Remember Keanu Reeves in the Matrix films? Along with millions of other humans, he grew up in a pod as he was farmed by artificial intelligence. Initially the machines created what they thought was a paradise for humans, a fake world where happiness was the ideal, but they found humans simply died off.
They got it right when they created a fake world that also had suffering and frustration included, which, for an American block buster movie, showed a great deal of insight.
We shouldn’t be happy all the time
According to evolution, happiness developed as part of ensuring we would enjoy doing the things that helped us survive as a species. It’s no surprise then, that we get such a kick from sex, eating and bonding together in groups.
However, suffering, or lack of happiness, is equally important. If we spent all day on the savannah having sex, we would have had very sore gentitals, and been easy targets for those sabre tooth tigers. If we spent all day eating around the camp fire, then ditto – there’d be little chance of outrunning that sabre tooth tiger lugging all that fat around. The key is that we didn’t evolve to be permanently happy, as depression and other negative emotions indicate we aren’t doing something right and need to change in some way.
Bad feelings as warning signs
How can this desire for permanent happiness be a bad thing? Let’s assume that most of the time, negative emotions such as depression and anxiety are meant to be sign posts that something is wrong in our lives – a destructive relationship, social isolation, poor health, low self-esteem or a job you hate. Instead of trying to set things right, we try to dull the pain and hang on to happiness through things like prescription medications, drinking, or other recreational drugs. While prescription medications can be useful in some situations, the fact still remains that we often look for short cuts to happiness, and avoid dealing with the causes of negative emotions.
It’s just a chemical thing
Our brain has around a billion neurons in it. These connect up with each other in many different ways, and little jolts of electricity fire away between them as we think, sleep, walk, talk and take the rubbish out. At a basic level, happiness is determined by how well all these little electric impulses are firing away. This is mainly regulated by two key chemicals in our brain – dopamine and endorphins.
Dopamine is a chemical that goes to the connections between neurons and helps those electric impulses to jump across the gap. It does a very good job of this in areas of the brain responsible for emotions and memories so the outcome is happiness. Not surprisingly, many recreational drugs temporarily boost levels of dopamine.
Endorphins are a kind of opioid, which means they are chemically similar to heroin, morphine, opium and pethidine. While dopamine encourages electrical messages between neurons that create pleasure, endorphins work differently – they discourage those signals that are pain signals.
For example, marathon runners find that endorphins flood their system and suppress feelings of pain and exhaustion, resulting in the ‘high’ that many runners enjoy. Again, some recreational drugs mimic this so heroin can produce an intense high as all negative emotions are temporarily suppressed in the brain. Other drugs, notably nicotine and alcohol, affect both dopamine and endorphins.
A potential problem with drugs
As mentioned, the brain has evolved a series of checks and balances to
make sure we don’t spend the entire day making love or stuffing our
face with chocolate, or even worse, both at the same time (unless that happens
to turn you on). The same applies with drugs, whether they be legal ones
such as alcohol and cigarettes, or illegal ones such as ecstasy, ice or
marijuana.
In physics, there is a rule which states that any force is met with an equal
and opposite reaction.
The same roughly holds true with the brain. Each time we artificially manipulate our happiness levels with drugs, our brain seeks to counter this to keep a balance. For example, stimulating the brain with amphetamines like ice will usually lead to a corresponding emotional flatness after the effects wear off. With regular use, the brain adjusts itself to work normally in the presence of a foreign drug. This is why the regular drinker or smoker finds that the drug has less and less effect over time, so more is needed to get drunk or feel that buzz from a cigarette.
The problems really start when heavy use of a drug is stopped abruptly. The brain has altered its chemistry to stop the effects of the drug – now the opposite reaction sets in, and withdrawals occur. The effects tend to be the opposite of whatever effect the drug had. If it stimulated the brain, the central nervous system will now be in a depressed state until a new balance is found. If it was a depressant drug like alcohol or smack, the brain will now be in a stimulated state until it adjusts to life without the drug. Dependency sets in as our brains crave the drug simply to feel normal – the way we did before we got dependent on the drug.
Our brain has evolved over millions of years to ensure our survival by balancing our need to eat, reproduce and look out for each other. If we are into legal or illegal drugs, it pays to do so in a balanced way, and control our level of use to ensure it increases our happiness in the long run.
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