5-Minute Brain Hacks for Instant Well-Being

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What if you could tap into the power of your own brain to feel happier every single day?

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Hello, listeners, and welcome back to the Path to Calm, featuring the works of Nick Trenton.

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Today's featured book is Neurohappiness, 37 Science-Based 5-Minute Methods to Increase Your Daily Happiness, Fulfillment, and Contentment.

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Today's episode pulls from Chapter 2 of this book, and it's entitled Quick Happiness Fixes.

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This chapter covers six quick ways to make yourself feel happier.

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Today's episode, we're going to take a look at the first three.

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The first is as close as your next playlist, and as an added bonus, researchers have indicated the top ten happiest songs that you can add to your playlist to make you feel better.

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Second, we all heard of Botox, but did you know Botox or just mimicking the effects of Botox can actually make you happier?

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And lastly, it comes as no surprise, but here's a bit of scientific validation for you, eating ice cream.

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Those three things incorporated at certain times into your day can increase your mood and just make you feel better.

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So, let's get into the details, and if you need a quick summary, check the show notes for the timestamp link to the takeaways for today's episode.

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So, let's get into the next one.

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Quick Happiness Fixes

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21 00:01:43,040 --> 00:01:51,600 So, now that we’ve covered a few science-backed habits to build into your everyday routine, let’s take a slightly different approach.

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Though habits can be powerful things, sometimes, you just need a quick fix to step in and help you shake a bad mood.

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Life doesn’t always go to plan, and sometimes it’s worth having a “happiness toolkit” to whip out in an emergency situation.

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If you are thinking, “Well, my emergency coping mechanism is food,” then you’re actually not too far off the mark – more on that later.

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In this chapter, we’ll look at a handful of practical tricks you can use on the spur of the moment to lift a low mood and brighten your day.

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What makes a happy song happy?

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Have you ever noticed just how quickly certain songs can completely change your mood?

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Maybe you’ve also noticed that there are plenty of curated playlists out there (for example on Spotify) that are organized specifically with the intention of making you feel energized, relaxed, or just plain happy.

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But how do people know which songs make us feel good?

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Can a song really boost someone’s mood?

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It turns out that there are predictable characteristics of songs that people universally claim are happy.

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Neuroscientist Dr. Jacob Jolij at the University of Groningen set out to un-weave the rainbow and come up with a mathematical formula for a happy song, as well as the ultimate feel-good playlist.

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He began by closely analyzing the music of British electronic band Alba and found that every single song was about a cheerful situation (or else fun, nonsense lyrics), was a little faster than the average song (an average of around 145 beats per minute - 20 more than the average pop song), and was always written in a major key, which sounds peppy and confident.

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These three elements, he would soon learn, played a big role in our perception of how “happy” a song sounds.

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While Jolij admits that a happy song is “highly personal and strongly depends on social context and personal associations,” he still set about compiling his own mega-playlist of the world’s happiest songs.

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Now, it’s important to note that Jolij didn’t publish this research in peer-reviewed journals, but people seem to like his analysis anyway!

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If you’re compiling your own playlist, take a page from his book and look for the three key elements, and then turn up the volume when you’re feeling down!

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The songs were:

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Don’t stop me now – Queen

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Dancing queen – ABBA

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Good vibrations – The Beach Boys

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Uptown Girl – Billy Joel

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Eye of the Tiger – Survivor

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I’m a Believer – The Monkees

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Girls just wanna have fun – Cyndi Lauper

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Living on a prayer – Bon Jovi

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I will survive – Gloria Gaynor

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Walking on sunshine – Katrina and the waves

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Whether you agree with Jolij’s taste or not, there’s no doubt that music can completely transform your mood – and your life.

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In fact, science is also impressed with the effects that music seems to have on the human brain.

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A 2013 study from The Neuro by Salimpoor et.

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al.

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has suggested that, not only does music have profound and measurable effects on our brains, but that listening to novel music is especially satisfying.

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Using (you guessed it) fMRI scans, participants were observed as they listened to songs they’d never heard before.

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Afterwards, they were given the chance to buy the songs they’d heard and asked to pay an amount they felt reflected their enjoyment.

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The researchers noticed that the brain’s pleasure centers lit up when listening to new music (this is the nucleus accumbens plus other areas responsible for memory and emotion).

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Interestingly, the more activity there was in the mesolimbic striatal regions, the more that listeners were willing to spend on that music afterwards.

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Salimpoor concluded that the strength of certain neural connections during listening to novel music predicted how much you would tend to like that music.

