Habits of a Happy Brain

by Loretta Graziano Breuning

  If you take an idealized view of happiness, it will always be out of reach. But you are free to be happy with small things instead of waiting for the world to meet your idealized requirements.

  Well-intentioned people often choose suffering without realizing it. Teachers and parents often choose suffering for their students by encouraging unrealistic expectations. If you try to motivate a class with the idea of becoming president or winning the Olympics, most of the students in the class will end up frustrated. It’s more helpful to teach students that everyone, even presidents and Olympic medalists, experience neurochemical ups and downs that they must learn to manage. Students are better off learning skills that will meet their needs, like literacy, math, and self-management habits, than learning grandiose aspirations. Focusing on skills is not “lowering standards.”

  “High standards” sound nice, but it can be an excuse for living with bitterness and resentment while you’re waiting for some abstract ideal. High standards can actually lead to low standards if you exclude a realistic middle ground. Meeting your own survival needs is the standard your brain evolved for, so that is what makes you feel good.

  Reason #2: “I Shouldn’t Have to Do This”

  You may be thinking, “Other people get to be happy without repeating things for forty-five days. Why should I have to?”

  Maybe you think you’ve done more than enough already and it’s time for the rest of the world to do its part. Maybe you think you are owed something, so why should you “let the jerks off the hook” by making yourself happy. You will be happy when “the jerks” do what you think is “the right thing.”

  Many people think settling a score with those who have short-changed them is the path to happiness. Once you look at life this way, you will easily find evidence that you have been wronged and you will easily find company to share your view. Unfortunately, this strategy is likely to distract you from taking steps that would actually bring happiness.

  I’ve often heard my students say it’s unfair they have to work hard at coursework while someone else seems to “get it” effortlessly. I hear dieters say it’s unfair that others stay thin effortlessly. If you think happiness comes effortlessly to others, you might decide that it’s unfair for you to have to work at it. If you feel wronged by life, you may give yourself permission to have another cookie, another drink, another pill, or another sulk. After all you’ve been through, why deprive yourself anymore? This is a vicious cycle. You keep feeling wronged in order to enjoy more of your favorite consolation prize.

  It’s easy to believe that others are luckier than you in the happy-circuit department. We mammals naturally compare ourselves to others. But we never really know the inside story about other people’s lives. Even if you did, it wouldn’t make you happy. Taking inventory for others diverts you from doing what it takes to trigger your own happy chemicals.

  If you are always searching for wrongs, you don’t notice what’s right, even if you stumble on it. And yet, this mindset is curiously popular. You wire it in when you are young, pleasing teachers with essays on the awful state of the world, and mirroring parents who feel deprived themselves.

  Some people have no experience making themselves happy because they grew up in a world in which others took responsibility for their happiness. Some parents live to please their children and never please themselves. Their children learn to expect others to please them, and another generation learns to take unhappiness as a sign that others messed up instead of learning to please themselves.

  Blaming others for your unhappiness is a habit that’s hard to give up because of the immediate rewards:

  You feel important when you battle perceived injustice (serotonin).

  You feel connected with others who feel similarly deprived (oxytocin).

  You feel excitement when you seek and find evidence that your fair share of happiness was wrongfully denied (dopamine).

  You may even trigger endorphin by welcoming physical pain into your life as evidence of your deprivation.

  You keep building the circuit for seeking happiness by feeling wronged.

  A stopped clock is right twice a day, so if you look for evidence that your share of happiness was mistakenly distributed to the undeserving, you will certainly find it. But it will only make you happy for a moment, and then you will need to find more such evidence. You don’t do what it takes to create your own happiness as long as you believe it is doled out by “them.”

  If you decide to build new happy circuits, you might be the happiest person you know six weeks from now. But you won’t commit if you believe you shouldn’t have to. If you think others are getting it for free, you end up shortchanging yourself.

  Reason #3: “It’s Selfish to Focus on Your Own Happiness”

  Many people take a zero-sum view of happiness. Whether consciously or unconsciously, they think one person’s happiness takes away from others. When my mother was scrubbing the floor in an angry rage, she thought she would be happy if I were doing the scrubbing. So I got on my knees and scrubbed, preferring that to being indicted for “selfishness.” But it did not make my mother happy. This was a huge lesson. I used to feel obliged to join in her misery, like the captain who must go down with a sinking ship. But I learned that I was not the captain of her ship. I could only be the captain of my own.

  Looking back, I see that my mother wanted company. She didn’t know how to stop scrubbing, so she wanted company in her prison. She was not forced to scrub by “our society.” It’s a habit she built long ago, when it seemed to promote survival. I kept trying to make her happy, but nothing worked. If I focused on making myself happy instead, she would condemn me for selfishness, but I decided that was better than being miserable.

  When you stimulate your own happy chemicals, you are not depriving others of them. Each adult is free to make his own calls in pursuit of happiness—as long as he takes responsibility for their side effects and avoids making himself happy at the expense of children. You are not obligated to subordinate your happiness to other adults. And others are not obligated to subordinate their happiness to you. Of course, you will want to cooperate in pursuit of mutual goals, but you get to define when and how you cooperate, and live with the consequences. If someone insists you must subordinate your survival needs to theirs, you don’t have to agree. And if you expect others to subordinate their needs to yours, you need a new plan.

