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

by Loretta Graziano Breuning

WHY EARLY MEMORIES ARE SO POWERFUL The

Your brain is always comparing the world to the early experiences that built your circuits. When you were young, everything was new, so you often experienced things as “the best ever” or “the worst ever.” That caused a neurochemical surge big enough to wire in a circuit. But the next time you eat the same pizza, it’s not “the best you ever had.” The next time you suffer the same public humiliation, it’s not “the worst you’ve ever had.” Life often falls short of your expectations because you built those expectations when the information was new.

Each of the happy chemicals disappoints in its own way.

The French Laundry serves only small plates because, according to founder and head chef Thomas Keller, a dish only pleases the palate for the first three or four bites. After that, you are just filling up instead of experiencing ecstasy. So the famous California wine-country establishment triggers joy over and over by sending a lot of tiny new dishes to your table.

But after a few bites, you’re disappointed.

Normally this is true, but occasionally there is some dish that continues to taste great. You want to keep eating after your full even. What's happening in this case?

The brain triggers joy when it encounters any new way to meet its needs. New food. New love. New places. New techniques. After a while, the new thing doesn’t measure up. “It’s not the way I remember it.”

He’s very excited as he runs back to tell his clan about it. Dopamine creates the energy to run back, and the memory to find the spot again. Then its job is over. Your ancestor might feel happiness in other ways: His serotonin might surge when he thinks of the respect he will get for his find. His oxytocin might activate when he thinks of the shared pleasure of feasting. But his dopamine will dip unless he finds an even bigger run of fish. He will look hard for more fish because he knows how good it feels.

Whether you are seeking the next margarita or the next career opportunity, your dopamine flows the moment you start seeking it, but when you get it, it’s not as thrilling as you expected.

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 never hear collectors say, “I don’t need anything else. I’ll just enjoy my collection as it is.” You have to keep seeking to keep stimulating dopamine.

Planning a project triggers dopamine.

Travel is a great dopamine stimulator. It bombards your senses with new inputs that you have to process in order to reach your goal of being a worldly person, or just to do a simple task like get breakfast. Planning a trip stimulates dopamine as you anticipate the great feeling of being at your destination.

Romantic love is perhaps the most familiar example of dopamine disappointment. When people are “in love,” they don’t realize they are riding high on the dopamine of a long quest. But the same old reward does not excite dopamine forever. It dips, and then unhappy chemicals get your attention. You may blame the bad feeling on your partner. You may think your partner is “not who she used to be.” You may even decide that a new partner would make you happy, because the last new partner triggered a surge that built a pathway. But if you seek the excitement of new love all the time, you may create a vicious cycle.

So if you took the drastic step of inflicting pain on yourself to get a rush of endorphin, it would take more and more pain to trigger the same good feeling.

Is this why people cut? They get an endorphin boost?

Social pain does not trigger endorphin, but the euphoria of endorphin masks social pain.

If you subject your body to pain just to get the endorphin, your body redefines what counts as an emergency. You have to keep subjecting yourself to more pain if you want to keep getting an endorphin high.

Notice your endorphin droop in these situations: An exercise session that felt good but then you realized you overdid it A joke that doesn’t make you laugh out loud anymore, even though you still like it A light-headed feeling that ended with a delayed meal A pain medication that doesn’t help as much as it once did

When your oxytocin is flowing, it’s easier to overlook reminders of past disappointments and betrayals. But when an oxytocin spurt fades, your past disappointments are suddenly more accessible. You can be so alert for threats that you feel attacked by a slight change in tone. Social threats seem to expand when the bubble of oxytocin is gone.

Oxytocin creates the bonds that lead to gangs, wars, battered spouse syndrome, and perjuring yourself to protect allies from the consequences of their actions. People do drastic things to sustain their oxytocin bonds because an oxytocin droop feels like a survival threat.

A zebra is often bitten by a herd mate, but it sticks with the herd because a lion quickly eats it if it leaves. Monkeys and elephants stick with their groups despite harsh domination because their young are eaten alive if they leave. Even lions and wolves stick with their groups because their meals are stolen by rival packs if they go it alone. Gangs, like herds, stick together despite enormous internal aggression because they fear external aggression even more. A gang needs the aggression of rival gangs to keep up the safe feeling associated with membership. Oxytocin makes it feel good to be “one of the gang” until the next betrayal, and the conflict keeps cycling.

Oxytocin disappointment feels bad, but it frees you to make good survival decisions about the world around you.

If your parents put your needs first when you were young, disappointment strikes when you learn that the rest of the world doesn’t treat you this way. And if your parents were not worthy of your trust, then you learned about disappointment even earlier. Either way, oxytocin droop is distressing, but it enables young mammals to transfer their attachment from their mother to their peers, and thus to reproduce.

You may have dreamed of joining a group that would make you feel good forever, and then felt disillusioned when you were finally accepted by it. It’s easy to idealize people from afar, especially people whose protection you seek. Once you gain admission, you see that these people are, well, mammals. You might start thinking that another group or organization would make you happy forever. A vicious cycle can result.

When you go to a shop or a restaurant, the staff treats you with a deference that you don’t get in the rest of life. Most of the time, the people around you are as convinced of their cause as you are of yours. If you count on getting deference from others to feel good, you may end up disappointed.

The brain learns to feel important in a particular way, and then it looks for more of that feeling.

We often hear about Hollywood stars who go into a tailspin when their popularity wanes. I used to be confused by this. “Isn’t one megahit enough to make a person happy?” I wondered. Now I understand that the good feeling of a megahit trains the brain to seek that particular way of feeling good. If you end up feeling bad instead, you don’t see how you created the disappointment. You can blame the ruthlessness of the industry, the fickleness of the public, and the incompetence of management, without recognizing your brain’s habit of seeking serotonin in ways that worked before.

