You were born with a lot of neurons but very few connections between them. Connections built as you interacted with the world around you, and they make you who you are. But you may want to remodel your circuits a bit. It seems like it should be easy because you built those circuits effortlessly in youth, but building new circuits in adulthood is surprisingly hard. Your old circuits are so efficient that avoiding them gives you the feeling that your survival is threatened. Any new circuits you build are flimsy by comparison. This is why change is difficult.
It helps to know how a brain actually builds its wiring, and that’s what we’ll discuss in this chapter. When you can appreciate how difficult it is to create new pathways, you can celebrate your persistence instead of berating your progress.
We mammals are born to create wiring instead of with wiring already established. Our circuits build as the world hits our senses and sends electricity to the brain. That electricity carves pathways that ease the flow of future electricity. Each brain is thus etched by its own experience. Following are five ways that experience physically changes your brain.
A neuron used repeatedly develops a fatty coating called myelin. This coating makes a neuron extremely efficient at conducting electricity, the way insulated wires are more efficient than bare wires. Myelinated circuits make a task feel effortless compared to doing it with slow, naked neurons. Myelinated neurons look white rather than gray, which is why we have “white matter” and “gray matter.”
Much of your myelination happens by age two, as your body learns to see and hear and move. When a mammal is born, it has to build a mental model of the world around it in order to survive. But you don’t need to relearn the experience that fire is hot and gravity makes you fall. That’s why myelin surges at birth and trails off by age seven.
Myelination increases again at puberty. That’s when a mammal needs to wire in new learning to improve its mating opportunity. Animals often move to a new group to mate, so they must learn to find food in new terrain and get along with new troop mates. Humans also seek mates in ways that involve learning the customs and survival strategies of a new tribe. The myelin surge of adolescence makes this possible. Natural selection built a brain good at rewiring its mental model of the world around puberty. We’ll discuss more about the importance of what’s learned in childhood and adolescence later in this chapter.
If you think myelin is “wasted” on the young, it helps to know there’s a good evolutionary reason. For most of human history, people had babies as soon as they reached puberty. They were busy meeting the immediate needs of the children who kept coming. Adulthood was spent investing in new brains rather than rewiring old brains.
Anything you do repeatedly in your “myelin years” develops huge, efficient branches in your neural network. This is why child prodigies exist, and why little kids on ski slopes whoosh past you even though you’re trying much harder than them. This is why new languages are hard to learn after puberty. You can learn new words, but you can’t seem to find the words when you need to express yourself. That’s because your new vocabulary is just skinny ungreased circuits. Your thoughts are generated by big myelinated circuits, so the electricity has trouble finding a place to flow.
Myelin also explains why it’s hard to unlearn a circuit you’d rather do without. Your white matter is so efficient that you feel inept when you try to do without it. That inept feeling motivates you to return to the old path, even when it’s not your best long-term survival choice. For example, if you’ve learned to feel strong by challenging other people, you may get yourself into trouble by challenging too much. But when you withhold your impulse to challenge, you might feel so weak that you blurt out a challenge. The opposite is true as well. You may have learned to feel safe by avoiding conflict, and you may get yourself into trouble by avoiding too much. But when you decide to challenge someone instead of avoiding conflict, you feel so unsafe that you quickly give up your new path and return to the old one.
The ups and downs of myelination can help you understand why certain current thought trends can be problematic:
A synapse is the gap between one neuron and the next. The electricity in your brain only flows if it reaches the end of a neuron with enough force to jump across that gap. These barriers help us filter important inputs from irrelevant buzz.
What it takes for electricity to spark a synapse is surprisingly complex. It’s as if the tip of each neuron has a fleet of rowboats ready to ferry an electrical spark across the synapse to specially fitted docks on the next neuron. These rowboats get better at crossing over to their docks each time they’re set into motion, and that’s why experience improves the chances of a synapse firing. In a brain with 100 trillion synapses, experience helps channel your electricity in ways that promote survival.
