The Inner Mammal Manifesto

Stop Saying “Mental Health”

 Today’s mental health culture is profoundly disempowering.

It insists that happiness is the automatic default state of nature, and something has gone wrong. It blames your genes and “our society,” and promises to fix you. It deprives you of agency. 

And it ignores basic biology too. Our brain evolved to promote survival, not to make you happy. The happy brain chemicals are not meant to be on all the time. Stress chemicals are meant to turn on when reality fails to match your predictions. No one tells us this, so most people end up believing that “something is wrong.”

The disease model of mental health persuades you that other people get an endless flow of happy chemicals and you are missing out. It promises happiness from a “diagnosis” and “treatment.” When that doesn’t work, you shop for another external fix, and another, because you haven’t been taught about your internal process. Here are the facts, so you can find your power over your happy brain chemicals.

Our dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and endorphin are inherited from earlier mammals and controlled by the limbic brain that all mammals have in common (the amygdala, hippocampus, etc.) Animals can’t talk, so your mammal brain can’t tell you in words why it turns on a good or bad feeling. The conscious verbal part of your brain cannot control the chemicals, so if you want to feel good, you have to get it from your inner mammal. 

That’s not easy because our inner mammal is not as “nice” as you’d like to think. We’re taught that nature is good and “our society” causes everything bad. We’re taught that animals are happy, children are happy, hunter-gatherers were happy, and you would be happy too if “our society” hadn’t messed things up. But the facts show that animals have a lot of conflict, children have a lot of conflict, and hunter-gatherers had a lot of conflict. You have inherited a brain that creates a lot of conflict in its quest for survival.

That’s because it defines “survival” in a quirky way: it cares about the survival of your genes. Animals don’t know what genes are, but they strive to do things that spreads them, from competing for mates to protecting the young. Animals fight for the best foraging spot because that leads to more muscle, which leads to more surviving offspring. Natural selection built a brain that rewards you with happy chemicals when you enhance your “reproductive success,” as biologists call it. You don’t consciously equate reproduction with success, but your happy chemicals reward you for competing and protecting. 

Managing this brain we’ve inherited is a complex skill. That’s why civilizations have always trained their children to manage emotions. Yet today’s mental health paradigm does the opposite. It invites you to blame others for your feelings, and expect others to fix you. It  blinds you to the conflict your inner mammal creates. 

But you have a choice. You can get real with your mammal brain instead of expecting others to manage it for you. The Inner Mammal Institute can help.

Getting Real with your Inner Mammal

Happy chemicals are released when you find a way to meet a survival need. You only get a short spurt, so you always have to do more to get more. This helped our ancestors take action in a dangerous world. Dopamine rewarded them for finding food and water. Serotonin and oxytocin rewarded them for building social bonds. These chemicals are quickly metabolized, so people kept seeking resources and building social alliances to spark more. The mammal brain motivates survival action by making it feel good. 

This may seem wrong because anti-survival behaviors often emerge from  our quest for happiness. You need to know that our brain defines our survival needs with neural pathways built from early experience. We are not born hard-wired like other animals. A turtle leaves home the minute it’s born, but a human takes decades to wire in essential skills. A gazelle runs with the herd the day after it’s born, but a human takes days to even lift its head. A monkey learns to find its own food weeks after birth, but a human can take decades to put food on the table.

We humans are born with billions of neurons but very few connections between them. Happy chemicals act like paving on your neural pathways, wiring you to repeat behaviors that sparked them before. Dopamine is released when you find a new way to meet a need, and that wires you to turn on dopamine faster the next time you see something linked to that moment. We are not wired by conscious thought, but by our random collection of experiences.

Early experience is what counts because that’s when the brain has a lot of the road-building material called myelin. Your myelinated pathways conduct electricity a hundred times faster than undeveloped neurons. You rely on old wiring for life because it’s so efficient.

