Did you know you can retrain your brain to be a glass-half-full kind of person? Social researcher and author Loretta Breuning talks to host Amelia Phillips to find out how we can retrain our brain and ignite our happy hormones, even when we’re confronted with mummy rage!
Below is an unedited transcript of the podcast episode:
The more I learn about hormones, the nicer I am to myself. The other day when Angus smashed a plate on the floor as the adrenaline and then the cortisol surged through my body, instead of flipping my lid, I recognized that this is an entirely normal reaction. I was able to take some deep breaths and override those hormones and handle the situation in a calm, nurturing manner.
This is Healthy her with Amelia Phillips, and today we are diving into the major mood hormones. I think it’s super useful for us moms have a deeper understanding of the hormones that drive our emotions and those of our kids. The more I learn about them, the more I understand my feelings and what triggers certain emotions.
I discovered the amazing professor Loretta Bruning when I was researching how our hormones can hijack our emotions. Dr. Loretta studies in mammalian brain and she’s found a way that we can retrain our brain to feel happy and carefree again. Yes, please, by boosting serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin, and endorphin levels.
Whilst taming the stress hormones, cortisol and adrenal. She is a sought after speaker, holds a PhD, and is an author of many books, including Habits of a Happy Brain. Thanks for joining me today, Dr. Loretta. Hi. Thanks so much for having me. You know, we could blame the life that we have post kids and the thousand more stresses that we have, but I reckon that there’s more at play than just a busy life that makes us moms feel these negative emotions more powerfully.
What has actually happened, bio chemically to us, that dials up these stress responses and triggers us. There’s so much there. First, it’s so useful to know that our brain naturally goes negative. So it’s very easy to make the worst case scenario, feel real, and actually it’s a skill to not go negative. And if you’re surrounded by people who sort of applaud you for going negative and to bond around worrying, and you feel like you’re not.
Doing your share. If you’re not worried enough, then that builds the negative pathways and you’re failing to build the positive pathways. But then there’s something even more, our brain evolved to focus on reproduction, and so even though you’re not consciously thinking, That your kids are going to keep your genes alive.
If you read any textbook on evolutionary biology, that’s what the brain rewards. So anything that could go wrong with your kids, that threatens the survival of your genes, and that’s why you react so hard even without that conscious. Because really we are truly a mammalian brain where we are programmed to survive and procreate and they’re our kind of two main drivers.
Tell me a little bit as well, you mentioned earlier we tend to focus on the negative more and we have a stronger threat circuit. What happens neurologically and, and I’ve heard you use an example of the stove top analogy with this. Can you explain neurologically why we are programmed that? Sure. So when we’re born, our brains are not connected.
So almost everything we know is from past experience. So if you think about your hunter gatherer, uh, ancestors and their child had a fire there, and that child had to learn not to touch the fire or even the hot rocks around it. So you only have to touch something hot once, and the pain builds a pathway in your brain, and then the next time you see that fire.
Whoa, I don’t wanna go near that. So it’s the same with everything that turns on your cortisol, which is the pain chemical, that it builds a big pathway in your brain and the next time you see that, you think, Oh, I don’t wanna go near that. Now, for our ancestors, the world was so dangerous that they didn’t worry about like things that could go wrong 20 years from now because they needed to find that day’s food and that day’s water and firewood.
But today with. Relatively safe lives. Our big brain projects into the next thread and the next and the next with those pathways that we’ve built. And so those threat pathways that are much more powerful feelings for us are built from when we are children, but they also are built and uh, laid down during our adolescent years as well.
And also, We inherit our parents threat circuits as well. Is that. So first adolescence, we have a lot of this substance called mylon that’s like paving on our neural pathways. We have a lot before age eight, and again during puberty because our ancestors would often move during puberty, which avoided in breeding, and they had to rewire themselves for that new environment.
So anything that caused you pain, emotional pain, or physical pain during puberty, you built pathways and now you overreact to whatever that is. So the simple example is if your child doesn’t get invited to a party, it triggers that adolescent feeling of like, Oh my God, if you don’t get invited to a party rejection, you’re gonna be shunned.
Your genes are gonna be wiped off the face of the earth because nobody’s ever gonna love you. Now, when you say that we inherit our parents’ pathways, we do not inherit them genetically. We inherit them through mirror neurons that whatever upset your parents, You feel they’re upset and you also feel their rewards, so you get excited about what excited them.
