Up to this point, we’ve been looking at happiness from the inside out. Socrates was concerned with the state of the soul, with virtue, self-knowledge, and inner alignment. His focus was on how a person ought to live once they were able to reflect, choose, and act with reason. But there’s an important question sitting underneath all of this. Under what conditions does that kind of inner life even become possible? Because if your me, learning about this for the first time your likely asking some very relevant questions or at least some honest observations right. Such as ‘that’s all well and good, but ive got bills to pay, I need to put food on my table, a family to support - how does self knowledge and inner alignment help me in that sense?’ Wisdom, reflection, and moral clarity don’t exist in a vacuum. They require a certain level of stability to take root. It’s hard to examine your values when you’re constantly in survival mode. Hard to pursue meaning when your nervous system is focused on staying safe. In that sense, Socrates’ emphasis on inner virtue quietly assumes a degree of ease within life, or at least a momentary freedom from immediate threat. This is where modern psychology begins to speak a different language. Not about virtue or the soul, but about needs. About what you and I require to survive before we can even think about thriving. About the conditions that must be met before the kind of inner life Socrates described becomes realistically accessible. And this matters, because happiness and clarity shouldn’t be reserved for the lucky or the comfortable. You are deserving of that sense of meaning too. Few models have captured this idea more clearly than Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Now stick with me here, let’s get creative for a second. Imagine you wake up alone on an island. Not a tropical beach resort, but instead your typical castaway-style island where all you have for a friend is a beach ball. We’ve all been posed this scenario in one way or another, but it’s completely relevant, I assure you. Imagine: you have no phone. No calendar. No long-term plans. Just heat, or lack of it, hunger, thirst, and the slightly unsettling realisation that whatever happens next depends on what you do today. In that moment, life becomes very simple very quickly. Your attention narrows. Big questions about purpose, fulfilment, or who you’re meant to become fade into the background. Right now, your focus is solely on survival, the constant question of what’s next.

I want to start right at the beginning because mental health and the pursuit of happiness isnt this new phenom that we have developed because of the smart phone, but it is something which has been continually question by the brightest minds in the history of the human race. Because long before neuroscience, or therapy, or over complicated wellbeing frameworks and fads, humans were already asking the same underlying questions. Such as, what does it mean to actually live well? What is happiness? What brings a sense of peace that lasts? Why do some people remain steady in the face of difficulty while others feel constantly unsettled? We tend to talk about mental health and happiness as if they are modern concerns, born out of technology, pressure, and the pace of contemporary life. As though previous generations somehow had it figured out, and we are the first to struggle with meaning, fulfilment, and inner stability. Sorry to burst that bubble, the reality is far less new. Philosophy, in this sense, was one of the earliest attempts to understand mental health. Not in the clinical way we think of it today, when you're handed a small cylinder of happy pills or sat on a leather couch with a safety pillow, nestled between your overbearing arms, but as an exploration of how a person’s inner world, values, and actions either align or clash. The language was different, but the concern was the same: how to live in a way that feels coherent, meaningful, and deeply human. Socrates - a name im sure your familiar with was the god farther of exploring happiness. Nope not in the way in which he ran a huge crime family but in the sense that he openly explored these questions to life. 2500 years before we had this mental health pandemic, he was becoming one of the earliest and most influential voices in the conversation around our own well being. He didn’t frame happiness as pleasure or success, but as something far quieter and more demanding. A way of living that required self-examination, moral clarity, and an ongoing relationship with truth.

Modern research shows that when social connection is threatened or absent, the brain reacts as though something essential has gone wrong. Loneliness activates stress and threat systems in much the same way danger does. Neuroscience studies show that social rejection and exclusion trigger neural responses similar to real felt pain, which helps explain why loneliness doesn’t just feel sad, but unsettling and exhausting. So no, you’re not being dramatic. Being lonely really does suck. This also helps explain why childhood connections often felt easier. Children seek proximity, play, and shared attention instinctively. They don’t intellectualise belonging; they embody it. Adulthood, on the other hand, prioritises independence, productivity, and emotional self-management. We also lose a certain fearlessness. It’s why social anxiety is relatively rare in children under ten. They approach the world with unfiltered curiosity. In all honesty, it’s one of the saddest losses we experience as we grow up, in my humble opinion. And the frustrating part when exploring all of this is that we don’t suddenly become less social creatures with age. We simply move into environments that ask us to override that wiring more often, slowly dulling those exploratory instincts one email reply and bill payment at a time. As Dr Robert Waldinger, director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, puts it, strong relationships are the single most reliable predictor of long-term well-being. Not success. Not status. But everyday relationships. When connection is present, it buffers us against stress, creating something like a protective force field against life’s inevitable challenges. When it’s missing, the body registers that absence as a problem that needs solving. By this point, it should be clear that relationships aren’t just a backdrop to our lives. They actively shape how we think, feel, and cope. Mental health doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and despite how individualised the conversation around wellbeing has become, our psychological stability is deeply relational. Strong, supportive relationships act as emotional regulators. They help us process stress, make sense of difficult experiences, and regain perspective when our thoughts start to spiral. When we feel securely connected to others, challenges don’t disappear, but they feel more manageable. We recover faster. We’re less likely to catastrophise. Our nervous systems calm more easily because they’re not carrying the load alone.

