We constantly strive for this wonderful thing called happiness. From an early age we are taught that hard work leads to success and success leads to money and money leads to happiness – that pot full of gold at the end of the rainbow! We spend so much of our lives working ourselves so hard in the belief that it will, eventually, hopefully, bring us some happiness.
But there is a fundamental flaw in this thinking. The results of over 200 studies on every area of our lives, including marriage, health, friendship, creativity, and in particular our jobs, and businesses, show that we’ve got it the wrong way around.
The researchers found that happiness causes success – not the other way round. True success is only achieved by those who are already happy. Happiness does not come from success: happiness creates success. What we should be striving for is happiness because then the success will follow.
The Science Behind Happiness and Success
Two important parts to our brains show us how this works.
First there is our intellectual brain. This is the bit we don’t share with other animals, the bit that means we can invent iPhones, planes, cars, go to space, be creative, write music – all those amazing things that make us human. All those things that make us successful.
The intellectual brain stores all the skills and experiences we’ve had in our lives, like a vast library. We can access it at any time to help us make decisions, come up with solutions, put forward persuasive arguments, learn and perfect new skills, in short – be successful. This bit of our brain has been key to the human species not just surviving, but thriving.
The happiness rewards
We did this by evolving a reward system. Our caveman ancestors knew that providing food for himself and his family was a good thing because he was rewarded. He knew being part of a tribe was better than being alone because he was rewarded for social interaction. The reward was the release of chemicals into his brain that made him feel happy. It gave him a sense of achievement and motivation to carry out the task again, which not only kept him alive but was the fundamental driver behind the success of our species.
That reward system is still in place today when we are doing all those great things that help us be a better species – acting positively, interacting positively and thinking positively. Our brain releases the feel-good happiness hormones serotonin and dopamine. These chemicals enhance the learning centers of our brain, helping us to organise new information, keep that information in our brains for longer and retrieve it faster later on. They help us to sustain more neural connections, allowing us to think faster and more creatively. We become more skilled at complex analysis and problem solving and come up with new ways of doing things.
When we are happy we have access to the part of our brain that helps us be more successful. Our bodies are flooded with serotonin and dopamine, making us happy, coping, motivated people. We feel encouraged to do similar actions again. We are functioning from our intellectual minds where we can access all our resources, enabling us to be the best we possibly can.
The primitive brain
The primitive brain also has an impact on our happiness and success. This evolved just to keep us alive, not to evolve and progress. It’s our fight or flight response. There aren’t many lions or woolly mammoths around these days so you’d think we don’t need to use it that often. Unfortunately our brain doesn’t know the difference between stress caused by being chased by a lion and stress caused by a difficult work meeting or money worries. As our anxiety levels rise due to stressful lifestyles, our primitive brain takes over.
The average emotional age of this bit of our brain is 4-5 years old, so it’s more likely to have a tantrum than come up with an intelligent suggestion. It’s designed to keep us alive so it’s always going to look at the worse-case scenario for each situation – the primitive brain is a really negative place to be. It floods our system with cortisol, our stress hormone. This makes our hearts race faster and increases our blood pressure, so we can run away from the scary lion quicker. It even dilates our pupils so we can see a clear line of escape better in the dark.
The cortisol also knocks out our serotonin and dopamine. When our primitive brain takes over we can’t access all our resources, we have an emotional age of about 4 and we lose all our lovely feel-good hormones. It’s not a great place to be and success or happiness isn’t going to come naturally.
Our brains are wired to look for danger and therefore pay more attention to the negative unpleasant things to help us learn how to avoid or overcome them. Our primitive brain is constantly pulling us towards negative thinking. The more we think negatively the more anxious we become and then the primitive brain takes over and we’re back to being 4 years old again.
Using our brain to reach happiness and success
But this is where the other brilliant thing about the brain kicks in. Our brains are not hard wired – we can change the neural pathways by being more aware of our own thought processes. By practicing and instilling positive behaviour patterns, we can continue releasing lots of lovely serotonin and dopamine to keep us in our intellectual brains.
Even the smallest shot of positivity can give someone a serious competitive edge. The bottom line is: when we are happy, when our mindset and mood are positive, we are smarter, more motivated and therefore more successful. We should all be striving for more happiness in our lives.
It takes practice to master any new skill, including training your brain to be happy. Hypnotherapy can help in literally rewiring your brain to be more optimistic, more positive and more grateful. It can help you access all the amazing resources you have that make you you, that will make you more happy and successful.
See our Top Tips for a Happy Brain to find out how simple these processes can be.
If you would like to explore how hypnotherapy can help you gain a positive mindset and achieve greater success, get in touch to book your FREE initial consultation.
About the Author: Caroline Prout is based in our Thrapston clinic in rural East Northamptonshire. Caroline chose to retrain as a hypnotherapist after her own anxiety led to physical health problems and a diagnosis of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. “One of the things that helped me the most in my recovery was understanding how our brains work and why that can have such a huge impact on our wellbeing, both physical and mental and this is something I now share with all my clients”. Using her own experiences and training Caroline specialises in helping people overcome anxiety and chronic conditions such as CFS, Fibromyalgia and other auto-immune conditions.
