Welcome And Meet Loretta Bruning

SPEAKER_01 0:05

Welcome back to Speak Out Standout. I'm Elizabeth Green, and today's guest is Loretta Bruning. Loretta is the author of Habits of a Happy Brain, a book about retraining your brain to boost serotonin, dopamine, oxy oxytocin. Okay, it finally got to me. Oxytocin and endorphin levels. And we're gonna talk about those things, what they actually mean outside of the words, and how we could retrain our brains to uh produce more of those. So, Loretta, I'm really excited to have this conversation with you. Thanks for being here today.

SPEAKER_00 0:35

Thanks for inviting me and for having this valuable resource for kids and parents. And I'm a grandparent in this age range now.

SPEAKER_01 0:43

Well, and I think there's so much I've been personally excited about this chat because it, I think it, like you said, it will apply to things that we can help our kids with, but also ourselves. And so I'm really looking forward to talking about this. But first, how did we get how did you get to the point in life where this is your focus that you researched this and wrote a book about the chemicals in our brain and how we can train them or retrain them?

SPEAKER_00 1:06

Thank you. Well, I was a college professor in a different subject, and I was always fascinated by academic psychology because I always thought it had all the answers. And when I grow up, I'm gonna do everything the right way, and everybody's gonna be happy as we all try to think that we can, you know, fix the past. And then, needless to say, I discovered that I was not happy all the time, my kids were not happy all the time, my students were not happy all the time. So that motivated me to go back into academic psychology and look for like what's missing? What why didn't it work? And I discovered the animal part of our brain, which controls the chemicals that make us feel good and bad. And there was a lot of research on how these chemicals work in monkeys. And believe it or not, monkeys fight with each other a lot. And it helps you understand why human life is full of drama rather than the unrealistic um illusions that academic psychology burdens us with. So I read more and more about that. I was fortunate to take early retirement, and I love to write. So here we are.

SPEAKER_01 2:22

Well, that's awesome. I think that, you know, we hear a lot in today's age in conversations about we hear a lot about serotonin, especially in dopamine. Dopamine and the dopamine hits we get from our phone. You know, before, um, I feel like it's at least those words I hear a lot more about now. Um, but what exactly do they mean before we get into the part of like, how can we make them do what we want them to do?

SPEAKER_00 2:46

Yes, exactly. So, well, let's start with the last part. Our uh um our control over them is limited. And that's why it's all the more important to understand what our power over them is and also to um not give up and say, oh, we're powerless and we,

Why Happy Chemicals Exist

SPEAKER_00 3:05

you know, can't do anything at all about it or expect your doctor to control them for you. Now, each of these happy chemicals has a different job because in the state of nature, each one's job is to motivate you with a good feeling to meet a different survival need. So we want all of them all the time, but we're not meant to have all of them all the time. That's why they're motivating, is like the thing, you only get the good feeling if you act on the survival need.

SPEAKER_01 3:37

Okay, and I think that's interesting to even start to consider because we live, most of us are lucky enough to live in situations where we don't think a whole lot about survival and the way our brains do things for our survival, we think more about what are we gonna have for dinner? You know, like we thankfully, we thankfully that's not at the forefront of our brain all the time. But that's good to know that it it boils back down to the very basic instinct of survival.

SPEAKER_00 4:03

Yeah. So, and also because we're not consciously with our verbal brain thinking about survival, but these chemicals are wired in our early years. So we humans are born with a lot of neurons, but they're not connected to each other. We're not hardwired like a squirrel that knows how to find food as soon as it's born. Takes a human a decade or two to figure out how to find its own food, right? So we wire our brains from early experience and we wire our happy chemicals from early experience. And needless to say, a child is not an expert on what's the best way to be happy. And that's the dilemma of life is that each of us sees the adult world through the lens of neural pathways that were built when we're young. So our power in this world and in adulthood is to understand our old wiring and understand that we can build new wiring, but it doesn't happen effortlessly. It requires a lot of repetition.

