Introduction
Joy is sucha human madness.
Zadie Smith
When was the lasttimeyou feltabsolutejoy?
I got married in the middle of a small wood outside of Cambridge during the summer of 2019, when I was 29. It was remarkably timed. One year later – when engagements among my 30-year-old friends had peaked – pandemic weddings were cancelled, postponed, attended by only the witnesses. But the night before my wedding, on an objectively smaller scale of disaster, it started to pour with rain. At two o’clock in the morning, the rain sounded like a biblical tempest. I moved myself into the spare bedroom and spent the night awake, sick to my stomach with anxiety, imagining the tables, chairs, hay bales and sofas we had set out in the woods that day getting soaked through, and my family and in-laws covered in mud, and rather unforgiving of our reckless choice to have our wedding outside in a British summer.
But in the woods at noon the next day, there was no sign of the storm. Sunlight floated through the leaves and landed on the heads of family members I thought for years might never attend my wedding. I looked over at my wife, and then for the next ten hours felt total consummate joy up until the moment I went to sleep (deep, unadulterated – I have no idea if it rained that night).
Joy feels ephemeral, impossibly to quantify. It is by its very nature rare and unexpected – out of the ordinary, leaps and bounds better than what we would predict from our day-to-day life. Many days do not consist of the singular experiences that bring joy. Most days have good elements and bad, predictable and unpredictable: a surprising success, an unforeseen loss. TheBalanced Brain is about how our brain builds each person’s sense of their mental health by learning to predict the complex, changing information in the world around us.
Something more quotidian than joy is pleasure. We experience pleasure on average at least once per day.1 Some researchers think pleasure is a concrete way to think about our sense of ‘wellbeing’, a term that is usually defined in two basic categories: the first, feeling good at one moment in time; the second, feeling good about your life in general. These two components are often assigned Aristotle’s terms: Aristotle called the first category of feeling hedonia– feeling happy, a pleasurable feeling. This is the category psychologists tend to measure in their experiments, and also relates to two famous definitions of happiness: the ‘possession of pleasures with the absence of pains’ (Jeremy Bentham’s definition);2 and our record of moment-by-moment pleasure and pain across time (Daniel Kahneman’s definition).3 But social scientists who want to know how happy one country is versus another are more likely to measure the second category, eudaimonia: life satisfaction, and the realization of one’s potential. Their work can answer questions like: are richer people more satisfied with their lives? (The answer is: up to a point.4 See Chapter 10.)
Personally, I think these two traditional categories of wellbeing have more in common than not. Studies have found that people who experience more pleasure in everyday life also report better life satisfaction – the experience of eudaimonia is interwoven with hedonia.5 Perhaps unsurprisingly, because the two categories are so closely related within individuals, it may be impossible to measure them separately from one another. When measuring hedonia and
eudaimonia using separate questionnaires on people from around the world, they were almost entirely correlated (0.96), casting doubt on whether they can be truly differentiated.6 Moreover, people’s responses to separate eudaimonia and hedonia questions were mathematically better accounted for by a single wellbeing measure than two separable wellbeing constructs,6 meaning perhaps pleasure and life satisfaction, while conceptually different, operationally reflect the same overarching wellbeing construct.
Improving mental wellbeing has been a quest for decades, centuries, millennia – but society and science are still urgently grappling with it today. In this book, we will explore what neuroscience reveals about what it means to feel better, momentarily or durably. This means diving into where someone’s feelings of mental wellbeing come from: what makes one person experience hedonia from a small, everyday pleasure of life? How do our own experiences of positive and negative events help us construct a general sense of our life as negative or positive? How can small shifts in the mechanics supporting these processes cause worse mental health, and how are the same processes adjusted by things we do to improve our mental health, such as drugs, exercise or psychotherapy?
What is mentalhealth?
