It’s hard to leave the disease view once you are in it. You lose oxytocin when you question it, as fellow anxiety sufferers stop seeing you as an ally and may condemn you as an enemy. You lose serotonin as you become an average person rather than a special person. You lose dopamine when you stop expecting a fix from the next doctor visit. In the short run, it may feel better to see yourself as a victim of bad health care. But in the long run, the disease view of emotions leaves you with a lot of cortisol.
3. The Bulletproof Armor Pitfall
We are born vulnerable, so it’s natural to want protection from an unsafe world. Seeking protection is a primal impulse, and finding protection feels so good that it wires you to expect more good feelings in that way. When self-protection feels good, it wires you for more of that. Self-protection gives you a reliable way to relieve threats. Repetition builds a pathway that makes it automatic. It’s your handy personal armor.
Armor comes in many forms.
Muscle tension is a common variety because it’s the mammal brain’s natural threat response. Tension literally armors your body to protect you from anticipated harm. Even when you anticipate verbal harm or social harm, your mammal brain triggers tension.
Boredom is another common type of armor. It’s your inner mammal’s way of saying, “Don’t get excited. There’s nothing here for you. No rewards are expected, so don’t invest anything.”
Distraction is also a kind of armor. It relieves threatened feelings by sending your electricity in a new direction. Addictions are armor too, because they distract so effectively.
Other varieties of armor are perfectionism, anger, procrastination, resentment, sarcasm, defensiveness, and apathy. All of these thought habits put you in the one-up position, which makes you feel protected in the short run. They can hurt you in the long run, of course, and the hurt can trigger more self-armoring. Each brain relies on the circuits it has, which makes it hard to see how your armor is hurting you.
Armor has value, but it weighs you down. It’s hard to take armor off once you put it on. But you can take it off and enjoy a new lightness and flexibility.
The first step is to notice your psychic armor. To do that, remember the time you told yourself, “I will never let this happen again.” That is when you wired in the habit of defending yourself with whatever was available at that time. You will recognize your armor if you take time to ponder the pain of your myelin years. That is not an appealing project, of course. Do it in a quiet moment rather than during a cortisol surge, and plan something fun to do afterward. Start by thinking about a bad feeling you experienced recently, and trace it back to an early experience that fits the same pattern. When you find the match, celebrate your adult power instead of reliving the vulnerability of childhood.
The second step is to build confidence in your unarmored self. You can face the world’s slings and arrows without it. Pain may result, but you will learn that pain doesn’t kill you. Your brain is designed to anticipate pain, and you may be confusing anticipated pain with actual pain. You end up with a lot of extra pain. When you stop fearing pain, you stop creating the extra.
We have all experienced the pain of criticism and rejection in youth. We fear the loss of social bonds that protect us, and, truth be told, we fear the loss of the one-up position. These social threats feel like survival threats when you are safe from the more urgent threats of hunger and predation. We don’t consciously see our disappointed dreams of grandeur as survival threats. And we don’t consciously expect to relieve them with anger, boredom, perfectionism, procrastination, defensiveness, apathy, resentment, or addiction. But when a self-protective thought relieves the sting of social pain, it feels good, so your mammal brain goes there again.
It’s natural to want armor when you’re a hairless ape with a big cortex. It’s hard to bear the thought of your own defenselessness. We can manage our armor more effectively when we are honest about it. We can build new protective skills instead of just repeating the ones built by accidents of youth. You can think of your new skills as hi-tech armor that’s light and flexible. You can feel safe without the arsenal you built in the past.
4. The Social Comparison Pitfall
Social comparison causes much human misery, yet we keep comparing ourselves to others. The mammal brain compares and reacts because that promotes survival. You have power over this impulse when you understand it. The mammal brain sees the strength of others as a survival threat. You don’t intend to think that way, but your brain keeps comparing and releasing cortisol when you fall short. If you don’t know you’re doing this, you believe other people are putting you down or trying to dominate you. When you understand your brain, you know that you long for social dominance just like other mammals. This is why you give your attention to social comparisons.
It’s hard to believe that animals engage in social comparison. We’ve been taught that animals are caring and sharing, and “our society is the problem.” It’s important to know the rest of the story. When two animals meet, each brain quickly makes a comparison and decides whether it’s in the position of strength or the position of weakness. It makes a dominance gesture if it thinks it is stronger, and a submission gesture if it sees itself as weaker. If both individuals think they’re stronger, a fight may erupt. Most of the time, fights are avoided because the weaker individual backs down. Animals are highly motivated to avoid pain.
Mammals get along once the uncomfortable business of status is resolved. They even cooperate in the face of a common enemy. But they care intensely about status because it affects the survival of their genes. The dominant individual is understood to have first access to any resources that come along. This is the mammalian way of preventing fights over food and mating opportunity. Weaker individuals restrain their impulses in the presence of a stronger individual. The dominant animal may share resources and control aggression once it has the position of dominance because that is what matters. The brain built by natural selection rewards you with a good feeling when you come out on top.