Alas, you can get wired to repeat a behavior that’s bad for you. When you see something that met a need in your youth, the electricity in your brain flows there so quickly that you don’t know you’ve made a choice. We don’t consciously remember the experience that built the pathway, so we end up not knowing why we do what we do.

To complicate matters, our brain has mirror neurons that mirror behaviors we see around us. They specifically mirror behaviors that get rewards or bring pain. Our ancestors learned to get food and avoid threats by watching others, without conscious thought. Each of us got wired to repeat the behaviors that worked for others in our youth.  

The “intelligent” part of your brain tries to help. It comes up with fancy language to justify your actions. You want to believe it because it makes you look good. Your cortex tends to see you as a victim of external forces because it’s not aware of your internal process. We think it’s rational, but it’s usually rationalizing.

Happiness Is a Skill Learned from Practice, Like Any Skill

We are not just robots. We can redirect our electricity, but it’s a complex skill. If you don’t build the skill, you just go with your early wiring. And it takes 100% of your attention to redirect your autopilot, so if you spend your attention elsewhere, you miss out on this superpower. 

We need this superpower because our brain evolved in a world of threat. Your brain will fill your life with threat signals if you don’t learn to redirect it.

There’s a good reason. Our ancestors could not eliminate stress because they lived with predators and droughts and neighbors with mammalian impulses. They survived because their threat chemicals turned on fast. We have inherited a brain designed to anticipate threats and warn us in time to protect ourselves. It’s not surprising that we end up with stress.

Our brain’s way to stop stress is to turn on happy chemicals. For example, our ancestors felt the joy of dopamine when they found food because it relieved their hunger. Their oxytocin turned on when they found allies because it relieved the distress of predators. Their serotonin turned on when they built strength because it relieved the fear of vulnerability.

 

Ideally, we stop stress by solving the underlying problem, but not necessarily. Anything that feels good stops stress. Anything. Our ancestors made human sacrifices because it relieved their natural negativity for a moment. The joy of relief paves neural pathways that wire you to repeat whatever worked.

Your brain scans constantly for ways to relieve threat. You can end up repeating a harmful behavior because it worked at one moment in your past. That’s why it’s great to know that you can blaze new trails through your jungle of neurons, to turn on happy chemicals in new ways.

It’s hard work, but it gets easier each time you activate the same neural trail. If you repeat a new choice consistently, a path gets established and electricity flows. You can rewire yourself to turn on happy chemicals in better ways. The Inner Mammal Rewiring Protocol shows you how.

You won’t do the work if you believe that you’re broken and need to be fixed by experts. You won’t do the work if you insist that you have “higher values” and couldn’t possibly feel happiness as a mammal. You won’t do the work if you follow the herd and wait for them to do it. 

You may feel insulted by the suggestion that you run on neural pathways built in youth. It helps to remember that everyone is in the same boat. We all see the world through the lens of pathways built in our myelin years (before age eight and during puberty). We are all capable of building new pathways, but it takes a lot of repetition. It’s like learning a foreign language. We all know it’s possible to learn a new language, but it takes so much repetition that most people don’t.

The Inner Mammal Method can liberate you from the thought loops you learned long ago. It can restore your sense of agency instead of making you a victim of forces outside your control. It allows you to shift from stress chemicals to happy chemicals without relying on happy habits with harmful consequences.

The Mammalian Re-Wiring Protocol

Step One:
Choose an unwanted thought or behavior and identify the happy chemical it sparks for you. 

Explore your memory and uncover the moment when you first engaged in this behavior or thought loop. You will see that it suddenly transformed a bad feeling to a good feeling. That built the big neural pathway that lures you today. Once you see your happy habit as a neural pathway, you can build a new pathway to replace it.

In the modern world, physical needs are more easily met, so social needs tend to dominate our quest for happy chemicals. Oxytocin turns on when you get protection from others. Serotonin turns on when you compare yourself favorably to others. This is not what you hear from “The Science,” but it was widely researched in the twentieth century before the disease model took over. 

