The Basics of Strengthening Resilience
All the world is full of suffering. It is also full of overcoming.
— HELEN KELLER
Life is full of challenge. We can’t avoid that. No matter how hard we try, how earnestly we seek, or how good we become, life throws us curveballs and pulls the rug out from under each and every one of us from time to time. No one is immune from that reality of the human condition. Bumps and bruises, even occasional catastrophes and crises, are so inevitable in human experience that we don’t have to take bad things happening to good people so personally.
We can’t change the fact that shit happens. What we can change is how we respond, and that’s what this book is all about.
Mishaps are like knives, that either cut us or serve us, as we grasp them by the blade or the handle.
— JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL, Literary Essays
When something challenging or even devastating happens, we have the power — the flexibility — to choose how we respond. It takes practice, and it takes awareness, but that power always lies within us. This chapter gives you a clear map of how you can train your brain to respond to life’s challenges in ways that are increasingly skillful and effective. You’ll also gain an understanding of how the changes that occur in your brain pathways make the brain itself more resilient.
When Shit Happens: Developing Response Flexibility
When faced with external problems and pressures — car accidents, catastrophic illness, divorce, the loss of a child — or when we are called on to help others face sudden and disastrous shifts in their lives, we can hardly be blamed for seeking to fix the problem by changing the circumstances and conditions “out there.” Even when we are tormented by internal messages about how badly we are coping — “I could have thought of that before. Dumb, dumb, dumb!” — we often still focus on fixing the external problem “out there” in order to make ourselves feel better “inside.”
Of course, it’s important to develop the life skills, resources, and wisdom to create changes in those external circumstances when we can, and to learn to cope well, again and again and again, when we can’t. That’s part of what resilience is all about. It’s all good work, all necessary, all helpful. But every bit as important as focusing on what’s “out there” is how we perceive and respond to what’s “inside”— to any external stressors, to any internal messages about those stressors, to any internal messages about how well or poorly we’re coping, and even to any implicit memories of danger from the past that are triggered by the current event and may feel very real right now. Our capacities for perception and response are among the most important factors determining or predicting our ability to be resilient and regain our balance going forward.
In trying to sort out what accounts for a person’s ability to cope with stress, it is useful to distinguish three different kinds of resources. The first is the external support available, and especially the network of social supports. The second bulwark against stress includes a person’s psychological resources, such as intelligence, education, and relevant personality factors. The third type of resource refers to the coping strategies that a person uses to confront the stress. Of these three factors, the third one is both the most important factor in determining what effects stress will have and the most flexible resource, the one most under our personal control.
— MIHALY CSIKSZENTMIHALYI, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
Thus the motto of this book is: “How you respond to the issue . . . is the issue.” (Deep bows to my colleague Frankie Perez at the Momentous Institute in Dallas, Texas, for that phrase.)
Shift Happens, Too
Whatever shit might be happening, the key to coping with the situation is how we shift our perception (our attitude) and our response (behavior). It may seem that there’s no end to external stressors, or to negative internal messages about how we’re coping with them. That’s why creating a shift in perception (attitude) and in our responses to those stressors and those messages (behaviors) may be the most effective choice we can make to strengthen our resilience.
You can experience this power of shifting your attitude and behavior by refocusing your attention from what just happened to how you are coping with what just happened.
Darn! I dropped the plate! It’s shattered in a dozen pieces. Double darn — that was the special plate my aunt gave me when I graduated. Sigh. I’ll call my aunt to tell her. We’ll commiserate. Maybe we can shop for another special plate next week — it will be a good excuse for a visit.
Three thousand bucks for a new transmission! That’s a lot of money. And. . . at least it’s something fixable. The car will still run for another five years, and. . . we’ll take one less week of vacation this year, and . . . in the very long run this is just a big bump on a pickle.
The doc wants to run more tests. Not such good news. This is really, really hard. Well, better to know, better to get the information I need to deal with this head on.
The big lesson of this practice is that if we can shift our attitude and behavior in these circumstances, we can shift them in any circumstances. Knowing this is the big shift.
Between a stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. The last of human freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.
