Habits of a Happy Brain

by Loretta Graziano Breuning

  To establish a new trail through your jungle of neurons, you must repeat a new behavior every day. Otherwise, the undergrowth will return and your next pass will be just as hard as the first. Spark your new trail each day whether or not you feel like it, and you will eventually pass it with ease. You may not get the highs of your old happy habit, but you will learn to feel good without artificial highs and their inevitable side effects. You will be so pleased with your new habit that you will want to build another, and another.

  It bears repeating that you will not be happy on Day One. Maintain realistic expectations. Nibbling on carrot sticks will not feel as good as licking an ice cream cone on Day One, and it may not seem that this could change with repetition. Doing homework will not feel as good as watching a movie on Day One, and it’s hard to imagine that changing either. Stick to your plan and you will connect carrot sticks or studying to your happy chemicals. You can feel good when you do what’s good for you.

  Linking the Past and the Future

  I stumbled on the power of repetition when I noticed that certain music made me happy. I don’t mean music I actually like. I don’t mean memories-of-the-beach music. I mean music that was forced on me by accidents of experience. When I was young, my ears were often filled with sounds chosen by my brother, my father, my boss at work, and the cafeteria I ate in. Today, when one of these songs reaches my ears, I feel strangely happy, even though I didn’t like it at the time. This mystified me until I read a book called Flow, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. It explained that music gives pleasure because your mind keeps predicting what comes next. Each correct prediction triggers dopamine. You can’t make good predictions for unfamiliar music, so you don’t get the dopamine. But when music is too familiar, something strange happens. You don’t get the dopamine either because your brain predicts it effortlessly. To make you happy, music must be at the sweet spot of novelty and familiarity.

  The music that makes you happy today will eventually fail to make you happy, because it will become too familiar. At the same time, music that doesn’t make you happy today can make you happy in the future. If you want to stay happy, it seems you have to expose yourself to unfamiliar music now, so it will be in the sweet spot by the time you’ve worn out your old pleasures. This was a revelation to me. It explains why happiness is elusive despite our best efforts. And it shows how the counterintuitive choice to repeat things we don’t already like can bring great rewards. We talk about “good music” and “bad music” as if the quality is inherent in the music. We overlook the power of the circuits we bring to that music. Your pleasures are shaped by circuits you built without knowing it. It’s natural to presume the things you like are somehow special and the things you don’t like are somehow lacking. But you can learn to shape your circuits in ways that expand good feelings.

  Overcome Initial Unpleasantness

  The first step is a willingness to do things that don’t feel good at first. This is difficult because your brain usually trusts its own reactions. You don’t usually listen to music you dislike on the assumption that you’ll grow to like it. You don’t befriend a person you dislike or join an activity you’re bad at on the assumption that something will change. It’s natural to trust your current likes and dislikes. But now you know that they’re based on accidents of experience rather than complete information. Your accidental circuits cause the threatened feeling you get when you depart from the road you know. If you avoid the threatened feeling by sticking to the old road, you miss out on a universe of potential happiness. You can learn to enjoy the challenge of embarking on a new road.

  Make a Commitment to One Pathway at First

  With so many choices and so many neurons, you can build a lot of new pathways to your happy chemicals. But you only have a limited amount of time and energy. If you spread it everywhere, a new road may not get built. So choose one remodeling project to start with. Commit to repeating it for forty-five days whether or not you feel like it. If you miss a day, start over with Day One.

  Commitments to yourself can be difficult to enforce. For example, I made the commitment to bring reusable bags with me when I buy food, but I kept forgetting them. So I added the commitment to go back to my car and get them if I forgot. The next time I found myself at the supermarket without the bags, I thought “I’m too busy to go back to the car.” Then I realized that I will always be busy, and I am a powerless person if I can’t even honor a commitment to myself. So I went back to the car to get the bags, and I never forgot them again because I didn’t want to waste time going back to my car.

  You will not want to waste time starting over with Day One. You will want to honor your commitments to yourself and thus enjoy a new happy habit. The following chapters lead you through a series of commitments to your first remodeling project. After that, you will love your new power over your brain, and find many ways to use it.

  7 | YOUR ACTION PLAN

  Formulate a Plan That Works for You

  We’ve all heard that a long journey begins with the first step, but we all know it’s more complicated. Before the first step, you have to choose the right course so you step in the right direction. After the first step, you know how deep the mud is but you have to find the will to take the next step anyway. To complete forty-five steps, you need an action plan you believe in. You need to choose the first new happy habit you want to build, the date you will start, and the tools that will ease your steps. This chapter and those following will help you commit to those choices.

