Habits of a Happy Brain: Retrain Your Brain to Boost Your Serotonin, Dopamine, Oxytocin, & Endorphin Levels by Loretta Breuning

“You may say you’re against status, but if you filled a room with people who said they were anti-status, a hierarchy would soon form based on how anti-status they are.”Loretta Breuning

If it feels good, it has side effects.This was a really cool read! Enjoyable & insightful into what triggers my own personal happiness and even unhappiness.

I don’t often think about what makes me happy and probably like many of us take things in life for granted. I do things also that Loretta would describe as my happy habits. Pathways I have learnt from experience that have made me feel good. Good and bad ones included.

When I am down, unhappy, I am aware. I reflect heavily in my down times. I feel pain; I place too much pressure on myself, and judge myself. Life is not and cannot always be total bliss. We are not designed to always be happy.

Pain and suffering is evident, inevitable and surrounds us all. This is not such a bad thing when you realise that you are not alone. But why do some people seem ever more happier than others?

It is because they have tools to manage them.

The author discusses our four happy chemicals, dopamine, endorphin, oxytocin and serotonin. She also delves into our very necessary unhappy chemical, cortisol.

Humans unlike other mammals have no pre built neural highways. We have no pre-determined pathways in our brain to help us survive. We have relied upon these chemicals to assist us with that.

And while what nowadays triggers our happy chemicals may not seem necessary for our survival they still work in the same way. Like a shopaholic that gets hits of dopamine when they go shopping, dopamine is released as we approach reward, and for a shopper this is their reward, their hit.

In survival terms it would have been comparable to the reward we got when we stumbled upon a beehive. Dopamine would be triggered, as the reward of sweet honey would be on the cards. These good feelings assist us in our survival and to avoid starvation.

I believe today for many of us we seek activities that help release our happy chemicals to pick us up when we are down. We have a tendency to always expect to be happy. The issue is many of these activities no longer are necessarily good for our survival or us.

Our neural pathways are built over our young years. When we experience things that make us feel good we create these happy habits. Our brain are full of these pathways by the time we get through our adolescent, and from there things can become much more difficult to change.

Loretta describes each of the chemicals in depth and what they mean to us today. She also discusses ways we can rebuild our happy pathways and adopt lifestyle approaches that can help us better manage our inevitable ups and downs.

Happy chemicals don’t stay forever, once their job is done they return to neutral.

Likewise cortisol can be inflamed by certain activities and decreased by others.

We can adopt strategies and activates that help us better utilise and manage these chemicals. And I am sure, like myself, we have happy habits that are not good for us and as the author shares, we can change them but it requires 45 days and hard work.

You see when you have done something for so long that seemingly makes you feel good yet has some kind of side effects it will be hard to make change. You need to struggle through the pain of going without and try training yourself in something else that will help you realise and create new happy pathways.

I am up for it and claim for the next 45 days I am going to attempt to alter my happy habit for the better. The good happy habit that is not so good.

Have a read of this book and learn about your own chemicals and what triggers your chemicals. Insightful and informative and in the efforts to continue to improve myself, this book is a winner.

If this book sounds of interest you can purchase Habits of a Happy Brain: Retrain Your Brain to Boost Your Serotonin, Dopamine, Oxytocin, & Endorphin Levels here.

Please leave your thoughts, comments & questions below.

Peace, passion and purpose…

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