Loretta Breuning, Ph.D. on ”Habits of a Happy Brain: Rewiring Your Brain to Boost Serotonin, Oxytocin, and Endorphin Levels”

The secret of being happy is accepting where you are in life and making the most out of every day…. Or is it? Is there a secret to happiness that we can uncover by looking into the chemicals in our brain? We will find this out today. Watch this interview on YouTube here https://youtu.be/6Sb8wAsvwQ8 On the episode we will explore: ✔  A deep dive into the four happy chemicals in our brain. ✔ How to move past old patterns, behaviors and stress response circuits in our brain, for new results. ✔ Healthy ways to increase our happiness neurotransmitters. ✔ Vicious cycles we should all be aware of, and ways to break these cycles. ✔ How to rewire a "low trust" brain and what we can learn from how monkeys build trust in others. Welcome back to The Neuroscience Meets Social and Emotional Learning Podcast, where we cover the science-based evidence behind social and emotional learning (for schools) and emotional intelligence training (in the workplace) with tools, ideas and strategies that we can all use for immediate results. I’m Andrea Samadi, and on today’s episode #236, we have Loretta Breuning, the Founder of the Inner Mammal Institute,[i] Professor Emerita of Management at California State University and the author of  Habits of a Happy Brain[ii] and Status Games: Why We Play and How to Stop. Her work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Psychology Today, Real Simple and numerous podcasts. Loretta helps people to build their power over their mammalian brain chemistry, reminding us that “happiness comes from chemicals we’ve inherited from earlier mammals: dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin and endorphin levels. When you know how they work in animals, your ups and downs make sense. Our happy chemicals evolved to reward survival behaviors, not to make us feel good all the time. But you can feel good more often when you understand nature’s operating system.” Let’s meet Dr. Loretta Breuning and learn together, how to retrain our brain to boost our serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin and endorphin levels, for a happier and healthier life by understanding why these neurotransmitters are important for happiness to occur in the present moment of our lives. Welcome Loretta, thank you for coming on the podcast. We have been focused on our brain as it relates to learning, and when I saw your book, Habits of a Happy Brain I jumped to learn more about it, because who doesn’t want to learn more about our brain chemistry, especially when it comes to retraining our brain for happiness. INTRO Q: Can we start with where your interest in this topic began? How did you go from being a University Professor, to writing books about our brain chemistry and connecting us back to our “inner mammal” and how our brain is wired for survival?  Q1: You mentioned something in another interview[iii], that I think is important for us to understand. You said “we are all wired by our early experiences because this is when we have the most neuroplasticity.” What should we all know about how our brains are wired, that makes us all unique, right down to the level of the neurons in our brain? Q1B: So, if we are to dive deeper into this, you know how we all have a trauma response, or when we are stressed, or experiencing overwhelm, we experience either fight (anger/irritability) flight (let’s talk about something else and avoid all of this) freeze (unable to move and disassociate), or fawn (where you keep the peace as a people please to avoid conflict)…all of these reactions hard-wired from our early experiences. I’m sure each of us, if asked, could think about which trauma response we use predominately. Once we are aware of our stress response circuit, what do we do with that?  Is it enough to just pay attention to whatever it is that’s causing a reaction and notice if it’s really a threat to you, or if we can just move beyond it? Q2: When I think about happiness, I don’t usually think about what’s going on at the brain level (until reading your book).  I’m thinking, I