Semester B - Dr. Loretta Breuning is author of Meet Your Happy Chemicals and I, Mammal. She's a docent at the Oakland Zoo, where she gives tours on animal social behavior. Loretta is Professor Emerita of Management at Cal. State, East Bay, and worked in Africa for a year with the United Nations. She's a graduate of Cornell and Tufts, and the mother of two tax-paying grown children.
Notice your neurochemical ups and downs. When an unhappy chemical spurts, don't try to "fix it" for a whole minute. When a happy chemical spurts, figure out if it's dopamine, endorphin, oxytocin, or serotonin. This daily practice trains your brain to develop the ups and ease the downs.
This is how you can re-wire yourself for happiness. Your brain can release more happy chemicals if you grow the circuits that turn them on. Unhappy chemicals decrease when you replace circuits that over-stimulate them. The circuits that control our neurochemicals build from life experience. You don't have to settle for the circuits you got from accidents of experience. You can build new circuits that lead where you want to go. This seminar explains how the brain builds neural pathways, so you can build new ones effectively. We explore the four neurochemicals that trigger happiness so you can build up all four of them. Soon, the electricity in your brain will be zipping down new superhighways to your happy chemicals.
