56. Loretta Breuning: The Evolutionary Science of our Mammalian Brain - Decoding Emotions and Behavior

What if you were given the key to understanding your own emotions and behavior? Prepare to venture on a fascinating exploration of the human brain with our esteemed guest Loretta Breuning Ph.D, the founder of the Inner Mammal Institute, an author of 8 books, and a  host of The Happy Brain podcast. We delve into the power of brain chemicals - serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin, and endorphins and the impact of childhood experiences on our neural development, and strategies for managing our emotions.

We're not stopping there. We're also diving deep into the role of cortisol - the stress hormone often overlooked in discussions about emotions. We examine our responses to fear and survival, and how these are linked to our evolution. Moreover, we provide practical tips on how to relieve cortisol and shed light on how our brain's operating system functions.

In the latter stages, we navigate the complex terrain of negative thoughts, pursuits, and disappointments, expectation setting, unraveling how these scenarios impact our neural pathways. We also discuss the differences in behavior between men and women from an evolutionary perspective, and how our expectations are directly linked to our dopamine levels. Join us as we reveal the power of creating new neural pathways, even in the face of fatigue or hardship. This episode is an essential listen for anyone wanting to decode the intricate science behind our emotions and behavior.

Resources:
Habits of a Happy Brain: Retrain Your Brain to Boost Your Serotonin, Dopamine, Oxytocin, and Endorphin Levels
The Happy Brain Podcast
Inner Mammal Institute
Reading List
Anger Management: I Feel Pretty

8 EIGHT SLEEP
Save $200 on 8Sleep and get better quality and deeper sleep with automatic temperature adjustment

LEORÊVER COMPRESSION AND ACTIVEWEAR
Get 10% off Loerêver Balanced Compression and Activewear to elevate your confidence and performance

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

This content is also available in a video version on YouTube.

If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with someone who may enjoy it as well, and consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. You can also submit your feedback directly on my website.

Follow @GrandSlamJourney on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and join the LinkedIn community.

Transcript

Loretta: 0:00

The idea is that the chemicals that make us feel good and the chemicals that make us feel bad have much more power than we realize. They're not like just emotions. In the animal world, those chemicals are the whole operating system. A good feeling chemical tells an animal to go toward a reward, which is anything that meets a need, and a bad feeling chemical tells an animal to pull back to avoid threats.

Klara: 0:30

Hello, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Grand Slam Journey podcast, where we discuss various topics related to the Grand Slam Journey of our lives sports, business, and technology. My guest today is Dr Loreta Bruning. Dr Loreta Bruning is the founder of the Inner Mammal Institute. She's a professor of management, a parent and author of eight books, ninth is on the way, and a fellow podcaster. Her podcast is called The Happy Brain, and I encourage you to check it out. I recently read one of her books named Habits of a Happy Brain: Retrain your brain to boost your serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin, and endorphin levels, and I found it very informative and fascinating, and so I was excited to have Dr Loretta Breuning join me and talk more about the subject.

Klara: 1:40

Dr Breuning founded the Inner Mammal Institute in 2013. She was disappointed by prevailing models of human emotion, so she went back to basic biology to better understand humans and our emotions. The Inner Mammal Institute helps people build their power over their mammalian brain chemistry. Happiness comes from chemicals We've inherited from earlier mammals: dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and endorphin. When you know how they work in animals, your ups and downs make sense. Our happy chemicals evolved to reward survival behaviors, not to make us feel good all the time, but you can feel good more often when you understand nature's operating system. The Inner Mammal Institute has all the resources you need to make peace with your Inner Mammal Books, videos, podcasts, social media blogs, infographics, a training program, and a zoo tour. It's not easy being a mammal, but you can build your power over the quirky brain we've inherited.

Klara: 2:56

I have been thinking for the longest time why we humans tend to be so different and behave so differently, despite our genetical similarities. Based on science, our DNA is 99.9% the same as the person next to us, yet there seem to be big differences in the way we see and perceive the world. Reading this book and talking to Dr Brunning made me understand these differences. During this conversation we dive into her book and studies. We go through all the major chemicals and their impact and purpose and how they affect our behavior. We discuss dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, endorphins and cortisol. We talk about the impact of our childhood experiences on brain development and behavior, in the creation of neural pathways in childhood versus later in our life. We explore how the brain's verbal and emotional centers interact and how mirror neurons can shape behavior. Dr Brunning shares tips from her book on managing unhappy emotions. We talk about the science of happy chemicals, as well as its relation to exercise or other addictions. We discuss the importance of understanding our brain's operating system and how it affects our decision making, and how cortisol builds even bigger pathways than happy chemicals, which explains our fear-driven nature.

Klara: 4:40

If you enjoyed this episode, I want to ask you to please share it with someone you believe may enjoy it as well. Consider leaving a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify, and don't forget to subscribe. This is your host, clara Egochova. Thank you for tuning in, and now I bring you Dr Loreda Brunning. Thank you, dr Loreda Brunning, for accepting my invitation to Grants them Journey podcast. So great to have you. How are you doing? Great Nice to be here. Where are you going from Oakland, california? Oh, you're in the baby room outside of San Francisco. Yeah, I recently relocated from there, although San Jose.

Loretta: 5:22

Oh really.

Klara: 5:23

Oh, okay.

Loretta: 5:24

Nearby.

Klara: 5:25

Yeah, and so you're the founder of the Inner Manual Institute and wrote the book Best Seller Habits of a Happy Brain, which I have been reading, and I'm so fascinated by it and I feel like it explains the world so much better. I can almost understand the chaos that I've always felt like is happening, just the way our brains get wired and the differences, because I've been always pondering, like, from DNA perspective, we'll all the same, but at the same time, these tiny differences make such a big difference, our upbringing and the way we experience the world around us. And so, first of all, thank you for writing the book and I hope everyone will read it and I'm excited to dive into it with you. But I want to give you an opportunity to introduce yourself to our listeners first.