In my lab at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, a department at the University of Cambridge surrounded by rivers and cow fields, we run experiments to understand the brain processes that cause better and worse mental health, particularly in people with psychiatric disorders. Eventually, decoding these processes could help us invent or improve treatments. But mental health can mean very different things to different people. Neuroscientists have not agreed on a universal definition of ‘mental health’. Nor have psychologists, or philosophers or any other group that one might turn to for a definitive stance on the matter. You would think this
would be problematic for scientists like me who study mental health. Actually, most neuroscientists do not let a philosophical quandary stand in the way of doing interesting experiments. Sometimes, better mental health is taken to mean lower scores on a clinical index (which itself might be measuring depression, anxiety, stress or any number of other factors). Other times, positive scores on wellbeing indices are used: life satisfaction, for example. Still other times, particular chemicals in the brain, behaviours performed by animals or humans, or regions of brain activity might be inferred to represent some aspect of mental health (pleasure, reward and so on). A full picture on mental health must incorporate all these aspects, from the experiential to the biological, and map the routes in-between.
In this book, I use terms like ‘mental health conditions’, ‘psychiatric disorders’ and ‘mental illness’ relatively interchangeably to refer to disorders such as major depression, schizophrenia, generalized anxiety disorder and so on. These more medical terms are used to indicate when experiences of poor mental health are severe enough to impair functioning and meet other specific diagnostic criteria. However, the way scientists refer to these conditions is constantly changing. In some cases, I use the more general phrase ‘mental health problems’ or ‘mental ill-health’ to signify that someone might experience problems without meeting the threshold for these traditional diagnostic criteria, or their problems might not fall clearly into a single diagnostic category. In any case, it is worth remembering that different people who experience poor mental health might choose to refer to their own experiences with the terms that are most meaningful for them (for example, as ‘experiences’ or ‘problems’ rather than ‘disorders’ or ‘illness’ or vice versa).
My view of mental health in the brain is that it is a sort of balance. In biology, living organisms survive by maintaining homeostasis: a relatively stable state inside the body, irrespective of changes elsewhere (the temperature outside, your blood sugar level,
your hydration and so on.). To stay in balance requires change: your body sweats to decrease your temperature; you eat a doughnut to increase your blood sugar; you drink fluids after running a race. What we think of as ‘mental health’ also requires homeostasis. Like our body’s homeostasis, maintaining a ‘balanced brain’ requires flexibly responding to changes in your environment. This includes our internal environment – which might present challenges via emotional pain, or even infection – as well as our external environment, which challenges us daily with the various stressors of life. Inherent in this balance is the ability of your mental state to help, rather than hinder, your functioning, increasing your chances of survival. For people who have experienced poor mental health at points in their life, their mental state may sometimes impinge on their ability to do daily activities, enjoy time with loved ones, or other things that are vital to living well in the world.
Where does mentalhealthcome from?
Mental health is supported by many different brain processes, from those involved in pleasure and pain, to those supporting motivation and learning. Your brain’s biology, and its close relationship with your physical body, creates, sustains and protects your mental state. You may already use many different techniques to support or improve your mental health, and these techniques will each have particular effects on these brain processes. But you have probably already noticed that if a friend recommends whatever technique they use (‘try yoga!’), it might do absolutely nothing for you. That is because an intervention to improve mental health works or doesn’t in the context of a particular person’s brain (and bodily) processes. These ongoing biological processes in your brain are shaped by oftensubtle differences in your genes, which affects your general propensity to particular thought, mood or behaviour patterns. Equally importantly, these processes are shaped by a whole gamut of earlier-life experiences. (I say earlier-life because often it is
assumed that all formative experiences for mental health or illness happen in childhood, when risk is highest, but they can happen throughout life.) These are not independent but interactive factors, with the effect of some genetic predispositions altered by environmental experience, and (though more neglected in popular conception) exposure to specific environmental experiences affected by someone’s genetic makeup. Nothing about ‘biological’ implies a static cause, however: these factors (and their interactions) are dynamic, particularly crucial at certain developmental timepoints, but relevant throughout someone’s life.
This is because many elements of the nervous system are plastic, changeable, moulded by their environments. By ‘nervous system’ I mean the brain and spinal cord, but also their extensive and bidirectional path of communication with the rest of the body. The function of the nervous system is influenced by our genetic makeup, cultural factors, economic security, stressful life experiences, the social world we live in, our diet and the physical condition of our bodies (to name but a few), all of which affect our mental health via their effects on the nervous system. It may seem impossible to measure and quantify a phenomenon originating from such a widespread set of factors. It is certainly very tricky. But each factor causes better or worse mental health by changing a physiological process in the nervous system. Experience of poor mental health can originate from vastly different causes, inside and outside the body. As you will discover in this book, mental health can also be improved or treated via just as wide a variety of things inside and outside the body. But no matter its cause, the brain is the final common pathway for mental health: the eventual target of every risk factor and every treatment.
