and your brain already knows how to build it
by Rachel Kennedy
A question we often hear people ask themselves is: “Why can’t I just be happy?”. Sometimes it comes with a shrug, and offered up as a rhetorical question. Sometimes it is asked with real frustration. Occasionally, many of us ask this with a quiet kind of grief, as we mourn happier days or better times.
It’s a fair and understandable thing to question, especially if we feel as though we try so hard to attain happiness.
The answer, if there is one, probably isn’t really about happiness at all, because happiness isn’t some fixed state. It’s not a destination to be reached when the circumstances are just right, or the ‘thing’ has been acquired… no, the research, and indeed most ‘happy’ peoples’ experience, tells us that happiness is something you practice, and can exist independently of circumstances.
Happiness is about habits.
That might sound too simple, and it might feel uncomfortable to sit with that, because it lays a bit of responsibility at our own feet. The neuroscience behind it is fascinating, and understanding it might just change the way we think about our own wellbeing.
The brain, like any system, works best when it operates efficiently. As a consequence this means that we are very good at recognising patterns and then automating them — forming habits. And this is, of course, enormously useful. Imagine if we had to learn to brush our teeth again each day? Or do up our shoelaces? This process is called neuroplasticity — the brain’s capacity to reorganise itself by forming new neural connections throughout life (Doidge, 2007).
What this means for happiness is significant. The emotional patterns we repeat most often — how we interpret events, how we speak to ourselves, where we direct our attention — become, over time, the well-worn grooves our brain defaults to. If worry and self-criticism are the most practised pathways, then our brain will keep returning our thoughts there. Not because we’re broken, or because we are pessimistic by nature, but because that’s the path of least resistance, the most efficient path.
The good news is that the research on neuroplasticity is clear: those pathways can change. The old adage that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks is wrong! We have daily evidence of that in our work in the clinic. Our brain retains its capacity to build new habits of thought and feeling throughout our lives (Merzenich, 2013), and positive emotion is no exception.
Our brain has what is known as a negativity bias — this is an evolutionary tendency to pay more attention to threats than to pleasant experiences. It made good sense for our ancestors, but in modern life it can mean we’re perpetually scanning for what might go wrong, sometimes not even registering what is going right.
The practice of happiness, then, isn’t about pretending everything is fine. It’s about deliberately and repeatedly directing the brain’s attention toward what is genuinely good — long enough and often enough for it to become a default and for those new pathways to emerge.
Waiting to feel happy before we do the things that make us happy is a bit like waiting to feel motivated before going for a walk. We’ve written about this before — the idea that sometimes the good feeling comes after the action, not before it. That the doing of the thing is what creates the feeling, not the other way around.
This is particularly relevant to happiness. Some influential research has found that roughly 50% of our happiness ‘set point’ is determined by genetics, around 10% by life circumstances, and — wonderfully — approximately 40% is within our intentional influence (Lyubomirsky et al., 2005).
That 40% represents the habits of thought, attention, and behaviour: things that we can actually do something about. It doesn’t mean the other 60% is irrelevant, it just means there’s more room to move than most of us realise.
Gratitude — properly practised. Not the performative #blessed kind, and not a rote list of things you feel obliged to be grateful for. Rather, genuinely giving attention to what has gone well — even on the most difficult day — and holding that attention for just long enough that the experience registers emotionally. And gratitude isn’t just a nice idea, it has helpful consequences. A 2003 study found that people who kept a weekly gratitude journal reported higher levels of wellbeing, more optimism, fewer physical complaints, and more generous behaviour than control groups (Emmons & McCullough).
The important thing is to be specific, and to do it regularly.
You can begin right now: What is one thing, big or small, that happened today that you can feel genuine appreciation for?
Savouring. Related to gratitude but distinct from it, savouring is the deliberate act of slowing down and really being in a pleasant experience rather than rushing through it. Things like attending a concert and paying attention to the live music instead of watching it through your phone while you record it. Bryant and Veroff (2007) identified savouring as a core mechanism in the amplification of positive emotion. Most of us are very good at replaying difficult experiences and quite poor at doing the same thing for good experiences. Savouring is the practice of correcting that imbalance.
