Satisfice
Our brains are good at finding satisfactory solutions, fast. Sometimes we regret them later as we imagine the ideal thing we coulda-woulda-shoulda done. The urge to make the most of life is natural, but if you’re always optimizing, you’re never happy. When I find it hard to stop optimizing, I remind myself that the 1978 Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to a mathematical proof that “satisficing” is better than optimizing. Herbert Simon showed us why embracing a satisfactory solution is better than investing in endless analysis.
I can always find a way that I fell short, even when I do well. When I see an adorable toddler, I fault myself for letting my children’s toddlerhood slip away. Then I remind myself that optimizing is impossible, and I am good at satisficing.
So instead of passing up a good parking spot in hopes of finding a better one, I take the satisfactory spot and feel good about it. If I’m left with a long walk, I feel good about the fact that I am walking rather than driving around in circles. Feeling good about the satisfactory solution stops you from wasting energy on a protracted search whose marginal benefits will not exceed marginal costs.
Plan
Build a new circuit before you need it. Try new vegetables before you get bored with the old ones. Do someone a favor before you need a favor from her. Develop new sources of pride before you retire and get wrinkles. You may feel too busy to do these things now, but once they trigger happy chemicals, you’ll be glad you did. Instead of waiting for happy chemicals to come your way, plan to “do something.”
Planning is also a good way to relieve unhappy chemicals. Instead of worrying all day, plan to worry while brushing your teeth. If that’s not enough, plan to worry while you floss too. In forty-five days, you will love the results.
Visualize
If you were prescribed two weeks of antibiotics to cure an infection, you would visualize the success of the treatment even though you couldn’t see it. You wouldn’t double your dose on Day Two if you weren’t cured on Day One, nor would you stop the treatment on Day Three if you already felt better. You imagine your cells developing even without visible progress. It would be nice to have visible evidence of your new neural pathway, but you can stay the course by visualizing your developing brain cells.
Once your new pathway is established, your happy habit will feel so natural that you will literally forget to feel bad.
EXERCISE: HOW WILL YOU USE YOUR TOOLS?
Make a list of tools that will make your new happy habit more comfortable.
THESE TOOLS WILL HELP YOU TRAIN YOUR BRAIN
Mirror: find someone with the habit you want and mirror them.
Balance: develop the happy chemicals you’re not already best at.
Graft: build new happy circuits onto old happy roots.
Energy: save your energy for tough challenges.
Legacy: preserve your unique individual essence to please your inner mammal.
Fun: find the fun in a new behavior and you will repeat it.
Chunk: divide difficult challenges into smaller parts.
Satisfice: a satisfactory solution may be better than an endless quest for optimal.
Plan: start building circuits now so they’re ready when you need them.
Visualize: your neural pathways are building even though they’re not visible.
Let In the Good
Our cortex is designed to learn from patterns, and we often look for the pattern in our mistakes. We can end up focused on what goes wrong and forget to notice what goes right.
Animals don’t dwell on their errors. A mouse who fails to get the cheese tries again without kicking herself for being an idiot. She is not expecting to get the cheese on the first try every time. She is only trying to fill her belly.
A lizard approaches life with a very simple decision model: When he sees something bigger than himself, he runs. When he sees something smaller than himself, he tries to eat it. If he sees something about his size, he tries to mate with it. This decision tree leads to a lot of mistakes, so a lizard has a lot of ups and downs. But he doesn’t expect to be up all the time. He doesn’t judge himself for his downs or compare himself to other lizards.
A big brain is good at keeping score on itself. Learning from your mistakes has value, of course, but your error-analysis habit can crowd out your awareness of the good. You can focus on what goes wrong in the world so intently that you don’t see what goes right.
I learned to notice what goes right after spending a year in Africa. Before that, I took flush toilets for granted, but I learned that people did without sewage systems for most of human history. When we have them, it doesn’t make us happy, but open sewage ditches and vermin-infested outhouses might make you unhappy. I learned to appreciate the work of my municipal waste institution instead of just finding fault with it.
My appreciation of infrastructure began in Haiti, when I was invited to a picnic at a dam. “Why would you want to picnic at a dam,” I asked. I had lived in the world where dams were sneered at as blots on the landscape. My coworker explained that electricity and drinking water were scarce, and the dam was widely seen as something to celebrate. Since then, every time I use water, I think about all it took to get it to me. When I wash a teacup, I imagine the quantity of water I’ve used in relation to the containers Haitian women carry on their heads. I value all that goes into these systems instead of just looking for their flaws.
