Habits of a Happy Brain

by Loretta Graziano Breuning

  The Added Dimension of Empathy

  Mirror neurons allow us to feel other people’s pain. This has a benefit, as often suggested by empathy researchers, but it also has a cost. You can get wired to suffer just by being around people who suffer. Even if your life is fine, mirroring builds a pathway to your cortisol. Once your physical sense of threat is turned on, your cortex looks for evidence of threat. It will find evidence because that eases the “do something” feeling.

  Social groups build a shared sense of threat. When your social group feels threatened, you notice. You are free to dismiss the alarm in your own mind. But your group mates may expect you to empathize with their pain pattern. If you don’t, your social bonds may be threatened. Your group mates may decide you are not “one of us.” They may even see you as the threat. It’s not easy being a primate.

  Groups vs. Individuality

  We all face a constant choice between striking out alone and doing what it takes to stick with a group. You don’t consciously believe you will die without social support, but the neurochemical response to this prospect is surprisingly strong. For example, if your work is criticized at a performance review, you know your survival is not literally threatened, but cortisol makes it feel that way. The alarm tells your cortex to search for threats, and your cortex cooperates by finding some.

  NATURE’S OUTCASTS

  Animals sometimes eject an individual from the group. The most common examples are deposed alphas and adolescent males. Cortisol spikes in an ostracized animal, and indeed they often perish. Animals fear exclusion so intensely that they typically do what it takes to stay with the group, even when dominated harshly. A mammal will leave the group when it promotes reproduction because the big cortisol surge is offset by a big happy-chemicals surge.

  Becoming Independent

  Social pain is an inevitable part of growing up. You start out with a degree of social support, but at some point you learn that your parents cannot protect you forever. This is poignantly clear among monkeys marked as juveniles by a tuft of white fur. The troop cuts you slack until the white fur is gone at three months of age. Then you’re fair game and adult monkeys will snatch food from your mouth. It may feel like something is wrong with the world when childhood ends and you face threats for yourself. Yet this is the way of nature. No species could survive unless its young learned survival skills before its parents died. Cortisol surges when you face threats without the protection of your elders. So every brain wires itself with the pain of losing social support.

  The Benefits of Social Pain

  This social pain circuit is a useful tool. It helps you choose between social rewards and other rewards. Imagine you’re offered a great promotion in another state. You feel bad at the thought of losing the life you have, but the idea of passing up the career advancement feels bad too. Bad feelings help the brain weigh one risk against others. Cortisol helps you interpret information, even when you have two good choices. Daily life is filled with choices between the bad feeling of lost opportunity when you stick with the herd and the bad feeling of being isolated and ignored. These bad feelings do not mean the world is bad. They are just a tool.

  Today’s Focus on Social Pain

  Social pain is not new to the world, but your brain gives it less attention when you’re experiencing hunger, violence, hard labor, and disease. Once you’re free from physical pain, as many of us are on a daily basis, social pain grabs your attention. Every possible threat to your social bonds looms large. Anything resembling the social pain of your past will light up your well-paved pathway and turn on your cortisol. Warning signs are wired in, so the slightest hint of that old familiar pain can quickly trigger a big surge.

  You have power over which information you focus on. But the choice is not simple. On the one hand, you want to avoid false alarms. On the other hand, you want to respect the alarm calls of your herd mates to avoid losing that social support. To make matters worse, just belonging to the herd doesn’t make your mammal brain happy. It wants to be noticed.

  Why Your Brain Equates Attention with Survival

  Exclusion makes you unhappy, but inclusion does not necessarily make you happy. Once you’re in a group, you see others getting what you are not getting. You feel bad, though you hate to admit it. There’s a good physical reason for this pervasive source of unhappiness. The first experience in your brain, the circuit at the foundation of your neural network, is the sense that you will die if you don’t get attention.

  It Starts Early

  The fragility of a newborn human is unparalleled in nature. No other creature is born so far from being able to survive on his own. Consider:

  A gazelle can run with the herd the day after it’s born.

  An elephant can walk before its first meal, since that’s how it gets to the nipple.

  A fish is an orphan from birth because its parents swim off once the eggs are fertilized.

  Yet a human cannot even lift his head for weeks, and he can’t provide for himself and his offspring for decades.

  We humans are born with an unfinished nervous system for a good reason. If we developed fully in utero, our heads would be too big to fit through the birth canal. Instead, we get born premature, with a nervous system that isn’t hooked up. This was learned by comparing human infants to premature chimpanzees. A premature chimp is not capable of holding on to its mother as she swings through the trees the way a full-term baby chimp can. A newborn human is like a premature chimp with a much bigger brain. Our brains kept growing bigger as our ancestors succeeded at getting more protein and fat. They thrived on bone marrow from scavenged bones even before they excelled at hunting. Bigger brains led to better hunting methods, more nutrition, and even bigger brains. So our species got born at ever earlier stages of development, with a lot of neurons, but fewer connections between them.