I think this mirror neuron concept is so fascinating and it’s the reason why with young babies and toddlers, they will mimic your facial expressions. Even young, young children, you can open your mouth and and do a big smile, and a baby will smile back to you. And this is where we are physically mirroring and feeling.
What the person in front of us is doing or feeling, That’s a mirror neuron, correct? Yes, exactly. And it, I, I agree exactly with what you said. Now, um, listeners may object and they may say, Well, I don’t feel the way my parents felt. So we have many influences on us, but that’s one of the most foundational ones, and.
We have two parents to choose from. So you may have mirrored one parent on one issue and another parent on another issue or other influences, and then in adolescence, even a bigger array of influences, But you can always trace your responses back to those early influences. Okay. And just briefly touching on Mylan, I do also wanna just understand that we create these neural pathways and they’re like roads, aren’t they?
And so just like a road, you might have a, a neural pathway that’s not used very much, almost like a dirt road. And then you might have these neural pathways that are used all the time, like a super highway. And when we have these strong feelings such as these negative feelings on repeat, based on our life experiences, That’s when the mylon sheath is laid down and suddenly it’s almost like soap on a slip and slide, for example.
It just creates these highways where electrical currents flow so quickly that it feels right to us. This feeling of worry about the stove top and getting burnt just feels right. It feels true and it feels real, and it feels like it’s happening right now, even though you built the neural pathway a few decades ago because the chemicals are new, but they’re flowing down the old pathway.
Okay? And these neural pathways, We’ve spoken mostly about the negative ones at the moment, but I wanna jump in and talk about some of the hormones that encourage the happy pathways and, and the positive feelings, cuz we can obviously build these strong pathways in both directions. Yes. So let’s quickly go through the role of the main hormones, starting with the happy ones.
So dopamine is the good feeling that you’re about to get a reward. So imagine a little monkey wakes up in the morning and has no refrigerator, doesn’t get anything to eat until it finds it. So it looks around and when it sees a piece of fruit, it’s dopamine turns on. It’s like, Wow. So that’s the feeling we’re always looking for.
It meets my needs and I can get it. If it’s those two things, then you get the excitement of dopamine and whatever triggered it when you were young. Wired you to expect the good feeling today from that same thing. Oh, that’s really interesting. So in a mum world, it might be the feeling of, at the end of the day, uh, looking forward to that glass of wine or sitting down and doing the online shopping or even projecting your children’s future and what they’re going to grow up to be like in a positive way.
Exactly. Okay. Next oxytocin. So oxytocin is the chemical of social trust and it really distinguishes us mammals from reptiles. So trust is what motivates an animal to stay with the herd. because they have the protection of others, and we like to intellectualize this in some kind of altruistic or spiritual way, but really as protection that we want, which is selfish.
Now, when an animal leaves the herd, it can get eaten by a predator instantly. So that’s why when you’re a little bit isolated, your oxytocin falls and you feel unsafe. So you wanna go back to the group, but then when you’re with a group, they get on your nerves. So that’s why we have this tension between, I don’t wanna be isolated, but you know, I don’t wanna be just a herd animal.
Oh, interesting. So it’s obviously a lot more complex for humans than it might be for the herd animals, but essentially for for moms, if our oxytocin levels. Own a happy place. It’s when we’re feeling like we’ve got that strong social bond, whether it be with our friends or our immediate family. Yes. Okay.
All right. What other happy hormones have we got? So serotonin is quite complicated because. Animals are very competitive. But in the modern world, we’ve sort of romanticized this and we’re being told that animals are cooperative and altruistic. But before this current fad, there was a century of research on the competitiveness and hierarchical behavior of animals, and it was found that the animal that gets the one a position gets a little bit of serotonin, and it’s not an aggressive feeling.
It’s actually. Confidence in your own strength, or you could call it pride. And in the animal world, when you have that feeling of strength, you’re more assertive, you get more resources and you promote survival. And so we are descended from individuals that felt that way, and that’s why we’re here. Okay. So it’s kind of feeling socially important and having a confidence in your own ability to.