The mammal brain is skilled at assessing its strength relative to others because survival depends on it. Young monkeys spend a lot of time wrestling, which trains their brains to compare their strength to others. When you were young, you spent a lot of time comparing your strengths to others. In adolescence, you added new social comparisons to those circuits. Your mirror neurons influenced your choice of traits to compare. You eagerly noticed which traits brought rewards and which traits brought pain. You wired yourself to expect rewards from certain strengths and to feel threatened by certain weaknesses. You ended up with pathways that tell you when you’re in the weaker position and need to back down, and when you’re in the position of advantage.
These pathways are well-myelinated from repeated use. They easily stimulate good feelings when you gain an advantage and bad feelings when your status is threatened. But you have always been told not to think this way, so you learn to ignore your internal impulses and blame externals. You believe your own spin because you do not decide in words to make social comparisons. But words are not needed for a mammal to make social comparisons. All it takes is chemicals and pathways built from experience with those chemicals.
It’s better not to compare, of course. We want everyone to be equal. When you say this with your verbal brain, you get respect and acceptance. But your mammal brain is still comparing. The more equal people are, the harder your brain looks for differences in order to make status distinctions. Bill Gates’s sneakers differ little from yours in the context of human history, but your inner mammal notices the difference and it cares.
The bigger a creature’s brain, the more complex its social comparisons. For example, reptiles compare in a simple way. When a reptile sees a critter bigger than itself, it runs. When it sees a smaller critter, it tries to eat it. And when it sees something about the same size, it tries to mate it. Reptiles don’t live in groups because they can�
�t restrain conflict among bigger and smaller individuals. Mammals inherited the brains of reptiles and added on. Mammals evolved the capacity for strength in numbers by using social comparison to prevent conflict.
Smaller-brained mammals compare in simpler ways. For example, when a bovine joins a new herd, it fights each individual once, and thus wires itself to “know its place.” It will not update its status perceptions unless there’s a major shake-up. Monkeys, with their larger cortex, are continually challenging and renegotiating their status. A monkey even recognizes the relative status of two other monkeys to each other. Status-seeking monkeys made more copies of their genes, so status-seeking brains got passed on.
A mammal compares itself to others before reaching for food or mating opportunity, so social comparison is effectively more primal than food or sex. It’s hard to think about animals this way. We prefer to imagine them in a pristine state of altruism. But when you know the truth, you can discover your primal impulses and escape from their grip. You can notice yourself making social comparisons at work, at the gym, at parties, and on your screen. You can notice the feelings these comparisons trigger. You can design a healthier alternative and repeat it until your electricity flows there.
So what is a healthy alternative? Each time you catch yourself comparing, you can tell yourself: “My mammal brain wants the one-up position because that feels safe. My mammal brain sees stronger individuals as a threat. I am creating these feelings by making comparisons.” When you say this to yourself, you can manage your feelings instead of jumping to the conclusion that you are under attack. When you fail to get the one-up position, you can reassure your inner mammal that your survival is not actually threatened.
There is no simple solution. If you seek the one-up position all the time, you end up with a lot of conflict. If you submit all the time, you get a lot of cortisol and little serotonin. Our only choice is to make constant decisions about when to assert and when to let go. Fortunately, that’s the job our brain evolved to do. We can do it with less intensity by reminding ourselves that the life-or-death feelings are just chemicals triggered by old pathways.
You may still be saying “I don’t do this.” You see others doing it, especially people you hate. But when it comes to yourself and your allies, you are sure you are above all that. Yet you often believe “they” are putting you down, so you have no choice but to respond. You feel like a victim when you deny your own mammalian impulses. You are better off seeing yourself as a protagonist.
For most of human history, these frustrations were managed with rigid rules. It’s fascinating to know that many human languages have status distinctions built in. For example, you cannot speak Spanish or Japanese without designating the listener as above you or below you. When I speak Spanish, I get anxious about this choice. When I use the form with more respect I fear being too formal, and when I opt to be informal I fear being disrespectful. I might be more relaxed about it if I were a native speaker, but then I would be still making status distinctions. I would just be doing it on autopilot.
We don’t like to talk about our animal urge for social importance, yet we have many words to denote it: pride, ego, confidence, competitiveness, status, assertiveness, dignity, and ambition. We call it getting respect, attention, or recognition, and feeling special, important, or appreciated. Harsh words come to mind when we think about our rivals’ quest for social advantage, while our own quest feels like an innocent survival necessity.