  A chimpanzee is born with eyes and limbs that are ready to go. Humans link up their sensory organs and musculoskeletal system after birth, from direct experience. When a newborn human sees a hand flying in front of her face, she does not know she’s attached to that hand, no less that she can control it. We are born helpless and we hook up our brains gradually during a long period of dependency. This gives us the advantage of adapting our nervous system to the environment we’re born into, but it also means we start life with an extreme sense of vulnerability.

  Fortunately, the vulnerability of the human baby sparked communication. A baby that could call attention to its needs was more likely to survive. Mothers good at interpreting their babies’ signals had more surviving DNA. Thus, the ability to communicate was naturally selected for. When we succeed, our needs are met and happy chemicals flow. When we fail, cortisol flows and we look for a way to do something. Eventually, we develop complex communication circuits, but they rest on the core sense that you will die if you are not heard. You don’t think this in words, but you think it with neurochemicals.

  When you were born, you experienced pain that you couldn’t do anything about. The resulting cortisol made you cry. That worked! It got your needs met. A newborn doesn’t cry as a conscious act of communication. It doesn’t cry because it knows what milk is. It cries because that’s one of our few prewired circuits. A baby soon learns to stop crying because it recognizes signs of relief from its past. It stops crying before its needs are actually met because it has linked attention to relief.

  But a baby learns that attention can vanish as quickly as it came. Social support disappears for reasons a baby doesn’t understand. When a baby feels safe, it ventures out to explore, and pain strikes again in some unexpected way. We must explore beyond the cocoon of social support to wire up our brains, so we experience threat and learn to manage it. No amount of nurturing can protect us from the reality of human vulnerability.

  Your Early Circuits Remain with You Today

  Your early vulnerability circuits are still there. When your poetry is ignored by the one you love, or your views are ignored at a meeting, th
ese circuits send electricity to your cortisol. We don’t consciously think it’s a matter of life and death to be seen and heard, but old circuits make it feel that way.

  The bad feeling of being ignored is compounded when you see others getting attention. In every troop of primates, some individuals get more attention than others. Field researchers have documented the way baboons give their attention to some troop mates more than others. Laboratory researchers find that chimpanzees will exchange food for a chance to look at photos of the alpha chimp in their group. Your brain seeks attention as if your life depended on it because in the state of nature, it does. When the expectation is disappointed, cortisol flows.

  EXERCISE: MAKE IT STOP

  It’s hard to stop your cortisol because your brain is designed to protect you from threats. Your ancestors conquered hunger, cold, and predators because cortisol made them feel bad until they found a way to make it stop. Once your physical needs are met, social threats get your attention. That’s why you feel like your survival is threatened when anything reminds you of social frustrations you experienced in youth. It’s hard to “do something” about this cortisol because the source of the threat is not clear. It helps to focus your attention elsewhere, which is why we develop habits that distract us from cortisol. Some of these “happy habits” are good for you in the long run, and others are not. Pulling your hair out when you feel bad is not sustainable, but weaving a basket is. Hopping on a plane to Vegas is not sustainable in the long run, but chatting with your Aunt Millie is. Notice the habits you use to shift out of distressing thoughts. Consider the consequences of each habit, and decide whether it serves your long-term well-being:

  Cortisol-stopping habits that hurt me in the long run

  Cortisol-stopping habits that serve me in the long run

  The Unquenchable Thirst for Status

  Most people find it hard to believe that their cortisol is caused by status concerns. It’s easy to say “I don’t care about status,” though you can easily see that others care. You may not care about one particular status marker, like the latest gadget or clothing brand. But your mammal brain is always comparing you to others and deciding who’s on top. When it’s the other guy, your cortisol is released. In the state of nature, that would warn you to hold back and avoid harmful conflict. Today, you get a vague feeling that you’re threatened by anyone you see in the one-up position. You don’t think that consciously, but your mammal brain wants to avoid the one-down position as if your life depended on it. And thus it drives you to seek the one-up position, though you’d never consider yourself a one-upper.

  These nagging impulses are hard to make sense of because you don’t think this in words. Many people make peace with their mammal brain by deciding that the world is forcing this on them. But it doesn’t work. Your one-down feelings are intensified when you feel judged by the world. You are better off knowing that you are participating in the judging. When you know you are creating the “do something” feeling yourself, you have power over it.

