Brain Fact Friday on ”The Neuroscience of Happiness”

Did you know that “from a neuroscientific standpoint, happiness is experienced in different ways depending on your state of mind?” Mark Waldman For this week’s Brain Fact Friday, and EPISODE #204, with all that is going on in the world, I wanted today’s episode to take a closer look at how we can all find happiness in our life, even during the most difficult times, and look at happiness through a neuroscientific lens. If we can do this, I am confident that we will all walk away from this episode with a way to generate happiness, with our brain in mind. Welcome back!  I'm Andrea Samadi, author, and educator from Toronto, Canada, now in Arizona, and we launched this podcast almost 3 years ago, with the goal of taking the mystery out the science behind high performance strategies, so that we can all apply the most current brain research, to improve productivity and results in our schools, sports and modern workplaces. I became interested in success strategies to improve performance in the late 1990s while working with some of world’s top performers in the motivational speaking industry and saw immediately how important these skills were for our future generations. For those who have been with us since we launched, thank you for coming back, for listening, and supporting the podcast over the years. The topics we cover each week seem to be never-ending, as more research continues to be uncovered, each episode connects back to past episodes that you might remember from our earlier days. Bringing us to this week’s Brain Fact Friday. Did you know that “there are three distinct networks in the brain responsible for happiness? It hit me while recording our Top 10 Episodes of All Time[i] when psychologist Dr. Francis Lee Stephens said “no one ever comes to me saying my thinking is awful. They come with—I feel like garbage.”  How do we look for happiness, or positive feelings when we “feel” like garbage? We covered The Neuroscience of Happiness way back in November 2019 on EPISODE #29[i] and I remember it being such an important topic, that I created a PowerPoint Presentation on YouTube[ii] to go along with this episode where we dove into the recipe for peak performance, with strategies to boost our serotonin levels to generate more happiness.  We took a closer look at the neuroscience of anxiety, with ideas to calm our limbic, emotional brain. We were almost a year into the pandemic, and nothing has changed with the importance of mental health and well-being since we recorded EPISODE 29, but today, I want to look at happiness with the latest neuroscience research I’ve recently  learned from Mark Waldman, adding a new perspective, hoping that whatever is going on in our lives, wherever you are listening from in the world, that you can look at happiness with this new lens, a neuroscientific lens, and see if the ideas I’ll share can help you today can generate more happiness in your life, as well as mine, as I put these strategies into practice right along with you. This week I learned that the latest neuroscientific research suggests there are three distinct networks in the brain that generate happiness. As we take a closer look at these three networks, I hope we can think of some NEW strategies to bring real happiness, into our day, with this new knowledge of the specific network of the brain that this feeling is being generated in. 1. Frontal Parietal Network: also called the Central Executive Network (CEN) or our Thinking Network that controls our everyday thoughts and memories about what happiness means to you. Waldman reminds us that these memories are “mostly based on old beliefs and memories of the past and that happiness is something that only occurs briefly in the present moment.” Remember: that your beliefs about happiness are embedded in the past, and that you can think back to old memories that made you happy, but this level of happiness won’t last forever. HOW DO WE GENERATE MORE HAPPINESS USING THE CEN: Have yo