We are lucky to live in a time when our brain is increasingly well understood. You can learn to turn on your happy chemicals in new ways. No one can do this for you and you cannot do it for someone else. This chapter outlines specific suggestions for new roads to dopamine happiness, endorphin happiness, oxytocin happiness, and serotonin happiness. The abundance of choices will help you find a path you can believe in. Then you can wire it into your brain by repeating it for forty-five days without fail. Once you’ve built a new habit, you will be so pleased with your power over your brain that you will want to build another.
You have some success every day, so commit to finding it and say, “I did it!” You will not conduct a symphony at Carnegie Hall every day. You will not lead starving hordes into the Promised Land every day. Adjust your expectations so you can be pleased with something you actually do. This doesn’t mean you are lowering your expectations, or “full of yourself” or losing touch with reality. It means you are lingering on your gains the way you already linger on your losses.
Celebrating small steps triggers more dopamine than saving it up for one big achievement. Big accomplishments don’t make you happy forever, so if you always tie happiness to a far-off goal, you may end up frustrated. Instead, learn to be happy with your progress. You will not be celebrating with champagne and caviar each day. You will be giving yourself permission to have a feeling of accomplishment. This feeling is better than external rewards. It’s free, it has no calories, and it doesn’t impair your driving. You have a small victory every day. Why not enjoy it?
Do not undermine your good feeling by apologizing to yourself for the triviality of the accomplishment. Just enjoy the split second of triumph and move on. It’s just a spark, but if you ignite it every day, you will be your own best spark plug.
At first, it might feel silly to look for reasons to pat yourself on the back, and the reasons you come up with might make you uncomfortable. Still, commit to doing this whether or not it feels good. You can decide to be worthy of your own applause and enjoy the feeling, even if just for a split second. If it feels fake or forced, that’s normal, because the circuits that berate your accomplishments feel strong and true.
Celebrating small accomplishments is a valuable skill, because big things come from many small steps. You won’t take those steps if you are just running on the fumes of the last big thing.
Finally, your daily triumph will feel better if it doesn’t depend on one-upping someone. If you have to win in ways that make someone lose, you limit yourself and end up with side effects. You can celebrate what you are creating instead of just who you are defeating.
It doesn’t take much time or money to step toward a goal. Just commit ten minutes a day and you will feel momentum instead of feeling stuck. Ten minutes is not enough to move mountains, but it’s enough to approach the mountain and see it accurately. Instead of dreaming about your goal from afar, you can gather the information you need to plan realistically. Your goals might change as your information grows. You might even learn that your fantasy goal would not make you happy. Those ten-minute investments can free you from unnecessary regret and help you find a hill you can actually climb. Your ten-minute efforts can define manageable steps so you’re not just waiting for huge leaps that never come.
Spend your time on concrete action. Don’t spend it fantasizing about quitting your day job or pressuring others to help you. It’s not their goal. Dig into practical realities instead. Do this faithfully for forty-five days and you will have the habit of moving forward.
If you think you can’t spare ten minutes a day, consider the time you already spend dreaming of what you’d rather be doing. You can use that time to research the necessary steps. You will get a dopamine feeling each day as those steps come into view. You will start to expect that dopamine feeling and look forward to it. You will learn to feel that it’s possible to transform a dream into reality with steady effort.
When your ten minutes is over, go back to living in the present. Do not make a habit of focusing constantly on the future.
Everyone has a dreaded task they’d rather forget about. It might be the mess inside your closets or the mess inside an important relationship. Commit to spending ten minutes a day on your dreaded task. You don’t need to have the solution when you start, only the willingness to keep stepping.
You may think it’s impossible to clean out closets or renegotiate relationships in ten-minute chunks. But if you wait for grand solutions, you will languish for quite a long time. Instead, go to that closet, pull out one chunk of mess, and sort it out for ten minutes. Go to that yucky relationship riddled with disappointment and plant goodwill for ten minutes. Don’t let a day go by without tackling another chunk. Keep it up for forty-five days and you will be comfortable tackling the annoyances that stand in the way of making your life better. Of course, you can’t control other people the way you can control the contents of your closet. But you will replace a bad feeling with a good feeling if you keep trying. And you will keep trying because your positive expectations trigger dopamine.
