Everyone rides the neurochemical roller coaster as they go about their days – just doing the things they normally do — ranging from happy to sad and everything in between. However, we all tend to have a happiness baseline that we hover around and come back to.

If your norm is more of a “glass-half-empty” point of view, there are good reasons for that. Your brain acclimates to anything that once made it feel good — even over-the-moon ecstatic initially. We’ve all heard about the lottery winner who is forlorn a year after winning millions of dollars. While gaining a million Twitter followers might get you pretty pumped when you hit six zeros, the feat will lose its thrill as the days go by.

On top of that, your brain has a natural negativity bias. It’s always on the lookout, ready to sound the alarm. This trait helped keep your ancestors alive, but hair-trigger reactivity doesn’t do you any favors today. Negativity bias causes your brain to look for, spot, react more strongly to, and remember negative more than positive which means your brain is wired to worry, overthink, and have a pessimistic slant.

Life is full of enough scary and terrible things. We don’t need our brains to make it any worse.

But they do.

They way you counteract your brain’s natural negative slant is to intentionally keep the happy chemicals flowing. In the book, Habits Of A Happy Brain, Loretta Graziano Breuning, PhD outlines simple habits to do that.

You can keep the happy chemicals flowing in your brain with simple daily habits.