Retrain Your Brain to Boost Your Serotonin, Dopamine, Oxytocin, & Endorphin Levels
Book by Loretta Breuning
Your brain is inherited from people who survived. This may see obvious, but when you look closer at the huge survival challenges of the past, it seems like a miracle that all of your direct ancestor kept their genes alive. You have inherited a brain that is focused of survival. You may not think you are focused on survival, but when you worry about being late for a meeting or eating the wrong food, your survival brain is at work. When you worry about being invited to a party or having a bad hair day, your survival brain sees the risk of social exclusion, which was a very real threat to your ancestors. Once you’re safe from immediate threats like hunger, cold, and predators, your brain scans for other potential threats.
It’s not easy being a survivor!
- Dopamine produces the joy of finding things that meet your needs- the „Eureka! I got it!” feeling.
- Endorphin produces oblivion that masks pain- -often called euphoria.
- Oxytocin produces the feeling of being safe with others-now called bonding.
- Serotonin produces the feeling of being respected by others–pride.
- Dopamine motivates you to get what you need, even when it takes a lot of effort.
- Endorphin motivates you to ignore pain, so you can escape from harm when you’re injured.
- Oxytocin motivates you to trust others, to find safety in companionship.
- Serotonin motivates you to get respect, which expands your mating opportunities and protects your offspring.
HAPPY SURVIVAL MOTIVES
Dopamine: seek rewards
Endorphin: ignore physical pain
Oxytocin: build social alliances
Serotonin: get respect from others
FOCUS ON YOUR OWN PATHWAYS
It’s easy to see vicious cycles in others. That’s why we’re tempted to take charge of other people’s happiness. But you cannot reach into someone else’s brain and make new connections for them, nor can they do that for you. If you focus on other people’s brains, you may fail to make them happy and fail to make yourself happy. Each person must manage his or her own limbic system.
You’ve probably heard that love is the key to happiness, but it’s useful to know how happy chemicals create that feeling. Love is a huge surge of happy chemicals because it’s hugely relevant to the survival of your genes. You’re not thinking about your genes when you’re in love, but your genes are inherited from people who did what it took to reproduce successfully. Brains that motivate reproductive behavior end up making more copies of themselves.
Sex is only a small part of the story. Everything from competing for healthy mates to nurturing healthy offspring is relevant to what biologists call „reproductive success.” Love motivates all of these behaviors.
You may find it hard to link your loving feelings to natural selection. But in the animal world, it’s easy to see how brain chemicals shape mating behavior. The mammal brain is very focused on reproductive success. Once a mammal’s immediate survival needs are met, its thoughts turn to the survival of its genes. Animals are surprisingly picky about their mates. For example, every species avoids in-breeding in one way or another.
Without conscious concern for genes, neurochemicals motivate alternative choices. Brains that produced in-breeders died out, while brains that motivated alternative mating choices flourished.
Dopamine is stimulated by the „chase” aspect of love. It’s also triggered in a baby who hears his mother’s footsteps. Dopamine is the brain’s signal that a need is about to be met.
For humans, finding „the One” makes you high on dopamine. However, you define what you seek, dopamine excites you when you approach it.
Oxytocin is stimulated by touch and by trust. In animals, touch and trust go together.
In humans, everything from holding hands to feeling supported triggers oxytocin. Orgasm does too.
Sex triggers a lot of oxytocin at once, yielding a lot of social trust for a very short time. Holding hands stimulates a small amount of oxytocin, but when repeated over time, as in the case of an elderly couple, it builds up a circuit that easily triggers social trust. Childbirth triggers a huge oxytocin spurt in mammals, both mother and child. Nurturing other people’s children can stimulate it too. Friendship bonds stimulate oxytocin, and they also promote reproductive success.
Serotonin is stimulated by the status aspect of love the pride of associating with a person of a certain stature. You may hate thinking of your love in this way, but you can easily see it in others. Animals with higher status in their social groups have more reproductive success, and natural selection built a brain that rewards you with the good feeling of serotonin when you raise your status. This may be hard to believe, but research on a huge range of species shows tremendous energy invested in the pursuit of status. Social dominance leads to more mating opportunity and more surviving offspring and it feels good. We no longer try to survive by having as many offspring as possible, but when you receive the affection of someone you perceive as important, your serotonin surges.
