Your brain is equipped with many circuit-building tools. You can rely on these built-in tools when the going gets tough. When you feel like something is wrong even though you know you’re doing right, these tools are with you. Following are descriptions of the trail-blazing tools that will help you stay on your new path until it gets established. Think of ways you can commit to them when you’re tempted by the comfort of your old path.
Mirror people who already have the habits you want. Find someone with a habit you’d like to create, and watch them. Your mirror neurons will light up and spark your circuits. This is a great way to overcome the inertia of those virgin neurons.
Modeling others can be awkward, but the world is full of people who have the behavior you need. Maybe they’d love to show you. If not, you can mirror without telling them. They may not even be consciously aware of their habit anyway.
The person you are mirroring may surprise you by having bad habits too! Remember that mirroring is a surgical tool: you only use it in small, specific ways. You don’t substitute another person’s judgment for your own. You just model the behavior you aspire to for reasons of your own.
Your brain wants all four of the happy chemicals. You are probably better at some than others, and it’s tempting to choose a remodeling project in the area you’re already good at. That may be good for your first circuit-building project, but after that, give your brain the happy chemical it is missing. You may have to enter unknown territory to do that, but the risk will bring great rewards. For example:
When you depend on one happy chemical more than others, you don’t know what’s missing because you equate happiness with the kind you already have. So try a project from each of the four happy chemicals. It’s not easy, but your brain will thank you.
Balancing your neurochemistry is not the same as “work-life balance.” It’s true that spending too much time at work can lead to neglect of other needs. But if you leave work to run the same circuits in your free time, neurochemical balance will not happen. If you manage your home the way you manage your work, free time won’t make you happier. It’s like a vegetarian trying to balance with a new vegetable, or an athlete balancing with a new sport. You keep seeking rewards in familiar places until you discover new places.
The good news is that a little bit of the missing neurochemical goes a long way. You don’t need to make huge changes to feel big results. Your brain rewards you for taking the neural road-not-taken. But it won’t release the new happy chemical immediately. You have to invest the time it takes to build the infrastructure.
You can graft a new branch onto the roots of a happy circuit you’ve already developed. When old people reconnect with high-school sweethearts, they are grafting new circuits onto old roots. Returning to a hobby you loved as a child or building a hobby into a career are other well-known grafting successes. Adding branches to an existing tree is a good way to overcome the difficulty of building brand-new happy circuits.
When I retired from academia, I began judging science fairs. I love this new limb on my old trunk. I meet kids that I deeply respect, and they are thrilled to have professional attention given to their work. I’ve also learned to use my love of color to make difficult things fun. When I work on a slide presentation or my newsletter, I enjoy designing the colors. It may seem trivial, but a pinch of spice is all it takes to enhance a dish.
Grafting is also a good way to balance your neurochemicals. You can spark the happy chemical that’s difficult for you by grafting onto an activity you love. If you love photography, for example, you are stimulating dopamine when you seek and find a particular shot. You can also stimulate oxytocin if you share the images with others, and serotonin by entering your pictures in exhibitions. If you’re a person who loves parties, you are already stimulating oxytocin. You can stimulate dopamine by planning parties, and serotonin by organizing fundraisers. New happy-chemical pathways are easier to spark when you build on existing roots.
Your brain only has a limited amount of energy. You can enhance it with exercise, sleep, and good nutrition, but it will still be limited. New behaviors consume more energy than you expect. When you commit to a forty-five day rewiring project, you commit to making that energy available. If you run out of energy before meeting your daily commitment, you will find reasons to ditch it. So make your new habit the top-priority use of your energy for forty-five days, even if you have to relax another priority.
One way to ensure energy is to schedule your new habit first thing in the morning. If that’s impossible, do something fun right before your challenging new behavior or right after. Watch a rerun of your favorite TV show in the middle of the day if that’s what it takes. Activating new neurons takes more energy that you realize, and some planning is needed to make that energy available.
