Habits of a Happy Brain

by Loretta Graziano Breuning

  But who wants to repeat something over and over if it doesn’t feel good? Usually, people don’t, especially when they’re already feeling bad. This is why we rely on the circuits built by accidents of experience. Your accidents will shape you unless you start repeating things by choice.

  Alas, repetition can be harder than you expect. It feels boring, in common parlance, to do things that don’t feel connected to your immediate needs. Without emotion to flag a behavior as “good for you,” your brain tends to dismiss it as unimportant. Without happy chemicals to spark the action, a new pathway is hard to fire. But you can do it anyway.

  An Example: Sticking with It

  Here’s a simple example. Fred wants to control his alcohol use. He decides to substitute a new pleasure with fewer side effects. He looks around for something that can grow on him, and remembers how he enjoyed sketching when he was young. He resolves to take out his sketchpad every time he feels like drinking. The goal is not to be good at sketching but to be good at shifting his attention elsewhere when he thinks of drinking. Of course, Fred doesn’t feel like sketching when he longs for a drink. In fact, he feels bad as he sketches and thinks about what he’s missing. But he resolves to live with the bad feelings for a while. He plans to do this for two months because he has a big event on the calendar then.

  At first, he hates his sketches and he hates the feeling of denying himself a drink. But he sticks to his plan whether or not it feels good immediately. After a while, his sketching time starts to feel like a gift rather than a burden. Fred learns that the unhappy feelings soon pass. Best of all, he discovers the joy of being alert and responsible. Before the two months are over, he stops looking at the calendar. His sketching circuit has grown big enough to compete with his alcohol circuit. Now he knows how to feel good without a drink. He knows it physically as well as cognitively. Sketching was simply a way to do something once his “do something” feeling started flowing. Fred is so pleased with his remodel that he can’t wait to build another new circuit.

  An Example: Finding What Works for You

  You can train your brain to feel good in new ways. Start by designing the new circuit you’d like to have. It may take a little trial and error to find the new habit that works for you with minimum side effects. Consider Louise, who wants a new job but can’t get herself to push through a sustained job search. She feels bad about her career prospects and escapes those bad feelings with a variety of habits. She decides to break the vicious cycle by learning to feel good about the act of job-hunting. She sets the goal of applying to two jobs a day and developing her career skills for two hours a day.

  On Day One, she meets her goal, but feels curiously awful. She eats an ice cream to escape the awful feeling, but finds herself craving another ice cream. The next day, she looks for a different way to feel good. She calls a friend after completing her task, but finds that talking about her career doesn’t really make her feel better. On Day Three, it’s dark by the time her career advancement work is over, and she decides to celebrate with a night on the town. The next morning, it’s hard to get started. She thinks of all the disappointment she’s endured and all the things she’d rather be doing. She decides to remove herself from temptation by going to a coffee shop while she works on her applications. By the time she finishes the coffee, she’s in the middle of her second application. It seems to just flow. The next day, she heads for a coffee and brims with career-speak. The following day, she finds herself actually looking forward to her coffee-plus-accomplishment routine, and by the next week she has figured out how to make luscious coffee drinks at home. When six weeks have gone by, she’s under consideration for a number of jobs, has a wealth of interview experience, and new confidence in her skills. Most important, she has experienced good feelings, which wired her to expect more good feelings when she thinks about doing more.

  The point is not that coffee solves problems. The point is that inertia is hard to overcome. A habit that will feel good later is hard to start now. Louise and Fred found a way to trigger positive expectations without harmful side effects. With trial and error, you can find a habit that works for you.

  Every brain is different. Some people would have a whole pot of coffee and never push the submit button on those job applications. Some people would love sketching but spill wine all over their sketchpad. You can experiment with alternatives before you commit for forty-five days. But if you keep starting over, your new habit will never build. After a few test runs, you need to keep repeating your new habit whether or not it feels good.

  6 | NEW HABITS FOR EACH HAPPY CHEMICAL

  Specific Suggestions to Get You Started

  We are lucky to live in a time when our brain is increasingly well understood. You can learn to turn on your happy chemicals in new ways. No one can do this for you and you cannot do it for someone else. This chapter outlines specific suggestions for new roads to dopamine happiness, endorphin happiness, oxytocin happiness, and serotonin happiness. The abundance of choices will help you find a path you can believe in. Then you can wire it into your brain by repeating it for forty-five days without fail. Once you’ve built a new habit, you will be so pleased with your power over your brain that you will want to build another.