The pain of social comparison is intensified by our brain’s natural focus on the strengths of others. For example, when I meet a certain friend, my eye instantly notices a waist that is much thinner than mine. She instantly notices that my hair is much thicker than hers. I feel bad about my thick waist, while I take my thick hair for granted. She feels bad about her thin hair, and takes her thin waist for granted. We are both focused on our weaknesses rather than our strengths. We are both stimulating unhappy chemicals rather than happy chemicals.
What if we did the opposite? What if I focused on traits I felt good about, and she focused on traits she felt good about? At first, focusing on your strengths can feel rude, conceited, arrogant. The word “self-satisfied” has come to be used as an insult. Focusing on your strengths feels dangerous too, because monitoring your weakness keeps you safe. If I stopped worrying about my waist it might get bigger and bigger. If my friend stopped worrying about her hair it may get thinner. It’s easy to see how we end up focused on our weaknesses, putting ourselves down and then resenting others for doing it to us. But we have the power to focus on our strengths and release that resentment.
5. The High-School Brain Pitfall
Puberty brings myelin that paves neural pathways. Each brain filters experience through a lens built in adolescence. This is why life often feels like a high school cafeteria.
You may not remember the adolescent experiences that are shaping your neurochemistry today. Your brain just relies on the pathways it has.
It helps to know that “high school brain” afflicts everyone. You can be less harsh with yourself and others when you know how it works.
Sex is just part of the adolescent equation. The mammal brain evolved to reward “reproductive success,” which includes everything that comes before and after sex. Before sex is the quest for a partner, and after sex is the quest to keep the young alive. No conscious intent to reproduce is involved. Animals are not consciously trying to spread their genes, but their brain rewards them with a good feeling when they take steps that promote their genes. Natural selection built a brain that responds vigorously to everything that affects your ability to find a partner and protect children. This is why your chemicals are so affected by an inviting smile or a career boost, and why a bad hair day can feel like a survival threat.
“Popularity” in high school is curiously linked to the factors that promote reproductive success in monkeys: a healthy appearance, a network of social alliances, and a willingness to take risks. Steps toward these factors trigger reward chemicals in young brains, thus wiring adolescents to seek more of that. Whatever works tells the brain, “This is the way to go.” If you look closely at the woes and joys of your adolescence, you will find a remarkable correspondence with your woes and joys today.
It’s easy to ridicule high school brain in others, but if you are honest, you can see that ridiculing others puts you in the one-up position. Ridicule is an adolescent way to enjoy a moment of social dominance. It’s not surprising that ridicule is so pervasive, but you can learn to notice and redirect this impulse.
You can learn to recognize the high school template in your interpretation of today’s events. Then you can train yourself to stop and generate an alternative when you start slipping into high school brain. A new pathway will build, and your new view will light up more easily.
6. The Hell-in-a-Handbasket Pitfall
When you tell yourself “things are going to hell in a handbasket,” you stimulate cortisol. The hell feels real because the cortisol is real. You can relieve cortisol by replacing your “hell in a handbasket” template with a more positive mind-set.
Hell-in-a-handbasket thinking is popular because it feels good in the short run. It stimulates oxytocin with the image that we’re all in the handbasket together. It stimulates serotonin by suggesting that your knowledge is superior. It stimulates dopamine by helping you predict rewards. It relieves cortisol by distracting you from private distress with its focus on public distress. These good feelings wire you to return to the hell-in-a-handbasket mind-set in future moments of distress.
Of course, it feels bad to think things are going downhill. So you end up with cortisol in the long run when you rely on this mind-set for short-run relief. It’s not surprising that escapism is often allied with hell-in-a-handbasket thinking. Why not have another drink if everything is falling apart?
You do not consciously want to think this way. But when anxiety strikes, y
ou urgently want to “do something” and you don’t always know what to do. Any reliable alternative is appreciated. You observe the relief strategies of others and their hell-in-a-handbasket thinking is palpable. Your mirror neurons take it in. After a while, the declinist world view feels obviously true because the flow is so effortless.
People have bonded around a shared sense of threat throughout human history. Children learn about expected threats from elders, and the expectation gets wired in. If you reject shared expectations, you risk being seen as stupid or “not one of us.”
Every historical era has its way of explaining threatened feelings. Every era has its high priests who define shared threats for others. High priests must compete for public attention in order to sustain their status. They do that by designing messages that are popular and by challenging rival high priests. Today, academics and mass media define shared threats for us. If you reject their message of decline, you risk being seen as stupid or “not one of us.”
The human cortex is designed to find patterns in the external world that match patterns in your neurons. It’s easy to find external evidence of decline because the inputs flow so easily into neural pathways created by declinist expectations. Others do it too, so it seems like absolute proof. But when you know how your brain works, you can see how the declinist pattern is constructed and build yourself an alternative. Your world will suddenly look different.
I am not suggesting that you replace the hell-in-a-handbasket view with a heaven-is-around-the-corner view. That is not really different. It’s still relying on a preconceived pattern to predict rewards and pain.
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