Loretta: 6:17

Well, first I should say the name of the book, so Habits of a Happy Brain Retrain your brain to boost your serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin and endorphin levels. And I've written eight books on this topic, so each one I delve deeper into one aspect, but that's the most introductory book with the introductory science. So to introduce myself, so I was a college professor for 25 years and I had enough, let's just say, and I took early retirement and that's when I had the time to look into why did academic psychology fail to explain the world around me? And I always talk about how we're wired in youth, so I should mention so.

Loretta: 7:04

When I was young I was surrounded by a lot of unhappiness, as many people are, and some people build some theory about why, but for me it was more like a mystery, like what is everybody so upset about? So that's, I think, what was really driving me. And then, once I raised my own children and had thousands of students, I saw that life didn't work according to the book of social science and I ended up looking at monkey studies, just because when I read self-help books I would read one little monkey study here and one little monkey study there. So I basically spent years of full time. Looking at monkey studies.

Klara: 7:45

Love it and I also find it so fascinating and how it would make sense at least for me, the way I understood it that you're tying the reality to the evolution. Nature builds on what existed if we don't create something new. So I love how in the book you kind of build on the reptile brain and mammal brain and the human brain and expanding the size of the brain and the evolution that it takes to build the neural pathways and just to share. I love observing animals, specifically dogs. I feel one of my best teachers is my own pet, ali, and it's just so interesting to me when you look at them I totally see just that survival brain and how we learn and react. So sometimes I have the best observation just looking at my dog and seeing how she behaves and how we train her.

Loretta: 8:41

Exactly, exactly, and that we can train our own inner mammal in the same way. And just to say that the reason I came up with this is not because of any theoretical reason that I think it should be this way, but is when I stumble on the fact that the same chemicals that make us feel good are, in animals, the exact same chemicals and they're controlled by the exact same brain structures, and I thought how come nobody ever told me this? So that's the mind.

Klara: 9:10

I love it and the same as you shared your childhood story not bringing I have mine and I'm sure all of us, as they're listening now, can reflect on their own and just to share. In my family when I was growing up there was a lot of anger. So I was joking we should have gone through the anger management movie. I was thinking I'm so pretty, I was so pretty in the car, I thought it was spot on for our family. So, sometimes throwing chairs out of the window was a totally acceptable behavior. You can imagine the relationship that my neural pathways have probably built from just looking at what was going on around me and just the expression of anger.

Loretta: 11:00

Yes, and then the fascinating thing is that the person who throws the chairs out of the window, they justify it with their verbal brain, and the verbal brain is the part of the brain that other people are thinking is the higher part, and that's what I wanted a really new view of this quote, unquote higher part of the brain. And also to talk about mirror neurons, that when you watch someone when you're young engaging in these unhealthy behaviors, it activates inside you and it says, oh, so this is how a person manages their anger.

Klara: 11:34

Yes, gosh, and I had so many excuses when I was younger. I think it took me quite a bit of coaching and just getting to know myself to try to figure out how to not act on my anger. But it was so embedded inside of me and I have to say I spent probably way too many of my young years not knowing how to deal with it and just feeling the sense of it, which you have fantastic tips for dealing with unhappy emotions in your book and I would love to dive into. But before we go to all of that, I want to actually turn it to you, because you're the expert. I want to dive into each of the specific chemicals, but also would love people to understand who haven't read that book yet. What does it mean to have this human brain and kind of the development?

Loretta: 12:24

So what do you think would be best to start with to give listeners a good base of understanding the idea is that the chemicals that make us feel good and the chemicals that make us feel bad have much more power than we realize. They're not like just emotions In the animal world, those chemicals are the whole operating system. A good feeling chemical tells an animal to go toward a reward, which is anything that meets a need, and a bad feeling chemical tells an animal to pull back to avoid threats. So we're constantly releasing these chemicals for these good reasons, to tell you hey, this is good for me, I'm going to go toward it. It excites you and activates you, and the brain that controls these chemicals is called the limbic system, which includes things everyone has heard of, like the amygdala and the hippocampus, and the point is not to pinpoint individual brain functions or structures. That's what academia does, is put everything into silos.

Loretta: 13:28

But what's important is that altogether, they are the core operating system, and the important thing is your cortex, which is your verbal narration going on. Your inner voice does not control the chemicals, and that's why so many people think, oh, I really want to do this, but they can't get themselves to do it, or I don't want to do it, but they do it anyway. So this pink, fluffy part of the brain I call it is just one part of the brain and it's not connected to your body. Your pink, fluffy brain is connected to your limbic system and that's connected to your body. So you can't get yourself to do anything without getting your limbic system on board. And it's exactly like a horse and rider that the rider has to persuade the horse to go. Yelling at it or ignoring the horse doesn't work.

Klara: 14:27

I love it and that probably explains a lot of our inner dialogue that sometimes you have almost like two people fighting with each other and you can figure out which one yells louder, and either feeling stuck or just knowing which one to listen to. And let's maybe dive into the specific chemicals as well, because I think it'll be really interesting to understand how they influence the way we feel. If you could describe the serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin, endorphins, and actually also I think it will be really good to describe the cortisol.

Loretta: 15:04

Sure, dopamine is the one we hear a lot about in the news. Each of these is covered in a way that I feel is not very realistic. I always go back to how it works in animals, if you could imagine a monkey waking up in the morning and they're hungry and they're not going to eat unless they do something about it. So they look around for food and when they see something that they can get, dopamine is released. Dopamine is both the energy that makes us feel excited and is the belief of like I can get that and it will meet my need. The monkey moves toward the fruit and every step closer releases more dopamine, but when the monkey finally gets the fruit, the dopamine stops. This is so helpful in understanding your daily life. You look for something that will meet your need. You feel excited when you see something you think you can get. You get more and more dopamine when you move toward it, but then it stops, and then you don't know why it stops.

