The Happiness Equation: Want Nothing + Do Anything = Have Everything

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The first war you are fighting every day

We are going to get to those three words.

But first we need to understand what’s causing our very worst days.

Your amygdala is in the oldest part of your brain. It is responsible for scanning the world for worries. It’s a problem-scanning machine. Imagine, you have a problem-scanning machine, right in your head, always on, always scanning, all day and all night. When the machine finds a problem, or even thinks it finds a problem, it flushes your body full of adrenaline and stress hormones, sending you into fight-or-flight mode.

Daniel Goleman, bestselling author of Emotional Intelligence says, “The emotional component evolved very early: Do I eat it, or does it eat me?” He calls this the Amygdala Hijack and describes it as a way our brains take control of our bodies.

Remember the reason it’s so hard to be happy from Secret #1. We all have negative thoughts. Those negative thoughts helped keep us safe and led to our survival through very strong emotional reactions. See a saber-toothed tiger suddenly look at you from a few hundred feet away in the grassy plains? You need your problem-scanning machine to flash! You have a problem. And this part of our brains is still part of our heads. Part of our lives. Even though the chances of being chased down by two-thousand-pound cats is gone.

This war in our heads reminds us of one major truth, though.

None of us can control our emotions. We can only control our reactions to our emotions.

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In addition to the amygdala, our brains have also evolved a prefrontal cortex responsible for rational thought. This is a new part of our brains! This part of our brains contains our most complex thoughts. Let’s call it our serenity-now mood tape. It plays quiet music, it contemplates, it’s responsible for thinking before acting. It decides what we do before we do it. The prefrontal cortex helps you think things through. It’s responsible for language and your ability to solve complex problems.

Sometimes you can feel the problem-scanning machine and your serenity-now mood tape blasting full volume at the same time. Say you get asked to make a presentation to the CEO late one afternoon. Your problem-scanning machine suddenly flashes bright red lights and makes that annoying alarm-clock morning buzz. NN! NN! NN! Meanwhile, your serenity-now mood tape is playing birds chirping and waves crashing onto the beach. That is your brain taking time to decide what to do, trying to think things through, instead of acting on impulses.

It is a war waged inside your own head.

Our problem-scanning machine (amygdala) and our serenity-now mood tape (prefrontal cortex) are at war.