SPEAKER_01 5:05

Okay, so let's dive into that. How do we do that? I'm sure that pretty much everybody listening thinks, even if you're generally happy, they probably think, you know, there, I could be happier, especially like a lot of moms listening when you have little kids and we're in that point, we are kind of in survival mode. So, so how do we do that?

SPEAKER_00 5:24

Sure. Well, first you asked, um, what do these chemicals do? So I'll explain what each one does. Okay. And in fact, I'm not actually saying we should have more of them. Needless to say, that's the question other people have. So I want to answer it. But my perspective is really self-acceptance, that we should understand why they're not meant to be on all the time and nobody else is having them all the time, and that they turn on for reasons that were wired in your childhood, which is to say they turn on for reasons that don't make sense and that you don't like approve of with your conscious brain. And that's what we need to know. And also, when you said that we hear these words all the time, I may I take a little bit of credit. So I first wrote about this 15 years ago. And since then, the words have become widely used, but they are used in a simplistic and to me completely incorrect way on the internet, which is not just the internet, but in academic psychology and in the therapy world, because people have the warm and fuzzy view of animals, which suggests that animals cooperate and share all the time, and we're all born in this perfect state. Children cooperate and share all the time, and something has gone wrong in this world that has made something go wrong with your chemicals, be whether whether you blame X, Y, or Z. And so, needless to say, this is not how our brain is in the state of nature. So, dopamine is the good feeling that you're about to meet a survival need. So, if you imagine our hunter-gatherer ancestors, they didn't know where their next meal was coming from, they had to work hard to find food, and then as soon as they found food, it was gone, and then they had to find more. So, our brain is designed to constantly look for more. And that's why people are always looking for more. So, when you get something like when our ancestors found a

Dopamine And The Drive For More

SPEAKER_00 7:35

tree full of ripe fruit, their dopamine turned on is like, wow, I'm gonna get to eat. And in the modern world, when we have all that food sitting around, so we need other ways to turn on that feeling of wow, I'm gonna get something new. It might be a healthy way, might be an unhealthy way. Either way, we want that feeling of wow, I'm gonna get something new.

SPEAKER_01 8:00

That is already so interesting to me. And so I'm guessing when you said could be a healthy way or an unhealthy way, is dopamine also what fuels addictions at the base root of it? Okay.

SPEAKER_00 8:11

Exactly. And that's why when I mentioned like the interview, uh, the internet view of this information is so misleading because it usually only focuses on the disease view or the bad view and ignores the good view. So, for example, dopamine is the good feeling of crossing something off your things to do list. But if you eat a cookie and then you want another cookie, it's also dopamine. But in the modern culture, they train you to blame the cookie manufacturer for your desire for the next cookie. And that I think people will be better able to resist that false view if they really understand their dopamine.

SPEAKER_01 8:56

Yeah. And I think one to just to focus on dopamine for just one more minute, because uh the what I usually hear about dopamine is the the hits we get when we scroll on our phones and that we're getting so addicted to that. And so talking, especially to the parents listening, even if your kids are not on social media yet or they don't have cell phones or you're just getting into that. Um what can we do? I mean, we're it we're already there. We already have this issue. We've got to deal with it on our own. How can we prevent our children from going down that same path when it comes to technology?

SPEAKER_00 9:27

When you say we're already there, you mean you already have the one already has the habit, oneself, and yet one. Okay. So let me tell you about mirror neurons, which have been discovered in the past few years. Uh, we all know this expression monkey see, monkey do, and we've all observed that our children tend to learn from what they see rather than what we tell them. And now we know that this is a real thing, that we all have mirror neurons. Monkeys have mirror neurons, so every monkey learns to choose the right food, even though its mother can't talk, it doesn't go to school, but it mirrors its mother's

