How to attain a Long-Term Happiness?

What is this article all about?

In this article, you will learn what happiness isn't and what happiness is. You will learn about tools, methods, and scientifically proven techniques as helpful when you want to achieve long-term happiness.

What do I mean when I say long-term happiness and why the word long-term is in the title of this article. Is there such a thing as long-term happiness?

We have instant happiness, some little things that we can do really fast and that can raise the happiness hormones and makes us happy for a little while and on the other side, some things can make us feel happy for a shorter span, but to attain long term happiness we have to work on fundamentals, the roots, the personal skills, belief system, thinking style, some more deep things and that's what are we going to do in this article.

We will not learn about superficial things and instant things that can help us be instantly happy. I will mention those things; of course, I will include that part also, what can we do to feel instant happiness, but the focus on this article will be what we really can do to achieve that long-term happiness, not just instant happiness.

What is my approach to attain long-term happiness?

My approach is always a combination of the science of psychology and practice, practical part experience (i.e.) My personal experience, etc. So that's how this article is made. It's a combination of psychology, the science of happiness, and the practical part. Those tools and techniques that worked for me are designed to become your permanent and personal characteristics. I would like you to implement them in your belief system, in your thinking style, so you will be able to achieve the permanent change, and that's why we have the word long-term in this article.

When we learn the fundamentals, when we explore, identify and change the mistakes we have in our thinking style and belief system that make us feel unhappy, we will achieve permanent and long-term happiness. So in this article, we will learn how to identify, how to change mistakes, how to create a new belief system, and how to develop and implement all those skills that are needed for achieving long-term happiness and peace.

What Happiness isn't?

To find out what happiness is, first, we have to answer the question of what happiness isn't, and that's how we will be able to truly found out how to achieve that long-term and complete happiness.

Chocolate, a very nice and tasty meal, eating ice cream when it's freezing outside, kiss with the one we love, new car, new shoes, new bag. Is that happiness?

If your answer is yes, I can tell you that you are maybe 10% right but 90% wrong. Those things are connected with the emotion of pleasure, and pleasure is really not the same thing as happiness, and there is the biggest and the most common mistake that we made when we are trying to be happy. So we use pleasure as happiness, we use this feeling of pleasure constantly, we're trying to achieve it, we are trying to do all those things that give us pleasure, and then we are not so happy at the end of the day. We're happy from moment to moment while we are doing all those things, eating that cake, going shopping, and all those little things that make us happy. But at the end of the day, we ask ourselves, OK, I did all those things during the day, so why I am not happy, why I feel like this at the end of the day, and the answer is because there is a huge difference between pleasure and happiness. Pleasure is the part, a little part of the happiness. But if we try to base our happiness on pleasure, it will be just a failure.

How Pleasure Differs from Happiness?

Difference №1

So first and biggest difference is between the chemicals they're in charge of with pleasure and happiness in our brains. So pleasure is connected with Dopamine. You all heard about Dopamine, and Dopamine is based on a rewarding system. Yes, that makes us happy; it's one of the four basic chemicals that make us happy: Dopamine, Serotonin, Oxytocin, and Endorphins. But Dopamine is not in charge of long-term happiness. 

Dopamine is here to bring us that feeling of pleasure and a rewarding system. If you want to raise the dopamine in your organism, set any goal, anything that will be rewarding for you, the material or not material, and you will feel that little bit of joy or you can call it happiness. But it's really exhausting if we are using that method to achieve long-term happiness. It's not possible, and it's exhausting to try to find rewarding and rewarding behavior and things constantly. OK, so pleasure is connected with dopamine and happiness, long-term happiness is connected with serotonin. It's a different chemical in our brain than dopamine. So dopamine, it's just for short little pleasures, and serotonin is here to bring us that stable wellbeing.

According to positive psychology, the definition of happiness is its subjective well-being, the feeling of subjective well-being, and satisfaction with life. Also, there is one trick with dopamine; it's straightforward for us to become addicted. Dopamine is connected with all the addictions that we have.

Difference №2

The second difference is because pleasure is a Short-Lived emotion, as we said. If I want to achieve something, some goal (eating chocolate cake or anything), and then I do that, and it's finished. So I have to do it repeatedly and again, and when we speak about happiness that we want to achieve, it is in the long term. It's something that will last; it's something that has roots and is stable and constant.

Difference №3

The third difference between pleasure and happiness is that pleasure is connected with receiving. We will take something to get pleasure but happiness, it's all about giving. Some research shows that we feel really and truly happier when we buy gifts for somebody else than when we receive the gift.

If this is not Happiness, then what is Happiness mean?

Now, when we know what happiness isn't, it will be easier for us to answer what happiness is. Easier because it's really not easy to answer this question, and we are not the first who will try to answer. Many different psychologists, neuropsychologists, philosophers, doctors during history all try to answer this question. There is no specific and unique definition of happiness. Still, there are many different definitions, and now we will take a look at some of them, and we will see what some important researchers in this field said about happiness.

According to these definitions, we can see that happiness is defined differently, but we can conclude similar things. All definitions have some similar things.

First of all, we are made of the cognitive, emotional, and physiological parts. Those three parts that we are made of and that are in charge of everything we do in our life, and those three parts determine happiness. We have that biological and physiological part, which is those chemicals that we mentioned, dopamine, serotonin, Endorphins, and oxytocin. We will talk a little bit more about them later, but that's that physiological part, biological part. When we speak about that chemical misbalance, it can lead to clinical depression. Well, depression is the opposite side of happiness, as we all know. So in this article, we will not talk about that clinical depression. We will not go deep there; we will focus more on the cognitive part.

So what can we do with our high cognitive functions like perception, thinking, and belief system to achieve that long-term happiness?

We will see what we will be able to do to increase those happiness hormones naturally with some food and exercise. But we will more focus on the cognitive part, the cognitive and emotional part, because as you can see, all those definitions that we saw they put in the center of the happiness, perception, and cognitive part of us, they put in the center, the way we see, the way we perceive, the way we think our belief system and what is really, really interesting and what makes me happy is that it says to us that we can do something with our willpower to feel happier.

So in positive psychology, happiness is defined as subjective well-being and life satisfaction.

So what is subjective well-being?

How we see our lives and ourselves is how we value and perceive all the things that happen to us and all the things that are happening to us, external, what's happening to us, and how we perceive and see ourselves. That's what we are going to do in this article. We will not focus on superficial things like eating, being happy, or instant little things that we can do and feel happiness.

Conclusion

You can notice that when we speak about pleasure, we speak about external things, that are really, really something that is basically always material and outside, and when we speak about the long term, complete happiness, it's all about internal things which mean something that is inside, that is not material, it's about our cognitive abilities, it's about our thinking style, it's about our beliefs, it's about how we think, how we perceive and what are we do mentally.