You didn’t decide consciously which synapses to develop. It happens in two ways:
Synapses can build without neurochemicals, but it takes a lot of repetition. For example, you can learn romantic words in a foreign language quite quickly, but learning verb conjugations usually requires dreary repetition. Romance triggers neurochemicals that build synapses quickly, but repetition gives you the power to build any synapse you decide is important. If a synapse is activated many times, it gradually learns to transmit an electrochemical signal efficiently, even without extra rowboats in the fleet.
Emotions are chemical molecules that can change a synapse immediately and permanently. It’s as if you have more rowboats in the fleet harbored at that synapse. Whatever felt good or bad in your past developed synapses that will fire again more easily in the future. Here is a simple example: I used to carry popcorn on long plane trips and loved the tasty distraction. (Chewing is exercise!) But one day I chipped a tooth on my popcorn. Fear surged as I realized I was stranded in the air with no access to dentistry. The cortisol built strong new connections, and now I fear eating popcorn on a plane.
Your synapses built from the repetition and emotion of your past. You are intelligent because your neurons connected in ways that reflect the good and bad experiences you’ve had. Some of those experiences were turbo-charged by molecules of pleasure or pain, and some were frequently repeated. When patterns in the world match the patterns in your synapses, electricity flows and you feel like you know what’s going on.
Neurons that aren’t used begin to wither in the brain of a two-year-old. That enhances intelligence, surprisingly. Pruning helps a toddler focus on the circuits he’s built instead of spreading his attention everywhere the way a newborn does. A toddler can zoom in on things that felt good in his past, like a familiar face or the container that holds his favorite food. A toddler can also stay alert to things that felt bad in his past, such as a rough playmate or a closed door. The young brain is already relying on its own experience to steer toward meeting needs and away from potential threats.
The brain does much of its pruning between ages two and seven. This causes a child to link new experience to relevant past experience instead of storing each new experience as an isolated chunk. Richly interconnected networks are the source of our intelligence, and we create them by building new branches onto old trunks instead of building new trunks. So by the time you are seven, you are good at seeing what you have already seen and hearing what you have already heard.
You may think this is bad, so it’s important to see the value. Imagine lying to a six-year-old. She believes you, because her brain takes in everything. Now imagine telling that lie to an eight-year old. She questions it because her brain compares new inputs to stored experience instead of just absorbing all new inputs. New circuits are harder to build at age eight, which motivates a child to rely on her existing circuits. Your trust in your old circuits makes it possible for you to detect a lie. This had tremendous survival value in a world where parents died young and children had to meet their own needs at an early age.
You spent your early years developing some neural networks while allowing others to atrophy. Some of your neurons got swept away like autumn leaves, and that streamlined your thought process. You added new knowledge, of course, but you did that in areas where your electricity already flowed. If you were born into a hunting tribe, for example, you easily added more useful hunting information, and if you were born into a farming tribe, you had solid farming circuits to build onto. You ended up with a brain honed to survive in the world you actually lived in.
The zip of electricity through your circuits gives you the feeling that things make sense. When the world doesn’t fit your developed circuits, your electricity trickles so you have less confidence in your knowledge.
Each neuron can have many synapses because it can have many branches, or dendrites. New dendrites grow when there’s a lot of electrical stimulation. As dendrites grow toward hot spots of electrical activation, they may get close enough for electricity to jump the gap. Thus a new synapse is born. When this happens, you have a connection between two ideas.
You don’t feel your own synapses, but they’re easy to observe in others. A person who likes dogs seems to connect everything to dogs, and a person who likes technology often connects things to technology. A person who likes politics seems to connect everything to her political views, and a religious person easily connects things to his religious beliefs. One person sees positive connections and another person sees negative connections.
Whatever connections you have, you don’t experience them as tentacles grown by well-used neurons. You experience them as “the truth.”
For electricity to cross a synapse, the dendrite on one side must release a chemical that arrives at a receptor on the other side. Each of our brain chemicals has a complex shape that fits its own special receptors the way a key fits a lock. When you feel flooded by emotion, you are releasing more chemicals than those receptors can process. You feel overwhelmed and disoriented until your brain builds more receptors. That’s how you adapt when you are “going through something.”
When a receptor is not used for a while, it disappears, which leaves space for any new receptors you may need. Flexibility is good, but it also means that you must use your happy receptors or lose them.
