Your brain compares itself to others even if you wish it didn’t. In the state of nature, comparing yourself to others promotes survival. It protects you from getting into fights that you are likely to lose. When your brain sees you are weaker than another individual, it releases cortisol to remind you of the risk. This helps you hold back, despite your urge to promote your survival interests. Unhappy chemicals help us inhibit our urge for dominance and thus get along with group mates. We need unhappy chemicals, as much as we’d rather live without them.
The Cortex’s Role in Threat-Seeking
The human cortex creates abstractions that feel real. We can terrorize ourselves with our own thoughts because of our ability to activate circuits internally instead of just relying on inputs reaching the senses. For example, you can begin to sweat just thinking about an upcoming work presentation, even though you’re not actually in the room, ready to begin talking. This allows us to imagine future threats and take action to avoid them. We can even imagine our own mortality: We know something will kill us, even though we don’t know what. This motivates us to keep seeking potential threats instead of just waiting for our senses to report what’s there.
The Chemical Roller Coaster of Threats
Identifying a potential threat feels curiously good. You’re like a gazelle that smells a lion and can’t relax until it sees where the lion is. Seeing a lion feels good when the alternative is worse. We seek evidence of threats to feel safe, and we get a dopamine boost when we find what we seek. You can also get a serotonin boost from the feeling of being right, and an oxytocin boost from bonding with those who sense the same threat. This is why people seem oddly pleased to find evidence of doom and gloom. But the pleasure doesn’t last because the “do something” feeling commands your attention again. You can end up feeling bad a lot even if you’re successful in your survival efforts.
A Big Cortex Has a Big Threat Response
A small cortex scans for threats it has actually experienced, but a big cortex like a human’s can build chains of associations from bits and parts of actual experience. You can think about a future that you can’t smell or touch. You can imagine disaster scenarios quite distant from your physical reality. And you can imagine what the world will be when you are gone. Knowing the world will go on without you someday is more distressing than we realize. It’s so upsetting that you’re tempted to imagine the world ending when you end. Then you won’t be missing anything.
I noticed this conundrum at a lecture on future energy reserves. When the speaker presented a chart projecting world energy reserves a hundred years from now, everyone in the audience had to imagine a world they would not be part of. The threat of collapse found a receptive audience—indeed, it was almost a relief, because the thought of living at the important time in history feels better than the thought of being gone without a trace. Feeling important helps relieve distress, even when we imagine we are only interested in facts. The cortex looks for facts that make you feel good.
Your cortex promotes survival by looking for logical explanations of what your mammal brain feels is true. If you feel that things are falling apart, for example, you will find evidence that things are falling apart and overlook evidence of things going well. A big cortex attached to a mammal brain can easily conclude that the world is going to hell in a handbasket. (More on this in my book Beyond Cynical: Transcend Your Mammalian Negativity.)
You may feel sure that you’re focused on facts and couldn’t possibly be so biased. But your brain actually has ten times more neurons telling your eyes what to look for than it has to take things in randomly. That is, ten times more neurons send information from the cortex to the eyes than from the eyes to the cortex. We are designed to scan for inputs we’ve already experienced as important rather than wasting our attention on whatever comes along.
It helps to know how the cortex finds facts that fit expectations. A clear example is the way your cortex reads this page. It does not just take in details passively. It generates expectations about the chunk of detail that will come next, based on past experience. Dopamine is released when you see a chunk that matches your expectations. You extract meaning and move on to generate an expectation about the next chunk. If a chunk fails to match your expectations, cortisol is released, which prompts you to take a closer look before you create meaning and move on. You’re not conscious of generating expectations before you read a word, but you’d never be able to read if you didn’t.
Expectations vs. Reality
Your expectations are neural pathways that light up in anticipation of sensory inputs. This makes a smooth flow of meaning possible. Which expectations you activate depend on your stock of life experience and the neurochemicals you are experiencing at the moment.
Your cortex is always making predictions about future pain and future rewards. But anticipated rewards don’t always materialize, which is another source of cortisol. Your cortex can imagine a better world that makes you happy all the time, but you fail to find this utopia. Reality is often a disappointment, and it’s hard to understand the role of your expectations because your cortex generates them so effortlessly.
