СМГ "Паисий Хилендарски" - Тема 13

Fellow mammal,
Serotonin makes you feel special.



It would be nice to feel special all the time, but serotonin evolved to do a job, not to flow for no reason. It rewards you with a good feeling when you gain a position of strength. You don't think this consciously, but it feels so good that you're highly motivated to find a position of strength again. You can see how others care about being special, important, stronger, or morally superior, though we hate to see this in ourselves.



Serotonin is not aggression. It's calm confidence in your ability to meet your needs in a world of rivals. Today's message helps you understand the things you do for serotonin and find new ways to get it.



In the animal world, you get more food and mating opportunity if you're stronger than the critter next to you. The mammal brain constantly compares itself to others. When it sees that it's stronger than the critter next to it, serotonin is released and it asserts itself to meet its needs. When it sees that it's weaker than nearby critters, cortisol is released and it pulls back to avoid harm.



So it's not surprising that humans are always comparing themselves to others and have such strong feeling about the results of their comparisons. It's not surprising that we are so eager for ways to feel one-up and so threatened when we see others as one-up.



The Serotonin Dilemma






This is not what you've heard about serotonin, and it's probably not what you'd like to believe. Our education is built on Rousseau's theory that nature is all good, and everything bad comes from civilization. This belief is so deeply embedded in our culture that it's hard to think otherwise. But a century of field research makes it clear that mammals are quite competitive in their herds and packs and troops. (Find that research on my empirical research page.)



Animals rarely fight because the weaker individual retreats to avoid harm. Animals are very good at predicting who would win, so they only fight in the rare case that both individuals think they'd win. But mammals are constantly displaying their strength in hopes of improving their access to resources. This impulse to communicate your relative strength is easy to see in the human world.



To complicate life further, serotonin is quickly metabolized and the good feeling is gone. To get it back, you have find a one-up position again and again. No wonder there's so much social rivalry in the world, despite our best intentions.



To make things even harder, when you fail to get the social position you have your eye on, cortisol makes it feel like a survival threat. You don't think that with your verbal brain, but in the animal world, a threat to your "reproductive success" is a threat to your survival. Social dominance helps keep your genes alive, so the loss of it triggers a fear of annihilation in the mammal brain. (More on this in the next two days, and on my reading list.) This is why the quest for social importance can preoccupy you, and why the one-down position feels like a survival threat.



The point is not that we should think this way. The point is that we do, and if you don't notice your own urge to put yourself up, you think others are putting you down. It seems like others are judging you because you don't see the judging you do yourself. When you get real about your natural urge to be special, you have more power to manage it.



You may hate the urge for social dominance and insist that you would never think this way. When you say that, you give yourself moral superiority and put yourself in the one-up position. But when you fear the strength of others, you alarm yourself with cortisol.



The solution is to put yourself up without putting others down.



It's not easy, but this message shows you how.





How Your Serotonin Got Wired

Neurons connect when serotonin flows, so whatever triggered it in your past turns it on for you more easily today. Your brain is always looking for serotonin opportunities using your past serotonin experience as its guide. But past experience cannot be a perfect guide to today's social rivalry, so disappointments are inevitable.


For example, think of a moment in your youth when you felt a surge of pride. Now think about your motivations today, and you will see a pattern that fits the basics of your early serotonin moment. You are eager to do certain things today because they made you special in your past.



Think of a time in your adolescence when you got recognition. Your serotonin surged and paved a neural pathway that turns on your serotonin more easily today. Most people's hopes and dreams are eerily similar to their early moments of social recognition. No conscious thought of that moment in involved because our brain is wired by early emotions. (That will be fully explained on Day 5.)



Alas, the behaviors that got applause in your past may not be good for your future. Yet it's hard to resist the strange pull to repeat those behaviors. When you know that you've produced these feelings with old neural pathways, they are easier to manage. When you accept your natural urge to feel special, you open yourself to new ways to feel it.




Why The Quest Never Stops

There is no royal road to serotonin.