When we think about loneliness, most of us picture something fairly obvious: dark settings, isolation, and hands in your head. Sounds about right. I say that with confidence because that’s exactly what shows up when you search loneliness on the web. The reality, though, is that loneliness includes a range of social cues that reflect the quieter negativity we see in everyday life: few social plans, a lingering sense of being left out. Because of this, loneliness is often treated as a problem that belongs to other people, or to particular phases of life, rather than something that quietly embeds itself into otherwise functional adulthood. And this is where things start to get confusing, because many adults who feel lonely are not alone at all. We are busy. We balance jobs, relationships, group chats, social circles, and calendars that require colour coding based on importance. What happens is this: you speak to colleagues all day, message friends in the evening, maybe even see people at the weekend. From the outside, nothing appears wrong. And yet, despite all this contact, there can be a low-level sense that something is missing. Not enough to cause a crisis, but enough to feel slightly off, in a way that’s hard to explain without sounding ungrateful or dramatic. This is partly why modern disconnection goes unnoticed. If your life is full and you are coping, it can feel indulgent to describe yourself as lonely. The word doesn’t seem to apply. But loneliness is not about how many people you interact with or how busy your diary is, and the science backs this up. Large-scale population studies consistently show that many adults report feeling lonely despite regular social contact, leading researchers to define loneliness not as social absence, but as a perceived gap between the connection we want and the connection we experience. In that sense, our social lives are shaped less by how often we see people and more by whether we feel genuinely connected within those interactions.

Regret is not automatically a problem. In fact, almost certainly a degree of regret does surprisingly have its uses. It allows us to reflect, ultimately learning from the prospect that the next time we do things differently. The trouble, on the other hand, starts when regret stops moving and starts looping, when you can’t quite let go. Instead of pointing forward, it turns inward as a negative self-reflection of whatever that feeling is, which boils up inside: embarrassment, anger, loss, guilt. For many people, regret quickly becomes tangled up with self-blame. So rather than thinking, “ahhh, that didn’t quite work the way I wanted it to,” the narrative instead shifts to, “there may be something wrong with me.” Research consistently links this kind of self-blaming regret to depressive symptoms, especially in people who tend to ruminate and sit still (Kraines et al., 2017). The decision itself fades into the background, while the emotional judgement radiates pity and remains centre stage. The mind keeps replaying the same moment, searching for a version of events where things turned out differently. This process is especially powerful when it becomes so overbearing it causes a sense of pain. This is when regret is experienced alone. Without anyone to challenge our interpretations, we overestimate how much control we had in the first place and sink into the uncontrollable depths which our own mental health has the ability to drag us. Hindsight makes uncertainty look obvious, as if the “right” choice should have been clear all along. In reality, most decisions are made with incomplete information, altering views, competing priorities, and that good old emotional pressure which often smudges over most things. Fundamentally, when regret is held privately, these contextual details are easy to forget, and what remains is a simplified story of personal failure. Most frustratingly of all, anticipating regret can also make decisions harder rather than easier. When people become highly sensitive to the possibility of future regret, even small choices can feel loaded, like they hold the weight of the world, when in reality, you just missed out on a catch-up with an old friend. Research suggests that the fear of regret increases decision-related anxiety, which leads to avoidance behaviours, such as delaying decisions or defaulting to the safest option available (Buckell et al., 2022). While this might reduce immediate discomfort, it often comes at the cost of satisfaction, growth, or change. Over time, people can find themselves feeling stuck, not just because they lack options, but because every option feels emotionally risky, and never having a sense of safety is a fuel of anxiety to the ultimate degree.