It’s easy to feel bad when someone around you feels bad. It’s easy to get sucked into the distress of family, friends, coworkers, and public affairs. But if you can't be happy unless everyone is happy, you will never feel good. This podcast gives you three simple steps to avoid getting sucked into other people’s negativity.
Step One is to give yourself permission to feel good, even when others feel bad. That may sound selfish or unethical, but the truth is that others do not benefit when you join in their suffering. You just do it out of habit.
The habit is natural because our brain gets wired in childhood. Children can’t meet their own needs, so they must depend on others for survival. Children suffer when their caretakers suffer, and this wires them to scan for drama in hopes of protecting themselves. The wiring lasts a lifetime, and creates the feeling that you need to get involved in the misery of others in order to be safe.
Someone may call you selfish if you refuse to get sucked in. But they are selfishly pulling you into their agenda. You can be a good person without submitting to everyone who wants something from you. You can feel good without anyone’s approval.
How to feel good is the next challenge. Step Two makes it simple: just focus on your own next step. Your brain rewards you with the great feeling of dopamine when you step toward meeting a need. You only get a small drip of dopamine, but you get more with each step. We need to focus on things we can control to spark our dopamine. If you focus on things outside your control, you end up feeling bad. It’s tempting to focus on what other people should do, but you can’t control that, so it leaves you feeling bad. You will feel good when you shift your attention from the drama around you to your own next step.
Each time you shift your attention in this way, you strengthen the neural pathway that turns on good feelings. Each time you dwell on the negativity of others, you build the pathway for bad feelings. You are always choosing what you focus on.
But it’s hard to notice this choice because we’re not aware of our own neural pathways. The electricity in the brain flows like water in a storm - it finds the paths of least resistance. We flow so easily into old pathways that we repeat an old habit before we know we’ve made a choice. Fortunately, we have billions of extra neurons to support new choices. But it’s hard to activate new neurons. It’s like trying to divert a river into a soda straw. Step Three helps you do this.
Step Three is to give yourself an immediate reward when you take a step toward a long-run goal. Give yourself a treat and your brain will link the good feeling of the treat to the step you are taking. Animal trainers use this method because it works. You may object to the idea of training yourself like an animal. You may fear needing too many treats, or think you’re too sophisticated to be motivated extrinsic rewards. But our brain is designed to learn from rewards, so you’re already wired by the rewards of your past. You will keep repeating whatever behavior was rewarded in your early years until you find a creative way to change your own reward structure.
Animal trainers reward any step in the right direction, but we humans often reward ourselves for steps in the wrong direction. For example, you open a bottle of wine when you join in the suffering of others. Or you order a pizza when you give up on your goals and follow the herd. Maybe you play a video game when you despair over other people’s problems. You can learn to notice which behaviors you are rewarding and take a lesson from professional trainers: quickly reward the behavior you want and never ever reward the behavior you don’t want.
Animal trainers cut a treat into tiny pieces so they can reward tiny steps again and again. It takes a lot of repetition to build a new neural pathway. And the brain habituates to rewards it already has, so trainers learn to vary the rewards. You can develop a variety of rewards to keep yourself motivated. You can develop healthy rewards so you don’t harm yourself with an excess of unhealthy rewards. I explain how to do this in all of my books and video courses.
The best reward is ten minutes of time for your favorite hobby. You can give yourself this treat when you take action on your goal instead of wallowing in collective misery. You may think you don’t have time for this, but you can use the time you’ve been wasting on steps in the wrong direction. You will be eager to take another step toward your goal to enjoy another ten minutes of hobby time.
These three steps may seem like a huge departure from what you’ve heard elsewhere. You may reject these three steps because they conflict with some popular beliefs. Let’s resolve these conflicts so you can start enjoying your new path.
Modern culture treats “empathy” as the highest virtue, so you fear being seen as lacking in empathy. Psychologists will applaud you for empathy if you claim to be suffering over the problems of others. And psychologists teach you to condemn others as “narcissists” if they don’t support your agenda. Psychological theories come and go, just like fashion. Not too long ago, it would have been called “enmeshment” if you couldn’t separate from the pain of others. You may prefer to be called a virtuous empath, but you’d benefit more from a psychologist who taught you to set boundaries.
Instead of seeing empathy as an end in itself, let’s look at the biology beneath it. We are all born with mirror neurons, so we’re all disposed to mirror the ups and downs of those around us. But our neuroplasticity peaks in youth, so we are wired by the drama we mirrored in childhood. In adulthood, we empathize with people who fit our early wiring. Some of those circuits are valuable and others challenge us to rewire them.
