Loretta G. Breuning, founder of the Inner Mammal Institute, spent years researching the origin and theories that revolve around happiness. She explains to Bay Area Innovators’ Steve Ispas the reason for happiness from a biological perspective, as well as the history and popular ideas of how to pursue happiness.
“Humans are unhappy a lot, because our brain naturally creates a lot of unhappiness. It has an important function, it alerts us when there’s important information that we should be cautious about,” Breuning said. “So if we are trained to define this natural unhappiness as a disorder, then we need a lot of services.
” “Our brain is designed to seek happiness constantly. So we’re designed to be disappointed, really,” Breuning said. “So if you’re saddled with this expectation that other people are getting happiness effortlessly, then you think, ‘Oh, maybe I do have something wrong with me.
’” Breuning said it’s normal to be unhappy. But nowadays, when unhappiness is seen as a disorder, it implies there is a way to treat it, and people rely on that treatment to feel happy, she said. They also feel reinforced when professionals say that happiness is the natural state.
So where did this concept come from? Breuning said that about 250 years ago, Jean-Jacques Rousseau introduced the idea that happiness is a natural state. An example of the idea, she said, is that if hunter-gatherers lived on a tropical island, they would be happy all the time, and t.