Showing results by narrator "Loretta Breuning" in All Categories

Bloomsbury presents Status Games written and read by Loretta Graziano Breuning. Rewire your brain to avoid the trap of comparison and status-seeking to achieve more contentment and satisfaction from life People care about status despite their best intentions because our brains are inherited from...

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. Listeners 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.

You have power over your emotions, but it’s limited, so you need to understand it. 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.

Unhappiness is our brain’s natural default state, but we’re taught that happiness is “normal.” This makes your natural ups and downs seem like a disorder. It suggests that others are happy and you are missing out. And it diverts you from building skills that would actually spark your happy brain chemicals. Why are we getting such bad information about our biology? It’s politics. Not politics in the sense of electing leaders, but politics in the sense of winning support by saying what’s popular.

I was politically correct until the day I heard myself lie about a simple fact because the truth didn’t sound progressive. I froze - in the middle of a lecture to 150 students. Enough! I decided to take back my brain. I gave myself permission to see what I see and know what I know instead of living in fear. It cost me, but the benefits outweighed the costs. Here is the story of my transition. You can do it, too.