🏃‍♀️Fulfillment, Full Stop

🌞 A conversation with my cousin.

🧠 Rebuilding Our Reward System

My cousin Nick — a freshman at Middlebury — called me recently with a question he was exploring for his behavioral economics class: What does fulfillment actually look like?

Instead of writing a traditional paper, he wanted to have a real conversation about it.

He told me he was looking for someone who’s spent time exploring both the science and the lived experience of happiness — not just in theory, but in practice. Someone who’s wrestled with the same questions he’s starting to ask. So he called me.

We talked for nearly an hour — about happiness, dopamine, distraction, attention, and the quiet power of human connection.

I’m sharing our conversation here not because I have answers, but because the questions themselves feel essential. Especially now.

Below is Nick’s write-up, followed by the full transcript of our conversation. All quotes and language are exactly as he wrote them — I’ve simply formatted things for clarity and flow.

I hope it resonates.

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✍️ Write-up by Nicholas Christoforakis:

Natalie Chernysh, a neuroscientist and mindfulness practitioner, has spent years studying the biology and philosophy of happiness.

A graduate of the Brown University neuroscience program, Chernysh combines scientific curiosity and knowledge with a deeply involved personal practice of meditation and contemplation. Growing up as a competitive swimmer, musician, and student, she learned early on how the mind shapes performance; an insight that later drew her toward exploring the mechanisms of well-being at the molecular level and beyond.

Now living in San Francisco and working in biotech, Natalie brings her dual perspective to modern and pressing questions about fulfillment. She believes that much of what society celebrates as “happiness” is more aptly described as fleeting pleasure. True happiness, she argues, requires awareness, mindfulness, and the ability to delay gratification.

In our conversation, Natalie discussed how mindfulness, attention, and human connection can reshape the way we experience joy. She spoke about the neuroscience of reward, the difference between fleeting pleasure and gratifying purpose, and why she believes intentional presence of mind might be the most effective and radical act of happiness in the modern world.

This interview has been edited and/or condensed for clarity.

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🎙️ Interview Transcript

By Nicholas Christoforakis | October 2025

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Nick: Hi, Natalie. I’d like to start by getting some background on you, your education, and any other experiences, and how that pertains to our discussion today on wellbeing.

Natalie: Yeah, of course. I’m Natalie Chernysh. I’m from West Hartford, Connecticut, and growing up, I was a competitive athlete. That taught me early on just how much our brain and our mind influence our physical performance, and that’s ultimately what led me to study neuroscience at Brown University, where I graduated from in May 2024.

Being a neuroscientist, I was always fascinated by questions of mechanism. So going down to the molecular level, what actually goes on in the brain. But I was also interested in the psychology side of the brain, where you go beyond the molecular reductionism. And I really got to learn more about psychology through my own journey with mindfulness and meditation over the last five years.

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Nick: Cool. So, let’s get into this a bit. You mentioned, joy, gratitude, happiness. When you think about happiness, what does that mean to you specifically?

Natalie: It’s a definition that has changed for me over the years. I’m 23 years old. I’m overlooking this beautiful San Francisco skyline as I give this interview. That is happiness, for me right now; present awareness and gratitude for the moment before me. I used to think that happiness meant a lot of extrinsic goals fulfilled, like some championship qualification time in the pool, or some accolade in school. But I’m definitely more on the intrinsic fostering of happiness nowadays.

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Nick: Can you tell me a little bit more about your sense and methodology for fostering happiness in people around you?

Natalie: Some of the oldest studies on happiness have really focused on our relationships with people. The longest Harvard study demonstrated that no other factor was as imperative in producing “happiness” as our relationships with other people.

I think that, increasingly in our age of hyper-connectivity and in this attention economy, where we’re constantly drawn to our phones, it’s really hard for people to feel like you’re actually fucking listening.

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Nick: I think that’s a good segue into one of our other questions here, which is how has your sense of happiness or fulfillment shifted over time?

Natalie: I think as a kid, my life was really structured. Between school, rehearsals, and swim, I was at school for 12+ hours. I put a lot of pressure on myself to excel in the classroom, and I thought that my worth was tied to my grades and teachers’ recognition of me.

When I came to university, there was a lot more autonomy. Therefore the onus is on you to cultivate schedule, and also to cultivate a sense of what’s important. It was a complete inflection point for me, because I had to reevaluate my sense of what I’m actually doing this for.

I think the answer has increasingly converged on “me.” I am doing this for me, and I never thought about it like that before, but I became much more responsible and agentic: I was in control of my happiness and how I interpreted situations. In not being a slave to my emotions and being in control of how I react, I believe that I can cultivate happiness more readily. At the end of the day, you decide how you feel, you decide on your suffering, and on the happier side of that, you decide on your enjoyment of life.

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Nick: Do you, living for yourself and being happy for your own fulfillment, think society’s version of happiness and fulfillment lines up with what actually makes somebody personally fulfilled?

Natalie: The short answer is no. That’s what we see in an increasingly materialistic world, a world that’s increasingly drawn to quick hits of pleasure. This is when I’d like to bring up the distinction between pleasure and happiness, because pleasure is much more acute and easy to attain. Pleasure is good food, good sex, good substances: something that gives you instant gratification that you didn’t have to do much work for.

