You may think that someone being happier could just be a decision they make. You may know people who constantly see the negative in everything, or who tend to let everything get them down. While part of being happy does have to do with attitude and choices, there are also a lot of other factors that can really work against happiness.

One of these things is brain chemistry. Depression is, basically, an imbalance in the chemicals in the brain. Anti-depressant medication is designed to balance those chemicals and restore a brain to a better state of health. Just like an imbalance in other areas of your body can cause them not to function properly, like stomach ulcers, gall stones, or diabetes, the brain also needs a specific balance of chemistry to function at its best.

Telling someone to “snap out of” their depression and just be happy is like telling someone to just stop having diabetes. There are medications to treat symptoms and causes, as well as changes in diet, lifestyle, activity, and so on, but no one can just decide to be healed from a physical imbalance and make it just magically happen.

There are some cool things, though, that you can do to help your brain chemistry’s balance remain healthy. The brain is somewhat trainable, sort of like your muscles are. If you work out and exercise your muscles regularly, they become stronger. If you feed your body the wrong things and don’t have any physical activity or exercise, your muscles will become weak and unhealthy. With your brain, the more positive you take in and experience, the healthier your brain chemistry will become, and in contrast the more negative you take in or experience, the less healthy your brain chemistry.

You can actually improve and strengthen healthy brain chemistry by regularly, consistently saturating your brain and your thoughts with positives. You may have seen someone repeating daily affirmations or mantras, which is meant to strengthen those repeated thoughts and make them become habitual thoughts. By taking in positives, like reading positive things, listening to positive music, being around positive people, and purposely and intentionally looking for positives in life, you will actually train your brain to think positively as its default, rather than negatively.

On the flip side, if you are constantly surrounded by negative, hearing negative things, being criticized, criticizing others, seeing life difficulties or experiencing them yourself, and so forth, your brain will start to naturally think in a negative way. Your brain is being trained by what you take into it.

Someone who is dealing with depression, though, may not have the ability to just start thinking and doing positive things – anti-depressant medication, counseling, and being surrounded with support can all help them, though, until they reach a point where they can start being intentional about their own positivity.

How much negative are you taking in during your regular day, week, or month? How much positive are you experiencing? If you find that you are naturally thinking of negatives, try replacing those negative thoughts with positive and hopeful thoughts and repeating those as much as you can. Again, you need to consistently saturate your brain with the positives in an ongoing way, to help change the brain chemistry. Start looking for ways to increase the positive influences in your life – next week we’ll talk about what kinds of things in our lives can work for or against our happiness.