— attributed to VIKTOR FRANKL
This shift is how we move from “poor me” to an empowered, active “I.” It’s a shift from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset, a way of keeping the mind open to learning. We can change any internal messages we may be hearing about how we are coping (or not) or have coped (or not) in the past. Strengthening resilience includes coming to see ourselves as people who can be resilient, are competent at coping, and are competent at learning how to cope.
Neuroplasticity
All of the capacities that develop and strengthen your resilience — inner calm in the midst of the storms, seeing options clearly, shifting perspectives and responding flexibly, choosing to choose wise actions, persevering in the face of doubt and discouragement — all of these capacities are innate in your own being because they are evolutionarily innate in your own brain.
All your life, your brain has the flexibility to create new patterns of response to life events because of its neuroplasticity. A mature adult brain is physically stable, but its functioning is fluid and malleable, not inert or fixed. Your brain can grow new neurons, connect those neurons in new circuits, embed new learning in new neural networks of memory and habit, and rewire those networks whenever it needs to.
The adult brain’s ability to continue to develop and change its functioning — lifelong — is without question the most exciting discovery of modern neuroscience. Neuroplasticity in the adult human brain was accepted as scientific truth only about thirty years ago, with the development of imaging technology that allowed neuroscientists to see these changes actually happening in the prefrontal cortex, the brain’s center of executive functioning, as well as elsewhere in the brain. Neuroplasticity is the engine of all learning, at every point in the human life span.
Neuroplasticity means that all of the capacities of resilience you need are learnable and recoverable. Even if you didn’t fully develop your capacities for resilience in early life — maybe because of a lack of healthy role models, less-than-secure early attachment, or the experience of too many adversities or traumas before your brain had developed the necessary circuitry to cope — you can develop them now. That’s right. The human brain can always learn new patterns of coping, install those patterns in new neural circuitry, and even rewire the old circuitry when old patterns no longer serve a constructive purpose. The neural networks underlying your coping strategies and behaviors can be shaped and modified by your own choices, by self-directed neuroplasticity. You can learn, change, and grow now because your brain can learn, change, and grow always.
Nurturing Response Flexibility in the Brain
Self-directed neuroplasticity requires the engagement of the prefrontal cortex, the center of executive functioning in the brain. It’s the structure we rely on most for our planning, decision-making, analyses, and judgments. The prefrontal cortex also performs many other functions essential to our resilience: it regulates functions of the body and the nervous system, manages a broad range of emotions, and quells the fear response of the amygdala. (That quelling is essential for resilience!) The prefrontal cortex allows us to attune to the felt sense of our experience and that of others, to empathize with the meaning of our experience and that of others, and to become aware of the self as it evolves through time. It is the seat of our inner moral compass. And it is the structure of response flexibility — our capacity to shift gears, perspectives, attitudes, and behaviors.
All of these capacities, especially the capacity to shift gears smoothly, mature as your prefrontal cortex matures. All of the brain’s growth, development, learning, unlearning, and rewiring is dependent on experience. Experience is how the brain learns, unlearns, and relearns anything, ever. That’s obvious in our initial development: learning to walk, talk, read, play baseball, and bake cookies.
We now know that experience is the catalyst of the brain’s neuroplasticity and learning for our entire lives. At any time, we can choose the experiences that direct the brain’s learning toward better functioning. Resilience can be strengthened — or diminished — at any time by experience.
As noted by Richard J. Davidson, founder and director of the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds, University of Wisconsin, Madison: “The brain is shaped by experience. And based upon everything we know about the brain in neuroscience, change is not only possible, but is actually the rule rather than the exception. It’s really just a question of which influences we’re going to choose for the brain. And because we have a choice about what experiences we want to use to shape our brain, we have a responsibility to choose the experiences that will shape the brain toward the wise and the wholesome.”
How Response Flexibility Can Get Derailed
Let’s look at four sets of experiences that can affect the development of the brain’s response flexibility and can explain why we sometimes experience difficulties in being resilient and coping.
1. EARLY ENTRAINMENT AND ATTACHMENT CONDITIONING
Because our earliest experiences kindle the development and maturation of the brain’s prefrontal cortex, we get a head start in developing response flexibility when the people closest to us growing up — parents, other family members, peers, teachers, coaches, and other important adults — have and demonstrate this capacity themselves. We learn from these role models by observing what helps them cope and what doesn’t — keeping calm and carrying on or stomping out the door in tight-lipped anger.
