Do we have a right to expect happiness?  Should we be waking up each day demanding that our brain make us happy or is there something wrong if we are unhappy?

The brain is not designed for happiness.  It’s made for safety.  Think prehistoric days when cave-dwellers were on constant lookout for something to hurt them.  That same reflex is what is triggered by our mobile devices, by the way, but that’s for another day.

Waiting to be happy trains the brain to delay contentment and meaning comes from the present not someday.  We can retrain our brains.  How do you want to be happy and dictate it to your brain.  It’s a continuous process not a one-time finish line because progress starts immediately and continues over time.

That’s the feeling of Mayo Clinic physician Amit Sood who has written extensively about the power of retraining the brain:  “We get so caught up weeding the yard that we completely miss the tulips that nature gives us for a few precious weeks”.

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