Why Your Happiness Never Lasts - Emotional Operating Systems Explained

I used to spend a lot of time wondering why I couldn't seem to stay happy the way other people could. I seemed like I was just as capable of feeling happiness in the moment as anyone most of the time anyway. But it didn't seem like that feeling lasted as long for me as it was supposed to or as it did for other people.

I didn't understand how it was possible for human beings to be in a good mood most of the time or to still be feeling good about something that happened like weeks or even months ago because my experience of positive emotions was always very very short-lived. It seemed like as soon as whatever was causing me to feel good stopped happening, I could like feel the happiness start to drain out of me, like immediately, almost like I was pouring water into a leaky bucket. And before long, I'd end up just feeling empty inside again.

And I found myself desperately looking for the next reason to feel good or the next thing I could do that would make me feel good. And as I'm sure you can guess, that pattern led me into a lot of very self-destructive habits and very poor decisions in my life. It wasn't that bad things were constantly happening to ruin my mood, although that was sometimes true.

It was more like my positive feelings just seemed to decay at a very alarming rate the moment I wasn't actively experiencing something to feel good about. It was like the absence of a present positive experience was in and of itself a negative experience in a way that it did not seem to be for other people. And just to be clear, I'm using happy very broadly here.

Like happiness can be a lot of things. Happiness could be joy, peace, excitement, contentment, like basically any positive emotional experience because happy is kind of a broad term that doesn't really mean much on its own. The other difference I noticed between myself and others during this period of life was that I seemed to react more strongly to all emotional stimuli.

Not just painful feelings, but like good things, too. During the relatively rare moments when things actually seemed to be going decent for me, I didn't just feel relief. I felt kind of incredible.

Not in like a manic type of way, but just in a like maybe things are actually going to be okay. life may have some meaning after all. I may not be permanently condemned to a hellish life in a strange society kind of way.

Um, and although I wasn't sure at the time if I was really feeling better than other people during these moments or if I was just feeling normal because when you feel when you rarely feel normal, feeling normal can feel kind of incredible. Much in the same way that when you have been sick for a long time, feeling healthy feels incredible. Like the absence of the thing that normally plagues you is a noticeable sensation when you aren't used to it being absent and you kind of feel amazing without it.

And for a long time, I just thought this was all just depression. Like these differences I noticed between myself and other people about my moods and my emotions, I was like, this it's it's major depressive disorder. It's a clical mood disorder.

But that theory didn't hold up well over time. And not to say that I didn't experience depression, but that everything I just described is not inherently true of all people with depression and potentially can be true also of people who don't have depression. Because even during like lighter, brighter periods of my life, whatever happiness I happened to be feeling, it always seemed very fragile.

It's almost like my emotions were like a nervous deer in an open field and I was afraid that I'd spook them if I like moved too much or paid too much attention to them. Like like this could go away at any moment. So be very careful with what you do.

I eventually concluded that this was not just my depression. My mind really doesn't work the way most people's seem to. And as far as I can tell, and I looked pretty hard, there isn't a name for this.

I I have not seen a description of what I was feeling that matched me and I've not seen a label for it. I personally am the kind of individual who finds labels and names very helpful or sometimes even essential for understanding. So I decided to make a name for this way that my brain worked.

And as someone who briefly worked in IT, what this difference most reminded me of is the difference between two operating systems at the time that I kind of started coming up with this theory. I would have said Windows and Linux because that's that was the time frame. Um I know it's a pretty dated reference that may not mean anything to some of you.

So to use a more modern example, think of the difference between like an iOS phone like an iPhone or an Android phone like a Samsung Galaxy. If you just hold them up next to each other, they look very similar, right? They're both smartphones with similar screens and and touchscreen features and a bunch of apps that probably do really similar things.

And so on the surface, these look like almost the same thing with just some slight differences here and there. But if you're used to using one and you start using the other, you realize there's a learning curve to it. And there are some some functions beneath the surface that are actually quite a bit different.

like apps have different names, settings are in different places. Sometimes the same gesture does a different thing. It's a different app store, different levels of like permissions and customization.

And it's ultimately if if you've ever switched like phones, not just like upgraded, but like if you've switched from an app from like an iPhone to an iOS or or Android or vice versa, there's a lot that's different and you don't always realize it right away. I have a different emotional operating system than what most people seem to have. I don't know that it's better or well, it's definitely not better.