We have this capacity to observe and replicate responses because our brains are entrained to function in precisely the same way that other brains around us are functioning, especially when we are very young. This entrainment in our early attachment relationships (other brains doing our learning for us) is the neurobiological underpinning of conditioning our behavior: it is nature’s way of being efficient. Your brain learns to regulate its own nervous system as a result of that nervous system being regulated by people around you. It learns to manage and express a wide range of emotions by having those emotions perceived and validated by people around you. And it learns to attune to its own experiences by people around you attuning to your experiences.
Much of this conditioned learning happens by three years of age, before there is even any conscious awareness of its happening. The brain encodes this procedural learning into implicit memory (out of awareness). This, too, is part of the brain’s extraordinary efficiency.
The brain learns most of its processes for regulating itself, responding and relating to others in this way, from others before we begin to make our own choices and learn on our own. Research has shown that secure attachment and early entrainment to other healthy brains and well-regulated nervous systems are the best buffers we have against later stress and trauma.
As we grow older, we do begin to make our own choices and learn on our own. The prefrontal cortex matures, and we learn less through entrainment (though that process can continue throughout life) and more from our own expanding capacities of self-awareness, self-reflection, and self-acceptance. These capacities support an increasing ability to select the experiences we want to use that can develop all of our brain’s capacities, and all of those experiences create changes in our brain’s neural circuitry and thus in our behaviors.
2. IF RESPONSE FLEXIBILITY DIDN’T FULLY MATURE
Alas, if our earliest attachment relationships didn’t provide that skillful entrainment and shaping of the brain’s development or the role modeling of resilience — if we experienced too much neglect or indifference, criticism or rejection, or mixed messages and unpredictability — our brain will struggle to develop the capacities it needs to be resilient: regulating our stress responses and powerful emotions of anger, fear, sadness; learning how to trust ourselves and trust others; learning how to make sense of what’s really happening and what to do about it; learning how to shift gears; learning how to learn.
The growth of the neural circuitry needed to support resilience can bog down in defensiveness and rigidity or fail to gel and remain chaotic — states that my colleague Bonnie Badenoch calls “neural cement” or “neural swamp.” Instead we develop habits of coping that are not very skillful — either not flexible enough or stable enough. (Please note: This is entirely normal in human experience.)
3. ADVERSE CHILDHOOD EXPERIENCES AND TRAUMA
Too many adverse childhood experiences, such as abuse, addiction, or violence in the home or community, can make it difficult for a growing child to learn to cope at all because those experiences compromise the organic development of the brain. For a child who grows up with an alcoholic parent and a bullying older brother and another parent in denial about the behaviors of either, the trauma in the home can overwhelm and even traumatize the growing brain. Such disruption can prevent the brain from developing properly, which impairs its capacities for learning to cope. Thinking and memory can be impaired, and the ability to regulate emotions and relate to others can be very compromised. A young person may learn to cope by dissociating: “checking out,” not being present. In this state, a person’s sense of aliveness, of hope for the future, and sense of self can disappear, too.
4. ACUTE TRAUMA
At any time, the impact of acute trauma — such as catastrophic illness, the death of a loved one, the loss of a home in a natural disaster — can knock the functioning of the prefrontal cortex offline, at least temporarily. Without the more comprehensive options offered by the higher brain, we find ourselves resorting to the more limited reactivity of the survival-oriented lower brain and the automatic patterns already conditioned in our neural circuitry. Researchers have found that 75 percent of all Americans experience at least one traumatizing event in their lifetime, so most of us can expect a real challenge to our resilience at some point in our lives. Researchers have also found, as stated so eloquently by Peter Levine, developer of Somatic Experiencing trauma therapy, that “trauma is a fact of life. It doesn’t have to be a life sentence.”
Here’s the good news. Even if your capacity for response flexibility didn’t fully mature as you were growing up or seems derailed now by some disruptive life event, you can still make the choices now that will help you fully develop and recover your capacities of resilience.
Let’s explore processes of brain change you can learn now to do precisely that.
Conditioning, and Three Ways to Change Your Conditioning
These processes of brain change are all amply validated by the discoveries of modern neuroscience. All of them are simplified here for ease of understanding and application.
