By Mala Daggett
Health and happiness, assumed to be life’s foundation, waft through our days and minds often with no notice or appreciation. Only when we find we do not have one or the other do we crave them, and even then without little depth of understanding of what they even are. Mistakenly, we sometimes assume one leads to the other without knowing which one comes first.
Arthur C. Brooks, a Harvard professor of…you got it…happiness… mixes the science of neurotransmitters with human activity, thought, and social interactions. His insights hold wisdom, simplicity, and common sensical yet uncommon practices. He sums up the relationship of health and happiness as being unnecessary to the other. Good health does not necessarily lead to happiness. Happiness is not a causative factor of good health.
However, poor health and unhappiness hold hands. Unhappiness requires a certain amount of negative feelings which can easily be promoted by chronic illness, ongoing lack of sleep, poor nutrition, imbalanced gut bacteria, and many other health-related imbalances. Although not the opposite of happiness, unhappiness can lasso the brain’s neurotransmitters, training them to repeat and establish a pattern of hormone release or non-release that results in negative feelings, unhappiness.
Brooks’ decades of work unveiled the recipe for happiness to be enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose which he defines as conscious pleasure; reaching goals; and answering these two questions for yourself: why am I alive? and for what would I be willing to die?
Master Mala Daggett’s 27 years of qi cleansing and weaving energetic health culminate into her passion to help people rediscover their true human capacity for power, strength, and joy. For more information, email daggettmala@gmail.com, IG: @qi_master_daggett, or call 501.626.2720.