On the other side of that coin is happiness. Happiness is when you put in a little bit of work to actually sit in a moment. At any time, we can just decide to pull out our phone and go down a rabbit hole. It’s actually much harder to be immersed in reality because that’s less sexy, less pleasure-inducing, and therefore it’s harder to get there. But when you get there, there’s a greater sense of fulfillment.

So, to get back to your original question of whether society’s version of happiness and fulfillment aligns with my own — it doesn’t. I have always believed and will always continue to believe in this difference between pleasure and happiness, and an addendum to that, that we need to take steps every single day to protect and continue to cultivate our happiness.

For me, that looks like mindfulness, that looks like meditation — literally sitting my ass down for 15 minutes and just being in silence with my thoughts, which is completely counter to society’s definition of productivity and production. I’m not attaining anything, except for this intrinsic gold, which, in my opinion, is worth more than any of that.

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Nick: To your point about instant gratification — from a neuro perspective, what do we know about the mechanisms behind that?

Natalie: Let’s talk about dopamine. It’s this neurochemical in our brain that sits in our reward pathway. It can be depleted very quickly. If you start your day by scrolling on TikTok right after you wake up, it’s being flushed out of your system because you’re getting a quick hit. The quicker the hit, the faster the depletion of dopamine. That makes it really hard later in the day to sit down and do your work, to read a book, to give anything focused attention. Not only is dopamine the chemical of gratification, it’s also the chemical essential to doing hard things, which is why, when we deplete it, we set ourselves up for failure later in the day when we have tasks to accomplish.

A couple other neurotransmitters related to happiness are norepinephrine and serotonin. Norepinephrine is essentially adrenaline, it puts you into a heightened state of awareness; related to happiness because it literally puts you into this moment more. Then, serotonin. It’s the target of the antidepressant and anti-anxiety selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRIs) medications. Serotonin is a fascinating neurotransmitter because it’s so ubiquitous in what it accomplishes. It’s involved in sleep, satiety, but it’s most associated with happiness.

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Nick: You said that dopamine runs out — how does it regenerate, and how long does it take?

Natalie: It’s a good question. It does run out, and it takes around 24 hours to regenerate. If you want to cite someone who knows a lot about dopamine exhaustion, Dr. Andrew Huberman, a neuroscientist at Stanford, frequently talks about dopamine depletion and how it makes it harder to do hard things later in the day. You can build your dopamine storage by doing things that have delayed gratification — like going on a long run, forcing yourself to do that even when you’re tired or it’s foggy outside. Doing something hard like that and seeing the end result through has been shown to increase levels of dopamine in the brain.

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Nick: I think we’re nearing the end of the interview but I’ve got one more question.
We’ve got what I’d call a well-being crisis. People are wealthier than ever, life expectancy is up, incomes are up — but people are unfulfilled. If you could give a few pieces of advice, or even implement a policy, to solve this fulfillment crisis, how would you encourage people to rethink their approach?

Natalie: You’re absolutely correct, we have a purpose problem. Never in history have we had this abundance of resources — to do, eat, and experience whatever we want — and it’s clearly not solving the problem.

But I’ll return to a core thesis of mine: it all starts upstream. We should be teaching mindfulness meditation in elementary school all the way up to 12th grade and university; with the rigor of mathematics, English, or any other core curriculum.

Children are the most amenable to new ideas and change, which is why education is so pivotal at an early age. But what if you’re not a kid anymore?

I think we should all strive to maximize the number of radically vulnerable conversations we have with people around us. Our relationships are so fundamental. It’s not just scrolling on our phones while we sit together and don’t interact. It’s actually understanding who this person is, where they come from, their context of life, what they care about, and resonating with it.

That resonance comes from the exchange of our true selves. If there’s anything I can push young people to do — and this is something I strive for in my writing every day — it’s to build relationships on the foundation of vulnerability. If we can’t educate (or if it takes a long time to educate) the younger generations, then let’s start with ourselves. Let’s start with our closest friend. Let’s start with our family members. See how much intentional gratitude, vulnerability, and presence can transform our ability to exist happily in a world that’s made it increasingly difficult to do so.

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Nick: Thank you for that. I really appreciate you taking the time to talk about this with me.

Natalie: Thanks, Nick. I appreciate the opportunity.

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🌿 Final Thought

In speaking with Natalie, it’s clear that her idea of happiness isn’t about comfort or ease; rather it centers on awareness, attention and patience. In a culture obsessed with the constant stimulation of the next notification, her reminder feels both timelessly old and urgently new:

Fulfillment isn’t found in a constant more, but in making a conscious effort to notice and appreciate what’s already here.
— Nicholas Christoforakis

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💭 YOUR TURN

How has your definition of happiness shifted over time?
What’s something that brings you fulfillment — quietly, consistently?

Shoot me a text (860-205-2236) or drop a comment. I’d love to hear.
🌞 Natalie

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This one’s from last year — a family gathering that, like most of ours, ended in music. Nick and I sight-reading a sax duet, because of course we did.