Habits of a Happy Brain Read online

  In the animal world, higher-status males generally get more mating opportunities. Higher-status females tend to be more fertile and their young have higher survival rates. Brains that seek social dominance made more copies of themselves. We are descended from them.

  At the same time, we strive for social trust to stimulate oxytocin. Your brain is always looking for ways to enjoy serotonin without losing oxytocin or increasing cortisol. For example, if your comment in a meeting gets respect, that feels good. But if you dominate the meeting, you may end up with pain. Each experience of pain or pleasure builds connections that help you figure out how to feel good and survive. Your brain is always trying to get respect using the circuits you have. (This is the subject of my book I, Mammal: Why Your Brain Links Status and Happiness.)

  EXERCISE: WHEN DO YOU FEEL SEROTONIN?

  Serotonin is the feeling of being important. We see how much others like to feel important, but we hate to see this in ourselves. It helps to know that our brain was naturally selected to seek social dominance, because brains that did so made more copies of their genes. We strive to avoid conflict because aggression can wipe out your genes. So the mammal brain keeps calculating social data, and when you find a safe way to assert yourself, it rewards you with serotonin. A big human cortex tries to stimulate serotonin with abstractions rather than one-on-one showdowns, such as “pride,” “confidence,” or “self-respect.” It feels good . . . even if you hate to admit it. Noticing your mammalian urge for serotonin is a valuable skill. Practice by looking for:

  Someone you don’t like seeking importance

  Someone you like seeking importance

  A moment when you feel respected

  A moment when you enjoy a competitive edge

  It’s All Relative

  Your past serotonin experiences built circuits that create your present expectations. If you expect to be master of the universe, you may end up feeling disrespected much of the time. Your life may be fine in objective terms, but the expectation of continual admiration from others leads to disappointment. A person who has set her sights differently may feel satisfied with the respect she is getting from her world, and thus enjoy the calm, secure feeling of serotonin.

  Social dominance is different from socioeconomic status. A person who is number 3 on the world billionaire list might feel like his survival is threatened when he falls to number 4. By contrast, a person with little socioeconomic status might harshly dominate those around him and feel good about it.

  Many social dominance strategies are unrelated to formal wealth and status. Appearance is a good example. One person may feel respected for his appearance, while another feels disrespected, even if the two people look exactly the same. Our neurochemicals depend on the expectation circuits we’ve built.

  Antidepressants, like Prozac, are known for raising serotonin levels in the brain. The function of serotonin was not understood when antidepressants were introduced to the public, in the same way that aspirin was used before anyone knew how it worked. They may have created the impression that ingesting some “correct level” of serotonin can make a person happy independent of their thoughts and actions. We are only at the first stages of understanding the link between serotonin and happiness. Animals offer insight into our neurochemical ups and downs, but these insights are unsettling. The dominance-seeking urges of mammals are not a prescription for happiness, but they are a window into the power of self-respect.

  Each happy chemical turns on for a specific survival reason, and then turns off so it’s ready to alert you to another survival opportunity. Unhappy chemicals are less noticeable during a happy spurt, but they get your attention when the spurt fades. It would be nice to eliminate unhappy chemicals, but the following chapter explains why they’re here to stay.

  3 | WHY YOUR BRAIN CREATES UNHAPPINESS

  Unhappy Chemicals Are Nature’s Security Alarm

  When you see a lizard basking in the sun, you might think it’s the picture of serenity. But in truth, that lizard is just trying to avoid death. Cold-blooded reptiles die of hypothermia unless they sun themselves often, but when they’re out in the sun, they risk being eaten alive by a predator. So a lizard shuttles constantly between the lethal threats of sun and shade. He makes these decisions by literally running from bad feelings.

  He runs to the sun when a drop in body temperature caused his cortisol to surge. Once he’s exposed and vulnerable in the sun, he scans constantly for predators and runs at the slightest whiff of harm. He is not having fun. But he survives because his brain is skilled at weighing one threat against another.

  The human brain stem and cerebellum are eerily similar to a reptile’s brain. Nature adapts old parts rather than starting over. We still use the reptile brain for the jobs it is good at, like metabolic balance and alerting to potential harm. Mammals added a layer onto the reptile brain that makes social life possible, and humans added on a layer that matches patterns among the past, present, and future. Your reptile brain lies where these higher layers and your body intersect, so it’s not surprising that you find patterns in the social world that give your body a threatened feeling. Many people end up feeling threatened more than they’d like to, so it helps to know how your threat detector works.

  How Cortisol Works

  Cortisol is your body’s emergency broadcast system. Corticoid hormones are produced by reptiles, amphibians, fish, and even worms, when they encounter survival threats. It creates the feeling humans call “pain.” Pain gets your attention. It feels bad because that works—it focuses your attention on whatever it takes to make it stop. The brain strives to avoid pain by storing details of the experience so you know what to look out for in the future. When you see things associated with past pain, your cortisol starts flowing so you can act in time to avoid future pain. A big brain can generate many associations, so it can anticipate many possible sources of pain.

