Happiness isn’t just a fleeting feeling of goodness; it’s a practice and process. Dr. Jed Diamond delves into some of the science of happiness.
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Life is good. I felt even better than a kid in the proverbial candy store when they told me I could pick out any book I wanted. I was preparing to talk about my new book, Stress Relief for Men: How to Use the Revolutionary Tools of Energy Healing to Live Well at Copperfield’s bookstore and I had 15 minutes before my presentation. But then the anxiety and fear set in. How could I choose from the thousands of books available? I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and let my intuition guide me.
I knew I had found the right book when I opened the cover and read from the first paragraph in Hardwiring Happiness by Rick Hanson. “I was a skinny, nerdy boy with glasses. Nothing awful happened to me, but it felt like I was watching everyone else through a wall of glass. An outsider, ignored, unwanted, put down.” Hanson, one of the top neuropsychologists in the world, had described me precisely. If he had some wisdom to share, I was ready to hear it.
We all want to feel joyful and happy, but too often we seem locked into worry, irritability, and other negative emotions. Hanson explains why this is so. He says our brains have a negativity bias and as a result they are like Velcro for negative experiences and Teflon for positive ones. I know that’s true. I give a talk and twenty people say it was wonderful. But I lay awake at night remembering the one person who said, “Your talk was good, but you generalized about men and women too much.”
Throughout our evolutionary history negativity had greater survival value than positivity. Hanson reminds us, “Our ancestors could make two kinds of mistakes: (1) Thinking there was a tiger in the bushes when there wasn’t one, and (2) Thinking there was no tiger in the bushes when there actually was one. The cost of the first mistake was needless anxiety, while the cost of the second one was death. Consequently, we evolved to make the first mistake a thousand times to avoid making the second mistake even once.”
This negativity bias worked in our favor for millions of years during our hunter-gatherer history when tiger attacks were serious, but few and far between. Now this negativity bias makes us sick. In modern times we live with perpetual stress and our brains are constantly in alarm mode. In his widely acclaimed book, Why Zebra’s Don’t Get Ulcers, Stanford University neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky says, “Stress related disease emerges, predominantly, out of the fact that we so often activate a physiological system that has evolved for responding to acute physical emergencies, but we turn it on for months on end, worrying about mortgages, relationships, and promotions.”
The Seven Basic Emotional Networks of Mammalian Brains
My wife, Carlin, and I went to a community talent show last night. One of the talents was a young woman who offered a poem that was poignant and sad. She described the human race as being cut off from nature, destructive to the land and the animals, and the reason she had chosen never to have children. I could understand her despair, but I felt there was still a chance we could reverse our destructive relationship to life on earth.
One man who offers a realistic, yet hopeful, view of the future, is psychobiologist and neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp, Ph.D. He coined the term “Affective Neuroscience,” the name for the field that studies the neural mechanisms of emotion. For more than 45 years he has been doing research on animals and has mapped out seven core emotional systems that lie deep in our brains. He capitalized the systems, lest they be confused with their ordinary uses: CARE, PANIC, SEEKING, RAGE, FEAR, LUST, and PLAY. I think of them as “The 7 Systems of Life.”
Understanding these basic emotional networks that are wired into our brains can help us prevent stress, stay healthy, and maintain joy and happiness in our lives. I’ve found Dr. Panksepp’s research very helpful in dealing with many problems my clients face, including depression, bipolar illness, attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder, and many other health issues. “Until we understand the neurobiological nature of basic emotional feelings within the human BrainMind,” says Panksepp, “our understanding of psychiatric disorders will remain woefully incomplete.”
Here is how Panksepp describes these seven systems:
The CARE system:
The CARE system is necessary for the survival of all mammals, and is particularly important for humans. “Mammals would not exist on the face of the earth,” says Panksepp in his book, written with Lucy Biven, The Archaeology of Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotions, “unless their brains and bodies were prepared to invest enormous time and energy in the care of their offspring, who simply could not survive without such devotion.” Activation of this system allows us to feel tenderness and love for our children and extends to our mates. “The physiology of mother love is the physiology of love,” says Panksepp.