Happy chemicals float around seeking receptors they fit into. That’s how you “know” what you’re happy about. A neuron fires because a happy-chemical key has opened a receptor lock, and that firing develops the neurons that tell you where to expect happiness in the future.
You don’t always act on your neurochemical impulses because your prefrontal cortex can inhibit a response. It can even shift your attention from one activation pattern to another. We humans have the power to shift our attention from a circuit activated by the outside world to a circuit we activate internally. We are not powerless servants of our impulses because of this.
When the information reaching your senses turns on your brain chemicals, it gets your attention. That’s the job these chemicals evolved to do. You are always deciding whether to “go with the flow” or divert your electricity elsewhere. You either act on your neurochemical impulse or generate an alternative. Then you decide whether to act on the alternative. You go for it if it stimulates happy chemicals. If not, you generate another alternative. This is how your separate brain parts work together. Your cortex comes up with options and your limbic brain responds to them as good for you or bad for you. You do this so efficiently that you hardly notice.
Animals do it too, but in a way that only requires a small cortex. An animal is always choosing between competing impulses to seek rewards and avoid pain. A human brain associates these impulses with related circuits in long chains of associations. You can anticipate the future before responding to an impulse. But eventually, you shift from thinking to acting, and neurochemicals help you do that. Electricity flows through your neural pathways, but you always have the power to redirect the flow. This is the core of your free will.
For example, if my husband does something that gets on my nerves, I could allow myself to dwell on it. Then my circuits would spark, my chemicals would gush, and I could tell myself he is causing the fireworks. But I am free in every moment to shift my attention elsewhere.
Your attention is limited. If you invest it in one place, you have less to invest in alternatives. It takes little attention to follow a familiar path, but shifting to the unfamiliar makes heavy demands on your attention. You have to juice up the weak signals to make sense of them, which leaves you less electricity for other efforts. You are always deciding which use of your electricity best promotes your survival.
Imagine your ancestor spotting a lion on the savannah. To survive, he focuses intensely on the lion to see which way it’s headed. At some point he decides to run, so he shifts his attention to the ground in front of him instead of the lion. You do this when changing lanes in traffic by shifting your attention between the rearview mirror and the cars themselves. Now imagine a person who spends most of his attention on web surfing. He is not conscious of deciding to invest his attention in that way. He often thinks of doing something else, but then a bad feeling comes up. A shift back to web surfing relieves the bad feeling, creating the impression that it promotes his survival. His connections facilitate this flow, but he is always free to shift his attention elsewhere.
The brain often generates conflicting impulses. You want to eat pizza and you don’t want to. You want to write your opus and you don’t want to. You want to call your mother and you don’t want to. You are always deciding which impulse to act on and which to inhibit.
An ape is always doing that, too. When an ape sees a juicy mango, she wants it, but she also wants to avoid being bitten by the bigger ape next to her. She inhibits the impulse to grab while assessing all the survival-relevant information around her. You have more neurons than an ape, especially in the important prefrontal cortex. You can consider more options, and you can even generate options in your mind that you’ve never experienced in the sensory world. It all depends on where you direct your attention. When you don’t direct, your electricity flows down the path of least resistance.
Before there was “education,” and even before there was language, people learned survival skills from repetition and emotion.
A baby chimpanzee builds life skills while watching the world from his mother’s lap. Before he knows what food is, he sees crumbs fall from her mouth. They land on her chest right in front of his eyes. He has the urge to grasp a crumb and put it in his mouth because his mirror neurons have registered his mother doing that. It takes several tries because his muscles haven’t learned to grasp yet. He’s not driven by hunger because he’s fully nourished by her milk. When a crumb finally lands in his mouth, it feels good! His dopamine surges, and he makes a connection. The next time he sees a crumb, he expects more good feeling, so he goes for it. Without conscious intent, he builds the wiring that will enable him to meet his needs.
