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A review by chrisamaphone
Habits of a Happy Brain: Retrain Your Brain to Boost Your Serotonin, Dopamine, Oxytocin,Endorphin Levels by Loretta Graziano Breuning
2.0
Oof. I have very mixed feelings about this book. My summary: a fascinating, but flawed, glimpse of how neurochemistry influences our daily lives. On the one hand, it's a really handy new way of thinking about emotions, habits, and physiological responses that has immediate practical implications. On the other hand...
The book makes a lot of claims about the relationship between neurochemistry and evolution, most of which sound like the kind of just-so stories that result in the field of evolutionary psychology being mostly bunk. The lack of citations for any of these claims, and the lack of any willingness to delve into technical explanations, really bothers me -- "just trust me, I'm an expert" doesn't sell it. Especially when the author makes gender-essentialist remarks or suggests society's influence on unhappiness is negligible.
Speaking of that last part: the parts of this book where the author rants about how people are always "blaming 'our society'" are the most insulting, condescending, and tone-deaf parts of the book. She basically dismisses the entire social justice movement because apparently it's useless to focus on external problems when you can just focus on stimulating more of your happy chemicals. What this perspective misses is that focusing on yourself doesn't help anyone else and doesn't prevent the continuation of dysfunctional, unnecessary social patterns. She's a neuroscientist, not a sociologist, so why does she feel the need to interject these comments that basically only serve to dismiss entire disciplines and ways of life?
Furthermore, the book seems predicated on the assumption that "being happy more of the time" is the reader's goal. While that assumption might be reasonable for most people, it's worth questioning and exploring, and I was disappointed by the uncritical view that this is just the right thing to do... when, for example, there's so much evidence that the more long-term rewarding things in life, e.g. learning new skills, coming to terms with difficult emotions, understanding and empathizing with people subject to a great amount of harm, etc. require a certain amount of struggle, suffering, and unhappiness. I think what most of us really want is a full, rewarding life, including things that sustainably keep us happy, not just triggers for pressing the happy buttons in our brains.
And finally, even if reliably triggering happy chemicals in our brains *were* the goal, the book does a terrible job explaining how to actually implement this practice. The chapters on creating habits in 45 days basically sound like generic, regurgitated advice for forming habits, but she gives no examples of how to put that advice into practice or what the goal should even be. Am I supposed to be eliciting each of the 4 "happy chemicals" every day? Am I supposed to be replacing "bad" habits with better ones? What's the step-by-step plan -- do I start with "doing nothing" as some of the earlier chapters suggest and then eventually replace it with a better habit? When would I switch? These details are mysteriously missing.
Despite all these flaws, I learned a lot about endorphin, serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin, and the mammalian instincts that trigger them. It helped me understand my own responses to certain situations, especially the concept that these feelings are somehow linked to a (mistaken) relationship between the stimulus and survival. Realizing that it's possible to retrain these responses through revealing that survival is not contingent on certain reflexive behaviors seems like a useful thing to realize and practice.
The book makes a lot of claims about the relationship between neurochemistry and evolution, most of which sound like the kind of just-so stories that result in the field of evolutionary psychology being mostly bunk. The lack of citations for any of these claims, and the lack of any willingness to delve into technical explanations, really bothers me -- "just trust me, I'm an expert" doesn't sell it. Especially when the author makes gender-essentialist remarks or suggests society's influence on unhappiness is negligible.
Speaking of that last part: the parts of this book where the author rants about how people are always "blaming 'our society'" are the most insulting, condescending, and tone-deaf parts of the book. She basically dismisses the entire social justice movement because apparently it's useless to focus on external problems when you can just focus on stimulating more of your happy chemicals. What this perspective misses is that focusing on yourself doesn't help anyone else and doesn't prevent the continuation of dysfunctional, unnecessary social patterns. She's a neuroscientist, not a sociologist, so why does she feel the need to interject these comments that basically only serve to dismiss entire disciplines and ways of life?
Furthermore, the book seems predicated on the assumption that "being happy more of the time" is the reader's goal. While that assumption might be reasonable for most people, it's worth questioning and exploring, and I was disappointed by the uncritical view that this is just the right thing to do... when, for example, there's so much evidence that the more long-term rewarding things in life, e.g. learning new skills, coming to terms with difficult emotions, understanding and empathizing with people subject to a great amount of harm, etc. require a certain amount of struggle, suffering, and unhappiness. I think what most of us really want is a full, rewarding life, including things that sustainably keep us happy, not just triggers for pressing the happy buttons in our brains.
And finally, even if reliably triggering happy chemicals in our brains *were* the goal, the book does a terrible job explaining how to actually implement this practice. The chapters on creating habits in 45 days basically sound like generic, regurgitated advice for forming habits, but she gives no examples of how to put that advice into practice or what the goal should even be. Am I supposed to be eliciting each of the 4 "happy chemicals" every day? Am I supposed to be replacing "bad" habits with better ones? What's the step-by-step plan -- do I start with "doing nothing" as some of the earlier chapters suggest and then eventually replace it with a better habit? When would I switch? These details are mysteriously missing.
Despite all these flaws, I learned a lot about endorphin, serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin, and the mammalian instincts that trigger them. It helped me understand my own responses to certain situations, especially the concept that these feelings are somehow linked to a (mistaken) relationship between the stimulus and survival. Realizing that it's possible to retrain these responses through revealing that survival is not contingent on certain reflexive behaviors seems like a useful thing to realize and practice.