Make America Sane Again

You decide whether to see your emotions as disorders.

We humans have inherited a brain that’s hard to manage.

We’re born crying because it’s our only hard-wired survival skill. Toddlers have tantrums because their skills are still limited. We build skills gradually, but that primal urge to explode with cortisol remains at our core.

Adults have toddler tantrums if they haven’t built the skill of redirecting their cortisol. This is why societies have always placed a high priority on teaching young people to manage their impulses. In the past, that was done by rewarding skills and not rewarding tantrums. But today’s culture often does the opposite. Cortisol explosions are rewarded in various ways, while skill-building is denigrated. This is done in the name of compassion, but it condemns people to a lifetime of cortisol explosions.

What becomes of a society that doesn’t teach people to manage their cortisol?

How can a teacher face a classroom full of students who have not learned to manage cortisol?

How can we related to coworkers and family members who have not learned to manage their cortisol?

We’re trained to call it a disorder and seek treatment.

But treatment has a low success rate because it’s based on the theory that a person is not responsible for their cortisol explosions. When an “expert” says you can’t control your eruptions, you are less likely to build the skill of controlling them. It would be nice if the “expert” could reach into a person’s brain and fix them. When that fails, we shop for a better “expert” instead of questioning the theory that people are not responsible for managing their brain.

How can we stop this destructive mindset?

Basic biology is the place to start. Monkeys don’t have tantrums because they’d go hungry if they did. Little monkeys are never given solid food, so they do what it takes to find it. Their efforts often fail and their cortisol surges, but if they had a meltdown, they would stay hungry. So they quickly learn to redirect their cortisol, and dopamine rewards them when they do.

Hunter-gather children do not have tantrums. They spend their days on tasks that would be called “child labor” in our world. Parents don’t give them a choice because starvation comes to those who lack survival skills. There’s no time to waste in a world without birth control, because children soon have children of their own to care for.

In modern America, we do not expect children to meet their own needs. We meet their needs for them on the assumption that it frees them to build more important skills. But if they refuse to learn skills and manage their cortisol, we reward them anyway. We even give them extra special rewards. The brain learns from rewards, so we are training young brains to expect tantrums to be rewarded.

When a young person has a meltdown, we say “they’re having a bad day,” or “they’re creative,” or “our society is the problem.” You have to spin it as “it’s not their fault” to protect yourself from being seen as a bad person.

The human brain builds its basic wiring in the first seven years of life. Our wiring builds from lived experience, not a genetic blueprint. No conscious intent is involved because the brain simply links all the neurons active at the moment when you got the reward. So a child who gets rewards when it has a meltdown builds basic wiring that seeks rewards by exploding with cortisol.

If a child’s needs are always met by others without expectations, the brain gets wired to expect the world to meet its needs without expectations. If a child mistreats others without consequences, their brain wires in the expectation of no consequences from mistreating others.

We often make it worse by actually rewarding bad behavior.

We give extra affection to a child having cortisol explosions. We give special privileges to a child who refuses to follow the rules. It’s hard to avoid this because you don’t want to be seen as unloving and harsh.

We need to see this from the child’s perspective. Social rewards are the coin of the realm once physical needs are met. When bad behavior is rewarded with special recognition, a young brain gets wired for bigger, faster explosions.

It’s hard to learn in school while you’re having an explosion, and it’s hard to navigate playground politics. So dysfunctional wiring leads to more frustration and more cortisol. Young people are condemned to a life full of cortisol just so adults can be seen as “caring.”

When a young person suffers, we ask what’s wrong, but they cannot know what’s wrong because the brain is not aware of its own wiring. We humans have two separate brains: a cortex that’s unique to humans and a limbic system that’s inherited from earlier mammals. Our limbic brain controls the chemicals, and since animals can’t talk, your inner mammal can’t tell you in words why it released a chemical. So our verbal brain looks for explanations. It repeats whatever explanation gets rewards. “It’s not my fault. It’s the fault of ______.” Fill in the blank with the currently popular blame theory. It feels true because our verbal brain does all the talking so we believe it.

When your cortisol surges, you think it’s a real threat. It’s hard to believe that this full-body sense of alarm is just a chemical sparked by a pathway. Managing this sense of alarm is a learned skill. Without this skill, it always seems like the world is attacking you. That motivates you to embrace fast, easy ways to turn off the alarm. Whatever works gets wired in.

For most of human history, people learned to manage their cortisol from natural consequences. If you were a medieval farmer, you got out of bed in the morning because you felt the risk of food running out before harvest time. You relieved that sense of alarm by working to build a food stock. Today, few children face real physical threats, so their natural alarm system dwells on social comparison. Scoring fewer points than someone else feels like a real threat when you’re not facing a bigger threat. The mammal brain releases cortisol when it sees itself in the one-down position. A child can end up with a lot of cortisol even in a very safe life. If they don’t learn the skill of redirecting it toward problem-solving efforts, they will have a meltdown.