  New Dopamine Habits

  Celebrate Small Victories

  You have some success every day, so commit to finding it and say, “I did it!” You will not conduct a symphony at Carnegie Hall every day. You will not lead starving hordes into the Promised Land every day. Adjust your expectations so you can be pleased with something you actually do. This doesn’t mean you are lowering your expectations, or “full of yourself” or losing touch with reality. It means you are lingering on your gains the way you already linger on your losses.

  Celebrating small steps triggers more dopamine than saving it up for one big achievement. Big accomplishments don’t make you happy forever, so if you always tie happiness to a far-off goal, you may end up frustrated. Instead, learn to be happy with your progress. You will not be celebrating with champagne and caviar each day. You will be giving yourself permission to have a feeling of accomplishment. This feeling is better than external rewards. It’s free, it has no calories, and it doesn’t impair your driving. You have a small victory every day. Why not enjoy it?

  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.

  At first, it might feel silly to look for reasons to pat yourself on the back, and the reasons you come up with might make you uncomfortable. Still, commit to doing this whether or not it feels good. You can decide to be worthy of your own applause and enjoy the feeling, even if just for a split second. If it feels fake or forced, that’s normal, because the circuits that berate your accomplishments feel strong and true.

  Celebrating small accomplishments is a valuable skill, because big things come from many small steps. You won’t take those steps if you are just running on the fumes of the last big thing.

  Finally, your daily triumph will feel better if it doesn’t depend on one-upping someone. If you have to win in ways that make someone lose, you limit yourself and end up with side effects. You can celebrate what you are creating instead of just who you are defeating.

  Take Small Steps Toward a New Goal

  It doesn’t take much time or money to step toward a goal. Just commit ten minutes a day and you will feel momentum instead of feeling stuck. Ten minutes is not enough to move mountains, but it’s enough to approach the mountain and see it accurately. Instead of dreaming about your goal from afar, you can gather the information you need to plan realistically. Your goals might change as your information grows. You might even learn that your fantasy goal would not make you happy. Those ten-minute investments can free you from unnecessary regret and help you find a hill you can actually clim
b. Your ten-minute efforts can define manageable steps so you’re not just waiting for huge leaps that never come.

  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.

  If you think you can’t spare ten minutes a day, consider the time you already spend dreaming of what you’d rather be doing. You can use that time to research the necessary steps. You will get a dopamine feeling each day as those steps come into view. You will start to expect that dopamine feeling and look forward to it. You will learn to feel that it’s possible to transform a dream into reality with steady effort.

  When your ten minutes is over, go back to living in the present. Do not make a habit of focusing constantly on the future.

  Divide an Unpleasant Task Into Small Parts

  Everyone has a dreaded task they’d rather forget about. It might be the mess inside your closets or the mess inside an important relationship. Commit to spending ten minutes a day on your dreaded task. You don’t need to have the solution when you start, only the willingness to keep stepping.

  You may think it’s impossible to clean out closets or renegotiate relationships in ten-minute chunks. But if you wait for grand solutions, you will languish for quite a long time. Instead, go to that closet, pull out one chunk of mess, and sort it out for ten minutes. Go to that yucky relationship riddled with disappointment and plant goodwill for ten minutes. Don’t let a day go by without tackling another chunk. Keep it up for forty-five days and you will be comfortable tackling the annoyances that stand in the way of making your life better. Of course, you can’t control other people the way you can control the contents of your closet. But you will replace a bad feeling with a good feeling if you keep trying. And you will keep trying because your positive expectations trigger dopamine.

  Your dreaded task may miraculously resolve itself in less than forty-five days! If so, don’t stop. Find another painful mess so you keep going for forty-five more days. That’s what builds the habit of facing tough challenges in small increments instead of being intimidated by them. Remember to feel good about what you’ve done each day. Soon, you’ll have the habit of tackling obstacles and feeling rewarded by it.

  Keep Adjusting the Bar

  Good feelings flow when the level of challenge you face is “just right.” If a basketball hoop is too low, you get no pleasure from scoring points. If it’s too high, you have no reason to try. Effort is fun when you expect a reward for your effort but it’s not certain. You can adjust the hoops in your life and make things fun.

