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Brain-Based Transformational Solutions

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

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Apparently, there are some extraordinary people out there who can cure whatever ails us, physically or psychologically. We know this because they excel at self-promotion to the extent that they’re difficult to escape. One of them is the neuroscientist who shall remain nameless and who seems to have spawned a minor genre of professionals debunking his overblown and/or inaccurate claims.

Another is motivational speaker, author, and podcast host Mel Robbins, who can provide us with dating and relationship advice, health advice, sleep advice, explain how we can control our thoughts and feelings, tap into our “limitless potential,” reset our brain, get a handle on stress and anxiety, achieve our goals, lose weight, handle criticism, be happy, confident, and creative, stop getting gratitude wrong (where have I heard that before?), and get along better with our in-laws and other family members. As to the latter, I recommend relocating. It worked for me, so I think that makes me an expert in this field.

She’s the author of several best-selling books, has given a “viral” TED talk, and is a frequent guest on the incestuous self-help circuit. I learned these things by searching online. Prior to the kerfuffle after the December 2024 publication of her most recent book, I had encountered her once, randomly, on You Tube, watched a few minutes of a talk, and moved on, although LinkedIn keeps suggesting I should connect with her. I watched her TED talk and a podcast episode on The 5 Second Rule and read a short excerpt of The Let Them Theory before writing this. I also watched some podcasts and read some posts by others that address the controversy—or I should say outrage—surrounding The Let Them Theory. I’ll put some links at the end.

Prior to her extremely successful stint as a motivational speaker, Robbins was a criminal defense lawyer. This is important.

In a nutshell, The Let Them Theory reminds us that we can’t control others, so we should simply let them do whatever they’re doing. This might sound either obvious or like it could be about our relationships with other people—that it expresses some generosity of spirit—but it’s really not about them. It’s about us and not letting the bad things they are doing get to us. This is questionable advice offered by someone with Green Operating System to other people with Green Operating System. It’s based on Robbins’ interpretation of Let Them, a “theory” that did not originate with her.

No Gratitude for You!

The person who popularized this phrase is Cassie Phillips, who wrote a poem titled Let Them in 2019. This and a subsequent poem titled Let Me became very popular. Phillips gave permission for the poems to be used freely by others. She had “Let Them,” in her own handwriting, tattooed on her inner arm. Many others followed suit.

People familiar with Phillips and her poems were quite surprised that Robbins doesn’t mention Phillips, either in her book or in the frequent guest appearances during which she describes her “discovery” of the concept and the writing of the book she considers to be her “legacy.” It may be her legacy, all right, just not the one she intended.

As if this complete lack of acknowledgement isn’t sufficient insult or injury, Robbins is attempting to trademark the phrase Phillips came up with. If she were to be successful, it would mean no one could use the phrase without her permission, and if anyone did (say some of the many people who have had Phillips’ permission to use it for the past couple of years), Robbins could sue them. Her applications were rejected—for good reason—but she didn’t apply the Let Them theory in this instance. Instead she’s filed for a 6-month extension to restate her case, which means this issue won’t be resolved until later this year. So much for taking your own advice.

Irony Abounds

I’ve seen Robbins give credit to people whose work she couldn’t get away with claiming as her own. It seems especially egregious, given the personal narrative she’s crafted about her rise to success, that she has no problem trampling on people who have fewer resources than she has and essentially stealing from them.

That seems to include her own daughter, Sawyer, who Robbins identified as co-author of The Let Them Theory but whose name was notably absent from the book’s cover. After being called out on this, Robbins recently “gifted” her daughter with credit as a birthday present. (Aren’t you glad you’re not a member of that family?) Sawyer’s name is now included under Robbins’ name, in much smaller print, where it used to say “New York Times Bestselling Author.”

So here is a person, Mel Robbins, who came across a concept articulated by someone else and decided not only to run with it and fail to acknowledge the source, but also to burn the person who had contributed her work to the world in a genuine act of generosity. This is deeply, deeply disturbing behavior. Maybe even pathological.

I would find it odious in any human being but Robbins makes a living advising people on how to live their lives. But it’s important to understand that her purpose in developing a motivational speaker career was to make a lot of money and be successful. She’s tapped into a large audience that is ripe for seduction by motivational hucksterism with little inclination to look behind the curtain. Unlike Phillips, Robbins and her followers—as well as her enablers in the self-help world—are not remotely interested in assisting people in identifying or reaching for aspirational goals. They’re interested in the quick fix, the clever or memorable turn of phrase, the NYT bestseller list, the external signs and trappings of adulation, approval, and material success.

