18 Quotes by Loretta Graziano Breuning

You may say you’re “anti-status,” but if you filled a room with people who said that, they would soon form a status hierarchy based on how anti-status each person claims to be.

Cynicism is popular because it stimulates the brain chemicals that make you feel good. It stimulates dopamine by making the world feel predictable. It triggers serotonin by making you feel superior to “the jerks.” It triggers oxytocin by telling you who to trust. You pay a high price for these moments, unfortunately, because cynicism keeps you focused on problems instead of opportunities.

Many people stimulate that good serotonin feeling by trying to rescue others. Feeling like a hero is a reliable way to stimulate your serotonin. But the good feeling soon passes and you have to rescue again. Sometimes rescuers reward bad behavior in others because they are so eager to rescue.

You can increase your pleasure if you’re willing to do things that don’t feel good at first.

You don’t notice your neural guidance system because you built it without conscious intent. That’s why it’s hard to build new trails: You don’t know how you built the old ones.

Reality can’t live up to your expectations because you keep building new expectations.

If you want to be happy with your music all the time, start exposing yourself to unfamiliar music now, so it will be in the sweet spot by the time you’ve worn out the old pleasures.

Repetition takes time, but it builds behaviors with fewer side effects. If you expose yourself to something over and over, it can “grow on you.” You can get to like things that are good for you, even if you don’t like them instantly. But who wants to repeat something over and over if it doesn’t feel good? Usually, people don’t, which is why we tend to rely on the circuits built by accidents of experience. You will be shaped by accident unless you start repeating things by choice.

When a monkey loses a banana to a rival, he feels bad, but he doesn’t expand the problem by thinking about it over and over. He looks for another banana. He ends up feeling rewarded rather than harmed. Humans use their extra neurons to construct theories about bananas and end up constructing pain.