Does it seem like the path to happiness is full of obstacles? I'm going to give you good news. There are many obstacles on the path to happiness that you've created yourself, and that means you can clear the obstacles yourself. I'm Loretta Breuning, Founder of the Inner Mammal Institute, and author of Habits of a Happy Brain: Retrain Your Brain to Boost Your Serotonin, Dopamine, Oxytocin, & Endorphin Levels. Here are three big obstacles to happiness that you are creating so that you can now go out and clear them.
The first obstacle is waiting for permission to be happy. Many people wait for permission to be happy instead of giving themselves permission. It's easy to do this with all good intentions, you think I can't be happy until everyone else is happy. So you wait until there's some kind of signal that everyone else is happy so now it's allowed.
Well, if you do that, you will never be happy because there will always be some unhappy people, following the herd will not lead you to happiness. And in fact, no one in human history would ever have been happy if we had to wait until every single person was happy. So as much as you may feel awkward or selfish about this, you have to blaze your own trail to happiness, which starts with giving yourself permission to do that. And you can actually help others to do that by leading the way and showing them that it's possible.
You may think you don't know how to give yourself permission to be happy, but I explain that in detail in my book, The Science of Positivity: Stop Negative Thought Patterns by Changing Your Brain Chemistry. Now, let's think about the second big obstacle to happiness that many people create for themselves, and that is not getting enough sleep. Did you know that the chemicals that make us feel good are actually manufactured while we're sleeping? So if you don't get enough sleep, then when you wake up in the morning, your tank is empty and you literally can't feel happy, even when good things are happening to you. What a waste. So you need to get plenty of sleep in order to manufacture your happy brain chemicals and have a full tank so that you can just easily release them all day. And if you make sleep your top priority, then you will figure out a way to get enough sleep.
The last self-created obstacle to happiness is unrealistic expectations. Now, it's very easy to have unrealistic expectations and in fact, hard to have realistic expectations. The first reason for that is that we're always told to dream big. So you probably think that big dreams are the way to be happy, but here's the problem with that. If you imagine yourself at the bottom of a huge mountain and you need to get to the top of the mountain in your opinion, in order to be happy. Well, the fact is that your brain only releases dopamine, that good feeling of joy and excitement when you see yourself approaching a reward. So you have to actually see yourself getting closer in order to feel good. Now, if you are always focusing on a goal, but so far away, and you don't see yourself getting closer, then you're just not going to release the dopamine.
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Loretta Breuning
Does it seem like the path to happiness is full of obstacles? I'm going to give you good news. There are many obstacles on the path to happiness that you've created yourself, and that means you can clear the obstacles yourself. I'm Loretta Breuning, Founder of the Inner Mammal Institute, and author of Habits of a Happy Brain: Retrain Your Brain to Boost Your Serotonin, Dopamine, Oxytocin, & Endorphin Levels. Here are three big obstacles to happiness that you are creating so that you can now go out and clear them. The first one is waiting for permission to be happy. Many people wait for permission to be happy instead of giving themselves permission. It's easy to do this with all good intentions, you think I can't be happy until everyone else is happy. So you wait until there's some kind of signal that everyone else is happy so now it's allowed.
Well, if you do that, you will never be happy because there will always be some unhappy people, following the herd will not lead you to happiness. And in fact, no one in human history would ever have been happy if we had to wait until every single person was happy. So as much as you may feel awkward or selfish about this, you have to blaze your own trail to happiness, which starts with giving yourself permission to do that. And you can actually help others to do that by leading the way and showing them that it's possible.
You may think you don't know how to give yourself permission to be happy, but I explain that in detail in my book, The Science of Positivity: Stop Negative Thought Patterns by Changing Your Brain Chemistry. Now, let's think about the second big obstacle to happiness that many people create for themselves, and that is not getting enough sleep. Did you know that the chemicals that make us feel good are actually manufactured while we're sleeping? So if you don't get enough sleep, then when you wake up in the morning, your tank is empty and you literally can't feel happy, even when good things are happening to you. What a waste. So you need to get plenty of sleep in order to manufacture your happy brain chemicals and have a full tank so that you can just easily release them all day. And if you make sleep your top priority, then you will figure out a way to get enough sleep.
The last self-created obstacle to happiness is unrealistic expectations. Now, it's very easy to have unrealistic expectations and in fact, hard to have realistic expectations. The first reason for that is that we're always told to dream big. So you probably think that big dreams are the way to be happy, but here's the problem with that. If you imagine yourself at the bottom of a huge mountain and you need to get to the top of the mountain in your opinion, in order to be happy. Well, the fact is that your brain only releases dopamine, that good feeling of joy and excitement when you see yourself approaching a reward. So you have to actually see yourself getting closer in order to feel good. Now, if you are always focusing on a goal, but so far away, and you don't see yourself getting closer, then you're just not going to release the dopamine.