Your dreaded task may miraculously resolve itself in less than forty-five days! If so, don’t stop. Find another painful mess so you keep going for forty-five more days. That’s what builds the habit of facing tough challenges in small increments instead of being intimidated by them. Remember to feel good about what you’ve done each day. Soon, you’ll have the habit of tackling obstacles and feeling rewarded by it.
Good feelings flow when the level of challenge you face is “just right.” If a basketball hoop is too low, you get no pleasure from scoring points. If it’s too high, you have no reason to try. Effort is fun when you expect a reward for your effort but it’s not certain. You can adjust the hoops in your life and make things fun.
For forty-five days, experiment with lowering the bar in areas where you have set yourself impossible goals and raising the bar in places where you’ve set it so low that you feel no reward. If you feel you have no choice between frozen dinners and gourmet banquets, define a moderate cooking goal and start your forty-five days now. If you feel you have no choice between sitting on the couch and walking the red carpet, try going out in a middle-of-the-road way, and then try another way.
Make a list of remodeling projects that can work for you in each of the following categories:
Laughing stimulates endorphin as it spontaneously convulses your innards. Find out what makes you laugh, and make time for it. A big ha-ha laugh is necessary to trigger endorphin—sneering at people you disdain doesn’t do it. Nor does laughing on the outside, although that might prime the pump. It can be hard to find what triggers your laughs, but you can commit to keep sampling comedy until you get your daily laugh.
Laughter is a release of fear. Imagine laughing with relief after a close call with a snake. Social risks are more common than predator risk in modern life, and we often fear expressing a socially unacceptable emotion. Social shunning is a real survival threat in the state of nature, so we are wired to take these things seriously. Comedians often express socially risky feelings. When they survive, the part of you that fears shunning laughs with relief. You can think of laughing as creating safety instead of thinking it’s frivolous.
You can enjoy more relief if you put it at the top of your priority list for forty-five days. Don’t give up if it takes a bit of trial and error. I often think jokes are “not funny,” but I have found a local improv troop that always seems hilarious to me. So I make time for it, a lot.
Crying releases endorphin because of the physical exertion. I do not suggest making a habit of crying—it comes with a lot of cortisol too. But most adults habitually squelch the urge to cry, and that creates tension. Unsquelching relieves the tension. A few minutes of crying can relieve a bad feeling that you’ve squelched for years.
You can’t cry on cue, nor should you make a goal of crying. But for forty-five days, you can make space to cry if the urge arises. The important step is to notice tension in your chest, back, abdomen, and throat when you are resisting the urge to cry. This tension will loosen when you pay attention to it. Unpleasant memories or sensations may also come up when you lower your guard. Sometimes it’s useful information, and sometimes it’s an old response that you’ve held in for years. If you feel like crying, don’t block it with the idea that it’s weak and foolish. The unpleasantness of the moment will pass and the nice loosening will remain.
It bears repeating that a crying habit is not the goal. The daily goal is to notice the tension between your crying reflex and your don’t-be-a-crybaby reflex. For forty-five days, you can commit to accepting this tension instead of running from it. The feeling may be so familiar that it’s hard to notice. Watching sad movies may activate that circuit for you. Other people’s tragedies trigger your mirror neurons, and a stranger’s threatened feelings may be easier to accept at first than your own.
Crying is our chief survival skill at birth, but over time we learn that crying can leave us worse off. We learn alternatives, but sometimes nothing works and you run out of alternatives. Cortisol keeps surging and you feel like a trapped animal. Your cortex can distract you away from this feeling, but your muscles may keep armoring you with trapped-animal tension. You can wear out your squelching muscles like any other overused body part. Crying can be physical therapy for a tensed-up diaphragm.
Varying your exercise routine is a good way to trigger endorphin. It takes strain to trigger endorphin, and if you keep straining the same place, you risk injury. If you work new places with new exercise, moderate exertion can stimulate endorphin.
Your body has three layers of muscles. When you vary your exercise, you give the neglected, constricted layers more attention. Since they’re weak, they have to work harder, so you stimulate development where it’s needed instead of going overboard on the parts you overuse. Chasing an endorphin high is not worth the risk of wearing out a part and needing a parts replacement. Variety is a great alternative.
If you’re a person who doesn’t exercise at all, everything you do will be something different. If you’re already athletic, you may hate the uncoordinated feeling you get when you try something new. You may see it as a setback, when it’s actually strengthening your weakest link. Free yourself from performance anxiety for forty-five days. You may like it so much that you want to try another variation for another forty-five days.
