So I faced the inevitability of human frustration. Each brain sees itself as the center of the world, though it is just 1 of 7 billion. Each brain panics at the thought of lethal threats, yet must live with the knowledge that it will die someday and the world will spin on anyway. These harsh realities will always trigger unhappy chemicals. No social system can protect you from them. Blaming bad feelings on the system and demanding a fix from the system can distract you from building the essential skill of managing your neurochemical ups and downs. If you externalize your dips by blaming them on forces outside yourself, you don’t learn to make peace with your own internal system. Each brain is free to choose peace, or to choose blame.
I frequently encounter people who choose blame. They can’t stop eating junk food until “our society stops eating junk food.” They can’t stop feeling shame until “our society stops shaming you.” They can’t stop worrying about the future until “our society addresses the future.” They can’t feel well because “our society is sick.” They believe they cannot change unless everyone else changes first. If you put “our society” in charge of your brain, you make yourself powerless. When you put yourself in charge of your own happiness, you have power.
The system-failure view of life is like a drug: easy to start and hard to stop. You may start because teachers and professors praise your work when you criticize “the system,” and you realize you can get “As” without doing the reading if you stick to that pattern. You realize that a social group will accept you if you blame their shared frustrations on the system. You continue this thought habit to avoid damaging the career and personal relationships you’ve nurtured for years. They may call you “smug” if you question the shared hostility toward “the system.” They may call you “privileged” if you take responsibility for your own happiness. They may even start blaming their unhappiness on you. But you still have a choice. You can repeat the rallying cries of starving serfs from past centuries, or you can accept your own mammalian urges and be glad you have that choice.
When you stop believing that the system can make you happy, you are stuck with the awful prospect of doing it yourself. It’s much easier to tussle with philosophical abstractions than to deal with actual people who get on your nerves. Fixing the system seems to be more fun and more righteous than fixing yourself. But when you understand your inner mammal, you realize that nothing is wrong with you. You are simply a mammal among mammals.
Of course, you keep tripping over the fact that your time on earth is limited and you are not the center of the world. Your brain cries out “do something!” One thing you can do is to join with others who feel the same way and “demand that your voice be heard.” But when you expect public institutions to satisfy that deep human longing to be heard, you get disappointed. The “do something” feeling continues because your mortality still weighs on you. These feelings are so hard to manage that many people externalize them with thoughts of an apocalypse of one variety or another. You can free yourself from such thoughts by understanding your own brain.
Reason #7: “I’ll Be Happy When . . .”
It’s natural to think you’ll be happy when you reach some particular benchmark. I’ll be happy when I can finish a triathlon, or get my grandchildren into a good school, or stop AIDS. But goals are double-edged swords. They stimulate happy chemicals with each step closer, but they stimulate unhappy chemicals with each obstacle. If you respond to each dip by rushing toward your goal, you can end up in a vicious cycle. You are better off having a variety of tools to manage your happy chemicals.
Approaching a goal feels good because your brain has connected it to survival. Of course, you know you can survive without winning the Executive Bonus Pool or the Stand-Up Comedy Olympics, but it feels different once your cortisol is triggered. You can distract yourself from that do-something feeling by focusing more intently on your goal. You may tell yourself you can’t stop until you “get a break” or “get it right.” You can imagine how good it will feel.
But if you do reach that important milestone, the feeling doesn’t last. All too soon, your cortisol is triggered in one way or another. You respond in the only way you know how: zooming in on another goal.
People often say they are forced to do this by “our society.” They don’t see how they are choosing it, even though they can see that in others. The urge to “make something of yourself” is natural. It’s much older than our society, and it’s much deeper than the urge for money or power. Your brain wants to leave a legacy and you only have a limited amount of time to do that. Our sense of urgency is real. Advancing your legacy is a good tool for managing these feelings, but it’s not enough. We need many tools to manage our feelings of urgency because they are so powerful. If you only have one path to your happy chemicals, a bad loop results.
Single-minded pursuit of a goal makes everything else seem like an obstacle. Other people, your physical body, and even rules and laws can seem like obstacles. Life feels like an escalator and if it’s not moving up, you think it’s broken down. You can free yourself from an escalator if you are willing to do something different for forty-five days. Do not simply replace one goal with another. Instead, build the habit of having multiple sources of satisfaction. Your new circuits cannot trigger happy chemicals every minute, but they can help you manage the cortisol blast you feel when you ease off your goal.
It’s hard to avoid the escalator view of happiness if you watch the news. Following the news fills your circuits with people who are getting a lot of attention. Your mirror neurons take it in, and give you the sense that you would be happy all the time if you were among their elite circle. Of course, you would not be happy all the time if you raised your social dominance, but you may never get into a position where you find that out. You could spend your whole life believing you’d be happy if only you were a rung higher on your imagined ladder.
