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July 31, 2020
We are born to wire ourselves from life experience.
There is no free happy chemical in the state of nature.
Your cortex sees the world as a chaos of raw detail until your limbic system creates the feeling that something is good or bad for you.
But your cortex cannot produce happy chemicals. If you want to be happy, you have to get it from your limbic system.
That electricity flows in your brain like water flows in a storm—it finds the paths of least resistance.
Your inner mammal has no reason to doubt its own reactions because they’re built from your actual life experiences.
Your neurons have difficulty sending electricity down a path you’ve never activated before.
So how can you build new pathways? The answer is simple: Feed your brain new experiences again and again. Repetition will build the circuits you want.
your survival is threatened as long as you’re alive.
When your cortisol surges, you respond by noticing what it’s paired with.
When the “do something” feeling strikes, your brain builds the idea that eating a doughnut is doing something.
brake—the same behavior triggering both happiness and unhappiness.
you can build the skill of doing nothing during a cortisol alert, even as it begs you to make it go away by doing something.
But the interdependence of mature love never measures up to the dependence of your brain’s first circuits.
Every brain learns to link effort and reward, whether material rewards, social rewards, or relief from a threat.
Solving math problems is another kind of seek-and-find activity. When you find the right answer, you get that “I did it!” feeling, which erases any cortisol feelings for a moment.
When both of us are satisfied that the other doesn’t pose an immediate threat, we relax, and it feels good. That’s the release of oxytocin.
Natural selection built a brain that can trust the judgment of others.
But we often feel like a lamb among lions because of our urge for oxytocin.
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 lives in rather than the world of its ancestors.
Today, lasting attachments are less preferred and often disparaged. Without them, however, we feel like something is wrong.
People who tell you life is awful these days are trying to validate your threatened feelings to win your support.
You keep scanning for evidence of bigger threats, and many people will offer you such evidence.
Each generation of humans can learn about danger from its own cortisol surges.
cortisol makes you feel like something awful will happen if you don’t do something now.
For example, if your work is criticized at a performance review, you know your survival is not literally threatened, but cortisol makes it feel that way. The alarm tells your cortex to search for threats, and your cortex cooperates by finding some.
Cortisol surges when you face threats without the protection of your elders.
To make matters worse, just belonging to the herd doesn’t make your mammal brain happy. It wants to be noticed.
Mothers good at interpreting their babies’ signals had more surviving DNA. Thus, the ability to communicate was naturally selected for. When we succeed, our needs are met and happy chemicals flow. When we fail, cortisol flows and we look for a way to do something.
Consider the consequences of each habit, and decide whether it serves your long-term well-being:
This is why people seem oddly pleased to find evidence of doom and gloom.
But your brain actually has ten times more neurons telling your eyes what to look for than it has to take things in randomly.
When a pattern-seeking human cortex is hooked up to a dominance-seeking mammal brain and a danger-avoiding reptile brain, it’s not surprising that we end up with a lot of cortisol alarms.
Accepting the bad feelings cortisol creates sounds harsh, but the alternative is worse.
Adjust your expectations so you can be pleased with something you actually do.
It means you are lingering on your gains the way you already linger on your losses.
Instead, learn to be happy with your progress.
