Science of A Happy Brain

Thriving in the Age of Anger, Anxiety, and Addiction

Dr. Jay Kumar, Dr. Jay Kumar

• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781644628010
• eBook ISBN: 9781644628027
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

What is happiness? Is happiness even realistic for you to achieve in today's world of rising anger, anxiety, and addiction? It's the fundamental question Dr. Jay Kumar (your Happiness professor) yearned to discover in the wake of a life-transforming family tragedy as a young adult that led him to the halls of academia and holy ashrams to explore the science and spirituality of happiness. Science of a Happy Brain is adapted upon actual lessons from Dr. Jay's popular university Happiness course that he has been coteaching for the past seven years. From millennials suffering from anxiety to folks in Middle America struggling with addiction, from veterans battling PTSD to parents coping to raise children hooked on technology, from the spike in suicides to the tribalism and hate in today's world, Dr. Jay guides you on a personalized and proven strategy for building a Happy Brain—for you and society.More research in brain science points to one undeniable truth—to socialize is to survive, to tribe is to thrive. Science of a Happy Brain uncovers a long-forgotten aspect of humanity by exposing a shared element of human biology—your social brain. Only recently has science affirmed what religions knew all along—you are a social being with a social brain that is nourished and strengthened by community and connection. But the marvels of society's Age of Digitalization can unwittingly bring you into the malaise of today's Age of Disconnection, which presently sabotages your health, weakens our society, and hijacks your Happy Brain. Your happiness demands tribe. Creating tribe in your life creates balance, longevity, and resilience—the foundation required for generating your Happy Brain. Science of a Happy Brain is equally a self-help course and a social commentary whose time has come that brings hope to a world in crisis, a nation in a happiness deficit, and a generation discovering where enduring happiness resides. It is a powerful work that is vital for the crossroads at which society finds itself by presenting a platform for public discourse to explore today's crucial social, cultural, and health issues. Dr. Jay reveals how you can achieve a Happy Brain by learning to experience happiness the way your brain evolved—biologically, psychologically, socially, and spiritually. A Happy Brain creates happy people. Happy people make a happy world. Now more than ever, the future needs you. Happy.For more information about Dr. Jay Kumar, visit: https://www.drjaykumar.com Follow @docjaykumar on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.

LESSON TEN

HAPPY BRAINS MAKE A HAPPY WORLD

If civilization is to survive, we must cultivate the science of human relationships—the ability of all peoples, of all kinds, to live together, in the same world at peace.

—Franklin D. Roosevelt

Your Happy Brain

Congratulations on completing your Happiness course. You’ve done an amazing job acquiring many valuable insights and applying strategies from brain science and spirituality on what happiness is and ways for you to enjoy the benefits of a Happy Brain. For your last lesson let’s summarize the main points you’ve learned throughout your Happiness course. I also want to make the case why developing your Happy Brain is the key to balance, longevity, and resilience. You’ll also explore how your Happy Brain makes a happy world.

But before doing so, do you remember the very first exercise I had you do in the opening lesson—defining what happiness means to you? Having mastered the concepts and engaged with exercises throughout the previous lessons, are you curious to see if your understanding of happiness has changed? If you opted to write your happiness letter by hand, you’re welcome to do the same here. If you originally composed it online, go to www.ScienceofaHappyBrain.com to begin this exercise. I now wish for you to answer thoughtfully and in detail these important questions. Feel free to take your time when answering and please be sure not to refer to your original letter. Here are the questions for this final exercise in your Happiness course:

1. Having explored the various ways my happiness can be hijacked, what does an ideal life of happiness currently look like to me?
2. What valuable insights have I acquired for advancing my Happy Brain?
3. Based on the tools I’ve now learned, is there a specific happiness strategy I can start today to implement into my life? Describe how that will happen.
4. Was there an issue standing in the way of my personal happiness when I wrote the original letter? Do I have a better perspective in resolving or dealing with this issue? If so, explain how?

Once you’ve finished your final exercise, I invite you to open your sealed envelope or follow the instructions you received to access your online version and read your original happiness letter. Has your definition of happiness remained the same, or are you surprised to learn how your outlook on happiness has evolved? Most people report the latter. Let’s explore the possible explanations for why that’s the case by summarizing the main points from your Happiness course.

One very important point advanced at the start of your Happiness course is how the Declaration of Independence rightfully states the “pursuit of Happiness” is exactly that—a pursuit. Happiness doesn’t come to you naturally. Happiness is something you have to pursue with practice and perseverance. If you recall the important point from the first lesson: “It’s not the promise of happiness, it’s the practice of happiness.” It’s precisely what research in brain science and wisdom from spiritual traditions affirm. Achieving your Happy Brain takes practice.

Nature doesn’t give a hoot about your happiness. Evolution didn’t wire your brain to be happy; it wired your brain to survive. Evolution achieved this goal in a very cunning way by making your brain become averse to pain and addicted to pleasure. Think of pain and pleasure as the opposite ends of the Survival Spectrum. Human behavior is forever fluctuating between these two terminal points of the Survival Spectrum, thus hijacking your happiness.