The alternative is to make peace with your mammalian status urge. Don’t hate that urge, because you will end up hating yourself and everyone else. Just accept it and appreciate your ability to invest your energy in different ways.
EXERCISE: FINDING YOUR OBSTACLES AND ELIMINATING THEM
Are you letting these thoughts deprive you of happiness? How?
I can’t lower my standards.
I shouldn’t have to do this.
It’s selfish to focus on your own happiness.
I want to be prepared for the worst.
I won’t be able to do this.
Who can be happy in such a flawed society?
I’ll be happy when . . .
Choose Happiness
You are master of the quirky neural network built by your life experience. You get to decide which thoughts and behaviors are good for you. When your unhappy chemicals flow, you have the power to send your electricity in a new direction. That creates space for a new thought to grow. At first it will just be a trickle of electricity, but a new happy habit will build if you persist. Choose that new habit wisely.
EXERCISE: WHAT IS YOUR START DATE?
Starting on _____________ I will repeat
I will repeat my chosen thought habit or behavior every day for forty-five days. I will make the energy available whether it feels like a walk in the park or a trudge through the mud. If I miss a day, I will start over with Day One until I reach forty-five.
9 | RELY ON TOOLS THAT ARE ALWAYS WITH YOU
Circuit Training for Your Brain
Your brain is equipped with many circuit-building tools. You can rely on these built-in tools when the going gets tough. When you feel like something is wrong even though you know you’re doing right, these tools are with you. Following are descriptions of the trail-blazing tools that will help you stay on your new path until it gets established. Think of ways you can commit to them when you’re tempted by the comfort of your old path.
Mirror
Mirror people who already have the habits you want. Find someone with a habit you’d like to create, and watch th
em. Your mirror neurons will light up and spark your circuits. This is a great way to overcome the inertia of those virgin neurons.
Modeling others can be awkward, but the world is full of people who have the behavior you need. Maybe they’d love to show you. If not, you can mirror without telling them. They may not even be consciously aware of their habit anyway.
The person you are mirroring may surprise you by having bad habits too! Remember that mirroring is a surgical tool: you only use it in small, specific ways. You don’t substitute another person’s judgment for your own. You just model the behavior you aspire to for reasons of your own.
Balance
Your brain wants all four of the happy chemicals. You are probably better at some than others, and it’s tempting to choose a remodeling project in the area you’re already good at. That may be good for your first circuit-building project, but after that, give your brain the happy chemical it is missing. You may have to enter unknown territory to do that, but the risk will bring great rewards. For example:
If you are already a “dopamine kind of person,” good at setting goals and meeting them, you could do more for yourself by working on a different happy chemical.
If you are already an “oxytocin person,” good at social bonding, you’d get higher returns by investing your effort in a different area.
If you’re a “serotonin person,” good at winning respect, you can flourish by developing other happy-chemical circuits.
If you tend to be an “endorphin person,” drawn to mastering pain, you could benefit from focusing elsewhere.
When you depend on one happy chemical more than others, you don’t know what’s missing because you equate happiness with the kind you already have. So try a project from each of the four happy chemicals. It’s not easy, but your brain will thank you.
DIFFERENT KINDS OF BALANCE
Balancing your neurochemistry is not the same as “work-life balance.” It’s true that spending too much time at work can lead to neglect of other needs. But if you leave work to run the same circuits in your free time, neurochemical balance will not happen. If you manage your home the way you manage your work, free time won’t make you happier. It’s like a vegetarian trying to balance with a new vegetable, or an athlete balancing with a new sport. You keep seeking rewards in familiar places until you discover new places.
The good news is that a little bit of the missing neurochemical goes a long way. You don’t need to make huge changes to feel big results. Your brain rewards you for taking the neural road-not-taken. But it won’t release the new happy chemical immediately. You have to invest the time it takes to build the infrastructure.
Graft
You can graft a new branch onto the roots of a happy circuit you’ve already developed. When old people reconnect with high-school sweethearts, they are grafting new circuits onto old roots. Returning to a hobby you loved as a child or building a hobby into a career are other well-known grafting successes. Adding branches to an existing tree is a good way to overcome the difficulty of building brand-new happy circuits.
When I retired from academia, I began judging science fairs. I love this new limb on my old trunk. I meet kids that I deeply respect, and they are thrilled to have professional attention given to their work. I’ve also learned to use my love of color to make difficult things fun. When I work on a slide presentation or my newsletter, I enjoy designing the colors. It may seem trivial, but a pinch of spice is all it takes to enhance a dish.