Whether it be get food or to kind of assert yourself in your social setting to get recognition, you could say, Okay, okay. Because animals compete for mating opportunity by getting recognition either from. Someone far away or someone close by. Okay. Are there other ways that we get a serotonin hit? Like I’ve heard people talk about smelling a rose or looking at the ocean or anything like that.
Are there other ways? I don’t think so, but that is what’s being said on the internet. So, I just do my thing and don’t market. Pardon it. Yes. It’s a fascinating area cuz it’s emerging research, I guess you could say. So there’s just, as we love in science, there are people that have different theories and different hypotheses that are still being workshoped at the moment.
But no one is actually researching it. You should know because to get your brain serotonin, they would actually have to tap your spinal fluid and no one is doing that. So that’s, And even no one’s even doing monkey research anymore because that’s become taboo. So all is talk about watching the sunset and smelling arose.
This is all based on self-reporting. None of it is actual measurement of sero. Wow, that’s so interesting. It’s all conjecture, but looking at what it does in animals is like, oh my gosh, it’s so easy to see that this is what people are doing all the time. That when you feel pride, even, even when you’re watching a sunset and you’re thinking, Wow, I manage to get the evening off and to get myself to this beautiful mountaintop where I can watch this.
There’s some pride in that. What about, um, the negative chemicals? So cortisol, adrenal, Yeah, the two different chemicals. So, uh, a simple explanation is adrenaline is like, I think I smell a predator. I stop and I freeze and I look around for more information. Then cortisol is, it is a predator and it gets my body, the energy it needs to run.
So, One is more that immediate alert and the other is the full revving up of your engine, which in the state of nature was meant to give you the energy you needed to protect yourself from a severe threat. So it’s often called the stress chemical, but stress has taught people to externalize it and blame stress on the world.
So it’s very valuable to understand how we created ourselves. So in the animal world, cortisol tells an animal that it’s threatened. And how do you know when you’re threatened? Well, anything that created pain in your past built a huge neural pathway because pain is like, it’s too late once you’re already in pain.
And the huge pathway helps you turn it on faster so you don’t hurt yourself. So whether it’s a hot fire or a predator, if you turn it on before you get too. Court is all is trying to protect you, and needless to say, in the modern world, then you’re always turning it on faster and faster. Whatever hurt you before you’re anticipating that this is gonna happen again.
Let’s talk about some top habits that US moms can. If we’re feeling like the weight of the world is just constantly on our shoulders, we’re feeling pressured, we’re feeling stressed, and we’re feeling tired all the time. I get that. We don’t wanna be happy and up, it’s just not real. But what are some of your top hacks and habits that we can take for improving our happy hormones and keeping those negative ones at bay?
Sure. So, Sleep is when you manufacture the happy chemicals so that they’re ready to be released in appropriate moments. Appropriate defined by your old pathways. So if you don’t get enough sleep, you’re not manufacturing the chemicals. And, and you know, we’ve all had that experience, like, if I don’t get enough sleep, then the next day nothing makes me feel good, even if nothing’s wrong.
The I. Yeah, that’s definitely a blanket for sleep is a solution to so many of our struggles. Let’s start with dopamine to help dial up our dopamine levels. What are some daily habits we could do? So I talk about always having good goal, and if you have a short run goal, a long run goal, and a middle term goal, then every step toward the goal stimulates dopamine.
So some people have the problem where they think too much about the distant goal and then they never feel like they’re getting any closer. You know that treadmill feeling. So that’s why we need some short run goals. You may not want that because you may feel exhausted, but. Simple example, like a person feels like I gotta do laundry, and that feels like a wait.
But the minute you get the laundry done, instead of feeling like you made an accomplishment, then you just rush to the next thing. Oh, then I gotta do that. Then I gotta, So instead to say, I’m going to do the laundry and then celebrate that I achieved something. So celebrating those small victories I’ve heard you say as well, kind of breaking down your those long run goals into the short term, small actionable goals so that you are actually feeling like you’re moving.
Yes. Okay. What about endorphins? And I know we don’t wanna actually chase endorphins because it can be potentially dangerous, um, because it’s masking pain. But if we do wanna dial up the endorphins a little bit, what can we do? Sex and endorphin. I feel like it should be sex. Oh. Um, so here’s a thing.
