One of the reasons happiness feels so elusive is because we barely understand what it is. The word itself is vague. Is it a mood? A goal? A spiritual state? In truth, happiness is as much a chemical reality as it is a mental one. Your hormones shape your emotions and those emotions shape how you interpret the world. If your body is dumping cortisol and adrenaline all day, happiness becomes nearly impossible to access. You are not just thinking your way into unhappiness. You are living in a body that is wired for stress and reacting accordingly.
Food influences your hormones more than you realize. So does trauma, especially the unresolved kind. If you were exposed to high stress or fear as a child, your brain adapted by producing stress hormones in excess. This changes how you think, how you breathe, how you see yourself and others. It shifts you from the frontal cortex, where rational thought lives, into the emotional centers of the brain, where fear and reactivity rule. These patterns do not fade on their own. The chemistry becomes a habit. The thoughts follow. Over time, the story you tell yourself about life becomes a loop you cannot escape.
But you can escape. You can climb out. That is what healing is. That is what self help is. It is not magic. It is not instant. But it is possible.
The key is to stop thinking of unhappiness as a moral failure and start seeing it for what it often is, imbalanced chemistry and patterned thinking. You will not fix that with willpower alone. You need tools. You need strategy. You need help.
Start with the basics. Therapy. Breathwork. Clean food. Daily writing. Exercise. Meditation. Most people are looking for shortcuts because they do not want to do the real work. The real work is not glamorous. But it works. Study philosophy. Study real psychology. Study yourself. One of the best writing exercises you can ever do is to document your entire life up until the age of twenty. Write it all. The trauma, the resentments, the guilt, the addictions, the fears. Write an inventory of your relationships. Dictate it into your phone if you have to. Then read it to someone you trust. Be witnessed. And then return the favor. Witness someone else. Serve something smaller than you. Care for plants. Rescue animals. Teach children. Be of use.
This is the path. The path is not about chasing happiness. It is about creating the conditions where happiness has a chance to show up. And when it does, even for a moment, breathe better. Let it land. Life is short. You deserve to feel alive while you're here.