Grafting is also a good way to balance your neurochemicals. You can spark the happy chemical that’s difficult for you by grafting onto an activity you love. If you love photography, for example, you are stimulating dopamine when you seek and find a particular shot. You can also stimulate oxytocin if you share the images with others, and serotonin by entering your pictures in exhibitions. If you’re a person who loves parties, you are already stimulating oxytocin. You can stimulate dopamine by planning parties, and serotonin by organizing fundraisers. New happy-chemical pathways are easier to spark when you build on existing roots.
Energy
Your brain only has a limited amount of energy. You can enhance it with exercise, sleep, and good nutrition, but it will still be limited. New behaviors consume more energy than you expect. When you commit to a forty-five day rewiring project, you commit to making that energy available. If you run out of energy before meeting your daily commitment, you will find reasons to ditch it. So make your new habit the top-priority use of your energy for forty-five days, even if you have to relax another priority.
One way to ensure energy is to schedule your new habit first thing in the morning. If that’s impossible, do something fun right before your challenging new behavior or right after. Watch a rerun of your favorite TV show in the middle of the day if that’s what it takes. Activating new neurons takes more energy that you realize, and some planning is needed to make that energy available.
Mental energy is a lot like physical energy. It depends on glucose, and it takes time to restore once depleted. You easily succumb to temptations when your mental energy is depleted. Some experts advise eating sugar to boost your mental energy. This is obviously a flawed long-term strategy, even though it helps to bring a candy bar into a life-changing exam for a short-term boost. A glucose-spiking habit will literally hurt your survival, even though it creates the illusion of strength for a moment. You need other ways to sustain your mental energy for forty-five days.
Legacy
Anything connected to your DNA triggers happy chemicals. For most of human history, children came unplanned, and grandchildren came if you survived to your forties. Whatever enhanced their survival prospects made you happy. Things have changed, and alternative ways to feel your legacy are being explored. Some people research their ancestry, and others make an effort to preserve family traditions. You don’t consciously connect this to your genes, but your happy chemicals turn on when you promote the survival of your unique individual essence. Even if you just buy pizza for a niece or nephew, it feeds your inner mammal’s interest in the survival of your genes. You may say genes don’t matter, but your brain has a curious way of perking up when they’re involved.
There are infinite ways to satisfy your mammal brain’s quest for a legacy. You might invent a stitch that lives on at your knitting club. You might design a new exercise machine at your gym club. A smoothie might be named after you at the corner store. It doesn’t have to make logical sense. When something of you can live on, it’s strangely effective at triggering happy chemicals.
Connecting with children rewards the urge for legacy even if they’re not yours. If you do have children of your own, every moment with them is part of your legacy whether or not it’s obvious. I figured this out when my son’s school closed for teacher training. Parents complained about all the no-school days, and I admit I had the I-should-be-working feeling too. Then I learned to see it as a gift: Here was an extra chance to invest in my kids. I would be crazy to see it as a burden.
Fun
Repetition is easier to tolerate if you can make it fun. I’ve had fun learning foreign languages by traveling and watching movies, and people have learned languages “on the pillow” (sur l’oreiller, as they say in French) since before there were pillows.
One reason adults don’t build new circuits is that they neglect the power of fun. Find the fun in a new behavior and you’ll free yourself from the drawbacks of your old amusements. Sometimes we need to do things that aren’t fun, of course. But finding the fun in an activity helps you persist long enough to pave the path.
Fun is a great energy-management tool. If I am working on something extra-hard, I take a fun break in the middle. I leave time for fun every evening so I can face challenges the next day. I never waste my fun time on movies about death and dismemberment. I don’t waste it on hostile, angry pundits, even though others think they’re funny. I don’t waste it on restaurants with long lines, loud noise, and the prospect of going to bed on
a full stomach. I am choosy about my fun because my energy is my most valuable resource.
Chunk
The brain is always dividing things into chunks because it can only process a few inputs at a time. Most of the time we don’t notice this chunking strategy, but you can consciously divide your challenges into chunks to make them feel manageable. A cyclist I know reaches the top of a mountain by mentally dividing it into quarters. He focuses his attention on the next quarter-post and mentally celebrates when he reaches it. This makes no logical sense, because the mountain is just as high. But chunking can trick your brain into feeling good even when you’re not really fooled.
When I learned this trick from the cyclist, I tried it on my own “mountain”—the mess in my garage. I was amazed at how well it worked. My husband and I both dreaded the chore, but longed to have it done. I suggested that we tackle it for fifteen minutes, and leave the rest for another day. I thought we would get it done in fifteen-minute chunks, but once we got started, we didn’t feel like stopping. We could not climb our junk mountain when we stood at the bottom and looked up because the top was too high. But when we set our sights on an easy goal, we expected to succeed, and the good feeling triggered the next step, and the next. Positive expectations can spark a fire of enthusiasm.
Habits of a Happy Brain Page 16