This may surprise you. Perhaps your intuition is that mental health works a bit differently to physical health conditions affecting particular organs or organ systems, such as heart disease or diabetes. Perhaps it even seems pejorative to claim that mental health conditions are physical, given that they are undoubtedly
influenced by many important societal factors (although societal influence is not unique to mental health: diseases affecting other organ systems, such as the lungs or the heart, can have social causes such as unequal pollution or access to healthy food). But just like the endpoint of these other socially caused diseases is in their effect on our biology, the experience of all mental states is also a physical process. Mental wellbeing, and our susceptibility to mental ill-health at various points in our lives, is constructed via ongoing biological processes in our brain. These biological processes shape our perception of the world: our outside environment, and the body (our internal environment). Changes to these processes, or different calculations by the same brain processes, can cause your perceptions to become distorted, maladaptive and altogether unhelpful to life’s pursuits. This causes the symptoms we associate with ‘mental illness’ – when your feelings, thoughts or behaviours interfere substantially with your everyday life, to the degree that you experience, for example, chronically low mood and suicidal thoughts (as in conditions such as major depression and bipolar disorder), repetitive thoughts that stop you from doing other important aspects of life (as in disorders such as generalized anxiety disorder, social anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder), or a disrupted sense of reality (as in psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia).
One example of a general function of the brain that supports mental health, and can precipitate mental illness, is our brain’s ability to learn about and predict events in the world. This includes predictions about the outside (Is there a tiger nearby?) and internal environments (Am I hungry? Thirsty? Terrified?). What is most salient, most important, most attention-grabbing to our brain is when these predictions are incorrect, because the brain might need to update its representation of the world – it might need to learn. This process of predictions and learning is often unconscious, woven into the background experiences of every day of your life. For instance, your whole life you have learned that objects fall towards the earth, despite (likely) never having been taught this explicitly. In
the context of mental health you have also learned about many other things that affect your mood, emotions and thought patterns: whether you expect you will experience positive or negative reception when you meet new people, whether you expect very much or very little pleasure from everyday activities, whether you are particularly sensitive to pain or other bodily signals (among other factors). And these expectations influence how likely you are to experience poor mental health.
For instance, a common principle across feelings of wellbeing, happiness, pleasure, mirth and other positive feelings is that positive feelings arise when an outcome is better than what your brain expected (but is still within the range of possibility for your brain’s predictions). That means it is helpful to expect good things, but it might be even more helpful to expect things that are slightly less good than they turn out to be – it is this positive surprise experience that might increase momentary wellbeing (see Chapter 3). Sometimes an experience in the world is vastly better than what you might have expected: a wedding that narrowly escaped being a mudslide is an overwhelmingly positive surprise causing an outsize effect on immediate wellbeing. In most cases, though, the surprises you experience happen in a less remarkable fashion, as repeated, everyday experiences – usually mundane, sometimes disappointing, occasionally extraordinary – that build up over time, cumulatively affecting your sense of mental health. This building of expectations happens via learning processes in the brain, triggered by surprise (both positive and negative) to subtly change the way you will experience the world tomorrow compared to today. This process of expectations, surprise and learning is one of the fundamental ingredients of mental health, including the science of what makes us resilient, what puts us at risk of mental health disorders and what aspects of mental health might be key targets of various treatments and interventions.
Because your brain’s representation of the world is unique to you, formed after years of experiences and your own genetic makeup,
there is no one-size-fits-all recipe for mental health. Differences in the neurochemistry of your brain (among many other factors) might make some people abhor what others adore. Similarly, the individual makeup of your brain means that different ways of improving mental health tend to work only in a subgroup of people. When you encounter a popular article about X treatment or Y diet improving mental health or happiness, at best that means on average across a whole group (sometimes quite a small group). But only using the average can obscure the fact that the treatment may have worked brilliantly in some people – and terribly in others.
That is why when it comes to mental health, what works for someone else might not work for you at all. This also means that potential roads to better mental health, whether in a medical setting, or at-home diet or exercise remedies, can come with personalized risks – they might even be harmful for you because of their effect on your particular biology. Mental health is supported by a complex mosaic of factors. Neuroscience is racing fast to find ways of measuring these factors to predict which treatment works for which patient – but in most cases, these predictions have not yet been successful on a large scale.