A lizard never thinks something is wrong with the world, even as it watches its young get eaten alive. It doesn’t tell itself “something is wrong with the world,” because it doesn’t have enough neurons to imagine the world being other than what it is. It doesn’t expect a world in which there are no predators, so it doesn’t condemn the world for falling short of expectations. It doesn’t condemn itself for failing to keep its offspring alive. Humans expect more, and we do something about it. That’s why we end up focused on our disappointments instead of saluting our accomplishments.
EXERCISE: WHAT ARE YOUR EXPECTATIONS?
Life feels good when it exceeds your expectations, and bad when it falls short of your expectations. Your ups and downs depend heavily on your expectations, so it’s important to understand them. Expectations are neural pathways that you electrically activate in anticipation of incoming information. You activate them without conscious intent because your electricity flows where it has flowed before. Your brain is always comparing the neurons activated by your senses to the neurons you’ve preactivated. When it finds a pattern that matches, you “know” what you are experiencing and whether it is good or bad for you. Your emotions are easier to make sense of when you learn to notice your expectations. Notice examples of:
A time you expected harm and ended up feeling harmed
A time you expected rewards and ended up feeling rewarded
Once you do this with big expectations, start noticing the smaller expectations you generate many times an hour.
When a monkey loses a banana to a rival, he feels bad, but he doesn’t expand the problem by thinking about it over and over. He looks for another banana. He ends up feeling rewarded rather than harmed. Humans use their extra neurons to construct theories about bananas and end up constructing pain. For example, imagine that a bully steals your parking spot once a year. By the time you are thirty-six years old, your brain has stored twenty chunks of evidence that the world is full of bullies. This template in your brain can divert your electricity from the abundant evidence of people being good to you. To complicate matters further, you may have misperceived those parking lot incidents in the first place. Haven’t you ever been accused of taking someone’s spot when you are sure you were there first? It’s easy to misjudge a situation when your eyes are busy driving. Yet it’s hard to notice your own misjudgments because electricity flows so easily along your well-worn pathways. A brain can construct an image of a bad world despite abundant evidence of good.
Accepting the Value in Unhappiness
When a pattern-seeking human cortex is hooked up to a dominance-seeking mammal brain and a danger-avoiding reptile brain, it’s not surprising that we end up with a lot of cortisol alarms. It’s useful to remember that cortisol prevents pain as well as causing it.
For example, lizards run from me
the moment I step outside my door. Most of this alarmism is for nothing, because I do not step on lizards. But reptiles don’t fault themselves for excessive caution. False positives are part of the reptilian survival system.
We humans hate false positives. We want to duck bullets, but we don’t want to duck when there’s no bullet. We expect our alarm system to call the shots perfectly every time. I think about this when I watch the meerkats at the zoo. They run for cover when a plane flies overhead, though no plane has ever tried to eat them. Meerkats did not evolve to live in zoos near airports, but they did evolve in places where birds of prey could grab them in an instant. They survived because of their alertness for a particular pattern of cues—in this case, flying predators. I am not saying we should fear everything our ancestors feared. I am simply appreciating the meerkats’ self-acceptance. They don’t castigate themselves for their timidity after the plane passes. They don’t berate each other for those bad calls. They just go back to what they were doing before the plane passed: scanning for threats and opportunities.
Cortisol Helps When You’re Cautious and When You’re Daring
Excess caution often helps us humans survive. I wash my hands before every meal even though my world is quite sanitary. I look in my rearview mirror every time I change lanes even though no car is there much of the time. A person could wear seat belts her whole life without ever being in an accident. Anticipating threats helps us prevent unhappiness in the long run. But over-reliance on this strategy can leave you with endless hand-washing and mirror-checking habits. Sometimes the best strategy is to approach a potential threat and gather information. Cortisol helps you do that, too. It frees you to try new things and still have an effective warning light when you’ve gone too far. Accepting the bad feelings cortisol creates sounds harsh, but the alternative is worse. You can end up unhappy about being unhappy. Instead, you can accept your own warning system, though it sometimes overreacts to patterns that resemble past threats.
You Can Change and Adapt
When I wish my cortisol would stop, I think about feral pigs. (These are pigs that have escaped from farms and returned to the wild.) They fascinate me because feral pigs start developing the features of wild boars once they start meeting their own survival needs. Their snouts grow bigger when they use those snouts to root for food. Their fur grows longer when they need it for shelter from the cold. In short: the bad feeling of hunger and cold triggers the strengths the pigs were meant to have. You can trigger the strengths you were meant to have when you understand your threat responses.
