The Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast Episode #233 - Loretta Breuning, Ph.D.

TRANSCRIPT

(Note: This is generated by AI with 98% accuracy. However, any errors may cause unintended changes in meaning.)

Melanie Avalon:
friends, welcome back to the show. I am so incredibly excited about the conversation that I am about to have. And actually, the timing of this conversation, we're recording this a little bit in advance, but the day that I'm recording this, we actually aired our best of recap for 2023.

Melanie Avalon:
And I included in that Loretta Bruning PhD, because she came on in 2023 for her past work, her books. That conversation was just so incredible, so amazing. I immediately knew it was going to be one of the best of recap features of 2023.

Melanie Avalon:
And so now what a way to start off 2024 to bring her back for her new book that I am so excited to talk about. So it is called Why You're Unhappy, Biology versus Politics. And I'm sure we will dive deep into what Loretta actually means by politics in that subtitle.

Melanie Avalon:
But friends, I really mean this from the bottom of my heart, reading this book, and Loretta's prior work, she is actually, this is her eighth book, which is just crazy. It will completely change the way you view the world.

Melanie Avalon:
And I really, really mean that. And it's all about the quote, and again, we'll dive into this, but quote, happy chemicals that we have, why they make us do what we do. And just to comment on that really quickly, I think a lot of people do have a basic understanding of like dopamine and serotonin and endorphins and kind of understand that they do things that they do because of those Loretta goes beyond that and kind of actually deconstructing the myths that we have surrounding all of that and how that has showed up in culture as so far as our addictions and our views of status and our views of happiness and unhappiness and what's normal and what's not normal and this potential myth that we live in society where we idealize nature and the animal kingdom and maybe really, maybe we're just meant to be unhappy or not.

Melanie Avalon:
We'll talk about that. It's really a paradigm shift. It's explained a lot of, I think, reasons that I do things that I do. So I'm just so excited to dive into this. Loretta, thank you so much for being here.

Loretta Breuning
Sure. Thanks for having me. I think people might be inclined to run away when they hear that we're meant to be unhappy. So I love to, you know, address that right away.

Melanie Avalon:
You say in the book that unhappiness is our natural state. I might be misquoting. There's something about unhappiness being our default state. Is that accurate?

Loretta Breuning
Yes. Yes. It's just that people haven't heard this before, and so it may seem overwhelming. And I explain why it's useful to know this, because if you're expecting unhappiness some of the time, then you don't view it as a disease, whereas today we've been taught that happiness is the natural default state.

Loretta Breuning
And if you're unhappy, you have a disease, and someone else needs to fix it for you. And in addition, when you go around expecting happiness all the time, it feels like something has gone tragically wrong with the world.

Loretta Breuning
But when you know that unhappiness is a natural state for the brain, then all the things in the world that frustrate you, you just know that you're creating that frustration inside you because your brain is just so darn good at creating frustration.

Melanie Avalon:
is so crazy. So okay, so to clarify, is unhappiness the default state or isn't like neutral the default state?

Loretta Breuning
Good question. You know, a lot of it comes down to definitions, but I think unhappiness is the default state because our brain prioritizes threats and that's how our ancestors survive. And what I'm proposing in the book is to make neutral your default state so that when you perceive something as a threat that you can more easily shift into neutral and shifting into neutral is more valuable tool because if you think you have to shift into happy all the time, then you're going to probably overdo it with some unhealthy weight shortcut to happiness.

Melanie Avalon:
And you do make the example in the book that children are born crying, like we're born into the world in a state of, I'm guessing cortisol and unhappiness. Are there any children that come out in the neutral state or the happy state?

Loretta Breuning
Of course, there's a lot of mothers that would say that, but anyone who's been around an infant, you know how hard you're working constantly to cheer them up out of that negative state. So they really rush into crying the minute they have some extra energy left.

Loretta Breuning
So we've been taught that for a baby, for example, it's a need. If it has enough food, if its diapers are clean then it won't cry, or if it's bored or needs love is the cliche. But really they default quickly to crying and we're constantly tap dancing to cheer them up.

Loretta Breuning
And over the years, every one of us is challenged to build this control mechanism to lift ourselves out of that rushing into crying state, and it's a big challenge.

Melanie Avalon:
And to that point, so historically throughout culture, because like I talked about the subtitle of your book is biology versus politics, and I guess we can define what you mean by politics, but how has this changed throughout eras as far as what we think should be normal or not with this happiness versus unhappiness state?

Melanie Avalon:
And what do you mean by politics?

Loretta Breuning
Yeah, that's a lot of questions, but I'll start with... So what I mean by politics, and we all know this from daily life, you tell people what they want to hear in order to maintain your social alliances.

Loretta Breuning
So a social alliance must be understood from the animal perspective. Everything in my book is from the animal perspective, especially how the happy chemicals work is understood from the animal perspective.

Loretta Breuning
Now, in the animal world, social alliances help you survive, and sometimes the truth is not so pleasant, and if you tell people what they want to hear, then you're more likely to get their support. So when people tell you that happiness is the natural state, and I can give you the happiness that you're missing, how familiar does that sound?

Loretta Breuning
All of our institutions are promising us fast, easy happiness. And before you blame social media and advertising, what I focus on is the medical profession, the media, therapy, and academic psychology.

Loretta Breuning
They're all part of this idea that happiness is the norm, and you have a disease, and something is wrong when you're not happy.

Melanie Avalon:
to that point because I'm, it's funny because I'm always reading multiple books prepping different people for the show and it was really interesting getting ready for this show because at the same time I was reading two other books that were literally saying not the entire thesis of the books but parts of the books were literally saying you know the complete opposite of what you're saying right now.

Melanie Avalon:
So one of them was talking about our spiritual state that we need to get to and basically this idea that there is this state of perfect you know happiness that like a high vibrational state that we naturally are and that we should all you know that we're trying to get to that and we should be at that.

Melanie Avalon:
And then the other book is about perfectionism and he actually ultimately ends up mostly ascribing it to society being the reason that we have perfectionism today and why it's a problem. So it's just been so interesting to see how counterintuitive your work seems and seems to be in contradiction to most other things I'm reading not most but a lot of them.

Melanie Avalon:
It's true.

Loretta Breuning
Yeah, it's a challenge for me because I read these things and I just cringe and I think, oh, that's just not true. So let's look at like the core paradigm that has been wired into all of us is society is to blame for your unhappiness and society should fix your unhappiness.

Loretta Breuning
Now, where does that come from? And what I explain is Rousseau, almost 300 years ago, introduced this idea that happiness was the natural norm and unhappiness was caused by society. And that philosophy has just been accepted.

Loretta Breuning
And in today's world, not only is it accepted, but because academics absorbed it, they find data that fits and then they tell you that the science proves it. So if you don't agree with this philosophy, you're dismissed as a nut who rejects and questions the science and you're not allowed to question the science.

Loretta Breuning
So in the book, I show how happiness is pitched as the norm for children, hunter -gatherers and animals in the academic world and how this is all really false. And I show that there's a mountain of evidence that happiness is not the natural norm for children, hunter -gatherers and animals.

Loretta Breuning
But if you say that in the academic world, it kills your career. So the information is just not available to us.

Melanie Avalon:
And diving into those categories, so we talked about children a bit. With the animals, do they even register, though, the concept of happiness? Like, is that even a thing to them or is it just stimuli response?

Loretta Breuning
Very good question. So you use the word concept and concept is something that comes from the cortex, which humans have a gigantic cortex compared to animals. So animals don't conceptualize. When you say, is it just stimulus response?

Loretta Breuning
Well, like 90% of human life is just stimulus response. So we don't really need the just. So the bottom line is that we have this little bit of extra ability to conceptualize, to generalize and to reconsider, but we rely so heavily on stimulus response because it built such big neural pathways in our childhood and the electricity in your brain flows into the biggest pathways.

Loretta Breuning
That's simply how our brain works.

Melanie Avalon:
If it's largely determined by our childhood and the narrative now, like in the present day is contributing to our overall, even though we said that we're naturally unhappy, but our increased unhappiness, I guess it seems like there's a dichotomy between the role of your past and your childhood versus the media now, the politics now, the culture now.

Melanie Avalon:
So like, what's the bigger driving factor in our happiness, unhappiness experience?

Loretta Breuning
So when we're young, we have a lot of neuroplasticity. It's a chemical called myelin, which you could think of as the paving material for the roads in your brain. So anything that you experience repeatedly when you were young built a superhighway in your brain.

Loretta Breuning
And we want to use those superhighways because they're so efficient. So to get yourself to do anything that deviates from those superhighways is quite hard. That's what we all know. So you're saying, well, what if the culture tells you something over and over?

Loretta Breuning
Well, normally the culture is telling you things that sort of fit your early pathways because otherwise you're politically unpopular if you violate people's old pathways. So a simple example would be young people growing up with the idea that happiness is the norm and unhappiness is a disease.

