What If Your Happiest Moment Lasted Forever

Insights from neuroscience, psychology and psychiatry

By default, I loathe taking and giving happiness tips. Same with the tips on how to lead a great and successful life.

I decided early on that the quest to meaning in life—which encompasses happiness and success in all their spectra—is intensely personal one and it is stupid to attempt to generalize any observation related to it.

For long time I just avoided anything with ‘happiness’, ‘motivation’ and ‘self-help’ in the title. After all, what can any one person teach me that the whole world around me has failed to teach so far? So went my logic.

After reading and listening to some neuroscientists, psychologists and psychaitrists, though, I loosened up some of those restrictions. If science has empirically found some insights that help us to lead a better life, why not grasp them?

My change of heart largely started after I stumbled upon and read the book ‘The Road Less Travelled’ by American psychiatrist Morgan Scott Peck. Written years before I was born, the book animated me and made me realize how little I knew about the human psychology even after doing a months-long training in psychiatry and sitting for an examination in the subject as part of my MBBS degree in Nepal.

My next stop in this journey was The Happiness Lab podcast by Dr. Laurie Santos, professor of psychology at Yale University. Over dozens of episodes, she patiently explained what we were getting wrong about the functioning of our brain and inspired me to change behaviors in ways proven to be beneficial empirically.

Over recent years, I have come across a few others like her.

Recently, though, a two-part series from the Hidden Brain podcast by Shankar Vedantam reinforced my faith in science-based approach to happiness.

Anna Lembke, the guest in the podcast, is an American psychiatrist who is Chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic at Stanford University. She is also a specialist in the opioid epidemic in the United States.

In the podcast, she beautifully explains the science behind happiness as a biological process. Here I’ll try to summarize her arguments with help of an analogy of my own.

Image credit: Onlinekhabar.com

If this boy loves swinging like this, probably he is thrilled to find himself perched so high in the air, above everyone in the ground. He is right to be so. Swinging like this is good for both physical and mental health. If the rope is installed close to his house and there are few others who like to swing, he can come whenever he wants and swing as much as he wants until he gets fatigued.

There is one thing that he cannot accomplish though: he cannot hold himself in this extremely elevated position for more than a second or so. As soon as he reaches the top elevation, he has to come down immediately. There is no other option.

Happy state of mind is just like that.

As soon as your brain is flooded with Dopamine and you are thrilled, the compensatory mechanism in the brain takes that as a cue to downregulate Dopamine. This much may be intuitive to many of you.

But as Lembke explains in the podcast, the downswing of mood with depleting Dopamine does not stop at the steady state, the same way as the swinging rope does not stop at the vertical position after moving back from one extreme.

The classic example of the pendulum moving to the opposite end of the spectrum—from ecstasy to deep sadness—after a thrill is the hangover that comes in the morning after heavy drinking. But there are many more: you feel a tinge of sadness after reaching the much-anticipated destination; you may even grieve finishing reading an immensely entertaining book, etc.

Why is it so?

Lembke does not dwell in this question much in the podcast. But let’s inquire about this question in some depth.

I think there can be a qualified analogy between a swinging mood and the swinging boy in the image above.

The swinging boy cannot hold himself in the elevated position because it is a mathematical impossibility. He is there in the first place because of gravity and he cannot defy it at his will. While he may think he is propelling himself to the sky with his muscle power, that is only a minor part of the story. It is gravity that mostly moves him.

A permanently happy state of being for any living organism violates a different logic: Survival.

Remember the happiest moment in your life and imagine that stretching forever with same intensity. What would you do then? Probably nothing. Not even eat, sleep or move, because why would you ruin or interrupt your happy moment?

This is why evolution has left us with so much of pain and so little of pleasure. Put it bluntly, all the so called negative emotions like fear, anxiety, insecurity, sadness, aggression and so on are more compatible with our survival than, say, pleasure, confidence, contentedness and so on.

If all this had no practical implications for all of us in our daily lifes, I would not have burdened you with such a long interpretation of Lembke’s words. Here is how we mess things up because we are ignorant about this pleasure-pain balance in our brains.

All types of addictions—the screens, games, nicotine, alcohol, drugs—are a result of our attempt to defy that basic logic of neuroscience: a trough of pleasure will be inevitably followed by the crest of pain.

Addiction works for some time. But millions of years of evolution has wired our brains in such a way that the artificially fueled pleasure is brought down forcefully by the compensatory mechanism in our brains.

That leads to dopamine deficit in the brain leading to craving and restlessness. The right response then would be to withstand it and let that feeling pass so that the brain gains the steady state again. It would then make sense to avoid attempting the potentially addictive stimulus thereafter so that brain functions normally.

Mostly, however, we do the opposite by trying to soothe our mood by reverting back to the same stimulus and pumping our brains with escalating amounts of the addictive substance or behavior.

The juggernaut of social media is entirely sustained by this faulty and myopic human approach to addiction. So is the tobacco and alcohol industry. So is the drug industry.

The real tragedy is: our brain’s compensatory mechanism responds with matching ferocity by depriving the brain of dopamine—despite the abundance of potentially dopamine-triggering stimuli—leading to a state of perpetual dopamine deficit. That also means perpetual craving and restlessness.

Have you ever felt happy doom-scrolling?

As Lembke articulates well in the podcast, this reactive dopamine deficit is behind much of anxiety, depression and other mental illnesses that plague our societies today. As technology advances, new tools of bombarding our brains are not helping at all.

I am not asking anyone reading this to change your behaviors. You all are free to ruin your lives with addiction of all sorts. (Chances are, some of you may stop some addictive behaviors if I ask to continue them. Humans never like being dictated! That is another lesson I get from human evolution.) But I have one sincere request.

Ruining yourself can be a choice but ruining your children cannot be. If you are giving unlimited screen time to your toddlers and older children, think calmly about this: you are exposing them to products that are potently addictive even to the adults with fully developed compensatory brain mechanisms.

If you expect your children to be bombarded by all those addictive stimuli all the time and still develop normal neuro-psychological milestones including the very compensatory mechanism that is to balance their pleasure with pain for rest of thier lives, that is a tall order.

I would never bet on that for my son.

So, as a parent of a 3-year-old, a medical professional (pathologist to be precise) and a responsible human being, I am informing you all this: all addiction is bad for mental health but it is terrible thing to be addicted to something even before you develop your long-term memory as is happening at a massive scale now.

If you are smoking tobacco or drinking regularly, please realize that it is bad for you and feel guilty for harming your own body and mind; and also for potentially harming your family members, relative and neighbors. That attitude towards the behavior may some day help you overcome the addiction.

On the other hand, if you go on justifying and rationalizing the addictive habit in one pretext or the other, it is going to ruin many lives starting with your own.

A timely choice of right approach to potentially addictive substances and behaviors in life can, on the other hand, change the entire lives of you and your kins for the better.

A special request before recommendations: please share this post wherever you can. Also, please forward this email to 5-10 addiction-prone friends who may potentially benefit from this. If you came to this page from outside email and have not subscribed yet, please do so:

Recommendations:

The most comprehensive conversation (in Nepali) about my book nun-tel is out now in Youtube (please also share after you listen to this):

I also carried a chapter from the book in an earlier post here at THG that I did not mail to you:

You can of course buy the book here and read it. (The book is in Nepali but English version of a chapter from it titled ‘Creation to Climate Crisis’ will be out soon.)

Here is a piece about the menace of junk motivation in our era of uncertainty that I published on the occasion of International Youth Day 2023 (in Nepali).