The Chemistry of Happiness — Part III
Or, why it’s impossible to eliminate stressors from our lives
👋 Hey there! My name is Abhishek. Welcome to a new edition of The Sunday Wisdom! This is the best way to learn new things with the least amount of effort.
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Q: How can we reduce stress from our lives?
Today, let’s continue talking about happiness. In the last two issues of The Sunday Wisdom, we talked about the “selfish” and the “social” chemicals — endorphins, dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin.
All four of them are important for our overall sense of well-being. Endorphins and dopamine push us to move forward as individuals, whereas serotonin and oxytocin incentivise us to work with others so that we can progress as a species.
They aren’t without flaws. The selfish chemicals give us short-term rewards to which we can become addicted. The social chemicals take time to build up in our systems before we can enjoy their full benefits. Though we may enjoy the thrill of reaching a goal or winning a race, that feeling doesn’t last. The bonds of love and trust and friendship take time to feel.
It’s a happy family of chemicals where all have unique roles to play. The selfish chemicals are like kids, less mature, more myopic and aggressive, while the social chemicals are like their parents — holistic and mature visionaries.
But, like any Bollywood family movie, every happy family has a distant relative who creates a lot of “stress” in everyone’s lives. In our little family of chemicals, this relative is Cortisol.
In the starting scene of Quentin Tarantino’s the Inglourious Basterds, when Christoph Waltz’s Hans Landa arrives at the French farmer’s place, you intuitively know something is amiss.
Landa is “hunting” for the Jews the farmer is sheltering. The tension builds slowly as Landa takes his own sweet time to chat with the farmer and his daughters. All of them know something bad is about to happen. Cortisol is rushing through our veins and we can share the threat with the family as the scene seems to go on forever.
When we perceive threat, we experience a massive biochemical change. Our heart rate, respiration rate, and blood pressure increases. Our immune and digestive functioning gets suppressed. Our pupils dilate, thereby shifting us into a battle-ready state. We are prepared for the action that is about to come (whether real or visceral).
The release of cortisol heightens our senses to prepare us for any possible danger. The word “possible” is important. There may or may not be any real danger, but our system prepares us regardless.
Whenever you have a hunch that something feels off, even though everything looks okay, it’s cortisol doing its job.
Absent this feeling, we would only be alerted when the lion or the burglar is already onto us. From a survival standpoint that would be too late. Cortisol release is designed (or, to be more precise, was originally designed) to increase the chances of our survival from all sorts of threats.
Now, cortisol is not supposed to stay in our systems. It is supposed to fire off when we sense a threat and then leave when the threat has passed. And for good reason. The stress in our body is serious. The manner in which it reconfigures our internal system can cause lasting damage.
For one thing, cortisol inhibits the release of oxytocin, the chemical responsible for empathy. This means if you constantly live in fear and anxiety, you invest more time and energy in looking after your own interests. This unknowingly makes you more selfish and less concerned about others.
Stress makes us less safe. When others perceive you as self-serving, they don’t have a lot of motivation to look out for you. You get pushed to the periphery of the group, which makes you susceptible to outside danger.
This is true regardless of whether you are a gazelle in the wild, a kid in a school, or an employee in an office. Human beings work better in groups. A loner has little chance of survival. We need our circle of safety.
Whether the danger is real or imagined, the stress we feel is real. The best way to experience this is to visit any govt. office. It’s the only place where absolutely nobody has your best interests in mind.
Even if you are polite and friendly to the young woman sitting at the desk, she doesn’t return the same courtesy. Though she doesn’t say anything rude or wrong, you can sense that she isn’t concerned about you or your needs. She answers your questions with a word or two and doesn’t give any extra help or directions beyond what is minimally required.
Now, even if they are unhelpful, govt. employees are hardly a threat to our survival. Even though our new brain (the neocortex) understands this, our primitive brain (the basal ganglia), whose primary purpose is self-preservation and survival, doesn’t. It just wants us to increase our chances of survival.
This ancient early warning system doesn’t understand that the “danger” we face is hardly life threatening. Which is why, in an effort to help us protect our interests, it prompts us to react as if the danger is real. Our bodies simply react to the chemicals flowing through our bloodstreams to prepare us for what might be lurking in front of us — disinterested govt. employees.
While cortisol works best when the threat is acute and real, it creates havoc on the body when it’s perceived, low-intensity, and chronic. If we are subjected to such a constant low-grade anxiety day-in day-out, cortisol keeps on firing all the time. Drip. Drip. Drip.
