How to hack your brain to the best month of your life

Posted on by J.J. Hamilton

When the New Year arrived, nearly five months ago, I entered 2025 with high hopes. As ever, I set my usual goal of writing more frequently, of getting into a regular exercise routine, and of reading more.

So far, so good. I feel stronger, I’ve been reading more frequently and, while the writing progress has slipped, I feel pretty positive about my goals.

But how do I know this? What makes me feel so confidently about my progress? Right now, it’s just that: a feeling. I think I’ve done well. You might be sat there, reading this, phone in hand or desktop in front of you, thinking, ‘I’ve really not done a great job of my goals this year.’ I get it. We’ve all been there. How can you make improvements, now that we’re through the first four months of the year?

Well, firstly, give this a read and work out how you’re doing with your Quarterly Goals. Quarterly goals are the ones that we set out to achieve after three months, so that we can reset if things aren’t going well or celebrate if they are.

Then, once you’re done reassessing your progress in the year so far, let’s think about the goals that you’ve set. Moving away from intangible, unquantifiable goals is really, really tricky. It’s so easy to say that I want to go to the gym more frequently but, to do that, I need to set actual, actionable, goals.

Actionable goals are those that I can do and visually, mentally, or emotionally accomplish. Otherwise, you might be about to enter yet another month without any signs of real growth.

Helping you to set goals is not the intention of this blog post. I’ve written a whole host of posts that you can skim through first if you’re more interested in that:

Instead, we’re going to work on our brains to ensure that we’re still optimising our lives for happiness, even if we’re way off from achieving our goals.

Here’s a guide on how to hack your brain chemistry, and why it’s essential to having the best month of your life.

Understanding the importance of brain chemistry

We are victims of the ways our brains are wired. To understand how to hack our brains, to change how it’s wired, and set us up for the best months of our lives, you need to start with understanding how our brains work and which chemicals we’re going to play around with. There are a bunch of different chemicals released in the brain, but these are the three key ones that we’re focusing on:

  • Oxytocin: This one’s released through forming social bonds and connections with people. You might feel this through touch or working collaboratively.
  • Dopamine: You’ll feel this one during moments of short-term pleasure, such as social media usage, gaming, or more risky behaviours.
  • Serotonin: Experienced when you feel accomplished or peaceful, often during exercise, when reaching goals, meditating or practising gratitude. I used to do this in my Bullet Journal, but these days I tend to use the BuJo as a purely functional life-planning device.

By themselves, these chemicals are not to be feared. But when experienced in varying combinations, or when they’re out of balance, is when we start to experience unwanted feelings. The more we engage in activities that promote the release of chemicals that alter our brain chemistries, the more our happiness and moods can be reshaped for the worse over time. 

Imbalanced brains

People tend to prioritise dopamine over the two other chemicals, since it’s generally easier to release. Scrolling on social media, for instance, just requires you to open your phone, swipe onto your favourite app, and start reading. In short bursts, there is nothing wrong with this – but over time, your brain struggles to recover from the persistent release of dopamine, leaving you starved of this brain chemical.

That’s why doom scrolling makes us feel so bad, despite inconsistent social media use making us feel good. Too much dopamine can also result in substance abuse, eating a lot of junk, and failing to exercise much, if at all. You’ll also have poor self-regulation and even addiction, which is a tough cycle to break. Prioritising dopamine also reduces the impact of serotonin and oxytocin, which we know are essential for maintaining positive mental health and healthy lifestyles.

Of course, too much serotonin can also have its own drawbacks. Gamers, those who don’t exercise or spend most of their time indoors and lack meaningful goals often suffer from this, since they lack self-worth or might develop poor mental health and struggle with motivation. 

Finally, low oxytocin levels are often seen in people who are socially isolated, lack physical affection, and find it tricky to develop or maintain close bonds. If you spend most of your time online without face-to-face interactions, you might have low oxytocin, which in itself leads to emotional isolation and a lack of belonging. This one’s a bit of a cycle.

Practical tips for hacking your brain chemistry

Okay, so, we know which brain chemicals to look out for and the impact of each of them, as well as the types of activities that are more likely to result in their production. So what?

The next step is to consider how best to manage them. So, grab a piece of paper or a tablet and stylus and get to work:

  1. Draw a table with three columns and two rows. Place each of the chemicals in the top row of each column.
  2. Next, jot down the activities that you do which result in the production of each of the three different brain chemicals. This will give you a good visual idea of what you do, on a daily basis, and what that is doing to your brain. You can see my example below:
  1. Then, take it a step further: turn this into a neurochemistry pie. This looks like a pie chart, except you’re going to assign a certain amount of room to each of the three brain chemicals and the activities that you’ve given each. Make a realistic one first, and then an aspirational one. Or, in other words, your first pie will be your actual, current, life, and the second one will be the life that you’d aspire to enjoy. Ensure you’ve jotted down what percentage of your time you ascribe to each of these events; you can also see mine below.

    This will give you a really clear idea of what you spend your time doing and whether there are any changes that you’d like to make to your lifestyle.

Spend the next month applying your aspirational pie to your life and prioritising activities that boost the production of serotonin and oxytocin to hack your brain into making you feel happier everyday. With that churning on in the background, you’re going to find it easier to start prioritising those goals that you set in the New Year, reviewed and adapted in the first quarter of the year.

Which of these actionable steps are you going to take to boost your production, mental health, and quality of life? Let me know in the comments below so that we can start being accountable for each others’ actions. I’d love to write a follow-up post where I can share your success stories with the rest of the community.

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