You may think some people have an easy path to serotonin. It seems like life gives them pats on the back all the time, while you are shortchanged. So it's important to know that everyone struggles with this operating system we've inherited. The brain habituates to rewards you already have, so new status markers are needed to get your serotonin going. If you made the Top Ten Billionaires list, you'd soon stop feeling it and start worrying about losing your spot to up-and-coming billionaires.



Here's a simple example of the treadmill feeling that serotonin creates. Imagine getting applause in a high school theater performance. It's more recognition than you've ever gotten, so it wires you to imagine how good it would feel to perform again. You decide to be an actor and feel sure that it will make you happy. But once you get a few small parts, you feel like you're in the one-down position around people who have big parts. You are sure you will be happy forever if you get a big part. Finally, you get a starring role, but then you feel one-down because you haven't gotten an award. After years of frustration and disappointment, you get an award! Soon you notice all the new young actors who are grabbing media attention away from you.



Disappointment triggers cortisol. You can ruin a good life with cortisol if you don't understand where the feeling comes from.



Our brain naturally longs to be king of the hill. Teenagers dream of being big someday because their brains are inherited from mammals who strove to be big.



You have to tell your inner mammal that 8 billion other people want to be special as much as you do. You have to remind yourself of it often!



Disappointments are inevitable, so you have to keep reminding yourself that threatened feelings are not evidence of a real threat.



Getting Real with Serotonin



Serotonin creates the good feeling that it's safe to let go and assert yourself. This feeling is not designed to flow all the time for no reason. But we are designed to seek it.



You may find it distasteful when you see others trying to dominate or win or be the center of attention.  So it's hard to admit that you long for this feeling yourself.



This is why we have so many words for the serotonin feeling. We call it pride, ego, status, power, self-confidence, assertiveness, competitiveness, arrogance, importance, social advantage, dominance, manipulativeness, being special, winning, feeling superior, dignity, saving face, getting recognition, respect, approval, or attention.



We use negative words for the serotonin-seeking of people we don't like, and positive words when it happens in people we like. We are critical of the social-dominance impulse when we see it in our adversaries, but when we see it in ourselves, we think we’re just doing what's necessary to survive.



Over time, the socially acceptable words for this natural impulse change. Today, "pride" is considered good but it was called "a sin" in the past. Today, you're told to "kill your ego," but in the past, ego was seen as a core component of mental health.



Let's think about the word "self-important." It's mostly used as an insult today. When a person believes in their own importance, you may think they're arrogant. That makes it harder to believe in your own importance, which leaves you dependent on the world's view of your importance.



If you cannot be "self-important," you cannot enjoy serotonin until you get the approval you think is necessary. You could spend your whole life waiting. Most of the famous people in history were harshly criticized while they were alive and were only valued after they were gone. (They were no longer a rival then!). If you are waiting for approval, you may not take the steps you need to build your skills. You can start enjoying serotonin now by building skills and honoring your own strength.

.



Your New Path to Serotonin


We cannot go around trying to dominate others all the time, of course. We start learning to restrain our serotonin impulse in our first years of life. You learn from the reactions of those around you.



Self-restraint makes it possible for people to live together, but you end up frustrated. What's a big-brained mammal to do?

The Rolling Stones had the right answer: "You can't always get what you want, but if you try, you get what you need." You could sing this song to your inner mammal when it feels threatened by the strengths of others. If you feel weak, your inner mammal will not feel safe, but you can teach it to feel safe by reminding yourself that you have the strength to meet your survival needs.



This will not feel natural because past experience wired you to focus on the strengths of others. But with repetition, you can re-wire yourself to enjoy the strength you have.



To do that, imagine you are a high school student walking into a cafeteria looking for a place to sit. When you are offered a seat, you are happy. But....a moment later, your mind flows to the thought that you are not at the GOOD table. You don't want to be a person who thinks that way, but the thought just popped in. You start to resent the people at the "good" table for excluding you. You created this whole scenario in your mind but you see it as fact about "them."



