True happiness comes from living a daily life that aligns with your values.
What interferes with happiness is our brain's mindless urges to feel safe and comfortable overriding our best intentions.
Being happy in a sustained, deep way requires taking a Wise, Whole-Brain approach to your daily life.
You need to treat your Brain Stem with respect and create a daily life in which you feel safe and secure. You need to get curious about all ways in which you may make yourself feel unsafe unnecessarily. You need to change your habit of focusing on the negative excessively, making yourself exhausted and stressed unnecessarily, and worrying about threats that aren't real.
You need to treat your Limbic System with respect and create a daily life in which you feel rewarded, satisfied, and comfortable. You need to use your natural strengths and take in a sense of accomplishment when you make good things happen. You need to rest and relax and pursue nourishing pleasure. You need to get release yourself from the habits that bring you instant gratification but lead to a vicious cycle of dissatisfaction, like compulsive eating, internet use, over-working.
When you are treating your Whole Brain with respect, by meeting it's core needs for safety and satisfaction, it will be soothed, calmed, and responsive rather than agitated, impulsive and reactive.
When your brain stops being so reactive, you can start spending more time aligned with your values.
When you spend more time aligned with your values, you feel really really good about how you're living your life.
With love and optimism,
Dr. J