Training Your Brain To Become Happier

Hi everybody, this is Paul Krismer, your happiness expert, and this week we’re doing something a little bit different. I had the honor of being interviewed by the prestigious charitable organization based out of the United Kingdom called Head Talks, which is all about providing mental health tools for the world for free. Soon, my interview with them is going to be up on their site, and they’ve given me a wonderful edited version of the interview we did. So please, stick with the full 10 minutes of this interview today and you’re going to get some of my best content in short order. I hope you enjoy it.

What’s really interesting is we tend to have hardwired into our brains this idea of a negativity bias. From a survival perspective, we had a need to pay attention to things that were threats. So the tiger that you see in the forest, or the inclement weather that was coming from the south, and we were constantly what we called scanning and landing on threats. So from a biological perspective, we all have this hard wiring to look for things that might hurt us. The signal to us that might hurt us is emotional feelings, fear, anxiety, worry, sadness, that kind of stuff. And in order to be happy and get those advantages that come from abundant positive emotions, we need to overcome this negativity bias, which simply is a matter of getting enough positive feelings recognized and appreciated on a daily basis.

Positive feelings tend to have less impact, less learning, than a negative feeling. So when we’re frightened by something, it makes a big impact from a neurological learning perspective. But positive things, even things that we think of are really positive like people’s wedding days or graduations and things like that, they tend to be relatively faded and not very huge in terms of our neural programming background. So what we need is getting our numbers, our volumes up. That’s what the research shows, that if we get enough recognition of positive things in our lives, we begin to lay down neural frameworks where we see that more readily. And it’s not just having good things happen in our lives, it’s appreciating, stopping, and pausing to see them. And it’s doing it in a kind of ritualistic, skill-based way.

One of the very best techniques I’ll teach you very briefly here is to look to your past 24 hours and simply write down three things that went well. I know it sounds ridiculously simple and it’s not about having the happy moment of looking back to your past 24 hours, although that’s nice in and of itself. The reason why this practice works is that by making it kind of mechanical, that every day at the same time I look to my past 24 hours, it’s actually training our brains to see positive things. Because the brain will go, “Oh gee, the user of this brain, me, wants me to recall three things.” And it does this over and over every day. And so, what the brain starts doing is laying down literally new neuronal frameworks or pathways in the brain to see and recognize positive things because it knows that this brain pays attention to that.

And so, what we can see over time is literally reprogramming of neurons in the brain, which is what’s called neural plasticity, so that people more automatically recognize things that are good in their lives. There are other skills too, but that’s a very good example and an intervention that the science is really crystal clear on. It works. People get happier by doing this routine practice day after day.

In our Western culture, in particular, we tend to run away from negative emotions. We don’t want them, we think there’s something wrong with us if I feel anxious or fearful. And so, we are filled with distractions: booze, internet, TV, you name it. The things that kind of take us away from paying attention to what’s actually there. And we particularly fall to those traps when it’s something negative that’s there. And so, there’s some beautiful teaching that’s again very science-based, showing that when we practice mindfulness, we can actually see and hold our negative emotions at a little distance from our own identity.

So if I can say, “Oh, there’s fear arising, I recognize it because I’m mindful, I’m seeing the fear arise, and now I’m acknowledging fear,” and sometimes the researchers talk about it being a self-liberating bubble that you can kind of poke it like a soap bottle and say, “Now that I see it and it’s clear in my view and it’s separate from me, it’s an emotion that will change just like thoughts and emotions are changing in us all the time.” I see this separate item, I go, “Oh, there it is,” and it’ll give it a little pop, and it kind of disappears. I’m not saying it goes away forever, but it ceases to have its power when it’s nagging at us in the background of our subconscious. “Oh, my day’s not going so well, I’m mad about this and worried about that.” And when we can bring them into awareness and be with them, then they cease to have as much power as they had previously.

The more, I’m going to use the word, materialistic we are, the more we look outside of ourselves to feel fulfilled, the more vulnerable we are to just the tides of change that are around us. We all have that to a degree, especially those of us who grew up in the Western culture where this is a huge emphasis on acquiring and accomplishing, both of which are things that are outside of ourselves intrinsically. And so, if advertising is spending gazillions of dollars every year to make us feel bad, so that we purchase products that are intended to make us feel well, well we’re bombarded with messages about our own lack of well-being and that something external to ourselves will make us feel well.

