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.
