry, avocados.
• Dopamine- found in fruits and vegetables with vitamin C.
• GABA- found in eggs, dark green vegetables, seeds, nuts, potatoes and bananas.

But happiness is not only in tasty and proper food, but also in a good mood, a positive outlook, the absence of stress, anxiety and worries, as well as in psychological and physical health.

How to learn to be happy?

• Don't be jealous or compare yourself to others. It is very important to learn to be content with what you already have, appreciate it and enjoy it, without ceasing to strive for more. Other people's victories and blessings of life should not cause anger and irritation, but motivate and inspire. The desire to keep up with others is one of the main enemies of happiness.
• Do not stop there and constantly set new goals for yourself, let them be both global, for example, build a house or visit an exotic country, and everyday, for example, pass a report or start going to fitness. Remember that becoming a doctor, raising a child, or making soup are all goals.
• Don't regret anything. If something has already happened, then it cannot be changed. Thinking about what could be changed in the past is absolutely useless, it is better to concentrate on what can be done in the present and future.
• Make your own decisions and take responsibility for them. No one knows what is best for you but you. Of course, advice is sometimes worth listening to, but try on your life only for yourself.
• Learn to rest After all, rest and pleasure are an important component of truly happy people. Do not sacrifice rest for the sake of work or money - there will always be a lot of the first, and few of the second. Try to organize regular vacations with a rich program for yourself, do not forget about daily rest, which includes not only sleep and leisure, but also the banal “doing nothing”.
• Learn to forgive and forget grievances. After all, keeping negative emotions in yourself is the same as drinking poison, but thinking that it will poison someone else.
• Go in for sports, fitness, do gymnastics regularly, or at least just walk a lot. It has been proven that during exercise, the brain absorbs more oxygen, and the body produces “hormones of joy” (dopamine, serotonin), which increase mood for at least 4 hours.
• Watch your health, because any disease is a feeling of poor health and a breakdown, and it is much easier to prevent it than to spend energy, time and money on treatment.
• Eat Right, try to learn how to avoid unhealthy foods, such as fast food, but still enjoy food. No diet has yet made a person happy, but a delicious dinner may well improve your mood.
• Learn to love yourself every day, respect and appreciate thus balancing healthy egoism with correct self-criticism.
• smile even if there is no one to smile at. Physiologists call a smile a good mood button, a joyful facial expression relieves muscle clamps and stimulates the parts of the brain responsible for a good mood.
• Surround yourself with positivity- positive books, films, beautiful things, such as flowers, photographs or dishes, listen to good cheerful music.

AiF.ru collected 8 sayings of famous people about happiness. Try to guess

• Translation

Happiness, in one form or another, seems to be a common goal that each of us would like to achieve. We often act like we can find a way to complete satisfaction—comfort, satiety, warmth, some other reward—and be happy all the time, just by making some good choices. But the pleasure of even the most pleasant sensations is fleeting, and this leads to boredom and a desire to try something new and amazing. As a neuroscientist, I can't help but think about whether the transience of our satisfaction is actually inevitable, or whether it is some kind of feature of the brain, understanding which, it will be possible to learn how to deal with it.

Many everyday functions of the brain seem so natural that we can hardly distance ourselves from them in order to look at them from the outside. The brain is busy noticing different things. Obviously, the main job of the brain is perception; on the basis of what he perceives, he can make assessments, and on the basis of them he can act. This work is performed by the neurons of the nervous system. They find and present inputs from the external (and internal) world, analyze the data, and respond to that analysis with appropriate action. Action is usually understood as movement: neurons send signals that cause muscles to contract, which allows you to perform some action. The input comes from the senses, the analysis is often called associative, and the output is motility. The trinity of feeling/associative analysis/motor is the neural counterpart of perception/evaluation/action.

How do the neurons that make up the brain cope with detecting and analyzing what is happening in the outside world? The simplest answer is that they primarily rely on a translation service. The parts of the body that we think of as sense organs - eyes, ears, nose, tongue, skin - contain receptor cells that receive information. On the membranes of these cells are tiny molecules of protein; they translate (technically speaking, transform) the physical influences of the external world - light, sound, chemicals, heat - into electrical signals, action potentials that form the language of the brain. Transmitting proteins form a small pathway, an ion channel, through which charged particles, ions such as sodium or potassium, enter or leave the cell. The movement of ions generates electrical signals. Each signal is propagated along the length of the cell by other proteins—also forming ion channels—resulting in the release of a chemical neurotransmitter. The next neuron receives the neurotransmitter through other receptor proteins that are also ion channels or associated with ion channels. Our ability to notice is largely dependent on our ion channel proteins.