How can we escape this dysfunctional loop?

Basic biology is always the answer.

For example, a dog recently attacked me on a walk in my neighborhood. The owner rushed to grab the dog and hugged it.

Animal trainers know that hugging a barking dog leads to more barking.

But the average person has been trained to believe that an aggressive dog just needs “more love.” People might say you’re “unloving” if you respond harshly to a dog’s aggression. So the “more love” theory leads us to reinforce dysfunctional behavior. It’s easy to see how the “more love” theory can lead to dysfunctional behavior in children.

We’re trained to blame genes when things go wrong. This seems true because the media is full of “experts” pointing to THE Studies. We need to know that genetics research is well funded, but no one funds research on the neural pathways built by early experience. So we’re like the drunk looking for their keys under a lamppost because that’s where the light is good.

We’re also trained to blame “our society” when things go wrong. You’re applauded as an enlightened person when you do this. Students quickly realize that they get good grades without studying if they cast blame on “our society.” They wire in the thought loops that are rewarded, like dolphins who learn to do flips because they’re rewarded. A dolphin doesn’t know what a flip is. It just repeats behaviors that get rewards.

It’s hard to believe that our brain is wired by early rewards, since we rarely remember the experiences and mental health “experts” don’t speak of them. We need to know that a young brain has a lot of the building material called myelin. It coats neurons the way insulation coats a wire, making them a hundred times more efficient. We have a lot of myelin before age eight, and another spurt in puberty. The neural pathways activated in those years become so efficient that we flow into them without realizing it. This is why we spend our lives seeking rewards in ways that worked in our youth.

The biological facts are hard to accept because they conflict with what we’ve been taught.

We’ve been trained to see nature as pure joy and to blame “our society” for everything bad. We’re taught that hunter-gatherers find food easily and spend their days making art and making love. We’re taught that children are born perfect so we should not interfere with their natural impulses. We’re taught that a good society would meet our needs for us, so our fears about unmet needs are completely “their” fault. These beliefs were manufactured by academics and infused into teacher training. No society has actually worked this way.

We need to see the facts behind the fancy theory. We are training young people to believe that their needs will be met without effort. We are wasting their years of neuroplasticity without building skills for meeting their needs. We are launching them into adulthood without basic skills. Such skills will be hard to learn once the myelin years are over.

Let’s get real about our natural operating system.

Each brain is wired by the carrots and sticks of its past. Today’s culture condemns the use of carrots and sticks. Negative reinforcement is taboo, and positive reinforcement is seen as an entitlement that you should get whether or not you perform a desired behavior. If a horse were trained this way, it would spend its whole life eating in the barn and never discover its potential to jump hurdles.

The brain learn from rewards and pain whether or not we “believe” in this. So we need to know how it happens. Dopamine is released when you meet a need. It feels so good that you want to repeat the behavior to enjoy more dopamine. How do you know what behavior to repeat? Not from intellectual analysis. The brain simply connects all the neurons active at the moment when the dopamine was released. The next time you see something similar, the electricity in your brain flows to the “on” switch of your dopamine because the pathway is there.

It’s the same when you see an obstacle to meeting a need. Cortisol is released and all the neurons active at that moment get connected to your cortisol. The next time you see a similar pattern, the bad feeling of cortisol turns on fast. This is nature’s way of helping you avoid potential threats.

Our ancestors foraged for food because dopamine made it feel good. Our ancestors went out in the snow to collect firewood because they were wired to future reward that would result from immediate pain.

Modern culture disables this natural operating system. It protects us from the negative consequences of our actions so we cannot learn from them. It trains us to expect society to overcome obstacles instead of doing it ourselves. It tells us we “deserve” to feel good all the time. It does not tell us that our happy chemicals evolved to reward action that meets needs.

No one is happy all the time because our happy brain chemicals are designed to turn on in short spurts when we see an opportunity rather than to flow all the time. Everyone is unhappy sometimes because our cortisol is designed to warn us of potential negative consequences of our actions. We need to teach the facts about our brain instead of disempowering people with the nothing-is-your-fault paradigm.

We need to teach people that they can spark dopamine by taking small steps toward meeting a need. You only get a drip, but then you can take another step toward meeting a need. Everyone can learn to feel good by taking steps to meet needs as nature intended.

We need to teach people that our brain evolved to promote survival, not to make you happy. Our ancestors had to find food constantly to survive, so they were happy when they found a tree full of ripe fruit. Today, physical needs are met, so our primal reward system dwells on social needs. When you don’t get the social rewards you seek, cortisol makes it feel like a survival threat even though you don’t consciously think that.