Loretta: 16:11

Unfortunately, people may think they have a disorder or something's wrong with the world, but when you know the natural function of dopamine, it just makes sense Mm-hmm, so oxytocin. So this is the idealized warm and fuzzy group feeling that people talk about in many idealized ways, like community, for example. But in the animal world a herd functions in a very specific way that we should understand. So when animals are too close together they have conflict over food, so they would really rather spread out. But when they perceive a predator, that motivates them to get close. When they get close they relax, like, ah, now I'm safe. So oxytocin is that feeling of, oh, now I'm safe because I'm protected by others. But that's a fundamentally selfish feeling, because I want you to protect me from the predator, but you want me to protect you from the predator. So if we don't understand that, then we're constantly getting upset with other people because we have unrealistic expectations that they should protect us from predators. And then they don't and they let us down, ok.

Loretta: 17:33

So moving on to the next chemical, because it keeps getting more and more complicated. A whole century of research shows that mammals have a lot of social rivalry and competition within their groups, and the ones that are lower in the social hierarchy end up making fewer surviving copies of their genes. So animals are very motivated to rise in the social hierarchy of their group because it gets the morbid opportunity and improves the survival prospects of their young. Serotonin is released when a mammal gets that little bit of like. You know I rose above you.

Loretta: 18:16

Now no one wants to admit that they feel that way, but everyone can see that everyone else feels that way. So serotonin is not mentioned this way ever in the official academic view of serotonin. But monkey studies in the 1980s showed that when a monkey had that momentary opportunity to get the difference from the monkeys around it, if people have read sometimes about the dynamics of a monkey group, it's like, ah, I'm the man. And then that feeling is quickly metabolized, the serotonin is gone. So that's why everyone is looking for that one up feeling again and again and again.

Klara: 19:05

I think that's basically just what I do. Ponsperly explains a lot our inclination to hierarchies. Isn't it that, wanting to in some ways cling towards the hierarchy? And where in the world hierarchy you are?

Loretta: 19:20

Yes, and the fact that you're constantly creating that hierarchy inside your mind and you have really strong feelings about where you are in it. And yet, because we're not conscious that this is a natural process, we blame the world for doing it to us.

Klara: 19:39

Gosh makes me think about all of the wars and powers that we've been struggling with ever since the history of the time, and I guess they're in the animal kingdom in some ways, but because they don't have the technology and guns, maybe we don't see it that way or not as distracted, and so should we dive into endorphins. Is that the last one from the happy chemicals? Yes, which is a big one for me. Being an athlete, I think I have had an addiction to endorphins quite a bit in my life, and so I would like to then kind of dive into follow up questions, but please lead us to endorphins, sure.

Loretta: 20:18

Well, thank you so much for corroborating my view of endorphins. So it is the body's natural opioid and the word endorphin means endogenous morphine, and it's triggered by real physical pain. So if a gazelle is attacked by a predator and its flesh is ripped open, it can still run for its life, because endorphin masks pain with a euphoric feeling for about 15 minutes. And it evolved for emergencies only. It did not evolve for us to inflict pain on ourselves, to feel good. And yet this cult of exercise has grown up as if this is the path to happiness. And I always explain like this endorphin high people should know or runners high is in fact only stimulated if you actually exercise to the point of pain. And I explain to people.

Loretta: 21:17

The reason this works in the short run is there's this thing. I call it distraction. So in the animal world, animals only get upset about a threat when the threat is actually there, but the big human cortex can create threatened perceptions all the time. So anything that disrupts our perceived threat relieves the cortisol. So runners high is an effective way of disrupting threatened thoughts, and every time it works it builds the pathway for you to expect it to work. So a simple example would be if you have a child who's upset about something and they play a video game that disrupts the perceived threat and then they want to play the video again. So anything you do that works, you want to do it again.

Loretta: 22:10

So that's one way that running works, or any kind of exercise to the point of pain. Another is the serotonin of feeling superior about your athletic ability, another is the dopamine of having an athletic goal that you move toward, and another is the oxytocin of having heard through your exercise regimen. So the bottom line is that there are thousands of ways to stimulate these chemicals, but as soon as you find one that works, you believe that that is the way. And, needless to say, exercise is better than if you do it through opening a bottle of wine. You could check all those boxes and then you're stuck with that. So we really need to know about our own operating system so that we know that we have a lot of choices rather than being stuck with anyone.

Klara: 23:09

I love it. And again, maybe just oversharing my personal experience, maybe I should have read your book, although I think it wasn't written when I was more than a decade younger, because then I wouldn't over train. Because literally I think when you become an athlete and this ties into one of the questions I've been thinking about, that I've been reading your book you really become addicted to this endorphin, right. It's just that feeling of being totally tired and your brain gets silent. And when I talk to other athletes we just love it. And I only get to that feeling through extreme exercise. And obviously now it's kind of declining because I don't train as much as I have in the past.

Klara: 23:50

But when I was in my elite athletic capabilities in kind of the early 20s, I've literally tore myself apart through exercising because I was in some difficult situations where I couldn't compete and so the way I learned to deal with it, I just added extra two, three hours of exercise to the day because I thought I just need to train that much harder and we did that exercise kind of blocked my brain from thinking about it, so I had something to do and then you feel so tired that you literally shut your brain down. But obviously this is not the way to solve things, because if you do, you really get addicted to it and you tear yourself apart. So I think there's so important, I think, for anyone who's an athlete and listening are you dealing with your emotions in the right way and would love your kind of opinion and feedback on it. I'm wondering do we as humans, based on our upbringing and experiences, have a tendency to more seek one of the happy chemicals versus the other?

Loretta: 25:00

I think we need all of them, we seek all of them, we want all of them. Some people think that they have more of a tendency to seek one because it worked for them in the past, and other people may think they have more of a tendency for that. But let me give you an example with your exercising, once you have that exhaustion that shuts down your mind, you don't realize it, but you consciously gave yourself permission Now I've done enough, so I can relax Until you're totally wiped out. You didn't give yourself permission to stop. Why is that? Because in some time in your past someone attacked you for not doing enough, so you had to wear yourself out in order to say okay, now I'm allowed to relax without anticipating that attack. So it's the anticipation of the attack for not having done enough that was really created in your own neural pathways because of that peak neuroplasticity of you.