Laughing is endorphin. Oh, good. That’s much easier. I could laugh. I can do that multiple times a day. Yeah. Sex is oxytocin. So if you laugh with, Then there’s a double header. Oh, . Perfect. Got it. . Okay. So laughing, crying, I imagine as well. Uh, yes, but I don’t, uh, recommend that I just explain it so that if a person feels weirdly good after crying, that you know why, But crying is also a lot of bad chemicals.
Too. So I’m not suggesting it, but laughing actually. So exercise is the example people always hear, but I’m always cautious about that because if you exercise to the point of pain to stimulate it, then many people think like that’s the way to be happy. And they keep exercising while they’re in pain and do permanent damage.
So that’s why I think it’s so important to understand what’s really going on. Laughing triggers. Abdominal muscles that don’t get much activity, and that’s you just get a little bit so you’re not getting a quote unquote high. But then you can laugh often as long as you give yourself permission to make time for things that you think is funny, instead of spending all your time on things that other people think is funny.
Okay. Oxytocin. So oxytocin is actually trust. That’s what we’re really looking for. So in the media you often hear that it’s hugging, but if you hug someone you don’t trust, then that doesn’t really feel good. Now, in the animal world, um, reptiles. Don’t have any childhood. They don’t have any parenting, and they don’t have any oxytocin except for during sex, which lasts for 10 seconds.
So in the mammal world, the whole attachment comes from oxytocin, and attachment is mutual trust. So if you have. Breaking of trust with someone, like if you’re constantly tiptoeing around people that get on your nerves. A great way to get more oxytocin is to sort of repair that broken, uncomfortable, yucky thing, and that’s not easy, but small steps and each little step gives you more oxytocin.
Okay. And serotonin. What are some hacks to dial up our serotonin levels and without one upping our friends all the time. . Yeah. So this is difficult and part of it is like this victim Olympics where you say, Well, my life is harder. So what’s really valuable? First to be aware that social comparison. Is going on in your brain all the time because every mammal is doing the social comparison thing all the time.
And once you realize that you’re doing it, then you have control over it. Otherwise, you feel that other people are judging you. And as soon as you know that you are doing the judging, like wow, what a sense of relief, then you can choose more carefully. How you’re comparing yourself to others. So instead of comparing yourself to this person and then hating them for being better than you, then you know, if you compare yourself to someone who’s not as good as you, then you may hate yourself for doing that.
So just relax and know that you’re a mammal, and what many people say is to compare yourself to the past that I’ve gotten better at something. But of course then you all know that then. Like sort of pressuring yourself. So we have to give it to ourselves. And the way I always think about it is I read a lot of biographies and I see that even someone that you might think with some super perfect achieving person, that in their own life they were suffering.
They didn’t get recognition until after they died. And just give yourself recogni. Okay, so if you are someone that does feel like you’re caught in a comparison trap, where everywhere you look it’s just, Oh, this person’s doing better than me. They look better than me. They achieving career-wise better than me, their kids are better behaved, whatever it might be, taking a step back and first of all, know that it is.
Completely in our innate mammalian brain to be doing this. You are not a bad person for doing it, but then expressing some pride in some of the things that you have done. And I do like the idea of looking back on your 21 year old self and I’m sorry, but we’ve got our shit together a lot more than when I 21.
Yeah. I like to think we all hopefully have . Um, yeah. So I do like that. And also, Um, maybe also looking around at the social position you’re in with the people that you truly love and trying to not focus on those other people out there that probably aren’t super close to you. And noticing that you are influencing in your own circle.
Yes. Your children, your family, your, your loved ones, and that idea of making peace. With those parts of your life that you can’t control. All of those things will help dial the serotonin up in a healthy way. And also to know that what you’re doing will have an impact 10 years from now. And it’s not visible now.
So it’s to say I’m having an impact, but it’s just not visible. Now that’s another good way to relax. But the other thing, it sounds crude, but this person you think is so perfect. They don’t think they’re perfect, so they are not getting serotonin every minute. So don’t assume that everyone else is just getting it easily, cuz they’re totally not.
Dr. Loretta, I wanna give you a couple of scenarios if you wouldn’t mind telling me what’s happening hormonally, and what a mom listening can do if she’s feeling this way. So, let’s start with the mom that feels like she’s failing at everything. She looks around. Everyone’s doing better than her. The kids addressed better.
