Happiness and Its Absence

Happiness and Its Absence

Nature is hardly the whole story regarding happiness, of course. Psychologist Martin Seligman says that set ranges are only part of the story – that a great deal of happiness includes environmental factors and choices that are completely under your control.

What research says makes you happy can be summarized in two sentences: Relationships make you happy. Money does not. One of the most potent surefire ways to sustain happiness in your life has to do with relating to other people – for example, cultivating and maintaining lots of friends. The more friends you have in your life, and the more you interact with them, the happier you are statistically likely to be.

Another aspect that science knows about making people happy is the amount of time people spend seeking out how to make other people happy. One of the greatest predictors of happiness turns out to be how outwardly focused you are on the needs of others, including volunteering and doing charity work. People who give out of the abundance of their heart are at lower risk for depression. They seem to receive as much as they give.

One counterintuitive idea concerns what does not make you happy: money. Pas a certain amount of income – enough to keep you our of poverty – more money doesn't make you statistically much happier. Millionaires are not substantially happier than even the lower middle class.

The absence of happiness is depression. Depression is serious; it can be life threatening. At its core, depression is an unusually negative reaction life. But it's not just feelings of being blue, which might occur, for example, after a divorce. And it's not just bereavement, which might occur, for example, after a death. Those are all normal reactions to life's hard events – not depression.

Depression involves a profound change in mood that explicitly affects a person's ability to function. There is often a chronic hopelessness associated with it. This type of hopelessness, which is described by an idea called learned helplessness theory, is usually accompanied by other changes in behaviors.

Sometimes, stress is our enemy. Some other times, stress responses are our evolutionary friends. Photo by Elena.

If you go down the depression road, you not only feel hopeless, but you also feel different. Your sleep habits often change; you either start getting too much or not enough. Your eating habits become altered. You lose the ability to focus and to make decisions. You quit enjoying things that used to bring you a tremendous amount of happiness. A hallmark is a loss of interest in sex.

Depression affects many people. About 17 percent of all Americans will experience it at some time in their lives. It also skews in the direction of gender. Upward of about 25 percent of all females experience depression (that statistic is an overall lifetime risk); upward of about 10 percent of all males will.

Depression also afflicts people in different ways. About 40 percent of anybody who suffers a major depressive illness do so exactly once, recover from it, and never get it again. About 50 percent of people who suffer a major depressive illness don't get that luxury: It will recur again after a period of recovery. About 10 percent of the people get depressed and never recover. This is called chronic depression.

There is a severity issue to contend with as well. Some people get severely depressed. Some people don't experience depression but deal regularly with something called dysthymia, which is a low-level depression that tends to stay with you for years. You wake up in the morning and are immediately persuaded that life sucks, and that low-level blue mood follows you throughout the day.

Dysthymia is not as intense as depression, but it is a mood disorder. And it's not all that uncommon. About 2.5 percent of all Americans will suffer from dysthymia at some point in their lives.

Both depression and dysthymia are opposites of happiness. The interesting thing about depression is that these days it is very treatable. Taking advantage of mental health services if you are depressed is about the smartest thing you can do.

The biological origins of depression have been under investigation for decades, but it has yielded its secrets only grudgingly. We know that some types of depression involve an aberrant balance in the concentrations of neurotransmitters between specific neuronal circuits – specifically, their reuptake, which is where one neuron spits out a bevy of neurotransmitters to its neighbor during signal transfer. 

Reuptake is recycling. It's the process whereby neurotransmitters return to their origin. A change in the balance of this trafficking is thought to undergird the disorder. Depression is often called a chemical imbalance, in part because of this insight.

Progress is certainly being made. We've tried to learn about depression by examining closely the molecular mechanisms of the of the most prescribed classes of drugs: antidepressants. There are many kinds of antidepressants. One of the most popular classes of antidepressants is selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs). They appear to be inhibiting the reuptake process and, in so doing, make some people's moods substantially better.

There are many mysteries regarding what antidepressants may or may not reveal about the disorder. First, many antidepressants take a long time to exert their therapeutic effects. Six weeks is not unusual. Second, they don't work for everybody. A person often has to go through several antidepressant medications, or several concentrations of a single medication, before he or she arrives at an effective dose.

(From Your Best Brain, Course Guidebook, by Professor John J. Medina).

There are many practices known to reduce stress in the vast majority of people, from deep-breathing exercises to progressive muscle relaxation. Photo by Elena.