I don't know that it's worse, per se. I think it's harder sometimes. It's just different.

And and the biggest problem I have had is not realizing or not knowing that it is different and thinking that I can use other people's lives and strategies as a blueprint for my own and that that will just work. And over and over and over again that just led to frustration. Again, it would be like reading a guide for how to use an iPhone if you have a Galaxy.

Like some of it kind of works, but then some of it it's going to be like that's not that's not even where that thing is. That doesn't do that. There are two key differences that that seem to exist between my operating system and that of a quote normal person.

And I kind of hinted at them already, but I want to lay it out clearly here just so we're all on the same page. First is that I seem to react more strongly than most people to all emotional stimuli, pleasant and unpleasant. I happy cry, not like sobbing, but like I I experience like happy tears like a lot and often over kind of mundane pretty normal stuff that I think many people would not even notice.

They can bring up like such deep feelings of happiness in me and I'm really really grateful for that side of it. But I can also enter a very dark, hopeless and meaningless place over relatively small stressors or challenges. It's like sometimes it's just one one or two little resistance points in my day and and there's a part of me and it used to be all of me and I've had to learn to fight against this that just says like screw it, don't bother.

Like it's not worth it. So in this way, my life can end up feeling a lot like a roller coaster ride that alternates between exhilarating and terrifying. I think my ups and downs are both more intense than most other people's.

And I'm aware that that sounds like I'm describing bipolar disorder and and there's probably a lot of overlap between these two things, but I I think this is something different because the second is I don't think that there is a natural floor or like lower limit to how bad I am capable of feeling and that in the absence of something to feel good about my mood does just do this constant downward spiral thing without anything needing to happen or go wrong. It's like this elevator that just keeps going down and down and down until something starts to pull it back up again. And it feels like I could literally like metaphor, not literally, I was about to say literally metaphorically, that'd be the stupidest phrase that ever came out of my mouth.

Metaphorically, reach the center of the earth without something, some kind of interference to pull it back up. I seem to lack a natural baseline feeling of contentment that as far as I can tell is meant to come with just like awareness of existence. Like I'm alive and that should feel at least semi- good to me.

Whatever line of code it is that is supposed to make a person feel at least somewhat happy about being alive does not seem to have been entered into my operating system. So, all that being said, I do not claim to have all the answers on how to live, maybe even enjoy living from time to time when you seem to have been programmed in a way that runs contrary to the general patterns of society. But I do claim to have some of the answers because I've been doing this for 42 years and things are getting better for me and I have figured some things out.

And what I want to do today is share with you some of those things I have figured out. some of the tips that have helped me not hate being me. And the first one I want to share with you in no particular order is to learn to enjoy the non-negotiables of life.

So there are certain things there's certain parts of life that no matter who you are, what kind of lifestyle you live as a as a biological organism, you cannot escape. Like we all have to eat, which means we all have to in some way, shape, or form secure and prepare food. We all have to sleep.

uh we all have to clean ourselves or at least we very much should be doing that. We all have physical bodies that we have to exist in. These are inescapable components of reality.

And so if I spend time and energy upgrading my experience with those unavoidable parts of life, that ultimately does more for my mood than just having a lot of fun stuff in my life, which used to be my strategy. Because if for no other reason than like the frequency with which those things occur, um if you can learn to enjoy the parts of your life that you cannot escape rather than constantly searching for ways to escape the parts you don't enjoy, your need to constantly seek out your next source of positive emotion, which was a chronic pattern for me, will will decline quite a bit because you will get more natural mood boosts from things that you are forced to do anyway to stay alive. Basically, so if you think of your mood expressed as a line graph, for a lot of people, it's constantly going down other than like maybe evenings and weekends when you have enough discretionary time to do the things that really boost your mood, right?

But then what do you do in between? If you can find ways to find some amount of joy or satisfaction or contentment in the things you're going to have to do like every day, multiple times throughout the day, or the things at least you should be doing, then you're going to have more boosts throughout your day just from being alive and doing basic tasks. Two of the things that have been like absolute game changers for me in particular have been cooking and fitness, which they go together really well.

Um, but like when I have a good workout in the morning, and that's I do work out in the morning because a that's really the only time I have time. B, if you work out too late at night, it can keep you awake. Um, I can feel physically and emotionally I can feel the effects of that like a positive ripple effect all day long.