Loretta Breuning
So young people are quite eager to believe that they have a disorder whenever they're unhappy. And then they're quite eager to hand over the keys to their brain to someone else and say, you fix me, rather than seeing their brain as something that's capable of learning skills to redirect from unhappiness to happiness.

Melanie Avalon:
So that kind of ties into, you talk about the history of the concept of the paradigm shift and how, you know, basically how time is required to change these ideas.

Loretta Breuning
Yes, yes, I talk about it's funny but sad that it's so hard to change those early circuits in your brain and so tempting to use them that it's only really when one generation dies that a new idea is implanted.

Loretta Breuning
And this comes from a science history book that introduced the word paradigm shift in the 1960s. But the bottom line today would be that it will take a really long time to undo this idea that my unhappiness is society's fault and it's society's job to make me happy because it's just so widely implanted and you're so really meanly treated if you question it.

Melanie Avalon:
have so many questions for you. It's so fascinating. Going back to the children, the hunter gatherers, the animals, we talk a lot about diet and the paleo diet and ancestral diet. So we talk a lot about hunter gatherers and we'll talk about their dietary history, their exercise history, but there's definitely this idea that they were happier and life was better than… Yeah.

Loretta Breuning
life was easy. Yeah. And also these paleo diet related conversations always flow into the idea that it's society's fault that you have this health problem or this eating problem or this mood problem.

Loretta Breuning
That's always the conclusion of the story. And in my opinion, it's very disempowering and makes it even harder to commit to putting in the effort that it takes to rewire those old highways in your brain.

Melanie Avalon:
Yeah, no, that's so true because on the one hand, I do believe that, and I'm even hesitant to say believe, but I do believe that the overabundance of processed food today and advertising and everything has made an environment where it's more likely we'll follow our happy chemicals into a path that leads to metabolic health issues.

Melanie Avalon:
And still at the same time, I think everybody has personal agency and like you used to talk about in the book, like people act like society made them eat the cookies. Like you share an example, I think of, you know, being in the workplace and like a coworker talking about how something about how they, you know, were made to eat the cookies and you're like, you don't, like, you're not made, nobody made

Loretta Breuning
He actually used the sentence, these cookies that our society eats. So he's not acknowledging his own agency about eating the cookies, but society eats the cookies.

Melanie Avalon:
Yeah, exactly. So, so interesting. Actually, I do, because I don't think you talked about this population in the book. I was just thinking through different populations that we've idealized in our head.

Melanie Avalon:
And like the Native American population is very idealized in our culture. Are they happy? There's always these talks about they're connected to nature and

Loretta Breuning
Yes, and not just Native American, but any other tribal people or foraging people are idealized. And if you say anything against them, you're racist, so I don't even dare say anything. You have to say that they're these ideal human beings, and you're an evil person if you say anything against them.

Loretta Breuning
And if they do have any problems, such as addiction, et cetera, then their problems are always assumed to be society's fault. And any academic who finds data to fit that pattern is considered a superstar, and any academic who finds data that doesn't fit that pattern is shunned and will not have an academic career.

Melanie Avalon:
So to clarify with the society's fault thing, is there a difference between society's fault versus society is the environmental factor that is the quote reason or is I guess the factor that the brain's happy chemicals are responding to?

Melanie Avalon:
Like is it still playing a role?

Loretta Breuning
It's playing a role like i said in the book the world will always surround you with cookies there will always be temptations so there are modern temptations in the past generations had other temptations the sad thing is if you look at human history and animal history and hunter gatherer history is that people were at war almost all of the time and today despite what the impression you get in the news.

Loretta Breuning
Most people are not at war you can travel all over the world in perfect safety where is in the past you couldn't leave your village because you'd be killed on the road so people don't realize how sort of threatening life was in the past and how people directed their threatened feelings into very violent behaviors and so in a way eating cookies is not nearly as bad as like training for war as soon as you turn 12 years old and spending your whole life at war.

Melanie Avalon:
I have a huge, huge question about this. Like you just mentioned, you talk about threats in the book and how we like making predictions because that makes us feel safe because then we're predicting the threat, but then it's like a double -edged sword because on the one hand we can feel bad by correctly predicting a threat or incorrectly predicting a reward that we don't get.

Melanie Avalon:
So it's kind of like not a win -win situation for feeling good, even though it makes us feel safe. So something I experienced, I was so excited that you talked about this in the book because it's something I struggle with just as far as the reaction to it, which is the media is all about threats and in the book you talk about how it, you know, it's really maybe you can talk about this some more about how it really engages our brain.

Melanie Avalon:
But if you choose to not engage with the media, which is what I personally do. So like I don't watch the news. Like I just don't. Hooray. Yay. I figure like if it's bad enough, it will find its way to me.

Melanie Avalon:
Like through a conversation or like if it is something I need to know to like live my life, it will find its way to me. And it does. Like I was aware that the pandemic happened and things. So the response to that and even my own response.

Melanie Avalon:
So like the way I feel about that, I feel guilty because then I'm like, I'm not caring about the world or I'm not being prepared. What are your thoughts on that? That if you don't engage, then you don't care about the world.

Loretta Breuning
Yeah. So first a short answer and then a more theoretical answer. So this is a popular mindset, a template that the way to be a good person is X and every generation has that. And so today being in a constant frenzy over the news is like considered this demonstration of caring.

Loretta Breuning
But in fact, on a deeper level, it's highly selfish because this is the way people bond with others. So in the past, let's say they would talk about the weather. And that had a deep relevance because your ability to grow enough crops to survive depended on the weather and you know, you could get a cold and there was no medication.

Loretta Breuning
So the weather was important. So in the same way people bond about sharing their concerns about whatever threat. So if you live in a world that's rather safe, then your brain extends out further for threat signals.

Loretta Breuning
And so the news feeds on that natural tendency to respond. Oh look, there's a threat signal. And then it's like, oh, now I know what to worry about. And if you don't share in other people's habit of doing this, then you're like, you're not doing your share of the worry.

Loretta Breuning
Now underneath this, the, the social chemicals, the social brain of mammals, we hear a lot about how animals have groups and we're given the impression that animals are very caring and altruistic and empathetic.

Loretta Breuning
And again, this is, this is the meme, this is the template. So you're shunned if you don't support that. And only evidence that fits is reported. So we have this illusion, but in reality, animals have constant conflict in their groups.

Loretta Breuning
And the only reason they stick with the group is because a predator is likely to kill them instantly if they're isolated. So we have a brain chemical oxytocin that rewards us for having the protection of a group, but it's not designed to be on all the time.

Loretta Breuning
It's only designed to turn on to reward you for making that trade off. Like, gee, it's annoying to follow the crowd. And yet I'm not safe if I'm isolated. So in this instance, I'm deciding to follow the crowd.

Loretta Breuning
Whenever you do that, then your brain gives you this little shot of oxytocin and it feels great. But then to make things more complicated, once you have a nice group, your brain notices that you're at the bottom of the status hierarchy of the group.

Loretta Breuning
Mammals have a very strong status habit in their groups. They are very highly aware of what the status is of each other member of the group and their brain rewards them with the good feeling of serotonin when they rise in the group's hierarchy.

Loretta Breuning
And we love that feeling. And that's why we want, like if the person who says to you, oh, you didn't know that, you know, they read the news and they put you down for not knowing that that's their way of rising above you in the status hierarchy that they've constructed in their minds.

Melanie Avalon:
I am so fascinated by this part. Especially, yeah, like you just said, how basically we're all seeking status. And even if we act like we don't care about status, we put down other people for caring about status.

Melanie Avalon:
So that's us trying to get status that way. Exactly.

Loretta Breuning
And I wrote two earlier books about that part. So one is called Status Games, Why We Play and How to Stop. And the other is called I, Mammal, How to Make Peace with the Animal Urge for Social Power.

Melanie Avalon:
some more questions about all of that. So actually two quick serotonin myths that you talked about that were so interesting. One was you talk about how, because I think a lot of people hear serotonin, they don't think status, they think, well, they think like just happy feelings.

Melanie Avalon:
I think because they associate it with depression or, but you talk about the role of massage and how we got that idea about serotonin. Well, that's only.

Loretta Breuning
the last paragraph of a long chapter. So most of this comes from the pharmaceutical industry. It introduced the idea that a pill that increases your serotonin will relieve depression. And so there's a whole chapter on this and most people, you know, have accepted that view.

Loretta Breuning
And I even have to say that in order to not get sued that my comments are just philosophy and not intended as medical advice and you should see your doctor. But in the book I constantly use the words ask your doctor in quotes because your doctor never learned the animal function of serotonin.

Loretta Breuning
And when I learned about it, I was so stunned. I found it in books from the 80s and research that was done in the 80s. And I explained in the new book, why don't we ever hear about this? Cliffhanger for people.

Loretta Breuning
You want me to tell you why we don't hear about it? Yes. Yes. Sure. So, so there's so many reasons, which is why it's not surprising that we don't hear about it. So the biggest one is that this research on the idea that a monkey gets a little shot of serotonin release when the monkey reasserts its status over another monkey.