Robbins is a prime example of someone who is in a position where both the experience and the expression of gratitude are wholly appropriate. She ought not to have to be told to publicly acknowledge Cassie Phillips and her daughter, Sawyer. But as I mentioned in a previous post, people like Robbins may talk about gratitude and have much, in theory, to be grateful for, but they aren’t the ones developing a gratitude practice or even expressing gratitude on a personal level. They want to succeed. And it’s more important to them that their success be perceived as a function of their work, their talent, their insight than it is to acknowledge the contributions of others. They need to maintain the narrative. As a result, they don’t just fail to add value to the world; they subtract value from it.

Some links:

Cassie Phillips on Instagram
Sage Justice on Substack
Andy Mort | The Gentle Rebel podcast
angyl can’t read

Previous posts in this series: Should You Practice Gratitude? ~ The Cosmic Gift & Misery Distribution System ~ Always Look on the Bright Side of Life

Should You Practice Gratitude?

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No. There you go; you can stop reading and move on with your life, unless you, too have ever wondered what the point is of looking for things to be grateful for and then writing about or listing them.

I previously called out empathy and authenticity, so why not go for a positive psychology trifecta and knock off gratitude, as well, right? To be fair, both empathy and authenticity—at least as authenticity applies to human beings—can be written off as valid concepts, while the same can’t be said for gratitude. What I’m taking aim at here is not gratitude itself, but gratitude as a practice, which involves focusing time and attention on identifying things to be grateful for.

One might think that’s a better focus of time and attention than identifying things to be distressed by, but we shouldn’t be too quick to make that assumption. In my workshop Anatomy of Desire, I ask participants to create three lists: what they have that they like, what they have that they don’t like, and what they don’t have that they want. Writing a list of things we’re grateful for over and over is like being stuck on repeat at step 1 in this list-making process, a step that’s intended as a prequel to the most important step: identifying what we want.

What Is Gratitude, Anyway?

To answer that question, we must head once more into the breach: much as I discovered in researching empathy, it depends on who you ask, what’s being measured, what perspective the person talking about it is coming from, and what his or her agenda or aim is.

Gratitude is considered by some to be an emotion. I could explain why trying to create and sustain a particular emotion, whether “positive” or “negative,” is wrong-headed, but you probably already know that, and gratitude is clearly not an emotion.

There are emotions that accompany the experience of gratitude but they vary from one person to another and even from one situation to another within the same person.  A drink of cold water when we’re thirsty, an unexpected gift from a friend, the warmth of home on a snowy day, or the arrival of a tow truck when our vehicle is stranded on a dark lonely road will elicit different types of gratitude and a different range of emotions.

In researching gratitude practices, I encountered several different varieties, including what I call bright-siding gratitude, undeserved gratitude (I am not worthy, but thanks, anyway), and performative gratitude. I’ll tackle that last one in this post.

We’re Doing It Wrong

A neuroscience guru who shall remain nameless claims that everyone is practicing gratitude wrong. He says new research reveals it isn’t experiencing gratitude that matters; it’s expressing it to someone else or watching it being expressed by other people. That would make gratitude an action or behavior.

This is not a new or original idea. An article from Greater Good Magazine quotes a passage from the New Testament in which Jesus healed 10 lepers but only one returned to thank him. Jesus muses as to whether or not the other nine were ungrateful (which is something it is very, very bad to be). The author of the article questions whether or not their gratitude “counted” if they didn’t express it.

The notion that gratitude is something you actively express to the person to whom you are grateful suggests the idea of making lists of things you’re grateful for, which might include a sunny day, does not represent gratitude. Gratitude, by this definition, is an expression, not an experience.

So then can we only be grateful (express gratitude) toward other people? Most of us don’t routinely express gratitude to the water that quenches our thirst or the furnace that heats our home. Yes, there are some cultures that thank nature and the environment for what is provided, but that is not the case for any of the cultures that are part of my heritage or the heritage of most people I know. And it’s beside the point. The water and the heater cannot receive our expressions of gratitude.

The Debt of Gratitude

This view of gratitude turns it into nothing more than a transactional social interaction, which excludes the water and the heater as recipients. It shouldn’t be a surprise, then, that obligation is one of the synonyms for gratitude. Are we motivated to express gratitude because we’re supposed to? Certainly children are repeatedly told to “say thank you.” In days of yore, writing thank you cards was a chore many children routinely put off. But is “thank you” an expression of gratitude or is it simply an acknowledgement? Is it any different from saying “hello” when you encounter a friend or answer the telephone or saying “good-by” when you leave or end your call?