  When cortisol surges, we call it “fear,” but when cortisol dribbles, we call it “anxiety” or “stress.” These bad feelings tell you that pain will come if you don’t act fast. Your reptile brain can’t say why it released the cortisol. Electricity just flowed down a pathway. When you understand how this happens, you can distinguish more easily between internal alarms and external threats.

  You might think you’d be free from cortisol if the world were in better shape. But your brain sees every disappointment as a threat, and this response has value. It alerts you in time to prevent further setbacks and disappointments. For example, if you’ve walked miles to get water and realize you’re on the wrong trail, a surge of bad feeling protects you from walking any farther on the wrong trail. You cannot make perfect predictions all the time, so your cortisol will always have a job to do. Understanding your cortisol helps you make peace with the world around you.

  Cortisol Wires to Whatever Precedes Pain

  The sensory inputs you experience just before a moment of pain are essential information from a survival perspective. They enable you to recognize trouble before it happens. The brain stores such information without conscious effort or intent because sensory inputs remain electrically active for a moment before they extinguish. This “buffer memory” allows pain circuits to include the events that preceded the pain. They enable creatures to detect probable threats without need for rational analysis.

  Sometimes, the brain wires in quirky associations between pain and the moments before pain. For example, there was a girl who panicked when she heard laughter. The girl had been in a car crash that killed some of her friends. She awoke from a coma without remembering the accident, and began having panic attacks at the sound of laughter. A therapist helped her remember that she was laughing and partying in the back of the car at the moment of impact. Her reptile brain connected the pain of the accident to the laughter she heard at that moment. Of course, her cortex knew that laughter didn’t cause the accident. But large amounts of pain create large cortisol circuits before the cortex can filter and sculpt them. When t
he girl hears laughter, her cortisol circuit triggers an urgent drive to do something to avoid pain, but she doesn’t know what to do.

  This quirky sense of danger promotes survival in an amazing way. Imagine a lizard being seized by an eagle. The claws digging into his sides trigger cortisol, which fuses all the neurons active at that moment. That includes everything going on before the pain, because electrical activity lasts for a few moments. A precise early-warning detector is thus built effortlessly. The smell of an eagle as it swoops in and the sudden darkness caused by an eagle blocking out the sun are now linked to the lizard’s cortisol. If he manages to free himself and survive, he will have a very effective new circuit. Thus, cortisol circuits enable a reptile to avoid death without actually “knowing” what death is, or even what an eagle is.

  The Memory of Pain Has a Purpose

  Pain wires us with warning signs. When it’s big pain, we may build big warning circuits that get labeled phobias or posttraumatic stress. Smaller pain builds smaller warning circuits that we’re less aware of. We end up with alarmed feelings that don’t always make sense. It would be nice if we could just delete a circuit that made bad predictions. But there’s a good survival reason why we can’t. Imagine your ancestor watching someone die from eating a poison berry. His cortisol would surge and he would remember that berry forever. Years later, on a day when he was very hungry, he would be able to resist eating that berry. Your ancestor survived because his cortisol circuits endured.

  Today’s “Survival” vs. Our Ancestors’

  Your cortisol circuits endure and create life-or-death feelings that are hard to make sense of. You know you won’t actually die if you fail to get that hoped-for promotion, or if someone pulls your hair on the playground. You know you won’t die if there’s a long line at the post office and you end up getting a parking ticket. But your neurochemicals evolved to give you a sense of life-threatening urgency when you face a setback.

  Modern life is often blamed for this feeling, though our ancestors lived with harsher survival challenges. If you had lived in the past, vermin would have infested your home, your food, and your drinking water. You would have felt sores irritating your skin most of the time. You would have watched siblings die. Your neighbors would invade, rape, and pillage. You would not have been free to choose your sex partner. Cortisol would have given you that “do something” feeling often, and you wouldn’t always have had a way to make it stop.

  Cortisol creates the belief that life is worse today. When you worry about the SATs or looking fat, cortisol creates the physical sense of imminent annihilation. When you think about threats your ancestors faced, no cortisol doom is triggered because direct experience is what builds cortisol circuits, and you share little direct experience with your ancestors.

  People who tell you life is awful these days are trying to validate your threatened feelings to win your support. You may find it hard to believe your threatened feelings could be caused by mere small annoyances. You keep scanning for evidence of bigger threats, and many people will offer you such evidence. If you watch the news or listen to political speeches, you will feel sure that the world is on the verge of collapse. The world does not collapse, but you don’t celebrate because they immediately capture your attention with a new sign of cataclysm. It leaves you feeling worse, but you’re afraid to stop watching because that leaves you alone with your threatened feelings.

  Generational Differences

  We like to challenge the fears of our elders, of course. You probably imagine your ancestor heroically eating that berry and proving it was harmless all along. Life would be easy if old warnings were always false, and your friends’ warnings were always true. The world is more complex, alas, and a person who ignored poison-berry warnings whenever he got hungry would have died and his genes would be gone. Our genes come from people who held on to their stored experience. This mechanism may seem flawed, but it’s much more efficient than being hard-wired for dangers at birth. We learn from experience instead of being born to fear whatever threatened our ancestors. Each generation of humans can learn about danger from its own cortisol surges. We learn about danger from our elders as well, but each generation tends to sneer at the fears of its elders and build fears of its own.

