The truth about happiness

Video Transcript

Happiness is an effect, not something to be attained. 

This is why my definition of Collateral Happiness is this: it’s an effect of inner joy and fulfilment created by embracing discomfort, overcoming struggle and applying discipline which creates an outward ripple effect of happiness.   
Today I want to explain in detail what happiness means to me. 

First off, happiness is like a camera.
We all know how to use a camera, but few of us actually know how it specifically works.  It’s really a sophisticated marvel that we take for granted. All we need to know is how to click a button and a picture will appear. We don’t need to know what happens between the click and the picture appearing to have a beautiful photo because Someone has done that for us.  

Now all is fine,
that is until the camera breaks. 
Once broken, we flail in anger or disappointment but we never take the time to fix it because we think it’s too complex to understand and not worth our time. Instead we go buy a new camera and toss the old one out. We rarely take the time to get it fixed, and even rarer, learn how to fix it ourselves.  

Many of us apply this logic to happiness. We try to buy, borrow or steal happiness once it becomes broken, but the effect is temporary, artificial and external. For example, instead of fixing unhappiness, we overeat, excessively shop, drink, compulsively check our phone, for example.

But Humans aren't cameras. 
The body can't be bought or deceived.  

It’s the one arena of life that we have to intimately understand and fix before we are rewarded with feelings of true happiness. It means we have to find someone to help us to understand it, so we are then able to address it ourselves.  Metaphorically speaking, we need to get someone to teach us how the camera works so we can fix it ourselves.

Let me begin to teach you how happiness works by explaining a conceptual idea the best I can within the limitations of language. 
Happiness is felt as an effect of finding an equilibrium between pain and pleasure. 

When we sense pain, the body is triggered to balance it with pleasure to find equilibrium and harmony. 

Now Pain can come in all forms – anger, frustration, sadness, humiliation, or boredom to list a few.

Pleasure also comes in many forms – eating, drinking, shopping, or texting, to list a few.

Now what most of us aren’t aware of is that for continued growth and fulfilment, and feelings of happiness, this equilibrium between pain and pleasure is not static. It ebbs and flows.

Without understanding this, many of us defy this logic. We instead, fight growth and change, and attempt to keep things the same. 

Think of when you hear yourself or your friends say, I feel happy now, but it’s only a matter of time before something bad happens again. 

We train ourselves to dread and anticipate the pain as bad rather than appreciating it as an ebb and flow within the spiritual law of balance. 

The point of life is not to remain comfortable but to ebb and flow between comfort and discomfort. When we embrace and appreciate this spiritual law of balance as part of our existence, we live in peace. 

Why this becomes complex , confusing, and counterintuitive is because as humans we have two conflicting needs: 

the need for growth and the need for comfort and safety. 

In order to grow we will experience pain and discomfort when stepping outside our 'comfort' zones, thus the term comfort zone. When we do this, it negates our need to feel safe and comfortable, and without understanding these conflicting needs, we may self-sabotage to get back to feeling comfortable again. 

Therefore, we can’t maintain one state indefinitely. If we stay 'comfortable' too long, we stagnate becoming anxious and jittery, and if we stay 'uncomfortable' too long, we become anxious and stressed. 

Anxiety is that feeling we get when we are out of balance with our intuition and authentic self.. 

To live in harmony, we must learn how to ebb and flow between the pain and pleasure and remain connected to our intuition and authentic self. 
  
So if you’ve been thinking there is something wrong with you because you often experience this internal conflict, like when your brain says I know I need to eat healthy, exercise, or speak in public (which is growing) 

but I’d rather eat fast food, watch TV, and avoid public speaking  (which is staying comfortable), 
I want to assure you that there isn’t anything wrong with you. It’s just that as humans we have to learn how to balance comfort and discomfort or pleasure and pain. 

And the only way to find balance, In order to sustain the effect of inner happiness, is to lose balance. 

To paint a picture, think of a pendulum.
 
Happiness is understanding and appreciating the ebb and flow of pain and pleasure. We experience inner happiness and joy as the awareness of seeking equilibrium between pain and pleasure. The body is designed to seek homeostasis. 

To grow our sense of self and fulfill our need of growth, the pendulum swings farther out toward the pain polarity outside our comfort zone. The result is a feeling of increased pain, and balance is lost within the pendulum. 