  Status in the Animal World

  It helps to know how animals one-up each other. One simple example is the quest to look bigger. Mammals stand their hair on end without conscious intent because cortisol tightens hair follicles. (That’s the equivalent of human goose bumps.) When your hair stands out, adversaries think you’re bigger than you are. Bigger animals seize food, mates, and even babies from smaller group mates, so looking big promotes survival. Bad feelings make it happen. (Oft-repeated disclaimer: I’m not saying you should do this; I’m saying you have more power over your impulses when you understand them.)

  Animal status-consciousness is easy to understand when you know how it happens. When a cow reaches puberty or joins a new herd, she fights each other cow once. If she loses, she associates that cow’s smell with pain. If she wins, she feels safe around that cow. Her brain links each herd mate to either her cortisol or her serotonin. That guides her social interactions, as she either submits to avoid pain or dominates to meet her needs. A herd is typically led by an “alpha” cow, who is the unchallenged queen for life. When she dies, the more dominant cows will challenge each other for her spot. Then things go back to normal. Cows don’t have enough neural plasticity to keep updating their circuits.

  Primates do, however. While small-brained mammals typically keep one status ranking for life, big-brained primates challenge the status hierarchy when they think they can win. Monkeys and apes quickly notice when a troop mate shows weakness, and they challenge them over food, mates, or just who gets the good seat. That doesn’t mean they fight all the time—they still avoid fighting when they anticipate pain. They use their big brains to build social alliances that threaten rivals with pain. Research shows that each primate in a group is aware of its own status in relation to each other troop mate, and the relative status of any two third parties. When conflict changes those rankings, each brain rewires itself to reflect the new status hierarchy. The rewards for status are often quite small, but they get the brain’s attention when it’s not busy meeting a more urgent need. Brains good at status-seeking made more copies of themselves, and the rest is history.

  Animals care intensely about the status of their mating partners. Each species has its own strategies for judging potential mates, and they always focus on traits that are uncannily relevant to the survival potential of offspring. For example:

  Peacocks with more colorful tails actually have higher resistance to deadly parasites, which gives their offspring a survival edge.

  In the chimpanzee world, status-seeking tends to trump courtship. That’s because males are only interested in fertile females, which means a five-year wait on average, because females are infertile while lactating. Males spend that time jockeying for position against each other.

  You may say you don’t care about status, but when a high-status person notices you, your happy chemicals soar. Raising your children’s status thrills your mammal brain even more. When your specialness is overlooked, your unhappy chemicals spike, and if your children’s specialness is overlooked, it’s much worse.

  Status in Today’s World

  You may blame these ups and downs on “our society” without recognizing the universality of these impulses. If every mammal in the room has eyes for the same beauty, we end up with many unhappy mammals. If all parents want their children to get into the same high-status institution, a lot of cortisol will flow. If everyone wants to be chief, unhappiness will reign. Such impulses are found in every culture and in our animal ancestors, so it’s futile to blame “our culture.”

  Your feelings about your status are independent of your socioeconomic circumstances. Imagine you’re a high-priced lawyer with a lot of formal status trappings. Every minute of your waking life is spent kowtowing to clients and senior partners and anyone who can help your career. Everywhere you look, you see threats that could destroy your career. You do not feel dominant. You might actually be happier if you were a bus driver who rules the bus all day and then rules the roost at home. Status does not come from fixed labels and abstract words. It’s the feeling you get when you interact with others. Those feelings change from moment to moment as we go through our day, but they depend heavily on the circuits we’ve already built.

  We tell ourselves that status doesn’t matter and everyone is equal, but each brain keeps monitoring how it stacks up against others. Expectations build from experience. When your expectations are exceeded, happy chemicals flow. When your expectations are disappointed, it feels like a survival threat, even if you consciously know better. Everyone is sensitive to slights because everyone wants to be special. The urge for specialness might seem annoying in others, but in yourself, it just feels like fairness.

  EXERCISE: THE URGE TO BE SPECIAL

  Being special promotes survival in the state of nature. Your mammal brain seeks specialness as if your life depended on it. Whatever made you feel special when you were young triggered happy chemicals that connected neurons. These connectio
ns trigger expectations about how to survive. When your expectations about specialness are disappointed, it feels like a survival threat. It’s easy to see this in others, but hard to see in yourself. We imagine ourselves having “good reasons” for our motivations, but a quest for specialness does not sound like a “good reason.” This leaves us confused about the reasons for our neurochemical ups and downs. Small social disappointments can give you the feeling of grave danger without knowing why. These surges have less power if you know where they come from. Make a habit of noticing the urge to be special, in yourself and in others. Instead of denying this urge, notice your expectations and the unhappiness you feel when your expectations are disappointed. Although it’s tempting to condemn yourself for these feelings, you can honor the mammalian energy that kept your ancestors alive. Notice examples of:

  The urge to be special in others

  The urge to be special in yourself

  The urge to be special in your ancestors

  Disappointments in the quest for specialness