  You have surely heard that happiness comes from unselfishly devoting yourself to others. It sounds nice, but your brain is motivated by the expectation of rewards. If you devote yourself to others, you are expecting a reward from doing that, and if the reward doesn’t come, you feel bad. You can end up feeling bad a lot, and you won’t even know why if you don’t acknowledge your expectations of reward. You can end up adding bitterness to the world even as you intended to add good. So you could actually help the world by being real about your natural “selfish” urges. Many people refuse to do this, so the world is still full of bitter people raging at the world for its selfishness while believing in their own unselfishness.

  MODEL “FEELING GOOD” FOR OTHERS

  If you give yourself permission to feel good, it can actually help others. It can trigger their mirror neurons and spark their happiness. But you cannot make yourself feel good just for the sake of others. Your brain doesn’t work that way; it focuses on you. You must step toward your needs to stimulate your happy chemicals.

  The confusion is rooted in the fact that rescuing others indeed stimulates happy chemicals:

  Serotonin flows when your rescuing gets respect.

  Oxytocin flows when you join forces with others.

  Dopamine flows when you set goals and accomplish them.

  But these spurts are soon over and you need to rescue again to feel good. Many rescuers persist when they do more harm than good. Your efforts to save others may have harmful consequences that you ignore because you need the selfish rewards of being a rescuer. You can do more good for the wo
rld by finding new paths to happiness.

  Every brain builds a sense of its own well-being that’s separate from others. This is the job the brain evolved to do. Being alone with your neurochemistry can be uncomfortable, and a person might avoid this discomfort by enmeshing themselves in the neurochemistry of others. Sometimes your enmeshment gets rewarded, and that wires you to expect more good feeling from more enmeshment. Escaping into the experiences of others can therefore become a habit. You may think you will always be happy by taking charge of other people’s happiness or by expecting others to take charge of yours. But your brain is always keeping track of what’s good for you. If your happy chemicals are not flowing, only you can take the steps to trigger them.

  If you decide to be happy, you may feel conspicuous and out of step among those who decide differently. You may fear being called selfish, and you might even feign suffering to avoid it. The problem is real because social bonds are often built on shared suffering. Many people focus on the suffering of children, or animals, or the planet. Of course, it’s good to help children, animals, and the planet, but much of this shared suffering does not actually help. It’s just an effort to meet selfish needs. If you don’t join in the shared suffering, people may indeed sneer at you. But in the past, people tortured and executed you if you didn’t join the shared belief system; so when I get sneered at for not joining in an unhappy thought habit, I’m just grateful that sneering is such a small penalty.

  It’s reasonable to feel bad about the suffering of others and to help where you can. But your brain is designed to focus on your well-being. Acknowledging your needs does not mean you are judging or abandoning others. You are respecting others as individuals responsible for their own needs. You are securing your own oxygen mask first, as they tell you on an airplane. If you put your happiness in other people’s hands, a vicious cycle is the likely result. Taking the reins of your own life is your only real choice. You cannot control the reins for other lives or expect others to manage yours.

  Reason #4: “I Want to Be Prepared for the Worst”

  Will you lose your edge if you let yourself be happy? Does happiness lower your guard and disadvantage you when things go wrong? Does unhappiness make you more apt to survive?

  No. It’s natural to scan for potential threats, but focusing on familiar threats does not protect you from new threats. So you actually make yourself safer when you stay open to new and unexpected information about the world. Preparing for the kind of threat you’ve already experienced is just a habit that you could replace with a new habit.

  You may not notice that you are scanning for familiar threats. You may intend to be open to the good in the world. But when it reaches your eyes and ears, you may ignore it, because your bandwidth is quickly spent on information that fits your past rewards and pain. You have to intentionally shift your focus away from them to notice the fainter signals of new threats and opportunities. But this shift can feel like a survival threat because your brain equates past rewards and pain with survival. This is why people tend to stay focused on old threats.

  You may feel like stuff is hitting the fan while you’re building those new circuits. That’s your old superhighways lighting up. Stay focused on good things instead of those crisis-mentality fireworks and you will have a new superhighway in forty-five days. You will see more in the world than potential calamity. You may be alone in that world if everyone you know is distracted by disaster preparedness, but you have the power to choose that anyway.

  We all have a brain that releases happy chemicals in short spurts, so we all have to live with the dips that come at the end of a spurt. When a dip happens, it’s easy to focus on danger signals, release unhappy chemicals, start preparing, and restart the cycle. It’s easy to expect a cataclysm. You can end this vicious cycle in one instant, just by shifting your attention elsewhere. It may feel awful at first, as you resist the urge to “do something” while your social allies are in crisis mode. But you will survive that instant, and you will courageously refuse to contemplate disaster for the next instant, and the next. Eventually, you will create a gap big enough to fill with positive expectations. A happy circuit will grow big enough to compete for your attention.

