Superheroes Exercise to Maintain Their Superpowers

Superheroes: don’t you hate the droop that comes when you’re not rescuing the galaxy? Maybe you restore your superpowers with a secret potion, but that erodes your batteries. Instead, you can learn from ancient baboon superheroes. Their force generator (adrenaline) is in you. It will always be there if you replenish it with sleep, exercise and nutrition.

Cave-Man Approach to Stress-Management

Humans have used the same basic stress relievers since we first walked the earth: Put something in your mouth. Follw a leader. Distract your mind. This cave-man guide to anxiety shows how to put new stress-relief tools in your tool kit.

Win, Lose or Quit?

Losing feels bad, but if you avoid all risk of loss, you never win. How can you stay in the game, in school, in love, at work, when your animal brain wants to run? You can build a new neural pathway that focuses on skill-building rather than score-keeping. Here's how.

Good Habits Make You Feel Like You're Gonna Die

When you give up a bad habit, your mammal brain feels like your survival is threatened. Even though you're doing what's good for you, your brain tells you it's bad. Live with that threatened feeling for 45 days and you will be able to replace a bad habit with a good habit.

Valuing your own culture as well as others

I learned in school to glorify other cultures and critique my own. But my ancestors came from a place full of cruelty and hunger. Learning about it taught me acknowledge the good in my world.

Control the World or Control Yourself?

You may think the world is flawed, so the world should change, not you. But if you focus your efforts on controlling the world, you get bad results. It's easy to control yourself instead when you know how the brain works.

Social Comparison: Taming the Beast

Our social radar is inherited from earlier mammals. Animals compare themselves to others because it promotes their survival. Social comparisons trigger threatened feelings that are easier to manage when you know they're a blast from the past.

Don’t Reduce Everything to Nature and Nurture

You were not born with a circuit chip in your brain, and you were not programmed by your culture. You built your neural circuits one connection at a time. So before you blame everything on genes and culture, consider these unique individual experiences with depression, psychosis and obesity.

Independence v. Belonging: Riding the Seesaw

When you succeed at belonging to a group, you may yearn for independence. But when you make it on your own, you may wonder if you're missing out on social bonds. Why do we focus on what we don't have?

Why Love Is a Roller Coaster

Don't blame yourself or your partner if you're not on a happy-chemical high all the time. Happy chemicals evolved to spurt when opportunity knocks, and then sag. How can we manage our mammalian motives?

Good Distraction/ Bad Distraction

Your brain has been deciding where to focus your attention since the moment you were born. Most of the time, your attention flows into your usual channels. But you can build new channels whenever you decide to.

The Dangers of Self-Identifying as “Too Nice”

Deciding that you're "too nice" is a comfortable way to frame a problem. But it may not get what you want. Being too nice can even reward bad behavior. The mammal brain is always comparing itself to others, but the cortex can be open to new information.

Who’s Afraid of Unhappiness?

Cortisol evolved to give you the bad feeling that you will die if you don't "do something, now!" If you do nothing in the face of cortisol, you teach your brain that it will not kill you. Accepting unhappy chemicals starts to free you from any habit you may be using to mask unhappy chemicals. You can build this skill if you can "do nothing."

Your Story Is a Survival Saga

Your brain is designed to remember the threatened feelings of your youth in order to avoid harm in the future. That's why our primal survival urges are often triggered. Here are some strategies for honoring and managing your primal self instead of abandoning it.

Is It Worth Being the Beta Monkey?

A mentor who helps you climb the ladder is nice , but what if he only wants followers? What if he rejects you when you think for yourself, and you lose your investment in the relationship? You may decide that you're not cut out to be a #2. Lighting your own candle is better than lighting someone else's. But are you ready to do without the support of the big kahuna?

Score! Dopamine! Repeat! Or Not

Reaching a goal triggers dopamine, but the spurt soon ends. When a high passes, the return to normal can be unnerving. But rushing to mask it with more dopamine-stimulating activity brings a cycle of frustration. You can free yourself by getting comfortable with the inevitable up-and-down-ness of the human brain.

“I Thought I Could Get Away With It”

Some people believe in their own invincibility, but everyone can learn to expect trouble when they break the law.

Sexual Harassment in the Animal World

Big-brained animals avoid aggression by exchanging favors. Humans seeking political office are giving and receiving favors most of their waking lives. They get good at asking for things. People often comply because they expect favors in return. How can democracy-loving primates choose a leader who's likely to respect the rule of law?

Naked in Shanghai, Massage Heaven

Lying on a massage table in China, I appreciate the miracle of trust among strangers. It took centuries to build this trust and we should never take it for granted.

The Urge to Be Heard at Your Core

Babies cry as if their lives depend on it because in the state of nature it does. The brain builds on each experience, so our early vulnerability is at the core of who we are.

The Danger of Self-identifying as "Stressed"

You literally hurt yourself when you "lose heart." You can break the habit of stressing yourself by managing your expectations. Instead of thinking something is wrong with the world, you can do what animals do when survival challenges trigger their cortisol: keep trying.

Abuse of the Nuremberg Principle

A dangerous free-rider problem is created when resistance to authority is glorified. Any time you find it convenient to break the law, you can call yourself a courageous ethicist who’s resisting an unjust authority.

You May Already Be Steve Jobs

New ideas would never get launched if visionaries bent to the will of the crowd. Many visions fail, and your vision may fall flat on its face. But it's your face. You get to decide where to invest your precious life energy.

The Animal Urge to Leave a Legacy

Your brain is hard-wired to care about what you leave behind when you're gone. You don't need money to name a building after yourself, or grandchildren to learn your recipes. You need the trust it takes to keep planting seeds though you may not see them germinate.

Pessimists: Stay Away From Me

People pretend concern for the greater good, so why do they sound oddly happy when forecasting doom for the human race? Hell-in-a-handbasket thinking makes people feel strangely good while the predicting pandemonium.

How Could I Be Related to These People?

Your happy chemicals turn on in ways that are different from those around you. It's frustrating to feel different, but it feels good to know how we got wired to be the way we are.

What a Let-Down!

When happy chemicals sag, your brain looks for "the problem." Unfortunately, the brain always finds problems when it goes looking. Focusing on let-downs builds neural pathways that shape your outlook on life. Ignoring those feelings is sometimes the best thing to do. They are just your brain's natural re-set after happy spikes.

7 Reasons to Honor Your Autopilot

Your brain evolved to run on autopilot. Condemning your own thought process leaves you frustrated and annoyed. What if we let go of the idea that autopilot is bad?

When Someone Pushes Your Buttons, Know Your Own Buttons

Your ability to analyze the trustworthiness of others evolved for a reason. When the lion laid down with the lamb, usually the lamb got eaten. So the world was left to lambs that made better decisions. Animals that formed sturdy alliances had more surviving offspring, and the capacity to trust wisely was naturally selected for.

Nature Gave Us Four Kinds of Happiness

The happy neurochemicals feel so good that we use our big cortex to figure out how to get more. But try as you might, you can't control your environment in a way that triggers all of them all the time. You could take this as evidence that "something is wrong," or just accept the fact that happy chemicals evolved to promote survival.