Unhappiness is a Cognitive Illusion
People say I’m crazy when I tell them that “they are already happy;” but it’s true. Being dissatisfied with life is often just a cognitive illusion for many people. All that people need to do is remove the source of the cognitive illusions. In some cases, people need to take off the dark glasses that they see the world with - in other cases, a simple frontal lobotomy is just the ticket.
Of course, it’s not quite as simple as that; and I do jest.
Let me start by saying first and foremost that clinical depression and anxiety are serious illnesses that should not be taken lightly. I do not address these issues in this article.
What I do explain in this article is how cognitive illusions about unhappiness and dissatisfaction with life came to be - particularly for the general population of folks that may find themselves questioning their happiness and Googling self-help books from time to time.
I assert that people are already happy. They just don't know it. Let’s start with how this phenomenon developed.
The story starts millions of years ago when people only had an emotional brain. Known as the old/mid brain, the emotional brain drives our automatic reactions to things like fear, survival, dominance and other automatic reflexes.
Back then, we didn’t assess things like: Am I happy? What is happiness supposed to be? Should I get the chicken or the fish? Will he still love me in the morning?
Back then, we didn’t assess, evaluate or question anything – we just “were.” We didn't have the brain functions to evaluate or assess at that time.
BUT, then came the hippocampus – our memory station. We started learning that bigger creatures will hurt us and that sparks make fire (which can be useful).
THEN ALONG CAME FRONTAL LOBES
Where humans outshine other species is that we developed a superior set of frontal lobes which provide us with extra tools: The ability to think and reason.
Humans slowly developed the ability to imagine – to put disparate pieces of information together, make sense of them, and even make scenes play out in our mind so we can plan for successful goal outcomes. For example, a hunter might imagine a dozen elk and might commiserate with fellow hunters to then plan out: ‘Who sits where and strikes when?’
Using broad-strokes terminology, future plans are also cognitive illusions.
Advance a couple million years to the present day and we can see that frontal lobes have helped the human mind to solve incredibly complex problems; like figuring out the universe and how life even came to be.
THE OLD/MID BRAIN IS STILL WHERE A LOT OF THE ACTION IS.
Over time, economists have assumed that we are rational creatures that use our frontal lobes to weigh all possible scenarios and make perfectly wise decisions based on rational thought. However, more than a century of research in psychology and behavioural economics shows that the old/mid brain is still where a lot of the action is. People still behave in mostly automatic ways: They fear, they want control and they want to survive.
That being said, frontal lobes have come to play an important role in moderating the old/mid brain, by reigning in impulses and weighing pros and cons. However, frontal lobes are also responsible for making a lot of false assumptions with all of the abstract reasoning they employ - these are known as cognitive illusions.
Humans have a lot of cognitive illusions. We think that our opinions are always right and then seek out only the information that confirms our original opinions (thus confirming that we were right in the first place). We also tend to choose things in the middle, rather than on the ends. Check out the Behavioral Economics Guide 2015 which beautifully illustrates dozens and dozens of the strange biases and heuristics that humans use when making decisions.
The key take-away is that psychology recognizes that frontal lobes do not make perfect decisions - they are flawed and make a lot of weird decisions.*
SO – HERE IS WHERE HAPPINESS COMES IN - - -
OK – so here is the part about why people are already happy.
It is because we use flawed frontal lobes to abstractly decide if we are happy or not. We question life, love, and happiness (and follow too many people on Facebook looking for happiness information and social comparisons). In other words, our frontal lobes weigh the pros and cons of happiness and create all sorts of misinformed beliefs that sometimes lead us down the path of thinking that we are not as happy as we could be.
If we didn’t use frontal lobes at all, we would just exist and “be” “happy”
(but, of course, if we didn’t have frontal lobes, chances are we wouldn’t have language development and that would mean that we wouldn’t be able to put “be” or "exist" into words - - - - but, we would still “be”)
THE CONUNDRUM
So, here we are. We are driven by our old/mid brains' desire to "be;" but we let our newer frontal lobes get in the way of “being.” The frontal lobes have created a lot of cognitive illusions about what happiness should or should not be and it is these illusions - these false assumptions - that really mess us up. This is why being dissatisfied in life is often just a cognitive illusion.
CONCLUSION
YOU might already be happy. The first step is to start recognizing that cognitive illusions exist in the first place. It is an important habit to develop in this worthwhile endeavour we call life.
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Dr. Cindy Ward conducts research in happiness, motivation and behavioural economics.
She counsels individuals and organizations about the cognitive illusions of happiness. She also speaks regularly. If you are interested in learning more, visit Dr. Ward’s pages at http://drcindywardphd.wix.com/happiness
NOTE * Frontal lobes fail most often when we are “in doubt” (which, according to a boatload of researchers is “all of the time”)
