What Is Happiness?
Psychology
From a psychological perspective, happiness can be broadly described as an emotional and mental state that arises when our needs and desires are fulfilled, or when we experience moments and events that bring us joy, pleasure, and excitement.
Neuroscience
From a neuroscience perspective, happiness is associated with neurotransmitters such as dopamine, which is synthesized from the amino acid tyrosine. Dopamine plays an important role in motivation, reward, and reinforcement, contributing to feelings of satisfaction and pleasure while encouraging us to take action and pursue rewarding experiences.
How Can We Find Happiness?
The Unhealthy Path
As discussed above, one way to experience pleasure and positive emotions is to artificially stimulate the brain's reward system through addictive substances. This shortcut can come with serious consequences, yet many people in modern society turn to it as a quick way to experience euphoria.
Alcohol, tobacco, gaming, sex, and other potentially addictive experiences can all become sources of immediate gratification. Some psychoactive substances, such as nitrous oxide, cannabis, and other drugs that directly affect the nervous system, can also produce rapid changes in mood and perception. In Vietnamese slang, many of these activities fall under the broad expression “chơi đồ”—roughly, getting high or chasing a high.
Everything comes at a cost. When pleasure arrives too quickly and effortlessly, people can become dependent on the experience, develop addictive behaviors, and continually crave that same sensation. Over time, this can lead to tolerance, where the same experience produces less satisfaction, as well as potentially serious harm to physical and mental health.
Moreover, sudden and poorly controlled changes in perception or behavior can increase the risk of actions that harm oneself or others, especially when judgment and self-control are impaired.
The Healthy Path
A healthier path to happiness is one that allows us to fulfill our needs through our own efforts and meaningful experiences. It may be longer and more challenging, but it can provide a more sustainable sense of satisfaction and well-being.
Dopamine plays a role in the brain's reward system, helping reinforce behaviors associated with rewarding outcomes. After a long period of effort, achieving a meaningful goal can feel rewarding and motivate us to keep moving forward. In this sense, our ability to experience satisfaction can encourage us to improve our lives and continue growing.
Psychologist Abraham Maslow proposed that human needs can be understood through five levels in his famous hierarchy of needs. We can think of personal growth as a process of leveling up, gradually fulfilling different needs as we work toward a more fulfilling life.
- Level 1: Physiological needs — The most fundamental needs for survival, including food, water, shelter, sex, excretion, breathing, and rest.
- Level 2: Safety needs — The need to feel secure in terms of physical safety, employment, family, health, and financial resources.
- Level 3: Love and belonging — The desire to belong to a community, have a stable family, and build trustworthy friendships and meaningful relationships.
- Level 4: Esteem — The need to feel respected, valued, appreciated, and trusted by others.
- Level 5: Self-actualization — The desire to realize our potential, create, express our abilities, develop our individuality, and achieve meaningful goals.
Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs
Looking at Maslow's hierarchy, we can also distinguish between two broad sources of satisfaction and happiness:
- Internal resources: Some needs can be fulfilled through our own efforts and independent actions, allowing us to generate a sense of satisfaction and happiness from within.
- External resources: Other needs depend partly on external factors, such as social connection, recognition, and respect from others.
Therefore, if we want to take greater ownership of our happiness and cultivate a sense of fulfillment independently, we should strengthen our internal resources. By developing our own capabilities and finding satisfaction in what we can control, we can become less dependent on external circumstances to determine how happy we feel.
Creating Small Moments of Happiness
Recognizing and cultivating happiness in everyday life may sound simple, but it can be surprisingly difficult to notice these little moments and turn them into lasting habits.
From my own experience, I'd like to share a few simple things that help me find joy and happiness in everyday life.
- Food
Honestly, a delicious meal that suits our tastes can easily make us feel satisfied and happy, especially dinner after a long day of stressful work and traffic on the way home.
Instead of rushing through a meal, we can choose something affordable that leaves us feeling content and satisfied. It can be a small way of rewarding ourselves after a hard day.
Eating well doesn't necessarily require much time or money. We can easily find familiar restaurants within a two-kilometer radius that serve food we enjoy, while occasionally exploring somewhere new for a change of pace.
- Sleep
Personally, getting six to seven hours of sleep a day, along with a short afternoon nap when possible, is often enough to help me feel rested and mentally refreshed for the rest of the day.
- Exercise
I'm terrible at sports by nature, and my physical fitness and health haven't always been great. Still, I've tried my hand at all kinds of sports at least once.
On days when I have too much on my mind—when I'm burned out, lonely, or feeling empty—an hour of running can feel like a lifeline that pulls me away from those negative thoughts.
When I exercise, my brain stops overloading itself with random thoughts. I breathe in the fresh outdoor air, observe the people and trees around me, and somehow, some of my worries begin to fade away.
- Art
I wonder if anyone else has experienced that sudden sense of satisfaction and excitement when stumbling upon a beautiful piece of music, watching a film that perfectly matches their taste, or standing in awe of an extraordinary painting.
I've experienced these fleeting moments myself, and the joy and fulfillment they bring have stayed with me long after the experience ended.
A few works of art have left a particularly deep impression on me, including the musical The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, the ballet Swan Lake, the symphonies of Beethoven, and the film Titanic.
Each of these works seems to awaken my senses and fill my mind with an overwhelming sense of delight.
- Nature
I don't really understand what kind of energy nature holds, but whenever I need to heal, unwind, or simply take a break, I find myself turning to the natural world—to the earth, the forests, the sea, and even something as simple as the small window in my room overlooking a garden when I wake up each morning.
There's something about connecting with nature that makes my happiness feel as though it's melting into the world around me, becoming one with it.
- People
Social connections with people we know and care about are undeniably another source of joy and emotional fulfillment.
However, to avoid becoming overly dependent on external relationships for our happiness, we can start by nurturing the connections we already have instead of constantly chasing distant or uncertain relationships.
A phone call to our family, or an unexpected reunion with an old friend we haven't seen in years, can bring us a surprising amount of joy and comfort.
- Work
Finally, I'd like to mention something that can be both a source and a consumer of our dopamine: work.
It might sound contradictory or even strange to list work as something that brings me happiness. But the joy of sitting in front of my computer, forgetting to eat or sleep while exploring a new technology, or the satisfaction of finally finding a solution to a difficult problem—all these experiences feel like rewards for the effort and persistence I've invested.
Perhaps the game of life can be reduced to a simple loop:
Face a challenge → grind hard → overcome the challenge → feel amazing → face a harder challenge → grind twice as hard → overcome it → feel twice as amazing → ... → feel amazing to the Nth degree.
In a way, this is also about “chasing a high.” But instead of seeking that feeling through harmful shortcuts, we can turn meaningful work into something we genuinely enjoy pursuing.
The excitement and happiness we experience along the way, especially when we finally accomplish something we've worked hard for, can be just as rewarding—if not more so—than the fleeting pleasure of an artificial high.