Mental energy is a lot like physical energy. It depends on glucose, and it takes time to restore once depleted. You easily succumb to temptations when your mental energy is depleted. Some experts advise eating sugar to boost your mental energy. This is obviously a flawed long-term strategy, even though it helps to bring a candy bar into a life-changing exam for a short-term boost. A glucose-spiking habit will literally hurt your survival, even though it creates the illusion of strength for a moment. You need other ways to sustain your mental energy for forty-five days.
Anything connected to your DNA triggers happy chemicals. For most of human history, children came unplanned, and grandchildren came if you survived to your forties. Whatever enhanced their survival prospects made you happy. Things have changed, and alternative ways to feel your legacy are being explored. Some people research their ancestry, and others make an effort to preserve family traditions. You don’t consciously connect this to your genes, but your happy chemicals turn on when you promote the survival of your unique individual essence. Even if you just buy pizza for a niece or nephew, it feeds your inner mammal’s interest in the survival of your genes. You may say genes don’t matter, but your brain has a curious way of perking up when they’re involved.
There are infinite ways to satisfy your mammal brain’s quest for a legacy. You might invent a stitch that lives on at your knitting club. You might design a new exercise machine at your gym club. A smoothie might be named after you at the corner store. It doesn’t have to make logical sense. When something of you can live on, it’s strangely effective at triggering happy chemicals.
Connecting with children rewards the urge for legacy even if they’re not yours. If you do have children of your own, every moment with them is part of your legacy whether or not it’s obvious. I figured this out when my son’s school closed for teacher training. Parents complained about all the no-school days, and I admit I had the I-should-be-working feeling too. Then I learned to see it as a gift: Here was an extra chance to invest in my kids. I would be crazy to see it as a burden.
Repetition is easier to tolerate if you can make it fun. I’ve had fun learning foreign languages by traveling and watching movies, and people have learned languages “on the pillow” (sur l’oreiller, as they say in French) since before there were pillows.
One reason adults don’t build new circuits is that they neglect the power of fun. Find the fun in a new behavior and you’ll free yourself from the drawbacks of your old amusements. Sometimes we need to do things that aren’t fun, of course. But finding the fun in an activity helps you persist long enough to pave the path.
Fun is a great energy-management tool. If I am working on something extra-hard, I take a fun break in the middle. I leave time for fun every evening so I can face challenges the next day. I never waste my fun time on movies about death and dismemberment. I don’t waste it on hostile, angry pundits, even though others think they’re funny. I don’t waste it on restaurants with long lines, loud noise, and the prospect of going to bed on a full stomach. I am choosy about my fun because my energy is my most valuable resource.
The brain is always dividing things into chunks because it can only process a few inputs at a time. Most of the time we don’t notice this chunking strategy, but you can consciously divide your challenges into chunks to make them feel manageable. A cyclist I know reaches the top of a mountain by mentally dividing it into quarters. He focuses his attention on the next quarter-post and mentally celebrates when he reaches it. This makes no logical sense, because the mountain is just as high. But chunking can trick your brain into feeling good even when you’re not really fooled.
When I learned this trick from the cyclist, I tried it on my own “mountain”—the mess in my garage. I was amazed at how well it worked. My husband and I both dreaded the chore, but longed to have it done. I suggested that we tackle it for fifteen minutes, and leave the rest for another day. I thought we would get it done in fifteen-minute chunks, but once we got started, we didn’t feel like stopping. We could not climb our junk mountain when we stood at the bottom and looked up because the top was too high. But when we set our sights on an easy goal, we expected to succeed, and the good feeling triggered the next step, and the next. Positive expectations can spark a fire of enthusiasm.
Our brains are good at finding satisfactory solutions, fast. Sometimes we regret them later as we imagine the ideal thing we coulda-woulda-shoulda done. The urge to make the most of life is natural, but if you’re always optimizing, you’re never happy. When I find it hard to stop optimizing, I remind myself that the 1978 Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to a mathematical proof that “satisficing” is better than optimizing. Herbert Simon showed us why embracing a satisfactory solution is better than investing in endless analysis.
