It’s Sunday morning, ☀️ and I’m still thinking about a man and his dog I don’t even know. 🐕‍🦺

I was out on the beach this week, walking 😎 at about the same pace as a man that was just a bit behind me. His dog was having the best morning of its life. Chasing a ball into the water, catching it on the bounce, absolutely delighted with itself every single time. 🐕‍🐾

I wasn’t paying attention to the man or watching that dog … I was watching Duncan. 🫶

Duncan was my Westie. He’s been gone more than 25 years now, and I still can’t see a West Highland Terrier, or honestly any dog, having that much fun, without landing right back on a trail with him. He was that kind of companion.

Hiking with him is one of the best stretches of my life, and some stranger’s dog on a beach put me straight back in the car on the way up the mountain with him in the back seat, anxiously anticipating the fun we were about to have when I parked the car 🚖in the lot at the trailhead. 25 years later, with no warning at all.

That’s the part I can’t stop thinking about. Not the memory itself. The fact that it still works. That a total stranger’s dog can reach back a quarter century and hand me something that good, on command, with zero effort from me.

I’ve taught a version of this for years in my Manufacturing Happiness class. A handful of specific brain chemicals sit behind every genuine “happy” you’ve ever felt, and you can trigger them on purpose instead of waiting around for life to hand you one.

Dopamine is the reward chemical. Oxytocin is the relationship chemical, the one your brain releases around anyone, or anything, you’re truly bonded to. 🤯

What I hadn’t done until this week was go looking for the research behind it. There is real brain-imaging work on this exact thing. When people recall a nostalgic memory, two brain regions light up together.

The hippocampus is where the memory itself is stored. 💾The ventral striatum is the brain’s reward center, the same one that responds to anything pleasurable. How strongly those two regions pair up tracks with how nostalgic a person is to begin with. 🤸

That reward circuit runs on dopamine. So when a stranger’s dog sent me straight back to Duncan, my brain wasn’t only retrieving a file. It was REWARDING me for retrieving it. 👏

I had a strong bond with Duncan, so I’d bet the oxytocin showed up too. That’s the piece I want to dig into properly, because I don’t think I’ve ever pulled the two halves of my own class, the teaching and the research behind it, fully together in one place. That’s next on my list.

While I go do that homework, don’t miss the point. You don’t need a dog, or 25 years, or a beach. You need one fond memory and thirty seconds of sitting with it instead of scrolling past it. This is exactly the kind of small, deliberate practice we build into the StressLess Sanctuary. You hand your own brain the chemicals it already knows how to make, on purpose, instead of waiting around for a bigger event to hand you one.