Mother chimps never feed solids to their children. If the little chimp wants to eat something besides milk, he has to get it himself. And he can, because he has built the essential circuits by the time he’s big enough to need the extra nutrition. She doesn’t show him or push him explicitly. He learns because food is rewarding, and because he has seen her choosing food over and over. When weaning time comes, he’s wired to choose the plants she has chosen. By the time his mother is gone, he has the skills he needs to survive without her.
Researchers have found that chimpanzees can recognize more than a hundred different kinds of leaves. They even select leaves with medical properties when they are sick. But the reward that counts in a chimp’s life is protein, such as nuts, insects, and meat. These foods are relatively difficult to obtain. Still, children are not provisioned. They only get the reward if they execute the skill.
A young chimp can take years to succeed at cracking open a nut. He gets interested because he tastes the crumbs his mother leaves in the shells of her nuts. His dopamine soars because the fat content is so much higher than the food he typically encounters. In the state of nature, good feelings surge when something is good for your survival. But when the young chimp tries to imitate his mother’s nut-cracking movements, the darned thing doesn’t open. He persists because dopamine gushes when big rewards are expected. He observes the nut-cracking efforts of others and tries again.
I once spent ten minutes watching a young capuchin monkey fail to crack a nut over and over. I was overwhelmed by an urge to “help.” I looked for a zookeeper, and when I found one, she told me I shouldn’t worry about it because the monkeys are well fed and this behavior is natural. If I were running the “education” of monkeys, they wouldn’t learn survival skills and the species would die out.
Social skills are learned the same way a primate learns foraging skills. Sitting on mother’s lap, he sees her interact with others. He sees her dominate some of the time and submit some of the time. He doesn’t need to label these responses. His mirror neurons simply trigger fear when she fears, dominance when she dominates, and trust when she trusts. This builds pathways that guide him in his quest for good feelings and his avoidance of bad feelings. He begins to interact directly with others, and by the time he’s grown, he’s wired to survive within the social expectations of his troop.
Chimps are not born preprogrammed with necessary survival knowledge. Their mothers invest five years in each child before reproducing again. The survival of the mother’s genes clearly benefits more from the extended nurturing than it would from having another child. But the young chimp’s education is not guided by the mother’s conscious intent. It’s guided by the urge for the good feelings of dopamine, oxytocin, and serotonin, and the urge to avoid the bad feeling of cortisol.
These neurochemicals guide our early learning as well. We learn some things consciously, like long division and punctuation, but we learn a lot from our neurochemical responses. The two strategies often work together because we feel good when we master a skill with conscious intent. We feel bad when we fall short of a goal we consciously pursue. Without our knowing it, the quest to feel good builds circuits that prepare us to meet our needs.
This is most evident when we speak of a person’s “passion.” Consider the child who watches a doctor cure a sick family member and then decides to become a doctor. That child built a big circuit because a life-and-death experience triggers a big neurochemical surge. We are not always aware of the neurochemical origins of our passions. They’re built in childhood with a child’s view of survival. For example, if you got respect from your basket-weaving teacher, the surge of good feeling might motivate you to devote your life to basket weaving. If you grow up watching rock stars get respect, you might long to be a rock star. In adulthood you might realize that your passions do not promote survival, but by then the major highways to your happy chemicals are already built.
People often complain that “we don’t learn from experience,” but we do—it just may not be in the way you imagine. Experiences that are neurochemical or repeated build circuits that endure. Experiences in youth build supercircuits. If you invest a lot of energy seeking approval from people who reject you, that habit probably helped you survive in your youth. If you invest yourself in conflicts with authority figures, you probably got rewards or avoided pain by doing that in your youth. If you have a circuit that gets you into trouble, you can be sure that it got rewards or avoided pain in your past.
By the time you reach adulthood, you have a neural network that tells you what is good for you. It is not the network you’d design today if you started with a blank sheet of paper. It’s the tangle you connected one neuron at a time from the moment your senses began taking in information.
Genes have a role to play. An amazing example is the laboratory mouse that started digging the first time she touched dirt. Her ancestors lived in cages for thirty to sixty generations, but she hit the ground digging, and she dug burrows that were much like those of her wild counterparts. The circuits for this survival behavior seem to be inborn.
