Retrain Your Brain to Boost Your Serotonin, Dopamine, Oxytocin, & Endorphin Levels

Habits A REVOLUTIONARY APPROACH TO enhancing your happiness level of a Habits of a Get ready to boost your happiness in just 45 days! Habits of a Happy Brain shows you how to retrain your brain to turn on the chemicals that make you happy. Each page ofers simple Happy activities that help you understand the roles of your “happy chemicals”—serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin, and endorphin. You’ll also learn how to build new habits by rerouting the Happy electricity in your brain to ﬂow down a new pathway, making it even easier to trigger these happy chemicals and increase feelings of satisfaction when you need them most. BRain Filled with dozens of exercises that will help you reprogram your brain, Habits of a Happy Brain shows you how to live a Brain happier, healthier life! Graziano Breuning, PHD Breuning, Graziano LORETTA GRAZIANO BREUNING, PHD, is the founder of 2 the Inner Mammal Institute, which provides resources that help people rewire their mammalian neurochemistry. She’s Professor Emerita at California State University, East Bay, and author of 59050 Beyond Cynical and I, Mammal. She also writes the blog Your Neurochemical Self: Getting real with a 200-million-year-old brain 45079 03 cnVlZ2VyAFTvGEUCMTMDMTAwATEFVVBD JUYrVyBQdWJsaWNhdGlvbnMsIEluYyAo SW9sYSBkaXZpc2lvbikPR3JlZ29yeSBL cnVlZ2VyAFTvGEUCMTMDMTAwATEFVVBD LUEMMDQ1MDc5NTkwNTAyoA== 01 02 03 04 on PsychologyToday.com. She has been interviewed on NPR, The 0120 04 FnL1 UPC 0 Matt Townsend Show, and the Ask Altucher podcast, and her Retrain Your Brain to Boost Your work has been featured in Psychologies and Real Simple magazines. Serotonin, Dopamine, Oxytocin, Cover design by Sylvia McArdle & Endorphin Levels $15.99 (CAN $17.99) Psychology ISBN-13: 978-1-4405-9050-4 ISBN-10: 1-4405-9050-8 EAN 51599 FnL1 04 0120 01 JUYrVyBQdWJsaWNhdGlvbnMsIEluYyAo 02 SW9sYSBkaXZpc2lvbikPR3JlZ29yeSBL 03 cnVlZ2VyAFTvEQYCMTMDMTAwATEGRUFO LTEzDTk3ODE0NDA1OTA1MDQA Loretta Graziano Breuning, PhD 9 781440 590504 www.adamsmedia.com Habits of a Happy Brain Habits of a Happy Brain Retrain Your Brain to Boost Your Serotonin, Dopamine, Oxytocin, & Endorphin Levels Loretta Graziano Breuning, PhD Avon, Massachusetts Copyright © 2016 by Loretta Graziano Breuning. All rights reserved. Tis book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permis- sion from the publisher; exceptions are made for brief excerpts used in published reviews. Published by Adams Media, a division of F+W Media, Inc. 57 Littlefeld Street, Avon, MA 02322. U.S.A. www.adamsmedia.com ISBN 10: 1-4405-9050-8 ISBN 13: 978-1-4405-9050-4 eISBN 10: 1-4405-9051-6 eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-9051-1 Printed in the United States of America. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Tis book is intended as general information only, and should not be used to diag- nose or treat any health condition. In light of the complex, individual, and specifc nature of health problems, this book is not intended to replace professional medical advice. Te ideas, procedures, and suggestions in this book are intended to supplement, not replace, the advice of a trained medical professional. Consult your physician before adopting any of the suggestions in this book, as well as about any condition that may require diagnosis or medical attention. Te author and publisher disclaim any liability arising directly or indirectly from the use of this book. Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their products are claimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in this book and F+W Media, Inc. was aware of a trademark claim, the designations have been printed with initial capital letters. Cover design by Sylvia McArdle. Tis book is available at quantity discounts for bulk purchases. For information, please call 1-800-289-0963. for David Attenborough, who told the truth about the conflict in nature and for my wonderful husband, Bill Contents Introduction . 9 1 | Your Inner Mammal . 11 2 | Meet Your Happy Chemicals . 33 3 | Why Your Brain Creates Unhappiness . 59 4 | The Vicious Cycle of Happiness . 87 5 | How Your Brain Wires Itself . 117 6 | New Habits for Each Happy Chemical . 143 7 | Your Action Plan . 169 8 | Overcoming Obstacles to Happiness . 177 9 | Rely on Tools That Are Always with You . 197 Keep In Touch . 213 Recommended Reading . 215 Index . 229 About the Author . 