This photo was in yesterday's message on the warm and fuzzy context of oxytocin, but today, let's see it through the lens of serotonin. Each of these students wants to be included, but they also want status. Each mammal brain looks for a way to be in the one-up position. You compare the strength of your group against other groups in addition to your individual comparisons. You don't notice yourself doing that, however, so you blame others for trying to one-up you.




Now imagine you are an adult entering your favorite restaurant. After you are seated, you look around and decide that others got a "good" table, and you got a "bad table." You don't intend to think this, but your thoughts flow effortlessly into neural pathways built from past experience.



What is the "good table"?



It's an abstraction activated by your own neurons. Your past experience with social dominance paved neural pathways that shape your thoughts at this restaurant. These thoughts feel important because you've linked them to the chemicals that make things feel important.



Suddenly, you notice your own thought loop. You see how you are torturing yourself with cortisol. You know that your old pathway is a real physical thing, but you also know you can build a new pathway by feeding your brain new inputs.



So you consciously focus on the advantages of the table you're at instead of on the advantages of someone else's table. Wherever you are becomes the "good table." This may seem arrogant or childish, but you have to get real with your inner mammal in order to manage it.



For one moment, focus on the advantages of where you happen to find yourself. Do this three times a day for 45 days. By day 46, you will have a new pathway to enjoy serotonin in a healthy way.


Do not berate or ridicule the other tables just to make your own look good. Focus on your positives instead of other people's negatives. Someday soon, you will be at another table because we constantly shift positions as we pass through life. If you focus on the negatives of each position, you miss out on a world of good.



Consciously, you know that the difference between tables is small. But your mammal brain takes what you have for granted and zooms in on what you don't have. You can end up feeling bad even when you're at a beautiful table in a beautiful place, without even knowing that you've created the bad feeling yourself.



This is why people waste so much of their lives feeling threatened by small social disappointments. You can change this if you keep noticing your inner mammal and redirecting it, like a rider on a horse.



But... but... but...






You may not want to do this.



You may still blame "our society" for your feelings about social rivalry. Such thinking is hard to avoid because it's built into our education system. Academics have buried the century of research on mammalian social rivalry. Now they tell us that animals are cooperative and altruistic. For most of human history, people would not have believed this because they could see the behavior of wild animals for themselves.



Today, few of us can observe animal behavior in the wild, so our notions about animals are built from pets. This misinforms us because pets do not meet their own survival needs. Pets do not find food, avoid predators, or reproduce. They do not use their brain for the job it evolved for. We must understand the natural state rather than the domesticated state in order to understand our own impulses.



You have probably seen images of young monkeys wrestling and jumping on each other. Experts often say "it's just play" and overlook its serious purpose. Each young monkey is learning how to feel safe in a world where other monkeys are always jumping on it. It learns how to avoid the pain of a position of weakness and to enjoy the feeling of being in the position of strength. No words or conscious thought is necessary for a mammal brain to wire itself to navigate the social world. You can see this on a human playground every day.



You may say "everyone is special."

Or "no one is special."

But your inner mammal is focused on how YOU stack up against others.



It's not easy being mammal! But you have power over where you focus your attention. You can find ways to feel good about your strength instead of fearing and finding fault with others. You can put yourself up without putting others down.





More on how to do this in these books:



https://innermammalinstitute.org/books/i-mammal/
Status Games:

Why We Play and How to Stop



Your inner mammal thinks you'll be happy if you gain a one-up position, but the serotonin never lasts. When you know how you produce this frustration, you have power over it. You can build new thought loops to enjoy more feelings of strength and relieve feelings of weakness. This book shows you how, and includes fascinating stories about the struggle with this emotion throughout human history .

I, Mammal:

How to Make Peace With the Animal Urge for Social Power



You don't need to perform in Carnegie Hall and save orphans from burning building to enjoy serotonin. You can wire yourself to feel good about the strength you have. This book shows how social rivalry works in animals, so you can see the common pattern in today's social rivalries. These animal stories help you laugh instead of cry at the human foibles that surround you.

https://innermammalinstitute.org/books/i-mammal/


Thank for reading. Please forward this email to someone who will appreciate it.





Inner Mammal Institute
All best wishes,
Loretta Breuning