As 2025 gets under way, I’m going to guess that one of your hopes for the coming year is ‘to be happy’. I’m also going to take a punt that you’re likely to spend a considerable amount of time, effort and money doing things you hope will make you feel that way.
But considering that happiness is the number one goal of most people living in the western world, here lies the unspoken paradox at the heart of this tireless quest. Most of us can reel off a list of things that we believe will make us feel good – a great holiday, a delicious dinner, a promotion at work, fabulous sex. Yet many still don’t have a clue about how the feeling of pleasure is made in our brains in the first place. And knowing would be an incredibly useful way to work out how get more of it in 2025.
It was Greek philosopher Aristotle who first named happiness as a goal of humankind in around the 3rd century BC. For thousands of years since then, the human race has mused over, chased and tried to commodify it – but never quite cracked its source code.
Dopamine – and feelings of pleasure – are not triggered by getting what you want. They are triggered by seeking and anticipation, by having a goal, by discovering new places and things
But then, from the outside, the brain is inscrutable. As this lump of jelly sits in the black box of your skull, it’s the only organ in our bodies which tries to work itself out, while giving very little away. For centuries it hasn’t easily exposed the alchemy which turns the inputs from our senses into actual good feelings.
The first eureka moment in understanding how happiness was made in our brains came just over 60 years ago in a lab at Canada’s McGill University. Two psychologists, James Olds and Peter Milner, were trying to understand the psychology of motivation. In experiments with rodents, they realised that lab rats would press a lever as many as 7,500 times an hour to get stimulation from an electrode which was implanted in a certain spot in their brains. It felt so good that they would give up food and sex in favour of this shot of pleasure.
But when the electrode in their brain was moved just a few millimetres, the animals no longer got the same euphoria. The discovery was immediately seized on as the answer to the secret of happiness. Newspaper headlines of the day trumpeted that scientists had found the elusive ‘pleasure area’, dangling the possibility of a world where endless joy would be freely on tap.
As we now know, of course, that utopia never came to pass. That’s because many other things have to happen in the reward system first before happiness is unlocked. By prodding that small part of the rats’ brains, Olds and Milner had discovered the nucleus accumbens – a small region in the basal forebrain which is indeed a key hub that gives pleasure. But this is just one stop on the route of the mesolimbic reward pathway that runs through all our brains. For the hotspots in the nucleus accumbens which make ‘pleasure’ to be triggered, the process has to be sparked by the chemical messenger dopamine.
We need to clear up a basic misconception about what dopamine is for. Despite its reputation as the ‘happy hormone’, dopamine’s job is not to make us happy. It’s actually to encourage us to get our survival needs met. It’s only when we do this that we are rewarded with a release of opioids in the nucleus accumbens.
Dopamine has been the secret sauce of humankind’s success – as we have more of it circulating in our brain’s reward system than any other great ape. It’s this extra dose of motivational rocket fuel which gave our hunter-gatherer ancestors the drive to keep searching for more nutritious foods and probably move out of Africa to explore the rest of Earth. As the Ice Age dawned, it also gave us the mojo to stay on the move and discover new ways to feed our increasingly energy-hungry brains. As a result, love of novelty is also built into our basic reward pathways.
So to boil it down into a lesson we can use, dopamine – and feelings of pleasure – are not triggered in your reward system by getting what you want. They are triggered by seeking and anticipation, by having a goal, by looking forward and discovering new places and things.
Of course, pleasure is not everything – and for the purposes of this short article, I have simplified some highly complex science. But it’s also very simple to apply this basic neuroscience to our everyday lives. How? In the year ahead, try setting a goal or a plan for an activity that you can look forward to doing later that week. Supercharge it by making it something new. For example, if you’re thinking about holidays in the coming year, plan short breaks to new locations, instead of one long visit to a place you’ve already been.
It doesn’t have to cost a fortune either. Since writing my book Feeling ‘Blah’?: Why Anhedonia Has Left You Joyless I’ve put the science to the test with weekly activities as simple as setting an intention to fly a kite in the park at the weekend or organising a visit to a museum I’ve never been to. And it works because, no matter what life throws at you, you’re giving your brain’s primal reward system an intentional and regular boost.
The bad news is that life is tough at the moment for a lot of people – and likely to remain so for a while. But the good news is that we’ve never known more about how happiness is made in our brain. If 2025 is going to be anything like 2024, there’s never been a better time to harness this knowledge.
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