When looking back on your life, or even the events of the past week, do you remember the happy or unhappy moments most? Neuroscience research tells us that we are hardwired to register and remember negative events more quickly and deeply than positive ones, which creates an unhappy brain.
A happy brain is shaped differently than an unhappy one, but neuroscience and the Bible tell us that through training exercises, an unhappy brain can be molded to actually look like a happy one. Neuropsychologists explain the concept as neuroplasticity, specifically how the brain’s physical shape can be changed. The shape of the brain can be changed under the influence of external events. Members of the grin-and-bear-it club can remain as they are hardwired, or they can choose to change.
How Your Brain Works
In the beginning, God designed the human brain for beauty, joy, love, and trust, but when Adam fell and was removed from the Garden of Eden, his brain mechanism had to adjust to a different environment, an environment of danger and pain. Out in the cold, cruel world and no longer blissfully unaware of danger or evil, Adam had to contend with those things.
His world was no longer perfect. His brain, therefore, had to adjust to anticipate and overcome dangers. Adam’s brain became a tool to protect him from pain and to figure out ways to solve problems. The brain became negatively biased. As a result, dangers, pains, and problems are the events that capture our brain’s attention to this day. The human nervous system, Rick Hanson writes, “scans for, reacts to, stores, and recalls negative information about oneself and one’s world. The brain is like Velcro for negative experiences and Teflon for positive ones; the natural result is a growing—and unfair—residue of emotional pain, pessimism, and numbing inhibition in implicit memory.”1
The brain makes distinctions between two types of memory: implicit and explicit. Explicit memory empowers us to do things like remember the names of our friends or where we parked the car. On the other hand, implicit, or emotional, memories are formed unconsciously. These memories are viscerally rather than logically initiated.
The amygdala of the brain, which is an almond-shaped set of neurons deep in the brain’s temporal lobe, acts as the switchboard in implicit memory as it responds to outside stimuli. It’s neurologically primed to label experiences as frightening and threatening. Once the amygdala flags an episode as negative, it immediately stores the event and compares it to the record of old, painful experiences. If a match is found, a series of chemical reactions signals alarm. These events occur to protect us from harm, but as a result, the bad things that happen are registered and responded to almost instantaneously, whereas the happy events take five to twenty seconds just to begin to register. The daily stress you live with is perceived by your brain as a literal battle for survival. The swirl of chemical reactions due to stress dictates the brain’s helpless, persistent focus on negativity.
We need to deliberately rewire our brain. Leading a genuinely happy life doesn’t happen without our deliberate effort or retraining our brain. For most people, agitation, anger, and fear are easier to access and sustain than peace, happiness, and fulfillment. That is why this book is aimed at teaching you new skills.
Deliberate effort is a function of the higher regions of the brain. In one fascinating study, researchers took brain scans of people who regularly engaged in some form of meditation and meditative prayer and those with no meditation experience. After an eight-week meditation program, researchers found that not only did the higher brain regions thicken but the amygdala also became less dense with the praying people. They were happier. Now wellness health centers are offering different forms of meditation to patients to protect them against stress-related disorders and depression.
It’s that easy? We should pray more?
Yes.
The Beautiful Effects of Quiet Prayer
Neuroscientists have discovered that human beings who practice prayer and meditation are happier people than those who do not. Prayer, of all things! Not a better environment, not health, not DNA, not social status, not money, not success, not wealth but prayerful meditation makes people happier.
Hinduism, Buddhism, and movements such as Transcendental Meditation use their form of meditation to empty the mind. For Christians, however, meditation is filling the heart and mind with the presence of God and His Word. David prayed, “The meditation of my heart shall give understanding” (Ps. 49:3). Quiet Prayer is a form of Christian contemplative meditation. It’s the process of entering the presence of God, as David explains in Psalm 145:5: “I will meditate on the glorious splendor of Your majesty, and on Your wondrous works.”
When you practice Quiet Prayer as a part of your daily life, you connect with God with the very depths of your heart. Think of closing the door of your busy, active mind and choosing another faculty to communicate with God by letting your heart connect with Him. The God of the Bible is a personal God who desires a personal, intimate relationship with us. Quiet Prayer is in direct response to the love of God, as in 1 John 4:19: “We love Him because He first loved us.” We’re so accustomed to chatter and clamor, to endless talking, that to sit still and simply focus on God with a wordless heart is a new experience. In most of us, this depth of our heart has been untapped. Only the outer layers have been broken through.