  EXERCISE: TIMELINE FOR YOUR COMMITMENT TO SELF

  Finish this chapter on choosing a new habit by _______

  Finish next chapter on choosing happiness over unhappiness by _______

  Finish final chapter on tools by _______

  How to Overcome the Inevitable Internal Conflicts You Will Face

  When you embark on a plan to stimulate one happy chemical, you can see how it might undermine another happy chemical. If you seek more serotonin, for example, you may see a threat to your oxytocin. And if you seek more oxytocin, it may feel like a setback for your serotonin. When you seek dopamine in one way, you have less energy to seek it another way. And your cortisol may be triggered by any and every kind of seeking. You may wish for a perfect plan before you take your first step, but perfect never comes. You will have to make tradeoffs on your way to a new happy habit.

  Fortunately, our brain evolved to make tradeoffs:

  A dog can only dig for a bone by passing up the chance to dig in another spot.

  An elephant has to choose in every moment between following her nose and following her herd.

  A lion chooses between the fear of hunting alone and the fear of hunting with mates who hog the food.

  Like those animals, you will always be choosing among imperfect options. If you focus on drawbacks and imperfections, it’s hard to commit. Here’s a close look at the inevitable tradeoffs of life. Think them through now and you will approach your new habit with confidence.

  Short Run vs. Long Run

  We constantly weigh immediate rewards against rewards we expect in the future. If you decide to smoke, you are trading off future rewards for a present reward. If you decide to party, you are choosing one set of rewards, and if you decide not to party, you get a different set. We cannot predict these rewards perfectly, but better predictions bring better rewards.

  To make good predictions, you have to choose good information. But we tend to rely on the information-filtering habits built into our circuits by accident. If you change your information-filtering habits, you will suddenly make new tradeoffs between short- and long-term rewards. For example, if you think you are a powerless victim of powerful forces, you will overlook the power of your own choices. Once you believe that your actions have consequences, you will find the information you need about the consequences. Then you will make more rewarding tradeoffs between the long and short run.

  Known vs. Unknown

  We are always trading off the safety of the
known against the promise of the unknown. Sometimes we stick with the known until we find an alternative that feels like a sure thing, and sometimes we risk an alternative before it’s fully baked. Once you choose, you see the drawbacks of your choice up close, but you never know how the other option would have turned out. So it’s easy to end up frustrated about your own choices.

  Instead, you can learn to honor your decision-making ability. Uncertainty is inevitable, so there’s no use judging yourself against idealized optimums. I am not saying you should defend your decisions to the point of refusing to learn from them. But if you only attack your decisions, you will never make a choice unless there’s absolute certainty. Celebrate your ability to live with uncertainty and you will broaden your options.

  Individual vs. Group

  The protection of a group feels good, but striking out on your own feels good too. It would be nice to have both, but that’s not a realistic expectation. Painful choices are everywhere and we often make them worse by focusing on what we’re missing. You miss your independence when you’re in a group, and you miss the safety of the group when you follow your individual impulses. Unhappy chemicals surge when you focus on the down side of each option. You could focus on the benefits you are currently enjoying instead—enjoy the group when it’s group time and enjoy your individuality when you’re alone.

  Appreciating what you have is difficult to do because the mind naturally seeks what it doesn’t have. It’s natural to feel the squeeze on your personal interests while you have group support. And when you go your own way, it’s natural to worry about the loss of social ties. We want to have it all, but this tradeoff is part of being human. Instead of expecting it to go away, pride yourself on your ability to manage it.

  Free Will vs. Dependency

  If you were an animal in a zoo, you might envy wild animals and try to break free. But if you were a wild animal, you might break into the zoo to enjoy food that comes effortlessly. At the zoo where I volunteer, animals often break in, and rarely break out. Meeting your own needs often feels like a burden, but when you are dependent on others to meet your needs for you, you miss out on happy chemicals, because they are stimulated by the act of meeting your own needs.

  A wild animal lives with great stress as it struggles to fill its belly, compete for mates, and protect its offspring from predators. Though we like to imagine a pristine state of nature, meeting your needs is stressful. Yet this is the job our brain evolved for, and escaping the burden does not make it happy. You may long to be taken care of, but if you actually escaped the burden of meeting your own needs, you would find yourself surprisingly unhappy. You might end up filling your life with stress about the inadequacy of what’s given to you. You might feel trapped in rage at your caretakers while fearing to leave them and return to a life of meeting your own needs.

  Choice is so frustrating that a person sometimes opts to live in a “zoo,” meaning, they want to be protected and led. When they feel bad, they don’t know why, so they blame the zookeeper for failing to meet their needs adequately. They resent anyone they believe to have power over them, and end up with perpetual hostility toward their providers and leaders. They enjoy a sense of personal power by putting down those they perceive as more powerful. But this habit never really makes up for the personal power you lose when you make others responsible for meeting your needs. Find the joy of meeting your own needs instead. You can celebrate your freedom to choose your steps instead of experiencing them as a burden.

  EXERCISE: WHAT ARE YOUR TRADEOFFS?

