Article by Arsh Merchant

Smile

Why sport makes us happy “Smile”, A word made up of just five letters but one meaning. A simple five letters that bring us together

and make us one. An action that only requires seventeen muscles and can make one’s day and potentially change one’s life. A simple word that has inspired millions of songs and books and is displayed in most of our lives on a daily basis. As children, we often hear our wiser population urging us to smile constantly; marveling at the existence of these five letters and what they can do for our society. These five letters have brought about thousands of studies and millions of questions that are still being asked across our world. Although, there is one question on happiness that catches the eyes of almost all in our society. How do we see more smiles in our everyday lives, how do we, as humans, increase the number of smiles (happiness) across the world? In order to answer this question, one must first know how to create happiness in individuals and eventually utilize this information to create more happiness.

This, in turn, leads to the most essential question.

How do we create happiness?

Before we dive deeper into the creation of happiness, let’s first understand happiness from a scientific standpoint.

Happiness or what scientists refer to as hedonia is the “presence of positive emotions and the absence of negative emotions”(12). When positive emotions are present in any form or factor neurotransmitters (messenger cells) such as dopamine and serotonin tend to release.(13) These neurotransmitters are not simply just a side effect of happiness but a key to unlock the secret of creating happiness on a consistent basis within humans. Which now creates one more question. How do we consistently release neurotransmitters in order to make us consistently happy?

Unfortunately, not all of us have superior genes like Dwight Schrute that can just release neurotransmitters on command as we wish. For us “normal” humans we must find another way to release our neurotransmitters.

Easier way out; but is it the best?

One of the simplest ways, unfortunately, to release neurotransmitters is actually to take drugs that increase the number of neurotransmitters that are released. For example, take the neurotransmitter dopamine which is primarily in charge of the feeling of pleasure, A common drug that is used to increase the amount of dopamine released is methamphetamine more commonly known as “meth”. The way “dope drugs” such as methamphetamine work is that they force the neurons in your brain to forcefully release unhealthy amounts of dopamine sometimes up to ten times more than any pleasurable activity.(14) This causes the brain to stop transmitting neurons from recycling extra dopamine, this is a problem because neurons can only hold a given amount of dopamine at a given time.

Think about it this way, let’s say you had a bathtub filled with water and one of those bath bombs that make your bathtub water look satisfying. And every time you go to take a bath you decide to put a bath bomb into the bathtub rather than just using some of your leftover soap to make your water bubbly. You continue to do this on a regular basis due to the satisfaction and eventually, you run out of the bath bombs leaving you with just the leftover soap that you would have regularly used. This leaves you dissatisfied and craving for the bath bombs in order to meet your regular levels of satisfaction. This is extremely similar to drugs such as methamphetamine as these types of drugs are not a reliable source and consistent source of neurotransmitters to release. So if drugs aren’t a viable or safe option then what is?

Smile

Why sport makes us happy The difficult but best solutions One potential safe option that releases several neurotransmitters for most humans is physical activity such as sports and general exercise. When you work out or participate in physical activity your brain releases a plethora of different neurotransmitters such as serotonin and norepinephrine get released throughout your body and send messages all through the nervous system. These messages are along the lines of “Your running!

This is awesome! Cheer up!” which in turn has a positive outcome on your mind and ultimately your happiness. (7) Neurotransmitters such as serotonin and norepinephrine are said to be depression preventing neurotransmitters and are extremely positive for one’s mind. It is claimed by much of the medical community that low levels of these neurotransmitters do cause depression and that exercise helps prevent depression and anxiety by making the body better at responding to stressors. According to J. Kip Matthews, Ph.D., a sport and exercise psychologist “exercise affords the body an opportunity to practice responding to stress, streamlining the communication between the systems involved in the stress response,” he also claims that “The less active we become, the more challenged we are in dealing with stress.”. Now that we know that exercise and sports are theoretically viable options when it comes to creating neurotransmitters to release and ultimately leading to happiness. It is time to test this theory in real life with interviews regarding specific instances where sports and physical activity affected people’s lives, as well as numbers and statistics from various pieces of conducted research to truly see if sports and physical activity are truly the way to create happiness.

Sport and Happiness It is an early spring day at Memorial park in Cupertino, California; an elderly Korean man feeds tennis balls with his racket to a student of his, while continuously motivating his student to continue to hit the ball with a fair amount of pace and power. This man is Shoggy Park, a 71-year-old immigrant tennis coach who has trained some of the nation’s top, up and coming tennis talent. Shoggy, however, is not known primarily for transforming athletes’ physical game but their mental game and their mental approach both on the court and in life. One of Shoggys students Sameer Merchant in an interview I had with him elaborated on Shoggy’s ability to promote happiness through sport saying “Shoggy is a fun loving human being” and later in the interview claiming that playing with Shoggy has made him a happier person by reinstalling physical discipline in his life which has made him a happier person. Shoggy himself spoke on the topic of having sports, specifically tennis, being used to make people happier. When speaking about the impact that tennis had on himself he said: “more smile, tennis, I enjoy, very happy always”. Even through his partially broken English Shoggy is able to convey the simple relation between sports and happiness going as far as to claim that all people should play sports in order to stay mentally sane and that sports, as well as music, are the reason why he is so happy today. One of Shoggy’s younger students Rayhan Merchant went on to claim in his interview that playing tennis is something he does to feel better when he is down and that physical activity makes him feel better no matter what.

