Alex Korb is a postdoctoral researcher in neuroscience at UCLA and the author of The Upward Spiral: Using Neuroscience to Reverse the Course of Depression. We already mentioned him in 5 rituals to reverse depression, according to neuroscience.
For Korb, the brain isn’t always all that clever. Let’s say it sometimes goes at its own pace. If you’ve ever felt a bit sad for no reason, or not as happy as you should be, there may be a simple explanation.
Sometimes our brain isn’t sure how it feels, so it “goes looking for clues” in a process Korb calls biofeedback: basically, it checks the information coming from your own body to decide whether or not to grant you a state of happiness.
1. The brain works in two directions
Sometimes you feel happy and that makes you smile. But it also works the other way around: when you smile, your brain notices and makes you feel happier. Put more simply:
“Happiness makes you smile, but a smile also makes you happy (even if you don’t feel happy at that moment).”
That’s why, even if you’re having a bad day or woke up feeling down, you shouldn’t stop smiling. According to neuroscience, the brain associates a frown with a negative emotion and a smile with a positive one, even if you aren’t actually feeling that emotion at the time.
Have you ever walked down the street with the sun in your face and noticed you were in a worse mood? According to neuroscience, your bad mood isn’t caused by the glare itself, but by your brain detecting your frown and concluding on its own that it must be in a bad mood.
It’s like the tricks for overcoming fear and anxiety we shared before. If you’re nervous before speaking in public, something as simple as chewing gum will calm your nerves a little, because your brain registers that you’re eating, and nobody stops to eat while running from a lion in the middle of the jungle. So your brain will reduce some of the substances we release in stressful situations.
When you’re nervous and very agitated, you’re also told to breathe slowly and deeply. The reason is simply to tell your brain that you’re breathing in a relaxed way, so it can calm down because there’s no danger (you’re also sending it oxygen).
So when it comes to happiness, just as with self-confidence, the famous advice to fake it till you make it works, because our emotional state has an internal part and an external part.
The internal part depends on our focus, on where we choose to direct our attention: do I want to focus on the many things I have or on the many things I lack? Do I want to focus on all the good things that happened to me today or on those few bad ones? Your emotional state will certainly be different depending on what you decide.
As for the external part, just remember that our mind picks up information from our facial expressions and body language. So if we have a smile on our face and an open, expansive posture, it’s more likely to read that as a positive mood and reward us with dopamine and endorphins (the “happiness hormones”).
2. How do you see the world?
Numerous scientific studies have confirmed that people who have a goal in life are much happier than those who are heading “who knows where”. Call it hope, enthusiasm or a sense of purpose.
Having a goal literally changes the way you see life. In fact, Viktor Frankl explained in his famous book Man’s Search for Meaning that most depressive states come not from stress but from boredom.
Boredom can lead to what’s known as an “existential crisis”, and clearly a person with goals and objectives in life knows why they exist and what their mission or purpose is.
That’s why, when someone says “I don’t even have time to get depressed”, they probably don’t realize how true that expression is from a psychological point of view.
When you feel stressed by life’s challenges, remember what lies behind those obstacles. Even from a neuroscience perspective, focusing on the reward rather than the obstacle gives us a sense of challenge and control and releases dopamine, which makes us feel more motivated. And being motivated about anything is synonymous with happiness.
Losing motivation and lacking goals is what leads us to lose the meaning of our existence, a situation that, if it drags on, can have devastating consequences. So always stay active and have a goal to reach, even a small one.
3. The need to rest and sleep well
Here too, our brain works in two directions. When you’re depressed you may have trouble sleeping, but sleep problems can also make you depressed.
Simply put, when we don’t rest properly, it’s as if our problems were worse than they are, our challenges much bigger and the solutions further out of reach. And in fact, everything stays the same. The only thing that changes is our state of mind for facing the situation, a situation that would seem much simpler if we were full of energy.
Sometimes, when a pile of problems has left us shattered, an effective remedy is to get into bed and rest, for 24 hours if necessary. Just don’t drag this phase out too long, or you could cause the opposite effect.
Sleeping well is happiness, because happy people tend to sleep well.
4. What does neuroscience say about procrastination?
Last week we published two articles about procrastination and how to avoid it, and about the akrasia effect, which explains why we don’t do what we know we should be doing.
When it comes to making decisions and we have several options (doing something productive or wasting time), we should picture our brain as an argument in a meeting where the group is deciding which way to go.
Korb explains that three regions of the brain are involved here, and they compete with one another:
- The prefrontal cortex: which thinks about long-term goals.
- The dorsal striatum: which is rooted in past behavior.
- The nucleus accumbens: the one that calls you to waste time on Facebook, watch TV and so on. It’s your most influential friend, because it usually gets its way with a powerful argument: “Work is boring, but TV and Facebook are fun.”
The good news is that once you decide to make the effort and concentrate on what you need to do, the prefrontal cortex kicks in, and it has the ability to override the other two.
Having a good time right now may seem to give us pleasure (which isn’t always the same as happiness), but not doing something productive leaves us feeling guilty and unhappy soon afterwards.
People who fall victim to procrastination and don’t do what they should tend to be more stressed and less happy.
Featured image: Geoff B Hall, CC0 1.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