You can end up with a lot of cortisol. And when you don’t know how your brain works, you take it as a real threat rather than a product of your own thoughts. If we don’t know how our brain works, we can make ourselves miserable in a life that’s better than our ancestors wildest dreams.

We can teach people that the conscious brain is only a small part of who we are.

We humans have two brains: the pink fluffy cortex that talks to us in words and the limbic system we’ve inherited from earlier mammals. This animal brain (the amygdala, hippocampus, etc.) controls the chemicals, but it cannot process language, so it cannot tell you in words why it turns chemicals on and off. This is why humans have always struggled to make sense of their emotions. Your cortex does all the talking so it thinks it’s the showrunner, but it is just the narrator. If you want to feel good, you must to learn to manage your inner mammal.

Humans are not hard-wired at birth like animals. We are born with billions of neurons but few connections between them. We have a long childhood compared to animals because it takes so long to wire a brain from experience. We all get wired to seek whatever sparked our dopamine before and fear whatever sparked our cortisol before.

It’s hard to believe that we’re running on old pathways because this is not how our conscious brain sees the world. People are told that we should be “conscious,” so they’re offended by the suggestion that we run on old pathways. People should be taught that our myelinated pathways conduct electricity so fast that we flow into them without realizing that we made a choice. We all have some old highways that don’t serve us, so we all need the skill of re-wiring.

Myelin has a second spurt in puberty, so adolescents can build new highways in their brain if they feed it new choices. After that, it’s hard. For everyone.

Redirecting a myelinated response is a skill we can learn like any other skill. Our quality of life depends on it.

We all build quirky wiring in youth because children are weak and vulnerable. So we all grow up with fears, and we rush to relieve our fears in any way that works. We are all challenged to rewire these relief habits.

But it’s hard. Change is harder than you expect it to be if you think your verbal inner voice is your true self. Change is easier if you know that your impulses come from chemicals and old pathways. Then you can find your power to build new pathways.

Why are we not being taught essential brain-management skills?

Because we’re told that happiness comes easily to “normal” people, and if you’re not one of the lucky ones, society should fix it for you. This disease model of mental health has been sold in the name of the greater good, but it does more harm than good. It trains young people to believe they are powerless over their brain. It allows young people to explode with cortisol in their formative years instead of redirecting their electricity toward useful action. They end up facing the adult world without the skills necessary to meet their needs.

This disempowering mindset was entrenched long before social media and covid. Almost three hundred years ago, Rousseau said that happiness is nature’s default state and unhappiness is caused by civilization. Our eduction system embraced this view, so we’re trained to believe it’s THE Science. The result is a culture that expects happiness to come without effort and blames society when it doesn’t. It invites you to wait for society to make you happy, and for the healthcare system to make you happy until society is fixed. We’re trained to see our ups and downs as disorders, which are defined so broadly that almost everyone thinks they have one.

How can this change?

Let’s think about it from the perspective of two horses: one is afraid to leave the barn, and the other wins the Equestrian Olympics.

The Olympic horse was trained with the time-honored “carrots and sticks” method. In the modern world, “sticks” means gentle resistance when the horse goes off task. “Carrots” means a small reward when the horse takes a small new step toward a goal. In time, a horse learns to jump big hurdles in its quest for carrots. It did not choose to be a prize-winning hurdle-jumper. It would have chosen to just eat in the barn if it were given a choice.

The other horse has a trainer who says “carrots and sticks” are cruel. They decide to give the horse carrots whenever it wants. In nature, that horse would starve unless it foraged effectively all day. The horse that’s fed by a well-intentioned trainer has nothing to do, so when an unfamiliar noise triggers cortisol, it gives its full attention to that. It bucks and runs in fear, and then stays hyper-alert for that noise. It spends its days scanning for threats because its brain has nothing else to focus on.

Each brain is wired by the reward structure it lives with. Healthy wiring does not come from love or money. It comes from a healthy reward structure. We can build healthy wiring if we reward desired behavior and do NOT reward undesirable behavior.

You cannot control “society,” but you can control yourself. You can learn to notice the way you reward your family, your coworkers, and yourself. You can stop rewarding bad behavior. Other people may not like it, but you can do it anyway.

The Inner Mammal Institute has the resources you need to do this. It has step-by-step guides to discover your old neural network and rewire it as needed. And you’ll learn how to build a healthy reward structure for everyone in your life. Whether you like to read, watch or listen, we have the resources for you. Our website has plenty of free resources to get you started, including the free 5-Day Happy Chemical Jumpstart on the opt-in form at the bottom of each page.