Endorphin is stimulated by physical pain, but you get a bit from laughing and crying too. Lovers are known for laughing together, and it’s interesting to know that they are stimulating each other’s endorphin. Crying is associated with love too, alas.
Confusing love and pain is a bad survival strategy, but endorphin pathways may explain some people’s tolerance for painful relationships.
Cortisol plays an important role in reproductive success, too. It makes you feel bad when you lose love, which promotes survival by helping you move on. If you remained attached to a person who is not available to you, your genes would be doomed.
MALE VS. FEMALE SURVIVAL STRATEGIES
Each gender seeks dominance in ways that best promote its DNA.
In most species, females invest so heavily in each offspring that their genes are best served by enhancing the survivability of her young. A male’s reproductive success is often served by maximizing mating opportunities. Within these strategies, both genders dominate and submit to meet their needs.
Cortisol is your body’s emergency broadcast system. Corticoid hormones are produced by reptiles, amphibians, fish, and even worms, when they encounter survival threats. It creates the feeling humans call „pain.” Pain gets your attention. […] because that works it focuses your attention on whatever it takes to make it stop. The brain strives to avoid pain by storing details of the experience so you know what to look out for in the future. When you see things associated with past pain, your cortisol starts flowing so you can act in time to avoid future pain.
A big brain can generate many associations, so it can anticipate many possible sources of pain.
When cortisol surges, we call it „fear,” but when cortisol dribbles, we call it „anxiety” or „stress.” These bad feelings tell you that pain will come if you don’t act fast. Your reptile brain can’t say why it released the cortisol. Electricity just flowed down a pathway. When you understand how this happens, you can distinguish more easily between internal alarms and external threats.
You might think you’d be free from cortisol if the world were in better shape. But your brain sees every disappointment as a threat, and this response has value. It alerts you in time to prevent further setbacks and disappointments. For example, if you’ve walked miles to get water and realize you’re on the wrong trail, a surge of bad feeling protects you from walking any farther on the wrong trail. You cannot make perfect predictions all the time, so your cortisol will always have a job to do. Understanding your cortisol helps you make peace with the world around you.
Pain wires us with warning signs. When it’s big pain, we may build big warning circuits that get labeled phobias or posttraumatic
stress. Smaller pain builds smaller warning circuits that we’re less aware of. We end up with alarmed feelings that don’t always make sense. It would be nice if we could just delete a circuit that made bad predictions. But there’s a good survival reason why we can’t.
Imagine your ancestor watching someone die from eating a poison berry. His cortisol would surge and he would remember that berry forever. Years later, on a day when he was very hungry, he would be able to resist eating that berry. Your ancestor survived because his cortisol circuits endured.
WHY EARLY MEMORIES ARE SO POWERFUL
The fading of happy chemicals motivates us to keep renewing our survival efforts, but it leaves us curiously vulnerable to frustration.
You might blame your frustration on „our society” until you understand its physiology. Your brain is always comparing the world to the early experiences that built your circuits. When you were young, everything was new, so you often experienced things as
„the best ever” or „the worst ever.” That caused a neurochemical surge big enough to wire in a circuit. But the next time you eat the same pizza, it’s not „the best you ever had.” The next time you suffer the same public humiliation, it’s not „the worst you’ve ever had.” Life often falls short of your expectations because you built those expectations when the information was new.
Imagine you’re receiving a Lifetime Achievement Award fig the Institute of Human Magnificence. You hear wild applause your name is called. It feels great. A few minutes later, however, the ceremony is over and you are back to who you were before it. Why? Because your happy chemicals have been reabsorbed. Though you may enjoy some more when you reminisce, you brain will go back to scanning for potential threats as well. And; will find some: Was my speech well received? What if they hate my next project? Why didn’t my friends come to the ceremony If you expect your award to bring constant happiness, you will be disappointed.
Everyone’s happy chemicals droop, which is why everyone looks for ways to stimulate more. That’s how our brain is designed to work. Even if you discovered a new planet, the happy-chemical surge would not last. You could look at your planet every day, but you would not feel the full joy of discovering it in every moment.