The Hebrew words for meditation in the Old Testament are hagah, which means “to sigh or murmur” but also “to meditate,” and sihah, which means “to muse or rehearse in one’s mind.” When the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek, hagah became the Greek melete, which expressed meditation’s effects on the depth of the human heart.
Meditate and meditation appear in the Bible about twenty times, fifteen times in the book of Psalms. One of my favorite verses throughout my life has been Joshua 1:8, which has new meaning for me now since I’m learning the power of Quiet Prayer.
This Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate in it day and night, that you may observe to do according to all that is written in it. For then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have good success.
Quiet Prayer doesn’t take the place of studying the Word of God with pen and notebook, reading, notating, memorizing, and taking part in Bible studies and prayer gatherings. It’s in addition to these. As your mind is stilled, a sweet transformation and inner growth take place that you carry with you in your daily life and callings.
Another category of quieting the clattering, chattering mind is the practice of holy awareness, as I introduced in chapter 4. I call it holy because there’s something sacred about the act of being fully alive and fully present. Holy awareness is a how-to-be-happy-in-an-unhappy-world life skill, and it means to fully experience the sensory world—seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, feeling—and to be aware of the moment and the holiness of it.
Holy awareness and meditation are alike in many ways, and both celebrate the presence of God. Purposefully paying attention deeply, and without judgment, to whatever arises in the present moment, either inside or outside of us, takes effort.
Creating New Patterns
Now that you recognize the negative patterns you’ve formed in your brain in response to pain (physical or emotional), you can learn new patterns of response. Most of our lives are spent fighting pain, reacting in flight or fight at the appearance of pain. Anger, indignation, fear, self-blame, and depression usually overtake us. For this reason, we need to combat the misbeliefs associated with pain and practice kindness and compassion first toward ourselves. You can’t offer love and respect to someone else unless you possess love and respect for yourself. Learn to practice awareness in such a way that you can create moments of contentment and peace wherever you are. When you nourish yourself, you can nourish another.
Here’s a short self-compassion practice for you. When dealing with pain (physical or emotional), take yourself to a quiet place, close your eyes, and allow your body to become still. Allow your body to release all tension. Breathe deeply. Remain this way for a few minutes, simply breathing.
Imagine the Lord Jesus entering the room or wherever you are.
Imagine Him smiling at you and opening His arms to you.
Imagine Him placing His arms around you and holding you close.
Stay there in His arms while breathing deeply and evenly.
I love you with an everlasting love.
I hold you in My arms with loving-kindness;
today feel My perfect heart of mercy embrace your dear heart.
I embrace and love every part of you.
I am drawing you closer to Me because I love you.
I am with you always.
I am your healer, your deliverer.
I give you all of Me. My dearest, My own.2
As we learn to be aware of our negative reactions to pain, we have a choice to take a different path, the path of compassion and kindness. We build new neural pathways in our brains.
Build new brain habits of compassion and kindness toward yourself first and then toward others. When we reach down to the roots of our souls where we all cry together, we discover real kindness. If we can grow to a point in this world where we inhabit truth wholly, we’ll come to know a deeper love and kindness for everyone on the road with us.
These new reactions hold you up in the face of difficulty and stress. You develop habits of mind and heart that can’t be disturbed, even under great strain. “I shall not be moved” becomes your reality because you have developed courage through pain and can rise up strong with the firm, deep knowledge of your safety and surety in Christ. “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me” (Phil. 4:13) is more than an encouraging statement. It’s the bone and marrow of your life.
Your faith is not based on willpower; you’re not white-knuckling it through life. Rather, you face what’s present in the moment, accepting the situation even if it means opening yourself to a painful or unpleasant experience, and see it exactly as it is. At this point of engagement, you look for the misbeliefs in your inner dialogue, or self-talk, that may be associated with the moment. “This is bad.” “I hate this.” “Why did this happen to me?” “How could God let this happen?”
Hear what you tell yourself. Then counter your misbeliefs with the truth:
God turns bad to good, evil to righteousness, mourning to dancing.
This may not be pleasant, but I can accept it.
I’m surrounded with God’s love at all times and through all things.
God knows me better than I know myself. He holds me in His arms.
As you sit with increasingly difficult experiences, you’ll discover the ability to overcome and rise up stronger than ever through the indwelling power of the Holy Spirit within you. Does this take faith? Yes.