  For forty-five days, experiment with lowering the bar in areas where you have set yourself impossible goals and raising the bar in places where you’ve set it so low that you feel no reward. If you feel you have no choice between frozen dinners and gourmet banquets, define a moderate cooking goal and start your forty-five days now. If you feel you have no choice between sitting on the couch and walking the red carpet, try going out in a middle-of-the-road way, and then try another way.

  EXERCISE: WHAT ARE YOUR NEW DOPAMINE STRATEGIES?

  Make a list of remodeling projects that can work for you in each of the following categories:

  Celebrate small victories

  Take steps toward a new goal

  Divide an unpleasant task into small parts

  Keep adjusting the bar

  New Endorphin Habits

  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 outside, 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.

  Laughter is a release of fear. Imagine laughing with relief after a close call with a snake. Social risks are more common than predator risk in modern life, and we often fear expressing a socially unacceptable emotion. Social shunning is a real survival threat in the state of nature, so we are wired to take these things seriously. Comedians often express socially risky feelings. When they survive, the part of you that fears shunning laughs with relief. You can think of laughing as creating safety instead of thinking it’s frivolous.

  You can enjoy more relief if you put it at the top of your priority list for forty-five days. Don’t give up if it takes a bit of trial and error. I often think jokes are “not funny,” but I have found a local improv troop that always seems hilarious to me. So I make time for it, a lot.

  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 you’ve held in for years. If you feel like crying, don’t block it with the idea that it’s weak and foolish. The unpleasantness of the moment will pass and the nice loosening will remain.

  It bears repeating that a crying habit is not the goal. The daily goal is to notice the tension between your crying reflex and your don’t-be-a-crybaby reflex. For forty-five days, you can commit to accepting this tension instead of running from it. The feeling may be so familiar that it’s hard to notice. Watching sad movies may activate that circuit for you. Other people’s tragedies trigger your mirror neurons, and a stranger’s threatened feelings may be easier to accept at first than your own.

  Crying is our chief survival skill at birth, but over time we learn that crying can leave us worse off. We learn alternatives, but sometimes nothing works and you run out of alternatives. Cortisol keeps surging and you feel like a trapped animal. Your cortex can distract you away from this feeling, but your muscles may keep armoring you with trapped-animal tension. You can wear out your squelching muscles like any other overused body part. Crying can be physical therapy for a tensed-up diaphragm.

  Exercise Differently

  Varying your exercise routine is a good way to trigger endorphin. It takes strain to trigger endorphin, and if you keep straining the same place, you risk injury. If you work new places with new exercise, moderate exertion can stimulate endorphin.

  Your body has three layers of muscles. When you vary your exercise, you give the neglected, constricted layers more attention. Since they’re weak, they have to work harder, so you stimulate development where it’s needed instead of going overboard on the parts you overuse. Chasing an endorphin high is not worth the risk of wearing out a part and needing a parts replacement. Variety is a great alternative.

  If you’re a person who doesn’t exercise at all, everything you do will be something different. If you’re already athletic, you may hate the uncoordinated feeling you get when you try something new. You may see it as a setback, when it’s actually strengthening your weakest link. Free yourself from performance anxiety for forty-five days. You may like it so much that you want to try another variation for another forty-five days.

  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 b
ecause 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.

  Slow movement is an essential variation on this theme. Tai chi and Qi Gong are so slow that you may think they’re not real exercise. But super-slow movement is more of a workout than it seems. It forces you to use muscles evenly, activating the weaker muscles instead of letting the dominant ones take over. Commit to doing something that doesn’t look like “real exercise” for forty-five days, and you will feel the difference.

  Make Exercise Fun

  Consider switching to a fun exercise for forty-five days. An exercise that triggers your happy chemicals helps motivate you toward more vigorous exertion. There are endless ways to make exercise fun. I took a waltzing class and was amazed at how hard I worked. Many people make exercise a social activity, from team sports to chatty hikes. It’s fun to exercise with music or an enjoyable audio book. Novelty also makes things fun: My yoga teacher makes the class completely different every week. Biking or hiking to new destinations is stimulating. Finally, gardening has an extrinsic reward, which motivates many people to keep exerting. Adding fun to exercise can help you persist.