How to Become a Normal Neurotic

More happiness, less craving, and some dirty laundry

Two weeks ago I wrote about the reality of our constrained lives, the impact of circumstances, some of the common responses to the reality of constraint in the mental health world, and the rise of a certain kind of problematic mental health content. Rather than focusing on what a small number of people might be able to accomplish under perfect circumstances, I suggested a new target for people living under constraint: normal neuroticism. The normal neurotic is someone who experiences typical human problems: they’re anxious sometimes, they don’t always do what they should, and they experience their fair share of conflict with other people. They’ve got their own internal bullshit, but they’re making it work in the course of a normal, human life.

In lives that are constrained in so many ways it’s motivating to have a target we know we can reach. Today I’m focusing on how we get there: what can almost anyone learn how to do in order to experience more happiness under constraint?

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Over time, most people can develop internal skills like self-awareness, patience, courage, compassion, and so on. But there are two meta-skills we can learn that help us learn all those other things:

1. Enjoying our good experiences more.

2. Dealing with our bad experiences more effectively.

We’d all like to create more good experiences and fewer bad ones, but the reality is that many of our experiences are a result of the unique circumstances we find ourselves in. We have the greatest influence not over what our experiences are but over how we relate to them. We often can’t do much about whether our boss yells at us, but we have a lot of influence over what’s going on in our own mind. Are we adding suffering, or removing suffering? Are we adding enjoyment, or removing enjoyment?

It’s (kinda) all your brain’s fault

One of our major problems here is that the brain has a variety of tendencies that make it hard to maximize our good experiences and minimize our bad ones. The first is the negativity bias, which I covered a few weeks ago. To summarize, our brains are like “Velcro for bad experiences, but Teflon for good ones.”¹ The brain pays more attention to negative stimuli than positive stimuli, which makes us very good at finding the fly in the punch bowl while ignoring life’s many small, good moments.

The second problematic tendency is the brain’s craving drive. To help understand what this is and how it works, let’s take a step back and think about the brain’s three primary goals:

1. Keeping you alive.

2. Conserving energy.

3. Passing on gene copies (i.e., having sex).

The brain motivates you to pursue these goals by assigning a reward value to behaviors that are aligned with them. High reward values are pursued, while low reward values are avoided. For example, imagine placing a button in front of a dog. Every time they press the button, a juicy steak is brought to them. The dog eats the steak, and it’s delicious. The button and the steak become linked in the mind of the dog, and pushing the button now has a high reward value. What we see here is a basic habit loop with a trigger, routine, and reward: the trigger is the dog’s hunger cues, the routine is the dog pressing the button, and the reward is the juicy steak.

Once the reward value of a behavior is fixed, the brain isn’t incentivized to highlight it any more. It’s not focused on maximizing your enjoyment of that steak, it’s focused on motivating you to get more steaks. This is the shift from liking into wanting, from enjoying what we have to desiring something else.

It might sound like a semantic distinction, but liking and wanting are driven by mechanically distinct regions in the brain. The experience of pleasure alone (i.e., liking) is highlighted in specific hotspots that lie across the limbic system. Wanting on the other hand is generated by a large and distributed brain system. There’s a lot of interplay and even some overlap between these two systems, but they’re not identical. This means it’s possible for us to experience liking without wanting.

The neurotransmitter dopamine plays a key role in this process. Check out this excerpt from research by Kent Berridge and Morten Kringelbach, particularly the last sentence (emphasis added):

“Conversely, dopamine stimulations do not reliably cause pleasure. Dopamine elevations in NAc fail to enhance ‘liking’ for sweetness, despite increasing motivational ‘wanting’ to obtain the same rewards. In people, L-DOPA-evoked surges in brain dopamine levels do not increase subjective pleasure ratings (Liggins et al., 2012). The intensity of dopamine NAc surges even when evoked by addictive drugs (e.g., amphetamine) correlates rather poorly with subjective liking ratings - but correlates much better with wanting ratings.”

Dopamine is often framed as the “pleasure chemical,” but things are more nuanced than that. Dopamine signals to the brain how “motivationally salient” (how desirable or aversive) a certain outcome might be, and therefore how hard we should work to either avoid or approach it. It has two major functions relevant to this topic:

• It plays a major role in learning and memory.

• It releases in anticipation of pleasurable experiences.

The neural substrates of working memory have a kind of “gate” that affects what’s retained and what’s lost. When this gate is closed, we stay focused on one thing. When this gate opens, new experiences flood into working memory, dislodging what was there. Dopamine regulates that gate, and ongoing dopamine activity indicates that something is worth paying attention to – which keeps the gate closed, so you stay focused on the object of attention. Dopamine activity decreases when things get less rewarding, which opens the gate to distracting stimuli.

Receiving a rush of dopamine generally feels pretty good, hence its association with pleasure. But it’s more accurate to think of dopamine as a “motivation molecule,” or maybe even more so a “Hey, this thing is important!” molecule. Its release in advance of an anticipated experience is part of the reason it can produce more wanting without more liking. This then helps explain why some high-dopamine activities – like watching the news, scrolling on social media, or pulling the lever on a slot machine – can cause us to crave more of that activity in the future without actually enjoying it much in the present.