Loretta: 26:06

So that's so important to know that when we're born we're wired by early experiences. We're not wired by genetic blueprint either. We're wired by our own experiences and then we just keep replaying them. The other thing just want to use the word habituation, because the word addiction has now gotten so many legalized and cultural meanings. But our brain is always habituating to whatever reward we have. So if I have the best pizza my whole life and I'm like, oh my God, this is so good, it's the best pizza I ever had, the second time I have it it's not the best pizza I ever had before, because I've already had it. So this is that sort of treadmill feeling that we always feel like we got to find something better and better. That's the dopamine part. And again, it's not the world's fault. It's just a natural thing, because our ancestors never knew where their next meal was coming from. They had to constantly seek to survive. So we've inherited a brain that's constantly seeking.

Klara: 27:12

Yeah, I love it and I can totally see the positives and negatives of that right, Because, positives, that helps us advance as a humanity to always grow and achieve the next thing. You have technological innovation and ambitious people like Elon Musk who is trying to create rockets to be this adventurous, kind and survive in a multi-planetary species. But I think knowing when to use it and are you doing it just for the sake of some other negative motivations to Sarah experiences which makes me wonder you could be a therapist actually like writing the books. And just going back to your comment, with your short description, it feel like it accurately described my childhood, Growing up in the tough love mentality which I'm sure many of us had. I wonder how much it triggered some of these pathways that you constantly have to keep pushing. And so, knowing when to rewire and create new neural pathways as we grow through life, I think it's very important. So maybe, diving into the cortisol, tell us a little bit more about the cortisol and the effects of that Sure.

Loretta: 28:22

So most people have probably heard the idea that cortisol is the feeling of being chased by a predator, and fight or flight is the common expression. And although we always hear about it in a negative context, it's important to understand that it exists for a reason. So in the modern world we're not necessarily running from predators, but you don't walk into the street and get run over by a car because you have developed these cortisol pathways when you were young. So we need them to deal realistically with the world. And if you have this like I can do anything I shouldn't not fear anything then maybe something bad's going to happen to you.

Loretta: 29:11

So we're all constantly trying to evaluate the facts of what really is safe and what really is not safe, but we evaluate them in the context of our own stored experience.

Loretta: 29:23

But what we don't know is that our early experience builds really big pathways in our brain and cortisol builds even bigger pathways than happy chemicals.

Loretta: 29:35

So we're all seeing the world through the lens of bad stuff that happened to us when we were young, and those big neural pathways turn on the cortisol real fast when you see anything related and when I say related, I don't mean related in this logical, conscious way, but it's like anything that was going on in a bad moment in your youth got connected.

Loretta: 30:00

So a simplistic example is like if a horse is beaten by someone with a big hat, then they fear people with big hats. So you turn on your cortisol when you see anything linked to that bad moment in your past and then, once it turns on, it makes you feel bad for about an hour. It has a half life of 20 minutes and its job is to get you to look for evidence of threat so that you can escape it. So for that 20, 40 minutes an hour you're only looking for bad stuff. So what I focus on is like do something fun for 20, 40 minutes, because if you do your problem solving when cortisol is flowing, you're only going to see the downside of every possible solution.

Klara: 30:51

I love it and especially some of your chapters, and writing about cortisol made me think about so many things. One I believe you've heard of or read perhaps the Thinking Fast and Slow book by Daniel Kahneman, where he describes for the System 1 and 2, which is one of my favorite books as well. But I actually think your book made me understand it on a deeper level and even the differences between the System 1 versus System 2 and the being fear driven, which was really fascinating to me and it seems like correct me if I'm wrong here by the way I understood it and even reading your book made me realize deeper understanding of is just our basic survival brain. We don't want to have fear or experience fear or threat, and so that typically becomes the most dominant driver of avoiding fear and avoiding cortisol, because that's where our brain thinks actually evolutionally how we survived. Is that accurate? Anything you would want to add? Yeah?

Loretta: 32:01

I want to add the word relief. So our real drive is to relieve cortisol. So, for example, when a gazelle is hungry, hunger is cortisol, so eating relieves the cortisol. But then if you're hungry and you smell a predator, then the predator is even bigger cortisol. So then you want to run to relieve the predator threat feeling. But then you want to eat to relieve the hunger feeling. So a newborn baby cries and it feels cortisol and one of our only inboard responses is to cry in response to cortisol. Because a newborn baby doesn't know how to relieve its threat, it doesn't have any skills.

Loretta: 32:41

But then we go through life saying, okay, what can I do to relieve that bad feeling? And we mostly fall back on those early neural pathways and it's fascinating to know that we build really big pathways in puberty. So whatever relieved your cortisol and puberty is pretty much what's running your life today. So everyone can sort of ponder what they did to relieve their cortisol when they were young. And then it's like, oh, so that's why I feel like if I don't do this one thing, then something terrible will happen, because that's what cortisol is. Something terrible will happen and then you just relieve it in the ways that you already know, but once again we need to say oh well, there's thousands of ways to relieve cortisol and I'm just doing the one I know.

Klara: 33:31

I wrote the question down here to reflect on, I want to repeat it what relieved your cortisol when you were young? I think that's a really important one to reflect on and I will ponder about. But diving a little bit deeper into the cortisol and this was so fascinating to me when I read your book was even reflecting on the evolutionary perspective of us humans and obviously, being now and living in 2023, it's a way, safer space. When it comes to just physical survival, you mentioned that there's not really big threats. Obviously, we went through COVID recently, but even still, if we take it into perspective of humanity, pandemics have been here forever. We just haven't been exposed to them perhaps as much.

Loretta: 34:19

Well, and also the death rate on this pandemic was so much lower than in the past.

Klara: 34:25

In the past.

Klara: 34:26

Yeah, so overall I think our threat to our physical bodies and self has drastically declined ever since the existence of our humanity, to put it into perspective.

