Most people wish for a happy and fulfilled life, but few people achieve this objective. Why is it that so many people enter adolescence with hopes, dreams, and aspirations, only to reach the end of middle age, full of regret, discontent or despair? British Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, reflecting on the typical stages of life, observed, “Youth is a blunder, manhood is a struggle, and old age is a regret.” Why is it that so many of us travel through life making decisions that we live to regret?
We humans are chemical beings who have evolved over millions of years, driven by the wants, desires, and intentions that are stimulated by the neurotransmitters in the our brain. By creating sensations of pleasure and well-being, these “feel-good” chemicals such as dopamine and serotonin drive us to eat, to indulge in sex and to engage in activities that bring us pleasure. These compulsions have evolved and intensified over several million years through a process of natural selection, pruning members of the species who lacked a strong need to engage in sexual activity.
During youth, these neurotransmitters are most intense, flooding throughout our brain, and driving us into behaviors that satisfy our neuron-generated wants. Our only defence against purely hedonistic behavior resides in the prefrontal cortex that is believed to be the location of rational thought, The prefrontal cortex is believed to have evolved in the later stages of the evolution of the human brain and it is usually subordinate to the operation of the dopamine-driven limbic brain. Using rational thinking to override the nagging needs and wants of immediate gratification emanating from the limbic brain requires a substantial self-discipline that usually requires a long time to acquire, because it runs counter to short-term pleasure. (Try explaining to a child why eating all their Halloween candies at one sitting is not a good idea.)
During this first stage of our lives, that Disraeli called “youth,” our inexperience leaves us vulnerable to making poor decisions that may have significant negative consequences throughout the remainder of our lives. Yet it is during this stage that we must make all the important decisions about our health (smoking, alcohol, drugs and diet) our education, our career, our choice of spouse and our personal money management.
In this first of a three-part series on the three dimensions of happiness, we will focus on the first, and most important dimension: good health. When I was a child, my father who had suffered various illnesses throughout life, told me in his Irish brogue, “I’ll tell ya lad; if ye have yer health, you’ve got every’ting.” I listened politely and nodded, but I didn’t believe him, because I had good health and yet I still had lots more things that I wanted.
However, as the decades passed, I saw many people whose lives were encumbered by ill-health, preventing them from participating in sports, traveling, engaging in social activities or merely enjoying a pain-free period long enough to enjoy the little pleasures of life. Some became inmates in hospitals and long-term care facilities, while others traveled with an oxygen tank on wheels as their permanent companion. In some cases, these people were victims of faulty DNA or bad luck, such as a car accident. In many other cases, the ill-health was a consequence of poor health decisions early in life.
During adolescence, we feel a strong compulsion to engage in social activity. (The hormone oxytocin, produced in the hypothalamus, is believed to play the major role in prompting us to bond with others, and in producing a sense of well-being when we are included in a social group. As Darwin, E. O. Wilson, and others suspected, our propensity to join groups is scripted in our DNA.) It is during this phase of our lives, that natural selection has primed us to enter social groups, seek out mates and reproduce. The compulsion to be accepted by our peer group and “fit in” is so great that we are prompted to take up habits that the group regards as “cool.” Smoking, drinking, drugs, excessive risk-taking, tatoos, purple hair, and body piercing emerge as signs of group membership. The negative long-term health effects of some of these practices are disregarded in favor of the immediate rewards associated with group acceptance.
Fortunately, some positive health-building activities such as sports, body-building, and dance are socially enhancing, and those who choose these mechanisms for group membership are likely to enjoy long-term health benefits. However, engaging in such activities requires a level of effort that denies immediate pleasure in favor of eventual gains. Practising football, basketball, hockey or dance skills to reach a high level of competence requires a lot of gruelling practice. Similarly, body-building demands long “grunt-and-push” sessions of high repetitions with medium to heavy weights. In his Encyclopedia of Bodybuilding, Arnold Schwarzenegger said “The brain quits before the body,” meaning that our limbic brains are constantly resisting the depletion of its physical reserve. It takes a strong personal discipline to counter the brain’s resistance.
Adding complexity to our decisions when we are young is the fact that the best choices are usually the ones that are the least attractive because they require restraint, hard work, or intensity of purpose. As chemical beings, we experience joy when we eat sugar, take drugs, engage in sex or drink wine. Since these choices are aligned with the demands of the limbic brain, they require no effort. On the other hand, clean eating and physical activity, bring significant long-term health benefits, but require that the rational brain overrule the limbic brain. Building a happy life begins with acquiring a high level of personal discipline as early as possible. Those with the power to overrule the demands of their limbic brain are much more likely than others to achieve the first and most important dimension of a happy life: good health.