You would want that feeling again, though. You’d try to fulfill that need with the pathways you have, which might motivate you to look for another planet.
But if you found one just like the last, it would not feel as good as the first time. You’d have to find a bigger planet to get that surge.
What if you went to the French Laundry and fell in love with one particular dish? Imagine that you persuaded the chef to make you a full plate of it. When it comes, you dive in with excitement. But after a few bites, you’re disappointed. You wonder if they messed up. Maybe they did something different? No, it’s just not new information anymore, so your happy chemicals don’t respond. It’s hard to believe you’re perceiving it differently, because you are not aware of your own habituation.
The brain triggers joy when it encounters any new way to meet its needs. New food. New love. New places. New techniques. After a while, the new thing doesn’t measure up. „It’s not the way I remember it.” You may wish you could trade it in for another new thing. But when you understand your brain, you realize the disappointment comes from you rather than the thing itself.
DO NOTHING!
You can stop a vicious cycle in one instant, simply by doing nothing. That teaches your brain that you will not actually die without the old habit. You learn that threatened feelings do not kill you. A virtuous circle begins the moment you do nothing and live with the threatened feeling instead of doing the usual something.
FIVE WAYS EXPERIENCE CHANGES YOUR BRAIN
- Experience insulates young neurons with myelin, so they’re superfast conductors of electricity.
- Experienced synapses are better at sending electricity to neighboring neurons, so you’re better at lighting up a path you’ve lit up before.
- Neurons atrophy if they’re not used, so you rely more heavily on the neurons you’ve used.
- New synapses grow between neurons you use, so you make connections.
- Receptors grow and atrophy, so it’s easier to process the feelings you experience repeatedly.
BUILDING SYNAPSES WITHOUT EMOTION
Synapses can build without neurochemicals, but it takes a lot of repetition. For example, you can learn romantic words in a foreign language quite quickly, but learning verb conjugations usually requires dreary repetition. Romance triggers neurochemicals that build synapses quickly, but repetition gives you the power to build any synapse you decide is important. If a synapse is activated many times, it gradually learns to transmit an electrochemical signal efficiently, even without extra rowboats in the fleet.
- Repetition, which develops a synapse gradually
- Emotion, which develops a synapse instantly
NO SUCCESS IS TOO SMALL
Do not undermine your good feeling by apologizing to yourself for the triviality of the accomplishment. Just enjoy the split second of triumph and move on. It’s just a spark, but if you ignite it every day, you will be your own best spark plug.
TAKE ACTION, DON’T JUST DAYDREAM
Spend your time on concrete action. Don’t spend it fantasizing about quitting your day job or pressuring others to help you. It’s not their goal. Dig into practical realities instead. Do this faithfully for forty-five days and you will have the habit of moving forward.
The Role of Happy Chemicals in Social Learning
A mammal’s survival depends on social skills as much as physical skills. Small brains are born with the social skills they need, while big brains build social skills from repetition and emotion.
Social skills are essential to reproductive success. Though reproduction is not your definition of success, it’s what mattered in the world our brains evolved in. The skills involved in reproductive success vary for males and females:
- A female can only birth a limited number of offspring, and in the past many of those perished before puberty. The survival of a female’s genes depends on her ability to keep her children alive. Social skills can help a female get protection, nutrition, and better paternal genes.
- A male mammal can promote his genes by creating more offspring and investing less in each one. The quantity strategy rewards males skilled at attracting females and competing with other males.
The male and female strategies overlap, of course, and evolution tends to increase the overlap.
For both genders, getting respect from your peers promotes survival. Monkey studies show that individuals with more social alliances have more mating opportunities and more surviving offspring. So it’s not surprising that the brain built by natural selection seeks social trust by rewarding it with a good feeling.
Cry on Occasion
Crying releases endorphin because of the physical exertion. I do not suggest making a habit of crying it comes with a lot of cortisol too. But most adults habitually squelch the urge to cry, and that creates tension. Unsquelching relieves the tension. A few minutes of crying can relieve a bad feeling that you’ve squelched for years.
