EPILOGUE

SIX BILLION PATHS TO HAPPINESS

OUR LUST FOR life is inborn. The itch of anticipation, the ecstasy of enjoyment, and the warm flow of sympathy are part of the basic equipment of our brains. They are gifts that are necessary for survival.

People can be happy in almost any situation. External conditions determine well-being much less than we usually think. Extensive studies have shown that the enjoyment of life is neither a question of age nor of gender. It doesn’t depend on your IQ, or on how many children you have, or on the size of your bank account. A craftsman in Bangladesh has different but not fewer opportunities for enjoyment than an office worker in Boston. Both—all of us—have to use the opportunities at hand.

Many people look for happiness “like a drunk for his house,” in the words of the French philosopher Voltaire. “They can’t find it, but they know it exists.” But since our capacity for positive feelings is hardwired into the brain and influenced only minimally by external conditions (according to many studies, less than 10 percent), there is only one explanation for Voltaire’s conundrum: hunting for happiness, we trip over our own feet.

In this book, I’ve tried to introduce a few strategies for achieving well-being and to show how and why they work. Unlike many such efforts, these suggestions don’t rest primarily on experience and transmitted wisdom. Rather, they are based on recent discoveries in neuroscience, especially on the insight that the brain is malleable and that it can change in adulthood—which is what enables us to train our relationship with our feelings. And neuroscience has shown something else: happiness is more than simply the absence of unhappiness. We have dedicated circuits in our heads for positive feelings, enabling pleasure and enjoyment to thwart negative emotions such as sadness and fear, much as wind drives away fog.

Our ability to make our lives happier rests on these two basic principles: we can strengthen the circuits for the positive feelings with conscious practice, and we can seek out situations that give us pleasure and enjoyment. A few examples will refresh your memory.

• The well-being of body and the well-being of mind are inseparably linked. Emotions have their origins in the body. Exercise and sex have proven the surest means of raising our spirits.

• Activity makes us happier than doing nothing. The often-heard advice to take a vacation when you’re “down” is wrong. Our controls over thoughts, intentions, and feelings are closely connected in the brain, so we worry easily when the brain lacks anything else to keep busy. On the other hand, the brain’s expectation system releases a sense of anticipation as soon as we set a goal, and we experience triumph when we reach it. Thus, activity almost always leads to positive feelings.

• An alert mind increases a sense of well-being even when it’s only observing. Concentrated perception is often accompanied by feelings of elation. This sense of mild ecstasy resembles anticipation. It, too, we owe to the expectation system. This capacity for enjoyment through attentiveness is something we can learn.

• By giving in to negative emotions like anger and sadness, not only do we fail to appease them, but we actually reinforce them. Letting off steam can only hurt us. The conviction that it is otherwise rests on a psychology that has been disproved. On the contrary, it is possible—and much better for our emotional balance—to control such feelings consciously.

• Variety gives pleasure. The expectation system is quickly dulled to pleasurable stimuli, which set in motion a vicious cycle of desire and reward. When we change our pleasures more frequently, we avoid taking something for granted. And in learning to value the unexpected and to see from new perspectives, we stoke our vitality.

• When in doubt, it’s better to have control over our decisions than to have our wishes fulfilled. The control over our own fate is for most of us an absolute condition for happiness and satisfaction. Helplessness is one of the least bearable of all feelings. People—and animals—respond to it with serious mental and physical deficits. When a wish is fulfilled only at the price of dependence (going into debt, for example), one usually does better by choosing freedom.

But what is most important of all for well-being is our relationship to other people. It is no exaggeration to equate happiness with friendship and love. The attention we pay to those close to us redounds to our own happiness.

These basic principles are valid for all people, since our emotions and many of our behaviors are a legacy from evolution. Nonetheless, within this framework we all make our own choices and have our own needs and preferences. For this reason, the recommendations in this book, even if they are based on modern science and the experience of many thousands of people, are only meant as suggestions. The choice has to be yours.

Therefore, the most important task in the search for happiness is to know yourself. This doesn’t require anything particularly elaborate or special. It’s enough to pay attention to your reactions to daily stimuli and to experiment a bit with settled habits. In this way, we get better and better at knowing what works for us. We will all discover our own answers. We are six billion people, and there are six billion paths to happiness.