On one end of the Survival Spectrum, your brain’s stress-response system alerts you to painful situations and experiences that threaten homeostasis. Thus, your brain is wired to avoid pain. On the other end of the Survival Spectrum, your brain’s dopaminergic-reward system entices you to pleasurable situations and experiences that entreat homeostasis. The sensation of pain is the way for an organism to know it’s out of homeostasis—the state of balance for optimal functioning. The sensation of pleasure became a strategy for humans to be motivated to perpetuate actions and behaviors that enhance survival. Here’s the takeaway: Pain is a threat for your brain; pleasure is a treat for your brain.

While pain and pleasure became effective strategies for survival, they sabotage your quest for a Happy Brain. Think of pain and pleasure as evolutionary relics of your Stone-Age Tribe brain. Again, recall the exercises outlined in the first few lessons that underscore how your Stone-Age Tribe brain views life via the lens of strife, scarcity, and suspicion. As a result, your Stone-Age Tribe brain is singularly focused on survival and self-preservation. Pain is a signal to your brain that there exist threats to your survival. Pleasure is a way for your brain to be rewarded for actions that promote survival.

That said, one key strategy for your Stone-Age ancestors was the realization how banding into tribes—for promoting safety, security, and stability—became an adaptive behavior that favored survival of the species. Just as humans developed opposable thumbs—along with the anatomy for walking upright, running, and human language—tribe was another powerful evolutionary strategy for human survival. As a result, this core aspect of human neurobiology and behavior became the basis for the Social Brain system.

It’s your Social Brain that holds the secret and is the unrecognized strategy for achieving your Happy Brain. More research in brain science continues to attest how your brain complexified and fundamentally developed as a social organ. Various systems and mechanisms developed in your brain over the course of millennia to reinforce the innate human drive for community and connection.

One revolutionary finding provides credence to this notion: shared regions of your brain process and co-regulate social pain as physical pain. The strategy behind this “piggybacking” of the response to social pain with overlapping regions that experience physical pain is how your Social Brain alerts you to threats of social stress in your environment. The ability for “pain to feel all the same to your brain” is nature’s strategy for survival of the species. Pain and distress in any form force you to seek out the safety and support from others—your tribe.

From whichever perspective you choose to view it, one fact remains: Nature shaped your Social Brain as a powerful, adaptive strategy that secured the survival of the human species. This undeniable, shared aspect of humanity remains the fundamental reason why—even today—every one of you necessitates attachment to tribe. Yet, living in an Age of Disconnection makes you crave community and belonging more than ever. One central concept of your Happiness course is how the lack of tribe in today’s world has become the driving force behind the rise in the Disease of Despair—precipitated from our Age of Disconnection—that is wreaking havoc in society. The Disease of Despair manifests as the dangerously accelerating rates of suicide, depression, chronic anxiety, addiction, mental disease, and behavioral disorders rampant today. As a result, more of you are at risk of going against what thousands of years of human evolution bred you for and what nature programmed you to do—to tribe.

But something very scary and sinister is occurring in today’s world. The functional strategy that was once the primary tactic for humanity’s survival—the need for tribe—is becoming distorted and artificially augmented by technology that miserably fails to become a viable and nurturing substitute for your Social Brain. The hazards from society’s Age of Disconnection is scrambling your Social Brain and compounding the Disease of Despair. There exists an entire generation being starved from social nourishment in the form of Vitamin S and growing up unknowingly infected by the illness of isolation. Vast segments of society are gripped by the Disease of Despair, resulting in your despairing brain and a society in desperation. In just the past few decades, society has morphed into one that dangerously continues to malnourish your Social Brain. Living in a time that plummets deeper into the Disease of Despair, you risk becoming more social...

Table of contents

• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• FOREWORD
• INTRODUCTION: CONFESSIONS FROM A HAPPINESS PROFESSOR
• LESSON ONE: THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS TAKES PRACTICE
• LESSON TWO: YOUR BRAIN EVOLVED FOR SURVIVAL, NOT HAPPINESS
• LESSON THREE: SUFFERING IS A DISSATISFIED BRAIN
• LESSON FOUR: THE HAPPINESS EQUATION
• LESSON FIVE: STOP HIJACKING YOUR HAPPINESS
• LESSON SIX: THE HAPPINESS STRATEGY OF COMFORT
• LESSON SEVEN: THE HAPPINESS STRATEGY OF CONTRIBUTION
• LESSON EIGHT: THE HAPPINESS STRATEGY OF CONNECTION
• LESSON NINE: THE HAPPINESS STRATEGY OF COMPASSION
• LESSON TEN: HAPPY BRAINS MAKE A HAPPY WORLD
• EPILOGUE: HAPPINESS AND THE GREAT AMERICAN EXPERIMENT