Meet Your Happy Chemicals: Dopamine, Endorphin, Oxytocin, Serotonin

You can feel good more often by stimulating the brain chemicals that cause happiness. This book shows how. It would be nice if your happy chemicals just flowed all the time, but they were not designed for effortless happiness. Their job is to promote survival, though your brain defines survival in a quirky way. It cares about the survival of your genes, and it wires itself in youth. That’s why we do quirky things to stimulate our happy chemicals, despite our best intentions. You can build new neural pathways to turn on your dopamine, serotonin, endorphin, and oxytocin in new ways. Dopamine is the “I can do it!” feeling. Serotonin is the pleasure of getting respect. Endorphin is a euphoria that masks physical pain. Oxytocin is the security of social trust. These impulses are easy to see in animals because they don’t mask them with words. Your happy chemicals don’t tell you in words why they turn on and off. They pass quickly, and you have to do more to get more. We hate it when our happy chemicals dip, which is why we rush to trigger more with whatever worked before. Bad habits result. You can free yourself of bad habits by accepting your natural ups and downs. You can enjoy more ups by building new pathways to your happy chemicals. This book shows how you can do that in 45 days.