The brain learns from experience. You’ll be able to say that in your sleep by the time you finish reading this chapter. Any experience, any experience at all, positive or negative, causes neurons in the brain to fire: that is, to exchange information through electrical and chemical signals. Repeating the experience causes the brain to repeat the neural firings, thus repeating patterns of response, whether positive or negative. This is known as conditioning. The well-known axiom in modern neuroscience is from the Canadian neuroscientist Donald Hebb: “Neurons that fire together wire together.”
Picture rain falling down a hillside. At first it trickles down the hillside more or less at random, but eventually the flow of water carves grooves and ruts, and then bigger gullies, into the hillside. Once those have formed, the water travels down the hillside only in those grooves and gullies. In the same way, our brain develops pathways and patterns of response that, unless we intervene, cause us to automatically respond to a stressor in the same way that we have responded before. Conditioning is what encodes all of our early learning about coping.
The brain does this kind of learning and encoding all the time, on its own, when we’re not directing it to do something else. When we’re not guiding the installing of new patterns of coping in the brain, or rewiring old patterns, the brain continues to do its own learning and automatically encodes responses in its neural circuitry. We don’t have to teach the brain how to learn, and we can’t stop it from learning. We can, however, guide that learning when we wish to rewire what the brain has already learned.
The brain comes equipped with many patterns that have become hardwired over the course of human evolution. The fight-flight-freeze-fold responses are the automatic survival responses of our nervous system that cause us to recoil from a spider, jump out of the way of a speeding car, or collapse in helplessness without any conscious processing at all. Negativity bias is the tendency (again, an unconscious one) to store memories of negative events more readily than memories of positive events. This trait, which alerts us quickly to danger, has been essential for human survival, but it is not always supportive of individual well-being. Our brain unconsciously filters our perceptions of other people into “like me” and “not like me,” based on gender, race, language, and culture. This tendency to automatically perceive us versus them is another trait that is important for survival but potentially problematic in daily living.
We can intentionally create new habits of response to these automatic reactions. In the next several chapters we’ll explore ways to rewire habits or rules of response learned from our family or culture of origin that are no longer serving us, such as withdrawing in passive anger rather than telling someone directly we need them to be kinder, or dismissing someone and their potential because they don’t fit our preconceptions of “good” or “capable.”
Any time we want to lay down new wiring or rewire old previously conditioned patterns of coping, we can use the three processes of brain change described below.
2. New Conditioning
New conditioning is my term for the process of deliberately and intentionally choosing to engage in a new activity or experience that will shift the functioning and habits of the brain in a particular direction. Any time you begin a gratitude practice, deepen your listening skills, work on strengthening the focus of your attention, cultivate more self-compassion or self-acceptance, and repeat the practice over time, you are using new conditioning to create new learning, new circuitry, and new habits of response to life events, even potentially or previously traumatizing ones. You are creating new wiring in the brain, new memories, and new ways of being that can become long-lasting positive habits.
New conditioning does not undo old conditioning. When you’re stressed or tired, your brain will default to its old patterns. It’s easier and more efficient for the brain to do what it already knows how to do. But with enough repetition, you can create a choice point in the brain’s functioning, and with the next process, reconditioning, you actually can rewire the old circuits.
3. Reconditioning
The technical name for reconditioning is memory deconsolidation-reconsolidation. In recent years, new scanning technology has allowed neuroscientists to see this process actually at work in the brain, but it has been the basis of trauma therapy for decades.
You begin the process of reconditioning by deliberately, carefully, and skillfully bringing to your conscious awareness a memory of a previous experience that derailed your resilience, your reactions to that experience, and the way you think and feel about yourself now because of that derailing. By focusing on this experience, you activate or “light up” the entire neural network that holds the memory of the experience: visual images, body sensations, emotions, locations in your body where you feel those emotions, thoughts you had about yourself at the time, and thoughts you have about yourself now. This activating of the neural network is the key to rewiring it.
For instance, if you’re still haunted by the memory of the time that you failed to show up for an important meeting and then lied to people about why you didn’t make the meeting, and you’re now hesitant to attend any more of those meetings because you’re afraid of what people will think of you, and your hesitancy is getting in the way of advancing in your job, you start addressing the issue by bringing to mind every detail that you can remember of that original event, including how that makes you feel and think about yourself now.
