The other side of happiness is building a bolder approach to living

The experience of pleasure is an important way to find happiness, but pleasure alone will never achieve this goal. To find true happiness, we need to build a bolder approach to living; we need to deal with our negative experiences head-on. We need to feel pain. By "pain," I mean all the things that do not include pleasures. I mean anxiety from a major challenge and the isolation of failure. I mean sadness from a breakup, or fear of our extinction. I also mean the physical repercussions we may face in a range of contexts, some chosen and others not. These experiences are not all "painful" only, but they also activate similar neural areas in the brain, and as we will discuss, they play a role in our overall happiness in similar ways based on recent scientific findings, including those obtained from my own research laboratory, and current theories in psychology, anthropology, and neuroscience. I aim to show that pain and suffering are not enemies of happiness nor merely incidental to it. They are necessary for happiness. Without pain, there is no way to achieve true happiness. One of the main reasons for our failure to see the relationship between pain and happiness is that we no longer see pain clearly; we have developed "blind spots." If I asked you to stop and think about your last painful experience, I bet you would think of some kind of illness, injury, or a major emotional shock. I also bet you would think of a physical experience rather than an emotional event. This illustrates two shortcomings in how we perceive pain. If you took a moment to list all the different descriptions of pain, including all the negative feelings and sensations you can think of, and then created a similar list for pleasure, you might find that your list of pain would be longer than your list of pleasure. Our descriptions of emotional experiences tend to differ greatly at the negative end of the spectrum, with many words to describe them.