What type of happy are you?

Oct 15, 2025

Are you happy?

It’s a question we sometimes ask each other, or ourselves, when we feel particularly vulnerable or high, or both. And the answer is usually preceded by a sigh, as we think about our life decisions

Happiness is a tricky beast, often talked about but rarely understood. We chase it all the time, but we often don’t know that we had caught it until it slips out of our grasp. Only a few among us already know what makes us happy, and even fewer are lucky enough to be able to get those things.

But can we approach happiness more logically?

Throughout evolution, happiness was associated with the neurochemical DOPAMINE, which increases in anticipation of a reward and promptly starts falling after achieving it (sometimes even while achieving it)

How much dopamine is released depends on the perceived value of the reward, and the effort required to get it.

The lower your odds of getting something, the happier you are when you get it

Whether it is chasing a high calorie meal, or a high value partner, or running away from a predator successfully, the happiness one gets from something is proportional to the difficulty in achieving that target. And if you can get a high calorie meal or an attractive mate (evolutionarily a difficult task) with the ease of clicking a button on your phone, you get a high dopamine spike.

Over the years, we have managed to hijack this Dopamine-based happiness quite successfully. Every time you bite into a carb-rich burger and down it with a milkshake, you’re taking in 600-1000 calories of energy. Your monkey brain believes this to be only possible after a lot of effort, so it gives you a lot of dopamine, which explains the pleasure you get from binge eating.

But here’s the thing with Dopamine happiness - it fades. And we are left with a ‘low dopamine state’ commonly experienced as sadness. The only solution to that then appears to be chasing another transient dopamine high.

But there is another kind of Happiness, the kind that does not fade off even after the achievement. The kind that keeps going; the kind that feels like a warm glow deep in your body. This is the happiness based on SEROTONIN.

This is when you chase something that reflects your identity, and is adding something to your larger story. It is the joy of putting another brick in the wall, another achievement in your CV, of getting a promotion. All achievements that could have only happened at the back of years of hard work. Serotonin happiness is a story.

Serotonin happiness is additive, while Dopamine happiness is addictive.

Turns out, the secret to happiness is something drug addicts have known all along - Cross fading. Learning to cross-fade from Dopamine to Serotonin is the key to happiness.