You can learn to use this reconditioning process by yourself. However, it’s crucially important to avoid becoming overwhelmed or retraumatized by the old memory. For this reason, it’s important to work with only a small part of the memory at a time, so that your brain feels safe enough to do the learning and rewiring. (The exercises in chapters 2–7 provide many opportunities to learn the process.)
Once the negative memory has been activated and is available for rewiring, you deliberately juxtapose it in your awareness with a stronger, more positive, more resilience-based memory or even an imaginary event, holding both the original negative and the new positive experiences in your awareness at the same time (or alternating between the two). The juxtaposition causes the original neural network to fall apart (deconsolidate) and rewire again (reconsolidate) a fraction of a second later. That’s the process that neuroscientists can now see with brain imaging technology. When the new positive memory or experience is stronger than the previous negative one, it will “trump” and rewire the negative memory.
For example, you can rewire the memory of failing to show up for the meeting and then lying about that by imagining a different ending to that scenario, even if that scenario couldn’t have happened in real life. You might imagine that you met with two key people from that meeting a few days later and explained to them why you didn’t come to the meeting, even if your reasons were pretty lame; you imagine apologizing for your lapse in good judgment and even more for lying, and offering ways to make amends. You imagine these two people being understanding and forgiving (even if that could never happen in real life), and then imagine yourself showing up for the next meeting.
This mechanism doesn’t change what originally happened — it can’t — but it does change your relationship to what happened. It doesn’t rewrite history, but it does rewire the brain. You don’t forget the old memory, but it no longer has the same charge or power to throw you off track. People who use this process of reconditioning to rewire a previously negative memory often say, “Huh! What was I so upset about?”
Both new conditioning and reconditioning rely on a focused mode of processing in the brain. We deliberately focus the attention of the brain on a particular task, a particular exercise. When neuroscientists first began scanning the brains of research subjects to learn what structures of the brain worked together as they played music, watched scenes of combat on the news, or mourned the loss of a pet, the scientists assumed that when the subjects weren’t asking the brain to do something, like name a color or solve a puzzle, the brain would be quiet.
Well, not exactly. They learned that the brain “at rest” is more active than ever — not just in certain brain regions but all over the brain. This has come to be known as the default network mode of brain activity: it’s what the brain does on its own when we’re not consciously focusing attention on a task. We can use this mode for what I call deconditioning.
4. Deconditioning
When you’re not consciously engaging the brain’s attention, it goes into default network mode and plays, creating its own associations and links, meandering where it wants to, and connecting the dots in new ways. This is the mode of processing involved in imagination and intuition. It is what’s happening when you are lost in reverie or have a sudden insight or “aha!” moment.
Deconditioning exercises, using your imagination in guided visualizations and guided meditations, open up what Dan Siegel at the Mindsight Institute at UCLA calls “the plane of open possibilities” for your brain. You can harness the new insights generated from your brain’s meandering and playing to create new behaviors.
I have two important cautions about using the default network mode of processing to recover resilience.
First, because the default network is where you process your social sense of self, activating it can tip you into worry and rumination: Do they like me? Do I belong? Did I just do something stupid in front of other people? What do they think of me? People who practice mindfulness meditation are familiar with the brain’s tendency to slip into that pattern of rumination, sometimes called “wandering mind” or “monkey mind.” For instance, while trying to focus attention on the breath or on a mantra, you’ll find your brain drifting into thoughts about what’s for dinner or next summer’s vacation, an argument with a coworker, or worry about a friend’s divorce. When you’re carrying any shame, worry, or anguish about yourself or an unresolved, disturbing event, your brain can chew on those thoughts and emotions over and over.
Second, when a disturbing or painful memory that we have pushed out of awareness starts to come back into our awareness, the brain will sometimes avoid confronting it by dissociating: checking out, staying focused on something pleasant, or going into a fog. The potentially disturbing or painful memory is not present in conscious awareness at all. Dissociation is one of the brain’s most powerful mechanisms to protect us from being overwhelmed by stress, pain, or trauma. Our brains can dissociate almost from the day we’re born, and dissociation can indeed support our resilience when we’re coping with traumas of violence or abuse from which there is no other escape.