You can’t cry on cue, nor should you make a goal of crying.
But for forty-five days, you can make space to cry if the urge arises. The important step is to notice tension in your chest, back, abdomen, and throat when you are resisting the urge to cry. This tension will loosen when you pay attention to it. Unpleasant memories or sensations may also come up when you lower your guard. Sometimes it’s useful information, and sometimes it’s an old response that vou’ve held in for years.
Laugh
Laughing stimulates endorphin as it spontaneously convulses your innards. Find out what makes you laugh, and make time for it. A big ha-ha laugh is necessary to trigger endorphin sneering at people you disdain doesn’t do it. Nor does laughing on the out-side, although that might prime the pump. It can be hard to find what triggers your laughs, but you can commit to keep sampling comedy until you get your daily laugh.
Building New Oxytocin Circuits
Build on „Proxy” Trust
Social trust is hard to create, so people often use proxies.
Animals, crowds, and digital friends are proxies that can stimulate good feelings of social trust without the complications of human bonds. The oxytocin is less than with live personal con-tact, of course. But proxies can expand the foundation for future trust.
Proxy trust is comfortable because there’s less risk of disap-pointment. Animals don’t betray you, large crowds don’t judge you, and digital friends are always available. Direct human trust always comes with the risk of disappointed expectations and feelings of betrayal. Those bad feelings built circuits that fire when you think about trusting again. Your neurochemical alarm bells ring and your brain presumes there’s a good reason. But if you give up on direct interpersonal trust, your brain feels that something is missing. And it is: Oxytocin is missing.
Start with small steps that don’t trip your alarm.
Stretch
Endorphin is also stimulated when you stretch. Everyone can add stretching to their daily routine, because you can do it while you’re watching TV, waiting in line, or talking on the phone. Mild stretching brings circulation into constricted areas.
Stop before you feel pain. Just because a little is good doesn’t mean a lot is better. If you stretch every day for forty-five days, you will come to enjoy it so much that you will look forward to doing it every day.
Stretching is not just about arms and legs. Sample classes that introduce deeper stretches without hurting yourself. The point is not to push harder on the usual spots but to stretch spots you didn’t know you had, such as the muscles between your ribs. Don’t forget to stretch your toes, fingers, and even ears.
KEEP AT IT
Many of the people we admire today got little respect while they were alive, but they kept working anyway. Do not assume that people who accomplish things have a perpetual cheering squad. It would be nice if that adulation just came to you, but keep going if it doesn’t.
Express Pride in What You’ve Done
Pride is complicated. Applause-seeking can have bad side effects, but when you get no recognition from others, something feels wrong. You could applaud yourself, but the brain is not easily tricked by hollow self-respect. It wants respect from others because that has survival value. Alas, there is no guaranteed safe way to get this serotonin boost. Social recognition is unpredictable and fleeting. But you can stimulate your serotonin without being „a jerk.” Simply express pride in something you’ve done once a day.
Make Peace with Something You Can’t Control
Your brain looks for things you can control and feels good when you’re in charge. But our control is often limited and unpredictable, so frustration percolates. You can learn to feel comfortable with your limited control. That doesn’t mean being out of control or giving up. It means feeling safe when you’re not in charge.
To build this new circuit, notice your usual strategy for feeling „on top of things,” and do the opposite. For example, if you are a person who tries to bake the perfect soufflé, spend forty-five days cooking without recipes. Conversely, if you are a person who likes to just throw things into a pot, spend forty-five days following recipes.
If you are a person who likes everything neat, let junk pile up for six weeks. But if you are a person who hates order and loves chaos, put things away as soon as you use them for six weeks.
Enjoy Your Social Position in Each Moment
Believe it or not, your social position changes constantly. One minute you feel like you’re in the subordinate position and the host minute you find yourself in the dominant position in rela-fion to those you focus on. You hate the subordinate position, but when you’re dominant, that frustrates you too. You can learn to enjoy the advantages of wherever you are instead of focusing on the frustrations.
You may think equality would make you happy, but the closer you get to it, the more your brain finds tiny differences to dwell on. When mammals gather, each brain seeks the good feeling of being dominant. You can easily see this in others, but when your brain does it, it feels like you’re just seeking what you deserve.