During my stays in China, I went for many massages. I marveled at the fact that I could safely hand over my credit card and take my clothes off on the other side of the earth. That level of trust is a colossal achievement. In most of human history, it was not safe to leave your village. Strangers could kill you with impunity, so people rarely left their hamlets in a lifetime. Now, strangers literally rub shoulders worldwide in safety. Things go wrong occasionally, but when you focus on that, you miss the enormity of what goes right.
In my travels, I’ve seen a lot of food contaminated by insects, vermin, and grains of sand, not to mention invisible toxins. For most of human history, people welcomed contaminated food because it was better than hunger. Today’s food supply has been purified to an extraordinary degree. Yet many people rage at the food industry and panic over food risks without perspective on what they have.
The same is true of healthcare. Our endless information about health risks makes it easy to focus on the faults of healthcare and overlook its accomplishments. I would not be alive today if it weren’t for antibiotics, so I was surprised to learn that they did not even exist a decade before I was born. Most of us alive today would already have been done in by something without modern healthcare, yet people tend to rage at healthcare with scarcely a thought of what goes right.
Raging at the flaws of the world is a habit that’s easy to build. Many people even see it as a skill to be proud of. They don’t know they’re in a vicious cycle that keeps them focused on disaster scenarios in order to keep feeling good about themselves. But we all have a choice.
Expectations and a Box of Chocolates
Choosing a chocolate from a box brings the risk of disappointment. To make matters worse, you may see someone else get the chocolate you’d hoped for. You can end up feeling bad even as you’re enjoying intense chocolaty goodness. The difference between your dream chocolate and your disappointing chocolate is extremely small, but that’s what you focus on.
Your brain builds expectations about what will make you happy and it sees the world through the lens of those expectations. You can skip over the rest of the story because your brain is so focused on what worked before.
We all see the world through a lens built in adolescence because that’s when the brain is highly plastic. This lens is inevitably unrealistic. A young person imagines she will feel on top of the world when she is free of homework and bedtime. But once she faces the challenge of meeting her own needs, she doesn’t feel like a master of the universe and she wonders what went wrong.
You may think som
ething is wrong with the world, or with your boss, your partner, your culture, yourself. You never blame the brain circuits that compare reality to your youthful expectations, because those circuits function without your awareness.
I have a friend who always complains about the food she gets in a restaurant. She chose it herself, of course, but once it comes, it seems flawed to her. She looks longingly at other people’s orders. I feel like I can’t enjoy my meal when I’m with her, so I no longer eat with this person.
I often hear students complain about the difficulty of choosing courses. But I also hear them complain when they have no choice because a course is required. They don’t value choice when they have it, but they lament losing it.
If you had lived in times past, you wouldn’t have been free to choose your career, your beliefs, or even your sex partner. You would have been constrained by group expectations. You would imagine eternal bliss if only you could choose your mate, your work, and other aspects of your life. Yet when you have these choices, they don’t make you happy. Your brain keeps looking for more and focusing on the obstacles. It’s just doing the job it was designed for.
Unhappiness is often blamed on “bad choices.” This implies that “good choices” are available. The truth is more complicated. Each choice has advantages and disadvantages. Once you pick, you get to see the disadvantages of that choice up close. It’s easy to imagine that all would be lovely if only the other choice were yours. But if a do-over were possible, chances are you’d be frustrated by another “bad choice.” You could spend your whole life lamenting your choices if you don’t make a habit of seeing the good in what you’ve chosen. And even a “good choice” can only make you happy for a short time, because happy chemicals only come in short spurts. So as we struggle to make “good choices,” the first choice we must make is to manage our own happy chemicals.
If you decide to be happy, your brain will find things to be happy about. You will still have frustrations and disappointments, but you will find ways to make yourself happy anyway. If your happy pathways don’t spark themselves, you will find healthy ways to crank them up.
You can do this right now.
No one is stopping you.
No one can do it for you.
And you cannot do it for someone else.
Your happy chemicals will not surge all the time, but you do not need to be having a “peak” experience at every moment. You can accept the inevitable dips in your happy chemicals instead of believing something is wrong. You don’t have to mask the dips with unhealthy habits. You can just take them as evidence that your inner mammal is looking out for you in the best way it knows how.
It’s not easy to manage this brain we’ve inherited from our ancestors. It’s the challenge that comes with the gift of life.
KEEP IN TOUCH
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RECOMMENDED READING
Here are some highly readable resources about the mammal brain. I winnowed down to the most engaging writing, and gave each book a unique Best in Category award to highlight my reasons for including it.
