Mindfulness is good training for creating a neutral state. It helps you leave an old relief habit without rushing into a new relief habit. That leaves you in a neutral state, where you can choose your next step “consciously” rather than automatically. These are valuable skills, yet being stuck in neutral does not make you happy. The mindfulness

The point is not that conflict is good. The point is that conflict is natural, so self-restraint must be learned. We don’t teach self-restraint when we are told that love is natural and conflict is society’s fault.

The disease model says that a “chemical imbalance” causes unhappiness, which presumes that “normal” people get these chemicals automatically. The disease model offers medication to correct the presumed imbalance, with increasing dosages and variations to deal with habituation. If side effects result, more medications are added.

We are fortunate to live at a time when more facts are available. But the facts conflict with Rousseauian beliefs. The fact that happy chemicals reward meeting a need conflicts with the belief that good feelings are the natural default state. The fact that our chemicals give us feedback about our surroundings conflicts with the belief that a good

Social alliances are hard for humans because our wiring is so individual. Each person thinks they’re right and others are wrong because we determine “the truth” with wiring built from our unique experiences. We want safety in numbers, yet we feel safer when we do things our own way. This is the human conundrum.

Your cortex keeps trying to predict patterns in rewards and threats so you can feel good.

We’d rather feel good all the time, but our brain evolved to keep us alive, not to make us happy. It uses happy chemicals to motivate steps toward rewards and unhappy chemicals to motivate steps away from threat.

Bad feelings exist for a good reason: they alert us to potential threats so we can act in time to protect ourselves.

The brain is always choosing which reward or threat to focus on.