building a happy brain
You can start increasing your happiness in just a few days, simply by making a conscious decision neither to think unhappy thoughts nor to permit yourself to feel negative emotions. But if you’ve been depressed for a while then it’s going to take longer. That’s because the physical structure of your brain will have been that of a ‘depressed brain’. We’re going to be doing noth- ing less than changing the physical structure of your brain to that of a ‘happy brain’. Dr Richard Bentall, a psychologist at the University of Liverpool, has suggested that happiness should be considered a kind of insanity. He gives three reasons: he says happiness is associated with irrational thinking, that it’s caused by a disturbance of the central nervous system, and that it’s a frequent side effect of epileptic fits. If he’s right, you’re very soon going to be completely mad!
When you’re happy you learn faster-it’s a scientific fact. So while you’re reading, keep smiling.
One of the most important secrets of happiness is that your brain is ‘plastic’. In other words, it can be moulded – In effect, in the same way as a muscle. And not just when you’re an infant. All thouth your life your brain has the capacity for physical change, so that’s reassuring as it’s never too late. Only a very few functions are irrevocably set in childhood. You have it in your power to mould your own brain and make it a happy brain.
How does it work? Well, neurologists have captured the essence of it with this saying: Cells that fire together wire together.’ It’s one of the answers to the riddle of how the brain functions. When two things happen at once, such as seeing the sun and feeling a delicious warmth on your skin, so two sets of neurons are set off in your brain and a connection, known as a synapse, is made between them. You’ve now learned that sunshine means pleasure. And forever more, when you see the sun, you’ll feel happy.
What’s more, each time you feel the pleasure, the synapse will be strengthened. This is called Hebbian learning, after the Canadian psychologist Donald Hebb who, as far back as 1949, proposed that single neurons were responsible for the learning process.
In other words, learning is simply wiring in new connections between some of the 100 billion neurons you have in your brain. The more something is repeated, the more lasting the wiring becomes. That’s why, when you repeat things over and over, you can remember them more easily. And the growth of this wiring has even been observed using something called a two-photon fluorescence microscope, so it’s not a hypothesis, it’s reality. When a lot of new wiring is added in a particular area of the brain it actually becomes physically larger. Some regions can grow incredibly quickly – in just a few hours – but others take weeks or even years.
When you rewire your brain for happiness you’re working at the most profound level by elevating your baseling. In other words, although life’s problems and tragedies may sometimes knock you down, and although occasional good fortune may sometimes fly you to the moon, this is the base level to which you’ll always return.
One of the ways of working at this deep level is through your thoughts. The concept is profound and yet very simple. If you deliberately think happy thoughts you’ll not only feel happier, but the chemi- cals that are linked to your thoughts will bring about physical changes in your brain.
Retraining your mind
Let’s say your boss tells you you’re going to get an unexpected and quite substantial Christmas bonus. You’re thrilled. A little later one of your colleagues tells you the size of her Christmas bonus and it’s double yours. Now how do you feel?
And yet your circumstances haven’t changed. The same bonus that made you happy a couple of hours ago now makes you unhappy.
What has changed is your mental attitude. You were content with the sum you were getting. Now you’re not.
This is an illustration of the principle that your happiness has a lot to do wiht your way of looking at things. One of the keys to more happiness, then, is to adopt a way of thinking that leads to happiness.
In our little scenario, you could storm into the boss’s office and demand that you also be given a larger bonus. You might get it. Then again, you might not. Alternatively, you could continue to be miser- able with the bonus you have. But if happiness is your aim, then all you really have to do is be grateful for what you got.
This idea that happiness comes from you controlling your own mind (rather than the outside world) has long been a teaching of Oriental philosophy. But, relatively recently, it has also become a teaching of modern psychology. In the 1960s, Dr Aaron Beck at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine began codifying the different kinds of thinking that lead to happiness and unhappiness. As a result, he developed a system for treating depression and various other mental problems, which he called ‘cognitive therapy’.
Let’s say you get the sack. These are two possible responses:
- I’m a failure; I’ll never get another job
- I was never really happy there and that was part of the problem; I’ll learn from this, move ahead and get a job I really
Obviously, if you were to respond as in the first example, you’d be talking yourself into a depres- sion and building a depressed brain. But if you were to respond as in the second example, you’d be much happier-and, incidentally, far more likely to get another job.
This more positive way of looking at the world is the essence of cognitive therapy (or cognitive behavioural therapy). It’s a rather highfalutin title to describe something that, infact, we all use on our- selves every day. Whenever we try to cajole ourselves into attempting something difficult (‘I can do this’), or whenever we try to raise our own spirits (‘It’s not so bad’), or whenever we try to counter a criticism (‘He doesn’t know what he’s talking about’), we’re using cognitive therapy (CT). In other words, we’re trying to make ourselves feel better by changing the way we think.