Pastor Steven Furtick of Elevation Church in Charlotte, North Carolina, says too many of us suffer from what he calls posttraumatic faith disorder. He says, “A lot of Christians I know stagger through life in a daze. Suffering from posttraumatic faith disorder, they hunker down in the basement, open a can of Beanie Weenies, and wait for the end of the world.”3
Faith makes you unshakable. Faith shows you the impermanence of this world and the eternity of God. Picture yourself as a mountain, unshakable through battering storms, deluges, the plundering of man, changes of nature. Unshakable. That’s you.
And that’s happiness.
When I was going through a particular dark hour of the soul, a girlfriend took me by the shoulders and drilled into me, “Marie, you are going to do three things to feel better! Here they are. One, you are going to get dressed every day. That means you are going to put on your makeup and look good. Two, you are going to answer your email and phone calls. Three, you are going to show up somewhere!”
That was so practical it hurt. But I begrudgingly tried to do as she suggested. I got up and got dressed every day. I put on my makeup. I answered email and phone calls. But the third thing—show up—well, not so much.
Studies have shown that 80 percent of personal happiness and success starts with showing up. Workers rise to the top of their companies by showing up and faithfully doing their jobs. Preachers, priests, and pastors show up to church; athletes show up for practice; actors show up for rehearsals and drama classes. Happily, my mother showed up for her wedding when she married my dad. My doctor showed up when I broke my neck in a bike accident. Friends have shown up when I’ve needed them.
I thought about it and miserably started showing up. I showed up at my computer to write, I showed up at the gym to work out, I showed up at church and at school. I showed up. No expectations of myself. No to-do lists of how to show up. I just showed up.
When you don’t feel like showing up, do as I did and grab the hand of God and head out the door. How many times do we doubt ourselves and feel we can’t do the task at hand? Grab the hand of God and show up.
I felt good about myself for doing what I didn’t want to do. Soon the darkness began to lift, and I was brought back to the reality of a life without fear. And I was grateful. The clouds parted and happiness was in sight.
Growth is a beautiful thing. Treasure your growth. Honor your growth. Inside a newborn baby is unlimited potential. Walking is inside that baby. Running is inside him. Speech is inside him. Words, laughter, thought, caring, loving—all inside.
In the same way, that person you pray to be already exists inside you. If you listen really hard, you’ll hear your own voice calling you forward into your wonderful future. The Bible says as a man thinks, so he is (Prov. 23:7), which means if you can think a thing, the pathway to reach it is already in motion. The reality of achieving what you see ahead is in you!
This is exactly how we spiritually train our minds and our hearts. We train ourselves to be happy and live happy lives. We live our training. Our human brains are wired to lean toward negativity, but God has created human brains to be rewired. Think of yourself as in the process of rewiring your brain. You’re developing permanent changes by taking radical action. You are choosing to see that with God you’re alive, mindful, and no longer a victim of circumstances, events, situations, or relationships. You’re in serious happiness training. You can change. You can turn from old habits and form new ones. Neuroscience studies show us that brain training can turn unhappy minds into happy ones.
Real Happiness
Don’t compromise your happiness. If you compromise and accept less than God has for you, you’ll know it. You’ll feel it. You’ll know it when you’ve settled for less. Don’t sacrifice the permanent on the altar of the temporary. I realize how easy it is to compromise, to accept the cheap, fleeting perks the world offers. But real happiness isn’t some fly-by-night thing.
Happiness involves being strong, tough, resilient. The world isn’t getting any nicer or any happier. We hear bad news from every corner of civilization, so we must be resilient. We must be able to stand up strong when the winds of chaos strike. We can’t do that unless we know how to stay happy.
I don’t mean shallow happiness that comes and goes. I’m talking about developing and holding on to a happy heart that experiences life in this troubled world with wisdom, character, courage, and understanding through God.
“A merry heart does good, like medicine,” it says in Proverbs 17:22. A happy heart is your cupful of vitamins and your mood elevator. A happy heart lives in your brave and courageous self. No amount of bad news from the world can tear down your happy heart. Jesus isn’t pulling out His hair and biting His fingernails up in heaven over the condition of our world. On the contrary, He’s busy empowering His children to overcome darkness and light up the world!
Miserable people cast no light. Grumpy, complaining people cast no light. Moody, selfish people cast no light. Angry people cast no light. Anxious, fearful people cast no light. You are the light of the world, remember.