We have probably all dissociated in small ways at some point in our lives: bored to death in third grade, you might have drifted off into daydream or a reverie; maybe you just mentally disappeared until the bell rang. There’s no shame or blame here. But dissociation is not the same as consciously processing something in the default mode network in order to increase awareness and learn from it.
You can instantly pull the brain out of rumination or dissociation by focusing your attention on something in the present moment — the sensations of breathing or of your feet touching the ground. But you can also use the positive aspect of the default network, imagination and free association, to spontaneously and randomly create new insights and behaviors from your own deep, intuitive wisdom.
Conditioning, new conditioning, reconditioning, deconditioning: there’s a particular wisdom to learning the processes of brain change in that order.
Conditioning creates neural circuitry in your brain all of your life. You want to become aware of previously conditioned patterns of response because those patterns, now stored in your implicit (out-of-awareness) memory, can be triggered by a current event and make you react as you have always reacted, before you have the chance to decide whether that’s how you want to respond.
Sometimes your conditioned responses are still right on target; sometimes they are no longer so useful. The tricky thing is, implicit memories have no time stamp. When they come to the surface “out of the blue,” they feel as real to you now as they did back then, and you may react as if the remembered events were happening right now, not realizing they are a memory. When you become aware of these patterns (something you will practice doing throughout this book), you can choose to rewire them or create new habits of response altogether.
New conditioning creates new neural circuitry and new, more skillful, more resilient patterns of response. These new circuits run alongside or on top of the old circuits, giving you far more options when faced with new or recurrent challenges.
With more new options available and with more stability within the brain itself, you can choose to use reconditioning to deliberately rewire old patterns as you become aware of them. This process is powerful. When used consciously and carefully, reconditioning allows you to focus your attention and not only rewire old patterns but also deliberately create changes in brain structure.
When you become skillful at focusing the attention of your brain, you can learn to consciously defocus your attention, too, letting the brain play without the hovering guardianship of the prefrontal cortex, while knowing you can come back to focused attention in a heartbeat if you need to. In the default network mode, the brain creates its own associations and links, connecting dots in new and sometimes very imaginative ways. This process of deconditioning generates our deep, intuitive wisdom. Exercises throughout this book help you practice accessing that wisdom.
As you become proficient at using these processes to create more resilience in your perceptions of events and your responses to them, you will begin to develop a sense of yourself as someone who can use these processes to effectively create brain change. You can see yourself as someone who can learn tools to cope with difficulty, disappointment, even disaster. You can realize that you can become more resilient; you can move into thriving and flourishing.
The Five Intelligences
Chapters 2–7 offer many tools using these three processes of brain change to help you strengthen what I call your five intelligences.
1. Somatic Intelligence
Accessing your somatic intelligence — the innate intelligence of your body — involves using body-based tools, such as breath, touch, movement, social engagement, and visualization, to manage the stress and survival responses of your nervous system, to engage the more comprehensive functioning of your higher brain, and to return the body-brain to its natural physiological equilibrium. Developing this intelligence strengthens your sense of safety and trust and primes the neuroplasticity of your brain for learning. Your “range of resilience” greatly expands; you are willing and able to try new behaviors and take new risks.
By developing your emotional intelligence, you acquire tools to manage powerful surges of anger, fear, grief, shame, and guilt; to cultivate the positive emotions that shift your brain out of contraction, reactivity, and negativity and into more openness, receptivity, and response flexibility; and to cultivate the practices of compassion, mindful empathy, and theory of mind that allow you to skillfully engage with and ride the waves of other people’s emotions as well.
3. Relational Intelligence within Yourself
In accessing relational intelligence as it relates to your sense of self, you learn to claim the resilience you already have and the wisdom of your wiser self; to retire the inner critic who may threaten to derail your sense of competence, courage, and healthy connections with others; and to accept, integrate, and even embrace all the various inner voices and parts that make up your personal self. You recover and strengthen your “home base” of a secure, trustworthy, and courageous self, the foundation of your resilience, of anything you wish to be.
4. Relational Intelligence with Others
Relational intelligence involves learning how to engage with other people, in both intimate and social relationships, in ways that allow you to trust and connect with them as refuges and resources of resilience. You learn to connect with people without becoming enmeshed, as well as to differentiate yourself from them without becoming withdrawn or cut off; you develop a healthy interdependence with the common humanity of others, initiating and deepening relationships that are healthy, resonant, productive, and fulfilling.
