The difference between happiness and pleasure.
Warning: Psychiatry can be hazardous:
Happiness and pleasure can often be confused but they draw the line on mental health.
Pleasure is often mistaken for happiness because of the immediate feelings during a pleasurable experience like drinking alcohol, casual sex or gambling. These experiences may put you on a high but afterwards you may often feel sick, used, or have no life savings left.
Alcohol ‘the most common pleasure drug in the world’ although labelled as a depressive drug is often approached with the opposite goal – to lose all inhibitions and be ‘happy’. People may feel happy at the time but afterwards when this feeling is gone they feel depressed and must face the consequences of losing their inhibitions.
People with addictions depend on their gambling, drinking or sex to feel pleasure which they mistake for happiness. They use these addictions to replace relationships which they do not think they need in order to be happy.
Behind the 8-Ball
Often when a gambler is gambling it is the only time that he/she seems alive or happy, so people encourage it. But then he/she begins to drift away from their relationships, deceive their friends and family and often steal to in order to pay off their debts or even gamble.
Their body is there but their mind is not, this is not happiness it is momentary pleasure.
Everything Bad is Good for You
Technology i would say is a false sense of happiness, it is animage and an image has gone, the moment is over, the experience is as real as any other but often it is not in this true moment, unless it is live.
‘The dirty little secret of gaming is how much time you spend not having fun.’
What Defines Happiness?
Your mood affects how you perceive things so if you are happy you are more likely to feel safe and more confident where as if you are in a bad mood life seems a lot more depressing and meaningless.
Moods always change from being bad to good quite quickly as we adapt to our situations the only exceptions being the loss of a loved one or anxiety from trauma (such as rape or military combat). (Psychology 9th Edition)
-
-- Feel-good Do-good study: ‘When we feel happy we more often help others’
Many studies showed that after a mood-boosting experience like getting a grade in a test or finding some money makes people more inclined to help other people around them by giving to charity, volunteering time or any other good deed. ---
close relationships, sleeping well, exercise and engaging your mind.
Studies have shown that people in wealthier countries are happier because they are able to provide themselves and their families with the needs to survive and be healthy. ( Psychology 9th Edition)
Happiness is often defined by love, wealth and health. Yet it is common knowledge that any of these alone are not enough and will not bring happiness in their own right, they may help enhance the experience.
It is said that if you are able to problem solve, you’re less likely to blame or vent, and more able to feel contentment. Here Education can help us to be more happy as we can be more reflective and gain emotional intelligence.
Practicing gratitude is a well-used term these days, what does it mean, does it make us more happy?
Is it suggesting we should be grateful, should we practice being grateful or does it simply mean, be grateful for what you have?
My understanding is we should be conscious of what we have, but this is not always easy if we as humans are suffering and or stuck in trauma body or mind, we may have a fog which hides the idea of ease and being grateful.
To be truly grateful we need clear space within ourselves to be able to feel and in this day and age of avoidant activities which take us away from being able to get in touch with our true feelings.
If someone is traumatised from the early years around attachment, they often do not learn to feel the opposite of gratitude, dread. These good feelings, that come with gratitude, can be taken away or they could be punished for feeling anything, any form of emotion/'weakness'.
If the parent is unable to regulate themselves and find a sensitive child to be a nuisance or uncomfortable for them, they can aim their shame feelings at the child, they can be known to cause punitive damage to the child, stopping them from feeling, because they are scared to feel, they might feel gratitude is selfish or not valuable also not in reach!
Is Being Young and Gorgeous Going to Make you Happy?
‘Being young and physically attractive has little or no bearing on happiness., not only did being young fail to contribute to happiness, but adults grew steadily happier as they moved into and through middle age’. Richard Easterlin in 2006 in the Journal of Economic Psychology
Sweetheart, You Really Make me Happy
Love – ‘romantic relationships constitute an important part of people’s lives.’
‘Involvement in and the quality of romantic relationships is an essential correlate of well-being. [happiness].’ Nathan W. Hudson, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 2020.
Research has shown that many people search for and experience features like companionship, affection and intimacy in romantic relationships which all add to happiness.
Love is often seen as something that will bring happiness.
Well as we all know love is a pure emotion but we as humans put many labels and ideas into the idea of what our love is.
Love has become something which we have turned into a commodity it has become something that has been turned into a fantasy and something that we should seem to try to fully intellectually understand.
Love is something that comes from within us, to truly love, do we need to feel love for ourselves?
Love is a pure emotion we are all born with, it constitutes, safety, connection, being seen and heard just as we are, unconditionally and purely for who we bring forward. I have wondered, If we don't practice self understanding and love how do we truly know who we bring forward. Our life experiences then determine how we might feel about ourselves, so much of this depends on generations of either a lack or a depth of understanding of what unconditional love is, surely.
This is not about blaming parents back through the generations it is about understanding that generational patterns move forward through our learnt body experience, we then intellectualise that and, hay presto! we have our own warped, clear or pure idea of what love is!
This continues as we go on having these learnt body experiences on how to show love to ourselves or others. Thats why it gets messy and that's why I dont think its a straight answer on whether love can make us happy.
I believe as many others do that our so called 'blueprint', life map, is already laid out through generations of suffering, familial patterns and the human experience which tends to involve a fair bit of suffering as we live in a complex world full of human ideals and beliefs brought forward and often turn into Chinese whispers or they can become moulded into the individual or groups felt sense of being, such as anger , generational undealt-with anger, does much damage to the purity of true love and safety.
I believe if we saw happiness as a goal rather than a given right we might all work harder at finding a way back to our heart- felt self.
Do relationships make us happier, we all know the answer to that one, they appear to bring happiness and sadness and many other feelings. It is known being in a healthy loving relationship helps us to feel less stressed.
To have a partner can make us feel happy, humans are team players, we need connection, so the feeling of being part of something with someone, can make us happy.
It is said people in a healthy relationship, tend to influence each other in positive ways.
It is also said that men are more likely to suffer with their health and even die younger if they are not in a relationship and live alone. https://www.yourtango.com
It is thought when we are in love, we experience less stress within ourselves.
My thoughts on happiness are that we need to go within to clear away our own suffering to travel back to that pure heart we are all born with to gain insight into our own hearts feel pure love.