You have power over your emotions.It's limited, so you need to understand your power.Here is a simple explanation of the chemicals that make us feel good: dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and endorphin. You'll find out what turns them on in animals, and how you manage them with the animal part of your brain. Then you'll learn to rewire your happy chemicals by feeding your brain new inputs in a new way. We'll do the same for the unhappy chemical, cortisol, too.It's a step-by-step method with no jargon, based on the work of the Inner Mammal Institute. A more complete presentation of the science is in the companion book, Habits of a Happy Brain: Retrain your brain to boost your serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin and endorphin levels.With one lesson a day for fourteen days, you will discover your power over your happy brain chemicals. This is not a checklist of activities. It's a guide to the way your brain got wired long ago, and the way to add on new wiring. We humans get wired by early experience, so we all need updates. You can learn to blaze a new trail through your jungle of neurons to reach your happy chemicals in natural, healthy ways.Realistic expectations are the key. Our happy chemicals are not designed to flow all the time for no reason. They evolved to reward you for taking a step that meets your needs. Our brain defines "needs" in a quirky way, alas. You will learn about these quirks so you can design realistic steps toward your happy chemicals.You cannot rewire your whole brain in 14 days. You can build one new neural pathway at a time. You will learn to target the new pathway you want and the steps that will build it. It will build with repetition, so you will flow there as smoothly as you now flow into your old happy-chemical pathways. You can replace an unsustainable habit with a new habit designed by you. You'll be glad you did!

Today’s greatest health challenges, the so-called diseases of civilization—depression, trauma, obesity, cancer—are now known in large part to reflect our inability to tame stress reflexes gone wild and to empower instead the peaceful, healing and sociable part of our nature that adapts us to civilized life. The same can be said of the economic challenges posed by the stress-reactive cycles of boom and bust, driven by addictive greed and compulsive panic. As current research opens up new horizons of stress-cessation, empathic intelligence, peak performance, and shared happiness, it has also encountered Asian methods of self-healing and interdependence more effective and teachable than any known in the West. Sustainable Happiness is the first book to make Asia’s most rigorous and complete system of contemplative living, hidden for centuries in Tibet, accessible to help us all on our shared journey towards sustainable well-being, altruism, inspiration and happiness.

Anxiety is natural. Calm is learned. If you didn’t learn yesterday, you can learn today. It’s not easy, of course. Once your natural alarm system is triggered, it’s hard to find the off switch. Indeed, you don’t have an off switch until you build one. Tame Your Anxiety shows you how. Readers learn about the brain chemicals that make us feel threatened and the chemicals that make us feel safe. You’ll see how your brain turns on these chemicals with neural pathways built from past experience, and, most important, you discover your power to build new pathways, to enjoy more happy chemicals, and reduce threat chemicals. This book does not tell you to imagine yourself on a tropical beach. That’s the last thing you want when you feel like a lion is chasing you. Instead, you will learn to ask your inner mammal what it wants and how you can get it. Each time you step toward meeting a survival need, you build the neural pathways that expect your needs to be met. You don’t have to wait for a perfect world to feel good. You can feel good right now. The exercises in this book help you build a self-soothing circuit in steps so small that anyone can do it. Once you learn how it’s done, and how it can help ease your anxiety, you will learn how to handle situations in which you feel threatened or anxious. Understanding the underlying mechanisms will help you stop them before they get ahead of you.

Offers simple activities that help you understand the roles of your "happy chemicals"--serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin, and endorphins. You'll also learn how to build new habits by rerouting the electricity in your brain to flow down a new pathway, making it even easier to trigger these happy chemicals and increase feelings of satisfaction when you need them most.

We're bombarded by messages telling us that more, bigger, and better things are the keys to happiness-but after we pile up the stuff and pile on the hours, we end up exhausted and broke on a planet full of trash. Sarah van Gelder and her colleagues at YES! Magazine have been exploring the meaning of real happiness for eighteen years. In this much-needed volume, they marshal fascinating research, in-depth essays, and compelling personal stories that lead to a life-altering conclusion: what makes us truly happy are the depth of our relationships, the quality of our communities, the contribution.

The Science of Positivity teaches you how cynical thought habits are formed, and how you can rewire yourself to go beyond them.

We're bombarded by messages telling us that bigger and better things are the keys to happiness—but after we pile up the stuff and pile on the work hours, we end up exhausted and broke on a planet full of trash. Sarah van Gelder and her colleagues at YES! Magazine have been exploring the meaning of real happiness for eighteen years. Here they offer fascinating research, in-depth essays, and compelling personal stories by visionaries such as Annie Leonard, Matthieu Ricard, and Vandana Shiva, showing us that real well-being is found in supportive relationships and thriving communities, opportunities to make a contribution, and the renewal we receive from a thriving natural world. In the pages of this book, you'll find creative and practical ways to cultivate a happiness that is nurturing, enduring, and life affirming.