But mice brains are different from ours. Their cortex is tiny, which means their ability to learn from experience is tiny. Our cortex is huge because we are designed to fill it with acquired knowledge. We are not meant to run on preloaded programs.
Every creature in nature runs on as few neurons as possible because neurons are metabolically expensive. They consume more oxygen and glucose than an active muscle. It takes so much energy to keep a neuron alive that they make it harder to survive—unless you really get your money’s worth out of them. Natural selection gave humans a gargantuan number of neurons, which means we must use them with gargantuan advantage over inborn knowledge. We are designed to trust the neural networks we’ve built. This is why it’s so hard to ignore them, even when they lead us astray.
Childhood evolved to give a creature time to build its neural networks. The length of a creature’s childhood is directly correlated with the size of its cortex, and a human childhood is by far the longest. Small-brained creatures have short childhoods because their operating system boots up quickly. A mouse is a parent by the time it’s two months old. A giraffe “hits the ground running” because it crashes four feet from the womb to the ground, and in a few weeks it can do almost everything an adult can do. Primates have a very long childhood by comparison. A monkey’s childhood is about three times as long as a gazelle’s. An ape’s childhood is triple that of a monkey. A human childhood triples an ape’s. The more neurons you have to maintain, the longer it takes to connect them in ways that promote survival.
Childhood is metabolically expensive because it reduces the number of offspring a mother can have. But natural selection does not favor shorter childhoods as you might expect. Longer childhoods evolved over time because natural selection rewards survival skills learned from life experience.
Childhood frees an organism from the burden of meeting its needs so it can learn to meet its needs gradually by interacting with its environment. Animals with short periods of early dependency need inborn survival skills, so they can only survive in the ecological niche of their ancestors. They typically die outside that niche. Humans are born ready to adapt to whatever niche they’re born into. But once you build those adaptations, you’re designed to rely on them as if your life depends on it. This is why it’s hard to unlearn a happy-chemical strategy once you’ve learned it.
We don’t usually associate childhood with survival skills. After all, children don’t learn how to get a job with good benefits, or a mate that will impress your friends. We often presume childhood habits have nothing to do with adult life. But early experience tells you how to feel good and avoid feeling bad, and that is the navigation system that pilots a brain through adult challenges. When your boss makes you feel bad, you may want to fight or flee, but your navigation system reminds you that you need support, so you reconcile with your boss. You are always weighing your options with the network of connections built by your life experience.
Sophisticated adults don’t imagine themselves navigating with childhood circuits, but if you examine your likes and dislikes, you will see where they came from. I discovered a curious example in myself when I noticed that I get excited about opportunities to choose colors. Since this is not an obvious survival skill, I tried to make sense of it. Early experiences involving color flooded back to me. When I was twelve, my mother inherited $2,000 (about $15,000 in today’s money). It was a lot of money to my mother, and it came from the father who had abused and abandoned her, so she decided to spend it redecorating. She showed me color swatches and asked my opinion.
This felt good because my mother didn’t respect my opinion very often. The happy chemicals told my brain that this was important survival information. I didn’t consciously say “choosing colors is a way to get respect”; I didn’t need to. The respect simply triggered serotonin, which connected all the neurons active at that moment.
More important, my mother was happy and my mirror neurons took it in. She was not happy often, so this was significant information for my brain. Without a conscious interest in decorating, I wired myself to expect more good feeling in this particular way. Of all the ways to feel good in the world, the ones you’ve already connected are the ones that get your attention.
Curiously, my brain had already been primed for this information. When I was in elementary school, my mother gave me a lot of paint-by-number kits. I also made art by gluing mosaic tiles and colored pebbles in the manner popular in the early 1960s. These crafts gave me a feeling of accomplishment and helped me focus on something other than the unpleasantness around me. Repetition and emotion trained my brain to sift and sort colors and feel good about it. Though picking colors is not an important survival skill, my happy chemicals were wired by my unique experience. Of course, I had many other experiences, and together they tell me where to expect rewards and where to expect pain.
When I was in high school, I wanted to be an interior decorator when I grew up. Then I got to college and learned that materialism is bad, and “girl jobs” are bad. Saving the world is good, I learned, so I dropped the decorating idea fast. I thought I had become a better person, but now I know I was just mirroring my professors the way I had mirrored my mother.