Acts of kindness. There is so much robust evidence that doing things for others produces a measurable boost in the wellbeing of the giver. Dunn et al. (2008) found that spending money on others produced greater happiness than spending the same amount on oneself — and that this effect held across a wide range of income levels. The same logic applies to time and attention. Small, deliberate acts of generosity shift something in us.
Social connection. Human beings are social animals, and the quality of our relationships is one of the most consistent predictors of happiness and longevity in the literature. The Harvard Study of Adult Development — one of the longest-running studies of adult life ever conducted — found that close relationships, more than money or fame, keep people happy throughout their lives (Vaillant, 2012). Connection isn’t a luxury, and for many of us, it’s what we’re missing most.
Mindfulness and present-moment awareness. A landmark study by Killingsworth and Gilbert (2010) found that people spend nearly half their waking hours thinking about something other than what they’re actually doing — and that this mind-wandering is a strong predictor of unhappiness, regardless of what they’re mind-wandering to. Mindfulness-based practices — even simple ones like stopping to smell the roses, as it were — can help interrupt the pull toward rumination and return us to what’s actually in front of us.
Many of the people who come to see us are not struggling with one discrete problem. Most of us are stuck in patterns — of thinking, of feeling, of behaving — that have become deeply automated. Things like the worry that won’t switch off, or self-criticism that runs like background noise. Some of us move through life feeling as though something is wrong, even when circumstances would suggest otherwise.
Hypnotherapy works, in part, by accessing the subconscious processes that drive those patterns. Conscious willpower and intellectual understanding are genuinely useful, but they have limits. Most of us know what we should do, but for one reason or another don’t do those things. The gap is usually between knowing and doing — between understanding something and feeling it, living it, making it automatic.
Hypnosis can help shift that gap. By working directly with the subconscious mind — where habits are stored and where emotional responses are generated — we can help to install new patterns that support wellbeing, rather than working against it. This isn’t magic, and we’re always real about that, but it can sometimes feel magical. The state of hypnosis itself, with the application of focused attention and suggestion in a deeply receptive state of mind, can help new ways of thinking and feeling take root more readily (Hammond, 2010).
The habits we’ve talked about here — gratitude, savouring, connection, kindness, mindfulness — are all things that hypnotherapy can support, even facilitate. Not as a replacement for doing the work, but as a way of making that work feel more natural, more accessible, and more automatic over time.
Happiness is not a reward for getting everything right. It is not waiting for you on the other side of a better version of your circumstances.
It is, more often than not, something that grows quietly out of small, repeated acts of attention. Where you look, what you allow in, how you treat the people around you. Whether you pause, occasionally, and notice that this — right here, right now — is something worth being present for.
Those are habits that build happiness.
REFERENCES
Bryant, F. B., & Veroff, J. (2007). Savoring: A new model of positive experience. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Doidge, N. (2007). The brain that changes itself: Stories of personal triumph from the frontiers of brain science. Viking.
Dunn, E. W., Aknin, L. B., & Norton, M. I. (2008). Spending money on others promotes happiness. Science, 319(5870), 1687–1688. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1150952
Emmons, R. A., & McCullough, M. E. (2003). Counting blessings versus burdens: An experimental investigation of gratitude and subjective well-being in daily life. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84(2), 377–389. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.84.2.377
Hammond, D. C. (2010). Hypnosis in the treatment of anxiety- and stress-related disorders. Expert Review of Neurotherapeutics, 10(2), 263–273. https://doi.org/10.1586/ern.09.140
Hanson, R. (2013). Hardwiring happiness: The new brain science of contentment, calm, and confidence. Harmony Books.
Killingsworth, M. A., & Gilbert, D. T. (2010). A wandering mind is an unhappy mind. Science, 330(6006), 932. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1192439
Lyubomirsky, S., Sheldon, K. M., & Schkade, D. (2005). Pursuing happiness: The architecture of sustainable change. Review of General Psychology, 9(2), 111–131. https://doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.9.2.111
Merzenich, M. M. (2013). Soft-wired: How the new science of brain plasticity can change your life. Parnassus Publishing.
Vaillant, G. E. (2012). Triumphs of experience: The men of the Harvard Grant Study. Belknap Press.