Like you know how you just wake up sometimes in a bad mood or maybe like had a dream that that really angered you or you maybe you like were scrolling on your phone, you saw something on social media and it just like puts you in a negative headsp space all day long. For me, fitness is the opposite of that. And I I want to be clear, I don't love all fitness.

Like, remember that fitness is an absurdly broad category. And and there's probably lots of things in there you hate. Like, I hate running.

I I don't really like anything cardio related all that much, but I found I kind of like weight training. So, that's what I do. Try to get some cardio in every now and then.

Like balance is important, but if you can find a form of physical activity that you kind of enjoy and you can do that regularly, that will probably have a greater net impact like a cumulative impact on your mood over the course of your life than some super awesome hobby just because you can do it every day. And in fact, you probably should do it every day or at least almost every day. Same with cooking.

Like I have to eat and I don't like to constantly pay for other people to make my food. So getting good at cooking, well getting decent, I wouldn't I don't know if I'm saying good. Getting decent at cooking like has helped me be passionate about so many things in life because it also makes grocery shopping more fun, which you have to do.

It also makes meal planning more fun, which you have to do or should do to some degree. I enjoy eating my meals more when I know I made it because then it's like there's a little bit of achievement in it versus like if I go get Chipotle, it still tastes good, but not because of anything I did. So there are with just those two things, there's so many like builtin experiences of joy just from being alive that kind of counteracts my general like disenchantment with that uh proposition.

So I hope I hope that helps. Another thing is to find a few things in this world that you are passionate about that either constantly kind of re-trigger themselves or bring you joy just by thinking about them. Because hobbies that only bring you joy while you're doing them, they're they're ultimately going to be naturally capped in terms of how much they can actually lift your mood up by how often you're able to do it.

And most of us, you know, have a lot of responsibilities and obligations. We're pretty busy, so we can't actually do these things that often. something that either creates constant joy stimuli because it's reoccurring naturally or because it's something that you can just think about and it gives you joy again is going to give you so much more net joy than a thing that only feels good while you do it.

I'll give a couple examples of both categories for like the reoccurring two that have been big for me and these are really specific so obviously like these may not you may not be into these and you may have to find your own watches and fragrances. I've mentioned that before like as you may notice I always wear a watch and it's not an Apple watch. I have a couple different ones.

Um, but you know, I as a therapist, I kind of keep an eye on the time throughout the day and putting a lot of research into different types of watches, brands, styles, etc. Like the more knowledgeable about something you are, usually the more you appreciate it. So, this is not a this is an Orient watch.

It's like $150. You know, it's nothing absurdly fancy or or valuable. Um, but just knowing more about how it works and like the brand heritage and the style and things like that, like I I'm happy every time I check the time because I have cool watch and fragrances every time I like I smell nice and every and I have a few different ones.

And again, I've learned a lot about like the different notes and the different fragrance houses and all that. And so like it's not just like, oh, I smell good. It's like there's a lot of almost like lore, if that makes sense, behind it.

And so I get a deep sense of appreciation and joy from those reoccurring stimuli throughout the day. And then things that make me happy to just think about them. To give you a couple examples there, uh, recently I've gotten into gardening.

And right now it's February, so no gardening is happening, but my seeds just came in yesterday for this coming year. Pretty soon I'll be starting them inside under some grow lights. Then I'll be transferring them outside.

And every day my garden will be growing and creating food. And so throughout the day, like I'm just at work, you know, doing my thing. And every now and then I'll have this thought of like you have cucumbers growing right now.

And that's a cool feeling. Like there's a positive thing happening right now in my life and I'm not even having to do it. Um, another thing I love is fishing.

And although I can't do that during the day, I live on a little creek that has fish in it. So sometimes I just get this picture in my head of like there's fish in my Well, not right now. I was going to say there's fish in my backyard right now.

Uh, the creek is very shallow. So in the winter they actually go there's nothing there right now. But when the weather warms up there will be.

And just thinking about that gives me joy. I don't have to do anything. It's just there.

It just exists. And that gives me more of that like natural baseline zest for life that people with my emotional operating system seem to be lacking. Third idea is, and these are all these I know these are all kind of similar, but they're different enough that I think they're all worth mentioning separately.

