The avenues of happiness

Happiness is a wonderful feeling; it’s a march of emotions towards victory, it’s an ailment from loss, and looking back at the poor times of your defeat, mistrust, vulnerability, and heartbreak. Happiness is picking up a book to read for yourself, shaping your cortex, deploying your thoughtful lights, and witnessing a change in your mental actions. Humans essentially look at happiness in the pursuit of emotional and corporeal cues: appreciation, making a lot of money and at the crumbs of distant past recognition, essentially a sense of validation. Nevertheless, the ministry of happiness lies in atomic habits ranging from lying on the branch of a tree and watching the miday-sunshine filter through the canopy to feeling fit upon climbing stairs over a 100’s of people that chose escalators. Happiness is always dynamical, self-accountable, at times opportunistic.  When was the last time someone asked you “how are you ?” and you had texted them back mirroring your exact state of emotions?  Your responses are usually an apparent bland statement and trimmed of truth. There have been times you were actually happy, and somebody asks you the same, and the replies revolve around the vibe of the crux of your true happiness, aka self-accountable. Sometimes, you discover happiness in independence by pursuing environmental and societal actions, aka dynamical. At times, the concept of happiness lies over personally benefitting for myriads of reasons, including selfishness to validation, aka opportunistic.

Biologically, the physical interior and natal section of happiness are amygdala, prefrontal cortex, hypothalamus, and nucleus accumbens.  The Amygdala is the pith region that controls various emotions including happiness and fear, synonymous with the fight-or-flight response seen in birds, another interesting region is the hypothalamus, which is like a regulator of hormones that control how much happiness molecules such as dopamine and oxytocin can be released. You can be in delirium, or called crazy, if the hypothalamus malfunctions and loses its control over releasing these molecules. The third region of the natal section of happiness is prefrontal cortex where all your decision making and actionable responses to your “happy situations around”, next time when you gamble more out of rush and thrill, blame this region because the contents are here excessively active and electric. The final region is the nucleus accumbens, and this region is more receptive and accepting rather than synthesizing anything new. This region processes new information, an image or a situation and sends signals to your brain region how you perceive them overall. Imagine when you first time see colors like ocean teal and burnt orange; slowly, these color simmers in your brain as memory and later become your natural choice of color because you have now liked them. Same way as your tryst with Bánh Xèo for the first time, you encounter it with doubt about its spurious look, but later your taste buds send signals here that they are allayed and become complemented for such a taste further, now you have liked the pancake, and next time when you are at a Vietnamese restaurant you would choose Bánh Xèo naturally.

Besides these four physical regions, there are some chemicals aka neurotransmitters that play a vital role in keeping the plasticity and animateness of your happiness alive. These are dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and endorphins. The dopamine is a reward molecule which is active during pleasure; serotonin stabilizes your mood, feelings, and sleep, which is important for your mental peace. The killer molecule is oxytocin, which is a love hormone that makes you fall for someone, buy expensive gifts, engage in physical intimacy, and nurture social bonding. Finally, endorphins are body’s natural painkillers released during exercise, laughter, or moments of stress relief, creating feelings of euphoria. So, your emotion of happiness is all about how these natal or birth places dynamically regulate these chemicals along with other hormones. Some people are emotionally void because it’s difficult for external factors such as the environment or people to stimulate any happiness in them. A few would be emotionally jubilant; they could be easily swayed to a pendulum of impetus.

Isn’t your axis working exceptionally lame that you walk straight toward a speeding automobile instead of safely crossing the road?

When you open your car door to loved ones, imagine a gush of hormones in your nerves, yet aplomb and gleefully awaits to see how they respond to your caring gesture. Would you outdo the velocity of hormones while reaching the 31st floor, spending time with your dame from ground zero? Imagine, the eloquence of your brain spots when they ask you to buy their favorite tees from you. I desist to explain the volume of happiness that explodes when they naturally pick up your hands on the zebra crossing. You take a detour from the original plan because they want to make more time with you; at this moment, imagine how sharp these chemical molecules work to splash happiness on your face. You know you get drenched, yet you give shelter to them with your broad shoulder while driving a bike, the sense of sacrifice you needed eternally. Though the food is on a plate, you could nibble anytime, but you find it ambrosial when they touch and give them through their hands. All such instances are the exact, well-coordinated, and brightly sweet axis of the natal chart of happiness and neurotransmitters. Let me know your favorite moment of happiness you have come across and acknowledge the axis worked for you in the comments section.

• Anand ¥