Phones Mirror Neurons And Modeling

SPEAKER_00 10:10

food-grabbing behavior, and then its mother dies when it's only a few years old. But the species survives because they mirror the survival behaviors that they observe. So your kids are going to observe your behavior. And in fact, it's emotion-driven. So your kids will mirror anything that makes you happy and anything that makes you sad. They're gonna they're gonna mirror your avoidance of anything that makes you sad. So if you tell them don't do X, but then they see you loving X, then they're gonna do it. Okay. So obviously the first answer is to model the behavior you want. And one simple, effective way to do that is you can enjoy your device in a responsible way by sort of casually mentioning, oh, I'm gonna sit down and use my phone for five minutes. And then when five minutes is over, you'd like, oh, that was good. Put it down with a smile on your face and go do your next thing. So you you show that uh modeling that healthy use. And so there's nothing wrong with the dopamine of your phone use as long as you get dopamine in other ways. And you mention addiction, that's the whole point of addiction, is you don't know another way to spark good feelings. So you abuse one of them.

SPEAKER_01 11:34

Right. Okay, that that makes sense. So um, and again, I like I know we have other things we want to talk about, but I'm just so interested in all of this. So if we're it like for me personally, I could definitely say I use my phone too much, I'm very guilty of uh bleeding work into entertainment and thinking, oh, I need to respond to this email and then go down a path of something that I didn't need to do right then. So when somebody's saying, I I am addicted to the dopamine that my phone gives me, how can I replace that healthily?

SPEAKER_00 12:03

Okay. So simple answer for the way you asked it is give yourself breaks. The reason you're going down that unwanted path is because you need a break. If you give yourself that expect expectation that I must work constantly, then your brain is gonna rebel and build in the break. If you don't take this kind of break, you take that kind of break. So maybe you build in some realistic expectations. And one simple famous example of that is what people call the um tomato method. What is, oh, there's a word for it. It's

Breaks That Prevent Doomscrolling

SPEAKER_00 12:40

a um a timer that looks like a tomato. Oh, pomodoro, that's it, because Pomodoro is Italian for tomato. It's called the Pomodoro method, which is like a timer, and you turn on the timer for 25 minutes, and then you give yourself a five-minute break. So every time you do 25 minutes of intense work, give yourself five minutes break, and then choose some kind of break that you find refreshing rather than this kind of break that you're gonna hate yourself for. So that's just a simple way of looking at it. But another positive way of looking at it that I think of, I use the example that when I was young, before cell phones even existed, I would sit on the New York subway and read a book. So I always had to carry around a physical book. Then if I wanted to write notes about something I found in the book, I'd have to dig in my purse and get my little memo pad and my little pen and on the subway and write the note. And then if I wanted to put something on my calendar, I'd have to fish in my purse and find my calendar. So, needless to say, a lot of the time that you're on your phone, you're really doing things that you would have done in other ways. And it's just that now they're all focused on one device and it's really simplifying things you would have done on other devices. And I'm just so grateful for my phone a lot of times because I reply to an email while I'm waiting while I'm waiting online somewhere, get it out of the way. It frees you to do other things. So we can see the positive side of it. And then when we feel like we're misusing it, we say to ourselves, well, what need is that meeting? And what other way could I meet that need? And I'm assuming that it's a need for a break, but other times, so there's another need, and that brings us to the chemical serotonin. So we all have a need for pride, respect, or to put it in a monkey way is social power. So monkeys are constantly competing for social power, and we all want social power, but we can't be the big monkey all the time. Nobody can. But our brain desires to be the monkey all the time. And so each time you get a little bit of um social one-upmanship, you get a little bit of

Serotonin Social Comparison And Kids

SPEAKER_00 15:08

serotonin release, and then it's gone. So then you want another little moment of social advantage or um uh social prominence, uh social recognition. And the internet and social media is an obvious way to get it. And so that's the need that it's probably meeting.

SPEAKER_01 15:29

Got it. That makes a that makes a lot of sense. And I'm glad you mentioned that the phone. We forget sometimes that well, I would say a lot of times we demonize phones because there are a lot of problems with them. But you're right, they're weird, they're they're life-changing in a lot of great ways. Well, so let's talk about like our kids for a second that when it comes to serotonin, uh, you know, they're probably, especially your kids are not on social media. Maybe they're using the internet, but let's say they're not. How are they getting that serotonin each each day or however often we we get those hits? And what can we do to make sure that they are getting that?

