Your Brain: The Missing Manual

In Search of Happiness

The brain isn't interested in keeping its pleasure centers continually active. As you've seen, it uses flashes of pleasure and pain to keep you moving along the arc of your life. Unless there's something you need—for example, a warm coat on a wintry day or a jam-filled donut on an empty stomach—there's no way to get pleasure. That's because without need there's no desire, and without desire there's no gratification, and without gratification there's no hope of getting a zap in your brain's pleasure zone. Similarly, once your immediate needs are met, the pleasure dies off to make room for future goals.

What your brain craves, like virtually all of the systems in your body, is homeostasis—a perfectly even and unremarkable balance between you and your environment. When pleasure, fear, and other emotions disturb this equilibrium, the brain fights to get back on an even keel.

The Set Point Theory

In Chapter 2, you learned about the set point theory, which suggests the body uses every trick in the book to maintain its current weight. The depressing conclusion is that if your weight inches up over the years, you'll have a hard time fighting it back down.

The set point theory is just one example of homeostasis, and many researchers suggest happiness is another. To understand this theory, it's important to distinguish between pleasure (raw, physical feel-good feelings) and happiness (the more ambiguous state of contentment and optimism that we all generally strive ...