Pursuing lasting happiness? Meet science.

I recently came across Anna Lembke's content on YouTube & tapped into my hitherto latent interest in the neurochemistry of pain and pleasure.

Fun fact: pleasure & pain circuits in the brain are co-located, i.e., the same part of the brain processes both pain and pleasure.

Anyway...

I had often caught myself breathlessly hankering after a vision of successful life that was sold to a much younger and gullible version of myself - one where I'd be perpetually happy. In the past I have accomplished some of the goals that I then assumed were necessary to do well in life, and yet never experienced lasting pleasure.

I've always wondered what the secret to constant happiness is - especially now that social media makes it seem so real. And it was in discovering Dr. Anna's content on dopamine & learning about its inherent nature to be balanced, that laid my quest to rest (ew, I didn't enjoy that rhyme).

Humans have evolved to the extent they have by making ends meet in an ecosystem of scarcity, as opposed to living in a world of over-abundance, where we now live. With the unceasing influx of information, opportunities & resources, we're hardly allowed time to reset. The addiction to productivity is socially rewarded (and isn't maladaptive, either, so that's cool). Therefore, we're expected to over-indulge & in meeting that expectation we get a surge of the pleasure hormone - dopamine. Pulling away from this constant bombardment of engagements is biologically necessary but culturally looked down upon.

In essence, the boredom, a.k.a. the 'comedown' following a highly dopaminergic engagement, is the result of dopamine returning to its baseline tonic levels. Ergo, it's super important for a healthy lifestyle. And being conscious of the process helps me not to sulk about it.