I Want to Make You Happy, seriously…
There are triggers, mechanisms and patterns your brain understands, things that make motivation, joy or contentment more likely to happen. Not guaranteed, because the brain is not a vending machine and life occasionally behaves like an absolute bitch, but more likely.
There are ways to naturally support the brain systems involved in positive feelings in ways that can make a meaningful difference. And if you stuff your day with these little triggers and mechanisms, there is a chance you will feel genuinely happier overall. It’s about those little choices I’m gonna help you discover in a minute, little sparks that can make all the difference.
The interesting part is that none of this is huge or revolutionary, that may be exactly why we underestimate it. They don’t require a new life, a healed childhood or spiritual enlightenment. Put your favourite music on, take the prettier route as you drive to work or to do something you are not particularity excited about but it needs to be done, wear the thing you keep saving for later, as it was expensive and you don't want to ruin it with the ketchup down the pub. Message the person who makes your brain feel spacious rather than exhausted. Make your coffee properly, add extra syrup if you like that type of thing, buy yourself flowers, weird? - Who cares? As long as it makes you feel something positive!
Do something new, different and see what it does to your sense of self, part of the brain responsible for joy, satisfaction, brings you close to your goal or makes you connected to the universe… Whatever rocks that boat! Sit in the sun for six minutes, learn something because it fascinates you, move your body in a way that doesn’t feel like punishment… and forget terms such like ridiculous or silly! The secret is that nobody is watching and, if they are, they will not care for long enough for their opinion to have any real meaning in your life.
Buying shower gel? Make sure its your favourite one! Getting a bus? Pick the seat that makes the journey a bit more joyful! Do you remember getting on a bus as a kid? Why would you run to that particular seat and be excited? - make those little choices more conscious, they build up!
We’ve been taught to think of happiness as a major life event: the relationship, the degree, the money, the weight loss, the house, the moment everything finally clicks into place and remains politely fucking clicked. Meanwhile, most of life is happening on an ordinary week day while the kettle boils and you have a moment to appreciate something small, that’s just somehow perfect, and maybe only you can see it?
Your brain is paying attention, even when you aren’t
Let’s murder one bit of Instagram neuroscience before it breeds:
Dopamine is not simply the “happiness chemical”, serotonin is not bottled confidence and oxytocin is not ten cuddle points and a free coffee, your brain is more complicated and, actually, much more interesting.
Pleasure, motivation and contentment do not come from one magical chemical. They emerge from several overlapping systems responding to reward, movement, connection, novelty, progress and sensory experience.
Your brain is a nosy, pattern-making little machine. It notices what gives you energy, what settles you, what sparks curiosity and what makes you feel more alive. Dopamine helps flag possible rewards as worthy of your attention, movement can change your physical and emotional state. Progress feeds competence, connection can create safety, novelty tells your attention to wake the fuck up. Even a smell, a song or a familiar texture can become part of your brain’s private map back to comfort, pleasure or relief.
Your brain learns through experience and association. It notices what repeatedly comes before relief, interest, warmth, energy or connection. Over time, those experiences become part of its map, but here’s the catch: you need to notice your own, personal map.
What makes one person feel beautifully alive may make another want to climb out through the nearest window. A six-mile hike could be freedom to me and a hostage situation to somebody else. Your wellbeing cannot be built entirely from activities recommended by people who don’t know you, this is not about copying somebody else’s morning routine, it’s about becoming curious about your own responses. What gives you energy? What makes you feel more like yourself? And what are you doing only because you have somehow decided that a good person should enjoy it?
The word should has ruined lives. "Should" is how other people’s expectations, rulebooks and useless social tactics sneak into your life and start acting like authority. That one word has talked people out of more perfectly good lives than failure ever did. This is why I strongly challenge the word should in therapy.
Sometimes action has to go first
One of the least glamorous and most useful ideas in psychology is behavioural activation.
When people feel low, they understandably withdraw from lif and people that might provide connection or achievement. Sadly, that withdrawal can reduce access to exactly the experiences that could help emotional movement begin.
We tend to imagine that we will act once we feel inspired, motivated, confident or ready, but feelings are unreliable little bastards and frequently fail to arrive on schedule.
Picasso is widely credited with saying, “Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.” I think it fits perfectly here because it helps explain how the system works. Motivation often works the same way. It is far more likely to catch up with you once you have begun than while you are sitting around waiting to feel ready. Sometimes the action creates the feeling, not the other way around.
A meta-analysis by Trevor Mazzucchelli, Robert Kane and Clare Rees examined 34 studies involving more than 2,000 people and found behavioural activation effective for depression. The same researchers later examined its application to general wellbeing, particularly through valued and enjoyable activity.
This does not mean going for a walk cures depression, it means behaviour and emotion influence each other in both directions. Sometimes the feeling creates the action, sometimes the action creates an opening for the feeling.
Small positive feelings are doing more than looking pretty
Psychologist Barbara Fredrickson developed the broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions. She argued that emotions such as joy, interest and contentment do more than feel pleasant for a moment. They can temporarily broaden what we notice and what we feel able to do.
