Applying common sense to relationships and adapting your inner chemistry

Extract from lecture 41 of The Calmness in Mind Process – Learning how to live without anxiety or OCD by John Glanvill.

Most people spend years with a partner yet devote almost no deliberate time to understanding how that person actually wants to be loved, what they need from daily life, or whether the two of them are genuinely aligned. The same applies if you are single: few people ask what kind of person they themselves need to become so that the right kind of partner would naturally choose them.

Alignment is not romantic fantasy. It is practical. Do you share core values, views on children, money, work-life balance, and how conflict is handled? Can you talk about almost anything without triggering each other? Complementary differences can work, but chronic mismatch in energy or outlook slowly drains both people. Knowing who you are and what you want is the starting point; then you communicate it clearly instead of hoping the other person will guess.

One useful framework is the five love languages. People tend to give and receive love through acts of service, physical touch, quality time, gifts, or words of affirmation. The problem is that the way you naturally give is often not the way the other person most needs to receive. Doing more of what feels loving to you will not fix a mismatch. You sit down, rank the list for how you prefer to receive love and how you prefer to give it, then compare notes. Adjust where possible. If the gap is too large and neither person is willing to change, that is useful information rather than a personal failure.

As you grow, your own list can shift. When someone learns to self-affirm instead of needing constant external praise, the need for words of affirmation drops. Physical touch or quality time may rise. The relationship then has to be renegotiated honestly. You can also apply the same model to parents, children and friends: give them love in the form they actually register, even if they cannot yet return it in the form you prefer.

The same common-sense approach applies to the chemistry inside your own body. Humans are a walking chemistry set. Most people never learn how to influence the chemicals that create calm, connection and motivation. They wait for external substances or situations to produce the feeling, then wonder why the effect is temporary and why the crash follows.

An ordinary experiment with laughter shows the principle. Forced laughter eventually becomes genuine and raises measurable endorphins and dopamine. The body responds to what the mind holds, even when the starting point is artificial. Optimism, play, movement, music, creative work, genuine connection and a kinder internal dialogue all access the same stores of serotonin, dopamine and oxytocin that many people assume they lack.

Fear-based chemicals work the opposite way. Every time the brain is allowed to treat ordinary situations as threats, the body releases its natural amphetamines. Accepting the physical sensation without adding catastrophic stories reduces the secondary surge. The rider can stay calm while the horse’s nervous system is temporarily stimulated.

Digital habits often deplete the same limited reserves. Notifications, likes, emotional television and constant low-level drama keep dipping into the reward chemicals without delivering lasting satisfaction. Protecting those stores means reducing unnecessary emotional spikes so the chemistry remains available for real life rather than being spent on screens and secondary drama.

None of this requires perfection. It requires noticing where common sense has been overwritten by cultural programming, school conditioning or pharmaceutical narratives, then testing a different approach. Love people the way they can receive it. Align where possible and leave where the mismatch is permanent. Treat your own chemistry as something you can influence through daily behaviour rather than something that must be fixed from outside. The results are gradual, measurable in mood and relationships, and entirely within ordinary human capacity.