Why bother understanding mentalhealth?
Understanding the cause of poor mental health and how to improve it is one of the most crucial questions of our time. Mental health conditions are the world’s leading cause of disease burden. The most common mental health disorder, depression, affects over 250 million people worldwide. The global economic costs of mental health disorders were estimated at US$2.5 trillion in 2010, a number that is expected to double by 2030.7 Most importantly, experiencing a mental illness can have a devastating impact on an individual’s quality of life. The vast majority of people who take their own lives (about 90 per cent) suffer from a mental illness.8 Our mental health crisis is also global: 77 per cent of suicides occur in low- and middle-
income countries.9 Suicide is also not the only, or even the largest, contributor to mortality in people with mental ill-health: people with severe mental health conditions, such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and depression, are estimated to lose around 25 years of life expectancy, mostly due to an increased risk of cardiovascular disease,10 underlining how inextricable physical health is from mental health and vice versa. Even in rich countries with well-funded mental healthcare, our best treatments – psychological therapy and antidepressant medication – only work in around 50 per cent of people, a mystery that motivates much of neuroscientific research into mental health as we try to uncover better routes to treatment.
Mental illness is also only one aspect of mental health. For people who are lucky to never experience life-changing illness, preserving good mental health is just as relevant for their wellbeing and quality of life. Simply feeling happier is associated with a longer and healthier life, even after accounting for other sources of longevity –physical and mental health conditions, age, sex and socioeconomic status.11 It is not clear why this is: it may be mediated by cardiovascular, hormonal and immune system changes associated with experiencing negative emotions.12,13 In contrast, experiencing positive emotions is associated with lower rates of stroke,14 heart disease15 and even cold symptoms.16 There is a world of difference between feeling down and having a mental illness – but there is some overlap in how these experiences affect the body and brain. Perhaps the best information we have about how the brain supports mental health comes from studying the brains of those who have experienced mental illness and examining what it tells us about the brain processes supporting wellbeing, happiness and other positive mental health phenomena.
What we know that leads to good mental health may surprise you. Things you might consider bad for your health – eating sugar, drinking beer, having a late night out – could have short- or even long-term positive effects on mental health. Each of these ‘bad for you’ things represent one of the myriad ways of tapping into your
brain’s various systems supporting mental health. For instance, and I’m not exaggerating here, laughing at a television show with friends harnesses the same brain system as heroin (see Chapter 1).
This book is not going to tell you to deprive yourself of everything fun, from sugar to online games, to feel better. It’s not going to tell you that the solution is thrice-daily mindfulness practice or taking probiotics. No – it’s going to tell you what neuroscience reveals about how mental health works.
This book will take you from some of the first modern experiments on the neuroscience of pleasure to the cutting-edge trials exploring new drugs, therapies or totally different interventions that might improve mental health. Different chapters of this book explore different scientific ingredients for mental health, some obvious (the neurobiology of pleasure) and some less obvious (the neural processes supporting motivation), though just as essential. Along the way we will find out how particular chemicals in your brain, such as dopamine, serotonin and opioids, contribute to mental health. And while the experience of mental health arises from processes in the brain, the brain itself is closely linked with the rest of the body. I will describe fascinating new work on the link between our physical body and mental health, including the role our gut and immune system play in mental health. This body-brain link may be key to understanding how positive mental states like happiness can improve our physical health – and why improving physical health by activities like exercise might alter mental health.
We will explore humans’ vast quest to improve mental health, from the discovery of antidepressant drugs to modern experiments using magic mushrooms; from the effects of mindfulness on the brain, to lifestyle changes in sleep or exercise, to cutting-edge electrical treatments for depression. Across all these myriad paths we will find commonalities: common brain networks and processes that underpin mental health and support recovery from mental illness. These common pathways could be the key to new,
personalized treatments for mental health disorders – the future of mental health neuroscience.
At some point, we will all experience mental and physical pain and distress, and many of us will seek some sort of treatment. Many will be disappointed by a much-lauded pill or lifestyle intervention: one person’s miracle cure is another’s snake oil. But there are many things we can try to improve mental health, including lifestyle changes that might preserve or protect mental health, a renewed focus on sleep, and openness to the arsenal of effective psychiatric medications and psychological therapies for more disabling conditions.
