Hallucinate Happiness.

When I was in grad school, I discovered the incredible experience of feeling high, but not being high.

Let me explain:

I was driving on a road trip, though I don’t remember exactly where I was headed. (I took a lot of road trips in grad school). The sun was shining, and the windows were down. The sky was a perfect baby blue. Something happy and dance-y was playing through the speakers. It was, in every conceivable way, a perfect moment.

I remember thinking: I feel high. Colors seem brighter. My mind feels like it’s floating. I can really feel the sun’s warmth on my skin. A giggle started to bubble in my chest.

I even asked myself, Wait, did I smoke something before this? (I didn’t.)

I was just…happy. So happy, in fact, that my mind immediately drew the connection of being under the influence. Like what happens after hearing a few notes to a song you know — my brain just filled in the blanks.

The feeling didn’t last long…maybe a few minutes. But it was more than just an errant thought. My mood, my perspective, my sensory system meaningfully shifted for that time. I was mildly hallucinating. Why? Because I allowed myself to. I leaned in. I saw an opportunity for joy, and (to borrow a term from improv acting), I said “yes, and…”

This experience was foundational to my understanding of agency in my own mind.

Have you ever managed to convince yourself that you’re angry of something? Of course you have — we all have. I don’t know a single person who hasn’t played out an argument in their mind, only to find themselves more upset at its conclusion. (My partner teases me that sometimes, when I get pretend-mad at him for too long, I will end up actually making myself upset. I confess that he is absolutely right.)

With the right kind of focus and intention, the reverse can be true, too. We can convince ourselves of our own joy — we can hallucinate happiness. But it’s like I said, it has to be the right kind of focus.

So often, when people talk about willing themselves to be happy, they try to leverage the logical reasons they should be happy. They create lists of what’s good in their lives, compare themselves to those less fortunate, all for the purpose of tricking their brain into something it doesn’t feel. For most of us, that strategy is tempting, but ineffective.

When you get into those arguments in your head, your logic isn’t what’s convincing you: it’s your emotions, your blood pressure, your heartrate, your experience of being angry.

If you want to convince yourself of your joy, logic isn’t the way to go. Our strategic thinking lives in a wholly different part of the brain than our emotions. Our emotions speak a different language entirely. You have to find that glimmer of a feeling, lean in, and let the hallucination take hold.

That’s what I was doing last week, in my Deep Breath writeup. That’s what got me out of my funk. I didn’t convince myself I was high, but I did manage to convince myself of joy that wasn’t there before. I fixated on the feeling of the sun like I was rolling at a festival. Call it a hallucination, but it worked .

So…what’s your drug? Where can you lean in?