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July 20 - August 2, 2020
Nature tends to build on what’s there instead of starting over with a blank sheet.
Neurochemicals pave these pathways the way asphalt paves a dirt road. Repetition also paves your pathways. Some of your neural trails develop into superhighways because you’ve activated them repeatedly and neurochemically.
Your human cortex can adjust your old circuits with new inputs: You can tackle math or resist pizza. But your old circuits are very efficient. You tend to rely on them because the world overwhelms you with information and your superhighways help it flow so well.
“Everything I like is illegal, immoral, or fattening.” The old saying has some truth to it because everything that triggers fast, easy happy chemicals has side effects.
You can stop a vicious cycle in one instant. Just resist that “do something” feeling and live with the cortisol.
Waiting gives your brain a chance to activate an alternative. A virtuous circle starts in that moment.
It’s not easy being a mammal with a big cortex. We have enough neurons to imagine things that don’t exist instead of just focusing on what is. This gives us the power to imagine solutions before it’s too late. We improve our lives, but we also stimulate bad feelings.
If you focus on other people’s brains, you may fail to make them happy and fail to make yourself happy. Each person must manage his or her own limbic system.
Your ancestors foraged for food by walking slowly until something triggered their excitement. That dopamine told them when to go for it.
Parental attachment revolutionized the biology of the brain. It became possible for mammals to be born without survival skills and to learn from life experience instead. Unlike reptiles, fish, and plants, which are born with all necessary survival knowledge, mammals are born fragile and stupid. The mammal brain does not fully develop in the safety of the uterus or egg. It develops by interacting with the world around it. A mammal needs protection while its brain is still developing, but this investment leads to a huge advantage: Each generation wires itself to survive in the world it actually
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You may get annoyed when you see others trying to secure their position. But when you do it, you think, “I’m just trying to survive.”
When cortisol surges, we call it “fear,” but when cortisol dribbles, we call it “anxiety” or “stress.” These bad feelings tell you that pain will come if you don’t act fast. Your reptile brain can’t say why it released the cortisol. Electricity just flowed down a pathway. When you understand how this happens, you can distinguish more easily between internal alarms and external threats.
Cortisol creates the belief that life is worse today. When you worry about the SATs or looking fat, cortisol creates the physical sense of imminent annihilation.
The first experience in your brain, the circuit at the foundation of your neural network, is the sense that you will die if you don’t get attention.
The fragility of a newborn human is unparalleled in nature. No other creature is born so far from being able to survive on his own.
These nagging impulses are hard to make sense of because you don’t think this in words. Many people make peace with their mammal brain by deciding that the world is forcing this on them. But it doesn’t work. Your one-down feelings are intensified when you feel judged by the world. You are better off knowing that you are participating in the judging. When you know you are creating the “do something” feeling yourself, you have power over it.
Everyone is sensitive to slights because everyone wants to be special. The urge for specialness might seem annoying in others, but in yourself, it just feels like fairness.
Being special promotes survival in the state of nature. Your mammal brain seeks specialness as if your life depended on it. Whatever made you feel special when you were young triggered happy chemicals that connected neurons. These connections trigger expectations about how to survive. When your expectations about specialness are disappointed, it feels like a survival threat.
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.
A Big Cortex Has a Big Threat Response A small cortex scans for threats it has actually experienced, but a big cortex like a human’s can build chains of associations from bits and parts of actual experience. You can think about a future that you can’t smell or touch. You can imagine disaster scenarios quite distant from your physical reality.
A lizard never thinks something is wrong with the world, even as it watches its young get eaten alive. It doesn’t tell itself “something is wrong with the world,” because it doesn’t have enough neurons to imagine the world being other than what it is. It doesn’t expect a world in which there are no predators, so it doesn’t condemn the world for falling short of expectations.
If you expect your award to bring constant happiness, you will be disappointed. Everyone’s happy chemicals droop, which is why everyone looks for ways to stimulate more. That’s how our brain is designed to work.
But if you found one just like the last, it would not feel as good as the first time. You’d have to find a bigger planet to get that surge. This brain we’ve inherited saves the happy chemicals for new information. The same old information does not get them going.
Dopamine is triggered by new rewards.
Collecting is a popular hobby because it overcomes dopamine disappointment. A collector always has something to seek. When he finds it, he avoids dopamine droop by starting the next quest. A collection gives you many “needs” to fill, and you have to process a lot of detail so your mind is always distracted from unhappy chemicals. You can also bond with other collectors to stimulate oxytocin. And if you one-up other collectors, you enjoy serotonin.