No wonder we are stressed, anxious, depressed, and unhappy. More than ever. To cope with stress, we take solace in dopamine shots: binging on food, cigarettes, alcohol, and sex. Without oxytocin, everything is fleeting, nothing long-lasting.
As social animals, we feel stress when we feel unsupported. That subconscious unease, the feeling that we are left alone to fend for ourselves and that others care primarily about themselves, is scary to our primitive brain.
While oxytocin boosts our immune system, cortisol compromises it. That our modern world has seen high rates of cancer, diabetes, heart disease and other preventable illnesses may not be a coincidence. Today these conditions are far more likely to kill us than threats like violent crime or terrorism.
This is one of the reasons exercise is often recommended to beat stress. Endorphins inhibit the slow dripping of cortisol. Good dopamine shots (such as learning to play a song on guitar) takes the mind off of anxious thoughts as well. The serotonin released after achieving something meaningful (such as helping the poor) boosts our sense of accomplishment, not to mention the love and support we get (thanks to oxytocin) because of these deeds.
All of them work together to bring a chemical balance in the system so that our basal ganglia isn’t on overdrive. But a lot depends on the environment where we live and work. An environment full of stressors and devoid of mutual trust and support is bound of make anybody anxious.
Having said that, it’s often not possible to change our environment completely and get rid of all stressors. If you are a stock broker, the nature of your job itself is stressful. If you don’t have supportive family members, you cannot simply get out of the family. If you are ambitious and want to climb the career ladder, you can’t simply leave everything and go live in the mountains.
Stressors are part of our lives. It’s impossible to eliminate them. Stress is an important defence mechanism of our body. It’s foolish to wish to get rid of it.
What we should try to do instead is make sure the family of chemicals, cortisol included, fire in good balance — not too much and not too little.
When dopamine is the primary driver, we may achieve a lot but we will feel lonely and unfulfilled no matter how rich or powerful we get. We’ll live lives of quick hits, in search of the next rush. Dopamine cannot not help us create things that are built to last.
When we live in a hippie commune in the wild, oxytocin is gushing. But without any specific measurable goals or ambition, we deny ourselves those intense feelings of accomplishment. No matter how loved we feel, we still feel empty.
While too much cortisol has adverse effects on our health and mental well-being, too little would make us “too relaxed” to achieve anything substantial (a slight amount of stress is necessary to keep us accountable), not to mention the immense risk from outside dangers.
But when the system is in balance we gain superhuman ability. Courage, inspiration, foresight, creativity, empathy, to name a few. When all these things come into play, the results that go with them are remarkable.
Timeless Insight
People with growth mindset believe that difficult material can be grasped with hard work. The novice can indeed become the master. When they fail at something, they tend to think like, “I should have tried harder,” whereas people with fixed mindset tend to think like, “Maybe I am not smart enough.”
Interesting Finds
Our culture as a whole tells us that if we refuse to quit, if we just hang on a little longer and give a little more, then all our dreams will come true. This is strengthened by the proliferation of success stories on social media that all seem to inevitably hit the same note: “Thankfully I didn’t quit and persevered through all of the setbacks.” We can think of opportunity cost as an attempt to quantify the path not taken, which often means the path we would have taken if only we’d quit the path we were on.
Outside of competitive environments, your peer group can be engineered to improve your decision making and steer you away from unhappy traps. The authors you read (or the podcasters you listen to) are a good place to start, because you have absolute control over their presence in your consciousness. Speaking with authors through their written work triggers the same neural circuits that produce imitation of desire. By stocking a bookshelf judiciously, you can express a preference over preferences — “what should I value? What do I want to spend my waking hours thinking about?” — and act on it through careful, honest reading.
What I’m Reading
What’s crucial is the need to override what your instincts are telling you to do (slow down, back off, give up), and the sense of elapsed time. Taking a punch without flinching requires self-control, but endurance implies something more sustained: holding your finger in the flame long enough to feel the heat; filling the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds’ worth of distance run.
― Alex Hutchinson, Endure
Tiny Thought
People more successful than you generally listen and want to learn from you.
People less successful than you generally want to tell you what you’re doing wrong and how they’d do it better than you.
Before You Go…
Thanks so much for reading! Send me ideas, questions, your movie villain. You can write to abhishek@coffeeandjunk.com, reply to this email, or use the comments.
Until next Sunday,
Abhishek 👋