I can always find a way that I fell short, even when I do well. When I see an adorable toddler, I fault myself for letting my children’s toddlerhood slip away. Then I remind myself that optimizing is impossible, and I am good at satisficing.
So instead of passing up a good parking spot in hopes of finding a better one, I take the satisfactory spot and feel good about it. If I’m left with a long walk, I feel good about the fact that I am walking rather than driving around in circles. Feeling good about the satisfactory solution stops you from wasting energy on a protracted search whose marginal benefits will not exceed marginal costs.
Build a new circuit before you need it. Try new vegetables before you get bored with the old ones. Do someone a favor before you need a favor from her. Develop new sources of pride before you retire and get wrinkles. You may feel too busy to do these things now, but once they trigger happy chemicals, you’ll be glad you did. Instead of waiting for happy chemicals to come your way, plan to “do something.”
Planning is also a good way to relieve unhappy chemicals. Instead of worrying all day, plan to worry while brushing your teeth. If that’s not enough, plan to worry while you floss too. In forty-five days, you will love the results.
If you were prescribed two weeks of antibiotics to cure an infection, you would visualize the success of the treatment even though you couldn’t see it. You wouldn’t double your dose on Day Two if you weren’t cured on Day One, nor would you stop the treatment on Day Three if you already felt better. You imagine your cells developing even without visible progress. It would be nice to have visible evidence of your new neural pathway, but you can stay the course by visualizing your developing brain cells.
Once your new pathway is established, your happy habit will feel so natural that you will literally forget to feel bad.
Make a list of tools that will make your new happy habit more comfortable.
Mirror: find someone with the habit you want and mirror them.
Balance: develop the happy chemicals you’re not already best at.
Graft: build new happy circuits onto old happy roots.
Energy: save your energy for tough challenges.
Legacy: preserve your unique individual essence to please your inner mammal.
Fun: find the fun in a new behavior and you will repeat it.
Chunk: divide difficult challenges into smaller parts.
Satisfice: a satisfactory solution may be better than an endless quest for optimal.
Plan: start building circuits now so they’re ready when you need them.
Visualize: your neural pathways are building even though they’re not visible.
Our cortex is designed to learn from patterns, and we often look for the pattern in our mistakes. We can end up focused on what goes wrong and forget to notice what goes right.
Animals don’t dwell on their errors. A mouse who fails to get the cheese tries again without kicking herself for being an idiot. She is not expecting to get the cheese on the first try every time. She is only trying to fill her belly.
A lizard approaches life with a very simple decision model: When he sees something bigger than himself, he runs. When he sees something smaller than himself, he tries to eat it. If he sees something about his size, he tries to mate with it. This decision tree leads to a lot of mistakes, so a lizard has a lot of ups and downs. But he doesn’t expect to be up all the time. He doesn’t judge himself for his downs or compare himself to other lizards.
A big brain is good at keeping score on itself. Learning from your mistakes has value, of course, but your error-analysis habit can crowd out your awareness of the good. You can focus on what goes wrong in the world so intently that you don’t see what goes right.
I learned to notice what goes right after spending a year in Africa. Before that, I took flush toilets for granted, but I learned that people did without sewage systems for most of human history. When we have them, it doesn’t make us happy, but open sewage ditches and vermin-infested outhouses might make you unhappy. I learned to appreciate the work of my municipal waste institution instead of just finding fault with it.
My appreciation of infrastructure began in Haiti, when I was invited to a picnic at a dam. “Why would you want to picnic at a dam,” I asked. I had lived in the world where dams were sneered at as blots on the landscape. My coworker explained that electricity and drinking water were scarce, and the dam was widely seen as something to celebrate. Since then, every time I use water, I think about all it took to get it to me. When I wash a teacup, I imagine the quantity of water I’ve used in relation to the containers Haitian women carry on their heads. I value all that goes into these systems instead of just looking for their flaws.
During my stays in China, I went for many massages. I marveled at the fact that I could safely hand over my credit card and take my clothes off on the other side of the earth. That level of trust is a colossal achievement. In most of human history, it was not safe to leave your village. Strangers could kill you with impunity, so people rarely left their hamlets in a lifetime. Now, strangers literally rub shoulders worldwide in safety. Things go wrong occasionally, but when you focus on that, you miss the enormity of what goes right.