  CONSIDER THIS

  When things do go wrong, ask yourself whether you could have prevented it by being unhappy.

  Your cortex is skilled at finding the information it looks for. If you don’t look for the good in the world, it will easily escape your attention. When you start looking for the good, it can feel like you’re frittering your attention and taking your eye off the ball. But bad things are curiously unpredictable, so a siege mentality just wears you out. Happiness builds a cushion that prepares you for bumpy roads better than unhappiness.

  Reason #5: “I Won’t Be Able to Do This”

  What if you try to build a new circuit and fail? It’s a horrible thought, and you may avoid it by refusing to try.

  Forty-five days is a long time to invest if you expect to fail. No one wants to spend forty-five days worried about blowing it. Failure is easy to imagine, because your brain has already greased those skids. If a new habit were easy to imagine, you’d already be doing it. So the challenge is to start without a clear conception of the finish.

  The way to do that is to focus on your next step. You can expect that one step to succeed, even if you’ve failed in the past. Expecting success doesn’t mean lying to yourself and others; it means being honest about the trial and error nature of success.

  Disappointment is always possible, but a next step is always possible too. If you refuse to take a step until you’re sure of being right, you limit yourself significantly. Instead, you can accept being wrong as a step on a path that isn’t perfectly predictable. Error is not a sign of incompetence; it’s a sign that you are facing an unknown that must be explored before it can be mastered.

  Failure triggers circuits etched by past failures, which amplifies the electricity of small disappointments. Day One of your circuit-building program can unleash the ghosts of everything you’ve ever done wrong, which makes Day Two feel like a huge step. But if you give up on Day Two, your failure circuit is strengthened. To stop this vicious cycle, you must take the step you committed to even when it feels bad. Tell yourself “I did it!” even if the only thing you did was thinking “I did it!” while feeling like you didn’t. This may feel fake at first, but if you persist, your success circuit will start to feel as true as your failure circuit.

  Of course, you don’t want to be a deluded person who pats himself on the back for no reason . . . but you may already be kicking yourself for no reason. Accidents of past experience will define you until you shape new experiences into new circuits. With each step, you are either building a new circuit or strengthening an old circuit.

  Reason #6: “Who Can Be Happy in Such a Flawed Society?”

  My college professors taught me to blame “the system” for human misery. I got praise if I linked human problems to the flaws of “our society.” Questioning that presumption brought harsh disdain, I learned. I didn’t want to be condemned as a person who “doesn’t get it,” so I “got it.” I even became a college professor and taught a new generation to blame their frustrations on “our society.” If I was not convinced that tearing down the system would make everyone happy, I kept my mouth shut.

  But I encountered many realities that did not fit the model—biological, historical, and personal realities—and I grew in my ability to tolerate life outside the popular consensus. So I faced the fact that human nature is more complicated than the lyrics to a 1960s folk song.

  For example, I learned that the frustrations we blame on our system are widespread in other cultures and other times. Often they’re much worse in those other times and places, but not publicly acknowledged. Yet mentioning the unhappiness of other cultures or periods can easily get you shunned by thought leaders ostensibly concerned with truth.

  KNOWLEDGE IS POWER

  When your happy chemi
cals droop, it feels like something is wrong with the world. It helps to know that your happy chemicals are meant to go up and down so you can focus on your next step toward happy chemicals instead of on the flaws of the world.

  You can imagine a better world that will make you happy all the time—in fact, just thinking about your better world stimulates your happy chemicals. You get a bigger boost when you imagine yourself fixing the flaws of today’s world, and an even bigger boost when you bond with others who share your perceived threat. These chemicals pave a circuit that keeps you focused on a world that does not exist—a world that would not, in fact, bring constant happiness if it suddenly appeared. You feed the dream by hating your reality. It’s a vicious cycle because you have to focus on the bad in the world to maintain your membership in the club.

  “The personal is political” was a popular slogan when I was young. Early feminists promoted the idea that personal problems are caused by political failures, and thus must be solved by political action. I was surrounded by this world view for most of my life. But I learned from experience that the political is personal. The ups and downs of our personal lives are so frustrating that we long to believe the political system can fix them for us.

  When you blame your frustrations on abstract institutions, it helps you avoid blaming real people you know in person. It feels good in the short run to avoid conflict with friends and family. But you never work things out with flesh-and-blood people when your attention is focused on imagined conflict with “the man.”

  I grew up watching extreme unhappiness and wanted to do everything possible to make sure my kids did not grow up in that way. So as much as I would rather have blamed my problems on “our society” like everyone around me, I did not want to overlook other obvious causes of unhappiness. So I took the risk of connecting the dots, even if it meant getting separated from the herd. I saw that primates do not always get along, and if political anger is your primary tool for working through these frictions, you get disappointed. People who say society has to change before they can meet their needs end up disappointed. I wanted my kids to manage their own neurochemical ups and downs instead of expecting the system to do it for them. And if I wanted my kids to do that, I needed to build that skill myself.