Endorphin is also stimulated when you stretch. Everyone can add stretching to their daily routine, because you can do it while you’re watching TV, waiting in line, or talking on the phone. Mild stretching brings circulation into constricted areas. Stop before you feel pain. Just because a little is good doesn’t mean a lot is better. If you stretch every day for forty-five days, you will come to enjoy it so much that you will look forward to doing it every day.
Stretching is not just about arms and legs. Sample classes that introduce deeper stretches without hurting yourself. The point is not to push harder on the usual spots but to stretch spots you didn’t know you had, such as the muscles between your ribs. Don’t forget to stretch your toes, fingers, and even ears.
Slow movement is an essential variation on this theme. Tai chi and Qi Gong are so slow that you may think they’re not real exercise. But super-slow movement is more of a workout than it seems. It forces you to use muscles evenly, activating the weaker muscles instead of letting the dominant ones take over. Commit to doing something that doesn’t look like “real exercise” for forty-five days, and you will feel the difference.
Consider switching to a fun exercise for forty-five days. An exercise that triggers your happy chemicals helps motivate you toward more vigorous exertion. There are endless ways to make exercise fun. I took a waltzing class and was amazed at how hard I worked. Many people make exercise a social activity, from team sports to chatty hikes. It’s fun to exercise with music or an enjoyable audio book. Novelty also makes things fun: My yoga teacher makes the class completely different every week. Biking or hiking to new destinations is stimulating. Finally, gardening has an extrinsic reward, which motivates many people to keep exerting. Adding fun to exercise can help you persist.
Make a list of remodeling projects that can work for you in each of the following categories:
Social trust is hard to create, so people often use proxies. Animals, crowds, and digital friends are proxies that can stimulate good feelings of social trust without the complications of human bonds. The oxytocin is less than with live personal contact, of course. But proxies can expand the foundation for future trust.
Proxy trust is comfortable because there’s less risk of disappointment. Animals don’t betray you, large crowds don’t judge you, and digital friends are always available. Direct human trust always comes with the risk of disappointed expectations and feelings of betrayal. Those bad feelings built circuits that fire when you think about trusting again. Your neurochemical alarm bells ring and your brain presumes there’s a good reason. But if you give up on direct interpersonal trust, your brain feels that something is missing. And it is: Oxytocin is missing.
Start with small steps that don’t trip your alarm. Every time you feel good about an animal, a crowd, or a digital relationship, tell yourself “I am creating this good feeling.” It may sound silly or self-centered, but knowing that you are creating it gives it a chance to grow. There will always be reasons for distrust to grow, so a source of balance is precious.
Notice your trusting feelings from any source for forty-five days, and you will build a foundation that can ignite more.
Maybe there’s someone you want to trust, but you can’t bridge the divide. It’s good to know you can build trust with a long series of very small interactions. Individuals or groups with an unfortunate history cannot always wipe the slate clean all at once. Intermediate steps build trust gradually. The stepping stones can be placed so close together that neither party risks a big betrayal. Each step need only create positive expectations about the next step rather than resolve the whole problem. Each small experience of trust stimulates the good feeling of oxytocin, which connects neurons that help trigger more.
Divorce lawyers use this strategy to help a couple reach agreement. You might try it with that person who is “ruining your life.” Initiate a very small interaction, and if that proceeds without disaster, do it again. The goal is not to trust blindly and get disappointed. The goal is to build positive expectations.
Coexisting without trust is bad, but getting burned again is worse. So instead of taking a leap of faith with that crazy neighbor or the coworker who stabbed you in the back, you can find steps that are comfortable. For forty-five days, craft reciprocal exchanges that build stepping stones toward trust with difficult people. You can’t predict the results since you can’t control others. But you will expand your sense of control over the trust bonds in your life. This is hard work, and it may not feel good in the short run. But in the long run, it builds confidence that you can do something about those thorns in your side.
You might start by just making eye contact with that person who’s making your life difficult. The next day, you could comment on the weather, and add a smile the day after that. It could take a week to build up to a shared chuckle about traffic, and even that may stir up bad feelings that are curiously strong. But you will continue making neutral contact—neither venting anger nor rushing to please. In forty-five days, you will have built a new shared foundation. You may always need to limit your trust in this person, but you will be able to relax in his presence the way gazelles relax in a world full of lions.
Oxytocin works both ways. When other people trust you, it feels good whether or not you trust them. You can enjoy more oxytocin by creating opportunities for people to trust you.