In my travels, I’ve seen a lot of food contaminated by insects, vermin, and grains of sand, not to mention invisible toxins. For most of human history, people welcomed contaminated food because it was better than hunger. Today’s food supply has been purified to an extraordinary degree. Yet many people rage at the food industry and panic over food risks without perspective on what they have.
The same is true of healthcare. Our endless information about health risks makes it easy to focus on the faults of healthcare and overlook its accomplishments. I would not be alive today if it weren’t for antibiotics, so I was surprised to learn that they did not even exist a decade before I was born. Most of us alive today would already have been done in by something without modern healthcare, yet people tend to rage at healthcare with scarcely a thought of what goes right.
Raging at the flaws of the world is a habit that’s easy to build. Many people even see it as a skill to be proud of. They don’t know they’re in a vicious cycle that keeps them focused on disaster scenarios in order to keep feeling good about themselves. But we all have a choice.
Choosing a chocolate from a box brings the risk of disappointment. To make matters worse, you may see someone else get the chocolate you’d hoped for. You can end up feeling bad even as you’re enjoying intense chocolaty goodness. The difference between your dream chocolate and your disappointing chocolate is extremely small, but that’s what you focus on.
Your brain builds expectations about what will make you happy and it sees the world through the lens of those expectations. You can skip over the rest of the story because your brain is so focused on what worked before.
We all see the world through a lens built in adolescence because that’s when the brain is highly plastic. This lens is inevitably unrealistic. A young person imagines she will feel on top of the world when she is free of homework and bedtime. But once she faces the challenge of meeting her own needs, she doesn’t feel like a master of the universe and she wonders what went wrong.
You may think something is wrong with the world, or with your boss, your partner, your culture, yourself. You never blame the brain circuits that compare reality to your youthful expectations, because those circuits function without your awareness.
I have a friend who always complains about the food she gets in a restaurant. She chose it herself, of course, but once it comes, it seems flawed to her. She looks longingly at other people’s orders. I feel like I can’t enjoy my meal when I’m with her, so I no longer eat with this person.
I often hear students complain about the difficulty of choosing courses. But I also hear them complain when they have no choice because a course is required. They don’t value choice when they have it, but they lament losing it.
If you had lived in times past, you wouldn’t have been free to choose your career, your beliefs, or even your sex partner. You would have been constrained by group expectations. You would imagine eternal bliss if only you could choose your mate, your work, and other aspects of your life. Yet when you have these choices, they don’t make you happy. Your brain keeps looking for more and focusing on the obstacles. It’s just doing the job it was designed for.
Unhappiness is often blamed on “bad choices.” This implies that “good choices” are available. The truth is more complicated. Each choice has advantages and disadvantages. Once you pick, you get to see the disadvantages of that choice up close. It’s easy to imagine that all would be lovely if only the other choice were yours. But if a do-over were possible, chances are you’d be frustrated by another “bad choice.” You could spend your whole life lamenting your choices if you don’t make a habit of seeing the good in what you’ve chosen. And even a “good choice” can only make you happy for a short time, because happy chemicals only come in short spurts. So as we struggle to make “good choices,” the first choice we must make is to manage our own happy chemicals.
If you decide to be happy, your brain will find things to be happy about. You will still have frustrations and disappointments, but you will find ways to make yourself happy anyway. If your happy pathways don’t spark themselves, you will find healthy ways to crank them up.
You can do this right now.
No one is stopping you.
No one can do it for you.
And you cannot do it for someone else.
Your happy chemicals will not surge all the time, but you do not need to be having a “peak” experience at every moment. You can accept the inevitable dips in your happy chemicals instead of believing something is wrong. You don’t have to mask the dips with unhealthy habits. You can just take them as evidence that your inner mammal is looking out for you in the best way it knows how.
It’s not easy to manage this brain we’ve inherited from our ancestors. It’s the challenge that comes with the gift of life.