Can you train your brain to be happy

Who does not want to be happy? The pursuit of happiness is a sincere concern of all people, and since ancient times there have been many theorists and philosophers who have pondered this topic. However, this is not an easy question to start with, because the concept of happiness is vague and is addressed in many disciplines. For example, at the public strategy level, there is mounting interest in developing methods to degree the well-being of people, and the United Nations publishes a report annually that ranks countries according to the Global Happiness Index .

On a individual level, we would all like to be a little happier in everyday life, but paradoxically, the continuous search for happiness, understood as immediate pleasure, can have the opposite effect. "Víctor Frankl, a psychiatrist who started logotherapy, suggested that happiness has supplementary to do with the purpose or connotation that each person gives to his life," explains the director of the RNCR Psychological Center and researcher at the International University of Valencia. Fatima Servian. "This is a general definition that can be adapted to each person and has more to do with subjective well-being ."

Numerous psychological studies have delved into subjective well-being, which, the expert explained, can be determined by how we experience three different mental states: negative affect, positive affect, and life satisfaction ratings. “To survive and adapt to the environment, a person needs to experience unpleasant emotions, these are negative affects. There are certain moments in life, for example, mourning, when they are necessary ”, says the researcher. "The tricky arises when we experience negative affects that are not necessary, for example, a person with generalized anxiety constantly expects possible dangers or problems, and this negative impact is not adaptive, but deregulatory ."

 

On the other hand, we have positive effects, which Servian reminds us that they can also be adapters or deregulators. “This is very important, since not because it is good, it will be good. For example, during the loss of a precious one, it is not normal to feel positive emotions, if this happens, the person is not regulated  ”.

Finally, satisfaction with life is related to our perception of ourselves and the environment and, obviously, if we experience more positive than negative influences, our assessment of life will be better. From all this it follows that in many cases the feeling of happiness depends not so much on whether "good" or "bad" events happen to us in our lives, but on how we deal with them. Things materialize to us in life that we cannot change, and we must learn to accept them, as well as face those who have solutions .

If happiness has such an important subjective section and does not depend 100% on the events that happen in our environment, it seems logical to ask whether you can learn to be happy. Servian explains that there are subjective well-being education programs that aim to improve the psychosocial variables that we all have to a superior or lesser extent. An article published a few calendar month ago in Frontiers in Psychology magazine analyzed the effectiveness of one of these programs, based on techniques such as mindfulness, to develop virtues and strengths such as expressive balance, self-awareness or solidarity with oneself and others. "This article shows that while it is challenging and requires a lot of effort and persistence, we can effort on these strengths that we all consume and improve our subjective well-being."

The dangers of seeking immediate pleasure

As we mentioned earlier, positive affects do not always help us achieve happiness. Today, the constant search for external and immediate pleasures can interfere with our comfort. In the situation of children and young people who have not yet reached the specific adaptive capacity that maturity gives us, this is a growing problem: “we find cases of depression in adolescents at levels never seen before”, imitates the psychologist. “You have to get all the components, it will not be something that can be explained by a variable, but we are talking about young people who grow up in the hedonism of social networks and television ... and also about the adults around them. them, because we take the short term and immediacy to the extreme. This is the exact opposite of what research on happiness suggests to increase our satisfaction with life. "