Habits of a Happy Brain: Retrain Your Brain to Boost Your Serotonin, Dopamine, Oxytocin, and Endorphin Levels
When you feel good, your brain is releasing dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, or endorphin.
But the good feeling never lasts because our brain evolved to promote survival, not to make you happy. It only gives you a spurt of happy chemical when you find a way to meet a survival need. But our brain defines “survival” in a quirky way. It cares about the survival of your genes and it relies on neural pathways built in youth.
Anything linked to a youthful pleasure sparks your happy chemicals, despite your best intentions. And “reproductive success” sparks a lot of them (a biologists’ term), though you don’t consciously think this. We do quirky things to spark our happy chemicals as a result.
Happy chemicals are not controlled by your conscious verbal brain.
They’re controlled by the limbic brain (amygdala, hippocampus, etc.) that we’re inherited from earlier mammal. Animals can’t talk, so your mammal brain can’t tell you in words why it released a chemical. This is why humans have struggled to make sense of their emotions since the beginning of time.
Our verbal human tries to help. It’s good at finding “good” explanations, and then finding “evidence” that fits. This leads us astray when old neural pathways spark happy chemicals in ways you’re better off without. We don’t know we’re doing this because our conscious brain is not aware of our chemicals or our pathways. What’s a big-brained mammal to do?
We need to know what sparks happy chemicals in animals.
Then we can notice the behaviors they motivate inside us. We can notice the old pathways that turn them on and build new pathways when needed. This book is a step-by-step plan for doing that. You will learn to blaze a new trail through your jungle of neurons by repeating a new choice for 45 days. You will train your brain the way an animal trainers teaches a critter to do a flip.
You have power over your happy brain chemicals. When you know what sparks them in the state of nature, you can design healthy ways to spark them in daily life. This is not what you usually hear about dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and endorphin. There is no alarmism here – just the joy of knowing what makes an animal happy, and how that shapes your daily life.
Habits of a Happy Brain is now available in Spanish, Russian, Turkish, Chinese, French, German, Arabic, Ukrainian, and many other languages. Details on my multilingual page. ISBN- 1440590508
Habits of a Happy Brain: Retrain Your Brain to Boost Your Serotonin, Dopamine, Oxytocin, and Endorphin Levels
When you feel good, your brain is releasing dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, or endorphin.
But the good feeling never lasts because our brain evolved to promote survival, not to make you happy. It only gives you a spurt of happy chemical when you find a way to meet a survival need. But our brain defines “survival” in a quirky way. It cares about the survival of your genes and it relies on neural pathways built in youth.
Anything linked to a youthful pleasure sparks your happy chemicals, despite your best intentions. And “reproductive success” sparks a lot of them (a biologists’ term), though you don’t consciously think this. We do quirky things to spark our happy chemicals as a result.
Happy chemicals are not controlled by your conscious verbal brain.
They’re controlled by the limbic brain (amygdala, hippocampus, etc.) that we’re inherited from earlier mammal. Animals can’t talk, so your mammal brain can’t tell you in words why it released a chemical. This is why humans have struggled to make sense of their emotions since the beginning of time.
Our verbal human tries to help. It’s good at finding “good” explanations, and then finding “evidence” that fits. This leads us astray when old neural pathways spark happy chemicals in ways you’re better off without. We don’t know we’re doing this because our conscious brain is not aware of our chemicals or our pathways. What’s a big-brained mammal to do?
We need to know what sparks happy chemicals in animals.
Then we can notice the behaviors they motivate inside us. We can notice the old pathways that turn them on and build new pathways when needed. This book is a step-by-step plan for doing that. You will learn to blaze a new trail through your jungle of neurons by repeating a new choice for 45 days. You will train your brain the way an animal trainers teaches a critter to do a flip.
You have power over your happy brain chemicals. When you know what sparks them in the state of nature, you can design healthy ways to spark them in daily life. This is not what you usually hear about dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and endorphin. There is no alarmism here – just the joy of knowing what makes an animal happy, and how that shapes your daily life.
Habits of a Happy Brain is now available in Spanish, Russian, Turkish, Chinese, French, German, Arabic, Ukrainian, and many other languages. Details on my multilingual page. ISBN- 1440590508
Top reviews
Habits of a Happy Brain is a profoundly simple, but breakthrough approach to describing daily experience and mapping it to the cocktail of neurotransmitters being released. This book truly is a leg up to understand yourself better as well as a gift for those who truly aspire to self mastery and positive fulfillment.
This book is a great guide to building better habits. New habits are hard to create, but not impossible to create. As the author shows, what is needed is reinforcement through repetition and emotion.
This is a fairly light read full of wisdom and powerful insights that explains the main neurotransmitters that affect us day-to-day. It is helpful for getting clear on the different neurotransmitters and how they show up in our lives in a simple and basic way.
Top reviews
Habits of a Happy Brain is a profoundly simple, but breakthrough approach to describing daily experience and mapping it to the cocktail of neurotransmitters being released. This book truly is a leg up to understand yourself better as well as a gift for those who truly aspire to self mastery and positive fulfillment.
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