The aforementioned neuroscience guru claims the expression of gratitude releases dopamine, which is apparently enough to validate this theory. But dopamine is released when we complete a task or a behavior loop. If doing so involved throwing a plate against a wall or shouting an obscenity, dopamine would be released whenever we did that, too. Dopamine motivates us to do everything we do. Dopamine literally is motivation.

The notion that performative gratitude has any inherent value is highly dubious. And I don’t recommend taking up expressing gratitude or finding instances when you can observe other people expressing gratitude, which sounds kind of creepy, in order to generate the release of the dopamine. There are far better ways to generate dopamine and less-creepy things you could be observing.

Wellbeing Enhancement

Most of the cheerleaders for gratitude practice point out how gratitude reportedly enhances our sense of wellbeing—or in some cases, our actual wellbeing. This idea is relatively unexamined, although there’s a tiny sub-genre of writing about gratitude practice that considers the potential negative impacts. The exploration of negative effects, however, is limited to effects on individuals. I believe the negative effects far outweigh the positive and that they extend beyond individuals to groups, societies, and humanity in general.

So…obviously there is more to come.

Avoiding “Disliking” Neurochemicals
Won’t Get You Anywhere

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Range: the extent or scope of something.

Imagine a pendulum swinging between two states: feeling good and feeling bad. When we experience liking (or “here and now”) neurochemicals, the pendulum swings in one direction. When we experience disliking neurochemicals, the pendulum swings in the other direction. The range of motion between the two states represents the extent of our emotional range.

Everything everywhere is in motion all the time, so the pendulum is never completely still. But the closer to equilibrium it is, the milder the emotional response.

Liking neurochemicals, if you recall, include serotonin, oxytocin, endorphins and other endogenous opioids, and endocannabinoids. These are the sources of pleasure (but not desire). The brain experiences them as rewarding, so anything—whether a substance, an activity, a situation, or a person—that elicits these neurochemicals will cause the brain to approach.

Disliking neurochemicals, also known as stress neurochemicals, include adrenaline, norepinephrine, and cortisol. These are sources of displeasure, pain, or stress that drive us to avoid or move away from whatever appears to be causing their release.

The brain is always trying to determine whether something is a potential threat, which we want to avoid or move away from, or a potential reward, which we want to approach or move toward.

The purpose of liking neurochemicals is to encourage us to want to do or consume or participate in activities that will enhance our chances of survival—at least in terms of how the brain has been trained to perceive them. Likewise, the purpose of disliking neurochemicals is to keep us away from situations or substances or actions that might decrease our chances of survival. Neurochemicals—and the emotional responses they evoke—are an important part of this process. It’s highly desirable, to put it mildly, for us to get agitated enough to get ourselves out of harm’s way. Being sedate about potential threats is not a good survival strategy.

But most of us tend not to face life-threatening situations on a regular basis. Keeping that in mind, there are two aspects, equally important, about the way we respond to liking and disliking neurochemicals that affect our ability to create transformational change and even our enjoyment of being alive.

Assess the Brain’s Interpretations

The emotions we experience are a result of our brain’s interpretation of things (“things” in this case being situations, events, etc.). We react emotionally to our interpretations, not to the events or situations. We can’t react to an event or situation before the brain has interpreted it because it is the brain that supplies the meaning. In order to do that, it uses the mental model of the world it has constructed over the course of our life. Our mental models are not always accurate, so the interpretations we’re responding to are also not always accurate.

As a result, we may need to assess some of our interpretations rather than taking them at face value. This requires practice because by the time we’re consciously aware of how our brain has interpreted something the interpretation is experienced as fact and an action is either already in progress or has been taken.

Our experience is not an accurate reflection of reality. Being able to distinguish interpretations from events and situations—and recognizing that our emotional responses are based on interpretations not on facts—is an essential part of the process of creating change. We can’t affect the choices our brain makes moment-to-moment. We can affect future choices, but only if we do more than just go along for the ride our liking and disliking neurochemicals take us on.

Expand the Range of the Emotional Pendulum

The narrower the range of our emotional pendulum, the quicker our brain will be to respond to disliking, and the quicker it will be to come up with an action to move us away from those feelings right now. I’m referring to the impulses that lead to short-term pleasure but long-term dissatisfaction. Have a glass of wine, says the brain. You’ll feel better. Or buy something. Better yet buy several somethings. Binge watch that show you like on HBO. Have some ice cream. In fact, have all the ice cream!

