Score! Dopamine! Repeat! Or Not: Why goals don’t bring satisfaction.

Reaching a goal triggers dopamine. That feels great, but the spurt soon ends. Then you become who you were before the spurt. If you’re not comfortable with that, you can get caught up in endless efforts to stimulate more dopamine with...

Love makes your happy chemicals surge, but they always dip. Love triggers dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin. That's why it's so motivating. But happy chemicals come in spurts. They do their job by turning off after they turn on. When your happy chemicals...

In a perfect world, ice cream would have no calories, I would win every tennis match I played, and everyone I loved would love me back. Then I wouldn't need self-control. I wouldn't need to practice. And unconditional love would follow me around....

If you have a bad habit, it’s because your brain thinks it’s good for survival. If you eat a donut when you’re annoyed, for example, it’s because your brain has experienced the donut's ability to transform a bad feeling into a good...

Happiness is just a neurochemical spurt. Four different brain chemicals create happy feelings, and you need all of them to feel good. You miss out when you rely on one or two old familiar ways of triggering your happy chemicals. You can enjoy a balanced...

Your brain evolved to look for problems. You get a break while your happy chemicals are surging, but when the surge ends your brain goes back to looking for problems. For example, the first bite of an ice cream cone...

You are hard-wired to care about what you leave behind when you're gone. Animals focus on making babies, and humans, until recently, focused on creating grandchildren who would carry on their ways. Today, people are open to other kinds of...