Status Games

Why We Play and How to Stop

De: Loretta Graziano Breuning

Narrado por: Loretta Graziano Breuning

Bloomsbury presents Status Games written and read by Loretta Graziano Breuning.

Rewire your brain to avoid the trap of comparison and status-seeking to achieve more contentment and satisfaction from life

People care about status despite their best intentions because our brains are inherited from animals who cared about status. The survival value of status in the state of nature helps us understand our intense emotions about status today. Beneath your verbal brain, you have the brain common to all mammals. It rewards you with pleasure hormones when you see yourself in a position of strength, and it alarms you with stress hormones when you see yourself in a position of weakness.

But constant striving for status can be anxiety-provoking and joy-stealing. Nothing feels like enough to our mammal brain. It releases those stress chemicals when you think others are ahead of you.

Here, Loretta Breuning shines a light on the brain processes that encourage us to seek higher status. She teaches us how to rewire those connections for more contentment and less stress. No more worrying about keeping up with the Joneses. Your new way of thinking will blaze new trails to your happy hormones and you will RELAX.©2023 Loretta Graziano Breuning (P)2023 Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

Reseñas de la Crítica

Our mammalian brains are hard-wired to seek status, according to Breuning, founder of the Inner Mammal Institute. Animals have pecking orders for obtaining food and seeking reproductive partners. Similarly, we are rewarded with a dose of serotonin when we buy a better car, display stronger ethics, build a better body, or snag a cuter partner. Social media feeds into the competitive quest for status. But Breuning proposes a better way to be rewarded by lifting yourself up without dragging anyone else down. Her unique inquiry in neurological and social aspects of status games includes fascinating looks into the role status-seeking played in the lives of various luminaries, including Charles Darwin, Jane Austen, Booker T. Washington, and Alexander Hamilton. The solution to the conflicts raised by comparison and competition that Breuning offers in this thought-provoking study is to choose a middle path between the fast and slow lanes of life, understand our mammalian urges, and learn techniques for rewiring out brains to build new inner pathways that shift our focus away from the stress of rivalry to the rewards of personal growth.

In this engrossing, matter-of-fact examination of the human being as a social animal, Breuning details the biological origins of the innate need for status. “We all fret over social comparison because we’ve all inherited a limbic brain that does that,” suggests Breuning. “Fortunately, we have power over these emotions when we know how we create them.” She explores how hormones (particularly oxytocin, serotonin, and cortisol) create instinctive human responses—even addictions—to approval from others and how one can change these responses. Her advice: accept one’s mammalian urge for social importance, make a plan consisting of small steps that amount to a goal one can be proud of and takes into account the approval of others as a motivator, then repeat the new steps so a new pathway (or habit) builds toward healthy attachments to achievement. One of the most intriguing facts explains why people commonly feel they “see the world through a lens built in high school,” where social status and popularity play an outsized role: neuroplasticity peaks in adolescence, so the pathways we build in those years get quite large. Breuning’s winning combination of simple advice for small changes and accessible science-based assessments make this a standout. Anyone who wonders about the age-old question of nature vs. nurture will devour this slim volume that weighs both sides evenly.

Dr. Breuning offers a captivating perspective on the biological origins of status seeking, offering us practical tools to manage this natural impulse instead of treating it as a taboo. A must read for anyone seeking greater emotional peace. (Andrea E. Parsons, MSW, LCSW)

Eye opening

I love this book. It helped me understand a ton about myself and others. I plan to take the advice and apply it to my life. I’m sure I’ll be reading again multiple times in the future as well.

Excellent content

Although the book is meant to focus on human behavior, but the accompanying examples are also worth reading for their own sakes. Real life examples and retrospective illustrates a concept best and the author has done that.

Really helpful

This book was really helpful for understanding how our physical, animal nature, especially our desire for the good feeling of serotonin contributes to our tendencies to compare ourselves with others as well as the pain (cortisol) that we feel when we are offended or rejected.

Animals and humans

Nothing really new to the subject and a lot of references to the animal kingdom.