The more sensitive one is to disliking neurochemicals, the harder it will be to resist the reflexive urge to squash them. Eating all the ice cream may seem like just the thing, at least in the moment. Never mind the many contraindications for eating all the ice cream, including the fact that doing so will probably lead to feeling even worse afterward. And feeling worse will lead to wondering why we engage in these counterproductive behaviors when we know better.

You do it, I do it, we all do it because that’s what the brain learned to do in the Pleistocene when we didn’t have refined sugar and HBO and shopping malls or the internet, so we wouldn’t have had access to the many different sources of immediate gratification that are available to us now. That’s one issue.

Another issue is that we tend to find it much easier to eat all the ice cream than to allow ourselves to experience the discontent or dissatisfaction. That keeps us from assessing whether or not there’s a response, a behavior, or a situation we might want to change. Eating all the ice cream maintains the vicious, unreflective cycle and keeps us stuck, at the effect of those liking and disliking neurochemicals.

If we can’t muster the energy to identify and pursue what we want, and if we haven’t built the muscle that allows us to tolerate disliking long enough to figure out what we want to change, all that’s left is swinging back and forth, back and forth, never really going anywhere.

It’s important to recognize that moving away from disliking is purely reactive and not the same as actively or intentionally moving toward liking. Many people not only don’t know what they want, they also don’t know what they like. When that’s the case, the disliking or stress neurochemicals become the dominant set of neurochemicals. The brain focuses on detecting and avoiding threats rather than on identifying and seeking rewards. This doesn’t lead to the minimization of threats or discomfort, however, but to the amplification of them.

Furthermore, stress in and of itself isn’t necessarily negative or bad. Some stress is good for us. If we want to create a satisfying and meaningful life, we must be willing and able to tolerate both ferocious dissatisfaction on one end of the pendulum and intense joy on the other end. That’s what allows us to play full out in enthusiastic pursuit of our aspirations and our desired outcomes.

This post is part of a series on neurotransmitters that both affect our behavior and are affected by our behavior.

Good Stress vs. Bad Stress

Pleasure Is Transient
but Wanting Persists

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Liking is the pleasure you experience from something. The source of that pleasure is the liking—or Here and Now—neurochemicals released in your brain: serotonin, oxytocin, endorphins and other endogenous opioids, and endocannabinoids. The same pleasure-generating areas in the brain are activated for all pleasures, from gustatory and sensual to musical, artistic, and altruistic.

Life’s intense pleasures are less frequent and less sustained than intense desires. —Dr. Kent Berridge, University of Michigan

Because the pleasure circuit is considerably smaller and far more fragile than the “wanting system,” it can be elusive; more importantly, it is always transient. Liking something doesn’t always motivate you to go after it. Dopamine is what generates motivation, so you also need to want what you like.

We often think of desire and the objects of our desire as inseparable. We think it is the indulgence itself—the luscious ice cream, the rush of nicotine, or the flood of coins from a slot machine—that motivates us. To a greater extent, however, it is the expectation of these rewards, the luxurious anticipation of them, that fires up our brains and compels us to dig in, take a drag, or place another bet. —Chris Berdik, Mind over Mind

While liking (pleasure) and wanting (desire) are separate systems, wanting actually enhances and, in a sense, prolongs liking. It’s said that the brain likes to want because it releases liking neurochemicals along with dopamine. On the other hand, instant gratification quickly dissipates pleasure. That’s how you end up on the hedonic treadmill where you are continually in pursuit of more and more of the things or experiences that initially brought you pleasure in an attempt to maintain a steady state of pleasant feelings.

When you work toward a reward and earn it, rather than simply treating yourself to it because you can, you actually enhance your enjoyment of it. But you have to be intentional about it. You have to make a connection between your actions and the reward so your brain gets the message.

Dopamine is a powerful motivator. It carries signals for both rewards and for the muscle movements needed to go out and get them. So when dopamine levels are diminished, you will still like what you like, but you will be less inclined to take action to get it. And when dopamine levels are elevated, you will be more inclined to take action to get something, whether or not you actually like it.

Liking and wanting usually do work together in your brain, but when they become uncoupled, you can want something without liking it. And according to Stanford University researchers, if you don’t get something you want, you desire it more while liking it less.