Your inner mammal will constantly find ways that you have been undervalued and this can make you miserable even in a rather good life. You will be much happier if you relax and enjoy wherever you find yourself.
You have built expectations about social rivalry from your past experience. The frustrations and disappointments of your past built circuits that make it easy for you to feel bad about being in the one-down position and bad about being in the one-up position. You could spend your whole life longing for the position you’re not in. Or you could build up the circuits that find the good
Mirror people who already have the habits you want. Find someone with a habit you’d like to create, and watch them. Your mirror neurons will light up and spark your circuits. This is a great way to overcome the inertia of those virgin neurons.
Modeling others can be awkward, but the world is full of people who have the behavior you need. Maybe they’d love to show you. If not, you can mirror without telling them. They may not even be consciously aware of their habit anyway.
The person you are mirroring may surprise you by having bad habits too! Remember that mirroring is a surgical tool: you only use it in small, specific ways. You don’t substitute another person’s judgment for your own. You just model the behavior you aspire to for reasons of your own.
- Start an activity without having an exact time you need to stop. Finish the activity without ever checking the clock the whole time. It’s over when you feel like it’s over.
- Set aside a time each day to spend with no plan.
- Designate a day you can wake up without looking at the clock and continue through your day with no time-checking.
FOCUS ON YOURSELF
You cannot make yourself responsible for other people’s suffering, and you cannot make other people responsible for your suffering.
Other people get to manage their happy chemicals with the circuits they’ve got, and you get to manage your happy chemicals with the circuits you’ve got.
- You feel important when you battle perceived injustice (serotonin).
- You feel connected with others who feel similarly deprived (oxytocin).
- You feel excitement when you seek and find evidence that your fair share of happiness was wrongfully denied (dopamine).
- You may even trigger endorphin by welcoming physical pain into your life as evidence of your deprivation.
- You keep building the circuit for seeking happiness by feeling wronged.
MODEL „FEELING GOOD” FOR OTHERS
If you give yourself permission to feel good, it can actually help others. It can trigger their mirror neurons and spark their happiness.
But you cannot make yourself feel good just for the sake of others.
Your brain doesn’t work that way; it focuses on you. You must step toward your needs to stimulate your happy chemicals.
- Serotonin flows when your rescuing gets respect.
- Oxytocin flows when you join forces with others.
- Dopamine flows when you set goals and accomplish them.
It’s natural to scan for potential threats, but focusing on familiar threats does not protect you from new threats. So you actually make yourself safer when you stay open to new and unexpected information about the world. Preparing for the kind of threat you’ve already experienced is just a habit that you could replace with a new habit.
You may not notice that you are scanning for familiar threats.
You may intend to be open to the good in the world. But when it reaches your eyes and ears, you may ignore it, because your bandwidth is quickly spent on information that fits your past rewards and pain. You have to intentionally shift your focus away from them to notice the fainter signals of new threats and opportunities. But this shift can feel like a survival threat because your brain equates past rewards and pain with survival. This is why people tend to stay focused on old threats.
You may feel like stuff is hitting the fan while you’re building those new circuits. That’s your old superhighways lighting up.
Stay focused on good things.
CONSIDER THIS
When things do go wrong, ask yourself whether you could have prevented it by being unhappy.
KNOWLEDGE IS POWER
When your happy chemicals droop, it feels like something is wrong with the world. It helps to know that your happy chemicals are meant to go up and down so you can focus on your next step toward happy chemicals instead of on the flaws of the world.
It’s natural to think you’ll be happy when you reach some particular benchmark.
But goals are double-edged swords. They stimulate happy chemicals with each step closer, but they stimulate unhappy chemicals with each obstacle. If you respond to each dip by rushing toward your goal, you can end up in a vicious cycle.
You are better off having a variety of tools to manage your happy chemicals.
Approaching a goal feels good because your brain has connected it to survival. Of course, you know you can survive without winning the Executive Bonus Pool or the Stand-Up Comedy Olympics, but it feels different once your cortisol is triggered. You can distract yourself from that do-something feeling by focusing more intently on your goal. You may tell yourself you can’t stop until you „get a break” or „get it right.” You can imagine how good it will feel.