Best Place to Start
Life (the video documentary series)
Sir David Attenborough (creator), Oprah Winfrey (narrator)
This BBC series offers mesmerizing images of the behaviors that promote survival in nature. Attenborough explains the behaviors with his usual frankness and clarity, and Oprah Winfrey narrates the U.S. (Discovery Channel) edition. The images are stunning in their beauty and detail, and the story of how the images were captured makes it all the more riveting. I was so excited by this series that I tracked down every Attenborough series, and thus enjoyed an up-close and personal look at the survival behavior of mammals, reptiles, birds, insects, and even plants. Finally I realized that Attenborough is not the talking head; he’s the driver of the technology that made it possible to capture images of wild behavior since the 1950s. His autobiography, Life on Air, is a very modest recounting of the perseverance that brought the facts of life to our living rooms. A knighthood richly deserved!
Best Can’t-Put-It-Down Reading
A Primate’s Memoir: A Neuroscientist’s Unconventional Life among the Baboons
Robert Sapolsky
Sapolsky is a Stanford University School of Medicine professor who darts baboons in Africa to sample their neurochemicals. Sapolsky’s careful linking of behavioral observation and neurochemical data has won scientific respect, but here he tells the personal story behind his work. He paints a vivid picture of the Masai villages and gun-toting game wardens that populated his workday on the Kenyan savannah. And he draws intriguing parallels between the social dynamics of academic science and the social dynamics of baboons.
Sapolsky’s investigation of the sex hormones is reported in his Monkeyluv and The Trouble with Testosterone. But his chief contributions focus on the unhappy chemicals, better known as stress. Sapolsky searched for a link between stress and disease, and his popular Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers reports those findings. As a fellow native of Brooklyn, I understand his interest in stress. But I also wanted to understand the happy chemicals, so I kept reading.
Best Description of How We Blend Conscious and Automatic Thought
How We Decide
Jonah Lehrer
This book shows how we combine our verbal and nonverbal thought processes when we make a decision. Lehrer marshals the latest research to explain why the best decisions rely heavily on the nonverbal processes. Individuals skilled at getting their conscious and unconscious minds to inform each other make better decisions. The author clarifies this skill with examples from daily life, from his difficulty choosing a breakfast cereal to a pilot’s decisions during a crash landing. (Don’t read on a plane!) Another brilliant book by the same author, Proust Was a Neuroscientist, shows how artists’ descriptions of sensory experience correctly anticipated what science later learned about how we decode sensory inputs.
Best Introduction to the Social Anxiety of Primates
Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex Among Apes
Frans de Waal
If you find it hard to imagine how chimpanzees can plot and scheme for status, this book is for you. De Waal spent two years observing a large colony of captive chimps and wrote about their daily lives in soap-operatic detail. He describes the dangerous liaisons, the coalition building, and the constant social calculations that chimps engage in to get ahead in their world. His tales of chimp society will remind you of people you know, and you will come to appreciate how a brain can build complex social relationships without words. The twenty-fifth anniversary edition has good photos, too.
Best Explanation of the Emotional Roller Coaster
I, Mammal: Why Your Brain Links Status and Happiness
Loretta Graziano Breuning
Most people say they don’t care about status, but small advances or setbacks in your social status trigger surprisingly strong emotions. This book explains why. It shows how the mammal brain rewards you with the good feeling of serotonin when you gain any small advantage over a rival. When you lose a small advantage, your mammal brain alarms you with the bad feeling of cortisol. It’s not easy being a mammal, but the good-humored depiction of animal status-seeking is followed by a set of exercises for making peace with your inner status-seeker.
Best Description of Monkey Business
Macachiavellian Intelligence: How Rhesus Macaques and Humans Have Conquered the World
Dario Maestripieri
Monkeys are Macachiavellian, according to this Italian neurobiologist from the lab in Parma that discovered mirror neurons. Rhesus macaque monkeys are second only to humans in intelligence—if you define intelligence as the ability to survive in new environ
ments. Macaques can survive anywhere, just like humans. They thrive all over the earth, even in the inner cities of Asia and the abandoned temples of tropical rain forests. Their social skills are key to their ability to adapt to different environments. That doesn’t mean they hold hands and sing “Kumbaya.” This book describes macaques’ social skills without a lot of sugar-coating or academic theory. We see how they pick their friends and lovers. We learn when they nurture their children and when they leave their children to develop independence. The empirical science is combined with lively stories of the private lives of monkeys observed in the wild. I loved it!
Best Challenge to the Disease-Based View of the Brain
Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America
Robert Whitaker
The limits of psychopharmacology are often debated with high emotion, but this book is not a simplistic rant at pill-pushers. It’s a well-reasoned and highly readable exploration of the temptation to put one’s faith in behavioral medicine. The limits and tradeoffs of meds are clearly delineated, and the promise of alternatives is explored.
Habits of a Happy Brain Page 17