SPEAKER_00 16:02

Yeah, that's a great question. Now, first we have to start with the fact that nobody has it all the time. So we currently have this dysfunctional cultural message that you should feel on top of the world all the time. And if you don't, that some something tragic has happened. Either we pathologize it as a disorder or as a social injustice. Something has gone wrong, and it's a parent's fault, or the teachers, or the system, and now we got to fix it so that you feel on top all the time. So that's just unrealistic. A monkey who felt on top all the time would actually get into more conflicts. They would always think, well, that's my banana. You can't have that banana, you know. So in the animal world, they make careful decisions, they constantly make social comparisons so they can avoid conflicts they're going to lose while still sparking their serotonin. So we have inherited a brain that's constantly making social comparisons and is constantly desiring that one-up feeling. So, a nice healthy way to think about it is if you and I are playing Scrabble and I draw just the letter I need, I feel like I'm gonna win. So we all like to win. There's nothing evil about that. So let's start from that and just say everybody wants to win. And yet it's not if you think I must have that feeling every minute of every day, as if I'm drawing the Z and Scrabble and putting it on the triple letter score. That's just not realistic, you know. So when you don't have it, you feel like, oh poor me. So then your kid is going to learn that oh poor me perspective. And it's so easy to transmit that idea to your kid. Like if your kid comes home from school and they wanted to hit a home run, but they didn't hit a home run, or they wanted to get the best grade in the class, but they didn't get the best. Oh, they must be bullied, or the teacher's mean to them. So we really have to work hard at accepting that our kids have to live with the constant social comparison that the mammal brain creates and cannot always be in the one-up position, just as we have to live with it. And when I say the mammal brain, just to so people know that this is a real thing rather than casting aspersions that something gone wrong. So the limbic system is the part of our brain that people have heard of, like the amygdala and hippocampus, it's that core part underneath our cortex that controls our chemicals and our body. Now, the cortex that we have, that humans uniquely have, that we give credit for everything and overlook the rest is because our cortex can use words. So we think it's the whole story because it's the only part of our brain that can talk. But it's really what I say is it thinks it's the showrunner, but it's only the narrator. So you have to kind of remember that your talking brain is just your internal public relations agency, but your mammal brain is running the show far more than you realize. And so you will be unhappy sometimes, and your kids will be unhappy all the time. And you can't indoctrinate them to think that the world is bad if they're unhappy. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 19:44

That this makes a lot of sense. Um usually conversations like this are a little bit over my head, uh, you know, because I haven't studied psychology and things like that. But you're you explain it so well, it's so easy to understand and visualize.

SPEAKER_00 19:55

Well, I have to tell you that what I'm saying is not accepted in academic psychology. So people often think that I'm speaking neuroscience, but really, people in neuroscience will only tell you this dopamine receptor is connected to this dopamine neuron. And if you draw any conclusions about it, you're wrong. And then they'll jump from that to saying that if you're unhappy, that you should rush to the doctor, you know?

SPEAKER_01 20:21

Yeah, yeah. Well, so we've talked about serotonin and dopamine. Are there any other of the chemicals that we want to talk about before we and it while we also save a little bit of time for how can we like we retrain our brain, right? That's the thing. How can we make it be the brain that we want it to be?

