Nothing promotes survival like escaping a threat, so nothing feels as good.
Cortisol evolved to make you feel awful, so anything that stops the flow of cortisol feels good. Fighting, fleeing, freezing, and fawning stop threats in the state of nature, and they feel good. (Fawning is the mammalian strategy of avoiding harm by submitting to social dominance.)
Negativity is a way of fighting, fleeing, freezing, or fawning. These thought patterns help us escape a sense of threat, so they feel good. When the good feeling stops, you can always repeat them. Unfortunately, you have to keep feeling bad about the world in order to keep enjoying these good feelings.
This chapter shows how your unhappy chemical creates a sense of crisis, and how we build habits to get relief. Those habits sometimes add to our sense of crisis, but we have power over them when we know where they come from.
Your brain evolved in a world full of threat, so escaping from threat became Job #1. Once your cortisol turns on, anything that turns it off, even for just a moment, feels good. The famous fight-or-flight response turns off cortisol, which is why it’s so pervasive. We are used to thinking of this response as a bad thing, but it helps to know that fighting and fleeing are the tools a mammal has to escape from threat. It feels good to fight or flee, compared to the horror of doing nothing in the face of threat.
When we humans feel threatened, we too feel an urgent need to “do something” to relieve the threat. Our big cortex helps us analyze lots of detail about our options. We realize that fighting has consequences. We notice that fleeing has consequences. A big brain can improve its prospects by fighting or fleeing abstractly. Negativity is a way to fight or flee without the physical actions. Negativity makes it possible to fight without physical harm, and to flee without running away. Anything that makes a bad feeling stop feels great.
Neurons connect when our neurochemicals flow, so if negativity relieves a bad feeling, we expect more relief from more negativity. If you gain a moment’s relief when you tell yourself “isn’t it always that way,” you wire yourself to say “isn’t it always that way” again.
You’ve probably heard the expression “I smell trouble.” It’s a great reminder of the fact that trouble is information we take in through our senses. A zebra feels threatened because the lion molecules that reached its nose triggered neurons that sent electricity to its cortisol. A zebra does not feel threatened because it has a cognitive concept of being eaten alive by neighbors who will always be there. It doesn’t have enough neurons for abstraction. It is not interested in philosophical generalizations about the state of the world. It is only interested in doing something to make the cortisol stop. And the first step for doing that is to take in more information about the threat. In a moment of crisis, the zebra’s brain skillfully zooms in on evidence of the lion’s whereabouts, and screens out other data.
We mammals are always looking for information that can help us escape harm. The big human cortex is especially good at scanning for evidence of threat. We have ten times more neurons going from our brain to our eyes than we have from our eyes to our brain. That means we are ten times more equipped to find the information we’re looking for than to process whatever happens to come along. Once our cortisol turns on, we are very good at finding threat signals.
But what turns on the cortisol? In the modern world, it’s not the smell of lions.
Cortisol, the unhappy chemical, evolved to signal physical pain. You may be surprised to learn that pain is valuable information. It motivates you to take your hand off a hot stove, fast. You don’t have to touch a hot stove twice because the brain stores everything going on while cortisol flows. You immediately learn to avoid anything resembling that hot stove. This ability to store and retrieve experience rests on a chemical called acetylcholine. It triggers the “remember what happened the last time you did that” feeling. Adrenaline adds the sense that something is ultra-urgent. If you decide to walk over hot coals, a surge of adrenaline alerts you to the very high stakes. Adrenaline and acetylcholine respond to good things as well as bad things, such as a glance from a special someone or a delicious smell. They rev your engine for action, but cortisol tells your engine to avoid rather than approach. Cortisol is the chemical that distinguishes bad-excited from good-excited.
Cortisol is found in lizards, frogs, fish, mollusks, and even amoeba. It promotes survival by causing such a bad feeling that an organism stops doing other things to focus on relieving it. The brain learns from pain, but a small brain only learns to avoid a hot stove that’s just like the hot stove that caused the pain. A big brain activates a big web of circuits so the individual learns to avoid anything vaguely similar to a hot stove.
When a brain sees something that caused pain before, electricity flows to the cortisol switch and alerts the body in time to avoid it. Avoiding pain is a much better survival strategy than trying to escape once you’re in it. For example:
We mammals survive by anticipating pain and acting to avoid it. Our cortisol alarm helps us do that.
Mammals evolved a new job for cortisol: social pain. The link between physical pain and social pain is clear in the mammal world. Isolation can lead to the pain of a predator’s jaws. But being near others can also lead to painful bites and scratches from troop-mates if you approach their food. Each painful experience of isolation or conflict wires a mammal to release more cortisol in similar situations. That’s why hurt feelings trigger the same chemical as physical hurt. In a social animal, social threats feel as urgent as physical threats.
Hurt feelings trigger the same chemical as physical hurt. In a social animal, both are relevant to survival.
The bigger a mammal’s brain, the more social threats it can anticipate. Anything similar to past hurtful encounters can get your cortisol going. You can feel endangered a lot of the time, even though you consciously know the difference between physical pain and social pain. Cortisol creates a sense of urgency that’s hard to ignore. Humans attach words to the cortisol feeling. We call it fear, anxiety, stress, panic, shame, dread, suffering, misery, unhappiness, or pain, depending on the quantity and the context. In every case, the underlying message is “make it stop!”
Animals respond to cortisol with action rather than words. They fight, flee, freeze, or fawn, because these behaviors can stop threats. Understanding these animal responses sheds light on our own responses to cortisol. We’ll see eerie parallels between negativity and the animal impulse to fight, flee, freeze, or fawn. In a moment when you feel threatened, negative thoughts can feel good.
To the mammal brain, anything that relieves cortisol promotes survival. So if a cigarette relieved your anxiety one day, your mammal brain “learned” that cigarettes promote survival. If pizza relieved a sense of threat in your youth, your mammal brain learned that pizza promotes survival. If cynicism helps you experience cortisol relief, your brain learns to see it as a lifesaver. No one thinks this in words, of course. But in a moment when your cortisol surges and you look for a way to make it stop, your brain relies on the neural circuits it has. These circuits can associate cynicism with relief as automatically as they associate water with relief of thirst or a warm fire with relief of chill.
When you see a lizard basking in the sun, you may think it’s feeling good, but it is living in crisis. It risks being eaten alive every moment it lingers out in the open. But if it runs under a rock, it risks dying of hypothermia. So a lizard only basks in the sun when it feels like it’s dying of cold, and it stays on high alert the whole time. As soon as its body temperature reaches the safe zone, it rushes back into hiding and stays there until it feels like it’s dying of hunger or cold again. A lizard is always running from pain. It survives by skillfully choosing which threat is most urgent at each moment.
Every mammal has a reptile brain at its core because evolution builds on what’s already there. We humans have inherited the same brain structures that enable a lizard to choose between one life-threatening risk and another. At the back of your neck, where your spine meets your brain (the cerebellum, medulla oblongata, and pons, often called the “brain stem”), you have structures that alert you to threats and prompt action that keeps you alive. This “reptile brain” manages metabolic functions like breathing and digesting as well as responding to danger. A reptile also has a tiny hippocampus and hypothalamus to process new inputs into decisions. Your hippocampus and hypothalamus are more sophisticated and can process more inputs, but they connect with your brain stem to interpret threats just like a lizard’s does. We humans also have a huge reserve of extra neurons, but they feed information down into our reptile brain to connect to the rest of our body in order to take action. So all of our complex analysis distills down to a go or no-go. We may strategize and optimize profusely, but we boil it all down to the act of approaching what we expect to help and avoiding what we expect to hurt.
I scan for threats. It’s always a crisis. I escape, and then find the next closest threat.
The reptile brain has gotten a bad reputation. You may have been told to avoid “reptilian thinking,” but you cannot shut off your reptile brain. It’s the base of your operating system. You are better off understanding it. It is always trying to protect you from harm by detecting threats in time to avoid them. That said, the reptile brain can get quirky ideas about threats. It can create the feeling that you will die if you don’t have a cigarette or a pizza, or the feeling that cynicism protects you from hurt. The reptilian response to cynicism does not rest on erudite socioeconomic analysis. It rests on the pathways you built in the past.
We don’t act on every quirky reptilian impulse, of course. But we can’t just ignore these impulses because the reptile brain thinks survival is at stake. It escalates when you ignore it. “Do something! Do something!” it keeps telling you. To stop the cortisol from flowing, you must satisfy your inner reptile.
The first step to stopping cortisol is identifying the threat. Cortisol can warn of internal threats, like hunger, or external ones, like predators. Your brain has to figure out what turned it on in order to turn it off. For example, when low blood sugar turns on a lizard’s cortisol, eating makes it stop. So a lizard looks for food when it gets the painful feeling we call “hunger.” But when your hand is on a hot stove, food doesn’t relieve pain. And avoiding hot stoves doesn’t relieve hunger pain. You have to interpret your cortisol in order to survive. A small brain does that with a small number of circuits. A big brain has so many circuits that the do-something feeling can be hard to make sense of. Fortunately, we have acetylcholine to say “remember!” and adrenaline to say “now!”
Lizards succeed at relieving cortisol, but the bad feeling soon returns. Hunger returns once food is digested. Predators return once you escape from them. The brain is always busy scanning for the next potential source of harm. A small brain focuses on immediate threats instead of worrying about tomorrow’s hunger or lasting peace with predators. It has just enough neural horsepower to seek immediate relief from immediate threats.
Reptiles have a smidgeon of cortex, too, so they have a limited ability to learn. They learn from pain. When a lizard feels the pain of an eagle’s talon in its sides, a surge of cortisol connects all the neurons active at that moment. If the lizard survives the encounter, it is now wired to detect an eagle faster the next time because the sight and smell of an eagle built bridges between activated neurons. Experience augments the predator-avoidance circuits that a lizard is born with.
A lizard doesn’t “know” what an eagle is. It simply avoids sensory inputs that trigger cortisol. A lizard runs for cover when it sees the sudden shadow caused by an eagle overhead. Reptiles evolved a lifestyle that requires very few neurons. This promotes survival because neurons burn a lot of fuel. The efficient reptile operating system works by avoiding things that feel bad without asking why.
Reptiles have no social life. They leave home the instant they’re born, and their parents eat them if they don’t leave fast enough. With no chance to learn from their elders, they are born hardwired with just enough skills to survive. A huge percentage of young reptiles are eaten by predators before they reach puberty, but their species survive because they make babies by the thousands.
Mammals can’t do that because a warm-blooded baby is much harder to gestate than a cold-blooded baby. Mammals put all their eggs in very few baskets, so their genes can easily get wiped out. To survive, they protect their young from predators with strong social bonds.
Reptiles don’t have social pain because they don’t need other reptiles to survive. In fact, reptiles can’t stand being near each other, and avoid their colleagues except while mating. But mammals evolved a brain that enjoys company, and even feels threatened without it. Cortisol surges when a mammal is separated from its group, making separation feel like a survival emergency.
But living in a group is not easy. When a mammal sees food, other group-mates see it too. When a mammal lunges at food, it may get a painful kick or scratch from a herd-mate. The mammal brain strives to avoid the pain of conflict while also avoiding the pain of hunger and the pain of social isolation. It performs this balancing act with circuits built from experience.
Reptiles are born prewired with the experience of their ancestors, but mammals wire themselves from their own life experience. We mammals connect our neurons by interacting with the world around us. We have time to do that because we are protected from harm during an early period of dependency. Of course, each young mammal must learn to avoid harm once its mother is gone in order for the species to survive. Each mammal learns from its own good and bad experiences.
Learning from experience has drawbacks. If you had to learn about lions by getting bitten, few mammals would survive their first lesson. Instead, mammals developed a capacity for social learning. If a young zebra wanders too far from the herd, its mother bites it and the pain quickly teaches the youngster to associate wandering off with pain. Hunger pain also grows during separation from the mother. A young brain can learn to link separation and pain before it comes to harm.
Mammals also have mirror neurons that sense the pleasure and pain of others. A lost baby senses its mother’s panic when they reunite. A young mammal senses the panic of its herd-mates when a predator approaches. Mirroring builds a young brain’s connections between separation and cortisol, and between companionship and relief. Mirroring helps a young mammal learn the behaviors that others use to escape threat. Thus, social learning helps a human brain learn the negativity of those around it.
Reptiles avoid their colleagues except while mating.
A threatened mammal is designed to act fast. Fight and flight are well-known responses, but freezing and fawning are equally important. A close look at each of these strategies is useful because they are a mammal’s threat-relief tool kit. We will see how the human brain can accomplish each of them with negativity and cynicism.
The natural response to threat is to withdraw, but fighting is the opposite. You approach whatever threatens you. Big-brained humans can fight with words as well as with physical conflict. We can even fight with words that are highly abstract. For example, when you feel threatened you may berate “the idiots in power” instead of directly fighting with an individual. We learn to curb our aggression and find other ways to enjoy the powerful feeling of approaching a perceived threat.
Fighting might seem like a cause of distress, but when a mammal is attacked, fighting back can relieve distress. Of course, a physical fight comes with the risk of injury and pain, which is why animals only fight as a last resort, or when they’re sure they can win. In the human world, a verbal fight can also lead to injury and pain, which is why it’s so tempting to fight with generalized cynicism like “they’re all morons.” When you feel attacked, you may find yourself venting with such abstractions, and it may actually bring relief in the moment. If you do this repeatedly, however, you are likely to augment the neural pathways that make you feel attacked.
Sometimes you have to fight. Imagine a mother lion that hasn’t eaten for days. When she finally catches a gazelle, hyenas swoop in to steal it. Should she fight them? If she loses the fight, her children are likely to perish. But if she doesn’t fight, her milk will dry up and her children will starve. She doesn’t think this in words. Her electricity simply flows through the circuits she has. Cortisol surges as she anticipates the pain of fighting but it also surges as she anticipates the pain of not fighting. One circuit triggers less cortisol, so it feels good in relative terms. When fighting feels better than fleeing, her adrenaline and testosterone surge and she rushes toward the threat instead of running away from it.
Mammals fight when they expect to gain more than they lose. A big gain is expected whenever reproduction is involved, whether it’s protecting a child from harm or prevailing over rivals for mating opportunity. Fights usually begin with what biologists call “display,” which is triggered by the intent to fight. A mammal shows its weapons and puffs up its size to encourage the adversary to back down. This often works, which is why people say, “it’s just for show.” But there is always a chance that the adversary will attack instead of backing down, so a mammal who displays must be prepared to fight.
Mammals choose their battles carefully. Research shows that animals only fight when they expect to win. They are skilled at assessing their own strength in comparison to others. They build this skill in youth through play and by watching their parents decide when to fight and when to retreat to safety. A young mammal at play is testing its strength against others. Brains that chose badly were weeded out by natural selection, so a brain skilled at making social comparisons evolved. Social comparison is a core survival skill.
In the modern world, we learn that fighting is wrong whether or not you can win. If your child fights over a cookie, you are likely to punish the child and take away the cookie. You may think your fine words are instructive, but the child’s brain learns from the cookie. If the child gets to keep the ill-gotten treat, his brain learns that fighting gets rewards, even if your words suggest otherwise.
Humans learn to fight without physical aggression. Put-downs, lawsuits, and competition (friendly and otherwise) are nonviolent ways to go toward a perceived threat instead of avoiding it. The brain keeps weighing the risk of fighting against the risk of not fighting. Cynicism is a low-risk way to fight. You can say, “They’re all jerks” without risking too much pain. You can mentally oppose all men, or all women, or all bosses, or all rich people, or all gluten-eaters. You can rage at public figures when you see them on screens. You can fight city hall. When this relieves your sense of threat, even if just for a moment, the good feeling builds a pathway. The next time you feel bad, that pathway offers you a way to do something. Of course, we don’t think that consciously, but when we feel attacked, we say, “They’re all jerks” and enjoy the relief.
Conflict is part of a mammal’s life. Animals resolve their conflicts without violence much of the time because one individual backs down to avoid injury. But they are at the edge of conflict a lot. We are distracted from this fact by heartwarming stories of animal cooperation, but animals don’t expect life to be conflict-free. When a threat triggers their cortisol, they look for a way to promote survival.
For example, stronger monkeys often grab food from weaker troop-mates. You won’t see a fight because weaker individuals back down to avoid getting bitten or scratched. Backing down means hunger, weakness, and reproductive failure, so a monkey is always weighing one potential pain against another. The pain of fighting is significant because injuries are often fatal in the wild. They slow you down enough for a predator to pick you off. A monkey may prefer to go hungry today and live to eat tomorrow, but tomorrow’s banana may get swiped, too. So a monkey has no choice but to constantly scan for opportunities to prevail, as much as it would rather avoid conflict. If he gets the banana, he feels good.
A monkey may prefer to go hungry today and live to eat tomorrow. But tomorrow’s banana may get swiped, too. So a monkey has to constantly scan for opportunities to prevail, as much as it would rather avoid conflict.
You may recoil at the idea of fighting weaker individuals. Yet if your boss adds to your workload, you may look for a weaker person to push the task onto. And you may be surprised to find yourself venting at a powerless stranger when you’re afraid to stand up to a bully in your home. It takes frontal lobes to anticipate consequences. Monkeys have small frontal lobes but humans have big ones. That’s why we spend so much time analyzing alternative scenarios instead of fighting. But as soon as you decide not to fight, it may seem like another monkey is eyeing your banana again. Cynicism is a welcome relief.
Fleeing is often the best survival strategy. Animals are so aware of this that they constantly scan for escape routes and refuse to enter an enclosed space. Flight is not just for the weak, since stronger animals can get away faster than weaker ones.
Escaping a threat feels good. When a baboon is threatened by a lion, climbing a tree feels good. The baboon does not think, “What is wrong with this world?” or “Tomorrow the lion may be back.” It is just glad to have escaped the threat in that moment. It is even happier when the lion leaves so it can climb down the tree and meet its needs. The good feeling wires the baboon to scan for trees when it feels threatened.
We humans can generate abstract images of future threats instead of just worrying about threats within striking distance. We have the amazing ability to activate neurons internally instead of just waiting for the external world to trigger our senses. This enables us to act in time to prevent harm, but it can also leave us with an endless threatened feeling. That’s why we’re so eager for ways to escape.
Distraction works. Distraction does not protect you from an actual predator, but when an internal image has triggered your cortisol, shifting to a different image interrupts it. This is why distractions of every variety are so popular, even when they have negative consequences.
To complicate things further, cortisol remains in your body for a couple of hours after you stop releasing it. So your sense of alarm continues and keeps you hyper-alert for threats until your body has finished metabolizing it. A big brain can keep finding evidence of threats when it looks. You can get into a bad loop unless you “do something” to stop it. At such times, you scan for past escape tools, the way a baboon scans for a tree. Negativity is activated if it worked for you before. Worrying about the world “going to hell in a handbasket” can distract you from an annoying situation closer to home. Ruminating on the state of the world may not sound like an escape, but it can shift your attention away from threats that are up-close and personal.
Each thought of “the global mess” interrupts more painful thoughts about a personal mess. From your mammal brain’s perspective, thoughts of global crisis actually save you from harm. Like running up a tree, it feels good.
Very small cues can trigger the threat alarm of a very big brain. Your boss’s raised eyebrow can trigger your cortisol. Fighting is a bad option. Fleeing is a bad option. Running away in your mind may seem like the best option. People can escape by overindulging in food, alcohol, drugs, sex, shopping, screen-watching, and many other habits. Negativity allows you to run away in your mind without the harmful side effects of food, alcohol, drugs, sex, shopping, and gaming. However, people often combine negativity with other escape behaviors. “The world is going to hell, so why not have another cookie/drink/pill/affair/splurge?”
A gazelle has the ability to freeze in the presence of a lion. It freezes so completely that the lion may take it for dead. This can promote survival because the lion is inclined to return to its pride to alert them to the meal, at which point the undead gazelle jumps up and escapes. This is a very risky strategy but in desperate circumstances it can work. Freezing is a real physiological response to a huge cortisol spike. It slows a mammal’s metabolism so much that its breathing isn’t heard. If the animal survives, it is equipped to unfreeze by shaking until the tension is released.
The expression “a deer in headlights” implies that freezing is foolish. But the reflex did not evolve in a world of cars. It evolved in a world of predators, where avoiding notice can save your life. Freezing is dangerous, but it’s a way to do something when other options are closed.
Cynicism can be a way of freezing. The mind’s equivalent of a freeze response is telling yourself, “The way things are these days, there’s nothing I can do.” If all the options in front of you look bad, cynical freezing can give you the good feeling of doing something. When you tell yourself, “What can you do in a world like this?” you might feel a moment of relief. That good feeling tells your brain that this way of avoiding harm works, which wires you to repeat the negative thought in another cortisol-drenched moment. The neural pathway grows, and soon you slip easily into the idea that you are frozen because of “the way things are these days.”
Fawning is another mammalian threat-reliever. Animals submit to more dominant group-mates to protect themselves from threat. In humans, this has been called the “fawn response.”
For example, weaker monkeys approach stronger ones with head and eyes down. This signals the intent to submit, and protects a weaker monkey from aggression. Subordinate monkeys often groom the fur of dominant monkeys as well. When fawning relieves a perceived threat, it feels good. You may think such hierarchical behavior is an evil of civilization, but mammals have been dominating and submitting for millions of years. An animal that dominates group-mates gets more of what it takes to spread its genes, such as food, mating opportunities, and protection from predators. Natural selection produced a brain that promotes survival by seeking social dominance . . . but it also knows when to promote survival by fawning to dominance-seekers.
Natural selection produced a brain that promotes survival by seeking social dominance . . . but it also knows when to promote survival by fawning to dominance-seekers.
The dominance/submission rituals of animals are well known to farmers, zookeepers, and field biologists. When an animal thinks it is stronger than the group-mate in front of it, it makes a dominance gesture, such as a direct stare and puffing of the chest. It expects a submission gesture in return, such as crouched shoulders and lowered eyes. Each animal in a herd or pack or troop knows its own strength relative to each group-mate, and avoids pain by submitting to stronger individuals. By adulthood, each mammal has learned the gestures needed to protect itself from in-group aggression. Fawning does not get you the banana or the mate, but it gets you the peace necessary to meet your needs for another day.
This facet of nature makes people uncomfortable. In fact, many experts are trying to disguise it as “cooperation.” It is true that dominant mammals sometimes cooperate by protecting their mates from third-party aggression. But most of the time, they put themselves first, and weaker individuals must “cooperate” with them, or else.
Fawning is easy to see among human primates. Let’s say you are threatened by a neighborhood bully, and you find yourself being extra nice to them. You reward the bully in ways you don’t reward people who are actually nice to you. This works, from your mammal brain’s perspective. It relieves the threat. You can blame your fawning on the system by telling yourself that the bully is just a product of “the system.” But your fawning is part of the system that creates the bully.
You are cynically fawning if you give someone money, knowing she will spend it on drugs. You are cynically fawning if someone steals your wallet and you say, “He probably needs it more than I do.” If you bribe a corrupt official or pay protection money to a criminal, it’s cynical fawning. In each case, you submit for the pleasure of relieving your own threatened feeling. Your verbal cortex finds a reason to act in a way that your mammal brain feels good about. You don’t intend to fawn. But in the moment you feel threatened, doing something that relieves the threat feels good. That nice feeling of relief connects neurons, wiring you to fawn again the next time you feel threatened.
You don’t “believe” in fawning. You also don’t “believe” in fighting, fleeing, or freezing. But when a cortisol surge tells you “something is wrong,” you want to make it stop.
“This is not me,” you may say. “I don’t fawn or freeze or flee or fight to feel good.” “I am no monkey or lion or gazelle.” It’s easy to think our threat responses are motivated by the intellectual arguments we’re so good at producing. To make sense of our threat circuits, we need to trace their development to the beginning.
We humans are far more helpless and vulnerable at birth than our animal ancestors. We enter the world with a more unfinished brain, so we’re dependent and needy for much longer than other animals. The first experience in each human life is cortisol, triggered by urgent survival needs you cannot do something about. This sense of threat is at the core of your neurochemical navigator.
A newborn responds to cortisol by crying. It’s one of our few prewired behaviors. Over time, you learned alternative ways to respond to cortisol. Each time you succeeded at relieving a threatened feeling, you learned from that experience. You do not consciously remember this learning, but you ended up with lots of circuits for relieving your cortisol.
We often think our early circuits are unimportant because they don’t speak to us in grand terms that make us proud. Yet these early circuits are the core of our self-management system. The larger an animal’s brain, the more it relies on learned circuits instead of on inborn circuits. The larger an animal’s brain, the longer its childhood, because these circuits take so long to build. We humans wire ourselves by interacting with the world instead of being born hardwired with the experience of our ancestors. This allows each new baby to wire itself for present realities instead of relying on what worked in the past. This opportunity took hundreds of millions of years to evolve, so it is foolish to think we just discard our early learning.
A big brain actually makes it harder to survive because neurons need so much glucose, oxygen, and warmth. A big brain only promotes survival if it is wired in a way that gives a critter its money’s worth from all those extra neurons. Connecting neurons from early experience instead of in utero is the way we do that. Recognizing the power of those early circuits helps us manage them.
The modern idea that we can always change our brain is an oversimplification. It’s more realistic to say that we can adapt our early circuits than to believe we can uproot and replace them. We peak at age two from the myelin perspective. A toddler’s brain develops so easily in response stimulation that it absorbs everything uncritically. After age two, a brain starts to rely on the circuits it has rather than changing itself in response to each new input. You keep learning and seeking novelty, of course. But instead of giving equal importance to every detail that reaches your senses, you start paying attention to variations in things you’ve seen and heard before. This is how we come to make sense of words and faces.
Myelin stays high until age seven, so new inputs easily build new pathways until then. A good way to test this is to lie to a six-year-old and an eight-year-old. The six-year-old will absorb what you say as the truth. The eight-year-old will check it against his existing stock of knowledge. An eight-year-old does not change his view of the world with every new input. The drop in myelin motivates a child to use the circuits he has instead of always building new ones. He adds new leaves to his neural trees, and even new branches with sustained effort, but relies on the trunks he’s already built. This enables him to meet his needs in ways that worked before instead of blowing with every new wind.
What did you learn by age seven that’s relevant to survival? You didn’t learn to qualify for a job with benefits. You didn’t learn to create an online dating profile that attracts the perfect mate to reproduce your genes. You learned to manage your sense of threat. Without conscious intent, you connected neurons each time you felt threatened and each time you enjoyed relief from threat. You learned that making noise brings relief, so you learned new ways to make noise. You learned the sounds that predict relief, so you learned to listen for those sounds. Happy and unhappy chemicals build bridges between all the neurons active at the moment they’re released. These bridges help the chemicals turn on again in similar circumstances.
Any pathway that’s triggered repeatedly gets myelinated. You may hear a child effortlessly command a language or a sport that you struggle with. Yet you can effortlessly command the language and physical skills you learned in your childhood. In the same way, some neurochemical responses come to you effortlessly because you myelinated them in youth. Other neurochemical responses might be a struggle for you, but you can wire them in if you invest the effort it would take to master a sport or a foreign language. Things that triggered your internal alarm bells in youth will easily trigger you later on. Things that relieved your internal alarm in youth are likely to relieve you later on.
By the time you were eight, you had a mental model of how the world works. It wasn’t complete or perfect, but it guided you toward rewards and away from pain. To a child, something is good if it feels good and something is bad if it feels bad. This is not the best survival strategy in the modern world, so it’s a good thing we keep building our mental model. Eventually we learn that good feelings can lead to bad outcomes and bad feelings can lead to good outcomes. Nevertheless, our foundational circuits rest on simple mammalian responses.
Of course, we can’t learn everything from experience. You’d get run over by cars and expelled from playgroups if you had to learn everything the hard way. To avoid this, adults structure the rewards and pain in a child’s environment. Hugs and praise and treats create good feelings in the short run for things that are good for the child’s long run. Bad feelings are created in the short run to help a child learn what’s bad for their well-being in the long run. One of the first things a child learns is that a bad feeling will get worse if he or she does not relieve it. Children build their operating system from pleasure and pain, not from conscious intent, so adults organize the pleasure and pain in ways that build useful circuits. Over time, we learn to interpret our internal sense of alarm and act to relieve it.
Children build their operating system from pleasure and pain, not from conscious intent, so adults organize the pleasure and pain in ways that build useful circuits.
The importance of our first seven years of learning is apparent when you compare it to the childhood of an animal. A mouse reaches puberty in four months, so it can be a great-grandparent at age one. A gazelle runs with the herd the day after it’s born. An elephant learns to walk before its first meal because that is how it gets to the mother’s milk. Animals learn to meet their needs fast because threats are urgent in the state of nature. The extended dependency of humans is unique in nature. Early learning is the foundation of our adult responses, whether we like it or not.
Myelin spikes again in puberty, so we build new circuits easily at that time. The ability to myelinate new learning during puberty has tremendous survival value. Animals tend to leave home before they mate, and myelin helps a brain adapt to its new environment. Leaving home prevents inbreeding and thus promotes survival, so natural selection built a brain that supports this. Conscious intent to avoid inbreeding is not required.
Humans have sought mates in other groups throughout history. When they went to new tribes, they learned new faces, new places, new survival skills, and even new languages. The neuroplasticity of adolescence made it possible. Myelin drops after puberty, and then it takes a lot of repetition or a huge neurochemical spike to fuse new circuits. That’s why we’re so heavily affected by our adolescent experience. Adolescent learning happens in the usual mammalian way: in response to pleasure and pain. Social rewards and social pain trigger lots of neurochemicals, so they make a big contribution to the neural network that guides our future expectations and decisions.
Anything relevant to reproduction gets an extra large response from the mammal brain. Big bursts of chemicals are triggered by the quest for mating opportunity because it’s so relevant to survival. From the pain of romantic rejection to the pleasure of social cliques, things feel urgently important in adolescence because they’re important to a mammal. Bad hair or an unrequited glance can feel like a survival threat, and big circuits get built. You don’t consciously care about your genes, and monkeys don’t either, but “reproductive success” triggers big neurochemical spurts over small things because brains with those responses made more copies of themselves.
We know the brain is always learning from what works and, in adolescence, what works is healthy looks, social alliances, and a willingness to take risks. You may blame this on our society, but those factors have triggered our neurochemistry since the dawn of time. Anything that enhances an adolescent’s appearance, social alliances, or risk tolerance triggers happy chemicals and builds circuits. And whatever threatens your appearance, social alliances, or ability to take risks brings floods of cortisol.
Whatever relieved your threatened feelings in adolescence built superhighways in your brain. Cynicism may have worked. You may have looked at the kids who had what you wanted and said, “They’re all jerks.” It felt good, which paved the way for you to see it that way again.
Beneath the verbal logic of adulthood lies an operating system focused on things relevant to reproductive success. No one intends to see the world through the lens of their adolescent experience, but we build our lens with the brain we’ve inherited.
Beneath the verbal logic of adulthood lies an operating system that is focused on things relevant to reproductive success. No one intends to see the world through the lens of their adolescent experience, but we build our lens with the brain we’ve inherited.
In the state of nature, sex leads to babies. For most of human history, people didn’t decide to have children. They decided to have sex and ended up with a baby. They struggled to relieve the baby’s crying, and the struggle increased as more babies arrived. Our ancestors had little free time to rewire themselves after puberty. We humans evolved to wire ourselves in youth and then get busy wiring the next generation. Now, the family-planning revolution has given us unprecedented opportunity to focus on our own rewiring if we choose. This is a new step in human experience, which helps us understand why the endeavor to change your early wiring is harder than you expect.
Each brain has special neurons that activate when we watch someone else get a reward or avoid pain. These “mirror neurons” play a big role in social learning. Watching others triggers less electricity than experiencing something yourself, but if you watch repeatedly, it’s enough to bridge your neurons. What you watch in your myelin years wires you to execute that behavior yourself. A young monkey wires itself to get rewards in ways it sees others get rewards, and to avoid pain in ways it sees others avoid pain.
Mirror neurons help us understand the many self-destructive behaviors in our world. Ordinarily, a mammal wouldn’t inflict pain on itself just to enjoy the relief. That wouldn’t promote survival. But if you see others engaging in a self-destructive behavior, and you get a small reward, it’s easier to start. And once you start, it’s easier to repeat. It feels bad. But the distraction, the social solidarity and perhaps some endorphin feel good. That wires in the expectation that it will feel good again.
Your brain can “learn” that a cookie relieves a threatened feeling. Each time you eat a cookie in a bad moment, the circuit builds. Soon, your brain expects cookies to relieve threats. You don’t think that consciously, of course. But the thought of not eating a cookie starts to feel unsafe. Eating too many also feels bad, but the bad feeling triggers a search for relief, which triggers the thought of more cookies. Similarly, a brain can “learn” to seek relief in cynicism. A person might curse “the system” when they feel threatened, perhaps mirroring others who curse “the system.” With repetition, you can end up wiring yourself to curse the system whenever you feel threatened. As electricity flows through this well-developed channel, you feel like you’re just seeing the obvious. The habit is self-destructive if it substitutes for action that meets your needs and avoids harm. You can end up with more cortisol, and the urge to relieve it with more cynicism.
The animal brain focuses on threats it can see, hear, or smell, but the big human cortex can imagine abstract, intangible threats. This is why we humans are aware of our own mortality. We struggle for survival with the certain knowledge that our struggle will someday fail. We don’t need to see a lion to know that something will kill us someday. We don’t know what will kill us, so we’re motivated to anticipate every possible threat. Each person must find a way to manage their cortisol while living with this death sentence. Belief in an afterlife is one way. Distraction is another. And some people say, “Cigarettes may kill me later, but I’ll have a heart attack right now if I don’t have one.”
Cynicism is a popular response to this existential dilemma. Focusing on the idea that the whole world is doomed can distract you from the fact that your mortal body is doomed. On the surface, it may seem like this increases the pain. But when you believe the whole world will end when you end, it relieves the feeling that you’ll miss out on something. People don’t consciously think the world will die when they die. But we scan for external evidence that fits our internal sense of threat. If your brain is looking for signs of “the end,” you will see a world on the brink of disaster. And it will seem obviously true.
There are other ways to manage our sense of mortality. Building something that lasts is a popular one. It could be a child, an organization, a monument, an immortal soul, or a work of art. When you focus on building something that lasts, your inner mammal has the good feeling of promoting its survival.
But this strategy leads to a new set of drawbacks. The smallest threat to your child, your organization, your monument, your immortal soul, or your work of art starts to feel like a survival threat. If your child flunks one test, or your organization’s budget falls 1 percent, you may have an extreme sense of urgency. You will feel an urgent need to “do something,” but there’s only so much you can do. So you fall back on strategies that worked before, whether it’s a pizza, a martini, or the idea that the whole world is going to hell in a handbasket.
People don’t consciously think the world will die when they die. But we scan for external evidence that fits our internal sense of threat. If your brain is always looking for signs of “the end,” you will see a world on the brink of disaster. And it will seem obviously true.
A human brain can terrorize itself with its own abstractions, but we can also benefit from our ability to abstract. We can anticipate problems before they hurt us. We grow food before we are hungry, and we protect our babies from predators before they are eaten. But as soon as we solve one problem, we focus on the next one, so successes do not effectively relieve threatened feelings. Our innate vulnerability keeps getting our attention. It’s hard for a big cortex attached to a limbic system to feel safe, which is why threat relievers are attractive.
When you tell yourself the world is in bad shape, you presume the information is coming from your higher logic. You hear intelligent people bemoan the fate of the world, so it seems intelligent to do so. You don’t think of cynicism as an effort to feel safe with equipment inherited from your ancient ancestors. Fortunately, we have inherited happy chemicals as well as threat chemicals. Dopamine, oxytocin, and serotonin make us feel good, and that relieves or masks cortisol. Negativity is curiously good at stimulating happy chemicals and you’ll see how in the following chapters.
Anything that relieves a threat feels good from your mammal brain’s perspective. Once negativity relieves a sense of threat, your mammal brain seeks it and expects it to feel good.