5. Reflective Intelligence
Using reflective intelligence, you practice mindful awareness to see clearly what is happening and your reactions to what is happening, to intentionally shift and rewire habitual thought processes that block your brain’s response flexibility, and to cultivate the mental equanimity that allows you to discern options and make wise choices.
The Three Levels of Disruption
Strengthening all five of these intelligences will help you navigate any level of disruption to your resilience. In this book I classify disruptions into three levels:
Wobble is what happens in life, moment by moment, but your inner base of resilience can be pretty stable. The response flexibility in your prefrontal cortex allows you to face any new situation, any unknown, and any uncertainty with calm confidence. No matter what is happening, you don’t wobble very much. This book offers many tools for developing and stabilizing this inner secure base. No matter what is happening, you can return quickly and reliably to the felt sense of this home base.
Level 2. Glitches and Heartaches, Sorrows and Struggles
Shit happens. You’re thrown off center briefly, or sometimes for longer, and your resilience is derailed for a time. But shift can happen, too. You use many tools and techniques that allow you to recover and respond capably. You choose to show up and use your skills to right yourself and regain your footing fairly quickly, fairly reliably.
Level 3. Too Much
Rarely do people get to face difficulties, let alone disasters, one at a time, at a time of their choosing, from a clean slate of no prior difficulties. Sometimes life hits us with more than we can handle. Maybe one terrible thing has happened, maybe many things are happening all at once. Maybe too many catastrophes or too much trauma happened too early in life. The defensive coping strategies we may have learned early on can compromise the natural development of the prefrontal cortex, hindering any new learning and limiting our ability to respond flexibly now. Maybe the effects of too many disasters have accumulated over time and weakened our resilience. When we face disruptions that seem like just too much, there’s a potential for trauma. Learning to process and move through a trauma is foundational to recovering your resilience.
You may find yourself experiencing any of these three levels of disruption to your resilience at any time in your life. The tools offered in this book can help you navigate them all. You can figure out which tools you need, based on the level of resilience strengthening you need for the particular circumstances you are dealing with, and rewire your brain as you need to.
Accelerating Brain Change
In my work, I’ve discovered five practices that accelerate these processes of brain change.
1. Little and Often Works Best
The brain is always learning from experience, any experience, positive or negative. That’s our neurobiology. Neuroscientists have also discovered that the brain learns best through a practice of little and often: small experiences repeated many times. In other words, you might be better off meditating for ten minutes a day, every day, than meditating for an hour only once a week. It may be more conducive to your brain’s learning to shift perspectives if you notice and write down three to five things you are grateful for every evening rather than making a list of twenty things all at once on the weekend.
The neuroscientist Richard Davidson observes that mindfulness and self-compassion practices are two of the most powerful agents of brain change known to science. These practices operate precisely in the way that the brain learns best: through moment-by-moment-by-moment practice, repeated many, many times.
When we are trying to undo the effects of negative, harmful, or traumatic experiences, little and often is the way to go, working with one small part of the memory at a time. We take baby steps so that the brain doesn’t get overwhelmed or retraumatized. This practice of little and often not only allows us to learn and reinforce new learning most effectively; it also helps us unlearn unhelpful patterns and lay down new ones most effectively.
2. Safety Primes Neuroplasticity
The need for resilience arises in the first place because we are facing something new or unknown, some difficulty or danger, some challenge or crisis. We develop our capacities for resilience each time we successfully engage with those unknowns, resolve the difficulties, and emerge on the other side of a crisis or trauma. But the brain also needs a perception (neuroception) of safety within itself in order to prime the neuroplasticity that does all of this learning and rewiring. A relaxed brain is better able to perceive and integrate what it learns from any experience than is a brain that is tense, contracted, and narrowly focused on survival.
In chapter 2, you’ll learn about the natural physiological equilibrium of the brain and how to work with it skillfully. Being calm and relaxed, yet engaged and alert, allows the brain — you — to skillfully meet any upset, distress, potential danger, or life threat. You stay centered in that equilibrium, consciously present for the experience, able to keep calm and carry on.