Loretta Breuning
This study was done in the 80s and was widely reported, including in the New York Times and many textbooks on evolutionary biology, which are right here on my shelf. So how did this all disappear? One reason and when I say this research, it was done by prestigious organizations like the National Institute for Mental Health and UCLA Medical School.

Loretta Breuning
So how did this disappear? Well, one reason is because the research was done on live monkeys. And in the 2000s, there were terrorist attacks against academics who did research on live monkeys. And in order to protect themselves, universities agreed to not only stop doing the research, but withdraw findings that were built on that research.

Loretta Breuning
And that's partly why you don't hear about it anymore. And no one says that this happened because as you know, when, when people cut a deal with terrorists, they never reveal it publicly. So that's one reason.

Loretta Breuning
Another reason is that it's such an extreme violation of the Rousseauian worldview that equality is the natural state of animals, hunter gatherers, and children, which is not true at all. But because this is so widely accepted that you ruin your career in academia if you don't conform to this.

Loretta Breuning
And finally, why we don't hear this is of course, the pharmaceutical companies that we hear so much about, and the advertising of pharmaceutical companies, and the influence peddling of pharmaceutical companies that's not as visible as advertising.

Melanie Avalon:
And you even point out, for example, how these things happen in the medical industry. And even if we kind of do become a tune of it, so like there's a lot of documentaries recently on Sackler, is that his name?

Melanie Avalon:
Sackler, that whole dynasty. But you talk about how even those documentaries focus on the certain type of drug or aspect of that that we have now decided is like can be demonized, but it doesn't focus on like any other aspect of that history, which is so interesting.

Melanie Avalon:
And actually, I've noticed this, I'm embarrassed to say that it's so funny, you know, reading your book, I realize all these things I do naturally, and apparently we all do naturally, but there's so much morality and judgment surrounding it that it's hard to even admit that you, you know, do these things or want these things.

Melanie Avalon:
I've really noticed it in myself with the status aspect. And this ties into you talk about the role again, the role of childhood in our current wants and desires and everything. So with this show, I get to connect with so many incredible people that I've looked up to for so long, which makes me feel like very good.

Melanie Avalon:
All of that said, and I've talked about this with my therapist so much, oh, which is a whole another part of your book. I see I'm embarrassed because she might actually listen to this, but out of all the relationship, like status relationships that I have acquired in recent years.

Melanie Avalon:
And again, a lot of really incredible, like high status people having the show, the one that has like landed with me that like lit me up the most, like, oh, I'm friends with this person, isn't anybody I've had on the show.

Melanie Avalon:
It's like a high school mean girl that is now my friend that relationship. She's actually my actual friend. She's amazing. She's like, incredible now. It's just, it's fascinating to me. And I've had so many therapy sessions talking about this.

Melanie Avalon:
I'm like, why does that relationship light me up so much? And I'm like, so proud of this, like coveted high school mean girl friendship when I've like met all these other like celebrities.

Loretta Breuning
So and here's the thing, and why would your therapist not say what I'm going to say? So our neural pathways are built from experience. So when we're born, our brain is completely unwired. And it gets wired each time we have a response to the world.

Loretta Breuning
A positive response is a release of a positive chemical. And that paves a pathway that says, this is good for you, get more of it. And every time your brain releases a negative chemical, your brain says, this is bad for you, avoid it.

Loretta Breuning
So your early experience with that mean girl built a really big pathway because that triggered your threat chemical. And the reason for that is when we're young, we all have huge concerns about our social position, even though you deny it.

Loretta Breuning
And the reason I learned so vividly from watching David Attenborough's nature videos, and you can learn it from any introductory textbook on evolutionary biology. Biologists have this word called reproductive success.

Loretta Breuning
Now, none of us defined success today by like, how many babies can I have? But for most of human history, that's how people define success was how many babies you had. And in the animal world, how many copies of your genes that you make is what determines your genes.

Loretta Breuning
So our genes are inherited from people who are really good at making babies. So in high school is when your brain, you know, puberty prepares your brain for looking at the world and saying, okay, what do I need to do to succeed in the reproduction game?

Loretta Breuning
And for some reason, that mean girl, like I bet she was succeeding and she was calling attention on your lack of success in the mating game. And that's what built a big pathway in your brain. So, so interesting.

Loretta Breuning
And so then why would you feel good about it today? So our brain is focused on promoting our own survival. Nobody goes around consciously saying, oh, yeah, I only care about my own survival. And we're told that this is a bad thing.

Loretta Breuning
We shouldn't think that way. But that's what stimulates the happy chemicals. So when you need a need, get a resource that stimulates your happy chemicals. But even more, if you prevent a threat, that triggers your happy chemicals even more.

Loretta Breuning
Because in the state of nature, relieving a threat is what promoted survival. So once you define the mean girl as a threat, now your current ability to relieve that threat is a huge achievement.

Melanie Avalon:
Okay, so it's like double, double goodies because you're relieving the threat and that she's no longer a threat and you're getting the benefit of the status. So like you're getting a positive and relieving a threat.

Loretta Breuning
And your brain is defining that as meeting a survival need, even though you would never consciously do that, because for each of us, however we define status in our teen years, is very deeply wired in.

Loretta Breuning
And that is just hard to get to avoid, even as much as we tell ourselves that we're avoiding it. I'll give you an interesting example. Like most people, whenever you say success or status, people jump to the financial aspect, and then they're quick to criticize that.

Loretta Breuning
But that's just such a tiny percentage of the whole status game, and people are very familiar with the appearance status game and the ability to attract the attention of romantic partner status game.

Loretta Breuning
And I'll give you an interesting personal example. When I was a kid, my mother's, so my family is Italian, Sicilian. So my mother's definition of status was how much time your kids spend with you. So we, needless to say, did not want to spend a lot of time with her, and she didn't make it especially rewarding either.

Loretta Breuning
Her status hierarchy was all about that. So in a way, this was good for me because I was not excessively pressured about achievement. So I felt very guilty because I was depriving my mother of what she cared about most by not buying a house next door to her and letting her come over and cook dinner for me.

Loretta Breuning
And yet, it was good because I was not pressured to achieve these other kinds of status. But now that I'm a grandmother, so here I have those very old pathways that like define status by how much time I spend with my grandchildren.

Melanie Avalon:
Wow, it's like the love languages, how they manifest today.

Loretta Breuning
Yeah, but that book Love Languages, it doesn't explain how they're learned. It makes you think that they're genetically imprinted. And this is what we've all been taught. And the reason for that is there's a lot of money for genetics research.

Loretta Breuning
But there's no money to go back into a two -year -old's life experience and see how it correlates with their ups and downs today. But you can do it for yourself. And this is what I've done is, like, if you, you know, politely chat with people, like when someone has a strong feeling, positive or negative, you ask them about their earliest experience with that feeling.

Loretta Breuning
And they'll have some amazing story that, like, this exact thing happened to them when they were young and they felt very strongly about it. And yet they will never admit that they're influenced by that.

Loretta Breuning
They will say, oh, but that's not why I feel so strongly about it today.

Melanie Avalon:
If you're curious because you mentioned that like what my therapist would say when I talk about these things I've talked about that a lot and then I've also talked about just in general how I See, I can't even it's even hard for me to say it right now.

Melanie Avalon:
Yeah. Yeah, I don't blame you It's very personal good just cuz like the how we ascribe the the judgment around things But but basically I really like I love all my friends so much and I really like Having high achieving friends like it's it's important to me I don't know like I like I want all my friends to be really high achieving And so I talk about that a lot with my therapist, but she actually her response is basically usually that That's normal for me to want that and that's fine.

Melanie Avalon:
And there's nothing wrong with it Which would that be in line with what you're saying? Basically, I shouldn't feel guilty about it. That's what she says

Loretta Breuning
It is natural for people to want to be with someone that raises their status so what raises your status so you find it one way and other people to find it another way like someone else might to find it as.

Loretta Breuning
I can hold my liquor better than you can i can go to a bar and buy around for everybody you know so you don't do that so you could find some how in your early experience. That you learned like maybe in some way either your parents rewarded you for having a high status friend or that you you you observed your parents investing effort in getting high status friendships.

Melanie Avalon:
Hmm, okay, so interesting. Going back to the tribe concept. So now, okay, this is a multifaceted question. So the four happy chemicals you talk about in the book, because I don't think we actually laid them out, dopamine, serotonin, endorphins, and oxytocin.

Melanie Avalon:
So my two -part question is, one, do certain people like, it's ironic because these are making you feel good, but beyond the experience that that chemical actually creates, do certain people like one more than the other?

Melanie Avalon:
Like, I've always said that I'm like a dopamine girl. Like, that's like what gets me going, but maybe that's, I don't know, is that accurate? Like, are some people like serotonin people, and some people are endorphin people, some people are oxytocin people?

Loretta Breuning
So, the way I always explain it is we all need all of them, but in our early years, some of us learned good, healthy ways to spark one of them. And so, whenever you want to be happy, you go toward that because you know of a healthy way to do that.