Klara: 34:38

Yes, and for that reason, because the way our brain evolves, we tend to be way more sensitive to cortisol through social impacts. That's sort of what I read or understood from your book and that total makes sense now to me because I reflected on the younger generation that has grown up in relatively safe space physically, to where we're not really dying from regular illness. There's pharmacy and so many scientific advancements through giving the right vaccines or antibiotics, et cetera. But it becomes that perhaps the social media thing and losing face and not having maybe the oxytocin from the social environments, that is way more powerful now in the younger generation than perhaps if I reflect on my grandma, which maybe she didn't have social networks back then. But I look at these generations, it seems like the older people, like my grandma, are just so much more mentally resilient and I wonder if it was just because the way they wired, because again, the illness was so much more prevalent still at that time. And so how do you look at it? Is that accurate?

Loretta: 35:58

Yeah, well, for most of human history, hunger was a constant threat.

Loretta: 36:03

So you didn't get too upset about not being invited to a party or somebody's bonus was bigger than yours if you didn't have enough food and didn't know what you were gonna eat tomorrow and had to tell your children that you didn't have food. And then war was so common, like people don't realize it because they look at the news and they see a war and they think, oh, we have war, yeah, but like war was in every town in the past, everybody was like being invaded by somebody had a realistic threat.

Loretta: 36:35

So then we have inherited this system that's monitoring threat. But when there's no real immediate threat, it invents threats that are further away or more subtle. So that's one whole part of it. We have this real huge threat detection system that's looking for threats. The other part of it is that the younger generation has been maybe with good intentions has been taught to be so focused on managing their bad feelings that first they disease-ify them, they focus on them, which increases them, and then, instead of being taught to manage their bad feelings, they're taught to expect society to manage their feelings for them, either by providing some kind of fix or by blaming society for causing them, and that's the subject of my new book that's coming out in January.

Klara: 37:35

Oh my gosh, I kind of wait to read it and maybe we can have another podcast about it. That's very interesting. Thank you, yeah, even just observing, obviously, from what's happening in the world and the burnout culture and overworking and psychological safety, I've been thinking about this topic so deeply and read many articles, so I can't wait to see what you're gonna write.

Loretta: 37:58

By the way, the book is written not for people like you, who already get it, though, so you could look at it from the perspective of how you would explain this to a less resilient person.

Klara: 38:10

I always find out writing the books that make you think from another person's perspective. I find them really interesting. That's when I learned the most. But, going back, I have so many topics trying to prioritize what I wanna dive into. I think there's definitely two things I wanna touch on, and maybe the one is the vicious cycle of happiness, which we actually talk a little bit about. Maybe I've shared my example of exercising in the endorphins, but what would you wanna share with listeners? How to think about it and avoid it, or sometimes even the importance of cortisol, because it's actually important. As you write, there's benefits of not wanting to avoid it at all costs.

Loretta: 38:53

So vicious cycle is the idea that something that makes you feel good in the long run builds a neural pathway and then the next time you feel bad, that comes to mind because electricity in the brain flows to the path of least resistance. It just flows like water in a storm. So you didn't consciously think, oh, I'm going to make myself feel better by opening a bottle of wine or whatever that choice a person makes. It's just, it works to your brain because it has worked in the past. So to share a personal example for me so in my teen years my distractor of choice was travel. So I got this idea that going to another country was the be all and end all. And it's fascinating when you think of like how this got built in my head.

Loretta: 39:47

So first I had a family that hardly did anything, hardly left home, was very fearful, and then, out of the blue, my father got some free trips offered to him and then he started bringing us along on the free trips. And then those free trips involved to make the story short, involved some very serious disappointments from my perspective, from my teenage perspective. So I was like I'm going to earn my own money and make my own trips. And I did. I earned a dollar and 60 cents an hour and I bought myself a ticket to Europe. And when I was 17, alone and I did it, and so that was such a big relief and neural pathway that said I can do this. But then whenever I had a problem, I just had to go on another trip, so you could see that anything has its own repetitiveness. And then, of course, going to Europe, I habituated to that. That wasn't enough of a high anymore, so then I had to go somewhere else and somewhere else.

Klara: 40:55

Mm-hmm, I love that. That's interesting and also made me think about effort. Just to share my fun new habit is cold plunging and I've been cold plunging now for about one and a half months and I love that feeling when you do it for the first week, when you get out of the cold plunge it's literally your body so excited you survived. Like I've never had such a high feeling of happiness, like there were just very few moments in my life where I just felt so ready and thrilled and excited to conquer my day. But now, the more I do it, the more I'm like I miss the feeling. So it's just funny to say that.

Klara: 41:36

Habituation yes, it's amazing how our bodies are, I guess, adaptable, which is good. That's how we survive right In all fronts, even through a methodic experience. You train and whatever you did a month ago, it becomes easier month later when you're training harder and you improve your skills. But there's also some part of it where you wish just that feeling of happiness state and so it's funny how you have to continue to sometimes push that envelope and you have tips in your book on how to continue to have it, but in a different way. So you want to share a little bit with people, maybe what's the way of creating these feelings of happiness? And it seems like when you're reading it it's pushing yourself out of a comfort zone and almost trying to do the opposite thing.

Loretta: 42:27

What you have done before Is that accurate, yeah, but not just any opposite, but an opposite that will wire in positive expectations, because positive expectations are what trigger your happy chemicals.

Loretta: 42:41

And if you just force yourself to do something you hate and then you just fill your whole life with things you hate, then you're going to have negative expectations. So we all have a limited amount of energy, and when your energy is low, that allows cortisol to come more easily, because it takes a lot of energy to steer the electricity in your brain out of those big old pathways into new pathways. That's the most energy consuming thing. So when you're tired you're more likely to go into those old negative thoughts of your past. So excuse me for saying the way I view this cold plunge is that it's using up a huge amount of your energy because the cold is very energy intensive. So then you have left later on, so you're more likely then to be tired at the end of the day. So how are you going to deal with that? Maybe you think, oh, I got to do a longer cold plunge tomorrow. No, no, no.

