Habits of a Happy Brain

by Loretta Graziano Breuning

  KNOWING YOUR GROUP

  Most species have distinctive markings that instantly separate members from nonmembers. An antelope with one black stripe on its butt can instantly distinguish itself from antelopes with two black stripes or one black and one white stripe. This is how it avoids following the wrong crowd into an ecological niche it’s not adapted to. Human groups are also known for their distinctive markings, including popular accessories, physical traits, and learned mannerisms.

  In-group conflict is inevitable because each group member has a mammal brain that evolved to promote its own genes. Animals stick with groups that are full of internal conflict because they are so threatened by external conflict. The more threatened you feel by life outside the group, the more pain you tolerate from within it. Each time you distance yourself from the group, your oxytocin falls and reminds you of the threat of isolation.

  We are meant to experience oxytocin dips, despite the discomfort. Trust is nice, but too much trust can threaten survival:

  Imagine a child who trusts his parents to tie his shoes and cut his meat for too long.

  Imagine a student who trusts others to do her homework for her.

  Imagine a spouse who trusts his partner to deal with the world for him.

  The nice feeling of trust may distract you from building skills you need to promote your own survival. You could lean on others to avoid the bad feeling of your own limitations, but you might end up with more frustration. That would trigger an urge to “do something,” which you might respond to by leaning again on others instead of building skills.

  EXERCISE: WHEN DOES YOUR OXYTOCIN DROOP?

  Oxytocin droops when you get too far from the herd. Whether they’ve left you behind or you’ve wandered astray, the droop alerts you to the fact that you lack social support. Suddenly, it feels like you’re facing survival threats alone. It would be nice to enjoy the good feeling of social support all the time, but if you stayed with the herd every minute, you’d miss out on other things. We are designed to find the best way to meet our needs instead of just following other people’s quest to meet their needs. Losing support is distressing, but we are not meant to enjoy a constant stream of oxytocin. We are meant to balance the urge for social support against our other long-term needs. You can learn to notice your own skill at doing that. Notice examples of:

  A time when you felt endangered by a lack of social support

  A time when you lost trust in your social support

  A time when you strayed from social support to seek other rewards

  Serotonin Disappointment

  When people respect you, serotonin surges and it wires you to expect more good feelings in similar ways. But after a while, the same old respect doesn’t thrill you. You search for a way to get more, using past experience as your guide. Sometimes you fail to get the respect you seek, despite your best efforts.

  When other people are trapped in a quest for approval, it’s easy to see—especially when it’s people you don’t like. You see how their quest for status soon leads to an even bigger quest. It’s hard to notice your own brain caught in this natural quest. Animals help us understand the brain’s urge for more social status as soon as the last serotonin boost droops. When a monkey asserts herself for a banana, the food is soon digested and she must assert herself again to make enough milk for her children to survive.

  The Quest for Social Importance

  When you go to a shop or a restaurant, the staff treats you with a deference that you don’t get in the rest of life. Most of the time, the people around you are as convinced of their cause as you are of yours. If you count on getting deference from others to feel good, you may end up disappointed.

  When you see people angling for the “best” table, you may think they are foolish. After all, you know that seating arrangements are not a matter of survival. But when you fail to get a good seat, it seems different. Your mammal brain is always monitoring your social position and reacting. It did not evolve to say, “I’m important enough now. I can just relax.” It evolved to keep advancing your prospects. That’s why:

  A person who buys the latest status object feels frustrated when others catch up.

  A person who gets her dream job soon focuses on the next dream job.

  A person who wants to save the world sees a world that’s ever more desperate for his saving. Making the world look bad helps him feel good about his contribution.

  A person who controls others wants them to comply faster to more arbitrary commands.

  The quest for respect can have positive consequences as well as negative ones, and much human achievement has been fueled by it. But however you attain your badge of status, the good feeling soon passes and you long for a bigger badge of status. When your serotonin dips, it may feel like something is wrong with the world. When you get the badge of status you seek, the world looks all right . . . for a little while.

  You may think you’ll be happy forever once your poetry is published in the New York Times, but your mind would soon seek the next bit of recognition if it did. The brain learns to feel important in a particular way, and then it looks for more of that feeling. When Marlon Brando wails “I coulda been a contender” in On the Waterfront, you believe he’d be happy if he’d won a boxing title. But in all probability, he would have contended for more once he got it. And when you watch Downton Abbey or Game of Thrones, you may consciously hate the powerful, but your mirror neurons enjoy that sense of power, so you go back for more.

  We often hear about Hollywood stars who go into a tailspin when their popularity wanes. I used to be confused by this. “Isn’t one megahit enough to make a person happy?” I wondered. Now I understand that the good feeling of a megahit trains the brain to seek that particular way of feeling good. If you end up feeling bad instead, you don’t see how you created the disappointment. You can blame the ruthlessness of the industry, the fickleness of the public, and the incompetence of management, without recognizing your brain’s habit of seeking serotonin in ways that worked before.