Loretta Breuning
The others, either you didn't learn a way to spark it reliably or you learn an unhealthy way. Like I mentioned, going into a bar and buying around for everybody would be an example of an unhealthy way to spark it.

Loretta Breuning
And yet, it does spark it and it does make you feel good. So, now, this idea of typologizing people to say, well, this person is this type and that person is that type, that's where we go naturally in our thoughts because academics, in order to survive, they have to publish studies, they have to focus on things that are quantifiable.

Loretta Breuning
So, dividing people into types is like a simple way to quantify. And even in the media world, like if you have a quiz that says, take this quiz to find out what type you are, that gets a lot of hits.

Loretta Breuning
But if you say, everybody is all the types, but maybe you feel good about your dopamine path and you feel less good about your serotonin path or vice versa, then that's not going to draw as much support.

Loretta Breuning
So that was, I think, just the first part of your question, I'm not sure. But what I wanted to say about this and the main point of the book is I talk about the bad side of each of these chemicals because we've been so indoctrinated now, like a lot of people talk about these chemicals as if you should have them all the time and they're always on.

Loretta Breuning
And so I explain why they're not always on and they shouldn't always be on and they're actually very hard to turn on. And if you do have them on, there's a trade -off, so you don't really want them always on.

Melanie Avalon:
Actually, to that point, and I'll come back to the second question, because like I just mentioned, typologizing myself as a dopamine person, I was thinking about this a lot recently and I think it was before I started reading your book, but it was still a sort of recent conversation with a friend.

Melanie Avalon:
We were talking about how, okay, how do I say this? Basically the way I have seen my life is, and maybe this is being too simplistic with the dopamine, but I really like having many goals and like many moments and getting the dopamine hit and then stop and then it's down and then going again.

Melanie Avalon:
I really like that. I don't expect it to be forever dopamine constantly. I like that just dopamine won and then we go again and then a new goal, because they'll often say in society like, oh, they say people set goals and they think the goals are going to make them happy and then they don't make them happy.

Melanie Avalon:
I'm like, well, yeah, because you get your goal, it makes you happy, then you need a new goal. But that scene is like a bad thing, that it's a bad thing you need to keep making new goals and didn't find happiness.

Loretta Breuning
It's seen as a bad thing, like with people with the Buddhist perspective, and then people with a progressive perspective, it's seen as an unnatural thing that our society forces on you. But when you understand that our brain evolved for foraging and our ancestors had to forage constantly, they couldn't just sit on their butts and assume that the next meal would just show up, but they had to seek and seek and seek.

Loretta Breuning
And so our brain is designed to seek and seek. So yeah, I'm like you, I like to constantly stimulate my dopamine by setting an agenda and moving toward it. But I think everyone feels good from that. It's just that some people don't know how to do it or expect society to do it for them.

Loretta Breuning
So they don't stimulate their dopamine, and then they feel bad, and then they stimulate their dopamine either by eating cookies or some other bad habit. Social media is blamed for this. So we all have an urge to seek.

Loretta Breuning
And we're always choosing what we seek with old neural pathways.

Melanie Avalon:
I feel so, I guess, passionate about this because I guess I just see it so much where it's like, oh, you shouldn't seek happiness in the goals because then you're just gonna need a new goal. And I'm like, yeah, it's great.

Melanie Avalon:
I like it. I like setting new goals.

Loretta Breuning
Yes, exactly. And the people who tell you you shouldn't do that, they may be depressed, you know, and then they may be blaming our society for their depression and taking a pill and, you know, more power to you if the pill works for you.

Loretta Breuning
But typically what happens is you have to take more and more because your brain habituates. And so you get more and more side effects. So you have to take more pills for that. And then you just end up getting more and more side effects.

Loretta Breuning
And then if you go off it, you get even worse side effects. So people are not adequately informed about this. And they're not adequately informed about the alternative, which is to accept that your happy chemicals are not designed to be on all the time, but you can learn the skill of sparking them.

Melanie Avalon:
Gotcha. Okay. I love it. Yeah. And the specific conversation that happened with my friend was I had had like, cause I'll often talk about like magical moments in life. Like I love having quote magical moments.

Melanie Avalon:
And so I was talking about this quote magical moment I had and how I wanted it again. It involved another person like romantically. And so my friend, my friend was like, she was basically saying that I should not think that way because it can never be as good as the first time.

Melanie Avalon:
And, you know, it's not sustainable. And I'm like, no, I'm not expecting, I'm like, it's just another magical moment. Like on the, on the, dopamine roller coaster.

Loretta Breuning
Yeah, she's been, you know, indoctrinated by that mindset that basically says you shouldn't care about things. And that has an advantage in the sense that if you care too much about something unhealthy, then you're better off not caring about things.

Loretta Breuning
But if you never care about anything, then you just don't spark your happy chemicals. Then there's another aspect of that, which is that if you were very excited about a relationship, then there's sort of this whole mindset of, well, you shouldn't care so much about, you know, who you're dating.

Loretta Breuning
Right? Yeah. Yeah. Because either, you know, because either society forced that on you, or because it's going to fail in the end. So, so this is why I yeah, I don't listen to these people.

Melanie Avalon:
And then there's the major paradigm shift. Oh, and this made me happy when I was reading your book because I was reading one section of it and I literally, oh, and this makes sense why it made me happy because I predicted something correctly.

Melanie Avalon:
I basically had an idea, I was like, oh, it's like this. And then the next paragraph was literally what you said, which, or literally was saying that, which was that in today in society, going back to the status and moralizing and what we should want and what we shouldn't want, today it's all about, it's so ironic, but the high status thing now is to be low status.

Melanie Avalon:
It's to be like the victim, which drives me crazy. Even though I guess, I don't know, should that drive me crazy? If that's just, again, it's just another status game. In the book.

Loretta Breuning
status games, I list, you know, 20 different kinds of status games. And one of them is my pain is more painful than your pain. But also if someone says, well, you shouldn't get excited about X because it's not going to last.

Loretta Breuning
Well, it is true that it's not going to last. So if you get excited about it in a delusional way where you think it's going to last forever, then it's true that, you know, you have to moderate that because then you'll get disappointed.

Loretta Breuning
So, but then if you completely say, well, I shouldn't get excited about anything, then you'll end up without the good feeling of dopamine. So it helps to just look at this excitement as it's just a chemical.

Loretta Breuning
It's just a pathway. There are no easy ways to get these chemicals. And yet they.

Melanie Avalon:
feel good. Yes. Okay. I'm so glad. I'm glad you said that again because that was literally what I was trying to communicate because the, you know, the messaging was you shouldn't feel good because it's not going to last.

Melanie Avalon:
And I was like, I'm not expecting it to last. That doesn't mean I can't like, you know, have these, these moments in life.

Loretta Breuning
So let's talk about infatuation. So the early period of every relationship triggers a lot of happy chemicals. I talk about that in the first chapter of my main book, Habits of a Happy Brain. And the reason is because our brain evolved for the purpose of getting you to reproduce.

Loretta Breuning
That is what motivates us because that's what keeps your genes alive, and that's how you happen to get those genes, is because they came from people who reproduced. So even though you're not consciously trying to do that, that's why it triggers so many happy chemicals.

Loretta Breuning
Now, there are two ways to look at that. One is that these happy chemicals built a lot of expectations about that relationship, and then the person is a disappointment. But the other way to look at it is to say, if I'm with this person 25 years later and they are not a knight in shining armor, but I still have these old pathways built from the early days of the relationship that helped me see them in a positive light.

Melanie Avalon:
Okay, so to clarify about that, presumably that's a good thing, like staying together with somebody because of the early pathways that were created. I mean, you talk about, for example, like no fault.

Loretta Breuning
I'm not saying to stay in an awful relationship, but if you are having an idealized view of relationships, and you may know this, like people end up with no relationship because therapists have indoctrinated them that the other person should make you feel special every minute of every day, and that's just not realistic.

Loretta Breuning
So if that's your standard, you're going to never have, you're gonna end up without a relationship. So it's better off to say, it's my job to make myself feel special, and everyone in the world wants to feel special.

Loretta Breuning
So if there are 8 billion people in the world who want to be special, I get 1, 8 billionth of that specialness. So I can't blame my partner for that. And so how can I be happy in a world where 8 billion other people want to be special?

Loretta Breuning
Well, I could be special to that partner.

Melanie Avalon:
You talk about in the book oxytocin shortcuts that we can get that don't actually provide protection. And you mentioned one earlier, which was crowds, but then one was no -fault relationships, which is kind of what relates to what we're talking about right now.

Melanie Avalon:
What happens with that and oxytocin?

Loretta Breuning
Sure. So first, for each of the chemicals, I explain the idealized view of the chemical that is caught on. And for oxytocin, the idealized view is hugging and empathy. So you've been indoctrinated by these institutions, as I mentioned, academic psychology and all the others.

Loretta Breuning
You've been indoctrinated that the state of nature is like all huggy -wuggy and everybody cooperates and shares, and that's the norm of nature, this effortless cooperation and sharing and support, and that something has gone wrong with our world.

