Breuning L.G. - The Science of Positivity: Stop Negative Thought Patterns by Changing Your Brain Chemistry

Do you get a bad feeling when you look at the world around you? Are you surrounded by people who only seem to focus on whats wrong? Do you wish you could enjoy more positive responses but fear that may be unwise or impossible?

Your response to the world is a learned habit. Our habits are hard to notice because theyre just physical pathways in the brain. These pathways channel electricity from your information inputs to your positive or negative brain chemicals. Your pathways were built from your unique life experience. The positive and negative experiences of your past paved neural pathways that channel your electricity today.

Negative thought patterns do not mean something is wrong with you. Negativity is natural. The science of positivity shows you why your mammal brain tends to go negative unless you build in a simple adjustment. This book will not tell you what to feel positive aboutthats for you to decidebut it will explain how your old pathways got there and how you can build new ones. Anyone can do it!

In this chapter, youll meet the inner mammal whose ups and downs are explained in depth later on in the book.

You may be thinking, the bad things I see are quite real. But this simple anecdote shows how easily our brain goes negative: Dog poop was a common sidewalk hazard when I was young. It was normal to let your pet mess in public and we couldnt imagine a world in which people routinely cleaned up after their pets. Today, most streets are gloriously free of dog poop. Did that make anyone happy? Not a bit. We rage at the occasional oops instead of noticing the enormity of the accomplishment. Wailing over one jerk who fouls the sidewalk seems more normal than celebrating the myriad sanitary successes. This normal thought habit does not leave you with a more accurate view of the world. It just leaves you feeling, well, shitty.

You may think anger was necessary to create that change. You may think negativity gives you power. But negativity is often just a habit. Historical perspective helps us see that, so heres a great example. In 1896, the London Spectator reported that society would be ruined by the invention of the bicycle. According to the agonizers of the day, the bicycle would end serious conversation by freeing people to flit in and out of more distant social groups instead of lingering for long talks with one group. Meaningful conversation would also be destroyed by the early bedtimes that extra exercise would provoke, it was reported. Behold the human brain at work, busily searching for negatives. You may think you would not have bought into such old rubbish, but you may be buying into new rubbish.

Most people pride themselves on their keen sense of the worlds flaws, so its hard to think of your indictments as a neural network that can simply be replaced. But you see things differently when you understand the operating system weve inherited from our animal ancestors. The brain chemicals that make us feel good (such as dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and endorphin) are inherited from earlier mammals. They motivate a mammal to promote its own survival by rewarding survival behaviors with a good feeling. When you know how your happy chemicals work in the state of nature, negativity makes sense. Before we explore that, lets define negativity.