  This theme pervades private life as well as the movies. Each person seeks respect from those around them in ways they expect to work. Some people impose their wishes on others just for the pleasure of it. And when the pleasure ebbs, they impose again. If they fail to get that deference from others and face the world without the serotonin boost, they crash and burn.

  Rescuing others is a popular way to seek respect. Making yourself a hero is a relatively reliable way to feel important, and it helps you avoid conflicts that would erode respect. But the good feeling soon passes and you have to rescue again. Rescuers can be so eager to feel heroic that they reward bad behavior in others. The result is more bad behavior, which a hero might interpret as a greater need for their rescue efforts. The codependent partner of an addict is the most familiar example. The spouse or parent ends up enabling the addiction, but she keeps doing it because rescuing others is the way her brain has learned to feel important.

  Winning the love of a higher-status person is another widespread strategy for stimulating serotonin. We don’t mix love and status consciously, but when a high-status person of the right gender notices you, your brain lights up. Even bonobos, the apes known for sexual dynamism, compete vigorously for high-status partners. Once that trophy partner is yours, however, your serotonin stops surging. It would surge again if you found an even higher-status love object. Probably you restrain the urge to do that, but it’s easy to see others yielding to it. A superstar spouse makes a person feel good, and that wires the brain to expect good feelings by acquiring a superstar spouse again. Some people repeat the cycle despite the side effects.

  Seeking Status Is Not a New Phenomenon

  Serotonin disappointment is often blamed on “our society,” but status frustrations are evident in every culture and time. In many cultures, cruelty to servants is accepted, and mothers-in-law dominate daughters-in-law with raw despotism. Tribal societies often have rigid dominance hierarchies, despite
their egalitarian image. What looks like cooperation is often submission to learned expectations to avoid punishment. You may think you’d enjoy a serotonin high all the time if you lived in another time or place, but if you got there you’d find that the people there are still mammals, and you are too.

  Social dominance grabs your attention because it promotes your genes in the state of nature. As soon as a mammal’s immediate needs are met, its thoughts turn to social advancement. This includes everything from promoting the welfare of children to attracting a more powerful mate. Mammals that kept striving instead of being satisfied were more likely to survive and pass on their DNA. This is why we’re so unsettled by flabby skin or a child’s setbacks. Any small obstacle to getting respect feels like an obstacle to survival.

  Everyone has a cousin who is doing better than they are. Your serotonin droops whenever you’re reminded of that cousin, though you have plenty of good in your life. Perhaps you grew up hearing your parents make social comparisons and lament their own position. You may have wired yourself to take the one-down position and feel threatened instead of enjoying all the good that you have.

  Serotonin Disappointment Can Be Healthy

  Each brain seeks serotonin with pathways built during youth. There are no pathways that deliver endless serotonin, however. If you grew up around people who dominated you, your circuits prepared you for one kind of frustration. But if you grew up with a lot of admirers, you’re wired for another kind of frustration. No matter what kind of expectations you’re wired for, your quest for respect is disappointed sometimes. Managing that disappointment promotes your survival more than fleeing from it. When children fail to make the team or get a prom date, we teach them to try again. Seeking recognition is part of a healthy human life, despite the potential for disappointment.

  You may protect yourself from serotonin disappointment by saying you don’t care about status, but your neurochemicals respond to your status ups and downs whether or not you intend to. Your responses are shaped by time and place because you learn what gets respect in your world. If you lived in another time or place, you might have fought duels to defend your honor or stayed locked up at home to defend your honor. Today, you might pride yourself on your higher consciousness. You feel entitled to the one-up position because of your higher consciousness. When you see persons of lower consciousness getting respect, you may find yourself triggered in a way you think quite beneath you. And when you do get the respect you crave, it doesn’t make you happy forever, despite your higher consciousness. Your brain is soon hatching plans to get more.

  EXERCISE: WHEN DOES YOUR SEROTONIN DROOP?

  If you were a big fish in a small pond, you would enjoy the one-up position all the time. But as soon as you heard of a bigger world with bigger fish, your serotonin would droop. A “do something” feeling would nag you until you found a way to advance your position. That serotonin droop keeps you seeking. It drove your ancestors to find a better way to skin a mammoth and let others know about it. You may be convinced you’ll be happy forever when your big break comes, but each break you’ve had so far has left you longing for another break. It’s easy to see this in others, but it helps to see it in yourself. Noticing your serotonin droop helps you avoid a sense of crisis when the one-up feeling eludes your grasp. Think of a time when:

  You saw someone gain an advantage but they soon lost interest

  You gained an advantage but you soon lost interest

  You longed for a new advantage, and paid a high price for it

  Happy Habits Help You Deal with Disappointment

  If you saved your life by running up a tree when chased by a lion, your brain would learn to feel good about trees. Anything that transforms a bad feeling to a good feeling is a lifesaver from your mammal brain’s perspective, and it builds a big pathway. If you lived in a world full of lions, you would always be scanning for trees. Since you don’t, you instead scan for anything that once made you feel good in a moment when you felt bad. These are your “happy habits.” They are not conscious choices, but pathways that create the expectation of feeling good. The good feelings don’t last, of course, so we end up resorting to our happy habits a lot.

