Everybody wants to be happy all the time. Humans generally confuse happiness with pleasure until they start missing happiness. We keep trying little things to achieve short-term pleasure at the cost of long-term happiness.
What is pleasure?
Pleasure is most wanted in today’s world as it has high intensity and visibility. The problem is, it has a shorter retention period. We have to repeat pleasurable actions more often to keep experiencing them. This excessive craving and repetition of pleasure are called addiction, and most of the time, it has negative consequences.
What is happiness?
On the other hand, happiness is all about the feeling of life satisfaction and fulfilment. Happiness is when your thoughts and actions align with your values to generate positive emotions in any situation.
Why are we unhappy?
As per Dr. Robert Lustig, pleasure is Dopamine, and happiness is Serotonin. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that plays a role in how we feel pleasure. It plays an essential role in the brain‘s pleasure and reward system. Serotonin is the crucial hormone that stabilizes our mood, feelings of well-being, and happiness. The increase in Dopamine reduces the level of Serotonin. So the more we experience pleasure more unhappy we become.
Where is the issue?
Happiness is a basic need of human beings, but we are being pushed farther and farther from true happiness due to confusion between pleasure and happiness.
How to create happiness?
By now, you would have understood that the whole world is selling you all types of pleasures, but nobody cares about your happiness. So, it means you have to create your own happiness and well-being and continue doing so every day.
The happiness circle
The above happiness circle shows the daily activities you can do to create long-term happiness and feel fulfilled on good days and also on bad days (Yes, on bad days too). What you have to do is simply, act on at least one activity from the outer circle every day. Keep shuffling the categories between Give, Care, Explore and Aim to feed a variety of emotional diets to your brain.
These activities may or may not bring instant pleasure, but long-term happiness and fulfilment are guaranteed!
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