I’ll give you two little quick bits of advice. The one is to focus on our areas of strength. So what are you good at? What typically is true is that the things that we are naturally good at, when we’re doing them, it makes us happy. The easiest example is when you’re doing athletics. So if you love playing, well I’m from Canada, I’ll say if you love playing hockey, you’re skating down the side of the rink, and when you’re in that state of flow just playing the game, you are genuinely happy and you’re not even aware of it. Because it’s after you, the play stops, and someone says, “Hey, Paul, do you like playing hockey?” I get this 12-year-old boyish grin on my face and I say, “Yeah, I love playing hockey.” So when we’re working in areas of strength, we tend to get outside of our head, more in the zone or in a state of flow, and we’re happier.

The second area that is intrinsically, we know from the research, very powerful for greater happiness is knowing one’s own values. We tend to get socially conditioned into our young adulthood to take on society’s sense of values. What do I value now? And that’ll be different from one person to another, but for example, for me, personal growth and health are really important high values for me. If I wake up in the day and I get some exercise and I eat a good diet, even though it’s not world-changing by any means, I can feel intrinsically that I’m living according to my own values. I have a sense of purpose that’s being fulfilled. It could be charity, it could be teamwork, it could be family, it could be any number of beautiful values. But knowing what your own personal highest priority values are, and then making sure that as the days, and weeks, and months, and maybe even years go by, that I’m living in accordance with those values, that is a tremendous source of intrinsic happiness.

Doing something kind for someone else will result in our own greater happiness. Even when the studies are done such that we know that the person we’re doing the kind act for won’t know who did it, so there’s no trade-off, it’s not like I do something nice for you and I’m expecting something in return. When I do something nice for you, and I know that you won’t know it’s me, it still makes me very happy. We don’t exactly understand the evolutionary cause for that, but the assumption, the working theory, is that it helped us evolve as a species. If we lived in tribal relationships in small communities, if I helped you today, and you helped someone else tomorrow, and then the next person helped the next person, and eventually it would come back to me, that as a group we had a survival reward for being cooperative and kind to one another.

That survival evolutionary reward for us turned out to be positive hormones: endorphins, and dopamine, and serotonin releases, and things like that. This comes from deep roots in who we are and how our wiring is in our emotional set. Altruism is genuinely a powerful thing, and we don’t really fully understand why, but it is, it works. A brilliant researcher, one of the fathers of positive psychology, a guy named Martin Seligman, came up with this way of teaching one’s own self cognitive behavioral therapy or what he sometimes calls learned optimism. There are interventions that you can simply use in your own self-dialogue that point out the errors in our thinking that tend to be negative spirals, where we ruminate on something to become more and more negative, and anxious, and depressed.

He basically says that there are these three P’s, these three P starting words, that we can question about our circumstances. So, if I’m working with a young person, let’s say for example who’s done poorly on a math exam, they can be questioned about these three P’s, and we’d say well and you know, is this poor performance in this exam pervasive? Is it affecting all parts of your life? Are there other parts of your life that are going well? The person will say, “Oh yeah, I’m really having fun with my basketball team, I’ve got great relationships with my friends, I’m doing well in my English class.” We go, “Okay great, it’s not pervasive. Let’s get some perspective there.”

Is this deeply personal? Is it about who you are as an individual? Like, are you a bad person as a result of this math exam? The person will probably, when questioned, say, “Well no, I’m a good son, I’m good with my friends, and the truth is I’ve done pretty well in other math exams. I just didn’t study as hard as I should have for this particular one.” I go, “Oh, okay, that’s cool, well good. So, you’re not a bad person. You’re actually a good person.” And is this problem that we’re talking about, this poor performance on this math exam, is it persistent? Is it something that’s consistently happening for you? “No, I’m doing really well in social studies, I’m doing well in chemistry, and frankly, on the previous math exam, I did okay.”

So, we popped all these bubbles. Pervasive: is the problem pervasive? Persistent: is it persistent? Personal: is it personal, is it deeply about who you are, or is it circumstances that were fleeting? They were here today and they’re going to be gone tomorrow. This is a very, very powerful mechanism. I know I’ve summarized it in brevity here, but it’s very powerful to ask these three questions and do your own psychotherapy.