What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite Quotes

“when we get the thing we wanted, the game is over. On top of this, something psychologists call habituation begins to set in and we get used to the thing in question in a mere matter of days or weeks.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“the power of wanting trumps the satisfaction of getting.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“Dieters relapse, smokers relapse, anyone with anything approaching a compulsion relapses—usually more than once. This study suggests that part of this repetition is due to thinking we can handle more than we can. Another”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“transactive memory—which simply means that over time relationship partners are able to rely on each other to remember things.3 They become a memory duo, sharing certain memories that neither one of them can reconstruct in total.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“Our brains are huge energy consumers (20 percent of our daily caloric intake fuels the brain) but stingy energy users.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“The anticipation of eating the candy drives up temptation, but the image of already chewing and swallowing M&M's drains the energy out of the temptation.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“great deal of “green” marketing is predicated on the assumption that people will buy a green product to make themselves feel better about moral deficiencies in other parts of their lives.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“why we repeatedly convince ourselves that we've overcome impulsiveness and can stop avoiding our worst temptations.1 This particular tendency toward self-deception is what psychologists call restraint bias,”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“those who ask themselves whether they will perform a task generally do better than those who tell themselves that they will.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“normative influence (SNI)—versus individuals who are not as easily influenced by others’ opinions (low SNI).”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“motivation to perform well and pessimistic expectations are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they seem to get along famously.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“Participants who anticipated more rapid feedback scored the highest on the test.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“N-Effect: the effect that occurs when the number of total competitors results in diminished motivation for individual competitors.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“your brain is structured to take the path of least resistance, because that's the less threatening way to go—but”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“words, for our brains, reality equals relevance.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“the amPFC and PCC were shown to play a large role in self-referential thinking and autobiographical memory (essentially, the “me” part of your brain).”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“anterior medial prefrontal and posterior cingulate cortices (amPFC, PCC)—while”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“After writing about their favorite TV shows, participants verbally expressed fewer feelings of loneliness and exclusion than when describing the filler TV shows or the experience of academic achievement.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“social surrogacy hypothesis,” which holds that humans can use technologies, like television, to feel a sense of belonging that they're lacking in their physical lives.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“Research indicates that those who obsessively ruminate tend to dwell on negative thoughts and emotions. There is, in fact, a strong correlation between this kind of rumination and depression.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“Overindulgence of our brain's tendency to wander is, however, a potentially debilitating problem. Psychologists have even coined a phrase to describe it: obsessive rumination.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“appears that our first instinct is for idleness, but when given an excuse to be busy (even a meaningless one), we're liable to act on it and consequently feel happier.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“Bertrand Russell touches on this point in his book The Conquest of Happiness”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“the fact that mind wandering often includes replaying stressful situations probably has a lot to do with it.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“Harvard psychologist Daniel T. Gilbert, we report being less happy when in mental default, even though (according to this study) our minds are wandering 46 percent of the time.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“it's always on in the background but only takes first chair in our brains when we're not focused on anything in particular.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“Specifically, a web of neurons—dubbed the “default network”—spanning three brain regions (the medial prefrontal cortex, the posterior cingulate cortex, and the parietal cortex) are activated when our brain flips on autopilot.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“The latest consensus is that most of us are mentally elsewhere between 30 and 50 percent of our waking hours.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“All that is gold does not glitter; not all those who wander are lost.” —J. R. R. TOLKIEN, THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite

“moral forecasting—how effective we are at predicting how morally we will act in a given situation.”
― David DiSalvo, What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite