Hormones Of Happiness. Part 5 - Reviews, Self-development

Chapters from the book "Hormones of Happiness"

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4
• Part 5

• Author: Loretta Graziano Breuning
• Hormones of happiness. How to train your brain to produce serotonin, dopamine, endorphin, and oxytocin
• Moscow. "Mann, Ivanov and Ferber", 2016

Difficulty forming new habits

If you are planning a trip to the Amazon, you will have to choose between interesting places, located away from paved roads, and the usual places for tourists. Exotic locations will beckon you. But when you imagine what it will cost to get there, there is a strong temptation to limit yourself to already known routes.

The same thing happens in the jungle of your neurons. You need to train new habits every day. Otherwise, the neural pathways will begin to "overgrow" and the movement of impulses along them will be difficult. Train new neural pathways daily, even if you are not in the mood for it. And they will work easily and quickly.

Your new habits may not be as enjoyable as the old ones, but you will feel comfortable with them without resorting to artificial stimulants with their side effects. You will experience such pleasure in new positive habits that you will want to cultivate them again and again

I have already repeated many times that it is not necessary to be able to experience joy on the very first day. Be realistic about your expectations. Gnawing on carrots instead of licking delicious ice cream in the early days is not so pleasant, it may seem that the situation will not change even with the constant repetition of tasks. Doing your homework is not the same as watching an interesting movie.

However, you need to stick firmly to your plan and get over the adversity in learning your "joy hormones." By doing something useful for yourself, you will definitely reward yourself with pleasant sensations.

Linking past and future

Each prediction that comes true stimulates the production of dopamine. We cannot make good guesses about unfamiliar music. Therefore, listening to it does not create dopamine. When the music is too familiar to you, dopamine is not synthesized either. This is because the brain predicts the next event too easily. In order for you to enjoy music, it must be somewhere in the middle between new and familiar.

The music that you enjoy today will stop doing so over time as you get used to it. On the other hand, the music that is not very pleasant today may well bring joy in the future.

If you want to experience positive emotions from music, today you need to listen to unfamiliar melodies so that after a while they will fall into the category of those that combine novelty and familiarity

This idea explains why the state of happiness is so ephemeral for us, despite all our efforts to achieve it. And she shows why repetition of even unpleasant things can bring significant rewards in the future.

The sense of pleasure that you get from things around you is determined by those neural circuits that arise without your knowledge

It is natural to assume that what we like is good, and what we dislike is not very good. However, you can learn to influence your neural circuits in such a way as to expand the limits of good.

Overcome initial feelings of rejection

The first step should always be the willingness to do things that we initially don't like at all. This is difficult because the brain usually trusts its first impressions a lot. After all, usually you do not listen to music, only on the assumption that someday you will like it.

You’re in no rush to befriend someone you don’t like, or join an unsympathetic group of people, assuming that something is about to change. It's natural to trust your feelings. But now you know that such sensations can be based on random life experience and not reflect the whole situation.

Your random neural circuits make you feel threatened when you turn off the beaten path. If you choose to avoid anxiety by sticking to old neural connections, you are missing out on many new opportunities to achieve happiness. You can force yourself to feel the joy of finding new paths.