Euphoria overdose: The pitfalls of happiness
Along with this liberated generation is an environment with a variety of options; if food back then only served as a necessity, food nowadays (expensive, affordable, nutritious or not) serves as a host of our gluttony. In the same way, cheerfulness can be compared to food: though it’s a fundamental part of your biological needs, eating too much from a buffet might leave you with a bloated stomach and a larger cost to pay, according to Washington Post.
When in a state of overwhelming positive emotion, people tend to expose themselves in risky behaviors like spree eating, alcohol consumption, and even drug use. The over-ecstatic might sometimes “overlook or neglect warning signs in their environment, or take bold leaps and risky steps” even when these signs says chances may be precarious according to Gruber. Perhaps to some freedom seekers or the youth living out their lives, taking in a little cautionary pondering in their adventures of happiness won’t harm their liberated ventures.
Meanwhile, it’s not shocking that some people (especially artists, writers, and the like) do their work effectively in a melancholic state. Take, for example, Edgar Allan Poe who wrote his now-classic poems under his depressed state, and we bet you also feel slightly more productive doing your projects in the same melancholic condition. Researcher Mark Alan Davis found that when some people experience an overwhelming delight, they occasionally no longer experience the same creativity lift unlike when people feel unhappy.
In extreme cases, when people are too ecstatic, it is possible that they’ll have an incapability to tap into their creative assets, since they are mostly satisfied and they usually won’t search for inspiration or fulfillment anymore, resulting to a creativity hitch. On the other hand, melancholic people yearn for a fulfillment in the things they do to help them get out of their gloomy state, making their outputs more creative, according to University of California, Berkeley’s website. So perhaps, for us students, thrilling parties and vacations would be timelier once we get our projects done, or else we might just suffer from submitting a dissatisfying output.
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American writer Denis Waitley once said, “Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, worn or consumed.” A slice of pizza, some nice shoes, or a new phone would make any normal teenager scream for joy. But perhaps it’s better to put into perspective that happiness isn’t about what we have, but how we relish it within ourselves and with other people.
Marielle let out a sigh of relief upon her discovery that something well-deserved—just like happiness—isn’t something she needs to exert effort in reaching, but something that would suddenly arrive in her life, like a subtle rainbow after a gloomy rainfall.