It helps to know that animals do not stick together in the idealized way you’ve been taught. Animals prefer to spread out to avoid eating grass that was soiled by others. They get intestinal worms when they stick too close, so they only cluster when they smell a predator. It’s a purely selfish impulse.
The three steps explained here also conflict with another psychological theory: the disease model of mental health. We’ve been taught that happiness is genetic, and if you didn’t get good genes, you should fix it with pills. You are told that THE Science proves this, so if you question it, you’re an anti-science nut. No one tells you that the pharmaceutical industry supplied all the research.
Modern culture trains you to see happiness as an entitlement. It seems like some people get an endless flow of happy chemicals and you’ve been deprived. Everyone blames the system for their unhappiness, so it’s easy to believe this. The truth is that our happy brain chemicals are not meant to be on all the time. They evolved to do a job, so they only turn on in short spurts. No one is getting a constant, effortless flow of happy chemicals. Everyone has to work for any dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, or endorphin they get. Sparking happy chemicals in healthy ways is a skill that takes a lifetime to build.
When you believe that happiness is an entitlement, you have no reason to work on the skill. You just wait for happiness to come on its own, and then feel left out if it doesn’t. You are better off knowing that unhappiness is our natural default state. We are born crying and slip back to that natural distress mode easily. Parents strive to soothe a child, but it’s soon back to crying. As you mature, you have new reasons for distress as you become more aware that death is inevitable. We’re tempted to relieve distress with shortcuts that often lead to more distress. There are healthy ways to feel good, but we must learn them with practice like any other skill.
You have no reason to build the skill if you’re told that “treatment” is the way to feel good. You may try one treatment after another, but no one tells you that a step toward meeting your needs is what sparks happy brain chemicals.
Let’s review the three steps. First, you give yourself permission to feel good instead of waiting for someone to give you permission. Then you step toward a goal instead of expecting the world to make you happy on its own. Finally, you reward yourself in healthy ways repeatedly, so a new pathway builds.
If you’re tempted to feel guilty about your new path, remember that you help people more when you model positivity than when you join their negativity. Others will feel your positivity through their mirror neurons and learn from it.
It shouldn’t be so hard, you may think. We’re taught that joy is the natural state, so it’s hard to understand why so many people are miserable. Let’s go back to the biology to find the truth.
Our brain is designed to learn from rewards. When a hungry squirrel finds a nut, dopamine paves a neural pathway that helps it find more nuts. When a hungry lion catches a meal, dopamine paves a pathway that helps it hunt better in the future. Bigger rewards build bigger pathways. So imagine a young person who gambles and wins a jackpot. They get a huge dopamine, which wires in huge expectations about future gambling.
Imagine a young person trying cocaine. The brain sees it as a jackpot because it sparks more dopamine than you get from natural sources. A huge pathway gets built.
Maybe you didn’t gamble or use cocaine, so it’s useful to see other jackpots from our brain’s perspective. Imagine a young person learning that they failed a math test, and then burying the bad feeling in a video game. The bad feeling changes to a good feeling, and the brain sees that as a big reward.
Every brain is wired by those moments when a bad feeling suddenly changes to a good feeling. Imagine a young person who feels ignored, and they suddenly get attention from a special someone after they have a beer. Imagine a young person who has a temper tantrum and notices that people are suddenly nicer to them. We can easily end up wired to seek rewards in ways that don’t serve us in the long run. But we don’t notice our own pathways, so we think we’re just responding to events outside us. We can create our misery without knowing how we’ve done it.
You can build your power over your brain when you understand how it works. If you don’t build your power, you will be sucked into the pain of the least happy person in your family, your workplace, your friend group, or your society.
If you don’t learn to target your own goals, you will follow the herd wherever it leads.
If you don’t learn to manage your own incentive structure, you’ll be driven by the circuits you built from early experience.
It’s scary to leave the herd and chart your own course. It’s hard to find steps you can actually take, and hard to find rewards that are motivating but safe. So it bears repeating that small steps are enough. You don’t have to change the world. You don’t have to make everyone happy. You don’t have to rescue orphans from burning buildings. One step toward meeting a need is all it takes when you understand your inner mammal. Find more on how to do this in my books and the free 5-day happy chemical jumpstart of the Inner Mammal Institute.