Invest in comfort more than in escapes. So like when I say invest, that could be time, energy, money. But I if you think about all of the environments that you're forced to spend time in and and the two that come to mind most are your bed and clothes, like you're you're going to be in clothes most if not all of the day and you're going to be in bed hopefully around a third of your day.

And so how those two um like sensory stimuli feel to you is actually going to have a huge impact on your baseline mood because you're going to be in one or both of those environments all day long. and the way they feel is going to affect things for you. There's been, it may not even be a conscious thing.

There's a lot of studies on like subconscious environmental quality having a major effect on mood and cognition, like the thoughts you think throughout the day. So that's why I'm a big advocate for like having and I know we all have different income levels to work with and I'm sensitive to that. But having a nice mattress, sheets, pillows, shoes, socks, pants, all these things like probably will make a greater impact on your quality of life than like going out and buying I I don't know what some some fancy thing that like doesn't do that much.

I wish I had a better example for that. But these are things that are going to affect your mood all day long. Personally, I am very texture sensitive and I hate like hard, scratchy clothes.

Um, but I also like my clothes to be fairly fitted. Um, I don't like super loose, baggy things. There are not a lot of brands that nail the overlap of like soft, cozy, and comfortable, but not overly flowing and billowy.

Um, one brand that does that really well is the sponsor of today's video, which is Cozy Earth. They have so many great options for gentle, comfortable clothing that is not super baggy. They make a lot of loungewear and athleisure.

Um, but that's not the only stuff they have. They do have some things that could probably be worn to most work settings as well, unless you work in like a super stuffy formal environment where you have to wear like a suit and tie. Um, they have something called the everywhere pant that you could probably wear in most office settings.

I would certainly let people here at the Northstar Psychological Center wear them. They look like chinos or or like casual slacks, but they kind of feel more like joggers. So, they kind of nail that overlap that I really like.

Definitely consider checking them out. And if you do find something you like, make sure to use the promo code Dr Scott 10 for up to 20% off your order. Fourth idea, I'll have to explain this one a little bit.

Determine your favorite biome and spend as much time in it as possible. If you don't know what I'm talking about when I say biome, I think it's mostly a gaming term. I first heard it in Minecraft.

Um, but it refers to the basically it's like different types of natural environments, right? So, here on Earth, you know, we have deserts and jungle and mountains and, you know, prairies and plains and and tundras and stuff like like there's different ecosystems, right? Different environments in the world.

And I strongly believe that some of us, if not all of us, are just more attuned to some than others. For me personally, my biome is water. Like any water, lakes, rivers, ocean.

I haven't spent much time around the ocean, but I think it's like fascinating. That that natural zest for life that I generally seem to lack is usually present if I'm on or near water. And that was part of the reason our house is kind of on water.

It's a creek, but a creek is water. Um, growing up, I spent a lot of my childhood on a lake. And just those were the happiest times of my life.

like as a child anyway by far it's not even close. there is when I'm around water, there's just some some level of natural peace and excitement at the same time that comes over me. Um, that doesn't seem to to happen in other environments for me.

Now, water is just the one for me. Like, some of you might be like, "Yeah, that's me, too. " And others, maybe you don't care about water that much, but there's probably some ecosystem or some setup in this world that excites you.

And this one I know can be tricky because I know we don't all have the ability to just like pick up and move to a different state or even possibly a different country. But even if you can't do that, maybe you can find something, you know, just just something resembling that. I mean, that's kind of what I have done.

Like I live in Iowa. I think Iowa, it might be the state that has the least water in the United States. It's it's definitely one of the like that would not surprise me if it's in probably the bottom five.

Um, so I don't necessarily live in my preferred biome as far as like the whole ecosystem, but living near water really has made a difference for me. So, if you can figure out what your favorite biome is and to the best of your ability in whatever circumstances you're working with, try to kind of engineer your life so you're there more often, I do think that'll make a difference. I have two more for you guys today.

I'm going to give I'm going to give an FYI to this. Both of these last two I think are going to be controversial. My first four most likely have not been and you've probably been like, "Yep, that sounds good.

That sounds smart. " These two are going to have some of you wanting to push back a little bit. And honestly, that's okay.

I welcome that. This is just me talking about me. If these don't work for you or if you find them offensive, feel free to discard them.

You have your own boundaries what to do with my ideas, okay? I'm not the boss of your life. But the fifth idea that has helped me a lot is I give myself permission to ignore the majority of the world.