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When you hear a really good song, and you feel an incredible rush of good feelings, it’s because your brain is literally awash in pleasurable neurochemicals, as the dopamine reward system is activated – the same ancient system that activates when we anticipate sex, food, or the thrill of gambling.

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But the researchers also note that how much you like a new piece of music is heavily influenced by what you’ve liked in the past.

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“Depending on what styles you’re used to — Eastern, Western, jazz, heavy metal, pop — all of these have very different rules they follow, and they’re all implicitly recorded in your brain,” Salimpoor says.

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“Whether you realize it or not, every time you’re listening to music, you’re constantly activating these templates that you have.”

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Professor Catherine Loveday is a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Westminster, and she’s been studying the way the brain processes emotions for years.

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Her findings echo Salimpoor’s.

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When we listen to music we know and love, especially music from our past, we experience a boost in activity in the reward pathways in the brain.

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The music we listened to during our teens years and early twenties has an especially powerful impact on our later memories because of what psychologists call a “reminiscence bump” – a period from about 10 to 30 years old we are especially fond of reminiscing about.

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The elements of the music get tied – physically and conceptually – to our autobiographical memories and sense of self.

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So, when we listen to the music that was the soundtrack of a time in our lives when we were laying down the foundation of our identities, we may experience a particularly potent feeling of wellbeing.

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A little bit of nostalgia, in other words, can be a powerful coping mechanism!

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When we return to potent emotional memories and events from our past, we are reconfirming our identities, reinvigorating ourselves, confirming our values, and connecting deeply to a time, place, and social group that we feel we belong to.

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On top of that, we get a satisfying dopamine hit that boosts our mood and may even strengthen our relationships and friendship groups.

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Salimpoor calls music an “intellectual reward” and an exercise for your entire brain, but it’s also a very effective way to shift how you feel quickly.

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Let’s put all of this information together: how can we get the best out of music when it comes to increasing our wellbeing and happiness?

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The good news is that you’re probably doing it to some degree already.

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Luckily, most of us now have access to all the music in the world and can easily find old favorites or endless new avenues to explore online.

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So, the next time you’re feeling a little lethargic, sad, disappointed, or stressed out, use the magic of music to revisit old neural pathways of joy, connection, and meaning.

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Create your own playlist for a dose of fortifying nostalgia and include all the “greatest hits” from your own history.

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This is not unlike value-based self-affirmations – you are tapping into a deeper sense of meaning, purpose, and value, only this time you’re doing it in musical form.

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Choose songs that rev you up, make you feel hopeful and inspired, or just make you want to get up and dance.

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If you have warm and cherished memories around those songs, all the better.

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Maybe you choose a life-affirming song that reminds you of certain people that you love and treasure – by listening to the song you not only get a dopamine surge, but you also strengthen all that neural circuitry repsonsible for feelings of closeness, belonging, and gratitude.

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But don’t just stick to the songs you know.

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Add a little novelty to the mix and use music recommendation apps to suggest new music to you based on what you already like.

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Or, take a leap into the unknown and choose something new at random.

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Neuroscientists haven’t yet figured out how ordinary people can magically induce certain brain states at will, but if they could, that magic would probably look like a pair of earphones and a few good songs!

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Injecting happiness

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88 00:10:36,680 --> 00:10:41,440 When it comes to happiness, there may be some wisdom to the “fake it till you make it” advice.

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Specifically, there is now research suggesting that a smile – even a fake one – can actually make you feel better.

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The conventional understanding is that we smile because we are happy, but cognitive neuroscientists have suspected for years that it may also work the other way around –we feel happy because we are smiling.

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In other words, our facial expressions can influence our internal experience of emotions.

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While most people know that Botox injections prevent the person from fully expressing their emotions, it turns out it also prevents them experiencing those emotions themselves, and recognizing and understanding the emotions of others.

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This makes sense – our facial expressions have evolved as part of our emotional and communicative makeup, and if our faces are frozen, it’s likely others can’t register, for example, that we feel surprised or angry.

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The “feedback facial hypothesis”, however, takes things a step further.

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One study in the journal Emotion (Davis et.

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al., 2010) had half of participants receive a facial filler that paralyzed the facial muscles and the other half an injectable that didn’t paralyze the muscles.

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Each group was then asked to watch movie clips and report their emotional responses.

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Those who had received the paralyzing Botox injections actually reported dampened responses compared to the other group.

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What does this tell us?

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That our outward facial expressions and our inward emotional experiences are interrelated and that, if we can’t smile, we may actually not be able to feel happy.

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Subsequent studies have supported this idea that facial expressions are just not expressions of emotion; they are regulators of that emotion.