But if you do reach that important milestone, the feeling doesn’t last. All too soon, your cortisol is triggered in one way or another. You respond in the only way you know how: zooming in on another goal.
People often say they are forced to do this by „our society.”
They don’t see how they are choosing it, even though they can see that in others. The urge to „make something of yourself” is natural. It’s much older than our society, and it’s much deeper than the urge for money or power. Your brain wants to leave a legacy and you only have a limited amount of time to do that.
Our sense of urgency is real. Advancing your legacy is a good tool for managing these feelings, but it’s not enough. We need many tools to manage our feelings of urgency because they are so powerful. If you only have one path to your happy chemicals, a bad loop results.
Single-minded pursuit of a goal makes everything else seem like an obstacle. Other people, your physical body, and even rules and laws can seem like obstacles. Life feels like an escalator and if it’s not moving up, you think it’s broken down. You can free yourself from an escalator if you are willing to do something different for forty-five days. Do not simply replace one goal with another.
Instead, build the habit of having multiple sources of satisfaction.
- If you are already a „dopamine kind of person,” good at setting goals and meeting them, you could do more for yourself by working on a different happy chemical.
- If you are already an „oxytocin person,” good at social bond-ing, you’d get higher returns by investing your effort in a different area.
- If you’re a „serotonin person,” good at winning respect, you can flourish by developing other happy-chemical circuits.
- If you tend to be an „endorphin person,” drawn to mastering pain, you could benefit from focusing elsewhere.
DIFFERENT KINDS OF BALANCE
Balancing your neurochemistry is not the same as „work-life balance.” It’s true that spending too much time at work can lead to neglect of other needs. But if you leave work to run the same circuits in your free time, neurochemical balance will not happen. If you manage your home the way you manage your work, free time won’t make you happier. It’s like a vegetarian trying to balance with a new vegetable, or an athlete balancing with a new sport.
You keep seeking rewards in familiar places until you discover new places.
Your brain only has a limited amount of energy. You can enhance it with exercise, sleep, and good nutrition, but it will still be limited.
New behaviors consume more energy than you expect. When you commit to a forty-five day rewiring project, you commit to making that energy available. If you run out of energy before meeting your daily commitment, you will find reasons to ditch it. So make your new habit the top-priority use of your energy for forty-five days, even if you have to relax another priority.
One way to ensure energy is to schedule your new habit first thing in the morning. If that’s impossible, do something fun right before your challenging new behavior or right after.
Watch a rerun of your favorite TV show in the middle of the day if that’s what it takes. Activating new neurons takes more energy that you realize, and some planning is needed to make that energy available.
Mental energy is a lot like physical energy. It depends on glucose, and it takes time to restore once depleted. You easily succumb to temptations when your mental energy is depleted.
Some experts advise eating sugar to boost your mental en
Watch a rerun of your favorite TV show in the middle of the day if that’s what it takes. Activating new neurons takes more energy that you realize, and some planning is needed to make that energy available.
Mental energy is a lot like physical energy. It depends on glucose, and it takes time to restore once depleted. You easily succumb to temptations when your mental energy is depleted Some experts advise eating sugar to boost your mental energy This is obviously a flawed long-term strategy, even though it helps to bring a candy bar into a life-changing exam for a short term boost. A glucose-spiking habit will literally hurt you survival, even though it creates the illusion of strength for moment. You need other ways to sustain your mental energy fo forty-five days.
Anything connected to your DNA triggers happy chemicals. For most of human history, children came unplanned,and grandchildren came if you survived to your forties. Whatever enhanced their survival prospects made you happy. Things have changed, and alternative ways to feel your legacy are being explored. Some people research their ancestry, and others make an effort to preserve family traditions. You don’t consciously connect this to your genes, but your happy chemicals turn on when you promote the survival of your unique individual essence. Even if you just buy pizza for a niece or nephew, it feeds your inner mammal’s interest in the survival of your genes. You may say genes don’t matter, but your brain has a curious way of perking up when ther’re involved.