Klara: 43:43

I did it longer today just to try if I get the high. Actually, that's what I was wondering how many minutes can I stay in to see if I get the feeling again?

Loretta: 43:51

Oh, that's so funny. I always use that example from the perspective of a hot tub. I love a hot tub. Of course it's not less athletic than yours. But when you go into a hot tub you get this high because it's literal pain on your skin. But five minutes later you're still in the hot tub, but your brain is racing on some other thing and you don't even notice it. Now I could make new endorphin by making the hot tub even hotter, but that would be crazy stupid.

Klara: 44:24

I consider that too, on the opposite side, to see how low I can go with the cold plunge.

Loretta: 44:29

So let's think of another solution. It's late in the day and I'm feeling bad and I still can think of 10 more tasks that I have to do, including one task that really bothers me. So in the interest of time, I'm just going to give a very simplistic solution. So the task that really bothers you first look at the core pattern of why does it bother you and see how that matches a core pattern from your past. So I'm upset about this task because it reminds me of this feeling that I always had when I was young.

Loretta: 45:08

And from the serotonin perspective, anything that puts you in the one down position is going to feel like a survival threat, even though you know consciously it's not a survival threat. So let's just call it status anxiety. So we all have this whenever you're having a one up position, you fear losing it. So that's often a big component of the tasks that bother us Anything that blocks your dopamine, because I'm so excited about moving toward a goal but the slightest obstacle then takes like oh no, I'm not going to be able to move toward a goal. That threatens my dopamine, so that feels like a survival threat.

Loretta: 45:53

Disappointment feels like a survival threat. I use the example that if a lion is running after a gazelle and it's so close but the gazelle starts to get away at some point, the lion needs to give up, because if it wastes all its energy on a gazelle that it can't catch, then it will use up its reserved tank of energy and never eat. So the giving up feels worse than the hunger, because that gets the lion to stop chasing that gazelle and find a better prospect. So we all face disappointment sometimes and that feels awful. So these are all these possible reasons, but the big one at the end of the day is that I've already gotten enough done, and if I can never tell myself that I've done enough and I try to tackle a new gazelle when my reserved tank of energy is empty, then I'm just going to drive myself nuts.

Loretta: 46:54

So we need to have rewards that we give ourselves to restore and replenish, and if we only have unhealthy rewards, then we're going to be in a bad way. So we need to create this list of. I call it like filling your pantry with healthy snacks. If you don't have any healthy snacks, then you only go for unhealthy snacks. So what are some alternative rewards, other than food, that you can give yourself so that you can replenish and rebuild your energy. So I use a simple example of listening to comedy or watching Netflix for 10 minutes. So just in the interest of time, very simplistic examples.

Klara: 47:41

Yeah, I love it. Actually, one of the kind of good habits we've been having now lately is, before we go too bad, find some fun video, even on YouTube, and just laugh. It's a really nice way to end your day, so I love your examples. One thing that your comment also made me think about is the expectations, and I feel that is so big in life as well as my corporate world and sports, for that matter. So I always need to achieve the expectations of what people expect from you. It's written or unwritten, or the ones that we put on ourselves, and kind of the disappointments that we may have when we don't meet those expectations. So maybe share a little bit more about that, because I feel like that's part of everyone's life, really. Yeah.

Loretta: 48:33

So those expectations it's useful to think about from a dopamine perspective is I have to reach the next big thing in order to spark my dopamine and when I'm doing that, every step along the way gives me more dopamine. So that is natural and normal and healthy because our ancestors, if you think about it, they were so tired and they finally found food, but then they had to find water, and then they had to find firewood, and then they had to find protein rather than just getting enough calories. So there was always another thing Dopamine is what gave us the energy to keep going and to keep trying, even when we were tired. So it's useful to know that that is a natural, normal thing.

Loretta: 49:18

But if you overdo it, because you're running from cortisol, because the minute you stop and rest, all these bad thoughts from your past come in, which is very individual For one person.

Loretta: 49:32

It's the bad thought of you haven't done enough and some disaster is going to happen, or some social aspect of it that you think about other people's disaster or other people being angry at you for not having done enough.

Loretta: 49:46

So you have to first be conscious that these negative thoughts are created by you and that they're real physical pathways in your brain that electricity is flowing into, that's triggering a chemical that creates a full body bad feeling.

Loretta: 50:03

So on the one hand, it's really there, but on the other hand, it's not a real threat in the world around you and you have power over it. But the only power you have is to create a new pathway, which is a teeny little neural pathway. And how do you get your electricity to go into a teeny little neural pathway when you're tired? And that's the real challenge of life that when you're tired, you just flow into your autopilot, which is all that bad habits. And so our power is rather limited, and yet we do have this power. So that's what we need to build on. And all of the verbal chatter that you use to explain oh, I got to do this, I got to do that, I got to do that that's just your verbal brain trying to figure out what am I so upset about? And it's using the whatever explanation you've used in your past.

Klara: 51:04

One other thing I wanted to go back to, when you were sharing the example of the lion hunting its potential meal is you mentioned that sometimes the hunger doesn't feel as bad as losing the hunt or kind of persuading with the hunt of the prey, which made me think about I don't know if you know any, do you can her book quit? And she explains why we don't often choose the option to quit and we're less likely to quit on time, because the more we're losing, the more committed we get to the losing cause. So I actually thought that your book explained the behavior of why it is so hard for us to know when to stop and when to stop on time, because the more we get into this pursuit, the chemicals pretty much drive us to continue on that path, even though it may not be the best path to continue to pursue.

Loretta: 52:10

Yes, that's fascinating, Although I understand in the context of that book. That's true, but some people give up too easily.

Loretta: 52:19

So, I also have to put it in that context. Many people have gotten the idea that things should come easily and then they say I've already done enough and I haven't gotten the reward. That's so unfair, I'm going to stop and quit because everything's unfair. So it's really hard to balance between these two. So first to say, oh, how can we feel positive in this world where nothing is predictable, so rewards are not predictable? There's nothing wrong with that, it's absolutely normal.

