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 doesn’t last because our brain saves the happy chemicals for opportunities to meet survival needs. It defines “survival” in a quirky way, alas. 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. The biggest surge comes from things linked to what biologists call “reproductive success.” We do quirky things to spark happy chemicals because our brain evolved to promote survival, not to make you happy.
Happy chemicals are not controlled by your conscious verbal brain.
They’re controlled by the limbic brain (amygdala, hippocampus, etc.) that we’ve inherited from earlier mammals. 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 cortex tries to help. It’s good at finding “rational” explanations and “evidence” for whatever makes your inner mammal happy. We think our conscious brain is the showrunner, but it’s just the narrator. What’s a big-brained mammal to do?
We need to know what sparks happy chemicals in animals.
Then we can see the behaviors they motivate inside us. This frees us to relax and accept some behaviors because we know where they’re coming from. And it helps us rewire unwanted behaviors by findng a new way to meet the need.
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 animal trainers teach a dolphin 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 get them in daily life. This is not what you usually hear about dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and endorphin. There is no alarmism or pathologizing. You can wire your brain to feel good in ways that are good for you.
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
Key Takeaways
- Our dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and endorphin are not controlled by our verbal cortex, but by the limbic brain we’ve inherited from earlier mammals.
- Animals can’t talk, so your mammal brain can’t tell you in words why it released a happy chemical.
- Your dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and endorphin are not meant to be on all the time. They evolved to reward behaviors that meet survival needs
- Happy chemicals are released in short spurts that are quickly metabolized. We want more of these good feelings, so we are motivated to keep meeting needs.
- Our brain defines “survival needs” with neural pathways built from past experience. Neurons connect when happy chemicals flow, which wires the brain to repeat behaviors linked to those moments without conscious intent.
- Each happy chemical creates a different good feeling, so we’re motivated to meet different survival needs.
- Dopamine releases energy when you anticipate meeting a need, as defined by your past dopamine.
- Oxytocin creates the safe feeling that you are protected by others.
- Serotonin creates confidence in your strength as compared to others.
- Endorphin is the brain’s natural opioid, released when you’re in physical pain.
- Cortisol creates the feeling that your survival is threatened if you don’t do something fast.
- The highways that control these chemicals are built in youth because that’s when our brain has a lot of the road-building material called myelin.
- No one has an endless, effortless flow of dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and endorphin, but anyone can build new neural pathways to spark them by repeating a new choice.
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 doesn’t last because our brain saves the happy chemicals for opportunities to meet survival needs. It defines “survival” in a quirky way, alas. 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. The biggest surge comes from things linked to what biologists call “reproductive success.” We do quirky things to spark happy chemicals because our brain evolved to promote survival, not to make you happy.
Happy chemicals are not controlled by your conscious verbal brain.
They’re controlled by the limbic brain (amygdala, hippocampus, etc.) that we’ve inherited from earlier mammals. 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 cortex tries to help. It’s good at finding “rational” explanations and “evidence” for whatever makes your inner mammal happy. We think our conscious brain is the showrunner, but it’s just the narrator. What’s a big-brained mammal to do?
We need to know what sparks happy chemicals in animals.
Then we can see the behaviors they motivate inside us. This frees us to relax and accept some behaviors because we know where they’re coming from. And it helps us rewire unwanted behaviors by findng a new way to meet the need.
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 animal trainers teach a dolphin 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 get them in daily life. This is not what you usually hear about dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and endorphin. There is no alarmism or pathologizing. You can wire your brain to feel good in ways that are good for you.
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
Key Takeaways
- Our dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and endorphin are not controlled by our verbal cortex, but by the limbic brain we’ve inherited from earlier mammals.
- Animals can’t talk, so your mammal brain can’t tell you in words why it released a happy chemical.
- Your dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and endorphin are not meant to be on all the time. They evolved to reward behaviors that meet survival needs
- Happy chemicals are released in short spurts that are quickly metabolized. We want more of these good feelings, so we are motivated to keep meeting needs.
- Our brain defines “survival needs” with neural pathways built from past experience. Neurons connect when happy chemicals flow, which wires the brain to repeat behaviors linked to those moments without conscious intent.
- Each happy chemical creates a different good feeling, so we’re motivated to meet different survival needs.
- Dopamine releases energy when you anticipate meeting a need, as defined by your past dopamine.
- Oxytocin creates the safe feeling that you are protected by others.
- Serotonin creates confidence in your strength as compared to others.
- Endorphin is the brain’s natural opioid, released when you’re in physical pain.
- Cortisol creates the feeling that your survival is threatened if you don’t do something fast.
- The highways that control these chemicals are built in youth because that’s when our brain has a lot of the road-building material called myelin.
- No one has an endless, effortless flow of dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and endorphin, but anyone can build new neural pathways to spark them by repeating a new choice.
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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