The Happiness Makeover by M. J. Ryan

Author:M. J. Ryan
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781609258399
Publisher: Conari Press

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Be Happy for Everyone Else's Sake

“Remember that happiness is as contagious as gloom. It should be the first duty of those who are happy to let others know of their gladness.”

—Maurice Maeterlinck

Recently I was at Esalen to teach a workshop. Another offering at the same time was “Love Yourself—For Everyone Else's Sake” by Mark Abramson. I told Mark I thought it was a brilliant idea. We tend to think that loving ourselves is selfish or self-entered. However, if we understand we are doing it not for ourselves but for everyone we meet, then it becomes easier to do.

The same is true for happiness. It may seem self-indulgent or self-centered to make it a priority in our lives. Indeed, even now, it feels somewhat frivolous or self-involved to think that one of my goals in life is to be happy.

But take a moment to think more deeply about it. When you're unhappy, are you thinking about yourself or others? Yourself, of course—we tend to be self-involved when we feel down. The Japanese call it “tone-deaf about life.” That's why Dennis Prager, author of Happiness Is a Serious Problem, says, “Each of us owes it to our spouse, our children, our friends, to be as happy as we can be. And if you don't believe me, ask a child what it's like to grow up with an unhappy parent, or ask parents what they suffer if they have an unhappy child.”

The reason our happiness is so important to those around us is, because of neurobiology, we are constantly being affected by the emotional states of those around us. As Daniel Goleman describes in Primal Leadership, our emotional center, the limbic system, is what is known as an open loop system. Rather than being self-regulating like the circulatory system, for instance, an “open-loop system depends largely on external sources to manage itself . . . In other words, we rely on connections with other people for our own emotional stability.” In fact, our feelings are so tuned in to others that the person doesn't even need to be in the same room to be affecting us. Studies done on navy ship commanders, for instance, show that the crew tends to catch the mood of the leader even when he is locked in his own cabin, seemingly not communicating with anyone.

Recently another reason for this mirroring has been discovered. It turns out that we are born with structures in our brains called mirror neurons, which cause us to experience in our bodies other people's emotional intentions even when they say nothing. No one quite knows yet how these work, but the implications are enormous.

Here's how Barry Neil Kaufman puts it in Happiness Is a Choice: “What each of us learns has the potential of becoming a message to all humankind . . . If just one of us changes our beliefs and teaches happiness and love, then that attitude or information goes into the connective tissue of the community and enhances the aptitude for happiness of the entire human group .

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