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This would explain why a study in the Journal of Psychiatric Research in 2012 (Wollmer et.

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al.)

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found that subjects treated with Botox in key areas appeared to experience fewer depression symptoms – because they could no longer frown!

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Justin Kim is a researcher who made a fascinating addition to this line of research.

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He and his colleagues investigated the effect of Botox treatment on a person’s perception of emotional experience, and they were actually able to monitor this effect in the brain’s amygdala – which is the brain’s emotional center.

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Kim et.

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al.’s research suggests that the amygdala is sensitive to facial feedback and that the ability to smile is a big part of expressing happiness, feeling that happiness, and understanding the happiness of others.

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What does this mean for us?

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Well, it means we literally have a way to influence our amygdala and therefore our inner experience of happiness from the outside in – when we smile (even if we don’t quite mean it) we are activating certain neural pathways and networks associated with happiness.

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When someone else smiles, and we see their smile, register it, and reflect it back to them, we are participating in powerful nonverbal communication that can actually impact our mood for the better.

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Isn’t that amazing?

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The look on someone else’s face can have concrete effects on the electrical activity in your own brain!

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Even if you’re feeling low, smile.

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Smile at others and you might be surprised just how easily you are “tricked” into actually feeling that happiness.

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If you feel phony smiling when you don’t feel happy, don’t worry – research led by Dr. Fernando Marmolejo-Ramos at the university of South Australia found that faking it really does have real-world benefits.

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The research scenario went like this: participants were asked to hold a pen between their teeth, which forces a kind of “covert smile” i.e.

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a fake one that nevertheless enlists all the muscles needed for a genuine smile.

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Then, the participants were offered a range of stimuli, and their brains were observed.

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Again, the amygdala was seen to be influenced – when participants held the pen between their teeth, they reported more positive emotions, and this could be seen in their brain activity.

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What’s more, the covert smile changed the way they perceived other people’s facial expressions.

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“When your muscles say you're happy, you're more likely to see the world around you in a positive way,” said Marmolejo-Ramos.

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The activated smile muscles appeared to stimulate the amygdala, which then created positive emotional feeling states.

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It’s as though our muscles are telling our brain, “You’re happy.

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The thing you’re perceiving right now is making you happy.” If your muscles say you are happy, your brain believes it.

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So, our perception and our motor movements are blended together.

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Does this mean, then, that frowning and scowling can make us feel bad in the same way?

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Possibly, although the research has yet to be done.

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But there’s reason to believe that, if you want to make yourself happier, it could be as simple as plastering a smile on your face and waiting for your brain to catch up!

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Knowing what we know about the brain’s facial feedback systems, there are a few practical ways to bring more happiness into your life:

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• When you talk to people, try to do it face to face rather than just via a phone call, since this way you can modulate your own emotional state by communicating nonverbally with them.

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It goes without saying that you should smile while doing so!

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If you’re on the phone, smile anyway – you’ll trick yourself into feeling happier, and this will show in your voice.

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• “Smile at a stranger in the street” seems like slightly lame advice, but it could be a potent way to inject your day with some good vibes.

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• If you’re in the middle of an unpleasant task or feeling overwhelmed or bored, smile.

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You can convince yourself that your current adversity isn’t all that bad after all.

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• If you’re feeling down, watch some silly videos or standup comedy and, even if you’re not quite feeling it, push yourself to smile and laugh.

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Even if you’re just laughing at yourself for being ridiculous, you’re getting that amygdala working, and that’s what matters!

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and that's a wrap on today's episode you know hopefully just listening to this made you a little bit happier but if not you've got some things in your toolkit that you can rely on to try and increase your mood when the need arises here are the main takeaways from today's episode though happiness is a habit there are also plenty of immediate happiness quick fixes to use when you're feeling low and need something to pick you up one great way to be happy is to use music pick songs that are relatively quick and tempo written in a major key and have positive and uplifting lyrics you may find that nostalgic music from your past is especially good at summoning up good feelings studies done on the effect of botox on people's abilities to express and interpret facial expressions point to the interplay between our moods and our biology being able to mirror other people's expressions is important even though we think we smile because we're happy we are also happy because we smile this means we can often create good feelings by smiling even if we don't quite feel it ice cream has been shown to be one of the greatest comfort foods that genuinely boosts mood primarily because of its associations a healthy diet is best in the long term but that occasional treat can be a legitimate pick me up so with those tips and tricks you'll find that happiness doesn't happen necessarily depend upon your mood you can choose to be happy and make actions to bring you to that point we'll leave you with this quote from eleanor roosevelt happiness is not something ready-made it comes from the conscious choice of attitude you