237 7 Introduction When you feel good, your brain is releasing dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, or endorphin. You want more of these great feelings because your brain is designed to seek them. But you don’t always get it, and that’s natural too. Our brain doesn’t release a happy chemical until it sees a way to meet a survival need, like food, safety, and social support. And then, you only get a quick spurt before your brain returns to neutral so it’s ready for the next “survival opportunity.” Tis is why you feel up and down. It’s nature’s operating system! Many people have habits that are bad for survival. How does that happen if our brain rewards behaviors that are good for survival? When a happy-chemical spurt is over, you feel like something is wrong. You look for a reliable way to feel good again, fast. Anything that worked before built a pathway in your brain. We all have such happy habits: from snacking to exercis- ing, whether it’s spending or saving, partying or solitude, argu- ing or making up. But none of these habits can make you happy all the time because your brain doesn’t work that way. Every happy-chemical spurt is quickly metabolized and you have to do more to get more. You can end up overdoing a happy habit to the point of unhappiness. Wouldn’t it be great if you could turn on your happy chemicals in new ways? Wouldn’t it be nice to feel good while doing things 9 10 Habits of a Happy Brain that are actually good for you? You can, when you understand your mammal brain. Ten you’ll know what turns on the happy chemicals in nature, and how your brain can substitute new habits for old ones. You can design a new happy habit and wire it into your neurons. Tis book helps you do that in forty-fve days. You don’t need much time or money to build a new neural pathway; you need courage and focus, because you must repeat a new behavior for forty-fve days whether or not it feels good. Why doesn’t it feel good to start a new habit? Your old habits are like well-paved highways in your brain. New behaviors are hard to activate because they’re just narrow trails in your jungle of neurons. Unknown trails feel dangerous and exhausting, so we’re tempted to stick to our familiar highways instead. But with courage and commitment, you will build a new highway, and on Day Forty-Six, it will feel so good that you will build another. Warning: Tis book is about your brain, not about other people’s brains. If you are in the habit of blaming your neurochemical ups and downs on others, you will not fnd support here. But you needn’t blame yourself, either—you can make peace with your mammalian neurochemistry instead of fnding fault with it. Tis book shows you how. We’ll explore the brain chemicals that make us happy and unhappy. We’ll see how they work in animals, and why they have a job to do. Ten we’ll see how the brain creates habits, and why bad ones are so difcult to break. Finally, we’ll embark on a forty- fve-day plan that explains how to choose a new behavior and how to fnd the courage and focus you need to repeat it without fail. Tis edition of the book contains a lot of new exercises and interactive features that help you take each step. You will like the results—a happier, healthier you! 1 | Your Inner Mammal 11 12 Habits of a Happy Brain Our Survival-Focused Brain Your brain is inherited from people who survived. Tis may seem obvious, but when you look closer at the huge survival challenges of the past, it seems like a miracle that all of your direct ancestors kept their genes alive. You have inherited a brain that is focused on survival. You may not think you are focused on survival, but when you worry about being late for a meeting or eating the wrong food, your survival brain is at work. When you worry about being invited to a party or having a bad hair day, your survival brain sees the risk of social exclusion, which was a very real threat to your ancestors. Once you’re safe from immediate threats like hunger, cold, and predators, your brain scans for other potential threats. It’s not easy being a survivor! Consciously, you know that bad hair is not a survival threat, but brains tuned to social opportunities made more copies of themselves. Natural selection built a brain that rewards you with a good feeling when you see an opportunity for your genes and alarms you with a bad feeling when you lose an opportunity. No conscious intent to spread your genes is necessary for a small social setback to trigger your natural alarm system. Tese responses are rooted in your brain’s desire to survive, but they’re not hard-wired. We are not born to seek specifc foods or avoid specifc predators the way animals often are. We are born to wire ourselves from life experience. We start build- ing that wiring from the moment of birth.

Load more