When I got an apartment, I started decorating it. I moved a lot in my twenties, and each time, the joy of decorating a new place eased the pain of starting over. When I finally put down roots, I had a curious urge to redecorate again and again. After a while, I realized that another remodeling project would not really meet my needs. So I set out to understand the urge instead of acting on it. I traced the links between one experience and another until the connections made sense. Then I realized that my happy-chemical pathways are just accidents rather than eternal truths. My brain connected decorating to survival because it connected my mother to survival.
When I figured this out, I looked at color in a new way—as a tool I could use to add pleasure to my work. I enjoy adding color to my website, my slide presentations, my meals, and my clothing. I allow myself to linger over details I’m wired to enjoy. I make good use of the happy-chemical infrastructure I have, which activates my happy chemicals without redecorating. I redirect my circuits toward today’s needs instead of the needs of my past.
We all end up with quirky circuits like mine because we build on the connections that are already there. Our happy chemicals pathways feel important so it’s hard to realize that they are just accidents. Anything that turns on your happy chemicals feels precious, which can lead to behaviors that are hard to make sense of. It can even lead to behaviors that are destructive. Though you can’t just delete an old circuit, you can connect it in new ways that are better suited to your present reality. It won’t happen effortlessly the way it did when you were young. But repetition and emotion can make it happen.
A mammal’s survival depends on social skills as much as physical skills. Small brains are born with the social skills they need, while big brains build social skills from repetition and emotion.
Social skills are essential to reproductive success. Though reproduction is not your definition of success, it’s what mattered in the world our brains evolved in. The skills involved in reproductive success vary for males and females:
The male and female strategies overlap, of course, and evolution tends to increase the overlap.
For both genders, getting respect from your peers promotes survival. Monkey studies show that individuals with more social alliances have more mating opportunities and more surviving offspring. So it’s not surprising that the brain built by natural selection seeks social trust by rewarding it with a good feeling. A young mammal builds social skills without effort or intent as it seeks ways to feel good and avoid feeling bad. Children build social skills without insight into their long-term needs. A child seeks social support to meet immediate needs, and when it succeeds, happy chemicals flow. That paves expectations about future social support.
Anything that works gets wired in, even behaviors that could be counterproductive in the long run. If a bad behavior gets a reward, a young brain tags that behavior as useful for survival. If a child gets support when he is aggressive, and the support disappears when he’s cooperative, a brain can easily learn that aggression is a good survival strategy. If a child gets rewarded when she’s sick, and she loses rewards as she gets well, lasting links get built. Your brain doesn’t learn from parenting experts and etiquette manuals. It learns from neurochemical ups and downs. Each time you felt rewarded or threatened, you added to the infrastructure that tells you where to expect respect, acceptance, and trust in the future.
Adolescence added a layer to your infrastructure. Whatever won respect or attention in your teen years developed big fat circuits because you experience more myelination then. Likewise, any threats to your respect and attention during these myelin years made a lasting impression. Any success at building social alliances built a pathway, and any threats to your social alliances built a pathway too.
Your social circuits are richly interconnected with your other circuits. Social learning even affects basic physiological functions like walking, eating, and even breathing. For example, an infant learns to regulate his breathing when he’s held against his mother’s chest and he feels her breathe. A newborn lacks a fully developed breathing response, so even breathing requires social support to develop properly.
Self-management is also affected by social learning. Children learn to manage their neurochemistry when they experience the responses of those around them. Adolescence adds a layer of self-management circuits, as we experience new social rewards, new social pain, and new social influences. These circuits shape our responses in the present, whether or not we remember the experiences that created them.
List early experiences of happiness and unhappiness, and notice the circuits they paved:
List early experiences that were repeated often and notice the circuits they paved:
Most adults end up with some circuits they’d rather not have. And most people wish they could have more happy chemicals with fewer side effects. You cannot build new circuits in the effortless way it happened the first time. But you can build them with repetition and emotion.