Let me tell you about a client of mine. He was a guy who believed the unhappy world was to blame for his problems in life. He assiduously followed the news and received regular disaster messages through the internet and social media. He kept tabs on terrorism attacks, flu epidemics, airplane crashes, prayer banished in the schools, and criminal activity both locally and nationally. He felt he was doing humankind a service by keeping up with the times and got frustrated when his wife and children placed demands on him. He couldn’t understand why they weren’t more supportive of what he considered a calling to keep people informed. He saw himself as a giving, unselfish, faithful Christian, but in reality he was functioning with an unbridled case of inferiority. Turning his attention from himself and his needs gave him a feeling of relief, and the emotional high he received from being outraged at world events fed a false sense of self-importance.
He didn’t talk about God’s goodness or mercy. He didn’t talk about God’s power or His purposes in these times. Instead, he concentrated on wrath, on judgment, on the perilous end times. He thrived on bad news, though God is on the throne and the word gospel means good news. His devil was bigger than his God.
Our Christian leaders and pastors continually cry out for God’s people to pray. God is telling us, “If My people who are called by My name will humble themselves and pray,” not “If My people will lose sleep over the world situation and worry themselves to pieces.” Here’s the entire verse: “If My people who are called by My name will humble themselves, and pray and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land” (2 Chron. 7:14).
Try a media fast. If you catch yourself getting sidetracked and focusing your attention on the evils in the world, turn off the TV and the radio, set aside the newspapers, and go on a media fast. See if you can fast from all world news for one solid week. During that week, devote the time you ordinarily spend online, watching and reading news reports, and talking about the events of the day, to God and His Word. Ask Him for a revelation of His power and purpose in these times. Look for supernatural assurance from Him and find rest in the faith that He’s in control. Pray 2 Chronicles 7:14 every day for your country.
The threat of terrorism, nuclear war, germ warfare, disease, and economic collapse loom before us. Add these global calamities to personal problems and disasters in the family, community, and church, and we’re overloaded with enough worries and burdens to last until the next millennium. You and I have been called to live in “such a time as this” (Esther 4:14), and not as wimps sniveling in corners and begging for protection from above. “My help comes from the LORD who made heaven and earth” (Ps. 121:2), and He lives in you! The salient, urgent message of how to be happy in an unhappy world is that you have what you need within you! Christ in you, the hope of glory!
Yes, God will send His angels to watch over you and guide you. Yes, He will protect you by His Holy Spirit. Yes, He will provide for you and keep you safe. Yes, He is your deliverer and fortress, your strong tower. If God is for you, who can be against you? The Lord is your shepherd, and therefore you shall not want for anything! (Ps. 23:1). “My help comes from the LORD who made heaven and earth,” and that help is inside you. God is calling His people to rise up strong in these times. I’m praying for you as you read this book that God is equipping you to rise up supernaturally strong and find lasting happiness no matter what happens.
Fixating on the nightmares of the world surrounding you does more to you than just fill your mind with negativity. It affects you physically as well. Your body stores emotional memories. Science, medicine, and psychology show that the human body traps such emotions as stress, unforgiveness, fear, and anger. We know that certain physical maladies are directly related to emotional problems and turmoil.
The brain contains about sixty neuropeptides, which are the means by which all cells in the body communicate with one another. This includes brain-to-body messages. Individual cells, including brain cells, immune cells, and other body cells, have receptor sites that receive neuropeptides. The kinds of neuropeptides available to cells are constantly changing depending on your emotions, both positive and negative.
Cellular memory is the collective energy generated by individual cell memories. I’m not talking about when an amputated leg gives a person what’s called ghost pain, nor am I talking about subconscious memories that respond to electric impulse. I’m talking about painful, toxic emotions that are stored in the body on a cellular level.
If you magnify your cells down to their atoms, you’d see that you are made up of subtle bundles of “info-energy.” This info-energy comprises physical, mental, and emotional data that comes from all of your life experiences. Nothing you experience escapes being imprinted into your cells in the form of a cell memory.
You need to empty your mind and your body of the effects that painful experiences have had on you. For example, when you think back on a painful experience, you may call up certain painful emotions. Take a deep breath and give your body a soothing message of release from the physical response to that day in your life. You might say something like, “I free my body now of holding on to the pain of that day in the name of Jesus.” Continue to speak freedom and healing to your body.
You may still be carrying the emotional pain of past painful experiences somewhere in your body, and you need to free yourself. Lack of forgiveness also stores itself somewhere in your body. If you carry bitterness or unforgiveness around in your heart, you’ve poisoned not only your heart and soul but also your body.
