Business Book Club: Habits of a Happy Brain
I've set myself a goal to read one self-development book per month. To make sure I truly reflect on what I'm reading I'm going to extract the wisdom from the best business and personal development books and share it with you.
This time, I've been reading Habits of Happy Brain by Loretta Breuning, PhD
The Book
I've read books from many fields such as psychology, neuroscience, philosophy and NLP, to name a few. For this book blog, I decided to explore more about human motivation from a brain chemistry perspective.
As a teacher and mother, Loretta Breuning was not convinced by the prevailing theories of human motivation. Everything finally made sense for her when she learned about the brain chemistry we share with mammals. Today, she is the founder of the Mammal Institute.
Can understanding the brain chemistry we inherited from our ancestors explain why we behave the way we do? If it does, is there anything we can do to override it when our ancient brain fails to serve us in the modern world?
What Did I Learn?
This book explains some sophisticated brain chemistry in a very accessible way. Below, I’ve reduced this down further into some very basic explanations but hopefully you’ll get the idea…...
Our mammal brains
We inherited our brains from people who survived, which means (unsurprisingly) we inherited brains which are focused on survival. Unlike some animals which are born with much of the wiring they need (a gazelle can run with the herd a day after being born for example), humans are born with minimal predetermined wiring. Unlike those animals, we wire ourselves from birth, and our core circuits aren't fully built until age seven. For many species having newborns that are dependent for such a long period would spell disaster. For humans, it has allowed us to build circuits that enable us to adapt to the environment we live in now rather than the environment our ancestors experienced. From day one, anything that makes us feel good builds wiring for happy chemicals, and anything that is bad for us builds circuits for what makes us feel unhappy. This has created a useful (but imperfect) guide to survival.
Meet the happy chemicals
We turn on our happy chemicals with unique neural pathways built from our individual experiences. Each time we have an experience, our senses take in information about the world and trigger electricity that flows through our brains. The pathways we've built allow the electricity to flow freely. The more we repeat an experience, the better the pathway and the quicker and easier it is for the electricity to flow. We end up with billions of pathways to channel this electricity, and they allow us to create meaning from the inputs reaching our senses.
Familiar pathways are easier to travel, but they are not always helpful. Depending on our experiences, we may end up liking things that are bad for us and fearing things that are good for us.
Four key brain chemicals
Dopamine: The joy of finding things that meet our needs
Dopamine tells our bodies where to invest our energy. The mammal brain scans the environment for rewards and dopamine is the signal that we've found one. Our ancestors foraged for food by walking slowly until something triggered their excitement. Dopamine told them to invest energy in pursuing it. These days we no longer need to forage for food, but we might feel the effects of dopamine when achieving a goal, finding something we were looking for or eating a sugary snack.
Sadly this good feeling doesn't last. Your brain saves its energy for rewards that are scarce in our lives and your dopamine is reserved for things that meet your present needs rather than what is already available. To feel more dopamine, you need more rewards.
Endorphins: Masks pain in a crisis
Endorphins are associated with a feeling of euphoria, but they are actually for masking pain. You might associate endorphins with the idea of an endorphin rush or 'a runners high', but this isn't what endorphins are for, and this 'rush' isn't necessarily good for you. An endorphin is only released when you push yourself past your capacity to the point of distress. Pain serves a useful purpose. It's a signal from your body that something is urgently wrong, and this signal shouldn't be ignored.
The true purpose of endorphins is to mask pain in an emergency. If you've ever seen footage of a Zebra being caught in the jaws of a lion, only for it to wriggle away, you've seen endorphins in action. Despite the Zebra being injured and bleeding it can still run away.
Oxytocin: Feeling of being safe with others
Whenever you feel trust in someone or you feel their trust in you, oxytocin is flowing. We experience our first surge of oxytocin at birth. A feeling of wanting to be near our parents keeps us safe, and it urges a parent to protect their child fiercely. Over time this attachment is transferred to the wider 'herd'. Humans are social creatures, and historically our survival has relied upon being part of a group. The herd only protects you when you run when they run. Oxytocin makes creating these bonds feel good. When two people meet, there is a risk. Is this person a friend or foe? The good feeling we get from oxytocin provides motivation for conducting this assessment.
