Bring your attention to the following 3 breaths
image by M. Lee Freedman
“It’s kind of amazing: right now, what you think and feel, enjoy and suffer, is changing your brain. The brain is the organ that learns, designed by evolution to be changed by our experiences.
Neurons that fire together, wire together. This is what scientists call experience-dependent neuroplasticity. Each one of us has the power to use the mind to change the brain to change the mind for the better. To benefit oneself and other beings.
Using this internal power is more important than ever these days, when so many of us are pushed and prodded by external forces—the economy, media, politics, workplace policies, war on the other side of the world, the people on the other side of the dining room table—and by our reactions to them.
Life is often hard. To cope with hard things, to be effective and successful, or to simply experience ordinary well-being, we need resources inside, inner strengths like resilience, compassion, gratitude, and other positive emotions, not to mention a sense of self-worth.
Some strengths are innate—built into your DNA—but most are acquired, woven over time into the fabric of your brain. These lasting traits come from passing states—experiences of the inner strength—that get installed into the brain. You become more grateful through internalizing repeated experiences of gratitude; you become more compassionate through internalizing repeated experiences of compassion; and so on.
So far, so obvious. But here’s the catch: without this installation, without the transfer of the experience from short-term memory buffers to long-term storage, beneficial experiences such as feeling cared about are momentarily pleasant but have no lasting value. Yikes! There is no learning, no growth, no change for the better.
Meanwhile, your brain is rapidly and efficiently turning unpleasant, negative experiences—feeling frazzled, stressed, worried, frustrated, irritated, inadequate, hurt—into neural structure. To help our ancestors survive in harsh conditions, the brain evolved a negativity bias that makes it good at learning from bad experiences but relatively bad at learning from good ones – even though learning from good experiences is the main way to grow the inner strengths we all need.”
“I don’t believe in positive thinking. You’re not overlooking the pains, losses, or injustices in life. I believe in realistic thinking, seeing the whole mosaic of reality, the good, the bad, and the neutral. Precisely because life is often hard—and because we’ve got a brain that’s relatively poor at growing the inner strengths needed to deal with these challenges—we need to focus on the good facts in life, let them become good experiences, and then help these experiences really sink in.”
-Dr. Rick Hanson (author of Rewiring the Brain for Happiness)
(Excerpt from post Be Mind Full of Good)
To read the rest of the post and how to use the mind to change the brain for the better, please click on this link:http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/just_one_thing_be_mind_full_of_good
If you would like to watch a 7 minute video in which Dr Hanson talks about self-directed neuroplasticity: how we can use our minds to change our brains to change our minds for the better, please click on this link: https://youtu.be/CRvMCIpGdE8
Wishing you a mindful day
Lee
M. Lee Freedman, MD,CM, FRCP(C)