  There is no perfect path to happiness. You will always have to navigate tradeoffs as you build new pathways. Make a list of the choices you face in each of the following categories as you attempt to build your first new circuit:

  Short run vs. long run

  Known vs. unknown

  Individual vs. group

  Free will vs. dependency

  The Burden of Choice

  There is no set path to happy chemicals. There is only a constant string of decisions to risk something in the expectation of gaining something else.

  Talking about “good decisions” and “bad decisions” creates the impression that there is an optimal path. If you believe in a right path, you compare your life to an idealized image that does not exist. That can leave you focused on disappointments and believing you’re on the wrong path, even in the midst of a good life. Instead, you can accept the fact that you will always have ups and downs because your brain is designed to continually seek rewards and avoid pain.

  If you have two good choices, you can get so caught up in regretting the choice you gave up that you skim over the happiness you have and end up with a lot of cortisol. Choice is so challenging that people are sometimes tempted to shift the burden of choice onto others. This strategy doesn’t relieve the cortisol of endlessly lamenting what you don’t have, but it relieves your frustration with yourself by blaming it on others.

  There is an alternative. You can think of life as a series of tradeoffs rather than an optimization function with one correct solution. Tough calls are inevitable, but you are the best judge of the fine-tuned tradeoffs of your own life.

  Your brain will never stop trying to promote your survival. It takes what you have for granted and looks for ways to get more—more rewards (dopamine), more physical security (endorphin), more social support (oxytocin), more respect (serotonin). Seeking more is risky. Your brain is constantly deciding whether it’s worth giving up some of this to get more of that. Once you decide, you may not get the outcome you expected. The frustration may tempt you to leave the hard calls to someone else, but you will end up with more happy chemicals if you carry your own burden of choice.

  EXERCISE: WHICH NEW HABIT DO I CHOOSE?

  I will retrain my brain to build a new happy habit. The new behavior or thought habit I will build is __________________.

  I will repeat it every day for forty-five days whether or not I feel like it, and start over with Day One if I miss a day. As I take the new steps, I may be stepping away from something else, but I can manage the tradeoffs on the trail to a new reward.

  8 | OVERCOMING OBSTACLES TO HAPPINESS

  Why Stick with Unhappiness?

  If you could be happy in forty-five days with just a few minutes of effort per day, why wouldn’t you? This chapter explains what is going on in your brain when you experience some common rationales for sticking with unhappy habits. You will probably recognize these reasons and the vicious cycles they lead to. Once you notice your own way of choosing unhappiness, you can make alternate choices that will lead you to happiness.

  Reason #1: “I Can’t Lower My Standards”

  “Why should I be happy with small things,” you may ask. “I have high aspirations.” It’s natural to assume big things will make you happy since we’ve all felt the big spurt of a big achievement. But big achievers are not necessarily happy. This is so hard to believe that tabloid news does a public service by constantly reminding us. Shunning big achievements does not guarantee happiness either, alas. Nothing guarantees it. You can help it along, however, by focusing on ways to meet your needs.

  In today’s culture, people claim their high standards are for the sake of others. They insist they cannot be happy until they “save the world.” People even assert that it’s unethical to be happy as long as one person is suffering, or even one animal. But the world has always been full of suffering. Is it unethical for anyone in human history to have ever been happy? No. This is just the verbal brain’s effort to explain the mammal brain’s quirky quest for happy chemicals. If you refuse to accept your inner mammal’s urge for more, you construct lofty-sounding explanations for your frustrations. But blaming your unhappiness on higher ethics does not bring you neurochemical peace.

  You may have the illusion that happiness is just handed to a lucky few, while others are wrongly deprived of it. You may think you must earn happiness by suffering. This often works for a moment, as your sense of superi
ority triggers serotonin and the perceived trust triggers oxytocin. This may tempt you to suffer more to enjoy another squirt of happy chemicals. Suffering can give you a sense of importance, and shared suffering helps build social bonds. But the good feelings soon pass, and it seems like you must suffer to stimulate more. The vicious cycle is obvious. You can’t let go of suffering because you fear losing what happiness you have. You don’t realize that suffering is just a circuit your mammal brain built because it was rewarded in your past. You might even tell yourself that happiness would make you one of the bad guys who steals it from others.

  FOCUS ON YOURSELF

  You cannot make yourself responsible for other people’s suffering, and you cannot make other people responsible for your suffering. Other people get to manage their happy chemicals with the circuits they’ve got, and you get to manage your happy chemicals with the circuits you’ve got.

  You get frustrated while waiting for the world to meet your high standards, and you might relieve it by engaging in a bad habit. You justify the bad habit by pointing to the flaws of the world. For example, you may catch yourself thinking: “With the state of the world as it is, why shouldn’t I drink/take drugs/eat junk food/have affairs/borrow and spend/rage at people?” As the bad habit becomes the focus of your life, you keep finding more ways to suffer to keep justifying your indulgence in the habit. This vicious cycle is a common by-product of the “high standards” mentality.