Every time a new treatment is discovered, every time a different lifestyle factor is found to be associated with greater happiness, the best-case scenario is that it works for some people. Ideally, many people. But not everyone. To grapple with this complexity requires a paradigm shift in mental health, away from the concept that something ‘works’ or ‘doesn’t work’ for mental health, and towards an understanding of which process it affects and which people it might help. My hope is that this book will be something of a guide toward this new paradigm, showing what lessons you can take from neuroscientific research to inform your own mental health, and what lessons you can ignore.
1. Naturalhighs:pleasure, painandthe brain
Some people have dramatically different experiences of pain and pleasure: heightened pleasure, chronic pain or no pain at all. In fact, one way in which pleasure is interconnected with mental health is that a cardinal symptom of several mental-health disorders, including depression and schizophrenia, is anhedonia : a loss of interest or pleasure in normally pleasurable activities. ‘Normally pleasurable’ is subjective but is not judgmental: it could include eating delicious food, reading a favourite book, having an orgasm, or other more eccentric things someone enjoys. When experiencing anhedonia, the things one typically enjoys might feel comparatively dull, less valuable, not worth the effort of obtaining. A disruption in pleasure has a debilitating effect on mental health.
Pain is also closely coupled with mental health, but in different ways. People with depression report more subjective pain in their day-to-day lives, potentially because of lower thresholds for pain.17 This relationship runs in both directions: people with conditions that cause chronic pain, of which I am one, are more at risk for mental ill-health.18 In general, the more frequently you experience pain and unpleasant experiences, the more likely you are to experience worse mental health.17
Why is mental health so closely linked to pleasure and pain? In this chapter we will discuss how the links between pain and worse mental health occur in part because of shared brain changes across
chronic pain and mental health conditions. We will discuss how the brain normally processes pleasant and unpleasant things, and how this relates to differences in your likes and dislikes. Your subjective experience of things as pleasant, disgusting or painful is one major ingredient for your mood, thoughts and behaviours – and therefore mental health. How pleasant or unpleasant you find things in the world also influences what your brain learns about (which we will discuss in Chapter 3), as well as what you are motivated to acquire or avoid in your surroundings (Chapter 4). Likewise, worse mental health can change how you experience the world, including blunting pleasure and enhancing pain. For this reason, changes to pain and pleasure could represent a warning signal of worsening mental health, and targeting the brain systems underpinning pain and pleasure might be one route to preserving good mental health.
The ‘naturalhigh’ofpain
Have you ever noticed that after experiencing something rather painful or frightening, you get a sudden and paradoxical rush of giddiness? In biology this phenomenon is called stress-induced analgesia. You might feel this giddiness during or after something genuinely dangerous (going skydiving) or relatively mundane (stubbing your toe). In either case, the brief rush you experience also causes a temporary reduction in your pain sensitivity.
A predator is pursuing you, an enemy is attacking you – your body’s only goal is to survive. At this point, when fleeing or fighting a life-threatening situation, it would be highly inconvenient to feel normal amounts of pain. It would get in the way of your survival. The last thing you need is to sit down and tend to a broken ankle or bruised eye socket. Any pain might distract you from staying alive. That is why we have stress-induced analgesia: we are more likely to survive a highly stressful encounter. Perhaps in evolutionary history, when stressful encounters were plentiful, those animals who had the
special ability to suppress pain during stress were more likely to stay alive until they could pass on their useful trick to their offspring.
Even today, not everyone experiences stress-induced analgesia to the same degree, suggesting there is variation in this trait in the population. This can be quantified by measuring people’s thresholds for pain before and after stress. Some people (and some animals) show more dramatic changes in pain thresholds than others: they are much more sensitive to stress-induced analgesia.19 For these people, acute stress might also have particularly positive effects on mood – danger might feel particularly euphoric. If, like me, you have no real inclination for high-acute-stress pursuits, you probably possess a more mundane amount of stress-induced analgesia. (Maybe you still feel it when you stub your toe, but you have no desire to repeat the action.)