If you’ve been abused or injured, take time now to pray over those areas of your body. Release God’s blessing on your body. Free your body from the memories and emotional pain it’s storing. Thank your body for being good to you, for keeping you alive, for serving you.
I’m not saying that all physical toxicity is due to toxic experiences and emotions, but you can be certain your body is carrying around baggage and begging you for relief. That relief can come only from the Lord because the relief is spiritual.
Our glands, organs, tissues, and cells are storage places for emotional memory, as demonstrated through the scientific research of neuropharmacologist Dr. Candace Pert, who worked at the NIH and Georgetown University Medical Center. In her research, she wrote that our bodies are our subconscious minds and can be changed by the emotions we experience. “In being expressed, emotions can be released, even old emotions stored in body memory.”4 The body-mind is far more attentive than we realize. It doesn’t miss a thing. The secret place of Quiet Prayer is a wonderful place to focus on letting go and releasing the trapped, stored, painful emotional memories in your body.
The man I spoke of earlier who was fixated on bad news lived with fierce emotional pain, not realizing what his inordinate interest in world disasters was doing to his body as well as his mind. Not only was he temperamental and moody, but his body also showed signs of the emotional baggage it carried. At thirty-eight years old, he suffered from arthritis, allergies, and insomnia. It was urgent he go on a media fast.
I’m happy to say he did! His wife says the media fast changed their life. God spoke to his heart during his media fast, and the Holy Spirit entered his body, soul, and spirit in an awakening he’d never experienced. With Quiet Prayer twice a day, he was able to quiet his mind and hear from God. He’s still interested in world events, but he says he only wants to see things through the eyes of God. He’s working at releasing the negative memories stored in his body, and the last time I spoke with him, he no longer needed medication to put him to sleep at night.
Aging, Happiness, and Your Beautiful Brain
How many old people do you know who are vibrant with happiness? My great-aunt Anna was one hundred years old and still as sweet as cake, giggly and full of humor to the very last days of her life. She was a well-loved centenarian, and my children, who were in elementary school, loved visiting her. She was fun! Not only was she fun, but she also listened. I could curl up beside her and talk for hours.
My mother was in her nineties when she died. She became a writer of romance fiction, and up to the very end, she was full of ideas for new books to write. All her life she had physical problems, but nothing ever seemed to stop her. She worked hard, laughed hard, and created a happy, blessed atmosphere around her. She was dearly loved by everyone who knew her. Like my great-aunt Anna, she was fun!
But then there are the curmudgeons, the nasty, mean-spirited oldsters who find fault with everything, complain constantly, and give nothing back to the world. It’s a tragedy really, because the brain can forge new pathways to happiness, and everyone at any age can live productive, fulfilling lives and give something back to the world. It’s never too late to start giving back.
Frank Lloyd Wright was ninety years old when he designed the Guggenheim Museum. It was a milestone of architecture when it opened in New York City. No museum in the world was like it.
Here’s another example. A woman named Mary Fasano went back to school at the age of seventy-one to earn her high school diploma and hit the news media eighteen years later when, at eighty-nine years old, she graduated with her undergraduate degree from Harvard University. She became the oldest person to earn a degree from Harvard.
In the college writing course I taught at Mira Costa College, I had a ninety-year-old retired psychiatrist take the class one semester. My young students loved her.
David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel, taught himself ancient Greek in old age to master the classics in the original.
Benjamin Franklin invented bifocal glasses at the age of seventy-eight.
What will you be doing at seventy? Eighty? Ninety? One hundred? If you give in to the misbelief that there’s no use pursuing new goals toward the end of life, you’re only hastening the mental decline of your use-it-or-lose-it brain.
Let me make this clear: never say it’s too late to change, or it’s too late to move forward, or it’s too late to learn new things. The words “too late” should repulse you. Never use them. Never let those two words cross your lips. Erase them from your vocabulary. It’s never too late for you.
I love this story of the famous cellist Pablo Casals. He was ninety-one years old when he was approached by a student who asked, “Master, why do you continue to practice?” Casals replied, “Because I’m making progress.”
No matter how old you are, your brain needs oxygen. Exercise brings oxygen to the brain and creates new neurons. Walking, cycling, and other cardiovascular exercises strengthen the heart and the blood vessels that supply the brain with oxygen. Everything that keeps the heart and blood vessels in shape will invigorate the brain. You don’t need vigorous exercise to stimulate the growth of new brain neurons. Walking at a brisk pace is sufficient.