SPEAKER_00 20:37

Yeah. So the other one, oxytocin that you mentioned, and I was glad you mispronounced it because uh this the whole cult has grown up around oxytocin because it's called the bonding hormone or the cuddle chemical. So um it's kind of some people are like overusing it to think um another word is like connection. Again, it's this idea that animals love each other all the time and something has gone wrong in our world, which is absolutely false. And also, like you might think that in some tropical

Oxytocin Trust Is Earned

SPEAKER_00 21:16

island somewhere that people love each other all the time and cooperate all the time. But in fact, you know, when explorers landed there, they always landed with some tribe that said, Hey, don't cross that river because those guys will kill us. So this is how the mammal brain works. So oxytocin is the good feeling of being protected by others. And your brain is very careful about when it releases it, because if you trust people who you shouldn't trust, that's not good for your survival. So the healthy part of this is like I have to work to earn your trust, and you have to work to earn my trust. So we cooperate, it's like the reward for I want protection, so I want to be nice to you so that you protect me. But it is inherently selfish that I want protection. So this whole idea that it's altruistic is rather false. And if you study the behavior of herd animals, the selfishness of their behavior is quite apparent. So oxytocin is the reward you get for cooperating with others. That's a nice way of putting it.

SPEAKER_01 22:33

Okay. All right. This makes sense. So we've talked about you have the talking brain and the feeling brain, right? But we can teach them to work together, right? And this is part of like how we would actually retrain our brain if we feel like, you know, um, these are I I want to be happier, but like you said, we can't be happy all the time, right? But if if we think I would like to think a little bit differently, how do we actually do that?

SPEAKER_00 22:56

Yeah. So the first thing is to accept that our brain is wired by early experience. And we use those early channels in our brain for life because they're so efficient. So if someone says, Oh, grow up, stop thinking like a child, no, that everyone uses their childhood wiring. If the simple way to understand this is that no baby is born speaking any language at all, and yet children soon learn to speak a language. And it has nothing to do with genetics. No baby

Building New Neural Pathways

SPEAKER_00 23:34

has ever learned a language from their genes, they only learn the language that they hear or you know that they're exposed to. So it's the same with your emotions. You learn them from what you're exposed to. And then what happens if you want to learn a new language later in life? It's a huge amount of work. So, what if you want to learn new emotional responses later in life? It's a huge amount of work. And it's pretty similar to learning a foreign language in the sense that repetition is what it takes to build a new neural pathway later in life. So the first step is to zero in on what you want to repeat. So when you understand how you are already triggering dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin from your early experience, and then what alternative would you like? And just think of one thing at a time. Like, what would be another way to trigger my dopamine? What would be another way to trigger my serotonin? And then you want to repeat that. I just use arbitrarily, let's say, for 45 days, and you reward yourself every day for repeating this new choice. Because who wants to repeat something that feels weird and not rewarding? But after 45 days, a new channel builds in your brain, and then the electricity in your brain can flow there easily. But if you don't do the work, then I say it's like trying to redirect a river into a soda straw, because the old channels in your brain are like a river, and the undeveloped neurons are like a soda straw, and we have to work to develop them.

SPEAKER_01 25:18

That's a great visualization. So can you give us what would be an example of let's say, like, so I know I get a lot of dopamine from my phone, and I don't want all of my dopamine to come from my phone. What would be an example of something else that I could do for 45 days or practice to to alternate that or to to move it away? So I'm still getting that, but not from social media or something like that.

SPEAKER_00 25:42

Sure. So let's say that um one of the things you're currently getting from your phone is the joy of discovering something new, because that's a very natural urge. Since if you could imagine that our ancestors were hungry and they didn't know always, they didn't have a calendar, they didn't know when the new crop of cherries were going to appear. That's my, you know, like when I see the first cherries of the season and I get so excited. So in daily life, once you're an adult, it's hard to discover something new. And so when, you know, we have our routine in daily life. And so one use of one reward, you figure out what is it about my phone? Oh, it gives me a way to discover something new. Well, what other way can I get that? I'm gonna give myself two novelty breaks per day. I'm gonna pick two times of day when I tend to have a droop in energy. So I'm just gonna use arbitrarily 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. 2 p.m. was exactly what came to mind. And you know, whatever. And then you set your little alarm and you give yourself, you know, you stop what you're doing at 2 p.m. and 8 p.m., and then you plan in advance. What is that little novelty break you're gonna give yourself? Now, it could in some cases be something that you've discovered on the internet, but you're having some conscious intent about what you're searching for and with some time limits. I personally use comedy, so I find that the greatest um relaxer because I tend to contract my muscles too much when in the course of daily life and comedy I find is a great thing, but I have to work to find comedy that's truly a release for me rather than, you know, the bitter angry comedy. So my idea is that you have to do a little advanced work in order to give yourself this appropriate reward. And then every day or week or month that you meet your goal of not using the phone, but doing this other thing instead, you can also combine, you know, like limits on using your phone, but give yourself the other reward. And then you reward yourself with some kind of special treat when you meet this new goal.

