How does happiness affect your body?

Happiness is an emotion that arises through physical sensations (hedonia) and through the joy of reason (eudaimonia) from connections, gratitude, savouring. 

Happiness or joy is an instinctive universal human emotion, one of seven core emotions, triggered through your physical senses or feeling connected in your mind. 

Happiness or joy, an instinctive emotion, acts in the reward pathways in your brain in your body, stimulating the production of serotonin and dopamine, ‘the feel good’ hormones. When happy, your body can feel tingling sensations, your face flushes, your heartbeat may increase and your energy levels increase, thus the saying ‘jump for joy’. 

Generally, happiness is one of the more pleasurable emotions and a great focus is placed on attaining this state in many of the world’s societies. One can argue that our human bodies and brains have emotionally evolved to seek hedonic pleasure. In fact, there has been an increase in the study and measurement of happiness within the sciences. The World Happiness report,  published by the United Nations, sponsored by Oxford University amongst many has now been published for 10 years. As a result of all the studies and interest, the definitions of happiness have now come to include wider lifestyle factors whereas the term ‘joy’ may be more apt for the instinctive emotion you feel in the complex interplay of body, mind and soul. Happiness or joy in your body can be dangerous, as seeking pleasures that stimulate dopamine and serotonin production can cause addiction and damage your body. 

Some bodies are more sensitive to happiness and joy than others 

Like all instinctive emotions that are universal to all humans, some feel the emotion more strongly than others. Pleasurable sensations, such as massage or stroking on one person’s body may make one person feel happiness whereas not another. As humans have emotionally evolved beyond instinctive emotions for survival, emotional triggers and awareness has become a complex interplay of body, mind and soul. Both sex and food, which have the most impact on emotion through the body, can be enjoyed in a myriad of different ways with different tastes and variations in the amount of pleasure and happiness received. Getting happiness and joy through giving pleasure to others is also a fundamental aspect of human evolvement.  A book by Lyubomirsky (2007) looking at happiness, in the wider definition than that of pure instinctive joy revealed that genes and circumstances account for 60% of happiness triggers. Thoughts play a role and these thoughts can also effect how your body is triggered into feeling happy.

Your body feels happiness through hedonic pleasures 

Hedonic happiness can be defined as the search for happiness through pleasures from stimulation. Sex and food are considered to be the most fundamental and universal human hedonic drivers to joy and happiness but other body sensations such as massage or sport can lead to happiness. 

Sex: Having an orgasm stimulates your brain in the same way as drugs, alcohol, gambling or an activity that you find pleasurable such as music. MRI and Pet scanning have revealed that an orgasm activates all parts of the brain, not just the instinctive emotional centre, in a gender neutral way. The brain releases the hormones ‘dopamine’, serotonin and oxytocin, which all contribute to making you feel good and happy, as your body is stimulated through sex. 

Food: The feeling of happiness and pleasure from food is stimulated through your mind and act of savouring pleasure but can also stimulate a feeling of happiness through your body. Many studies have been published on the brain-gut axis and most of the body’s serotonin receptors are found in the gut. Certain foods are thought to stimulate these receptors. In addition, on the consumption of food, your brain produces dopamine, known as the reward hormone. 

Alcohol/gambling: both alcohol and gambling create feelings of pleasure as they act on the reward pathways in the brain and stimulate ‘dopamine’. You can become addicted to these pleasures as dopamine production becomes out of balance, creating a physical need in your body beyond your mind. 

Touch: your body can be stimulated into feelings of happiness through touch (both sexual and non-sexual) or massage. As well as the feeling of connection in your mind, your body’s hormones are stimulated through the touch. Touch can be orgasmic. According to Jess O’Riely, a sexologist, remapping of the senses can occur to experience sexual and orgasmic sensations from other body parts when some organs have been damaged. 

Physical Movement: physical exercise through sport or dancing or simply ‘jumping for joy’ is well reported as having a positive effect on feelings of happiness and joy, as endorphins and the ‘feel good’ hormones are released. 

Pleasure seeking for happiness can lead to body addiction  

‘Addiction’ can be a negative effect of excessive joy or happiness seeking of body pleasures. Whether it be alcohol, sex, food, gambling, these pleasures can negatively affect the brain reward pathways in your brain and production system of ‘happy hormones’.  Strong habits such as drinking coffee or chocolate will create tolerance and can affect your body on withdrawal but may not necessarily alter your brain pathways and chemical make-up to create deep addiction.

When you are happy your face flushes

Like any of the universal instinctive emotions, these activate physiological reactions in your body. When you are full of ‘joy’, you are excited, possibly, as in the case of blushing, triggering the instinctive ‘fight or flight’ and blood flow increases causing you to blush. Experts from the Ohio State University’s Center for Cognitive and Brain Sciences, using computer analysis of imaging, have discovered that not only does facial expression but also facial colour changes with emotions. 

When you are happy, you breathe faster and have more energy

In a similar way to how you blush when you are really happy, your body reacts to the emotion with increased heart rate, breathing faster to get more oxygen and a subsequent energy search. 

Savour to coax your body into feeling happiness  

Savouring, taking time to let your body enjoy, the taste, touch or smell of something or someone, can coax you into feeling both mental and physiological feelings of instinctive joy and happiness. In the Yale course of happiness, Dr Laurie Santos quotes the study by Jose et al. (2012) that proves that savouring positive experiences makes you happier. The act of savouring runs across many cultures, such as enjoyment of food in French or Italian culture or sensuality and wellness that has become international. 

You can trick your body into feeling happy by smiling

Dr Fernando Marmoleio-Ramos, a human and artificial cognition expert at the University of South Australia found that forcing yourself to smile can really stimulate happiness: “ In our research we found that when you forcefully practice smiling, it stimulates the amygdala  – the emotional centre of the brain – which releases neurotransmitters to encourage an emotionally positive state.“ 

Exercise can make your body feel happy 

Moving your body with whatever suits you, whether it be through exercise, dancing, sex or just jumping for joy, stimulates your body into happy feelings. With the additional movement, endorphine hormones are released into the blood stream.

Instinctive emotions are like the weather, beyond your conscious control. For a balanced life, the first step is to understand human instinctive emotions, how they work and practical steps to take in order to avoid situations that are destructive to emotional wellbeing. Not every instinctive emotion that is acted on has positive consequences. Sometimes, it may be best to take shelter from the storm. Joy or happiness is an instinctive universal emotion but happiness has come to include wider lifestyle definitions, a state of being which lasts longer than an instinctive emotion. Like all emotions, happiness comes and goes like the weather. Science has proved that you can influence happiness through your body through moving or savouring but it is also human to have other instinctive emotions that cannot be ignored, such as sadness. For example, trying to dance yourself out of a valid instinctive sadness at the loss of a loved one would be to ignore your humanity. Accepting that sadness, like a rain storm, with help from your body will pass eventually is a more realistic approach to emotional well-being.