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How Baboons Choose Their Leaders
Patronage works in the Baboon World Every baboon troop is led by an alpha who holds power until ousted by a challenger. Brute force makes you alpha among small-brained mammals like bovines, but in the...
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Why It’s Always High School In Your Brain
Your teen self is still the core of who you are Does life sometimes seem like a high school cafeteria? It's not your imagination. Our brain is designed to wire itself in adolescence. Our emotional...
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The Urge To Be Heard At Your Core
You need to express yourself to feel safe. We are born with no survival skills except the ability to express pain. When you withhold your urge to be heard, you feel helpless and endangered. A human...
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Five Ways to Boost Your Natural Happy Chemicals
You can trigger more happy chemicals naturally. Here’s how. You can stimulate more happy chemicals with fewer side effects when you understand the job your happy chemicals evolved to do. Here’s a...
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The Sadness of Partisan Polarizing
And the choice to live without partisan goggles. I am surrounded by political anger. Everyone expects me to be on their side because they are the good guys, and they label me a bad guy if I don’t. But...
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Why Winning Feels Good
Winning doesn’t matter, we’re told, but something deep inside suggests otherwise. “Our society” creates the urge to win, we’re taught, yet monkeys have been trying to one-up each other for fifty...
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How to Make Frustration Work for You
Overcoming obstacles is the natural way to feel good. Our frustrations are often blamed on modern society, but monkeys had the same frustrations 50 million years ago. They could climb a high tree for a...
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Why Is My Phone So Addictive?
Your phone triggers dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin, while it relieves cortisol Our brain is not designed to release good feelings all the time for no reason. It evolved to promote survival. It...
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Good Habits Make You Feel Like You’re Gonna Die
If you have a bad habit, it’s because your brain thinks it’s good for survival. If you eat a donut when you’re annoyed, for example, it’s because your brain has experienced the donut’s ability to...
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Why Love Is a Neurochemical Roller Coaster
Love makes your happy chemicals surge, but they always dip Love triggers dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin. That’s why it’s so motivating. But happy chemicals come in spurts. They do their job by...
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Control the World or Control Yourself?
In a perfect world, ice cream would have no calories, I would win every tennis match I played, and everyone I loved would love me back. Then I wouldn’t need self-control. I wouldn’t need to practice....
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Score! Dopamine! Repeat! Or Not: Why goals don’t bring satisfaction.
Reaching a goal triggers dopamine. That feels great, but the spurt soon ends. Then you become who you were before the spurt. If you’re not comfortable with that, you can get caught up in endless...
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Feeling Good Is a Learned Skill: Dwelling on your gifts wires in good feelings.
“When I’m good no one remembers. When I’m bad no one forgets.” This lament rings true for most people. How can we learn the skill of feeling good when we’ve learned to feel bad? You ca feed your...
View ArticlePersonal Responsibility and Mental Health
Personal responsibility is the spark that allows “help” to help. It’s time that we fix a flaw in our mental health model: its denial of personal responsibility. Mental health is not hard-wired at...
View ArticleWhy You’re Unhappy: Biology vs Politics
Unhappiness is a natural brain function, but we’re taught to see it as a disorder. They say THE Science proves this, so it’s hard to question. My new book shows that unhappiness is natural biology, and...
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