Melanie Avalon:
I'm wondering about the role of no -fault relationships, and

Loretta Breuning
Oh, and shortcuts, oxytocin shortcuts. To understand the job of oxytocin more realistically, because if you think that it's supposed to make you feel like other people are on your side all the time, then you're going to notice that other people are not on your side all the time, and then you're going to get upset and disappointed.

Loretta Breuning
So a simple way is to just realize that oxytocin is about feeling protected. We all want to feel protected. Animals feel protected when they stick with the herd, despite the fact that sticking with the herd is very unpleasant because you have to eat grass that other guys in the herd have peed on.

Loretta Breuning
So they would rather spread out, but they stick with the herd because a predator will eat them otherwise. So in our lives today, we don't want to say, oh yeah, really, I want you to protect me. I want people to protect me.

Loretta Breuning
But that's really what we're looking for. So we can't always get it because we're adults. You know, we're born wanting protection, but then as we grow through childhood, we have to let go of that protection and we may think it's tragic and unfair, but you can't go through life having the protection you had then.

Loretta Breuning
So maybe you had, when you were in high school, someone that covered for you when you messed up. And so you have this wonderful feeling of protection about them. And so that's like a big neural pathway that, oh, that person sparks your oxytocin and you think, oh, they're going to have my back.

Loretta Breuning
So we want someone to have our back. But can't always like steal their homework or, you know, they're always going to call your boss and tell you you're sick when you have a hangover. Like it's just not realistic.

Loretta Breuning
So that's why we look for oxytocin shortcuts, which are things that trigger our oxytocin and give us the illusion of feeling protected. And a simple example that I use is being in a big crowd. Like if you go to a stadium and there's, you know, 20 ,000 people and they all care a lot about whatever it is there, if it's a sports game or an entertainer or a politician and consciously you don't think that they're going to be there for you tomorrow morning.

Loretta Breuning
But in that moment you feel like a mammal with the protection of a huge herd. So I have a whole lot of examples of oxytocin shortcuts. No fault relationships is like in the past, it was very hard to get divorced.

Loretta Breuning
When you married someone, it was for life. And many people would not really like that today and they would find it difficult. And yet when you get together with someone today, like they could break up with you at any time for any reason.

Loretta Breuning
And if you're married, they could take half your stuff. So I just, I just mentioned that relationships are easier to get into today, but easier to get out of. So that feeling of protection on the one hand, you don't mind losing the relationship because you could get into another easily, but then you don't feel quite as protected in that relationship because it could end at any moment.

Loretta Breuning
And then you use the other, what was the other example? Nostalgia. Nostalgia. So nostalgia is a neural pathway built from a moment when you felt protected in your childhood. So if you think of anything that makes you feel safe today or that really motivates you, you really care about, you could think of what was your earliest experience with that.

Loretta Breuning
Sometimes it's a food, sometimes it's an entertainment. And you could see a moment in your youth when you felt protected and that food or that entertainment was going on. So your brain linked it to the feeling of being protected.

Loretta Breuning
Now, when you think about it today, you feel protected even if that food is not really protecting you or that kind of entertainment is not really protecting you. It's just a pathway to your oxytocin.

Melanie Avalon:
I have an example of that that is so obvious to me. Thunderstorms for me make me feel really safe. And it's because I remember like being a little kid in bed inside, protected from the thunderstorm outside.

Melanie Avalon:
So now thunderstorms make me feel safe.

Loretta Breuning
Well, good. And it may even be that your parents were especially comforting when there was a thunderstorm. And so that's the source of the positive expectation about thunderstorms, whereas other people clearly don't have that experience.

Melanie Avalon:
Yeah, I remember I had a conversation with a friend and we were talking about thunderstorms and he was saying that they just terrify him and he can't sleep at all when there are thunderstorms. And I'm like, that's so interesting because they're like the way to help me sleep and feel so safe.

Melanie Avalon:
And so it's so interesting that people can have, you know, completely different experiences.

Loretta Breuning
And that always fits their early experience, even though nobody is consciously aware of it. And a really simple example is with food. If a person has a really strong feeling about a certain food, you could always find some early experience where that food was connected either to a good experience or a bad experience, and that's the link they have today.

Melanie Avalon:
My audience knows that's funfetti cake for me. I'm like obsessed with birthday cake.

Loretta Breuning
I have a funny example of that funny but sad. My mother was taking a leg of lamb roast out of the oven when I was a kid and the phone rang and it was her mother had died like instantly of a stroke and it was a big shock and she could never eat lamb after that.

Loretta Breuning
Isn't that amazing? She never made lamb after that. Now for me, what's funny is my husband, he likes lamb and because lamb was sort of off the menu when I was young, so now it's a treat for me because like a rare thing because my brain did not associate it with my grandmother's death.

Loretta Breuning
My brain associated it with sort of a scarcity item, you know, so now when my husband and I travel, we get all excited about finding lamb on the menu somewhere. Oh, wow.

Melanie Avalon:
Well, that is a really good example.

Loretta Breuning
It just shows you how random it all is.

Melanie Avalon:
Yeah, that's so so interesting. And so something else and this relates to the like the crowds aspect and what I was talking about earlier about how I was wondering if certain people like one of the compounds more than the other.

Melanie Avalon:
I remember I don't know if we talked about this before, or if you've seen it in your research, but there was something called, I think it was called the mappiness project. It was like an app, they had people, it was like thousands of thousands and thousands and thousands of data points.

Melanie Avalon:
But they basically would randomly, I don't know how it worked, like a text or an app prompt, a push notification, it would basically ask people, what are you doing right now? And then they would say if they were happy or not.

Melanie Avalon:
And so it was trying to figure out what made people happy. Number one and number two, interestingly, so number one was sex. And number two was like seeing a show. And I thought that was really interesting, because sex presumably would be oxytocin.

Melanie Avalon:
And then also the show is that like the crowd the oxytocin, I was just curious, like what happy chemicals might be a play in those two experiences.

Loretta Breuning
Oh, good, good. Yeah, that's funny. I hadn't heard that one. When you say a show, I assume you mean a live show, right?

Melanie Avalon:
Yeah, like seeing a live show like it so that's why I was like, oh, it's like a crowd experience like yeah

Loretta Breuning
Yeah, yeah. Well, so oxytocin, yes, it's sex. I mean, sex is oxytocin, said that wrong. A show. Well, so there's a few things about a show. One of them is the scarcity value that you don't go to a show very often.

Loretta Breuning
So in a way, it's like when our hunter -gatherer ancestors found a food that was only available once a year, and it really had nutrients that were scarce, and they got very excited. So our brain is designed to get excited about scarcity.

Loretta Breuning
So if you don't go to a show very often, it's rather expensive. So use a lot of money. That's part of the scarcity thing. But almost always, when you go to a show, you have the tickets in advance. So you've been looking forward to this.

Loretta Breuning
So that's a big dopamine thing that anything you're looking forward to. So I forgot to say before you have a scarcity value is all dopamine. So that's part of it is like, you know, I've been planning for days or weeks, maybe we had to get a babysitter, we had to find a parking spot.

Loretta Breuning
And we got here, and here we are, and here's this scarce experience, and it'll be over in two hours. So that's part of it. So then another part of it is, yes, it's the oxytocin of you're with this big group of people who went through the same thing as you and had the same priorities as you as that, that show meant enough to them to make that effort to get there.

Loretta Breuning
So you assume it feels like protection, because it's like, Oh, here's all these people that share my sense of priorities. And then what is the content of the show, either it's designed to make you laugh, or if it's music that that stimulates dopamine.

Loretta Breuning
But a big thing here is what I call distraction. Now, distraction usually has a negative connotation. But while you're watching the show, you are not thinking about how the earth is going to end, you know, next year.

Loretta Breuning
And you're not thinking about who's mad at you, and whether you're going to be able to pay your bills. So you stop triggering your own threat chemicals, because you have something else to process.

Melanie Avalon:
And there's the serotonin status, especially with, because I always get like front row tickets and so I probably am feeding my serotonin status with that aspect.

Loretta Breuning
Yes, or even if you get back row tickets, you're like, wow, isn't it cool that I acted in time to get these tickets? So you're very proud of yourself for having gotten the tickets.

Melanie Avalon:
Well, it's just so interesting. I mean, looking back, because I love going to shows and they make me feel so good. And now, now it just provides so much context for why that is, especially like when I went to the Taylor Swift concert, the feelings of, yeah, like the crowd with the oxytocin and feeling protected and like bonded.

Melanie Avalon:
Like we talked about in the book, it's like you get to bond with an entire tribe with minimal commitment. Like you don't even know these people. Yeah.

Loretta Breuning
Yeah, exactly. And then I do emphasize, though, that that's an illusion, of course, because then if you do need support in some aspect of your life, those people are not going to be there for you.

Melanie Avalon:
Yeah, I've thought about this a lot when I'm at like a show or something, how I would like trust somebody to like, if I needed to like go to the bathroom, I would feel totally fine being like, can you watch my stuff?

