Happiness On Demand

Hello Reader,

In my last newsletter, I talked about health and happiness being your factory settings (you can read it here if you missed it).

Today, I'm going to explain the philosophy behind that idea. This will probably be the first in a series of posts that will cover the basics of health and healing, emotions, happiness, and more.

It's a bit on the longer side again, so make sure you're sitting comfortably and have a cup of your favorite beverage at hand.

Happy reading!

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Disclaimer: Everything I share here is based on my personal experience and the best of my knowledge. That doesn't make it the ultimate truth about healing, life, or anything, really. Think of it as a collection of ideas and tools to help you increase your awareness, explore new perspectives, and find your own path toward health and well-being. Please remember that if you're struggling with mental health issues, seeking help from a qualified mental health professional is always my recommendation. This article is not a substitute for professional assessment, advice, or treatment. You don't have to figure everything out on your own, and exploring these ideas can complement professional support, not replace it.

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Healing 101: What Is Healing and How to Heal?

We are used to thinking about health as something to strive towards.

Eat healthy, train your body, take your supplements, get 8 hours of sleep, meditate, journal, practice gratitude - you name it.

And when we fall ill, physically or mentally, the common course is to treat the symptoms.

Lower the fever, numb the pain, learn techniques to become resilient to unwanted emotions.

But what if health didn’t need an endless list of wellness routines and treatments?

I want to introduce a new way of thinking about health and healing:

Health is the baseline.

We seem to have confused (or deliberately switched) supporting our natural state (health) with the attempt to manufacture health from scratch.

Modern wellness culture seems to treat the body and the mind like fragile machines that will "break" if we aren't constantly maintaining them with rigid routines or the latest hacks (not to mention I haven't seen any routines for spiritual health…)

The irony is that this mindset often creates a state of chronic performance anxiety that triggers the very inflammation and distress we are trying to avoid

When we live in fear that missing a 5:00 AM ice bath or a specific macro count will "reset" our health to zero, we are treating our biology as a project to be managed.

In reality, our body/mind/spirit complex is a hyper-optimized system that can (and should) be trusted to stay healthy. Yes, those are the three parts that you are made of, and they all should be taken into account when talking about healing.

What we’ll be discussing here is a different way of understanding healing:

1. Health is the baseline, not the destination: We often approach health as something we must constantly pursue and achieve. But our body/mind/spirit system already has mechanisms dedicated to maintaining and restoring health.
2. Symptoms are signals: Instead of merely trying to treat, suppress, or eliminate them, we can learn to understand what they are telling us. Like the check engine light on a car's dashboard, symptoms can point us toward something that isn't working as it should.
3. The body, mind, and spirit work together: Mental health isn't isolated from our biology or the “spirit” (how you want to define the spirit is up to you). The brain's adaptability, our emotional responses, our beliefs, and our physical well-being are all interconnected.
4. Healing is supported, not manufactured: Our actions matter, but we don't have to force healing. We can learn to create conditions that support the body's and mind's natural processes.

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1. Health Is the Baseline

When your body/mind/spirit system (these three parts make up the totality of who you are) is functioning normally, you don’t have to “work” to be healthy—you simply are.

Being healthy is your birthright. This applies to all of your facets: your physical, mental, and spiritual health.

Children, for example, don’t wake up every day asking themselves how to maintain their mental well-being. They naturally experience joy, curiosity, and emotional balance, unless something disrupts it.

Our bodies and minds are not equipped with mechanisms to “be sick”. They are wired exclusively for repair, defense, and balance.

Our bodies are remarkably sophisticated systems, equipped with countless mechanisms for maintaining balance, repairing damage, adapting to change, and restoring health.

• Cellular regeneration
• Immune responses
• Brain’s ability to reorganize itself through neuroplasticity

Our biology is constantly working to keep us healthy.

And this capacity extends far beyond the physical body. Our minds also possess remarkable abilities to adapt, learn, process experiences, and recover from psychological challenges.

1.1. You Are Designed to Adapt and Recover

Consider neuroplasticity, the brain’s ability to form new neural connections and reorganize existing ones in response to experience.

Through learning, repetition, and new experiences, we can gradually change established patterns of thinking and behavior.

The mind-body connection offers another fascinating example.