Serotonin: Feeling of being respected by others.
Being respected feels good because it triggers serotonin. That good feeling motivates you to seek respect because respect promotes survival. In the wild, the dominant mammals get the most food and the best mating opportunities, increasing their chances of promoting their DNA.
We might not get into fights to establish our dominance but a feeling of one-upmanship or having our achievements recognised gives us the same thing. Therefore, we seek social dominance because of the good feeling serotonin gives us whilst trying to avoid the pain of conflict. Fail to seek respect, and our needs might not get met. Overdo it, and we might get into painful conflict with those around us. This ability to judge when to put our needs first or when to let the needs of others take centre stage is an important life skill.
Be careful
Happy chemicals don't always reward the right things. For example:
We seek evidence of threats to feel safe, and we get a dopamine boost when we find what we seek. This is why you feel good when you see ‘evidence’ that confirms your view that people are not to be trusted for example.
You get a serotonin boost from the feeling of being right (“I told you I would fail that test”)
You feel an oxytocin boost from bonding with those who sense the same threat. This means you could bond with people over feeling miserable.
“When a monkey loses a banana to a rival, he feels bad, but he doesn't expand the problem by thinking about it over and over. He looks for another banana. He ends up feeling rewarded rather than harmed.”
What about the unhappy chemicals?
Cortisol: The body's warning signal
Cortisol creates emotional pain or discomfort, and this 'pain' gets our intention. That, in turn, causes us to focus our attention on whatever makes that pain stop. Our brain tries to avoid future discomfort by storing details of what causes us difficulty now. When you see things that caused you pain in the past your cortisol starts flowing. These bad feelings tell us that something terrible will happen if we don't act fast, creating a 'do something' sensation. Your cortisol circuits create life or death feelings. Of course, you know you won't die if you make a fool of yourself speaking on stage or if you ask someone on a date and they turn you down, but our neurochemicals have evolved to give us that life-threatening sense of urgency regardless.
This keeps us safe from danger. Unfortunately, this 'act fast' feeling can lead us to do things that aren't in our best interests. Here's why:
You get a cortisol surge
You notice what it is paired with (pain/isolation/low blood sugar)
You know donuts make you feel good.
The donut provides a distraction from unhappy chemicals. The awful' act fast' feeling goes away.
Next time to reach for the same solution. The dopamine flows quicker and easier for this solution each time we use it.
This doesn't solve the underlying problem. It may even be getting worse
This results in more unhappy chemicals
“Consider this: when things do go wrong, ask yourself whether you could have prevented it by being unhappy.”
Habits
The thing to remember is that we didn't evolve to get instant highs. The solution is to build more happy chemical inducing circuits.
Breuning suggests that in order to create a new, happier, habit, you need to keep it up for 45 days for the new wiring to form. She explains that the pain of resisting an old habit will feel threatening at first. The new habit won't feel great straight away as it lacks the 'zip' of electricity of a more established circuit. However, the more that habit is repeated, the faster and easier that neural pathway becomes. The discomfort will ease as the new habit forms. Breuning suggests this takes around 45 days.
What Did I Think?
Initially, I was resistant to the idea that we are so greatly influenced by our mammal programming. However, the more I read, the more I grew to appreciate just how much of our behaviour and thought processes have been inherited. Learning this helped me understand not only my behaviour but the behaviour of others too. Breuning's book contains a fantastic explanation of the neurochemistry on our behaviour that a layperson like myself can understand and she also provides exercises in each chapter that help you increase the happy chemicals you experience every day.
Far from being another competing theory, I found that this book complements other studies I have read on behaviour and motivation and helps you to further understand it. If you want to understand your poor decisions, annoying habits and increase your hits of happy chemicals, this is a useful guide in helping you understand yourself and make meaningful changes.
What should I read next?
Have you read the book? What did you think? What shall I read next?
If you have any recommendations let me know below or via Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn
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