Melanie Avalon:
But if I was like on the outside, I wouldn't trust that person wouldn't take my stuff. But it's like, because now we're like in this thing together. Now I can automatically trust them for no reason. Yes.

Melanie Avalon:
So as far as actually making changes with all of this, you know, rewiring our brain. So in the book, you go through all the different ones. Well, I guess we should clarify that with endorphins, you do point out that that's not something that we should be seeking.

Melanie Avalon:
Would you like to comment on that?

Loretta Breuning
Sure, so endorphin is the body's natural opioid and it creates a good feeling that masks pain and it's only released when you're in real physical pain. So people who want to stimulate endorphin, they inflict pain on themselves to get that temporary distracting good feeling.

Loretta Breuning
And it's very unhealthy to do things to yourself that stimulate pain and it's not what our body is designed for, it's not what endorphin is designed for. And the reason people do it is because they're not aware of how the other chemicals work and there's become this cult of inflicting pain on yourself as the way to stimulate it.

Melanie Avalon:
Is endorphins why humans like spicy taste?

Loretta Breuning
In some cultures, that is the way to get it. In our culture, exercising to the point of pain is a more familiar way of getting it.

Melanie Avalon:
Like I mentioned earlier, I think people do have a basic idea of these chemicals. So a lot of people think that the reason they like exercise is the endorphins, like the end. But you talk about how exercise is actually stimulating all of the different chemicals.

Loretta Breuning
Yeah, so exercise stimulates dopamine because people tend to set goals for their exercise for their exercise and then they perceive success at reaching those goals and that stimulates their dopamine and the dopamine pathway is the anticipation of rewards.

Loretta Breuning
So you start to believe in yourself like I set the goal of running a mile and I achieved it. So now not only am I going to go for another goal but I have more belief in my ability to reach goals and to feel good about it.

Loretta Breuning
So that's the dopamine aspect. Now the serotonin aspect of course is I'm healthier than you are and the oxytocin part of it is like you feel bonded with people who share your exercise regimen.

Melanie Avalon:
So, so interesting. And actually that reminded me, because you deconstruct dopamine studies that potentially were misleading. And one of them was one that I had read in another book that I did an episode on.

Melanie Avalon:
And it intensely went through this study and you mentioned it, which was, there's a whole narrative that dopamine is about wanting but not liking, or like not enjoying. So is that is that not accurate?

Melanie Avalon:
Or like, what are the issues with that perspective?

Loretta Breuning
So this is part of a bigger concept, but this idea of wanting but not liking comes from initial rat studies, and I explain that whenever something fits the paradigm, that all it takes is one study for it to end up in the textbook, and every single freshman is taught this.

Loretta Breuning
And then if there are other studies, they don't get covered, or even a person who does the other study doesn't get tenure, doesn't get grant money, and you never hear about it, period. So you only hear this idea that dopamine motivates wanting but not liking.

Loretta Breuning
So why does that fit the paradigm? Because from the academic perspective, they want to think of humans in this Rousselian way where nobody cares about resources, nobody is motivated to seek resources, because life is supposed to be effortless, where you just pick coconut off trees, and the fish jump into your lap.

Loretta Breuning
So seeking, this is part of this whole thing that seeking is a bad thing, and our ancestors didn't have to seek. So they view seeking as greed, and they think greed is caused by our society, and it's a bad thing.

Loretta Breuning
So they can't acknowledge that we naturally have this impulse. So that's why they're making these very obscure distinctions. And where this all comes together is related to addiction. So when a person is an addict, they are focusing so much of their energy on seeking whatever they're addicted to.

Loretta Breuning
Now, normally when you seek something, if it makes you feel good, then you seek more. But when you're an addict, you sort of end up feeling bad by this thing you're doing. So why do you keep seeking it?

Loretta Breuning
Because the positive expectation this is going to feel good is such a huge pathway that you continue to want more of it, even though it's bad for you. So the wanting versus liking, they're not really acknowledging this thing that you quote, want.

Loretta Breuning
You want it because of a huge pathway built in your past. It's a dopamine pathway that says this is going to feel really good. And many people can find their own personal example of that, where you really want something and you say, this is going to feel really good.

Loretta Breuning
Then when you get it, you know, you're not that excited about it. But then tomorrow you want more of it. So partly you're not that excited because your brain habituates. That's a natural, normal thing.

Loretta Breuning
So then you want more and more. So this is a natural thing. But academics want to tell you that addiction is not your fault. It's society's fault and that addicts have been unfairly treated and unfairly blamed.

Loretta Breuning
So they want to say that addicts get no pleasure from what they're doing. And that's why they say addicts want it, but don't like it to tell you that they're getting no pleasure. So if you say that dopamine is related to pleasure, then that's deemed hate speech against addicts.

Loretta Breuning
So everything is politicized.

Melanie Avalon:
do you think that, and I guess this goes into like nature versus nurture, but if any given person was in the exact same environmental situation that they would in that situation become an addict, or are some people just, their different pathways in their brain are going to be more responsive?

Loretta Breuning
So this whole idea of, like, it's not my fault because I have this special kind of brain that has become the paradigm of our times. And the core belief of it's not my fault, it's not your fault, nothing is anybody's fault.

Loretta Breuning
I think this is very disempowering. But this is the accepted belief in all of these institutions, medicine, academia, therapy, and the media. So it's very hard to counter it. If you think it's not your fault, then you don't put in the effort to change it.

Loretta Breuning
And what is fault? This is just a vocabulary game. So let's say, why does one person have this addiction to this thing and another person doesn't? Well, I'll give you a simple example. People who love candy, it's just so clear, like if you talk to them, there was some time when they were young that their parent gave them candy and it was associated with meeting a need in a big way.

Loretta Breuning
So one example could be, like, there was nobody home and nobody put food on the table and candy is what they had. Or it could be that you failed a test and your mother gave you a hug and gave you some candy.

Loretta Breuning
So it was a link to approval. Or it could be that somebody bullied you and then you went and had some candy with friends and that helped you forget the bullying. So whatever you're addicted to, if you go back to the early experience and see how it met a deep need, that relieved distress for you, it's just learned.

Loretta Breuning
It's all learned. And I don't think these institutions are helping us by making us think that there's some genetic blueprint and ignoring the extent to which they're learned because that's where we get our power to relearn.

Melanie Avalon:
I talked a second ago or a few minutes ago about the solution to all of this, and so hearing that, what you just said, what are the implications for focusing on, quote, love as the solution? Because there's a lot of that in society today.

Melanie Avalon:
And so hearing what you just said about childhood and things that happen, what would be the implications if you were just surrounded with love about everything?

Loretta Breuning
Yeah, so this idea that love is the answer, so it's always putting the blame on the other person, which is saying, love is the answer, and therefore, if I have a problem, it's your fault for not loving me.

Loretta Breuning
And you may have actually a devoted partner who says, but I do love you, or a devoted relative who says, but I do love you, well, but you're not loving me the right way. So that's the sad misuse of this concept.

Loretta Breuning
So it's maybe a matter of how we define love. So we all have a deep natural urge to feel protected, because we're all born vulnerable and weak with no ability to protect ourselves, and we need protection.

Loretta Breuning
And yet, if you hold on to that childlike sense of vulnerability forever, then you're really gonna be disappointed and unhappy all the time, because nobody is gonna make you feel protected because it's just not realistic for an adult to expect the level of protection of a child.

Loretta Breuning
And so what politics has done is feeding on this and having all these people who were given unrealistic expectations and said, it's society's fault that you don't feel loved. In a proper society, you'd feel loved and protected.

Loretta Breuning
Vote for me and I'll make you feel safe.

Melanie Avalon:
The connection with that and like rewards, talking earlier about the solution to all of this, something you talk about that I really love reading your thoughts on, which is when children are in school and stuff, now they're often rewarded for not doing things.

Melanie Avalon:
Like they don't have to like actually accomplish anything and they get rewarded. So what is the role of rewards and actually making change? Like how should we approach rewards?

Loretta Breuning
Sure. In the state of nature, rewards are very scarce and people were desperate to find water. Maybe they were desperate to find calories or maybe they were desperate to find protein even if they had enough calories.

Loretta Breuning
Rewards are highly motivating to our brain. But in the modern world, we have unlimited water and we have enough food. So we've inherited this brain that's very motivated by rewards and yet the historic rewards are not so motivating.

Loretta Breuning
Because the brain focuses on an unmet need. If the need is already met, it doesn't spark your dopamine. So what are our unmet needs? Well, social needs. You never have enough attention, approval, specialness.

Loretta Breuning
So that's why ways to get that are highly sought after. Now for a child, if you, let's say you have a homework assignment and one child works very hard on it and another child just spends two minutes and does something very sloppy.

Loretta Breuning
So if they both get the same formal approval from the teacher, whatever that may be, then the child who doesn't make any effort learns that you get approval without making any effort. So why should I make any effort?

Loretta Breuning
And it's really sad because then later in life, they don't learn how to get effort through taking small but difficult steps. And so they just do that two minute no effort homework. And then if the reward doesn't come in adult life, they feel wronged like what went wrong?

