Table of contents:
- Chapters from the book "Hormones of Happiness"
- Orientation system in neural connections
- How can we create new neural connections?
Video: Hormones Of Happiness. Part 3 - 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
Orientation system in neural connections
All the neural pathways that have arisen in you by the present moment of life create an orientation system in neural connections. This system controls your responses to everyday stimuli. You do not notice the work of this system, because it was formed without your conscious participation. This is why it is difficult to create new neural connections: you do not fully understand how the previous ones were created.
Your neural connections allow you to love some things and not love others. It may also turn out that you will have a positive attitude towards what is not so useful, shy away from what is really necessary
Why would the brain need to create such capricious neural connections in an effort to survive? Because a person is designed so as to accumulate his life experience and not get rid of it. In the vast majority of cases, the accumulated experience gives us valuable lessons. It enables us to repeat actions and decisions that have helped us avoid those that have given us trouble in the past. However, the neural pathways created in your brain can be disorienting.
For example, forcing you to avoid negativity that is long gone, or sweating in search of excess pleasure. For example, even as an adult, you can avoid math by remembering how your deskmate laughed at you in class. Or getting too addicted to pizza, remembering great moments with your parents at a pizzeria many years ago.
The cerebral cortex can "correct" old neural circuits so that you can cope with math problems or refuse extra pizza. But the old neural pathways that have formed in your head are very effective. And you often tend to trust them, because the world around you overwhelms you with information, and the existence of well-established neural pathways allows her to calmly move along them.
However, neural highways do not always lead to the desired goal. Sometimes they become the cause of the appearance of "hormones of unhappiness" precisely at those moments when you were hoping for something pleasant
The more new connections are made in the neural jungle of the brain, the more likely it is to secrete more "happiness hormones." This may not be easy to achieve, but it will be easier if you begin to imagine how your brain works.
How can we create new neural connections?
In your youth, you created new neural circuits very easily. The older you get, the more difficult this process becomes. With age, he begins to resemble jungle travel with a machete in hand, when he has to cut his way forward.
Each step requires colossal effort, and the new neural connections that you have created with such difficulty instantly become overgrown with dense bushes, like paths, if you do not use them from time to time. Fighting wild bushes in this way can feel like a waste of time if you can instead leverage existing broad neural pathways.
It is difficult for neurons to direct electrical impulses along circuits that are inactive
But each time they make it easier. The neural connection develops rather slowly, and the narrow and slippery neural pathway hardens only after many years of use.
So how do you effectively create new neural pathways in your head? The answer is simple: constantly fill your brain with more and more new experiences. Repetition will create the neural connections you need. Nobody can do it for you, and it is impossible to do it for someone else.
Whatever triggered your "stress hormone" cortisol rush in the past, that sensation created a neural connection in your brain that works to keep you out of trouble today. You can call it whatever you want - stress, anxiety, fear, or panic, depending on the severity of the sensation - but cortisol always makes you think that if you don't take decisive action right now, something terrible will happen.
It is still difficult to understand what exactly triggers this mechanism, because it manifests itself in the form of a weak instantaneous electrical impulse running along an established chain of neurons. But if you learn to pay attention to negative feelings, you can develop certain behaviors to counter them. This will help you make decisions to avoid harm, rather than simply digesting old information.
