Happy Talk; Physical, Spiritual, Transcendental: Happiness. What Is It? Why Do We Want It? How Do We Get It? These Questions Aren't Often Asked so Plainly, so Now We're Asking

Summary

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HAPPINESS and its lovely travelling companion, fulfilment, are like Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake - everyone agrees that it would be nice to have them but nobody spends too long asking exactly why they are so desirable.

Rather than considering what would make us happy and how to achieve this, we spend time working out how to become richer or thinner, how to be famous or how to fit in. Most of us are randomly laying bricks with little thought of how the completed wall should look. But surely the most effective approach is to think of happiness as an overarching concept? For it to be achievable by a specific route, we need to be more specific about what it is.

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Extract

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Happy Talk; Physical, Spiritual, Transcendental: Happiness. What Is It? Why Do We Want It? How Do We Get It? These Questions Aren't Often Asked so Plainly, so Now We're Asking

So what is happiness? Let's start by looking at how this woolliest of concepts manifests itself in the body. There is a great deal of scientific evidence, most recently by Professor Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin, that feelings of happiness correspond - in right-handed people; lefties are the opposite - to brain activity in the left side of the pre-frontal cortex. This means that the happy zone of your brain is above and in front of your left ear.

Feelings of happiness are also linked to high levels of serotonin, a neurotransmitter in the brain; some anti-depressants, including Prozac, work by increasing serotonin production. Approximately two million Britons are estimated to be currently taking anti-depressants, a figure that has tripled in the last ten years. This means that four per cent of the UK population are so far away from their desired level of happiness t...

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