If you don’t clearly identify what you want—and determine how you’re going to get it—you’re liable to end up going along for the ride of getting what your brain wants. What you want needs to be compelling enough to you to activate the amygdala, thus creating a sense of urgency. Amygdala activation is critical in getting you to act on your desires. It settles down when you receive or achieve them.

In the case of long-term goals, once you’ve identified a reward and begin taking steps toward it, your brain gradually and steadily releases increasing bursts of dopamine the closer you get to the reward. And the bigger the reward (the more your brain craves it), the more dopamine will be released.

Reward systems integrate liking, wanting, and learning. Our pleasures help us learn and change our behavior, and what we learn alters the pleasure we experience. Our reward system has a built-in flexibility in which cognitive and pleasure systems interact and modulate each other. Anything can be a source of pleasure as long as it taps into reward systems embedded in our brains. –Anjan Chaterjee, author of The Aesthetic Brain

Wanting has a purpose. It is critical to any focused effort. It motivates you to pursue both long-term and short-term goals. But, as Chris Berdick says, once that goal’s been achieved, wanting moves along.

Unsurprisingly, liking neurochemicals have a close relationship with stress neurochemicals—adrenaline, norepinephrine, cortisol, etc.—which I also call disliking neurochemicals. I’ll talk about how that relationship can hamper our ability to create change next time.

This post is part of a series on neurotransmitters that both affect our behavior and are affected by our behavior.

Which Path Are You On?*

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As we know, dopamine is involved in many different aspects of our lives, including sleep, memory, mood, learning, and movement. Dopamine is also a significant component of the brain’s reward system and, as such, it’s the source of motivation. That’s why it’s so important in regard to behavior and behavior change.

There are four major dopamine pathways in the brain. The two that matter most to us here are the mesolimbic pathway and the mesocortical pathway. While both pathways motivate us, they motivate us in different ways and in different directions, indicated by the nicknames given to them: desire dopamine and control dopamine.

While dopamine is distributed throughout everyone’s brain, the amount and pattern of distribution is not the same for everyone. As a result, some of us have more dopamine in the control pathway and some of us have more dopamine in the desire pathway. And of course not everyone who has more dopamine in the control pathway has the same amount, which is also the case for dopamine in the desire pathway. Still others may have similar amounts of dopamine in both pathways.

Here’s a comparison of what a predominance of dopamine in one pathway compared to the other pathway looks like:

Desire dopamine generates craving for things, substances, people, situations—whatever is salient (important) to you. You desire (want) what you like and what matters to you.

Control dopamine generates a craving for achievement or accomplishment, which can range from completing multiple years of education in order to attain a degree or checking off boxes on a to-do list.

Having more desire dopamine doesn’t automatically cause you to have unrestrained appetites or develop addictions. And having more control dopamine doesn’t automatically cause you to make better judgements or be a better critical thinker.

Our genetics play a role in our neurochemistry, including dopamine distribution, as does our experience. We all have dopamine in both pathways. One of the things about neurochemicals is that while they affect us, we can also affect them. So if we have lots of dopamine in the desire pathway but not enough in the control pathway to actually get what we want, we can use contrivances to take actions that alter our neurochemistry. Likewise, if we have lots of dopamine in the control pathway but not enough in the desire pathway to identify what we really want, we can use contrivances to help us increase desire dopamine.

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
—Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken

As with the Meta Mindsets, in which Production mindset is most effective in the service of Experiment mindset, control dopamine is most effective in the service of desire dopamine. Otherwise the functions and processes of the mesocortical pathway have to operate without salience, meaning without your direction. You have nothing to process but the exteroceptive or interoceptive situations or stimuli you happen to encounter and no context within which to process it.

One of my favorite quotes from neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett is: You tweak the world, and the world tweaks you back. With too much control dopamine and not enough desire dopamine, it’s more like: The world tweaks you, and you attempt to manage the effects.

We happen to live in a world where control dopamine is held up as the gold standard, whether it’s labeled as such or not. People are very busy pursuing completion for its own sake without having determined whether or not there is anything meaningful to them in the pursuit. This has negative implications for individuals, societies, and the world. In The Molecule of More, Daniel Z. Lieberman, MD and Michael E. Long write:

Some people have so much control dopamine that they become addicted to achievement but are unable to experience H&N [Here and Now] fulfillment. They achieve something, then move on to the next thing.

Next time, we’ll take a closer look at the relationship between dopamine, the wanting neurochemical, and the liking (aka Here and Now) neurochemicals.

*Hat tip to Pete Seeger

This post is part of a series on neurotransmitters that both affect our behavior and are affected by our behavior.

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