  I learned this in a painful way. My mother once told me she was up all night fearing the milk would spoil because she forgot it on the counter. I sneered at her anxiety. But after she died, I realized that when she was a child, she would have gone hungry if she left the milk out. Her three sisters would have gone hungry too, because she was responsible for feeding them when she was only a child herself. Real pain built connections in her brain that were always there.

  I wish I had understood this when she was alive. The best I can do is celebrate my brain’s ability to learn from my own experience. Her fears were part of my experience thanks to mirror neurons. I didn’t have to learn by playing in traffic and eating poison berries, thanks to her fears. I built my own threat detector, and it may have quirks of its own.

  Extrapolating from Experiences

  The human brain generalizes from past pain. Sometimes we overreact, but we’d be worse off if we didn’t learn from pain. Jellyfish don’t generalize the way humans do, so if they burn one tentacle on a hot stove, the other tentacles will still touch it. Your brain is a central clearing-house that links past pain to potential future pain. We anticipate threats so efficiently that we agonize over statistical projections that 1 person per 10 million will be harmed twenty years from now. We feel threatened when the boss lifts one eyebrow by a millimeter. It’s hard to be so good at anticipating pain.

  EXERCISE: YOUR PERSONAL SECURITY ALARM

  Whatever triggered cortisol in your past built neural pathways that alert you to avoid harm today. You can call it stress, anxiety, fear, or panic depending on the intensity, but cortisol makes you feel like something awful will happen if you don’t do something now. It’s hard to know what turns it on because it’s just electricity flowing down a well-developed chain of neurons. But if you pay careful attention to your bad feelings, you can find patterns. That helps you make new decisions about avoiding harm instead of just flowing with old information. Bad feelings may still come because the pathways are still there. But when you know it’s an old response to an old threat, you stop seeking evidence to feed it, so the feeling just passes. Explore your threatened feelings and find examples of:

  A threatened feeling that fits the pattern of your adolescent threats

  A threatened feeling that fits the pattern of your early childhood threats

  A threatened feeling that fits the pattern of a parent’s sense of threat

  A threatened feeling that fits the pattern of threats that bond your social circle

  Social Pain and the Mammal Brain

  Mammals alleviate the feeling of imminent threat by congregating in groups. Herds make it easier to relax while remaining alert for danger. Herd behavior has a bad ring to it today, but the math proves that safety in numbers promotes survival better than the every-reptile-for-himself lifestyle. Mammals have a higher life expectancy than most earlier species, and their babies have higher survival rates too. But all is not warm and fuzzy in the mammal world. Social groups trigger bad feelings as well as good feelings. When the brain adapted to group life, a new kind of unhappiness evolved: social pain.

  Social isolation is a survival threat in the state of nature. Natural selection created social pain to warn you of a threat to your social bonds the same way that physical pain warns you of a threat to your body. When you see images of herd animals, you may think they are enjoying a nice sense of solidarity. But if you look close, you find that each individual brain struggles to find a safe place.

  Imagine you’re a wildebeest seeking greener pastures with your herd. When you reach a river, you fear pain from a crocodile if you jump in alone, so you stop to watch what others do. While you’re analyzing this, the herd builds up behind you and you fear they’ll push you in.
That would be even more dangerous, so you decide to do something fast. When you jump, others quickly jump with you because crocodiles eat stragglers. You feel pain from hooves and horns tumbling around you.

  These social complications are not obvious when you see a video of wildebeest leaping majestically into a river. It looks like they fit in effortlessly. We humans value our individuality and don’t just follow the crowd. But when you move away from a group, huge cortisol spikes often take you by surprise. Your brain is inherited from creatures that monitored their group mates to survive. Critters indifferent to the group got weeded out of the gene pool, and a brain that monitors social dynamics was selected for.

  Animals with bigger brains have bigger social ups and downs. Small-brained mammals tend to size each other up once and build a lasting circuit. Primates have enough neurons to keep updating their feelings about each other.

  What Are Mirror Neurons?

  Primates have special neurons that facilitate social bonds. These mirror neurons activate when an individual watches the behavior of others. Scientists discovered mirror neurons by accident. They were studying the electrical activity in a monkey’s brain while it grasped a peanut. When the experiment was over, a researcher picked up the peanut to put it away. To his amazement, the monkey’s brain lit up with the same electrical pattern observed when it picked up the peanut itself. Watching an action stimulates the same neural trail as executing the action.

  We do not mirror everything we see in others. Mirror neurons only fire when you watch someone get a reward or face a threat. The firing is much weaker than executing an action yourself. But if you repeatedly watch another person get a reward or face a threat, connections build. You wire yourself to get the reward or avoid the threat in the way that you’ve seen. This research is in its infancy, but it has been learned that songbirds have mirror neurons, and they learn their songs by listening to others.