The Chemistry of Happiness — Part I
Or, how to design a life that’s optimised for happiness
👋 Hey, Abhishek here! Welcome to the 126th edition of The Sunday Wisdom. Each week I share ideas on thinking clearly and making better decisions.
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Q: How can we design our life to optimise for happiness?
Today, let’s talk about happiness. More precisely, let’s talk about happiness from the POV of chemicals released in our body.
In Season 2, Episode 9 of Breaking Bad, Walt and Jesse take their RV into the desert to cook meth for an entire weekend. After their work is done, Walt calculates how much they would be making by selling all that. “Huh! $672,000,” Walt says, almost to himself, unable to believe the numbers. “All that?” Jesse asks excited, to which Walt says, “No. Each.”
You can see the sense of accomplishment and euphoria building on Walt and Jesse’s face as they realise they are gonna be rich. Jesse dances around inside the RV. Walt is reluctant to high-five initially, but is soon overcome with tremendous animal energy. They high-five in excitement. “Hell yeah!”
A surge of chemicals is rushing through Walt’s and Jesse’s veins at this moment. Chemicals that are making them feel these feelings. We’ll discuss some of them today and in the next few issues.
This is the first part of a three-part essay on the chemistry of happiness or, how to design a life that’s optimised for happiness.
Happiness isn’t one single component. There are four primary chemicals that constitute happiness: Endorphin, Dopamine, Serotonin, and Oxytocin. These chemicals are secreted at the appropriate moments to incentivise us (i.e., make us feel good in a certain way) and reinforce certain behaviour.
Why? Well, from an evolutionary point of view, nature doesn’t care about our happiness or quality of life. Human beings, like any other species, have evolved (and still evolving) for one purpose and one purpose only: to ensure our progeny will live on beyond us.
Feelings of happiness, belonging, friendship, love, jealousy, rage, anger, etc., are just fodder in pursuit of this singular goal.
The first two chemicals, endorphin and dopamine, work to get us where we need to go as individuals—to survive, find food, build shelters, invent tools, and get things done.
They are the “animal” chemicals. They are the reason we are driven to hunt, gather, and achieve. They make us feel good when we find something we’re looking for, build something we need, or accomplish our goals. They are the chemicals of progress.
The other two chemicals, serotonin and oxytocin, are there to incentivise us to develop feelings of trust and loyalty. They are the “social” chemicals. They work to help strengthen our social bonds so that we are more likely to work together. After all, we have a stronger chance of survival as a species if we are together. Needless to say, being together also makes sure we procreate and pass on our genes.
Endorphins have only one purpose: to mask physical pain. That’s it. In other words, they make us love pain (by turning pain into pleasure) so that we can push harder while running, exercising, or doing manual labour.
The experience of a “runner’s high” is nothing but endorphins doing their magic. This is one of the reasons people often crave for a workout. They basically crave for that amazing high.
Because of endorphins, humans have a remarkable capacity for physical endurance. Our ancestors developed the ability to track animals over great distances and still have the stamina to make it home. If the trusty hunters gave up at any time sooner because they were exhausted, their tribe would not eat very often and would eventually die off. Evolution made sure this didn’t happen.
Endorphins not only allowed them to run longer distances, but also enjoy it. They went hunting not simply because they had to, but also because it felt good. Like them, marathoners don’t run simply because they have to, but also because if feels good.
Not just running, laughter also triggers the release of endorphins. This elevates our pain threshold. We’ve all had the experience of laughing so much that it hurts. Laughter causes our internal organs to contract and endorphins are released to mask the pain.
Like that of a runner, the hurt actually begins earlier, but thanks to the endorphin release, we don’t feel it until later. The high we get makes it hard to be stressed. You cannot laugh and be stressed at the same time.
If you’ve watched any Marvel movies, especially the ones involving Spider-Man or The Guardians of The Galaxy, you know how casual their demeanour remains throughout, even in the direst of circumstances.
If you can build a knack for cracking lighthearted jokes even as the world around you is falling apart, you have a huge advantage. It’s a fact that humorous people, or people who have humorous friends, don’t get depressed or anxious very often. In today’s day and age, it’s nothing short of a superpower.