Interestingly, virtually all of these proteins respond to changes in stimuli; but in the presence of prolonged and constant stimulation of mild to moderate intensity, many of them are turned off and do not allow ions to pass through them. We call this process adaptation (or desensitization or inactivation, depending on the physical basis). It leads to familiar sensations. Due to adaptation, when moving from a place with bright lighting to an unlit room, at first it seems dark, and after a while the lighting in it already seems to be normal. It's only when you step back into the sun that you realize how dark the room was - or how bright it is now. Similarly, most people adapt to the smell of food soon after they enter a restaurant, or to the coolness of a pool after jumping in on a hot day, or to the background noise of a refrigerator. After a short exposure, the smell, cold or noise - unless they are so strong as to cause discomfort - ceases to be felt, and we do not pay attention to them. That is, as they say, we get used to them. In particular, because of adaptive ion channels, we feel a lot not in absolute value, but in contrast to what was before (although not all types of adaptation occur due to ion channels, and not all feelings are subject to adaptation). In one exceptional case, the experimenters were able to demonstrate this phenomenon by stabilizing the image on the retina. Our eyes typically make small jerky movements, microsaccades, which allow retinal cells to compare light reflected from dark and bright areas of any visual environment. By tracking the movements of a person's eyes and changing the image projected onto them, neuroscientists have been able to show that when an image is artificially fixed on the retina, it seems to the person that it disappears. If you don't have the ability to compare, the world becomes gray. In other words, diversity doesn't just add flavor to life; you basically can see anything only through changes.

This sensitivity to change and insensitivity to constancy does not stop at the level of sensory receptors. Deeper in the brain, in almost all neurons, there are other ion channel proteins—notably sodium channels, which fire action potentials (by allowing sodium ions into the neuron) and potassium channels, which stop action potentials (by releasing potassium ions out of the neuron). Sodium and potassium channels are different, and many of them are also inactivated—turned off—during use. Therefore, even when chemical neurotransmitters deliver prolonged or repetitive stimuli to neurons, the inherent properties of ion channels limit the number of action potentials. For example, in some neurons, the inactivation of sodium channels makes it increasingly difficult to generate action potentials with constant stimulation.

But in some neurons, certain sodium channels prevent inactivation with a special protein that blocks it. Such neurons gladly fire long high-frequency sequences of action potentials. Many of these neurons are found in the cerebellum and brainstem.

Meanwhile, certain potassium channels gradually increase the flow of ions, helping to slow down or turn off signals from neurons after several action potentials have passed. The interaction between sodium and potassium ion currents allows electrical signals to be generated only at the beginning of a stimulus, a process called accommodation. While there are exceptions, most of the major excitatory cells in the cortex and hippocampus—the ones that encourage action potentials in target neurons—are susceptible to accommodation.

In some cells, accommodation can be reversed by neurotransmitters such as norepinephrine. Interestingly, the global effect of norepinephrine on the brain is to increase attention. Many toxins and poisons, such as those found in scorpions and snakes, prevent sodium channels from being inactivated and block potassium channels, leading to convulsions and death—that is, the brain can suffer from too much of the good.

It is not always clear to us what information the accommodating neurons carry, but we do know that they respond most strongly to a change in stimulus. It is hard to resist the temptation to conclude that the more activity in the brain, the better - but it is very good that some neurons have the ability to turn off their signals through the inactivation of ion channels. A lot of neurological diseases are associated with an excess of action potentials in neurons, which usually react very little. This "overexcitability" is often found in pain or epilepsy. With the first, there are too many feelings, with the second - muscle contractions. Often the best drugs for such cases are those that inactivate sodium channels. Even people without these syndromes are familiar with the analgesic effects of sodium channel blocking drugs like novocaine or lidocaine. Epilepsy drugs do not shut off neural activity altogether, but limit overactive neurons.

Similarly, neurotransmitter receptor proteins can experience desensitization, in which their ion channels shut down when exposed to prolonged stimuli. They can turn off due to desensitization, which is an inherent property of the protein, or due to the short life of the neurotransmitter itself, as it is destroyed by enzymes or absorbed into neighboring glial cells. Substances that affect these processes and prolong the action of neurotransmitters can radically change the functioning of the nervous system. Tranquilizers prolong the duration of the flow of ions through the channels opened by the neurotransmitter GABA. The nerve gas prolongs the action of acetylcholine, a neurotransmitter that causes muscles to contract.

But neurons have an interesting ability to respond to a long-term increase in neurotransmitter exposure - over periods of days or more, which can lead to an excessive amount of signals passing through a particular neural circuit - they simply absorb their own neurotransmitter receptors, and there are fewer working receptors on the cell surface. . This reaction may underlie the emergence of resistance to drugs, drugs and spicy foods.