Our brains were not designed for sitting around contemplating what we already have. They don’t release excitement for nothing. They were meant to dip after a spurt so we have to do something again.
The first step to happier habits is to do nothing when your cortisol starts giving you a threatened feeling. Doing nothing goes against your body’s deepest impulse, but it empowers you to make changes in your life. Once you do nothing, you have time to generate an alternative. At first, no alternative looks as good as the habit does, but positive expectations build if you give a new pathway a chance to grow. Each time you divert your electricity in a new direction, you strengthen your new circuit. It all starts when you accept a bad feeling for a moment instead of rushing to make it go away.
A neuron used repeatedly develops a fatty coating called myelin. This coating makes a neuron extremely efficient at conducting electricity, the way insulated wires are more efficient than bare wires. Myelinated circuits make a task feel effortless compared to doing it with slow, naked neurons.
Only Neurons That Are Used Stick Around Neurons that aren’t used begin to wither in the brain of a two-year-old. That enhances intelligence, surprisingly. Pruning helps a toddler focus on the circuits he’s built instead of spreading his attention everywhere the way a newborn does.
You spent your early years developing some neural networks while allowing others to atrophy. Some of your neurons got swept away like autumn leaves, and that streamlined your thought process. You added new knowledge, of course, but you did that in areas where your electricity already flowed. If you were born into a hunting tribe, for example, you easily added more useful hunting information, and if you were born into a farming tribe, you had solid farming circuits to build onto. You ended up with a brain honed to survive in the world you actually lived in.
You can consider more options, and you can even generate options in your mind that you’ve never experienced in the sensory world. It all depends on where you direct your attention. When you don’t direct, your electricity flows down the path of least resistance.
We all end up with quirky circuits like mine because we build on the connections that are already there. Our happy chemicals pathways feel important so it’s hard to realize that they are just accidents. Anything that turns on your happy chemicals feels precious, which can lead to behaviors that are hard to make sense of. It can even lead to behaviors that are destructive. Though you can’t just delete an old circuit, you can connect it in new ways that are better suited to your present reality. It won’t happen effortlessly the way it did when you were young. But repetition and emotion can make
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If you think you can’t spare ten minutes a day, consider the time you already spend dreaming of what you’d rather be doing. You can use that time to research the necessary steps. You will get a dopamine feeling each day as those steps come into view. You will start to expect that dopamine feeling and look forward to it. You will learn to feel that it’s possible to transform a dream into reality with steady effort.
Good feelings flow when the level of challenge you face is “just right.” If a basketball hoop is too low, you get no pleasure from scoring points. If it’s too high, you have no reason to try. Effort is fun when you expect a reward for your effort but it’s not certain. You can adjust the hoops in your life and make things fun.
EXERCISE: WHAT ARE YOUR NEW DOPAMINE STRATEGIES? Make a list of remodeling projects that can work for you in each of the following categories: Celebrate small victories Take steps toward a new goal Divide an unpleasant task into small parts Keep adjusting the bar
Asking others to respect your accomplishment is risky because you may be disappointed. People often protect themselves by insisting that social respect doesn’t matter or that it’s hopelessly unfair. But these rationales don’t soothe the mammal brain’s longing for the sense of security that social respect brings.
You may think equality would make you happy, but the closer you get to it, the more your brain finds tiny differences to dwell on. When mammals gather, each brain seeks the good feeling of being dominant. You can easily see this in others, but when your brain does it, it feels like you’re just seeking what you deserve. Your inner mammal will constantly find ways that you have been undervalued and this can make you miserable even in a rather good life. You will be much happier if you relax and enjoy wherever you find yourself.
When you’re in the subordinate position, notice the advantages. Someone else is in the “hot seat.” You’re not responsible for protecting others, and you don’t have to worry about defending your position. When you’re in the dominant position, enjoy the moments of respect and choice instead of being overwhelmed by the pressure, because those moments will end.
Many people try to raise their status by looking for the bad in others. They feel good about themselves in comparison, but they pay a high price for this serotonin boost. It surrounds them with bad will. You can make a small change that stimulates your serotonin without the harmful side effect. Simply enjoy your influence on others. Without criticizing or controlling, you can notice when others mirror your good example. Don’t expect credit or even a thank you. Just quietly enjoy.
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
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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.
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.
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.
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
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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.
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.
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.
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
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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.