Think about how much of your day runs on autopilot. You replace shampoo because the bottle is empty, shower because you have to, make coffee without tasting it, drive the same route, wear whatever is easiest and rush through the ordinary bits as though they don’t count.
But the ordinary bits are most of your life!
If you need shampoo anyway, choose the one that smell gives you a tiny aromatherapy kick. If you shower every day, use the shower gel that makes you want to stay there for another minute. Drink from the mug you love, put music behind the chore, wear the perfume on a Wednesday, use the ridiculously expensive candle instead of preserving it for the arrival of the perfect evening.
This is not an instruction to buy your way into wellbeing, it is about waking up inside the routines you already have.
You have to perform hundreds of small acts of personal maintenance simply because you are alive and apparently expected to remain that way. So stop treating every one of them as an automated chore. Ask: if I have to do this anyway, what tiny choice would make it feel better?
A better smell, softer towel, food you genuinely enjoy… it changes the experience, it counts.
Over time, the small moments may help us build psychological, intellectual and social resources. In one daily study, momentary positive emotions predicted increases in resilience and life satisfaction.
The philosophers were onto this long before wellness influencers discovered beige
Research suggests that happiness is a journey rather than a destination, so perhaps happiness was never meant to sit inside the goal itself, waiting for us to arrive. Goals matter because they give us direction, but the journey towards them is where we make choices, notice progress, develop skills, change our minds, recover from mistakes and gradually become someone capable of reaching them.
The research supports this. A meta-analysis of 85 studies found a substantial relationship between successful goal-striving and subjective wellbeing, and that relationship was stronger when success meant making progress, rather than finally attaining the goal.
That distinction matters, reaching a goal is a moment, moving towards it might take months or years, and that is where most of the actual living happens.
Happiness can appear in the small evidence that you are moving: the paragraph you finished, the difficult conversation you finally had, the extra distance you walked, the skill that feels slightly less impossible than it did last week. The destination gives you somewhere to aim, and the journey gives happiness somewhere to happen.
Aristotle described eudaimonia. He did not treat it as a lovely mood we eventually possess. In the Nicomachean Ethics, happiness was connected with activity: how a person repeatedly lives and acts across a life. A good life was not something you owned, it was something you did.
Carl Rogers reached similar territory from humanistic psychology. He wrote:
“The good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction, not a destination.”
For Rogers, living well meant becoming more open to experience and increasingly able to trust your own responses. Not reaching some polished final version of yourself who drinks enough water, has perfect boundaries and is never triggered by any dickhead again.
And then Viktor Frankl arrives to stop the whole conversation becoming pastel bullshit.
Frankl did not argue that people could manufacture happiness regardless of suffering. His position was deeper: happiness is rarely produced by hunting it directly. It tends to emerge through meaning, connection, creation, responsibility and engagement with life. The Beacon Press guide to Man’s Search for Meaning captures this idea of happiness as something that ensues rather than something we can force.
Start collecting your own evidence
For the next week, stop asking the enormous, impossible question: Am I happy? - It reduces a complicated, changing human life to a yes-or-no. Ask smaller questions:
What made me feel slightly better today?
When did I feel most like myself?
What gave me energy - and what quietly drained it?
Did I experience pleasure, choice, progress, curiosity, beauty, play, rest or meaning?
Then collect the evidence. Not in an elaborate journal you’ll abandon after buying twelve coloured pens. Put one line in your phone: Good coffee in the sun. Finished the horrible email. Unexpected conversation. Red lipstick. Walked somewhere beautiful. Cancelled something I didn’t want to do. Made somebody laugh... You are building a personal database of what your nervous system responds to - then use it.
If music reliably shifts something in you, stop waiting to accidentally hear it. If certain people leave you warmer, make contact deliberately. If finishing small tasks creates momentum, break the giant bastard task into pieces your brain can actually complete. If beauty matters to you, create more of it. If you need novelty, stop living every Tuesday like a photocopy of Monday. If you need rest, stop treating exhaustion as evidence of moral excellence.
And when something good happens, stay with it for a moment, look at it, feel it, let yourself register that it is happening. That deliberate process is called savouring, and a recent meta-analysis of 20 randomised trials found that savouring interventions produced moderate improvements across emotional outcomes. A good moment you don’t notice barely gets time to become part of you. Happiness needs somewhere to land
You cannot choose every circumstance, you cannot command your nervous system to feel wonderful. Money problems, trauma, illness, grief and depression are not defeated by buying flowers and putting Fleetwood Mac on, but you can sometimes change the conditions around how you feel. You can learn what brings you closer to yourself, you can create more contact with the right chemical systems in your brain. You can stop saving every good thing for a more deserving future version of you.
You can make the next five minutes slightly better, not as a cure, not as a moral obligation, but as participation in your own life. Happiness may arrive in moments, but contentment is built through repetition: what you choose, allow, refuse, notice and return to. The ordinary day is not what happens before your real life begins - it is your life.
