Your Brain Prevents You From Happiness.

Why is that? 

Your brain is designed to ensure your survival. If you want to be happy, you must control your emotions rather than hoping you will be happy in your natural state. Dopamine usually has a heavy influence on your brain, and it can also mess with your mind.

As you all know. Humans have brains and it is one of the greatest gifts if we can use it properly. The philosophy starts with our mind. This is proof that humans can do a lot of wonderful things. There are many types of chemicals in our brains.

But for now, let's focus on dopamine. A neurotransmitter that helps with motivation, movement, and pleasure. It is released when we do something that feels good or when we complete a task. At the core of these feelings are brain chemicals that affect your happiness.

How Dopamine Can Mess With Your Mind?

Dopamine plays a certain role in rewarding certain behaviors. When dopamine is released, the pleasure center gets an intense sense of well-being similar to a high. This sense happens, when you gamble, exercise have sex, or eat great food.

But beware, dopamine does not know between good and bad. If you are doing bad things and getting rewards. Dopamine will be released and you will keep going. In today's world, this reward system is one of the best. In the past, dopamine was directly linked to survival and eating food. But now we have a technology called social media.

But it does not stop at social media. Watching pornography and gambling also leads to a release of dopamine which can make these activities highly addictive. But the good thing is, we don’t need to continuously check out our Facebook newsfeeds just because it gives us a pleasurable shot of dopamine.

Today society sells happiness that can make us unhappy. We tend to compare our lives to what we have seen on the internet. Everything is looking perfect and we see ourselves as not good enough. They always forget not everything on the internet is real. 

Worse than that dopamine can create real addictions with severe consequences on our health. When permitted to self-stimulate their pleasure center, participants did it an average of forty times per minute. They choose the stimulation of their pleasure center over food, even refusing to eat when hungry.

Someone has already died because of dopamine. He died after playing video games for 58 hours straight with very little food or water and no sleep. The investigation concluded the cause of death is because of heart failure induced by exhaustion and dehydration. He was only 28 years old.

How to prevent this?

To take control of your emotions, you must understand the role dopamine plays and how it affects your happiness. Are you addicted to your phone? TV? Or maybe you spend too much playing video games. Most of us are addicted to something.

For some people it is obvious, but for others, it is more subtle. For instance, you could be addicted to thinking. To better control your emotions, you must recognize and shed light on your addictions as they can rob you of your happiness.

Limit your time on social media. Less distraction is better than most of the time. Do exercise such as boxing, karate, silat, muaythai, jogging, and many more. It will hurt a little but you will have the strength to recover. Try to learn new things and make a mistake. You will have the courage to go through your life.

Mood-boosting food.

When you think about food, things like ice cream, cheese or macaroni may come to your mind. Yes, comforting food may provide you with happy feelings.

Leave a comment down below if it helps you with your life.