How Lifestyle Leads to Happiness

All work and no play can lead to burn out so it is important to learn How Lifestyle Leads to Happiness. It also helps to have a practical definition of happiness.

People know when they feel happy and know things that will make them happy, but few know how to sustain happiness. This is because other than external events occurring, people don’t know how happiness occurs biologically and why.

How Our Parents Start Us on the Wrong Track

Your parents guided your happiness ideals with their ideals. They wanted you to do well in school, have a good career, get married and have grandchildren. There is a lot of time in those gaps and even achieving these milestones in no way guarantees happiness.

Nature has the real control over happiness. She has designed the neurotransmitters and hormones that drive you and scientists have labeled happiness. Understanding the science helps you develop habits that sustain happiness without the need for events or milestones.

What Are Nature’s Happiness Goals for You?

Think about Nature’s goals for you, your species, and life in general. Getting food to create energy for reproduction is number one. Raising the young ones and building community help sustain life in most species. How would the brain help in these main endeavors. Nature has created the happiness chemicals to stimulate these drives and reward the behaviors.

Yes, hunger is a drive because of chemicals not because our stomachs are empty. Sex is the same. Our drive to take care of our young is the same. We have hormones and neurotransmitters creating the drives and rewards. You have little conscious control. You just act out the behaviors from the stimulus.

What are some behaviors that the brain supports and grants the rewards we can learn is happiness. The brain loves us to learn. We get dopamine and adrenaline from learning and to sustain it. We get oxytocin and serotonin when we see great rewards for ourselves in learning and especially if our intention is to contribute to the community.

More Happiness Behaviors

Exercise is an easy happiness stimulant. To encourage strenuous exercise, the body generates endorphins, a sort of euphoria. When we add risk to the exercise we can feel the adrenaline plus dopamine. Extreme athletes who may be professionals and adrenaline junkies who may just be reckless get big rushes of feelings they will describe as bliss.

Taking care of your health has survival intentions and is supported by the brain. Intentions to eat healthy, sleep, relax, and exercise create a feeling of well being that does become addictive. We get happiness feelings in this process. Unfortunately, overeating stimulates dopamine as well, bu this is to cover up emotional issues we are experiencing.

Caring for people in your circles, contributing to the whole, protecting the ones we love, all are behaviors supporting the circle of life that earn Nature’s reward for ourselves. So buying a BMW, buying nice clothes or jewelry, getting a big boat are activities we may think is happiness and for which we might strive, but they are outside the necessary parameters for sustaining happiness. How often can you buy a boat? We become habituated to owning it and the buzz can die.

Create a lifestyle with happiness behaviors. You don’t have to wait for events. Happiness is the process. We get stimulated for our intentions and activity. The rewards can be happiness chemicals supporting and praising us for these survival perpetuating activities.

It can be so simple and we make it so hard and elusive. This is why surveys have shown people without money can be as happy or happier than people with money. It isn’t the money that sustains happiness. The money allows us to buy happiness on a daily basis, but sometimes that takes great sacrifice of our nervous systems and maybe our souls.

Lifestyle Posts:

Lifestyle Determines Our Health

How Lifestyle Leads to Happiness

Lifestyle Changes for Productivity

Making Gratitude a Primary Goal

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Happiness is more achievable than most people realize. It is not as complicated was we seem to learn when we are young. We can have it right away without first achieving some life goal. Learn more Available on Amazon as E-Book for $2.99 or Paperback for $6.95

Read my new book Self-Leadership. It is about time management and how to create a life that is meaningful to you and will make you more productive and employable at the same time. Available on Amazon. E-Book for $2.99. Paperback for $6.95