There are infinite ways to satisfy your mammal brain’s quest for a legacy. You might invent a stitch that lives on at your knitting club. You might design a new exercise machine at your gym club. A smoothie might be named after you at the corner store. It doesn’t have to make logical sense. When something of you can live on, it’s strangely effective at triggering happy chemicals.
Connecting with children rewards the urge for legacy even if they’re not yours. If you do have children of your own, every moment with them is part of your legacy whether or not it’s obvi-AlIc I foured this out when my son’s school closed for teacher
The brain is always dividing things into chunks because it can only process a few inputs at a time. Most of the time we don’t notice this chunking strategy, but you can consciously divide your challenges into chunks to make them feel manageable.
Build a new circuit before you need it. Try new vegetables before you get bored with the old ones. Do someone a favor before you need a favor from her. Develop new sources of pride before you retire and get wrinkles. You may feel too busy to do these things now, but once they trigger happy chemicals, you’ll be glad you did. Instead of waiting for happy chemicals to come your way, plan to „do something.”
Planning is also a good way to relieve unhappy chemicals.
Instead of worrying all day, plan to worry while brushing your teeth. If that’s not enough, plan to worry while you floss too. In forty-five days, you will love the results.
If you were prescribed two weeks of antibiotics to cure an infection, you would visualize the success of the treatment even though you couldn’t see it. You wouldn’t double your dose on Day Two if you weren’t cured on Day One, nor would you stop the treatment on Day Three if you already felt better. You imagine your cells developing even without visible progress. It would be nice to have visible evidence of your new neural pathway, but you can stay the course by visualizing your developing brain cells.
Once your new pathway is established, your happy habit will feel so natural that you will literally forget to feel bad.
THESE TOOLS WILL HELP YOU TRAIN YOUR BRAIN
Mirror: find someone with the habit you want and mirror them.
Balance: develop the happy chemicals you’re not already best at.
Graft: build new happy circuits onto old happy roots.
Energy: save your energy for tough challenges.
Legacy: preserve your unique individual essence to please your inner mammal.
Fun: find the fun in a new behavior and you will repeat it.
Chunk: divide difficult challenges into smaller parts.
Satisfice: a satisfactory solution may be better than an endless quest for optimal.
Plan: start building circuits now so they’re ready when you need them.
Visualize: your neural pathways are building even though they’re not visible.
A big brain is good at keeping score on itself. Learning from your mistakes has value, of course, but your error-analysis habit can crowd out your awareness of the good. You can focus on what goes wrong in the world so intently that you don’t see what goes right.
I learned to notice what goes right after spending a year in Africa. Before that, I took flush toilets for granted, but I learned that people did without sewage systems for most of human his-tory. When we have them, it doesn’t make us happy, but open sewage ditches and vermin-infested outhouses might make you unhappy. I learned to appreciate the work of my municipal waste institution instead of just finding fault with it.
Unhappiness is often blamed on „bad choices.” This implies that „good choices” are available. The truth is more complicated.
Each choice has advantages and disadvantages. Once you pick, you get to see the disadvantages of that choice up close. It’s easy to imagine that all would be lovely if only the other choice were yours. But if a do-over were possible, chances are you’d be frustrated by another „bad choice.” You could spend your whole life lamenting your choices if you don’t make a habit of seeing the good in what you’ve chosen. And even a „good choice” can only make you happy for a short time, because happy chemicals only come in short spurts. So as we struggle to make „good choices,” the first choice we must make is to manage our own happy chemicals.
If you decide to be happy, your brain will find things to be happy about. You will still have frustrations and disappointments, but you will find ways to make yourself happy anyway. If your happy pathways don’t spark themselves, you will find healthy ways to crank them up.
You can do this right now.
No one is stopping you.
No one can do it for you.
And you cannot do it for someone else.
Your happy chemicals will not surge all the time, but you do not need to be having a „peak” experience at every moment. You can accept the inevitable dips in your happy chemicals instead of believing something is wrong. You don’t have to mask the dips with unhealthy habits. You can just take them as evidence that your inner mammal is looking out for you in the best way it knows how.
It’s not easy to manage this brain we’ve inherited from our ancestors. It’s the challenge that comes with the gift of life.
scrisori netrimise 