Handle this strategy with care—you do not want to be the rescuer of everyone you know forty-five days from now. Your goal is simply to feel the pleasure of another person’s trust for a moment each day. Of course, you can’t force other people to trust you, and it may take more than a moment to extend yourself in ways that build trust. Do not spend a lot of time seeking approval. Simply honor your commitments, and then pause to enjoy being a person who honors her commitments. It may sound self-important, but the circuit it builds is the foundation of future trust. So plan to honor your commitments scrupulously for forty-five days.
You can practice the old adage “trust, but verify.” Monitor results. Count your change. Check up on people. That may sound harsh, but verifying makes it possible to develop trust with strangers. If you’re too nice to verify, you get stuck inside the safe harbor of people you already trust.
To venture beyond, you have to interact with people whose trustworthiness is unknown. By trusting and verifying, new trust can grow. If you do it for forty-five days, you can’t predict what others will do, but you can build confidence in your ability to extend your trust circle. Instead of being confined to the niche where you can trust everyone, you have a tool for taking controlled risks.
Do not grow your circle by trusting people who are not trustworthy. The goal is not to trust as an end in itself, but to gather information about good places to trust. You succeed whether or not the other person shortchanges you, because you build trust in your own verification plan. Celebrate that each day, whether your trust is rewarded or disappointed.
Natural selection rewarded those who fanned out from familiar turf. In the animal world, young males are often ousted from their natal groups, or they leave on their own initiative because they’re excluded from mating opportunities. They experience huge cortisol stress when they leave their trust networks for parts unknown, according to excretory samples taken in the wild. This stress intensifies when a new troop rejects them. But the seekers don’t give up. They keep trying to build trust bonds, because it feels great when they succeed.
Massage stimulates oxytocin. You don’t have to spend a lot of money to have a daily massage. Here are some other options:
Once you create the habit of stimulating your oxytocin in this way, it’s a pleasure you will always have available.
Make a list of remodeling projects that can work for you in each of the following categories:
Pride is complicated. Applause-seeking can have bad side effects, but when you get no recognition from others, something feels wrong. You could applaud yourself, but the brain is not easily tricked by hollow self-respect. It wants respect from others because that has survival value. Alas, there is no guaranteed safe way to get this serotonin boost. Social recognition is unpredictable and fleeting. But you can stimulate your serotonin without being “a jerk.” Simply express pride in something you’ve done once a day.
Pride is a rudder that helps you navigate opportunities to get social recognition. It helps you steer between the opposite extremes of constant approval-seeking and cynical dejection.
Taking pride in yourself means more than just thinking it silently. It means daring to say, “Look what I did!” to another living soul. Asking others to respect your accomplishment is risky because you may be disappointed. People often protect themselves by insisting that social respect doesn’t matter or that it’s hopelessly unfair. But these rationales don’t soothe the mammal brain’s longing for the sense of security that social respect brings.
So for forty-five days, say “look what I did” to someone else once a day. You will expect a positive reaction, and if you don’t get it, you will learn that it doesn’t kill you. The next day you will crow with positive expectations again. It’s hard to overcome negative expectations. It’s natural to have concerns about the “right” way to crow. But if you keep trying for forty-five days, you will wire in the feeling of social respect.
Many of the people we admire today got little respect while they were alive, but they kept working anyway. Do not assume that people who accomplish things have a perpetual cheering squad. It would be nice if that adulation just came to you, but keep going if it doesn’t.
Ironically, people who get public adulation often complain about it. They feel trapped, longing to do something different, but fearful of losing the applause they have.
Whether you get a lot of social regard or a little, your brain will keep longing for it. That’s what your mammal brain does. And that’s why you need the skill of taking pride in your own accomplishments instead of waiting around for applause.
If you focus on your shortcomings, you tend to overlook any applause you already have. You may be getting quiet respect that is not expressed as audible applause. That’s why it’s useful to expect appreciation once a day, even if you have to force yourself. It allows you to take in what is already there.
Believe it or not, your social position changes constantly. One minute you feel like you’re in the subordinate position and the next minute you find yourself in the dominant position in relation to those you focus on. You hate the subordinate position, but when you’re dominant, that frustrates you too. You can learn to enjoy the advantages of wherever you are instead of focusing on the frustrations.