Emotion is a Catch-22. Anything that feels good now will have side effects later. Good feelings exist because of their side effects, thanks to natural selection. So the quest to feel good does not always lead to survival improvements. It can lead to weight gain when you quit smoking, or a new phobia when you conquer an old phobia. Emotion works fast, but it brings trouble.
Repetition works slowly, but it can build behaviors with fewer side effects. If you expose yourself to something over and over, it can “grow on you.” You can come to like things that are good for you even though you don’t like them instantly.
But who wants to repeat something over and over if it doesn’t feel good? Usually, people don’t, especially when they’re already feeling bad. This is why we rely on the circuits built by accidents of experience. Your accidents will shape you unless you start repeating things by choice.
Alas, repetition can be harder than you expect. It feels boring, in common parlance, to do things that don’t feel connected to your immediate needs. Without emotion to flag a behavior as “good for you,” your brain tends to dismiss it as unimportant. Without happy chemicals to spark the action, a new pathway is hard to fire. But you can do it anyway.
Here’s a simple example. Fred wants to control his alcohol use. He decides to substitute a new pleasure with fewer side effects. He looks around for something that can grow on him, and remembers how he enjoyed sketching when he was young. He resolves to take out his sketchpad every time he feels like drinking. The goal is not to be good at sketching but to be good at shifting his attention elsewhere when he thinks of drinking. Of course, Fred doesn’t feel like sketching when he longs for a drink. In fact, he feels bad as he sketches and thinks about what he’s missing. But he resolves to live with the bad feelings for a while. He plans to do this for two months because he has a big event on the calendar then.
At first, he hates his sketches and he hates the feeling of denying himself a drink. But he sticks to his plan whether or not it feels good immediately. After a while, his sketching time starts to feel like a gift rather than a burden. Fred learns that the unhappy feelings soon pass. Best of all, he discovers the joy of being alert and responsible. Before the two months are over, he stops looking at the calendar. His sketching circuit has grown big enough to compete with his alcohol circuit. Now he knows how to feel good without a drink. He knows it physically as well as cognitively. Sketching was simply a way to do something once his “do something” feeling started flowing. Fred is so pleased with his remodel that he can’t wait to build another new circuit.
You can train your brain to feel good in new ways. Start by designing the new circuit you’d like to have. It may take a little trial and error to find the new habit that works for you with minimum side effects. Consider Louise, who wants a new job but can’t get herself to push through a sustained job search. She feels bad about her career prospects and escapes those bad feelings with a variety of habits. She decides to break the vicious cycle by learning to feel good about the act of job-hunting. She sets the goal of applying to two jobs a day and developing her career skills for two hours a day.
On Day One, she meets her goal, but feels curiously awful. She eats an ice cream to escape the awful feeling, but finds herself craving another ice cream. The next day, she looks for a different way to feel good. She calls a friend after completing her task, but finds that talking about her career doesn’t really make her feel better. On Day Three, it’s dark by the time her career advancement work is over, and she decides to celebrate with a night on the town. The next morning, it’s hard to get started. She thinks of all the disappointment she’s endured and all the things she’d rather be doing. She decides to remove herself from temptation by going to a coffee shop while she works on her applications. By the time she finishes the coffee, she’s in the middle of her second application. It seems to just flow. The next day, she heads for a coffee and brims with career-speak. The following day, she finds herself actually looking forward to her coffee-plus-accomplishment routine, and by the next week she has figured out how to make luscious coffee drinks at home. When six weeks have gone by, she’s under consideration for a number of jobs, has a wealth of interview experience, and new confidence in her skills. Most important, she has experienced good feelings, which wired her to expect more good feelings when she thinks about doing more.
The point is not that coffee solves problems. The point is that inertia is hard to overcome. A habit that will feel good later is hard to start now. Louise and Fred found a way to trigger positive expectations without harmful side effects. With trial and error, you can find a habit that works for you.
Every brain is different. Some people would have a whole pot of coffee and never push the submit button on those job applications. Some people would love sketching but spill wine all over their sketchpad. You can experiment with alternatives before you commit for forty-five days. But if you keep starting over, your new habit will never build. After a few test runs, you need to keep repeating your new habit whether or not it feels good.