SPEAKER_01 28:05

I love it. This is fantastic information. So, well, Loretta, I could ask you a bazillion more questions, but we are running out of time. Is there anything that we haven't touched on that you think our audience should really know that would help them in, you know, working with their own brain, but especially raising young kids to be happy, healthy individuals?

SPEAKER_00 28:25

Well, there's so much, but um the the stress chemical called cortisol that people hear so much about. So it again, it helps to relax and think about it from a natural perspective because otherwise, modern culture is going to drown you with these false beliefs about trauma and disorders and anxiety and post-traumatic stress, everything is you know all amped up. So another way to think about it is that in the natural world, that we would have a forward gear toward looking

Cortisol Cooldowns And Better Timing

SPEAKER_00 29:03

for that ripe fruit tree, and we would have a natural reverse gear, which is to run away from a predator, let's say, or to um avoid the thorns that might hurt you while you're going out and looking for food. So it's natural to have a forward gear, it's a happy chemical. A reverse gear is an unhappy chemical. So there's nothing tragic about a reverse gear. It's just telling you, uh-oh, there's thorns in the way, better pull back. Now, cortisol lasts in your body for about an hour. Once it's triggered, it tells your brain something dangerous is happening, look out. And so now you're looking out for bad stuff for the next hour. So when you understand how this is working inside you, then you don't put too much weight on all those bad things that you find, but give yourself a break, especially the first 20 minutes is when you have the most cortisol. And the same with your kids. You know, the cliche of that is don't try to solve the problem while you're in the middle of the explosion. Whether it's you or the kid or the conflict is have like 20 minutes, half hour of distraction before you try to do the problem solving.

SPEAKER_01 30:27

Yeah. That makes me think of like, you know, we joke about one of the worst things a man can say to his wife is to calm down. You know, it I imagine is the same for our kids. You know, when has that ever worked in the history of the world as have the words calm down actually calm somebody down instead of doing the opposite? So, well, Loretta, you have um you have a book, you have a bunch of great resources. We'll make sure we link to everything. So if you're listening to this or watching this, wherever you're at, the links are going to be right where you are. But Loretta, tell us um, what would people what should they come and check out and find out from your website? I know you have a podcast, all the things. What would be a great resource for people to do?

SPEAKER_00 31:01

Thanks. Well, my website is innermammalinstitute.org. Inner mammalinstitute.org. There's lots of free resources that give you a simple introduction to everything I said. There's a free five-day happy chemical jump start if you put your email at the bottom of every page. You get one email for five days on each of five chemicals for happy chemicals and one unhappy chemicals. I have eight books. I have a parent teacher page, intermammalinstitute.org slash parents teachers, all one word. And um I have some resources that are child friendly on that page that you can share with young people, including some that are attractive, easy to read PDFs. One of them is called Why You Can't Stop, and one of them is about how to help your children build healthy neural pathways.

SPEAKER_01 32:01

Oh, that's great. That's fantastic. I'm sure that will be interesting to our reader or to our listeners. So well, Alerta, again, we really appreciate your time, all your expertise. Again, conversations like this are usually hard for my brain to fully grasp, but you did such a great job explaining all this that I feel like I get it. And I can like go talk to my family about these things. So um, you're really, really amazing at the way you can explain complicated concepts like the way our brains work. So all right. Well, we again we appreciate your time. Again, if you're listening, all the links will be there. And thanks so much for listening, everybody. Have a great day.