Smile

Why sport makes us happy Do Sports work for All? However physical activity does not result in everyone being happy, in Andre Agassi’s autobiography Open, Agassi describes his hate for tennis and how horrible he felt to play the sport. Agassi describes tennis as being a lonely sport when he writes “Only boxers can understand the loneliness of tennis players - and yet boxers have their corner men and managers. Even a boxer’s opponent provides a kind of companionship, someone he can grapple with and grunt at. In tennis you stand face-to-face with the enemy, trade blows with him, but never touch him or talk to him, or anyone else. The rules forbid a tennis player from even talking to his coach while on the court. People sometimes mention the track-and-field runner as a comparably lonely figure, but I have to laugh. At least the runner can feel and smell his opponents. They’re inches away. In tennis you’re on an island. Of all the games men and women play, tennis is the closest to solitary confinement....”. This quote, however, is a generalization for a single sport rather than physical activity in general. Agassi, unlike a lot who engage in physical activity, was forced to play tennis and that may be part of the reason why he felt so trapped when playing the sport. Nonetheless, a majority amount of personal testimonials continue to show that physical activity is a consistent way to create happiness. But do the numbers back this up?

According to Haifang Huang and Brad R. Humphreys’s research paper Sports Participation and Happiness: Evidence from U.S. Micro Data, the numbers do indeed back up the fact that sports do provide happiness. In this study, the researchers looked at overall satisfaction ratings for individuals based on where they lived in relation to various sports facilities, and what they found was extremely similar to the qualitative data explored earlier in this paper. The researchers found that 94.6% of people claimed they were satisfied or better with their current happiness situation and 77% of those people had participated in exercise or physical activity within the last month.

Based on these stats an evident relationship can clearly be drawn between participation in physical activity and general happiness. Another study done by Loughborough University’s Dr. Paul Downward confirms the data collected by Haifang Huang and Brad R. Humphrey even adding on to their points to claim that team sports display the most amount of well being among all physical activity. Although this paper continued to clarify many of the points that had previously been explored, it also brought up a whole new side to increase the happiness in individuals, their given income.

Smile

Why sport makes us happy Sports and the Easterline Paradox Theory This research paper briefly brought up something called the “Easterlin Paradox” which stats that “ at a point in time happiness varies directly with income both among and within nations, but over time happiness does not trend upward as income continues to grow.”(15) This paradox is further explored in a Ted Talk by professor Jan Emmanuel De Neve called “The economics of human well-being’’ In this talk professor De Neve explores nations’ general happiness in relation to their GDP per capita and what he found was astounding. He found that the Easterlin Paradox also relates to GDP per capita and that after a certain GDP rating countries general happiness tends to equalize out, thus proving that although wealth impacts general happiness it does equal out after a while.

But how does this relate to sports and physical activity?

Well, a person’s physical activity and general income for a given person actually have a direct relationship with each other. This relationship is detailed in a research paper by David O. Meltzer and Anupam B. Jena titled “The Economics of Intense Exercise”. In this paper, the two researchers collect data on people’s average income and compare it to the number of hours spent intensely working out. In the data, the researchers found out that people whose income is at or above seventy-five thousand US dollars tend to exercise the most. Although there is no scientific reasoning for how exercising relates to higher income it is the ultimate conclusion determined from this paper. Since we can justify that exercising relates to higher income and higher-income relates to higher general happiness from Haifang Huang and Brad R. Humphreys’s research paper, we can conclude that exercising(as we proved earlier as well) is directly related to higher happiness via. the Easterlin Paradox.

Back to the top Now let’s circle back to our initial question and the spark that started this whole paper.

How do we make people happier? We make people happier by instilling the basic principle of activity in our youth from a young age. We build these principles in our youth through family and school activities that get kids engaged and happier about being active in their everyday lives. It is an utmost priority however that we don’t overly force these principles on our youth as we do not want the Agassi experience to happen with our youth again. Instead, we want our youth to be as engaged in athletics as Shoggy is while also instilling a positive mindset within each and every one of our children.

However, most importantly it is important for us to make sure that our youth seeks happiness in the right ways and that we continue to promote the importance of drug safety in order to make sure that our youth’s dopamine levels are safe. Nonetheless, we have to make sure we do what we love, whether that may be engaging in physical activities or just simply curling up by the fire and reading a book because happiness is subjective and all that matter at the end of the day is that we are all smiling.

Smile

Why sport makes us happy About the Author Hello reader! My name is Arsh Merchant, thank you for reading my first published article. I really appreciate you taking the time out of your day to read it! This article was inspired by my tennis coach Shoggy Park who has changed my life through sport. I wanted to write this article to inspire people to seek happiness in their everyday lives no matter what their circumstances may be.

I one day wish to live in a world where people prioritize happiness and general well being and seek to be the happiest version of themselves. As for myself I am working on being happier in my own everyday life by engaging in desirable activities and surrounding myself with the people that make me happier. These people include my freestyle community, mentors, friends, and family whom I am very close with. Surrounding ourselves with people that make us happier will only do good for us in the future. I want to end by thanking my freestyle teachers and mentors who made this piece possible. I also want to thank my family for supporting me no matter what and for always being the light in my life. Thank you again for reading this article and keep smiling.

- Arsh :)