My 5 step process for lasting happiness.

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1. Believe that you have control over your emotions. If you can't even believe this yet, believe that it is at least possible for you to learn how to choose your own emotional states. This is actually the necessary first step to emotional self-mastery, to accept that it is something you have control over. Most people go through life being emotionally reactive, they just instinctively respond to stimuli in their environment, thinking there is an external world that supersedes their internal world. This is the biggest limiting belief there is, you underestimate how you can shape your perception of reality and develop psychological capabilities far beyond the levels of consciousness previously known to you.

2. Disengage emotion from perception. Realize that emotions are entirely subjective, and existentially meaningless. You were predisposed by biology, and programmed by society to feel happy when you accomplish things, win competitions, and receive approval, praise, sexual validation and a sense of belonging others. Consequentially you would naturally feel unpleasant emotions when you desire such things and do not get to experience them. Humans evolved this way so that you would be guided by your urges to survive, compete and procreate, really no different from any other species of animal. By realizing that's the whole point of having emotional reactions, that they are just shallow, rudimentary, primitive instincts designed to enslave you to the game of life, you can relinquish any sense of attachment you may have had to your emotional states.

This is the hardest part of the transformation, because people think of their emotions as deep, meaningful, and real, denying the validity of your emotions seems like destroying your sense of self altogether, and perhaps this is the very means by which you stop being a victim of emotional reactiveness, and start being the author of your own emotional states. Since emotions are not grounded in any objective, external reality, they all come from within the psyche, why wouldn't you be able to just choose your own emotional states- if you want to be happy, then be happy for the sake of being happy. What is the point of clinging to the reactive model of emotionality- you don't need it at all. It's just an embodiment of the victim mentality which is keeping you depressed. Time to discard that old paradigm.

3. Differentiate between emotions, sensations and meanings. Be conscious of the pure sensations you experience in your body at any moment, without attaching any thoughts or emotions to them. Think about an emotion you have felt- any emotion. Now what is the emotion made up of? Sensations and thoughts. Sensations are visceral things you experience in your body, and thoughts are the language you use to describe it, the meanings you attach to the sensations. For example, just notice how your body felt when you had been sad, or angry, or scared. How was your breathing, muscle tension, posture, heart rate, etc. And what thoughts did you associate with these sensations, what stories did you tell yourself? Now you are beginning to see the big picture. By dissecting emotions into their components, you can manipulate those components as to eliminate unpleasant emotions, and create desired emotional states. Body and mind are not separate entities, but one integrated organism in a continuous feedback loop. You can be more conscious of what you do with your body, and of what narratives you tell yourself. By doing both of these you can actually affect the root sensations as well, and control the entire process of feeling emotions.

4. Hack into the emotional feedback loop. The most straightforward demonstration of this would be the relationship between facial expressions and emotions. Normally, facial expressions are simply external reflections of an animal's emotions, and their evolutionary purpose is to broadcast those emotions to communicate with other animals. But this is a feedback loop, and it works just as well the opposite way around. It's devilishly simple how you can just manipulate your own emotions by changing your facial expressions, you can make super wide smile, a deeply smug, evil grin, smile so hard your cheeks get sore, and keep smiling like that for 5 minutes. You will soon be overcome with very pleasant sensations, and start to actually feel ecstatic, blissful and overjoyed. Hacking into your emotional feedback loop, getting something from nothing, is really this simple. You can also listen to upbeat, fast paced music while clapping your hands to help get into state when doing this smile meditation. This is totally not normal, I'd even call it an abnormal psychology technique, but it absolutely works. Normal people are miserable, neurotic, emotionally reactive messes with very little self-awareness, drifting through life haphazardly, reacting to stimuli, deriving a sense of self worth from other people. Disregard all that nonsense, and create your own reality.

And there are endless more techniques like this that allow you to just change what you do with your physical body in order to bring about desirable emotional states. Some are fairly simple like smiling, deep breathing, posture and body language control, music/sounds and aromatherapy. There are also next level techniques you can use to release emotional baggage, like through intense sound vibration (think chanting AUM so deeply you become the mantra) and deep tissue release, massaging whatever parts of your musculature you can reach, applying as much pressure as you can without injuring yourself, also kneading your back and upper legs on a lacrosse ball.

I reiterate again, there is no separation between mind and body, treat it as one feedback loop. Emotional tension is physical tension and vice versa. You won't become happy just talking about your "feelings," nor by numbing them with drugs. You become happy by dissolving any sense of duality between your mind and body, the internal and external reality. It will seem very simple once you get it, because happiness is naturally the default state of being, since once you realize nothing actually matters, you can stop projecting meaning onto everything, no longer feel you need to do anything in life, and just experience the bliss of "beingness."

5. Step 5: Commandeer the emotional feedback loop as your source of self-sustaining internal happiness, permanently detaching your mood from any outside input. It can get to the point where your subjective emotional states become their own enclosed ecosystem, and absolutely nothing external to you can penetrate this bubble. This takes practice, and when you find yourself removed from your comfort zones, you are forced to get creative, and can reach profound levels of personal development much quicker than when just thinking about this as a concept. Facing situations that would have used to make you sad, scared or angry can force your emotional resolve to really kick into overdrive, and this builds a resilient foundation for achieving emotional mastery.

The process I am trying to describe here is super-normal, the establishment might label as psychosis, a breaking from reality, emotional derangement. This is also necessarily a rejection of affective empathy, refusing to react emotionally to others by not opening yourself to instinctively feel what they are feeling. On the other hand it is the core of self-mastery, fully internalizing that you are the creator of your own reality, the fundamental kernel of true personal freedom. Though one potential thing to watch out for is that when you are happy, negative motivation will no longer work, so once this happens, all of your actions will have to be driven by love, not fear.