4 | THE VICIOUS CYCLE OF HAPPINESS
The Slide from Happiness to Disappointment
Imagine you’re receiving a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Institute of Human Magnificence. You hear wild applause as 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, your brain will go back to scanning for potential threats as well. And it 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. This brain we’ve inherited saves the happy chemicals for new information. The same old information does not get them going.
I experienced the brain’s indifference to old information in a local flower shop. I was thrilled by a fabulous smell when I walked in the door, and decided to buy a bouquet so I could keep enjoying it. After I paid for the bouquet, I took one last deep breath before heading to my car. I was surprised to find that I hardly smelled anything! It was not new information.
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.
I feel a surge of joy when I smell coffee beans grinding. But if I comment on the smell to the baristas, I’ve often found that they don’t know what I’m talking about. If I got a job at a coffee shop with the expectation of feeling joy all the time, I would be disappointed.
Each of the happy chemicals disappoints in its own way. This chapter explores dopamine disappointment, oxytocin disappointment, endorphin disappointment, and serotonin disappointment. Then we will examine the vicious cycle that results when we rush to relieve bad feelings by stimulating good feelings. You can build a virtuous cycle instead when you understand these impulses.
Dopamine Disappointment
Dopamine is triggered by new rewards. That’s why the first lick of an ice cream cone is heaven. Ten licks later, your attention wanders. You start thinking about the next thing on your agenda, and the next. You still love the ice cream, but you don’t feel it as much because your brain doesn’t see it as new information. Your brain is already looking for the next great way to meet your needs. Old rewards, even creamy, delicious ones, don’t command your brain’s attention. Scientists call this habituation.
The Joy in the New
How can a person be happy with a brain that habituates to good things? Philosophers have long contemplated this dilemma, and now scientists and even gastronomists are getting into the act. The top-rated restaurant in America is based on the science of pleasure. The French Laundry serves only small plates because, according to founder and head chef Thomas Keller, a dish only pleases the palate for the first three or four bites. After that, you are just filling up instead of experiencing ecstasy. So the famous California wine-country establishment triggers joy over and over by sending a lot of tiny new dishes to your table.
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.
Dopamine’s Role in Survival
Dopamine disappointment is easier to accept when you understand its survival value. Imagine your ancestor finding a river full of fish. He’s very excited as he runs back to tell his clan about it. Dopamine creates the energy to run back, and the memory to find the spot again. Then its job is over. Your ancestor might feel happiness i
n other ways:
His serotonin might surge when he thinks of the respect he will get for his find.
His oxytocin might activate when he thinks of the shared pleasure of feasting.
But his dopamine will dip unless he finds an even bigger run of fish. He will look hard for more fish because he knows how good it feels.
Facing a Dopamine Dip
When your dopamine dips, you suddenly notice your cortisol so you’re more aware of threats. You want the bad feeling to stop so you look for a way to “do something.” You know from experience that an immediate happy-chemical stimulator will work, if only for a moment. This conundrum is easy to imagine from the perspective of a teenager at a gambling casino. He wins $50, and a huge dopamine surge wires his brain to expect a good feeling from gambling. The next time he feels bad, the idea of gambling pops into his head. But when he goes, the great feeling doesn’t happen. He keeps expecting it, though, so he keeps gambling. Soon he’s feeling bad about all the money he lost. The bad feeling drives him to look for a way to feel better, which activates the thought of more gambling. You can have a gambling habit at any age, but a young brain more easily builds neural highways big enough to outlast multiple disappointments.
Healthy behaviors lead to a dopamine dip as well. Imagine a child winning a spelling bee. She suddenly feels more respect (serotonin) and acceptance (oxytocin) than ever. She wants that good feeling again, so she spends a lot of time studying spelling words. Her dopamine is stimulated each time she mentally seeks and finds the spelling of a word, because she linked that to a big reward. The steady stream of dopamine distracts her from any bad feelings she may have. In a world full of threats you can’t control, it’s nice to know you can feel good whenever you want just by picking up a dictionary. But the day will come when the habit disappoints. If the girl wins a few more spelling competitions, the thrill will eventually droop. To get more of it, she will set her sights on a new reward. Whether it’s the school talent show or getting into medical school, each step will trigger dopamine once she links it to meeting her needs.
Habits of a Happy Brain Page 7