The detection of spicy food does not occur in the brain's neurotransmitter receptors, but in peripheral chemical receptors that respond to capsaicin, the natural substance that gives pepper its spiciness. An interesting example of addiction is capsaicin-based ointment, which desensitizes receptors and relieves the pain of arthritis and neuropathy.

Conversely, when neurotransmitter production falls, a particular neuron may produce more receptor proteins and associated ion channels. In this way, overstimulation returns to normal perception, and understimulation sets up the neural circuit for increased sensitivity to even weak signals. How do cells know this? Through various feedback systems, many of which use the special biochemical properties of calcium ions, allowing the neuron to find, so to speak, a comfortable or suitable golden mean. Similar processes can be triggered when stimulation that is initially pleasant—or repulsive—is repeated over and over again. Acute perception subsides as the brain finds its checkpoint.

This process is called homeostasis, and much effort is being spent on studying the "homestatic plasticity" of neural circuits - neurons returning to their baseline checkpoint even with changes in the strength of the input stimulus.

At the level of the organism as a whole, the sensations of these stimuli change accordingly; decrease in the case of repeated stimuli, and then recover in the event of a change. A simple demonstration of this phenomenon is the experience with the marine mollusc Aplysia, which, in response to a light touch, first retracts its gills. After a series of harmless touches, he gets used to and stops responding, until the touch is combined with something unpleasant, such as an electric shock. When addictive, the receptors do not experience desensitization - instead, the neurotransmitter ends in the neurons.

In the case of more pleasurable sensations, hungry rats will work for food, be it regular or extra tasty, while satiated rats will only work for the treats they especially like. The motivation of rats to work for food can be reduced by using drugs that interfere with the natural opiate and dopamine receptors, neurotransmitters in neural circuits that signal rewards. It appears that reward circuits are stimulated by both anticipation and ingestion of food, but in satiated rats this only occurs if the food outperforms recent experience. In other words, there is no need to leave room for dessert; it will still be pleasant, as long as it tastes better than what came before it.

Familiar stimuli and the sensations they create can also induce other modifications of ion channels and neurotransmitter receptors that can change entire neural circuits. In fact, some brain circuits in many animals (including us) are so good at predicting the outcome of a well-known stimulus that they send back signals that balance the feeling of what is happening. The body does not even notice that something is happening - until something else or unexpected happens.

An interesting illustration of the brain's ability to ignore the known is provided by electric fish, whose electrical sense allows them to sense electric fields. They study the environment with the help of an electric organ discharge (REO) - a special “shout” that creates an electric field around the fish. In the presence of objects, this field is distorted - perhaps a bit like the distortion of the shape of the skin when touching an object. It is the deviation from the usual form that indicates that it is necessary to save or explore. The constant REO signals themselves are not something important. The neurons that create the REO also send a signal to the brain of the fish, indicating that they have worked. This signal is strictly opposite to the sensory signal received by the fish as a result of the sensation of its own undistorted field obtained as a result of REO, as a result of which it neutralizes the fish's sensation of its own "shout" when there is nothing nearby.

Being able to habituate and ignore incoming information that turns out to be static, familiar, predictable, and safe helps in terms of behavior. In other words, it has an evolutionary advantage. If we were constantly aware of the touch of clothes on our skin or the faint smell of fabric softener, it would be very distracting, to say the least, and could even prevent us from detecting and responding to a meaningful signal - a pat on the shoulder or the smell of burning toast. The inability to predict and adapt is possibly one of the contributing factors to the development of autism spectrum disorders.

In addition, signals that communicate information already known to the brain would be an unnecessary waste. All these ions moving in and out of cells to send signals to the brain can't just stay on the opposite side of where they came from. It literally takes energy to pump sodium back out of neurons and pump potassium back in, so it's more efficient not to generate action potentials that don't carry worthwhile information.

Does this mean that only something new makes sense, and that everything familiar must be discarded as soon as sensations become boring? Vice versa; I think that this is the key to happiness, compatible with the principles of the brain. The ability to detect even familiar stimuli is restored by a quick "reset" that allows one to recover from desensitization enough to intensify subsequent sensations. It seems to me that it is precisely the ability of the brain to perceive sensations in contrast that partly explains why our attempts to achieve eternal satisfaction remain unsuccessful. The brain works on a curve, constantly comparing the current situation with the previous one, and therefore the secret of happiness may be unhappiness. Not absolute misfortune, of course, but a momentary chill that allows us to feel warm, a feeling of hunger that makes satiety so desirable, a period of despair that sends us into a tremendous sense of triumph. The path to satisfaction passes through contrasts. Add tags

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