Get outside, breathe the fresh air. Don’t tell me it’s too cold outside. Bundle up and stick your nose out the door. There’s a definite correlation between a relationship with nature and your well-being. Stay in touch with nature. If you don’t have a garden, buy flowers. If you have allergies, buy nonallergenic plants and take care of them. When they die, buy more. Take a walk every day. Ever notice that after surgery, patients are forced out of bed almost as soon as they’re awake to walk the halls toting their IV pole? Walking is good for you! One of my older clients sprints the halls of her apartment building during the winter when it’s below zero, and then she flings her front window open and allows the outside air to “clean out the joint,” as she puts it. Our brains need oxygen.
The nervous system is divided into two parts. The first part is the central nervous system, which is your brain and spinal cord, the command and control center. The second part is your peripheral nervous system, which brings messages from the sense receptors to the spinal cord and brain, and carries messages from your brain and spinal cord to your muscles and glands.
Your brain needs to be properly and regularly exercised to keep it functioning well. The nucleus basalis, which works by secreting acetylcholine and helps the brain tune in and form sharp memories, has been totally neglected in most older people. In a person with mild cognitive impairment, the acetylcholine produced in the nucleus basalis is not even measurable.5
Unlearning can be more difficult than learning, and bad habits are hard to break or unlearn. When we learn a bad habit, it takes over a brain map, and each time we repeat it, it claims more control of that map and prevents the use of that space for good habits. Leading brain plasticity researcher Michael Merzenich believes our neglect of intensive learning as we age leads the systems in the brain that modulate, regulate, and control plasticity to waste away. He claims that a major reason memory loss occurs as we age is that we have trouble registering new events in our nervous system “because processing speed slows down so that the accuracy, strength, and sharpness with which we perceive declines. If you can’t register something clearly you won’t be able to remember it well.”6
Look at the brain’s life cycle.
Childhood: This is an intense period of learning, and every day brings new experiences and new learning.
Young adulthood: Elementary school, high school, and college bring concentrated learning, and we acquire new skills and abilities. Employment brings new learning, challenges, and skills as well.
Middle age: This is a more placid time of life. We have careers and jobs but rarely engage in tasks in which we must focus our attention as closely as we did when we were younger. Mostly what we engage in now are already learned skills. We have jobs we know how to do, and we do them by rote. We’ve formed familiar habits for our social life and our downtime. We don’t form new stimulating relationships, and if we travel, it’s with the same noninvolved spectator mentality with which we watch TV. Exercise begins to diminish, and life becomes more laid-back as we prepare for retirement.
Retirement age: Here is where the brain starves for stimulation. Many people in their seventies and older do nothing requiring intense prolonged focus and attention. Physical exercise goes to the wayside, healthy diet choices decline in favor of comfort food, and old habits are stuck to like cement.
If you don’t want to get old before your time, give your brain new things to do. Merzenich recommends anything that requires highly focused attention, including learning new physical activities that require concentration. Many physicians tell their older patients to take up learning a new language to improve and maintain their memory and to keep up the production of acetylcholine.
If you do the same physical activity you did thirty years ago as your exercise regime, it won’t help your brain’s motor cortex stay in shape today. If you’re doing the same dances, the same walking routine, the same workout at the gym, you’re not keeping your brain alive by learning something new. You need to learn something new with intense focus to lay down new memories and stimulate the brain.
The stress of life, of getting older, releases glucocorticoids, which can kill cells in the brain. But brain science shows that the brain can form new neural pathways. We can add “happy paths” to our brains—at any age! We can recondition our mind-sets. We can end the negative living patterns that we’ve accepted as okay. We can exercise, get the oxygen flowing to our brains, and teach ourselves the skills of lasting happiness.
Write these words in bold letters in your happiness journal: “Everything that you can see happen in a young brain can happen in an older brain.”
Can you teach an old dog new tricks? I don’t know about dogs, but according to scientific research, there’s no age limit on the ability to learn. When I began teaching How to Be Happy in an Unhappy World workshops, I wasn’t sure how older people, especially those set in their ways regarding church, would respond to sitting in Quiet Prayer. I was pleasantly surprised. One man in particular who was in his late eighties loved the teaching I gave on quieting our thoughts, and then when it came time to enter our Quiet Prayer practice, five minutes wasn’t long enough. He sat in Quiet Prayer for a half hour, and a fruitful daily practice was launched. It’s possible to teach our brains to be happy.
If you like, take five minutes for Quiet Prayer before the next chapter. As you look at God, He is looking at you.