Loretta Breuning
Must be your fault. Must be society's fault.

Melanie Avalon:
And then the second layer to that is that i think in society and you talk about this in the book as well like there are intrinsic rewards and extrinsic rewards and for what whatever reason we've demonized extrinsic rewards like you should only want.

Melanie Avalon:
Internal rewards for we know what you're doing and it's bad if you want an external reward is that accurate though.

Loretta Breuning
Yeah. And you also asked me what is the role of rewards. So what I say is that the brain is highly motivated by rewards. And if you just say that rewards are bad, then you lose this huge mechanism for motivating yourself.

Loretta Breuning
And a very, very simplistic example of this would be, let's say you love your morning coffee. Let's say you have some difficult thing that you have to do in your life. So if you decide that I'm going to do that thing before I have my coffee, then you'll be very motivated to do it because you want the coffee.

Loretta Breuning
So not only is there nothing wrong with using rewards in that way, but that's where our power comes from. If we go through life giving ourselves rewards for no reason, like I'll just have a coffee for no reason, then the coffee is done in five minutes and all you want is another coffee.

Loretta Breuning
So the quote unquote studies that are pointed to, to focus on this, they talk about, and people have heard this all different ways, that intrinsic rewards are bad and extrinsic rewards are, I said it opposite.

Loretta Breuning
And you all know the example of a bad extrinsic reward is money, fast cars, expensive designer purses. And in my life, for every one person I know, every time one person lusts for an expensive item, I hear like 99 attacks on people who lust for expensive items.

Loretta Breuning
So attacking those people I think has become the reward. And all whether it's extrinsic or extrinsic, in my opinion, it's learned. And so if you have learned to motivate yourself with unhealthy rewards, whatever they may be, then your goal is to rewire yourself so that you can motivate yourself with healthy rewards.

Melanie Avalon:
This resonated with me so much, and now I'm just wondering why in my past I became like this, but I'm fairly certain that this is sort of how I structure my life. Like I just set up my day, and I notice it now even more now that I read your book, but with like just small little dopamine drips of rewards.

Melanie Avalon:
Like all my work I do, it's just lots of little mini goals and lots of little reward drips that I'm looking forward to for each thing. It works very well.

Loretta Breuning
Do you have any idea how

Melanie Avalon:
How you learned that? That's what I'm trying to think now, because I notice it so much. Even last night, I was doing it because I was prepping something. So I would do it in 10 -minute drips, and I would give myself another task that I really, really enjoyed doing that was rewarding in itself, and I would alternate them.

Melanie Avalon:
So I would do 10 minutes of this, and then I get to do the other task that I really enjoy, but they're all productive. So it all works.

Loretta Breuning
Yeah, that's great. That's fabulous. So I'm wondering if you can think of examples in your adolescence. Did you do that then?

Melanie Avalon:
I've always been the person that was like doing all the things and like overachieving and like and so I definitely got rewarded from like my school and my parents by verbally and my and my love language now is definitely words of affirmation but I was always told like that's a you know that's a good thing and you're a good student and I don't know like the the actual beginning like when was the first time I did that.

Loretta Breuning
Well, we should mention for the first time for a lot of people, we have something called mirror neurons, where we mirror the people around us. So you may have had a parent that had the skill of dividing a difficult task into small chunks and rewarding themselves in between in healthy ways.

Loretta Breuning
I'm going to have to think about this.

Melanie Avalon:
a lot. So yeah, after reading your book, I was like, this is what I do.

Loretta Breuning
Oh, great, good, good. Yeah, I even use the example, if you're gonna watch a movie on Netflix, you could watch it in 20 -minute chunks and you do some difficult tasks, then you go watch for 20 minutes and go back to your difficult task, and it works on so many levels.

Loretta Breuning
One is the obvious that you're really motivated to get the task done so you could go back to the movie, but another one is the positive expectation of the fun of the movie bleeds over and merges into this general loop of I feel good about taking action, and it actually builds a pathway where you feel good about taking action.

Melanie Avalon:
And actually to that point, and this is really resonating with me, because that's definitely the way I feel. It's the way I approach life. I really like being productive, but then you're told that that's not good because then you're a workaholic or then you're- Burn out, you're gonna get burned out, yeah?

Melanie Avalon:
Yes, so then there's that whole layer to it.

Loretta Breuning
Yeah, I know what you're saying because you know what? I went to yoga for 10 years and the big topic of conversation was always stress and how to use yoga to overcome your stress. But they ended up focusing so much on stress that I quit because I was just so tired of being in this subculture that was like, oh, everybody's stressed.

Loretta Breuning
Our culture is so stressful, blah, blah, blah. I just don't want to be around it. So if you have this self -motivating neural network, then you're not going to gain that much from a culture that says, oh, poor me, life is awful.

Loretta Breuning
So it's just a fact of life, but to know that many other people don't have that neural network.

Melanie Avalon:
Well, it's so funny. I mean, it even got so intense that I, and now I actually, now everything has become so much that I am much better about like taking days off on holidays and such. But in the past, I would sometimes have a holiday and I'd be like, well, it's a holiday.

Melanie Avalon:
So what I'm gonna do today is I'm gonna work on stuff I like and I'm not gonna feel bad about it because it's a holiday.

Loretta Breuning
Yeah, I think the same thing. I know exactly what you mean. Yes, yes. I'm a little worried that I said something very taboo, you know, when I just said, poor me, my life is awful or something like that.

Loretta Breuning
So maybe I should if I may go into for a minute. So what if a person really did have a terrible, traumatic childhood? Okay. Now, I had a terrible childhood. So it's very individual. In my case, my terrible childhood taught me to do things for myself, you know, because if you ask for help, something really bad is going to happen.

Loretta Breuning
And so I just was like, not worth going through that. Like I have this vague idea, like if I tried to tie my shoes and I couldn't do it, maybe I'd get frustrated. But if I'd asked for help, something even worse would happen.

Loretta Breuning
And today, when I try something and I can't do it, and I get upset, then I know, oh, yeah, there's that, that old neural pathway that said there's no help. And so then I make a practice of asking for help, because I know that's against my pathways.

Loretta Breuning
But in fact, often I think, Oh, why did I ask for help? That person just made it worse. So bottom line is it's very individual, one person may have had a bad childhood, but they learned to ask for help constantly and didn't learn to trust their own skills.

Loretta Breuning
So this is a million variations. So it's not just what happened to you. But what worked in dealing with it. So many people like when something bad happened, you engaged in x activity. And so now your whole life revolves around that activity, because that relieved the threat.

Loretta Breuning
So sometimes that's a healthy activity. And sometimes it's not. So we all have to just untangle that spaghetti of neurons that we have, and decide which pathways we're glad to have and which pathways we want to reroute.

Melanie Avalon:
We were talking before the show about how you were, you know, looking forward to the launch of your book and, well, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but it's such a triggering topic, it's a sensitive topic.

Melanie Avalon:
I said...

Loretta Breuning
controversial. That's a new buzzword, meaning something you're not allowed to say.

Melanie Avalon:
Yeah. It's just so interesting how that concept infiltrates certain ideas and not others and like why are certain things controversial and other things not. And then there's like the controversial things you can talk about and it's cool to talk about them and then there's the ones that you just can't talk about at all.

Loretta Breuning
Yeah, very good. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I think it's sort of like a politics thing in the sense that whoever has power any moment in time, if you say anything that undermines them, then they have the power to retaliate against you.

Loretta Breuning
So then it's controversial. So let's say that we lived in the Aztec society a thousand years ago and you may have heard like, so a lot of societies had human sacrifices years ago and on holidays, people would get together and watch a human sacrifice be made.

Loretta Breuning
And you would see this adolescent being killed and you would know that they were very honored and their whole life was spent like being trained to look forward because like they were so special that they were the ones that were gonna save their culture and save the world by giving their body to the gods.

Loretta Breuning
So everybody believed that because that was the culture. And if you question that, not only were you a nut, but the high priests of that culture had the power to make big trouble in your life. So every society in every period of history has had this belief system about how the world works.

Loretta Breuning
And there are always high priests who benefit from whatever the belief system is and get you in big trouble if you question it. And in the past, it was often around religion. And today this idea of the science has replaced it.

Loretta Breuning
But when people say the science, there's sort of a religious belief that this guy is at Harvard. So if he said it, it must be the science and therefore you're a bad person if you question it. Do you know?

Melanie Avalon:
Um, Charles Eisenstein, his work. No, I had him on a show because a lot of books, but he has a book called the coronation you would like it. It's all about how everything today is kind of like a religion or like a coronation and like a religious experience, like how the science has become that.

Melanie Avalon:
It's kind of what you just said, but I remember bringing him on and I was like, this is going to be controversial.

Loretta Breuning
So, and again, when I said that there are these high priests that benefits from something, it's also popularity. Like high priests choose a cult that pleases the people. So the human sacrifice made you relax because you thought, well, if it doesn't rain, then our crops will fail and we'll all starve to death.

