Welcome to Mind Voyage everyone who joined since our last article 🎉
My aim is to share with you a consistent dose of mind-enhancing content.
If you haven’t already, subscribe here to level up:
I’ve written about happiness and depression before.
I constantly think about this topic because it fluctuates so much in my life. There’s evidence to suggest that depression is partly genetic and this makes sense because my father also suffers from it too.
But recently, rather than accepting depression as a constant part of my life, I’ve started to consciously change it.
Being happy is something we should all seek. It’s the most important thing you can do for yourself.
My argument for this is that in the future, there's a non-zero chance that we can eliminate aging and death.
In this reality, the major threat to your well-being becomes your state of mind. You can become a happy immortal or a depressed one.
This post will cover the top six routines I have in place to pull my emotional state towards happiness.
1. Practice Gratitude
I’ve had a gratitude journal since 2020.
With the Covid pandemic in full steam, 2020 was a difficult time for many people. The strange thing is that it’s exactly at these very difficult times—when you think you have nothing to be grateful for—that you need to consciously find things to be grateful for.
I’m a big fan of Rick and Morty and in one of the episodes, an alternate version of Rick comments:
“I say, appreciate the life you have. Because it could always...be worse.“
However bad your life is someone else has it 10x worse. There’s truly no limit on how terrible things can get so always be grateful.
Keeping a gratitude journal helps enforce this habit. I use the awesome Gratitude App for this. I love it because you can set daily prompts to remind you to note things you’re grateful for.
You can be grateful for having a hot shower or kind co-workers. Eventually you’ll start to notice even the smallest things to be happy about.
2. Say Thank You Every Day
This relates to gratitude.
I watched this great video from this David Meltzer that changed my daily habit:
The message is simple: say Thank You every day.
Say thank you when you wake up and before you sleep. It doesn’t even have to be at anything in particular.
The mind can’t comprehend a vacuum.
For example, try not to think of an Elephant.
Just by reading that sentence, you first have to think of what an elephant is. There is no vacuum in the mind. Even absence must first be comprehended.
Saying thank you daily works exactly the same way.
The mere act of saying thank you forces your brain to come up with things you possibly have to be thankful for. Even if you’re having a terrible day.
After watching that video I now have an alarm on my phone that goes off every morning at 7 am and every evening at 7 pm with the prompt “Thank You“.
Twice a day I hear the alarm, look at my phone, see those words and I repeat the phrase.
THANK YOU
3. Sleep Well
I’ve had what I would characterize as clinical depression a few times in my life. This is when you’re so depressed you lose the motivation to do anything—even eat.
And during this state, I sleep often. I think this is the brain’s natural coping mechanism for handling overwhelming stress.
You’ve probably had a bad day, went to sleep, and woke up feeling like whatever happened the previous day wasn’t such a big deal.
Sleep is like a partial resetting of your brain.
There’s a saying that sleep is just practice for death.
And if sleep is practice for death—and in death, all problems lose significance— then sleep is a taste of the ultimate insignificance of all your problems.
Without a hyperactive mind looping over the same problems minute by minute, you have peace.
This is the basis for how meditation works.
Next time you feel unhappy try taking a nap or a good night’s sleep. You’ll feel much better.
4. Exercise Frequently
Like sleep, exercise turns off the hyperactive mind.
When you do anything intensely physical you’re pulled out of your mind and into your body.
Your unhappiness is really just a brain problem because it’s a thought problem.
As Mark Twain said:
“I've had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.”
I’ve done both intense and light exercise and I’ve found that doing anything at all helps.
Though the more intense the exercise the more you have to focus on your body and ignore the mind—which as we’ve already established is the cause of all unhappiness.
You get bonus points if you exercise outside. Sunlight exposure is correlated with better sleep and increased happiness.
I do calisthenics workouts and take walks in the morning and evenings. I’ve found they give me a chance to decompress after a long day.
5. Try Chemical Help
A more modern approach for sure but this list wouldn’t be complete without it.
A simple analogy I use is that the brain is made up of interconnected rivers (neurons) that make up your daily life and experiences.
The stronger a habit, the stronger the neural pathways—the deeper the river—the more likely for that pattern to occur.
Because of biological or personal history, some of us have neural pathways—rivers—that flow along the pathways of depression.
When you introduce a new experience you force your brain to create new pathways. Going to a new country, learning an instrument, meeting new people…your brain has to form new connections.
Psychedelics drugs work on the brain in a similar but more intense way. A drug like LSD floods the rivers of your brain until they overflow.
Different rivers connect, old pathways are submerged and when the drug subsides you have new pathways in your brain.
Your brain on LSD:
This is why psychedelics are used to treat people with therapy-resistant depression.
Some of the most popular drugs used for treating depression include SSRIs, LSD, Psilocybin, Ketamine, and Ayahuasca (Warning: Don’t take psychedelics if you’re on SSRIs).
These drugs flood your brain with neurochemicals that allow new neural pathways to form. They can disrupt your habit of depression and give you a chance at a happier life.
As always this isn’t medical advice. You should always do your own research.
You only have one brain…don’t mess it up.
6. Consciously Seek Happiness
I chose the title of this article after a book I’m reading written by Mo Gawdat “Solve for Happy“.
I love it, especially the title because he didn’t call it “The Happiness Cure” or something similar.
Happiness isn’t something you achieve once and forget about it. Rather it takes constant practice to maintain—it’s something you solve for daily.
Nothing on this list—and no one for that matter—can help you unless you truly want to be happy.
You probably have a financial goal, relationship goal or a health goal. But do you have Happiness as a goal?
Like literally stating as a goal:
“I want to be happy as frequently as possible“
In truth, you don’t really want more money or career growth—these are just intermediary steps that you think will make you happy.
Which is why some people have a lot of money and are at the high point of their careers but are still unhappy.
In actuality, nothing will ever make you happy for long unless you choose to be happy.
So why not just solve for exactly that—Happiness.
I know from personal experience that you can be unhappy for so long it becomes your default state. You build your habits around it and unhappiness becomes your identity.
And it’s threatening to lose your identity. Even a negative one.
You have to realize your human brain is working against you on Happiness. Your brain evolved to overemphasize security—hence danger/fear—over happiness because this kept you alive the longest.
Imagine you’re a hunter-gathering human 5,000 years ago and your friend says:
“Hey, isn’t the moon beautiful tonight?”
Vs
“Hey, a Tiger ate someone over there yesterday.”
Even reading this today in safety, your brain places more importance on the second statement—”Fuck the moon, I wanna live!”
Our brains wants to keep us alive so we can make babies and it doesn’t really care if we’re unhappy.
In this modern dynamic world, this is pushed to the extreme.
We no longer have to fear Tigers but we have so much more information than our ancestors did in their villages.
No Tigers but we have the threat of war, climate crisis, financial insecurity...
And since our brain lumps real and imagined threats into the same fear category. Our primitive brain is on hyperdrive.
Happiness won’t come on its own. Because to choose to be happy is to not only defy your biology but also society. This cannot happen by accident.
To be happy, you have to first make it a priority in your life and then solve for it constantly.
When you become happier, you make the people around you happier too and the world would be a much better place with more happy people.
These are six of the most important routines that help me align with happiness. I hope they bring you happiness too my friend.
Please take care of yourself.
P.S. Happy Bonuses : )
I loved this TEDx talk on Happiness
I fall asleep to this every night…it’s Magical ✨
A video on Loving Yourself and Happiness
A great short book on getting out of depression: The Depression Cure