I know how that probably sounds especially like now because there I mean it seems like there's always a lot happening but I feel like now in particular there's maybe like more than average happening. Um and and even by the fact that I can say that obviously I'm not completely ignorant about what's going on in life. Someone else said this better than me.

So I'm going to summarize his uh his argument for this. Uh that person is Henry Rollins. If you guys don't know who he is, he well he's a lot of things.

Musician, poet, speaker. He in his younger days was probably one of the angriest people that you can imagine. Um and very much would would like rage against the state of the world and against society and all the things they were doing wrong.

And and it kind of would appear from the outside looking in that while he has not really changed his stances on anything, he seems to have mellowed with time. And I actually saw he was doing like a TED talk type thing and someone kind of asked him about that lately. They're like, "Have you lost some of your passion or like you know you're not you're not going about this the way you used to?

What's going on? " And again, this is me paraphrasing. I don't remember exactly what he said word for word, but he said basically my perspective hasn't changed and my perspective has always been when I look around in the world I it just looks like there's garbage everywhere.

Not like the people necessarily, but just like the things that are happening is like there's just piles of trash everywhere. for you like bad things are happening everywhere all the time. And he said, "I used to think that I needed to pick up all the trash as much as I could and basically yell at other people to also pick up the trash so that we could finally get this mess cleaned up.

" He said, "It it looks the same to me as always, but now I'm focusing more on the me part. meaning I'm going to clean up my proportionate pile of this trash because if every single human being just did that, we'd be all right. And so that's what I'm going to do.

I'm going to do my part and I'm going to realize that I can't force other people to do their part. The world in general and society as a whole is not going in a direction that I find super pleasing or appealing. So it it's not like I'm saying it's not like the meme where it's the dog in the flaming house saying this is fine.

I know it kind of sounds like that. This is not fine. It's very much not fine.

I don't think that. I am just aware that my power is limited. And by being good to the people in my inner circle, taking appropriate care of of my family and loving them and, you know, having the Northstar Psychological Center where people can come for help, creating my content to try to help strangers for free.

Like, those are my contributions. And if everyone I'm not I'm not trying to like sound egotistical or anything, but if everyone just did those types of things, we'd be all right. We really would.

Um, so it's very much a matter of just doing your part and and knowing that there are limits to your power and that you cannot change the world by yourself. And if you try, you're probably going to drive yourself nuts. Because here's another potentially controversial opinion within this.

A lot of times the people who try to make the really big global changes are not great to their inner circle. Like it it's it's almost like it's an eitheror proposition. If you look at like great leaders, if you look at people like Martin Luther King, Gandhi, even like John Lennon for example, like not always great to the people closest to them, even if they advocated for the world as a whole to be a better place.

So don't don't get so big picture thinking that you neglect the few things in this world that you actually do have agency over because that's where we all have the greatest impact that we can make in my opinion. Controversial, I know. And the last one, which I know is also going to stir up some controversy.

The the sixth idea is to cultivate a spiritual belief system for people like us, I don't know is a tough pill to swallow. And that's been how I felt most of my life about everything I do, everything I see. And at least for me, even the best moments of my life, for most of it anyways, they always had sort of this so what vibe to them.

Like, yeah, this is a nice moment, but if the best outcome that I can achieve in my life is to have moments that don't hurt, if that's my ceiling, like if that's all I can achieve, is it really worth continuing to play this game? And I was never able to find a satisfactory worldly answer or worldly response to that thought. And it just kept eating away at me until I started to explore nonworldly possibilities.

Other ways to understand my own existence beyond just what happens and what I feel in the moment. Because at least for me, even the good moments don't ever quite seem like enough to justify it if that's all I'm able to look at. I'll leave that one there.

You guys can decide what you want to do with that. That's my ideas for you today. I sincerely hope they're beneficial.

One last shout out to Cozy Earth for sponsoring today's content. Definitely encourage you to check them out if you want to explore some more comfortable options for things like clothing and and bedding and things along those lines. I sincerely hope this is helpful.

Obviously, this is a topic that's very dear to me. It's something I've been trying to understand about me for 42 years, and uh I don't feel like I completely understand it, but I do feel like I'm closer. Hopefully, you also feel like you're closer after listening to me.

Thank you for your time.