You may think equality would make you happy, but the closer you get to it, the more your brain finds tiny differences to dwell on. When mammals gather, each brain seeks the good feeling of being dominant. You can easily see this in others, but when your brain does it, it feels like you’re just seeking what you deserve. Your inner mammal will constantly find ways that you have been undervalued and this can make you miserable even in a rather good life. You will be much happier if you relax and enjoy wherever you find yourself.
You have built expectations about social rivalry from your past experience. The frustrations and disappointments of your past built circuits that make it easy for you to feel bad about being in the one-down position and bad about being in the one-up position. You could spend your whole life longing for the position you’re not in. Or you could build up the circuits that find the good in what you have:
For forty-five days, notice your status frustrations and remind yourself of the hidden advantages of wherever you are. Your status will always be going up and down in small ways. Your mammal brain will always keep track of it, as much as you wish it wouldn’t. If you fret over your position, the fretting will never end. You can focus on the positives instead. Once you create this thought habit, you will always have a way to make peace with your mammal brain.
Many people try to raise their status by looking for the bad in others. They feel good about themselves in comparison, but they pay a high price for this serotonin boost. It surrounds them with bad will. You can make a small change that stimulates your serotonin without the harmful side effect. Simply enjoy your influence on others. Without criticizing or controlling, you can notice when others mirror your good example. Don’t expect credit or even a thank you. Just quietly enjoy.
This may sound arrogant, but every mammal brain longs for social significance. Everyone wants to have an impact on the world and fears dying without a trace. If you don’t meet the need in healthy ways, you will be tempted to meet it in ways that hurt. Some people cause harm intentionally just to feel their impact. There is an alternative: Value the impact you already have.
Right this minute, people may be respecting you behind your back. If your antennae are busy looking for disrespect, you won’t know it. People may be secretly admiring you, and instead of enjoying it, you may be anticipating criticism from them. If so, you’re wasting that potential serotonin boost.
Stop once a day to appreciate your good effect on others. Don’t call attention to it or say “I told you so.” Simply look for your subtle influence and feel satisfied. If you do this for forty-five days, you will feel satisfied by your ability to influence the world and you will feel less frustrated by other people’s flaws and neglect. You will have a mental pathway to feel good about your social importance.
Parents often bemoan their lack of influence over their children. If they knew how much they really do influence their kids in the long run, they would pay more attention to the example they set.
Your brain looks for things you can control and feels good when you’re in charge. But our control is often limited and unpredictable, so frustration percolates. You can learn to feel comfortable with your limited control. That doesn’t mean being out of control or giving up. It means feeling safe when you’re not in charge.
To build this new circuit, notice your usual strategy for feeling “on top of things,” and do the opposite. For example, if you are a person who tries to bake the perfect soufflé, spend forty-five days cooking without recipes. Conversely, if you are a person who likes to just throw things into a pot, spend forty-five days following recipes.
If you are a person who likes everything neat, let junk pile up for six weeks. But if you are a person who hates order and loves chaos, put things away as soon as you use them for six weeks. Color outside the lines if that’s new for you, but if you already pride yourself on that, courageously stay inside the lines. It might feel awful on Day One, but forty-four days later it will feel curiously safe.
Getting rid of the clock is a great way to experiment with control, because you can’t control time. We all have habits for managing the harsh reality of time. For some it’s chronic lateness and for others it’s constant clock-checking. You may think you can’t change your relationship with time, but here are three great ways to ignore the clock and make friends with the passage of time:
No matter how busy you are, you can find a way to relax your efforts to control time. You may be surprised at the bad feelings that come up, despite your abiding wish to escape time pressure. The bad feelings won’t kill you, however, and accepting them helps you accept the harsh realities of time.
Your mammal brain feels good about things it can control. Some people break traffic laws to enjoy a sense of control, while others feel their power by scolding those who break traffic laws. Whatever gives you a sense of power won’t work all the time, however. You will end up feeling weak and unimportant some of the time. That triggers cortisol, but you can learn to feel safe when you are not in control.
For forty-five days, give up control instead of trying to control the world in your accustomed ways. Don’t quit your day job to beg with a rice bowl. Just stop checking the weather report, buying lottery tickets, and expecting the world to work according to your rules. Choose one habit you have for feeling in control, and do without it. If you can’t give up your control ritual completely, commit to giving it up for a certain time each day. You will learn to feel safe in the world despite your inability to control it.