Loretta: 52:49

So to think that my hunter-gatherer ancestors thought that maybe they would find food if they climbed over this mountain. But then they climbed over the mountain and there was no food. So they had this survival threat, feeling like, oh my God, now we've got to really find food fast. So that's the operating system we've inherited and it creates a sense of urgency. Now cost-benefit analysis is going on all the time and it helps to think that animals are doing this cost-benefit analysis all the time, like if a monkey is looking for fruit and it's like, well, maybe I climb up high in this tree and it's a lot of effort, and then when I get there, the fruit is rotten or a bigger monkey comes along and takes the fruit, or the branch is not strong enough to support my weight. So nothing comes easily, and when you're trained to think things should come more easily than they do, then that leads to a lot of frustration. Now, even when you have realistic expectations, you really try really hard and then you invest so much in something and you don't want to give up. Now, when's the right moment to give up? It's so hard to know. So Two things about this. One is disappointment is a huge release of cortisol because, as you said, disappointment has to feel really bad in order to get you to give up, because you already have positive expectations. The only way that you give up is if the negative expectations are even worse. That's why disappointment feels so bad. Then a big search of cortisol builds a big cortisol pathway. It's a now you're seeing the world through the lens of all of your past disappointments, because they're the biggest cortisol pathways.

Loretta: 54:46

The big thing I really want to mention is also that we personalize this in a social way, because pleasing your boss is the lens that many people have created through this, rather than just can I get this goal. If the goal is getting a promotion and you think you have to please your boss to get the promotion, all that energy of running after the gazelle, rather than just being the pure physics of my body, is my thought about what is my boss thinking about me? That's the lens that drives you crazy in the future, because you never can really make valid predictions about your pleasing of other people. What really got me at peace about this? Remember I said for a few years I read all these monkey studies.

Loretta: 55:39

The big one is a monkey is grooming another monkey in order to promote its own survival. The monkey would like to get another grooming in return, but often it does not get a grooming in return. It keeps investing in that relationship, hoping that when mating season comes that the other monkey will reciprocate in some way that promotes the survival of that monkey's genes. Stacks of books have been written about this primate analysis of reciprocation. When you see that through a monkey's eyes, you're like oh so I'm just like everybody else, just giving a grooming and trying to get a grooming in return.

Klara: 56:31

Yeah, and thank you for mentioning that, because that was another thought I've been having as I've been reading your book and I would like to dive a little bit, if you're open to it, to the differences of sex, which seems to be a taboo thing, but I still think there's, on average, some differences between men and women, and especially the pleasing one is one that my partner thinks that I'm way more pleasing, obviously, than him, which I agree.

Klara: 56:57

I think he's on the opposite side of the spectrum. So there's wide differences. But even thinking about it from business and corporate world, I often find that my girlfriends or the women group seem to be more likely to fall into this kind of pleasing mentality and I wonder if it's again from evolutionary way versus a little bit of on average, the male being more aggressive and maybe searching the hierarchy and dominance. I wonder if some of these happy chemicals even on a sex level we tend to lean more towards one versus the other or maybe the default behavior, and again, it may be, maybe just how we grew up and what we saw socially acceptable and that's how I guess we created this. Newer pathways. Anything you want to comment, loreta, from your research or thoughts you want to share on that?

Loretta: 57:53

Yes, but because there's so much, so I just put my reading list in the chat, because there's so much on this and all of my books touch on it too. So first, yes and no. And also every book on evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology explains this. So a lot of it is learned and there's a lot of nastiness among females as well as males. Like when you hear about males fighting the dominance hierarchy, but females do it in their own way and when you read the female ways they're like, oh yeah, that's really familiar and they work. The female way helps to promote the survival of the females genes and the male way helps to promote the survival of male genes.

Loretta: 58:38

Now I have to say that I happen to be less of a pleaser and I had a therapist tell me that I realized that I couldn't please my mother, so I just gave up on trying to ever please anybody, whereas my husband is sort of a super pleaser. So but I agree that that's not typical and that there are somewhat patterns, but the patterns that really helped me with generalized male and female behavior is hunting versus gathering. So hunting is you only focus on one thing and you ignore everything else, and if you do that, you succeed. So ignoring everything else in the pursuit of one thing is a real, valid survival skill. Now, gathering, which is typically the female skill, rather than hunting, is the opposite of hunting in the sense of I'm open to everything and I don't have a specific expectation of what I'm looking for.

Loretta: 59:42

I'm just like maybe that would be good, would that be good? Would that be good? You know you're looking and so you're not screening out, you're not focusing on one thing. You still have some expectations of what would be good, what would not be good, but and you have limited energy so which berry bush do I invest? Which trail do I think? Maybe there's water there. Maybe there's water there, but it's processing more possibilities. But then, like, once you're going toward that bush, maybe you see a better berry bush.

Klara: 1:00:14

So just to touch base on what you said is the key to bigger happiness. Also, try to minimize your expectations and just look at more of the opportunities, but really don't set your expectations high more. Go with exploratory mindset and see what best fits sort of your definition of success or where you want to head next.

Loretta: 1:00:41

Yes and no again. Yes, but if we tell people here to have low expectations, that doesn't sound very exciting and that's not going to make anybody happy. So first I call it realistic expectations. So the expectations have to be positive in order to spark your chemicals. Like a monkey is not going to climb up a tree if it thinks there's no fruit.

Loretta: 1:01:06

But if a monkey remembers the best tree in its whole life that has hundreds of fruit and it says I'm not going to climb any tree unless I see the best tree of my whole life, then it's going to starve to death. So it has realistic expectations because it's hungry. And in the modern world people are not hungry. So that makes it a little harder to have realistic expectations. And so to make that link between realistic expectations and positive expectations is to say that my dopamine is only stimulated when I perceive that I'm getting closer to a reward. So my expectations have to be realistic in order to stimulate my dopamine. So how can I lower my expectations to the point where I actually can reach them? So it's like if you can't climb Mount Everest, find a hill that you can climb and then, once you climb that, you get that great feeling of dopamine, and then think about the next hill.