  Distraction is often the core of a happy habit. Distraction can make you feel good just by interrupting the electricity in a bad loop. Distraction doesn’t work if you smell a lion and distract yourself with perfume. But most of the time you are not facing a lion—you are facing the sting of disappointment. Anything that diverts your electricity feels like a lifesaver. If your stamp collection once distracted you from a bad feeling, your brain built a connection that expects relief from your stamp collection.

  Why It’s Difficult to Break Old Habits

  I learned about the quirkiness of habits from a hypnotist who helps people quit smoking. He told me to imagine a fourteen-year-old boy at a party. The boy sees a girl he wants to talk to, but he’s afraid. He tries a cigarette to steady his nerves, and it works! The girl returns his affection, and his happy chemicals flow. The reward is huge because it’s so relevant to “reproductive success.” The neurochemical spurt creates a huge link to his mammal brain that says: Cigarettes promote survival. Of course, the boy doesn’t think this in words, but the next time he needs confidence in the face of a “survival challenge,” his brain lights up the idea of smoking. With each cigarette, the pathway builds.

  Years later, when he tries to quit smoking, the insecurity of the fourteen-year-old boy at a party surges up because it has nowhere to go without the cigarette pathway. His inner mammal feels like he’s threatening his own survival when he resists the urge for a smoke. He must build a new happy habit in order to live without the old one.

  Distract Yourself

  Happy habits give your threatened feelings a place to go. If you felt disappointed by a bad grade in math long ago, whatever made you feel better built a pathway in your brain. If you went to a party and enjoyed it, your brain “learned” that a party makes you happy when you’re feeling unhappy. Consciously, you know the party doesn’t solve your math problems, but when the bad feeling returns, your party circuit is there. Each party makes it bigger.

  Distraction is not a good survival strategy when action is needed. But when you feel miffed by a coworker at the next desk, you may be better off not acting. When your brain screams “do something,” distraction gives you something to do. It protects you from fueling threatened feelings and rewards you with the sense that you’re saving your life.

  Side Effects of Habits

  Every habit has side effects, and the more you indulge, the more side effects you get. At first, the consequences may be small, so it’s easy to tell yourself “it’s just one little cookie.” “It’s just one little drink.” “It’s just a little flirtation.” “It’s just a little splurge.” “It’s just a little anger.” “It’s just a little down time.” “It’s just a little risk.” “It’s just a little party.” “It’s just a little project.” “It’s just a little confidence-booster.” “It’s just a little lie.” “It’s just a little competition.”

  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.

  It would be nice to have a habit with no side effects, but happy chemicals evolved because of their consequences. When the consequences pile up enough to trigger your cortisol, you end up feeling threatened by the very behavior you use to relieve a threat. Now you’re in a vicious cycle. You can probably think of ten vicious cycles in ten seconds: junk food, alcohol, love affairs, drugs, losing your temper, gaming, getting recognition, shopping, watching a screen, telling others what to do, withdrawing, career advancement, pleasing people, climbing mountains, rescuing people, smoking, dieting. (That’s more than ten. I couldn’t stop.
) You know your happy habit can lead to pain, but when you try to feel better, you rely on the pathways you have. You feel like your survival is threatened when you resist.

  How to Build a Virtuous Circle

  The first step to happier habits is to do nothing when your cortisol starts giving you a threatened feeling. Doing nothing goes against your body’s deepest impulse, but it empowers you to make changes in your life. Once you do nothing, you have time to generate an alternative. At first, no alternative looks as good as the habit does, but positive expectations build if you give a new pathway a chance to grow. Each time you divert your electricity in a new direction, you strengthen your new circuit. It all starts when you accept a bad feeling for a moment instead of rushing to make it go away.

  It would be nice to have an alternative that feels good instantly. But instant good feelings are only triggered by behaviors that appeal to a mammal, like eating a hot fudge sundae, getting kissed by your teen idol, and accepting a standing ovation. Instant highs are not possible at every moment, so it’s good to know that you can build a pathway to your happy chemicals with repetition even when something doesn’t feel good instantly. When you know how your brain works, you can build more happy habits with fewer side effects. You can start a virtuous circle without being virtuous. The following chapters show how.