PSYCHOLOGY | HAPPINESS

You Too Can Have an Unusual Brain Like the ‘World’s Happiest Man’

You can shrink it the bit that makes you anxious and thicken the bits that keep you happy

Created by the author with StarryAI

There’s a part of your brain that’s largely responsible for stress, anxiety and misery. The harder it works, the bigger it physically gets, and the more you suffer the consequences.

If we don’t use it, like never using a muscle, it starts to shrink and lose its strength.

Then we can live free from its grip. Meanwhile, there’s another part of our brain, involved in emotion regulation, that we can physically thicken. One man has made these changes to unusual lengths, and is known as the world’s happiest man.

The Well-Meaning Part of the Brain Which Makes Us Suffer

The amygdala isn’t all bad. It tries its best. It’s there to keep us safe. The problem is it evolved so many centuries before the parts of our brains that deal with the complexities of life, and even more centuries before we ended up with crowded trains, social media and productivity culture.

Its job is to make sure we don’t get eaten by animals or killed by rival tribes. It does that by making us…