The kids are doing better at school. They’re better behaved. Uh, their house is cleaner. You know the whole story. What’s happening hormonally. To that mom and what can she do about it? So when we compare ourselves to others, we do it with neural pathways built from past experience. So if in your early experience you got into the habit of seeing yourself in the one down position, that’s a real physical pathway in your brain that always picks up the information to keep putting you in the one down position.
So you really have to build a new pathway to see it in a new way. And in order to do that, it takes a lot of repetition. Put yourself in the one up position, and you’re gonna feel very guilty and awkward and crude when you put yourself and also like you’re lying. So it really takes a lot of repetition, but you could do it with very small things.
And each time you put yourself in the one up position, it’ll feel a little bit more comfortable. And if you repeat it for about 45 days, you’ll find that it’s more easy to accept. Yourself being one up sometimes instead of always being one down. Okay, so a really quick example is if she’s really feeling not beautiful.
As an example, for 45 days, she could wake up and a couple of times a day say. I’ve got beautiful soft skin. I love my hair. I have great feet. And just repeating that for 45 days, which kind of seems silly, but hopefully over that time, that helps to train a neural pathway that says, actually I have got some really beautiful qualities about myself.
Exactly, and it doesn’t have to be appearance. It, it could be, you know, depending on the individual is appearance really. Bothering them or maybe there’s an issue with their spouse or something. And of course, anything, whatever it is, whatever that negative story is to yourself. Okay. Well then what about the stressed mom?
Where just everywhere you look, there’s just this like gut wrenching stress of the endless to-do list, The financial worry. What is happening hormonally to that mom and what can she do about it? So once again, it’s old neural pathways that are turning on your cortisol. So when you see all these things that you have to do, another person might look at your to-do list and think, Gee, I’d love to be in your house folding laundry and cuddling your child.
So why are you taking a negative view of it? Because something in your past. Turned on negatives in that situation. And if you think about it, you can probably figure out why you’re anticipating something going wrong and you can build a new pathway to have positive expectations instead of negative expectations, and then you’ll stop torturing yourself with the cortisol.
I love that. And that’s a real one for the perfectionist out there because for the perfectionist, they’re looking around their house going, Oh, this needs fixing nuts. Ugly, Oh, I’ve gotta clean up that mess. And then for your girlfriend down the road, who’s got the crazy house with the broken toys everywhere, they’d be looking at your house going, Oh, it’s totally perfect.
Yeah. Finally, Dr. Loretta, if a mom is sitting here feeling like the Debbie Downer of the family, sorry to all the Debbie’s out there, but feeling like they just still have this weight of the world on their shoulders and they can’t shake it, what is one simple trick that she could go and do today to just feel more optimistic and more happy?
Hmm. What I explain, I have a book TA Your Anxiety. So I explain that Unhappy Chemicals, cortisol, people have probably heard of it, lasts in your system. It has a half life of 20 minutes. So once something upsets you, everything’s gonna look bad. And then in 20 minutes, half of that chemical’s gonna be gone.
20 minutes, half of what’s left is gonna be gone. So if you do something relaxing and fun for like about an hour, Then the world will look better. But if you try to get something done in that hour, everything’s gonna look worse. And then you’re gonna trigger more cortisol, and then you’re gonna look for more bad news and you’re gonna be in a spiral.
So it’s really important to understand, to say, This is just a chemical that’s making things look bad temporarily. Because when a gazelle smells a predator, the bad feeling tells them to look, Where’s the lion? And that’s what you’re doing. It’s, it’s telling your brain. Look for evidence of bad. Oh, that’s great.
All right, so ladies, next time you get that horrible email from your boss, or you have a fight with your partner or the school calls and says we’ve gotta talk about Kevin, just know that that horrible feeling is probably gonna hang around for at least an hour. So, you know what? Shut up shop. Go look at the sunset, , go and do something like exercise or move, because that hour, no matter what, you know, no matter what, that cortisol’s gotta drain out of your system.
Yes. Unless you, you say, I gotta do this right now, then you get frustrated and you trigger more cortisol and that’s, that’s the loop that is so, Tempting. Oh, I think I do that cuz my husband says that. I do that. Come to think of it. Anyway, Dr. Loretta, this has been so fascinating. I hope it’s really helped some of your moms out there to understand that we really are at the mercy of our hormones, but we can do a lot to shape them and retrain our brains.
Thank you so much. Sure. Thanks for having me.
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