Habits of a Happy Brain: Retrain Your Brain to Boost Your Serotonin, Dopamine, Oxytocin, & Endorphin Levels

by Loretta Graziano Breuning

The urge for specialness might seem annoying in others, but in yourself, it just feels like fairness.

Your brain compares itself to others even if you wish it didn’t. In the state of nature, comparing yourself to others promotes survival. It protects you from getting into fights that you are likely to lose. When your brain sees you are weaker than another individual, it releases cortisol to remind you of the risk. This helps you hold back, despite your urge to promote your survival interests. Unhappy chemicals help us inhibit our urge for dominance and thus get along with group mates. We need unhappy chemicals, as much as we’d rather live without them.

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.

If you take an idealized view of happiness, it will always be out of reach.

With each step, you are either building a new circuit or strengthening an old circuit.

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.