How to make a happy brain in 5 easy steps

The key to happiness lies in that moment of connection with ones experience: if you can't meet yourself where you are, then, you will never truly 'be' happy anywhere else.

I want to thank the commenters to my last post on Happiness for their input and questions. A couple of you asked if I would go more into the ‘how’ of tip #3 and I have decided to do that here. To save you from reading back, here is what I wrote:

3. Stop focusing on what you don’t have or what you don’t want. Most of the world decides on what they want to have, do and/or feel whether more money, a better job, less weight, healing from an illness, and then they focus on its opposite. Someone who wants more money thinks and complains about being in debt. Someone who wants to lose weight thinks and complains about being fat. And so it goes. Our brains only know what we tell them and they are very compliant. If you want to be a fat person, complain about not being able to stick to a diet and your brain will help you out. Taking what you believe as real, it will produce the depressive neurochemistry to support the feeling of ‘I can’t’ and’ what’s the point’, and you won’t be able to make the changes necessary to have the physical body you say you want to have.

Let me first give the disclaimer. Although I am a mental health professional I am not a scientist and don’t want to present myself as one. My explanation is that of an educated lay person and nothing more.

How we think determines how we see things, how we relate to our surroundings and how we then feel. We can’t choose what comes our way in life but we can choose what we do with it. We can choose to interpret it from a place of good intent or ill intent; good natured or malicious; friendly or unfriendly, etc. When we choose to negatively interpret what goes on in our day to day world, a cascade of depressive neurochemicals gets released from the neural networks that control them in our brains and we immediately take the position of the victim in our life’s play, and proceed to embody those characteristics and feelings. Poor us, bad them, life sucks, and ultimately project all of that back out into our world.

When we choose to interpret these daily experiences in a positive or even just neutral way, we get the release of safe and happy neurochemicals from the neural networks that control them, and we stay out of victim mode. Our world seems inviting and positive in its regard for us and we end up feeling good. We then project those feelings back into our world and we get to have the experience others as pleasant, cooperative and holding us in positive regard.

What happens in the brain is the same for each case. The brain responds to our interpretation of our experience and produces hormones and neurochemicals to help us deal with that perceived environment. Positive interpretation = happy, safe, connected chemicals and hormones, negative interpretation = unhappy, anxious, and/or depressive chemicals and hormones. This cycle of perception directly influences the size and thus chemical dominance of those particular neural networks based on activation. The more the negative or positive feeling networks are activated the bigger they get and others get smaller to make room in the brain through a process called pruning. We eventually become addicted to the neurochemistry of our biggest neural networks and start to behave in ways that will trigger their cascade without even knowing we are doing it. The good news is that we can become just as addicted to the chemistry of feeling good as we are to feeling bad.

How to create a happiness generating brain in 5 easy steps:

1. Accept responsibility and reclaim your power to change. Read the above a dozen times and remind yourself that YOU have the power to change the size and quality of your neural networks by how you interpret your experience. None of us controls what happens to us, but we all have dominion over how we interpret and respond to it.

2. Focus on the positive and ignore the negative. A good way to see this effort is like strengthening a weak muscle. You have to target that muscle and work it to build its strength and let the overdeveloped ones weaken for balance. Focus on thoughts, feelings and images that automatically generate a positive feeling in you and then amplify those feelings by adding to them. Let the negative thoughts just go, don’t give what you don’t want or don’t have attention. Focusing on them doesn’t make them better anyway and you will be working against yourself.

3. Stop complaining! Our brains at their most basic levels only register ‘ok’ or ‘not ok’ from our reactions. When we complain, we are not ok and our brains tell our bodies to get ready to fight, run or freeze by triggering stress hormones. Not good when you want to feel happy. So, when your chicken comes out underdone, send it back with clear request to fix the problem. Do NOT complain to your dinner mate and the waiter and the chef and the woman sitting at the next table and then go home and post it on Facebook. Complaining doesn’t do anything; it isn’t an action towards any positive solution. It just increases the negativity inside of you, in your relationships and in the world.

4. Practice the art of appreciation. Seeing the world through eyes of appreciation is probably the fastest way to change your brain into a happiness-seeking organ. A good exercise for this in the beginning is to use the time in your car as ‘appreciation school’. As you drive look at the world around you with the intention of finding things to appreciate. This is a wonderful time of year for this because spring is upon us and there are flowers and trees in bloom everywhere. Build on the feeling of appreciation by going from object to object until you really start to feel uplifted and energized. This is a lot better than Prozac and you can’t lift your mood in minutes. Do this every time you are in your car and you will see the difference is just days.

5. Be silly on purpose. Shake up your habitual tendencies by wearing socks that don’t match, your shirt inside out or a clown nose to work, or in public. Don’t explain anything or make the excuse that you read it on some therapist’s blog, simply allow your experience to be whatever it is and see if you don’t end up laughing along and having a surprisingly fun day. This is a positive surprise to your old ways and really gets the positive chemistry pumping.

Negative thinking is a habit. When we have the tendency to stroll down that path to sit by our ‘little river of misery’ as Marianne Williamson so wonderfully put it, it is going to take some time and practice to change it. Make a decision, stop complaining, cultivate appreciation and have some fun at it!