Stress-induced analgesia was measured in what I think of as the ‘hot and cold bath’ experiments of the 1980s. Scientists studied rats swimming in various temperatures of water for precise amounts of time. After removing the rats from their hot and cold baths (and towel-drying them), the scientists then measured the rats’ pain responses. Short cold-water swims, such as a 3 minute-swim in 15 degrees Celsius water, reduced the rats’ responses to pain. Many of us like a nice, warm bath, but you may have heard (and been too timid to find out yourself) that cold baths or cold-water swimming can produce euphoric effects. If you’re willing to brave the shortterm pain, people swear by cold-water swimming.
Stress-induced analgesia exists because mammals have an in-built chemical system in the brain activated by pain and stressful experiences called the endogenous opioid system. These chemicals associated with suppressing pain (as anyone who has taken an opioid drug like codeine can attest to) also make you feel rather giddy.
The reason a short, mildly stressful cold-water swim causes pain relief is because it elicits the release of the particular class of chemical called opioids.20 You may have heard a popular term for
these opioids: endorphins. This comes from the contraction of endogenous morphine (endogenous here means coming from inside the body): drugs such as opium or morphine both bind to opioid receptors in the brain. Opioid drugs simply mimic the effect of endorphins. The effect of either natural or drug opioids binding to these receptors is a cascade of cellular processes, including inhibiting some neurons’ activity and stopping the release of other brain chemicals.21 This cascade of cellular processes then alters communication from brain regions where opioid receptors live to other brain regions and the spinal cord that blunt (or ‘gate’) incoming pain signals from the body.22 Endorphins elicit a ‘natural high’ – giddiness, relaxation, light-headedness – that can feel pleasurable and decrease pain sensitivity. That means that under certain circumstances, moderate stress can make you feel good because it releases opioids (and other chemicals) in the brain. (If you are lucky enough to ever go to the thermal baths in Budapest, Hungary, which range in temperature from toasty to painfully chilly, you can try the hot and cold bath experiment on yourself.)
Perhaps you do not fancy trying a cold-water swim. If not, you are in luck: in humans there is a huge diversity of briefly stressful experiences that induce natural opioid release. Even activities that were not typical challenges in our evolutionary history (like dropping out of a plane) seem to harness the same opioid system as our evolutionary survival response, releasing opioids in the brain to reduce acute pain and (for some people, anyway) causing pleasurable responses to short-term stress. In one study, skydiving reduced pain sensitivity, just like the rats’ cold baths, indicative of opioid release.23 When skydivers were given a drug that stops opioid transmission right before their jump, they retained higher pain sensitivity than the group given placebo, confirming the reduction in pain sensitivity was linked to the endogenous opioid system. However, it was a small study, and pain sensitivity was not tested until after the skydivers were back on land (there are limits to what
you can do mid-air, and I suppose testing someone’s pain responses is a step too far even for these intrepid scientists).
Like skydiving in humans, a number of surprising things can cause stress-induced analgesia in rats. Pain itself is one: natural opioids released by a brief but painful electric shock reduce rats’ pain when tested afterward.20 Rotating rats at a certain speed has a similar effect20 (do not try this with your pets, please!). Like with swim temperatures and skydiving, all these stressors have something in common: they are mild and they are temporary*. Even rotating a rat too quickly (presumably a more unpleasant feeling than a rat being rotated more slowly) fails to elicit opioid release.20 You can imagine why this is the case. Suppressing pain temporarily is useful: it might help you delay imminent death or escape from a predator when injured, for example. But if long-term extreme stress also suppressed pain we might be less inclined to escape stressful, harmful situations or avoid the sources of pain.
Pain is a useful, important signal. People who are unable to experience pain due to rare genetic conditions suffer from profound physical consequences of this insensitivity to pain – burns, broken bones, bitten-off tongues. Pain and stress might feel unpleasant but they have a hidden ability to make you feel pleasure until you are out of danger – and even when particularly unpleasant, to help you survive.
You might be wondering what stress-induced analgesia has to do with mental health. Your personal constellation of pleasure and pain (and their more minor counterparts, likes and dislikes) makes up the hedonics of your everyday life, contributing to your current mental state as well as your long-term mental health. People’s differences are at their most extreme in their reactions to uncomfortable, painful situations. There is no better example of this than chronic, long-term pain, which can have a devastating effect on the mental health of sufferers.