Make a list of remodeling projects that can work for you in each of the following categories:
If you were planning a trip to the Amazon, you’d have to choose between interesting places far from paved roads and destinations that are easily accessible. The exotic locales would entice you, but when you saw what it took to get there, you might gravitate toward the beaten path.
It’s the same with your jungle of neurons. New goals sound great, but once you start slogging toward them, well-paved neural highways may tempt you. You can build a new highway if you slog for forty-five days. Exciting destinations will become accessible, so your old roads will be less tempting.
To establish a new trail through your jungle of neurons, you must repeat a new behavior every day. Otherwise, the undergrowth will return and your next pass will be just as hard as the first. Spark your new trail each day whether or not you feel like it, and you will eventually pass it with ease. You may not get the highs of your old happy habit, but you will learn to feel good without artificial highs and their inevitable side effects. You will be so pleased with your new habit that you will want to build another, and another.
It bears repeating that you will not be happy on Day One. Maintain realistic expectations. Nibbling on carrot sticks will not feel as good as licking an ice cream cone on Day One, and it may not seem that this could change with repetition. Doing homework will not feel as good as watching a movie on Day One, and it’s hard to imagine that changing either. Stick to your plan and you will connect carrot sticks or studying to your happy chemicals. You can feel good when you do what’s good for you.
I stumbled on the power of repetition when I noticed that certain music made me happy. I don’t mean music I actually like. I don’t mean memories-of-the-beach music. I mean music that was forced on me by accidents of experience. When I was young, my ears were often filled with sounds chosen by my brother, my father, my boss at work, and the cafeteria I ate in. Today, when one of these songs reaches my ears, I feel strangely happy, even though I didn’t like it at the time. This mystified me until I read a book called Flow, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. It explained that music gives pleasure because your mind keeps predicting what comes next. Each correct prediction triggers dopamine. You can’t make good predictions for unfamiliar music, so you don’t get the dopamine. But when music is too familiar, something strange happens. You don’t get the dopamine either because your brain predicts it effortlessly. To make you happy, music must be at the sweet spot of novelty and familiarity.
The music that makes you happy today will eventually fail to make you happy, because it will become too familiar. At the same time, music that doesn’t make you happy today can make you happy in the future. If you want to stay happy, it seems you have to expose yourself to unfamiliar music now, so it will be in the sweet spot by the time you’ve worn out your old pleasures. This was a revelation to me. It explains why happiness is elusive despite our best efforts. And it shows how the counterintuitive choice to repeat things we don’t already like can bring great rewards. We talk about “good music” and “bad music” as if the quality is inherent in the music. We overlook the power of the circuits we bring to that music. Your pleasures are shaped by circuits you built without knowing it. It’s natural to presume the things you like are somehow special and the things you don’t like are somehow lacking. But you can learn to shape your circuits in ways that expand good feelings.
The first step is a willingness to do things that don’t feel good at first. This is difficult because your brain usually trusts its own reactions. You don’t usually listen to music you dislike on the assumption that you’ll grow to like it. You don’t befriend a person you dislike or join an activity you’re bad at on the assumption that something will change. It’s natural to trust your current likes and dislikes. But now you know that they’re based on accidents of experience rather than complete information. Your accidental circuits cause the threatened feeling you get when you depart from the road you know. If you avoid the threatened feeling by sticking to the old road, you miss out on a universe of potential happiness. You can learn to enjoy the challenge of embarking on a new road.
With so many choices and so many neurons, you can build a lot of new pathways to your happy chemicals. But you only have a limited amount of time and energy. If you spread it everywhere, a new road may not get built. So choose one remodeling project to start with. Commit to repeating it for forty-five days whether or not you feel like it. If you miss a day, start over with Day One.
Commitments to yourself can be difficult to enforce. For example, I made the commitment to bring reusable bags with me when I buy food, but I kept forgetting them. So I added the commitment to go back to my car and get them if I forgot. The next time I found myself at the supermarket without the bags, I thought “I’m too busy to go back to the car.” Then I realized that I will always be busy, and I am a powerless person if I can’t even honor a commitment to myself. So I went back to the car to get the bags, and I never forgot them again because I didn’t want to waste time going back to my car.
You will not want to waste time starting over with Day One. You will want to honor your commitments to yourself and thus enjoy a new happy habit. The following chapters lead you through a series of commitments to your first remodeling project. After that, you will love your new power over your brain, and find many ways to use it.