Three goals

So, we have two targets: enjoy good experiences more, deal with bad experiences more effectively. Then, we all have two tendencies that stand in our way: the negativity bias, and the brain’s drive toward craving. Along the way we have to deal with normal life issues and various constraints, everything from resource limitations to time constraints to having a brain that tends to struggle to sustain attention.

There are three skills 90%+ of people can develop:

1. Emphasize liking. Improve your ability to be present with the normal, good experiences of life that tend to slide into the background.

2. Slow down wanting. This usually means a combination of:

   1. Staying in the moment without time traveling into the future.

   2. Doubting the brain’s promises that the next thing will be the one that “no actually for real this time” makes you happy.

   3. Finding “a kind of boredom.”

3. Develop coping skills. Bad stuff happens. How can we relate to it more effectively?

That’s the list. Most people can improve significantly in those three areas with dedicated effort, even in the midst of a difficult life.

Those three things can seem simple, and maybe even unimpressive. But as you begin focusing on them deliberately, all of this interesting stuff starts happening. Most mental strengths are built from the internalization of positive experiences, and the longer we stick with those positive experiences the more our brains have to work with. As you get better at being with your experiences, enjoying them for what they are without craving some slightly better version, each day becomes a little more fulfilling. You notice many small, pleasant things that used to fall into the background. You compare yourself to others less frequently, and move the goalposts on yourself less often. You become more content with life as it is. Shifting the overall “climate” of our internal emotional environment just a point or two up the scale tends to snowball over time. As we fill our cup with more enjoyable experiences, we have more to give to others. This makes us more enjoyable to be around, we get appreciated more, and corrective emotional experiences start flowing our way. Our self-confidence goes up, which usually means our anxieties (and related pathologies) go down. This makes us even more enjoyable to be around, which leads to more positive experiences, and so on.²

As you develop better coping skills, you become more confident in your ability to handle different kinds of circumstances, leading to more comfort, safety, and self-assuredness. You become more willing to just shrug and let that dumb comment from Todd in accounting sail right by, rather than getting sucked into a meaningless argument. Greater self-awareness gives you earlier warnings that it’s time to step away from a situation, and better self-soothing skills help you recover more rapidly when you’re tapped out. If we think about our experiences arranged on a scale from -10 to +10, the truly bad ones remain pretty bad…but the -2s and -3s bother us less and fade away more rapidly.

It isn’t all sunshine and rainbows. Remember, normal neurotic. I’ve spent most of my work life over the last 8 years or so focused on these topics, and I still experience plenty of anxiety, frustration, burnout, self-doubt, overwhelm, and questions related to long-term fulfillment, meaning, and purpose. But that first track of hanging out in liking, relaxing around wanting, and getting better at coping has brought enormous benefit to my life, and I’m confident it can do the same for 90% of people.

What else is there?

As we’re heading down that first track, a second track might appear that runs parallel to it: gaining more awareness of, and insight into, our interior.

This is where we start unpacking our personal history, and becoming more aware of the patterns that construct our behavior. As we untangle those patterns we start to learn more about ourselves: what we authentically enjoy, what our true desires are, and what really matters to us. This then means that we get better and better at resisting “the allure of middling priorities:” all the stuff that’s appealing enough to distract you but not appealing enough to fulfill you. This process often leads to those breakthrough moments where we finally choose a partner that’s actually healthy for us, rather than chasing the same kind of person whose never worked out for us in the past and will never work out for us in the future.

This second track is more subtle, internal, and not as “skills driven” as the first track. It’s also got more “ooh” to it for most people, because it’s more about the mysteries of our deep psychology. But there are two problems with it:

1. (in my opinion) It’s not available to everyone.

2. It’s easy to get trapped in it.

While the first track is eminently practical, the second track tends to involve a lot more navel gazing. It’s common for people to get stuck in cycles of developing more insight and more insight…and more insight……and more insight………….and you get the point, without ever crossing over into taking real action. This is only made worse by the fact that most self-help focuses on the second track, in part because it tends to lend itself to good marketing copy. You can only publish so many podcast episodes on liking more, wanting less, and developing some normal-range coping skills before people change the channel. But delving into the MYSTERIES of the UNCONSCIOUS MIND???? You can milk that sucker for years.

In the first track we’re constantly returning to essential questions:

• What’s happening right now?

• What do I have influence over?

• What can I let go of?

Then, I know the first track is available to most people. I’m not sure the second track is due to real, practical reasons tied to our constrained circumstances. Maybe you don’t have a life that allows you to engage with that process. Maybe you’re buried under other obligations, a painful past, and resource limitations. Maybe you need a therapist to do that work, and therapy is expensive, insurance is a nightmare, and our healthcare system is a mess. Maybe there’s some significant underlying health issue or neurological condition or whatever else that makes this kind of work unrealistic. Or maybe you just don’t have the time, space, or interest in it – you’re pretty content and accepting of the way you are, and are mostly interested in picking up some practical skills.

My point is that’s okay.

Hope you enjoyed this week’s post, I’d love to hear from you down below. What would you like to see me write about in the future? The practical “how” of liking more and wanting less is probably something I’ll be covering sooner than later.

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1. This quote comes from my dad, Rick Hanson.

2. Enlightened self-interest is a great starting point.