Everyone has a cousin who is doing better than they are.

So timely! I just saw my cousin Cara lamenting that her new BMW was stolen. As i live in an RV.

If you lived in another time or place, you might have fought duels to defend your honor or stayed locked up at home to defend your honor. Today, you might pride yourself on your higher consciousness. You feel entitled to the one-up position because of your higher consciousness. When you see persons of lower consciousness getting respect, you may find yourself triggered in a way you think quite beneath you. And when you do get the respect you crave, it doesn’t make you happy forever,

If you saved your life by running up a tree when chased by a lion, your brain would learn to feel good about trees. Anything that transforms a bad feeling to a good feeling is a lifesaver from your mammal brain’s perspective, and it builds a big pathway. If you lived in a world full of lions, you would always be scanning for trees. Since you don’t, you instead scan for anything that once made you feel good in a moment when you felt bad. These are your “happy habits.” They are not conscious choices, but pathways that create the expectation of feeling good. The good feelings don’t last, of course, so we end up resorting to our happy habits a lot.

Distraction is often the core of a happy habit. Distraction can make you feel good just by interrupting the electricity in a bad loop.

Anything that diverts your electricity feels like a lifesaver. If your stamp collection once distracted you from a bad feeling, your brain built a connection that expects relief from your stamp collection.

I learned about the quirkiness of habits from a hypnotist who helps people quit smoking. He told me to imagine a fourteen-year-old boy at a party. The boy sees a girl he wants to talk to, but he’s afraid. He tries a cigarette to steady his nerves, and it works! The girl returns his affection, and his happy chemicals flow. The reward is huge because it’s so relevant to “reproductive success.” The neurochemical spurt creates a huge link to his mammal brain that says: Cigarettes promote survival. Of course, the boy doesn’t think this in words, but the next time he needs confidence in the face of a “survival challenge,” his brain lights up the idea of smoking. With each cigarette, the pathway builds. Years later, when he tries to quit smoking, the insecurity of the fourteen-year-old boy at a party surges up because it has nowhere to go without the cigarette pathway. His inner mammal feels like he’s threatening his own survival when he resists the urge for a smoke. He must build a new happy habit in order to live without the old one.

Distraction is not a good survival strategy when action is needed. But when you feel miffed by a coworker at the next desk, you may be better off not acting. When your brain screams “do something,” distraction gives you something to do. It protects you from fueling threatened feelings and rewards you with the sense that you’re saving your life.

You can stop a vicious cycle in one instant, simply by doing nothing. That teaches your brain that you will not actually die without the old habit. You learn that threatened feelings do not kill you. A virtuous circle begins the moment you do nothing and live with the threatened feeling instead of doing the usual something.

pleasing people,

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.

Your old circuits are so efficient that avoiding them gives you the feeling that your survival is threatened. Any new circuits you build are flimsy by comparison. This is why change is difficult.

Our circuits build as the world hits our senses and sends electricity to the brain. That electricity carves pathways that ease the flow of future electricity. Each brain is thus etched by its own experience.

Myelinated circuits make a task feel effortless compared to doing it with slow, naked neurons. Myelinated neurons look white rather than gray, which is why we have “white matter” and “gray matter.” Much of your myelination happens by age two, as your body learns to see and hear and move.

When a mammal is born, it has to build a mental model of the world around it in order to survive. But you don’t need to relearn the experience that fire is hot and gravity makes you fall. That’s why myelin surges at birth and trails off by age seven.

Anything you do repeatedly in your “myelin years” develops huge, efficient branches in your neural network. This is why child prodigies exist, and why little kids on ski slopes whoosh past you even though you’re trying much harder than them. This is why new languages are hard to learn after puberty.

Myelin also explains why it’s hard to unlearn a circuit you’d rather do without. Your white matter is so efficient that you feel inept when you try to do without it. That inept feeling motivates you to return to the old path, even when it’s not your best long-term survival choice.

You didn’t decide consciously which synapses to develop. It happens in two ways: Repetition, which develops a synapse gradually Emotion, which develops a synapse instantly

Synapses can build without neurochemicals, but it takes a lot of repetition. For example, you can learn romantic words in a foreign language quite quickly, but learning verb conjugations usually requires dreary repetition. Romance triggers neurochemicals that build synapses quickly, but repetition gives you the power to build any synapse you decide is important. If a synapse is activated many times, it gradually learns to transmit an electrochemical signal efficiently, even without extra rowboats in the fleet.

When patterns in the world match the patterns in your synapses, electricity flows and you feel like you know what’s going on.

The zip of electricity through your circuits gives you the feeling that things make sense. When the world doesn’t fit your developed circuits, your electricity trickles so you have less confidence in your knowledge.

You don’t feel your own synapses, but they’re easy to observe in others. A person who likes dogs seems to connect everything to dogs, and a person who likes technology often connects things to technology. A person who likes politics seems to connect everything to her political views, and a religious person easily connects things to his religious beliefs. One person sees positive connections and another person sees negative connections.

Whatever connections you have, you don’t experience them as tentacles grown by well-used neurons. You experience them as “the truth.”

When you feel flooded by emotion, you are releasing more chemicals than those receptors can process. You feel overwhelmed and disoriented until your brain builds more receptors. That’s how you adapt when you are “going through something.”

When a receptor is not used for a while, it disappears, which leaves space for any new receptors you may need. Flexibility is good, but it also means that you must use your happy receptors or lose them.