The Secret to Never Ending Happiness

This is the 5th part in my series, The Secret to Never Ending Happiness. If you are here for the first time, please make sure to check out the part 1, part 2, part 3 and part 4 and then come back here. Now without further ado, let’s get into it straightaway. The above diagram is a representation of everything that we have learnt in the first 4 blogs. The fp boxes represent the factors in life that affect the state of mind positively and the fn boxes represent the negatively affecting factors. All of these factors are different for different people. The y-axis in the diagram represents a spectrum of emotions we experience. Each factor is placed based on how it affects the state of mind in the absence of other factors. Think of all the arrows that go from the mind to the factors like the factors are pulling the mind towards the emotion they are in. The labellings wp1…wpn and wn1…wnn are the weights or kind of the force by which these factors pull the mind to their emotion. These weights are variable. All these factors are everything we have ever experienced in life. Every little and every large thing. These factors contain all our fears, all our abilities, all our success, all our failures, all our biases and everything you can possibly think of. It includes small annoying things like your barber spoiling your hairstyle, small happiness like the food being tasty, extreme happiness like becoming a parent for the first time. The diagram here is a very simplified version of what I am trying to explain and not all emotions are covered here but you get the point. Our state of mind at any point in time is determined by a weighted average of all these factors. ...

This is the 4th part in my series, The Secret to Never Ending Happiness. If you are here for the first time, please make sure to check out the part 1, part 2 and part 3 and then come back here. Let’s continue the discussion as promised, let’s talk about the the biggest pleasures you experience in life. Let’s take an example of arguably the biggest happiness a person experiences in their whole lifetime, the birth of their child. Now you would say how would the state of mind affect the person’s ability to be happy in a scenario like that. There is no way a person can’t be happy on the birth of their child. ...

This is the 3rd part in my series, The Secret to Never Ending Happiness. If you are here for the first time, please make sure to check out the part 1 and part 2 and then come back here. Let’s continue the discussion as promised, let’s talk about the really small pleasures that you experience in life. For some time, let’s forget the placebo effect and focus on the state of mind. Let’s consider a situation where you are eating your favourite chocolate. It is a delightful experience, you are enjoying the chocolate. Is this a happiness? Yes. Would you say this kind of happiness has nothing to do with the state of mind? The type of happiness we talked about earlier was naturally very easy to relate with the state of mind, but this one is a bit difficult. You would say who thinks so much while eating a chocolate. We eat it, we enjoy it, and we forget about it. And yes, you are absolutely correct. But within the next few minutes, I will prove it to you that it is the state of mind and nothing else in this situation as well that makes you feel happy. ...

This is the 2nd part in my series, The Secret to Never Ending Happiness. If you are here for the first time, please make sure to check out the part 1 and then come back here. At the end of part 1, we discussed about one kind of happiness, the happiness of bouncing back from all odds and we compared it to the placebo effect. We took the analogy of a depression patient in case of placebo effect and a cricketer in case of the happiness of bouncing back. Where the cricketer corresponds to the patient, the depression corresponds to lack of form. Medication given in placebo effect corresponds to the mental therapy that the cricketer took. And we concluded that overall as a process, this was quite similar to placebo effect. Overall it was the same thing, it is all about conditioning your mind to believe that the situation you are in is curable. Once you are able to successfully condition your mind, irrespective of the method you take to condition your mind, which in case of placebo was a fake medicine, and in case of cricket was therapy and time away, happiness is guaranteed. ...

Let me directly break this to you. The secret to never ending happiness can be understood by the concept of the placebo effect. Yes! You read it right. I can already hear you scream at your screen that what the hell am I talking about! How can happiness be a placebo effect. Yes, I know you have experienced happiness for real, it is not fake like the placebo effect. Just hear me out once. It is not as direct as you think ...