The PANIC system:
Young socially dependent animals have powerful emotional systems to solicit nurturance. When they are disconnected from the safety and support of their mothers, they panic. They exhibit intense crying when lost, alerting caretakers to attend to their offspring. But if the mother doesn’t return quickly, numbness and grief set in. Most of us have had some experience of trauma and panic as children and it can strongly impact our adult relationships. “The separation-distress mechanisms of the mammalian brain are believed to open the gateways to human grief,” says Panksepp, “and then to sustained depression despair.” To feel love, nurturing, and care, means we are also susceptible to the panic, grief, and depression that accompanies loss of love.
The SEEKING system:
This is a general-purpose motivational system that is essential for animals to acquire all resource needs for survival, and it probably helps most other emotional systems to operate effectively, Panksepp has found. “When fully aroused, SEEKING fills the mind with interest and motivates organisms to effortlessly search for the things they need, crave, and desire. This system, Panksepp finds, becomes underactive during addictive drug withdrawal, chronic stress, and depression. Overactivity of this system can promote excessive and impulsive behaviors and manic thoughts.
The RAGE system:
When SEEKING is thwarted, RAGE is aroused. “Anger is provoked by curtailing animals’ freedom of action,” says Panksepp. “RAGE lies close to and interacts with the FEAR system, highlighting the implicit source of classic ‘fight-flight’ terminology. It invigorates aggressive behaviors when animals are irritated or restrained, and also helps animals defend themselves by arousing FEAR in their opponents. Human anger may get much of its psychic energy from the arousal of this brain system.”
The FEAR system:
The evolved FEAR circuits help to protect animals from pain and destruction. FEAR leads animals to flee, whereas much weaker stimulation elicits a freezing response. Humans stimulated in these same brain regions report being engulfed by an intense free-floating anxiety that appears to have no environmental cause.
The LUST system:
Sexual LUST, mediated by specific brain circuits and chemistries, are distinct for males and females. Two “social neuropeptides”—oxytocin which is promoted by estrogen in females and vasopressin which is promoted by testosterone in males— help create gender-specific sexual tendencies. Oxytocin promotes sexual readiness in females, as well as trust and confidence, and vasopressin promotes assertiveness, and perhaps jealous behaviors, in males. Because brain and bodily sex characteristics are independently organized, it is possible for animals that are externally male to have female-typical sexual urges and, others with female external characteristics to have male typical sexual urges.
The PLAY system:
Young animals have strong urges for physical play—running, chasing, pouncing, and wrestling. These “aggressive” and assertive actions, says Panksepp, are consistently accompanied by positive feelings. In studies with rats he found PLAY stimulated an intense social joy, signaled in rats by making abundant high frequency (~50 kHz) chirping sounds, resembling laughter. One key function of social play is to learn social rules and refine social interactions. Panksepp believes the decline of physical PLAY in our schools may account for the huge increase in irritability, anger, and attention deficit and hyperactivity disorders, particularly among boys.
Towards a New Understanding of Mental Health and Happiness
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is the standard classification of mental disorders used by mental health professionals in the United States and contains a listing of diagnostic criteria for every psychiatric disorder recognized by the U.S. healthcare system. I’ve been required to use it since I came into the field in 1965. But it’s never been very useful to me.
I’m often required to pick a diagnosis out of the many detailed in the manual which seems to expand in size every year. Yet the “proper diagnosis” rarely, if ever, helps me understand the problem the person is facing or how best to help them. As someone who has dealt with my own depression and bipolar disorder over the years, I’ve always hoped for a diagnostic system that would actually be therapeutic.
I’ve found Panksepp’s model to be much more helpful than anything I’ve found in the official DSM manual. Understanding the CARE, PANIC, PLAY and SEEKING systems, for instance, have helped me better understand my own emotional highs and lows. In their excellent and comprehensive book, The Archaeology of Mind, Jaak Panksepp and Lucy Biven offer a better way to understand how we can all become happier and healthier.
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–Photo: AP