The placebo effect demonstrates how our beliefs, expectations, and experiences can influence physiological processes, including pain perception and emotional responses.

Our mental state is not separate from our physical well-being. And then there’s the spirit.

The three parts are irrevocably interconnected and possess highly sophisticated mechanisms to be healthy, maintain health, and return to being healthy if something disrupts them.

Medicine, treatments, and healthy lifestyle choices can support these processes, but the foundation of healing lies in your own biological capacity for repair and adaptation.

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2. Symptoms Are Signals

What we perceive as symptoms of physical or mental illness are not merely symptoms, but also signals.

Take physical pain. Pain isn’t your body working against you. It’s your body’s way of saying, “Something needs your attention.”

If you accidentally touch a hot stove, the pain makes you pull your hand away before more damage is done. Without pain, you could seriously injure yourself without realizing it.

Pain is meant to protect us from harming our bodies.

Our emotional pain works in a similar way. We often treat emotions like sadness, grief, fear, or anger as problems to get rid of as quickly as possible. But these emotions didn’t appear by accident. They are trying to communicate something important.

Grief helps us process loss and gradually let go of what can no longer be held onto.

Anger tells us that a boundary has been crossed and gives us the energy to protect ourselves.

Fear alerts us to possible danger and encourages caution.

Rather than asking, “How do I get rid of this feeling?” it can be more helpful to ask,

“What is this feeling trying to tell me?”

That doesn’t mean every painful emotion should simply be accepted without question, or that the pain these conditions bring shouldn’t be alleviated. It wouldn’t be beneficial to reduce depression or anxiety to “just signals.”

Mental health challenges are often complex and can involve biology, life experiences, relationships, and our environment. But seeing emotions as messages instead of enemies can completely change how we respond to them.

Instead of fighting every uncomfortable feeling, we can become curious about what it’s pointing toward.

Often, our emotions are trying to guide us back toward what we need to heal, protect, or change.

2.1. Stop Covering Up the Check Engine Light

Here’s how you can think about it:

Think of your body, mind, and spirit as a car that rolled off the production line perfectly tuned, with every component designed to work in harmony.

Now imagine the check engine light suddenly comes on.

Would you simply put a piece of tape over the warning light and continue driving, expecting the problem to disappear?

Of course not (even though we do just this, as I'm about to explain).

You’d try to find out what’s causing it.

Perhaps something is malfunctioning, a component is out of alignment, or a system isn’t working as intended. You’d address the underlying problem and restore the car to proper working order.

Yet, when it comes to our mental health, we often do the equivalent of putting tape over the warning light.

We focus on suppressing, managing, or eliminating the symptoms without necessarily investigating what they’re trying to tell us.

Chronic stress, anxiety, depression, and mental fatigue can be understood as warning signals from a system that isn’t functioning as it should.

The signal itself isn’t the problem. It’s an indication that something deserves our attention.

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3. All Healing Is Holistic by Nature

With everything that I’ve experienced, I’ve come to realize that the human body and the mind are systems.

To be more precise, we humans consist of three parts:

1. Body
2. Mind
3. Spirit

We are mind/body/spirit systems.

A system can be defined as “an assemblage or combination of things or parts forming a complex or unitary whole.”

The keyword here is whole.

Your body, mind, and spirit are not independent entities. They are interconnected parts of one complex system, constantly influencing and interacting with one another.

One part cannot be fully understood in isolation from the others.

Therefore, health, healing, and life itself are holistic by definition.

As a three-part being, everything that happens to you is irrevocably interconnected.

Your physical health affects your mood. Your thoughts affect your biology. Your emotions influence your nervous system. Your relationships, environment, sense of purpose, and daily experiences all shape what happens inside your brain.

This has an important implication: addressing just one part of your body/mind/spirit system may not be enough to restore your overall well-being.

We need to consider the whole system and understand how its different parts influence one another.

3.1. Treat the Wound Where It Occurs, but Understand the Whole

A cut on your hand is a physical wound. You treat it on the level of the body.

Anxiety is an emotional and psychological experience. It needs to be understood and addressed on the level of the mind, while also considering the influence of your physical health and other aspects of your life.

A loss of meaning, disconnection, or lack of purpose may call for attention on the level of the spirit.

