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
For those who don’t know what a placebo effect is, it is a very widely known phenomenon in clinical psychology. Various tests have shown that if a patient who is suffering from depression, anxiety, fatigue, etc. are given a fake medicine or a fake drug without telling the patient, i.e. the patient thinks that they are being treated with the real medicine. And the results in many of the cases have been on the positive side, the patients have reported reduced depression, stress, fatigue due to the so called “medicine”. Just because they think that they are being treated, they actually start showing healing signs.
Now you would say how is it related to happiness, it is just something used in clinical psychology, isn’t it? Okay let me explain this with a real life example that I myself have experienced. I remember I was in my 2nd or 3rd standard and all my other friends and cousins who were the same age as me had learnt how to ride a bicycle. I was late, I still used to ride the bicycle with the training wheels on and I felt very humiliated every time my parents compared me with my cousins or friends. Even my friends used to mock me because at that time knowing how to ride a bicycle was the “cool” thing for us and I was not able to ride the bicycle no matter how much I tried. I used to be scared everytime my mother would take me to the ground to ride the bicycle. Because it had almost become a norm at that time (at least in my mind), that I won’t be able to drive the bicycle without the training wheels and I’ll fall down and get hurt and come back home crying.
Now one day, my mother told me to take my bicycle with me to the ground. I, as usual, was scared and pleaded her to not leave my bicycle and hold on to it from the back while I try to balance it without the training wheels. She agreed to that. I started pedaling, my mother was holding the bicycle from the back and protecting me from falling. I kept on riding the bicycle for 5 minutes straight. Then I stopped and looked behind. I was surprised to find that my mother was not holding on to the bicycle, I rode the bicycle by myself, I asked my mother how long did I ride it on my own. She said that she had left the cycle after walking 8-10 steps after that I was on my own the whole time. I was so shocked after listening to it. My 8-9 year old brain wasn’t able to comprehend what I had done. I was in awe, but was very happy. Because I knew that there is hope that I will be able to learn how to ride a bicycle.
This was a placebo effect. Here my mother pretending to hold the bicycle was like the fake medicine and I was like a patient going through an illness of not being able to drive a bicycle. This example may seem petty but if we think about it, many of the problems we face in life are so similar to this. In this particular example, it was not my inability to ride a bicycle that was a hurdle for me to learn it, it was my mind. Mind is a funny thing, it plays games with you. It is so difficult to control your mind, to take command of your mind. A student who is not being able to score good marks fails again and again because he or she has completely made up their mind that they can never score good marks, that they are dumb. People who are really successful tend to get carried away by success. Students who are toppers consistently stay toppers because they are confident of their ability of scoring marks. Even in sports, for example in cricket, if a batsman is not scoring runs, he consistently fails to score runs, a batsman who is within the runs, consistently keeps on scoring big runs, there is no question about the ability of the batsman who is not amongst the runs, it is just the state of mind they are in. There are countless examples in each and every phase of life where what state of mind you are in decides whether you will be happy or not.
Now happiness is of multiple types. One could be the really small happiness, let’s say you ate your favourite chocolate, that is a happiness, let’s say you won the employee of the month award, that is a happiness, let’s say you are a to be parent and you hear the news for the first time, that is a happiness. Each of these examples make you happy but the magnitudes are different. One by one in the subsequent blogs of this series, I will explain that irrespective of the magnitude, type or situation, the state of mind is the main factor that decides whether you are happy or not. I will one by one compare each of these kinds of happiness to the placebo effect. First of all, let’s consider the happiness of bouncing back from a position where your mind is just hopeless and then winning, irrespective of your age, field or phase of life. Let’s consider the earlier example of a cricketer who is not scoring runs. The batsman is completely out of wits, and he is going through a very bad phase in his career. What does he do? He takes rest, spends time with family, takes mental therapy, improves his state of mind, comes back fresh, in confidence and ready to score big runs from the first ball. And he does so as well. It is the change in state of mind that led to this happiness.
Someone would argue that although being in a good state of mind leads to happiness, how is it a placebo effect? Placebo effect is about faking the comforting feeling. It is like faking in front of a batsman that he has been scoring 100s from the last 5 games. But that is not how it works right? The batsman knows that he hasn’t scored runs. Yes, that is correct. That is a perfectly valid argument, but are we actually faking that the batsman has scored 100s? Think about it, in the placebo effect, are we actually faking that the patient does not have depression? In this case, that depression is lack of runs. We are not running away from the fact that the batsman is not scoring runs, we need something like a fake medicine that convinces that batsman to actually gain confidence and then let that confidence (or the body itself in case of placebo effect) do the job. Again you might argue that the medicine in placebo effect was fake, here the cricketer is actually working on his mental health. Again, that is a valid argument. But let’s take a step back and think. Aren’t those two the same thing? It is basically conditioning your mind to achieve a purpose. I remember the famous dialogue from the movie 3 idiots, where Aamir Khan says “Aal izz well”, and explains the logic behind it, it is not about solving the problem, it is about convincing your mind that you will be able to solve it. Although the way it is achieved is different, it is exactly the same thing. Happiness in case of bouncing back from a situation is basically the placebo effect. This kind of happiness is the easiest to compare with placebo effect and has the most direct relationship. In the subsequent blogs, we will get into some of the more complicated ones that are kind of difficult to relate to a placebo.
But this raises a serious concern. If happiness is all about mindset, then let’s consider an example where this could go wrong. If let’s say a person isn’t getting a job, and he says that he is happy with his life right now and does not need a job. He is satisfied with his life and lacks the hunger to crack an interview and get into a job. Do you think that’s okay? Do you think convincing your mind to be satisfied with the adverse situation of being jobless helping the person here? I don’t think so! Do check out the part 2 of this blog to know the answer to this, hope you enjoyed this one!