You may say you don’t think this way because saying that is highly rewarded. You get protection (oxytocin) and moral superiority (serotonin) when you deny your self-interest and insist that you only care about others. Your verbal brain is skilled at saying what it takes to get rewards. It thinks it’s the showrunner, but it’s just the narrator.

Play detective and discover those old pathways to your reward chemicals.Running on old pathways is normal, but you can give the electricity in your brain a new place to flow.

Step Two:
Design an alternative thought or behavior to spark that chemical.

There are no easy ways to do this. You could spark dopamine by  constantly chasing new rewards, but that has bad side effects. You could spark oxytocin by following the crowd, but that has bad consequences. You could spark serotonin by feeling superior all the time, but that has harmful consequences too.

Finding healthy ways to spark happy chemicals is the dilemma that comes with the gift of life. We are all challenged to please our inner mammal in healthy ways. You can develop safe, realistic ways to honor your dopamine urge to discover new resources, your oxytocin urge for the protection of others, and your serotonin urge for superior strength. 

You can spark dopamine by setting a goal and moving toward it. You can spark oxytocin by investing in social alliances with realistic expectations. You can spark serotonin by taking pride in your skills. Each repetition builds the pathway that makes it easier the next time.

Experiment with a variety of thoughts and activities. Do not presume there’s one right answer. Do not presume other people have the answer. Do not presume that diet and exercise are the answer. Your inner mammal is quirky, but it will give you reward chemicals if you accept it for what it is.

Step Three:
Motivate repetition with structured rewards.

It takes a lot of repetition to build a new pathway once your myelin years are over. It’s hard to stay motivated because the old choice is so much more appealing than the new choice. We can solve this problem with the method used by animal trainers: they give tiny treats for tiny steps forward. The brain links the good feeling of the treat to the new behavior, which helps the pathway build.

It may seem like too many treats will ruin your life, but you can learn to give yourself a healthy reward structure. A tiny reward is enough to motivate a tiny step forward. Add big rewards for big milestones. A reward only works if it’s something you actually like. Kale and yoga are not rewards if you don’t like them. Vary the rewards since the brain quickly habituates to rewards you already have. 

Professional animal trainers know that you must never, ever reward unwanted behavior. This sounds obvious, but we often reward bad behavior in daily life. We treat ourselves when we’ve had a bad day, which trains the brain to have a bad day to get a treat. We reward friends and relatives when they have a bad day, which reinforces bad results in the long run.

Let’s Do This

Rewiring is hard. It’s like trying to divert a river into a soda straw. But with rewards and repetition, you can wire yourself to feel good when you do things that are good for you.

This method is for you if you can see the mammal in everyone. It’s for you if you’re tired of the disempowering mindset and want to enjoy your natural superpower. It’s for you if you’ve tried everything and love to feel your power over your old loops.

You can keep making small updates to your mammalian operating system. You will train your two brains to work together like a champion horse and rider. You can do this whether or not others do.

You may want to help others once you enjoy your new powers. Indeed, the urge to fix family, friends, and co-workers is hard to resist. But you cannot reach into their brain and do it for them. Remember that they are wired by their own past experience, not yours.

But you can help others if you reward desired behaviors and never, ever reward undesired behaviors. Remember that your attention is a big reward. We often give our attention to bad behavior, which wires in bad behavior despite our best intentions.

It’s not easy being a big-brained mammal. You might prefer to just blame your genes. You might prefer the warm, fuzzy view of nature and keep blaming “our society.” But you have a choice. You can accept basic biology, even if disease mongers call you an anti-science nut. 

When you know the facts, you know why a biology textbook sounds like a soap opera script. You know why the field notes of a primatologist sound like the lyrics of a country western song. You can make peace with your inner mammal when you know how it works. You can shift bad feelings to good feelings in healthy ways.

The Inner Mammal Institute can help. It has all the resources you need to build the wiring you want and to help others build theirs.

Loretta Graziano Breuning, PhD
Founder
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