A simple, famous example of that is young person who's told to focus on their dreams, and so they dream that they're going to be a Rock star or a YouTube star. And that might feel good in the short run, but over time they see that they're not really getting any closer to being a star. So if you think you need to be a star to be happy, then soon you're just not going to get closer, you're not going to release the dopamine. Now, a bigger reason why we have unrealistic expectations is because our biology is actually quite confusing. The brain chemicals that make us feel good are only released in short spurts, so we always have to do more to get more. Now, whatever it is that makes you happy, it's hard to figure out what turns on those spurts, because they're controlled by the animal part of your brain, which is the limbic system, and not by the verbal part of your brain, which is the cortex.
Now, these two brains are actually literally not on speaking terms because your animal brain can't use language. So it can't tell you in words, why it's releasing the happy chemicals. And that's why we tend to rely on philosophers and poets to tell us what makes us happy, but they're only in the verbal brain. So we really need to understand the biology of animals, understand what actually triggers our happy chemicals. And even when we find that out, it's not really what you want to hear. What makes animals happy is taking a step toward meeting their survival needs. Now, this may seem confusing because many things that people do to be happy may seem not especially good for survival and you may think, "Oh, that's not survival." But in fact, our brains are wired by past experience. So with this quirky brain, we all have quirky ways of turning on our happy chemicals, because whatever made you happy in your youth is what turns on your happy chemicals today, because that built the pathways to the switch of your dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and endorphin.
This is a difficult brain to manage and now we're trying to manage our nonverbal brain by using our verbal brain. It's all quite complicated with this equipment we've inherited and I explain how to do that in all of my books. But again, it all starts with realistic expectations about happy chemicals. So what is a realistic expectation? That my happy chemicals did not evolve to be on all the time. They did not evolve to reward you with a good feeling when you're just sitting on the couch. They evolved to reward you with a good feeling when you take action to meet your survival needs. And again, it's quirky because we define those survival needs with neural pathways built from past experience, but the bottom line is your happy chemicals are quickly metabolized. So whenever you feel good, the good feeling is soon gone. Your body just uses up that chemical, eliminates it, and you always have to do more to get more.
You always have to take another step, more action to meet your survival needs in order to trigger more happy chemicals. Now that's what creates that treadmill feeling that people find frustrating. But when you know that that's absolutely natural and normal, and it's what kept our ancestors alive for all these millennia, then you can just relax and accept that and focus on your next step toward needing your survival needs and know that you have power over your happy chemicals. Because when you take that next step, you get a little bit of good feeling, and soon it's gone and then you take that next step. And now you feel not only that you have a little bit of good feeling, but you have power over it and you build new neural pathways to feel good in new ways, instead of just repeating what triggered your happy chemicals in the past.
This is great news, if you are open to it, instead of just expecting to be happy by sitting on the couch and reading poetry and philosophy. It may seem hard to accept, so let's think of a simple example. Let's say you're a gazelle and you smell a predator. You think a lion is near you, so you start to run. You focus on the path in front of you. If you stay focused on the path in front of you, you escape the lion, and soon you're back to enjoying the fresh grass. If you focus on the lion instead, you're going to trip and you're going to get eaten. So we evolved to focus on the path in front of us and keep taking that next step rather than obsessing over potential threats. And it's interesting to know how this works. The animal part of your brain is always alert for potential threats, just like a gazelle is always alert for lions.
But obsessing over potential threats is when the verbal cortex is so focused on looking for threats, that it can actually create threats when they're not there, which is to say a human can imagine a lion when it's not there, even though a gazelle only worries about lions when it can smell one. Now, there are some advantages to being human. We can anticipate threats in time to take action. But the disadvantage is that you can dwell on threats so much that you never take that next step. And then you never trigger your happy chemicals. And then you blame the herd, why are they not taking a step? It's their fault that I'm not happy. You wait for the rest of the herd to take action and you think it's powerless for you to take action on your own.
But once you understand your brain, you can go for it. You can know that a small step toward meeting your survival needs will stimulate a good feeling. And then you can just take another small step and another and another, and you will keep stimulating your happy brain chemicals and actually build a new pathway that makes it easier to turn them on with those healthy steps, instead of turning them on with unhealthy steps. I explain this all in lots of detail on my website, innermammalinstitute.org, innermammalinstitute.org. There are plenty of free resources, and if you don't like to read, there are plenty of resources to listen to and watch. And if you speak Spanish, there are plenty of resources in Spanish, and actually, if you speak Russian, there are plenty of resources in Russian.
So I hope you will continue with me on this journey to making peace with your inner mammal, clearing those obstacles to happiness, so you can lead the way and help everyone, especially yourself to blaze new trails through your jungle of neurons, to turn on those happy brain chemicals and feel good about your next step and the next and the next. I'm Loretta Breuning. Thanks for listening.