Your pursuit of happiness may be making you unhappy. It sounds counterintuitive, but it’s true, and I will tell you why.

You confuse the thrills, high points, and exciting moments in your life for true happiness. Going out with friends, attending concerts, or bungee jumping from a bridge are things you think make you happy. But these moments are not true happiness. Instead, those moments are thrills, and they have the same effect on your brain as taking drugs.

What happens when you experience a thrill is your brain releases the feel-good chemical dopamine. This neurotransmitter is the same one stimulated by drugs like cocaine. So when you engage in these exciting activities, you are giving yourself a hit just like a drug user. And just like a drug user, each high comes with a crash when the experience ends.

Like any substance abuser, you come to love the highs and dread the lows. And just like any chronic user, you are constantly chasing the next hit of excitement. You are addicted to your misperception of happiness. You chase after more thrills and abhor the dull moments because they make you depressed.

But the source of your unhappiness is not the circumstances surrounding you; it is your attachment to thrills that leads to your suffering. You fear that you will sink into despair if you don’t get your next hit of excitement. It is that fear which is the real source of your melancholy mood. Your clinging to the need for the next thrill is the real source of your suffering.

Ironically your addiction to stimulation causes you to suffer both when you don’t get the thrill and when you do. That’s right, when you find yourself at the height of excitement, the knowledge that the rush will end dampens your enjoyment. You can’t fully enjoy the experience because you know it will end, and you desperately want to prevent that. Just like any other drug addict, you are no longer able to enjoy the highs fully.

It is your belief that you need these thrilling experiences to be happy that is making you unhappy. Why? Because you believe that when you are not ecstatic, you are missing out. This is a false belief.

Real happiness is something different. Real happiness is uncaused. It is all around you, but your attachment to thrill-seeking keeps you from seeing it. Genuine happiness comes from accepting that you are enough and that what you have right now is enough. Once you get that, you don’t need anything outside of yourself to experience joy. You can be happy right where you are, right now, and all you have to do is give up your attachment to the thrills.

Your need to chase after exciting experiences keeps you from recognizing the happiness that is already here. Your addiction to the highs and avoidance of the lows keeps you from acknowledging that you are already happy. Once you recognize this, you can wean yourself off your dependence on thills and be satisfied on your own. You will tap into your baseline level of happiness.

The problem is that you cycle between high moments when you get the thrill you desire, but then when the euphoria wears off, you feel despondent and sink into a low. To avoid the lows, you seek out more thrills, more parties, adventures, shopping sprees, nights out with the gang, etc. But a big part of your lows is the fear that you won’t find more experiences to get you high. If you suffer from the fear of missing out (FOMO), you know you are using happiness like a drug.

When you tap into contentment, you will find that you mellow out the lows while maxing out the highs. When a peak event occurs, you can enjoy it fully without the background anxiety of worrying that it will end and the stress of trying to keep it going as long as you can. When your high fades, you will settle into your baseline happiness; you will be content. It is the best of both worlds; you can experience the peaks and mellow the lows.

One wise man explained it like this. Imagine there is a band inside of you. When you are engaged in exciting activities, your band plays along with the tune of that activity. And when the peak experience subsides, your band goes back to playing its own song. The score may change, but the music doesn’t have to stop. That is what it means when people say that someone has a song in their heart. They listen to their inner orchestra, and when the music around them subsides, they can continue listening to the music within. The content are never without a tune.

The difference between contentment and your definition of happiness is that contentment does not involve clinging to high experiences. The content person does not need to chase after thrills. Instead, the content person can enjoy the good without dreading its inevitable end. That is because they know that when the excitement passes, they will return to the baseline level of uncaused happiness. Thus, they don’t need to dread the low moments.

Let go of your attachment to thrills as the means to happiness. Stop clinging to the false belief that happiness is something that comes from outside of yourself. This false belief makes you unhappy; anxious the experience will end when you should be enjoying it, and despondent when the thrill does go away. To be truly happy, you need to drop your addiction to exciting experiences and instead tap into the inner contentment that is already yours. Listen to the music that is within you. It will swell with the highpoint and settle into contentment, but your song never needs to end.

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