Of course, these levels aren’t isolated. A psychological wound can manifest in physical symptoms. Physical illness can affect your emotional well-being. A loss of connection or purpose can influence both your mind and body.

The point isn’t to separate these experiences, but to recognize where the problem originates and where the healing work needs to begin.

Think of it this way: you need to treat the wound where it is, but understand the patient as a whole.

That’s the difference between treating isolated symptoms and supporting holistic healing.

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4. Healing Is a Process of Returning to the Baseline

So far, we’ve established that health is the natural state, and your body/mind/spirit system has the mechanisms for returning to that state.

Therefore, healing isn’t really about fixing something that’s broken, but about returning to the baseline — the natural state of health.

Think about what happens when you break a leg.

The pain tells you something is wrong. You might take painkillers to manage the discomfort, but if the diagnosis is a broken bone, simply numbing the pain won’t solve the problem. You need to understand what’s causing it and address the actual injury.

But here’s something interesting: you don’t need to manufacture a new bone, either. Your body already knows how to repair bone tissue. The doctor’s job is to set the bone in the right position, put it in a cast, and create the conditions that allow the natural healing process to do its work.

The cast supports healing; it doesn’t manufacture it.

I believe we can apply the same principle to healing as a whole.

First, remember that symptoms are signals.

The signal is there to alert that there’s a problem. The problem is not the signal itself. The check engine light on a car’s dashboard tells you that there’s something wrong. You investigate what triggered the warning and try to fix the root cause.

The same principle applies to our health. Pain, anxiety, chronic stress, and emotional distress can tell us that something needs attention. Instead of merely trying to suppress or eliminate these experiences, we can become curious about what they’re pointing to.

What is out of balance? What needs attention? What might be interfering with our natural state of well-being?

4.1. Healing Happens by Removing Obstacles and Supporting Natural Processes

Our bodies and minds (not to mention our spirits) have remarkable mechanisms for maintaining and restoring health. Our brains can adapt and form new connections. We can process emotions, learn new patterns of thinking, and change behaviors that no longer serve us.

We don’t necessarily need to add something new.

Often, the more important task is to identify and remove what’s getting in the way.

That might mean processing unresolved emotions, questioning limiting beliefs, changing unhealthy patterns, reconnecting with others, or learning to treat ourselves with compassion.

Our actions matter, of course. Just as a broken bone needs proper alignment and protection to heal, our body and mind need the right conditions to restore balance.

But there’s a fundamental difference between forcing something to happen and supporting a process that already knows how to unfold.

This is what I mean by returning to the baseline.

Rather than treating health as something we must constantly create or achieve, we begin to see it as something we can support by removing the obstacles that interfere with it.

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Conclusion: A Different Way Forward

We’ve grown accustomed to thinking about health as something we need to achieve and maintain through constant effort. When something goes wrong, we look for ways to suppress the symptoms, manage the discomfort, and get ourselves back to functioning.

But maybe we've got the order backwards?

What if health is actually our natural baseline, and healing is about returning to it?

Your body, mind, and spirit form one interconnected system, equipped with remarkable abilities to maintain balance, adapt, and recover.

When something goes wrong, the first step should be to understand what our symptoms are telling us, not just trying to make them go away.

Instead of asking, “How do I get rid of this, quickly!?” we can start asking:

• What is this experience trying to tell me?
• What might be interfering with my natural state of well-being?
• What can I change, release, or address to support my healing?

This doesn’t mean that treatments, medication, healthy habits, or professional help aren’t important. They absolutely can be.

The point is to understand their role. They can help address problems, remove obstacles, and create the conditions for healing.

We don’t manufacture health from scratch.

We support the natural processes that make health possible.

It may not be useful to treat yourself as a broken machine that needs constant fixing.

In my opinion and experience, the better way to healing is to start treating yourself as a whole that needs the right conditions to thrive.

That way, healing becomes a journey of removing what stands between you and your natural state of well-being.

Until next time,

Think happy thoughts!

​- Atte

P.S. In my last newsletter, I introduced the idea of health and happiness being your factory settings. But how do you actually reset them? I shared a few simple "factory resets" that can help you return to your natural state of health and well-being. Catch up on the last newsletter here if you missed it!

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