Klara: 1:02:12

I love that.

Klara: 1:02:13

So it's more of like a strategic goal, setting to a point that's not too high, but you know, with some sort of confidence, that you could achieve, and really it seems like celebrating the small wins as well than what you're sharing, which is great, and one of the things I also want to share.

Klara: 1:02:32

We're coming to an end here, but creating your own neural pathways. So this is what you're pretty much saying no matter what you have gone through or have been born with, and how your brain works now and the pathways are created, you always have the power to create new ones, although you do say the reality that it's so much harder to create them in our adulthood and so the sooner we start, the better it is. So what are some of the main tips you want to share with listeners? Anybody who's kind of listened to this conversation hopefully have gone through some of their audit of what makes them happy or sad and could reflect on the positive and negative, perhaps habits and behaviors they have. How could they then create that's new neural pathways to live a better, happier life, whatever that means for them, and create more fun things for themselves in their life? Sure?

Loretta: 1:03:33

So we can build new neural pathways in adulthood. But it takes a lot of repetition. So I say that it's like learning a foreign language, that anybody can learn a foreign language, but it takes so much repetition that most people don't. So how do you get yourself to do? The repetition is small rewards for small steps a lot, and that's exactly how animal training works. So if you take an animal training class and you think of your inner mammal in that way that I can give myself small rewards, find healthy rewards, and all of my books teach you how to develop healthy rewards and then to do it often so that you keep building that neural pathway.

Klara: 1:04:16

And, yeah, you have some great tips in the book and guidance, so hopefully people will check it out. And so last couple of questions. Given all that's happening in the world and there is a lot we've talked about some of the things that we're facing, even just the way we've created these neural pathways for ourselves through our surrounding and upbringing what would you want to inspire people to be doing more for ourselves?

Loretta: 1:04:42

Always focused on being aware of the social comparisons that you're making, because that's the mammalian thing. It's happening all the time. You don't know you're doing it, so you're blaming other people and then you're feeling judged, you're feeling put down and you don't know that you did the judging yourself. So I learned so much from watching nature videos and you see how the constant social rivalry among these monkeys in a group and to say, oh, that's what my animal brain is doing, because the monkey, literally, if it reaches for a fruit near a bigger monkey, it's going to get bitten, so it doesn't reach for a fruit until it makes a social comparison. And so every time you're doing anything you're making social comparison and you have to detect that in yourself.

Klara: 1:05:34

I love that and it actually made me realize I've been observing my dog playing with other dogs and so when there's a toy that is in their periphery, it seems like they have this unwritten rule that when other dogs can and cannot steal it, and I've always been wondering how they decide whether the toy is close enough under the supervision of the other dog or not. And you just answered my question. I've been actually thinking about it for a long time. That's so interesting.

Loretta: 1:06:03

Well, that's amazing because you won't believe this, but I'm a new grandparent and so I'm writing about the exact same thing with my little toddler grandson, who goes into a playground and is like having this radar for this toys and always wants the other one's toys. That's so funny, but I'm not a dog person, so that's hilarious.

Klara: 1:06:25

Love it, and so where can people best find you? Again, I recommend everyone to read your book. I'll add links to it. I'll also add links to the research you've added here in the chat, your reading and some of the other things on the Inner Mammal Institute you had shared. But anyone who's interested to dive deeper, what's the best way for them to follow you?

Loretta: 1:06:49

So go to my website, innermammalinstituteorg innermammalinstituteorg and I have every form of information that you might like. So I have social media. I have a YouTube channel, I have a podcast, I have eight books and blogs, but I have a free five day happy chemical jump start. You get on my mailing list and you get one email a day for five days. That explains each of the chemicals in a very simple way.

Klara: 1:07:17

Love it and I'll add all of those to the episode notes. Thank you, do you?

Loretta: 1:07:21

have a second for one little story. I think you love this story. I just keep thinking of it and didn't get it. So there's a hundred mile endurance race. There's probably a few of them that you know about, but there's one of them in California and my son lives right near the finish line. So he wanted to go with that and I was visiting, so I'm going to this with him.

Loretta: 1:07:45

So you may know, but people probably don't. So this people have 30 hours to finish this hundred mile endurance race. So I said to my son so you mean, they don't sleep, they run all night. So because his house is right near the finish line, we're hearing a loudspeaker like every time, every time somebody crosses the finish line, they read a little bit about them and everybody cheers. Like to me this sounds like the most miserable thing, like because I really need my sleep. So my son is like really excited and when he goes and he looks on their faces, then they're finishing and he sees ecstasy, whereas I see like misery, like oh my God, this person is going to have a heart attack. You know, like if you force yourself to do this, but maybe you're doing permanent damage. So it's just funny how we really project on to other people like what feels good and we really have to become aware of like we have our common biology but then our individual pathways.

Klara: 1:08:51

Yeah, that is so true and I can reflect on my past and even present. I know one person who actually went to hike the Grand Canyon rim to rim to rim, and so you go more than a day to do it, and I'm actually awful person now if I don't sleep. I need to get my sleep, but I guess it's just an extra level of people who train themselves to handle pain and figure out what this dopamine and endorphins they get from this sort of achievement.

Loretta: 1:09:25

Yeah, well, and the first person who flew a plane across from the US to Europe. They didn't sleep all night and like if they fell asleep they'd crash. So yeah, this is part of human potential, I guess.

Klara: 1:09:38

Love it. Thank you so much, Dr Vruning, for teaching us a bit more about how to take charge of our own emotions and figure out new pathways to create a more fulfilling life for ourselves. Thank you.

Klara: 1:09:51

If you enjoyed this episode. I want to ask you to please do two things that would help me greatly. One, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts, spotify or any other podcasting platform that you use to listen to this episode. Two, please share this podcast with a friend who you believe might enjoy it as well. It is a great way to remind someone you care about them by sharing a conversation they might be interested in. Thank you for listening.