Ten thoughts that can make you unhappy
When you put CT together with philosophy from ancient traditions, such as Taoism and Bud- dhism, you see a lot of similarities and you end up with a list that looks something like this.
- Theirs is (comparing)
- I want .. and more. (greed)
- If It’s not black, it must be (all-or-nothing)
- If it’s not perfect, it’s no (perfectionism)
- Why is this always happening to me? (exaggeration)
- I’m not going to like (jumping to negative conclusions)
- I feel it, so it must be (emotional reasoning)
- I’m a label; you’re a (labelling)
- I should do this; you should do (obligation)
- If it’s wrong, if must be my (wrongly taking responsibility)
Ten harmful emotions
In addition of the ten unhappy ways of thinking, there are also atleast ten harmful emotions. They are feelings that literally poison our minds in the same way that cyanide would poison our bodies. We take great care to avoid poisonous substances. We need to exercise the same care in keeping negative emotions away from our minds. These negative emotions include.
- anger
- blame
- cynicism
- hate
- hostility
- revenge
- jealousy
- resentment
- suspicion
Why are we negative?
It’s worth asking why you or anybody else should want to look at things in a negative way. After all, if looking for the positive leads to happiness, and if looking for the negative leads to everything bad, then only a fool would look for the negative. And yet so many people do.
According to many psychiatrists and psychologists, infants very quickly develop into one of four types, rather entertainingly expressed like this:
- I’m all right and you’re all
- I’m all right but you’re not all 3 I’m not all right but you’re all right.
4 I’m not all right and you’re not all right.
You can probably grasp right away that the first of these is most likely to lead to happiness. The second will lead to occasional happiness. The third and fourth are recipes for unhappiness.
According to this theory, once the thought pattern has developed, so it will continue for the rest of your life, unless you make a conscious effort to change. And this is the key point. A person will interpret everything that happens in the world in one of these four ways. In other words, four different people (one from each category) can have the identical experience and yet each will find in it the ‘proof’ that their own philosophy is the right one.
Here’s a little test to see which category you are. Suppose the economy of the country has got into serious difficulties and a leading politician has come on the television to explain what has happened. Which of the following do you say?
- The government has done a pretty good job up to now and I’m sure he’s disappointed as we all It will come right again.
- You idiot! A bunch of monkeys would make a better job of running the
- These things are too complicated for me but I’m sure he’s clever enough to solve the 4 Why does everything have to go wrong for me? What a lousy world!
These four kinds of response correspond to the four types of personality.
If you’re type 1, you’re lucky, You’re happy. Your self-worth doesn’t rely on seeing other people as inferrior. You can empathize freely without being judgemental. You don’t see the world as hostile. But this is the hardest of the four positions to maintain consistently.
If you’re type 2, you may have had parents who tended to view the world with a certain hostility. They and you (and other close family members) were OK (infact, far more than OK), but everyone else was incompetent and potentially dangerous. You relish seeing everyone else as ‘not OK’ because in order to maintain your own sense of superiority, and therefore your self-worth, you need other people to be failures. You may not be very happy but, on the other hand, you’re unlikely to become depressed.
if you’re type 3, you may have had parents who were often ‘disappointed’ in you and critical. You
feel that other people are more successful and happy than you are. Unfortunately, you may indulge in behaviour that will have the effect of confirming your belief, such as drinking heavily. You’re liable to become depressed.
If you recognized yourself as type 2,3 or 4 don’t worry. This book will teach you how to transform yourself into type 1. It can be done.
Getting rid of the negative
You may object that mindsets such as perfectionism and driving ambition are aspects of your personality, along with emotions such as anger and jealousy. You may feel that they’re natural and can’t be eradicated in you or any other human being. And that if they were to be eradicated in you then you just wouldn’t be’you’ any more.
Well, lots of things are unnatural. It’s not ‘natural’, for example, to be able to read this book, nor to cut your fingernails and, as Dr Bentall has suggested, it may not even be ‘natural’ to be happy very often. But that’s what we’re aiming for. So let’s not worry about what’s ‘natural’ and what isn’t.
As regards your personality, that’s a different issue. It’s certainly true that if you’re to become happier, then your personality is going to change. Indeed, in a sense, yes, you won’t be ‘you’ any more. You’ll be different. Be ready for that if you want to be happier. But who knows which is the ‘real’ you anyway? Maybe it’s the happy version.
In the next chapter you’ll learn how to tackle the poisons.
