Reciprocal Happiness

I recently discovered something that seems, to me, pretty revolutionary. At the time, I called it The Secret to Happiness, but it's not the only secret to happiness, and it's probably not even a secret. Right now, I'm calling it Reciprocal Happiness.

Last night, I was in a bit of a funk. A friend I was chatting with was pretty bummed out that I was in a funk, and he wanted to help me feel better, but I actually only felt worse. I felt bad for making him feel bad about me feeling bad. And, of course, me feeling worse made him feel worse, which made me feel worse, and so it went until something miraculous happened. Perhaps to break the tension, or to try to lighten the mood, my friend joked about something. Hearing my friend kinda joke about something made me feel a little bit better, and that's when I realized what was going on.

We had created a positive feedback loop. Now, the "positive" part of "positive feedback loop" can be misleading. It doesn't mean anything positive is happening. It mainly means that it's a self-reinforcing cycle. Like, if your rolling dice, and you get another die every time you roll a six, rolling more dice means you're more likely to roll sixes, which will get you more dice, which will make it so more sixes get rolled more often, so you end up rolling more and more dice and more and more sixes. That's a positive feedback loop. The feedback loop is "positive" because it compounds upon itself.

The beauty of this epiphany was realizing that this positive feedback loop could be reversed.

When my friend kinda laughed a little, knowing that he wasn't completely miserable made me feel a little better, and then, knowing that my mood had lightened, his mood lightened a little more as well. Meanwhile, I had this epiphany and almost deliberately got excited about it, knowing that my excitement would rub off on my friend. He felt happy that I had learned something that made me happy, and knowing he was happy made me happier, which made him happier, and so on.

Using both the misery and the happiness as examples, I would guess that many emotions are contagious and they can spread back and forth between people, growing over time. This can have the undesirable effect of making each other miserable, or it can have a desirable effect, like making each other happy. Naturally, I chose to focus on the happiness. We can increase our own happiness and the happiness of others by making other people happy and by cultivating and sharing our own happiness.

Granted, this doesn't always work. You can't always get someone out of a slump by joking with them or directly trying to "cheer them up." People, and their emotions, can be pretty complicated. So, take this general life advice with a grain of salt, I guess. Still, it's good to be happy, and to express happiness, especially if there's any chance that happiness might spread to others and also bounce back to us.

Suffering alone probably isn't good for one's mental health, so another grain of salt for this life advice, but if all I was going to accomplish by sharing my unhappiness was to make other people unhappy too, I'd rather share some light and happiness, too, especially in hopes that some of it spreads out to others and radiates back to me. As long as emotions are contagious and self-reinforcing, I'd rather focus on spreading the good ones.