But you don’t necessarily have to be humorous to beat stress. Watching a funny movie can also help. Exercising, running, bicycling, doing physical sports such as boxing are also great treatments for anxiety and depression.
Endorphins are designed to be released on a daily basis. But (no) thanks to cars, supermarkets, and food delivery services, we don’t have to hunt for food anymore. Therefore it’s important that we do the daily minimum physical activity to trigger the release of endorphins. It’ll not only keep the body and the mind healthy, but also give us a nice high. What’s not to love!
Dopamine is the most culturally famous (or rather infamous) chemical. It is responsible for the feeling of satisfaction after we finish an important task, complete a project, or reach a goal.
We all know how good it feels to cross something off our to-do list. That feeling of progress or accomplishment is primarily because of dopamine.
It is dopamine that makes us a species with a bias for progress. When given a task to complete, if we can imagine what success looks like, we get a little burst of dopamine to get us on our way. Despite how the media portrays it, we cannot get much done without dopamine.
Where willpower fails, dopamine succeeds.
A marathoner gets a dopamine hit every time they finish a lap, which keeps them going for the next. When they finally reach the finish line, that intense feeling of “got it” is a massive hit. We experience something similar when we crack an exam, get a job, close a business deal. Dopamine is our biological reward for all the hard work we’ve done.
As I’m writing this essay, I’m getting multiple tiny dopamine hits. As soon as I realise a sentence or a paragraph is structured the way I want, I get a small hit.
90% of the writing experience is frustration, but these little moments of dopamine-filled pleasure is what keeps anybody going. Without that it would be nearly impossible to spend close to 5–6 hours on an essay. And when it’s finally ready for publish, I get a huge hit for a job well done — a feeling of “yass” very similar to the marathoner.
Obviously the bigger the goal, the more effort it requires, and the more dopamine we get. This is why human beings are often motivated to work on big hairy even crazy problems.
We are visual creatures and dopamine works the best if we can visualise success. Therefore, the clearer we can see our goals, the more the chances of us accomplishing them. The age-old advice of writing your goals down, breaking them into smaller goals is not without good reason. As you achieve each small goal and cross them off, you are motivated to complete the rest.
Despite all the good it does, dopamine release can easily be hijacked to incentivise us for doing all the wrong things. In popular media, dopamine is often portrayed as the main chemical of pleasure. It’s the reason why we crave for likes and comments on social media.
It is also because of dopamine that we often love to buy things we don’t need. There’s no rational benefit, we enjoy them because they satisfy our prehistoric foraging needs.
If we aren’t careful, there’s a good chance we’ll get addicted. Like any other addiction, dopamine addiction, as good as it may feel in the short-term, it comes at a high cost in the longterm. For example, if the first thing you do in the morning is check your phone for a dopamine hit, you already are an addict.
Addiction or not, the feeling of accomplishment fuelled by dopamine isn’t long lasting. We crave for another hit soon after the last one passes. Same is true for the high we get from endorphins.
For a lasting feeling of fulfilment, happiness, and joy, we require engagement with others. We are after all social animals. The “animal” chemicals can only take us so far. On top of that, it’s harder to do everything alone, especially big things. Together is better. And to help us with that, we have “social” chemicals that incentivise us to work with others. We’ll cover this in the next issue of The Sunday Wisdom.
Timeless Insight
Our brains often confuse imagination with achievement. Since we find it easy to imagine good events rather than bad ones, we often overestimate the likelihood of them happening, thus making us unrealistically optimistic about the future. This is why we often go after crazy goals. This is also what propels humanity forward. We are a bunch of silly optimists.
What I’m Reading
We didn’t evolve to be healthy, but instead we were selected to have as many offspring as possible under diverse, challenging conditions. As a consequence, we never evolved to make rational choices about what to eat or how to exercise in conditions of abundance and comfort.
— Daniel E. Lieberman, The Story of the Human Body
Tiny Thought
Anyone who is willing to end a relationship because of a difference in opinion is not worthy of friendship.
Before You Go…
Thanks so much for reading! Send me ideas, questions, Breaking Bad trivia. You can reply to this email or use the comments.
Until next Sunday,
Abhishek 👋
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