(However we can still remain in a state of inner happiness despite feeling pain if we listen and address the pain rather than ignore it.)

Balance is restored when pleasure is obtained to equalize it. This means that our state of balance or happiness is always moving within the pendulum. It does not nor should it be expected to remain static. The key is to use favourable means of pleasure.

When we overcome the pain, rather than self-sabotage, our sense of self grows and we develop a new comfort zone. 

Happiness is allowing that natural rhythm of pain and pleasure to ebb and flow towards equilibrium. Unhappiness results when we resist it. 

To provide an example, imagine that you get into an argument with someone. In the heat of the argument, you feel anger as your pain. After a prolonged period, your body will seek homeostasis, and trigger you to find pleasure to offset this state. You may respond in an unhealthy, unfavorable way by yelling and insulting, or even byovereating, and drinking too much. 

Or you could respond in a healthy, favorable way by self-reflecting in a journal, going to a yoga class, 

talking it through with a reliable friend, or drinking a healthy elixir. 

There is no right or wrong response...only cause and effect. You have the freedom to choose your response but what you can’t choose is to alter the spiritual law of balance between pain and pleasure. This law is governed by nature just as the law of gravity is. 

To paint another picture of a simpler example, imagine that you had the a terrible day at work and you are feeling the weight of the world on your shoulders. You then come home to find the house in a mess and you have fight with your spouse. 

At this moment and in this pain, the only thing getting you through to bedtime is knowing there's a huge slice of pizza and a bag of chocolates waiting for you. When you finally sit down with the pizza and the chocolates, you 'savor' the first few bites and instant pleasure enters your body. 

You keep eating but once you finish the pizza and get about half way through a bag of chocolates it doesn’t feel as pleasurable anymore. 

But you commit to finishing because you don’t want to waste any of it. By the time you get to your last bite, you almost look at the chocolate in disgust because that pleasure has swung back to pain now. 

You feel the pain of a full stomach because your body is telling you to stop.  You managed to swing from pain to pleasure back to pain.

Happiness is a dynamic state which ebbs and flows like this. As long as we work to maintain equilibrium, the effect is that we feel balance, harmony and joy.  

When we don't live in connection to our authentic selves, or when we perpetually live in the pain without making changes, the equilibrium is thrown off and the result is unhappiness.  

This is why we have to embrace pain and discomfort, overcome struggle and apply discipline as in my definition of collateral happiness so the effect of inner joy and fulfillment is created.  

We use pain as a call to action and opportunity to learn, not as something to perpetually punish ourselves with. When we overcome pain and learn from it, that intrinsic reward we get equalizes our center of balance. 

The body is designed so that when you put in effort and do something difficult, you are rewarded with feelings of pleasure once you complete the task. 

The problem is that in our instant gratification world, we try to defy this balance with artificial and external means to get to the pleasure faster.  Instead of putting in effort and overcoming difficulty, we overeat or drink in order to trick the body into releasing pleasure hormones. 

If we then keep repeating this cycle and procrastinate dealing with the cause of pain, we never get to that sense of reward of overcoming something difficult. Instead We 'stuff' it down and then keep feeling pain each time it resurfaces. 

In life, the intention is to learn and grow from this pain, not to avoid it and only seek pleasure. 

True inner happiness comes from the intrinsic reward of triumphing something painful and difficult. They key is to have perseverance and appreciation of overcoming struggle so that we can get to that feeling of intrinsic reward, rather than interrupting and stalling the learning process with artificial, temporary or external means of pleasure. 

We really need to embrace the virtue of patience required for conquering something difficult. 

This can be challenging because the defiance of patience is amplified in our current world that is driven by the subconscious beliefs of instant gratification. 

It is my mission to help people get back to appreciating that humans are complex, require time, need to put forth effort, and must value intrinsic reward to create inner happiness. 

I realize that this concept of happiness can be super confusing and overwhelming so please re-watch this video a few times until it absorbs in. Remember just like the camera, we have to understand it and then be able to fix it ourselves. We can’t buy it. Creating happiness is very challenging if we do not understand it. 

For me until I understood it and the steps within it, I constantly beat myself up thinking there was something seriously wrong with me. However, I finally learned, that as a human, there was nothing wrong with me, I just didn’t understand how to operate the equipment so to say.  

In my next video, I will explain the effects of collateral happiness. So please Stay tuned for that.