Self Expression as a Factor in Happiness

Mammals are very social beings.  They can usually be found living in communities.  The advantage of living in communities can be for survival but it then has a big communication component. We communicate to take care of basic necessities, but then we like to communicate to express ourselves.  Mammals like to play and frolic.

What is it about play that is so fundamentally important? Children love to play, dolphins love to play, horses love to romp and chase.  It is an expression of feeling good.  It is a form of happiness.  And yet with our tremendous mental capacity, we can play in many more ways than the physical.

In our youth, little girls’ minds develop faster and they take to conversation before boys.  Boys develop physically faster and they take to the terrible two’s because that’s how they best express themselves at that stage.  Later we might use our minds or our bodies or both to express what we feel and who we are. It is our way of playing out our experience of what life means to us.

The more we focus, the more uniquely or skilled our expressions can be.  The 10,000 hours of practice makes people experts in their expressions.  The term “flow” is said to be the highest form of emotional intelligence, at least as defined by Daniel Goleman in his book  Emotional Intelligence. Being “in the zone” is the place a person can achieve with practiced skills to the exclusion of distractions and with disregard to judgment.

Neurologists say that being in flow or in the zone, the brain produces dopamine as our happiness chemical.  We are pre-wired to be experts in expressing ourselves and getting rewarded for doing so.  Maybe in our search for “happiness” through acquiring and achieving we lose touch with the most elementary mammal desire.

We like to express ourselves and we are often inclined to see if their is a limit to just how good we can be. Why climb Everest? Because it’s the tallest mountain or we would climb something else.  Why go to the moon? To see if we can do it.  Why practice the violin ten hours a day? Because we want to see just how good we could be.

If you are getting bogged down in daily life and want to find some happiness, key into a passion of self expression.  We often use up our time with meaningless activities like TV, marrying our smart phones, and so on when real happiness awaits our arrival.

Get into something that is uniquely you.  Write, dance, cook, build, paint, sew, climb, surf, bike, or whatever it is you could practice regularly and improve upon your skills. This is where happiness lies.

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