Loretta Breuning
So this cult helped you relax about that. So in the same way, if there's some scientific study that tells you, oh, you don't have to worry about X and how do we do it is because it's not your fault. So everyone loves the study that leads to the conclusion that it's not your fault.

Loretta Breuning
So the ones who are coronated is they're giving you studies that tell you, oh, this is not your fault. You can blame this other thing.

Melanie Avalon:
So, so interesting. And actually just a really practical piece of that, and this is very specific and random. But you talk about, for example, when you go to the doctor, I'm so glad you pointed this out.

Melanie Avalon:
Like, nobody talks about this. You were saying that you shouldn't ask about the risks of a drug or anything that they're recommending because it is so saturated in this narrative that's going on, but to ask for the number needed to treat.

Loretta Breuning
Yeah, I didn't say you shouldn't ask for the risk, but it won't do you any good because the risks are not widely researched or communicated. And so your doctor has a very skewed idea of the risks. Now there are, of course, other people who are like hyper alarmists.

Loretta Breuning
So it's really hard to know what the truth is. But I said that there is there are little ways that you can access some idea. And one example was this thing called number needed to treat, which is something that doctors do learn.

Loretta Breuning
And I use the example if the number needed to treat is 10, that means that 10 people must be treated with this drug in order for one person to benefit. Now for you making that personal decision, it sounds insane.

Loretta Breuning
Why would I want to take this drug and get the side effects if there's like nine out of 10 chance that it's not going to benefit me? And yet your doctor is like legally required to offer you this drug.

Loretta Breuning
So you really have to make your own decision.

Melanie Avalon:
Two quick comments about that. One, it's often even way higher than 10. Like, it'll be like 300. I want to look up, like, I think the NNT, like, NNT for, let me just see really quickly. I could be wrong what statins is.

Loretta Breuning
Yeah, I was thinking of Staunce exactly.

Melanie Avalon:
So, the NNT, and this is just me briefly googling, but this one study says the NNT for statins was 217 for non -fatal heart attacks, and I need to fact check that, but

Loretta Breuning
And then what is the side effects of the Stanton's so that you can say, if I'm only getting a one out of 200 chance of getting a benefit, but what is the harm that might do? And here's the important thing is the company is not motivated to research the harm and the government is not pushing the companies on that as much as they should because of politics.

Melanie Avalon:
Here's another one that says it's 400. It's probably definitely in the hundreds. Wow.

Loretta Breuning
If you have access to this, what is it for antidepressants?

Melanie Avalon:
that's such a broad category, but let's see.

Loretta Breuning
Yes, and also it's so subjective, you know, whether it's working or not, there's no physical measure the way there is with like statins, at least you could measure a heart attack.

Melanie Avalon:
No, it's funny because when you said 10, I was like, I feel like that's a good an NT compared to what I often hear.

Loretta Breuning
Really? Oh, so you've heard about this before. How have you heard about it?

Melanie Avalon:
That's why I was really excited that you mentioned it. I get really excited when there's something like, well, A, very, very, very practical that people can actually use and something very important and pervasive, but not well known, which is definitely NNTs.

Melanie Avalon:
Mostly I hear about it a lot. I listen to Dr. Peter Attia's podcast. He talks about NNTs all the time. According to chat GPT, which that could be a whole tangent about what might be happening with that.

Melanie Avalon:
But let's see, a Cochrane review for SSRIs. Okay, this is much better than Staun's. Seven. And then for tricyclic antidepressants, it's nine. Another one found it was from seven to 16. So yeah, that's more in line with what you were saying.

Melanie Avalon:
But again, I kind of wanted to go on a rabbit hole later, but I would be curious what drugs have an NNT that is like two. One really last quick, and I want to be respectful of your time, but one last quick mind -blowing thing that I loved in your book was you talked about how, going back to what we were talking about with the animal kingdom and how we have all these ideas about the way it actually is in the animal kingdom.

Melanie Avalon:
But then you talk about how we model a lot of our behavior or our thoughts about animals off of pets and how like a little dog barking at a large dog would not happen in the real world in nature. The broader question I have there is, does that just speak to the idea that we have these chemicals in our brain and these pathways, but like a dog, a pet dog can learn not to have that threat, fear response from another animal.

Loretta Breuning
Yeah, that's a different way to look at it. Yeah, but that's failing to learn a healthy fear. Right? Like that would be like the equivalent of if you're a child and you're allowed to run into the street and you don't get run over because you have like bodyguards stopping the traffic, that's like the equivalent of that.

Loretta Breuning
But then do you really want to go through life thinking it's safe to just run into the street? In the pet world, if a little poodle barks at a big dog, the big dog cannot attack the little poodle. So then the little poodle fails to learn that they're being aggressive, that their barking is an unsafe behavior.

Melanie Avalon:
It's so interesting. It's just so interesting because it's like so much stuff happening in our world that we just have no idea. Like nobody's going to look at a little dog working at a larger dog and be like, oh wow, that's an example of how like, you know, how different threat and happy chemicals are interacting and how our conditioning and how we were raised is affecting how that manifests.

Loretta Breuning
Yeah. So the main thing is just with everything that our neural pathways are built from experience, that our emotional chemicals are the paving on our neural pathways effectively. So anything good or anything bad that happened to you when you were young, that built your pathways.

Loretta Breuning
And so it's not like a blueprint. You just learn from experience. And we have a lot of overlaps because we have similar experiences, but then we have a lot of uniquenesses because we had different experiences.

Melanie Avalon:
I love it. I love it. Very last question, I promise. Is it normal for our mind to wander?

Loretta Breuning
Oh okay yeah good question good question so that's two different answers so one would be what i talk about hunting versus gathering so when you're hunting you're gonna just look at that one thing you're hunting and not look at anything else but gathering is i'm gonna take in everything around me because there may be something good that i didn't know is there.

Loretta Breuning
So one person maybe in their past got rewarded from hunting in another person in their past got rewarded from gathering so if you're a good gatherer then you've learned like i'm gonna keep my always open for everything because there may be something really good.

Loretta Breuning
So so that's the valuable healthy side of not being overly focused on one thing but then there's the unhealthy side which is this. Let's say something bad is going on in my life and i have this habit of thinking about that bad thing all the time and then how do i get myself to not think about it so.

Loretta Breuning
People learn different ways one person has alcohol another person plays video games but another person daydreams so your brain may have learned that daydreaming. Makes the predator go away because once you daydream you stop thinking about the predator so your brain thinks oh this work this is an effective technique.

Melanie Avalon:
So some people, because you talk about it in the section on mindfulness and meditation, are some people just not meant to meditate? Or like it's not beneficial for them?

Loretta Breuning
So I talk about this current culture where mindfulness and meditation are represented as the solution to everything. And I question this idea that they're the solution to everything because they have certain benefits, but there are other ways of getting those benefits.

Loretta Breuning
So what I just said, distraction. If you have a habit of thinking of something bad, then meditating changes diverts you from thinking about that bad thing. But if, on the other hand, you have a habit of, I'm going to set a small goal, I'm going to reward myself, set another small goal and reward, so you're feeling good.

Loretta Breuning
So you don't need to go back into neutral and think about nothing because you're already thinking of pleasurable things. So I think it's mostly a tool for a step out of a bad thought.

Melanie Avalon:
it completely makes sense. Well, thank you so much, Loretta. I'm just so, so grateful for your work. It's mind -blowing, I guess, pun intended. I'm really excited for you with the launch of it. Was there anything else you wanted to draw attention to or clarify or touch on?

Loretta Breuning
I hope people listen to the other one also where I explain each of the chemicals. I explained each of them in the positive way, and then the book explains the negative side of each chemical. The book is available in all formats, and I encourage people to get on my mailing list and you get a free five -day happy chemical jumpstart when you sign up, and that's one email a day on each of the chemicals for five days.

Melanie Avalon:
We'll put it in the show notes. Well, thank you so much. This has been so, so amazing. I'm just so appreciative of your work. And I don't remember, know if you remember this from last time, but the last question I asked every single guest on the show, and it's because I really appreciate the importance of mindset surrounding everything.

Melanie Avalon:
So what is something that you're grateful for?

Loretta Breuning
I'm grateful that I learned when I was young to rely on myself and to feel good about relying on myself rather than to feel abandoned by it. So for me, it's sort of like a foundational neural pathway and I didn't have to build that effortfully because since I didn't have a lot of support, I learned to support myself.

Loretta Breuning
So I'm grateful that I learned that.

Melanie Avalon:
I love that answer so much. And that's just an example of where culture today would be like, oh, but you shouldn't want to rely on yourself. You should. That's so.

Loretta Breuning
Or you should feel bad that you didn't have enough support when you were young. Oh my goodness. Well, thank you so much for reading it and understanding it and going into detail.

Melanie Avalon:
No, thank you for what you're doing. An open door here, any, all your future work. I'm just, I'm just so obsessed. So hopefully we can connect again in the future. I really, really appreciate everything that you're doing.

Melanie Avalon:
Thank you so much.

Loretta Breuning
Take care. Bye. Bye.