This natural equilibrium in the brain is known in psychotherapy as the range of resilience, and in trauma therapy as the window of tolerance. There’s a similar concept in the Buddhist wisdom tradition, where it’s known as equanimity — the ability to witness the tumult of life with calm eyes. And there’s a story from that tradition to illustrate the power of this kind of inner safety zone.
A Buddhist master and his disciples were meditating one day when a bandit and his gang, who had been terrorizing the countryside, burst into the temple. The monks fled, but the master quietly continued his contemplation practice. Furious at the master’s lack of reaction to him, the bandit drew his sword, raised it above his head, and thundered, “Don’t you understand? I could run you through with this sword and not bat an eye!” The master calmly replied, “Don’t you understand? I could be run through by your sword and not bat an eye.” The bandit was so unnerved by the master’s equanimity that he and his followers turned and fled, never to be seen again.
That’s a high bar for staying calm in the face of danger, but you get the idea. Learning to maintain that kind of equilibrium allows you to face a potential disaster full on without going into your automatic survival responses of fight, flight, freeze, or fold.
3. Positive Emotions Shift Brain Function
All emotions, negative as well as positive, are powerful signals from the body to the brain that say, “Something important is happening! Pay attention!” Chapter 3 offers you tools for managing the surges of even the most difficult — some would say destructive — emotions so that you can be informed and motivated by them without being overwhelmed or hijacked. You’ll even learn how to rewire the habitual responses you may have when those negative emotions arise.
But first, you’ll look at the power of positive emotions to shift the functioning of the brain out of contraction and reactivity and into more openness, receptivity, and optimism. The direct, measurable cause and effect outcome of this shift is greater resilience. You learn to cultivate positive emotions — gratitude, awe, and delight — not just to shift your mood and help you feel better but to enable your brain to do better, to be wise and more skillful in all your interactions.
4. Resonant Relationships Teach Us New Strategies
Being truly seen, understood, accepted, and validated by another person for who we truly are encourages us to understand, accept, validate, and value ourselves for who we are. It helps us develop the inner secure base of resilience that is essential to navigating the world with calm, courage, and competence. It’s what allows us to trust other people both as refuges and as resources for our resilience.
Maybe you didn’t get to experience or trust this valuing and appreciation early in your growing up. Close to half of us didn’t. You may still be carrying patterns of mistrust (of yourself or others) from earlier in your life — patterns reinforced by repeated experiences of hurt, betrayal, neglect, abandonment, rejection, and criticism. Chapters 4 and 5 introduce you to many tools and techniques for undoing and rewiring those patterns, helping you fully recover that trust. They will help you develop the interpersonal skills — such as reaching out for help, negotiating change, and setting limits and boundaries — that allow you to engage in relationships, both intimate and social, that are a fundamental source of well-being and support for your resilience.
In her book Love 2.0, the positive psychology pioneer Barbara Fredrickson shows us how the foundation for resonant relationships might develop. When two people are in physical proximity, making eye contact, sharing positive emotions (kindness, serenity, joy) and a sense of mutual care and concern, their brain wave patterns begin to sync up, mirroring each other, creating a sense of resonance that I would call trust and she calls love.
This neural synchrony is probably fueled by the release of oxytocin, the hormone of safety and trust, which I talk more about in chapter 2. Oxytocin brings you into that safety zone that creates optimal conditions for neuroplasticity, and thus for learning and growth. We’ll explore where it’s possible to create these moments of relational resonance or neural synchrony — with parents or parental figures, siblings, friends, teachers, coaches, therapists, romantic partners, spouses, support groups, or therapy groups — to help resilience take root in your psyche and in your brain.
5. Conscious Reflection Helps Us See Clearly and Choose Wisely
The brain can process experiences without going through conscious awareness. Very often traumatizing experiences are encoded in a person’s neural circuitry as implicit somatic memories from a time when the person was too young to form conscious memories of specific situations and events. But the same unconscious processing can happen with positive or neutral experiences. The brain does that all the time. Your commute route can be so deeply encoded in your brain that you can drive to work on automatic pilot, only “waking up” when you turn down the wrong street and suddenly everything looks different. The brain can register a vibe from someone at a party before you consciously remember where you’ve met them before.
When you want to create and install new patterns of perceiving and behaving in your brain, however, you need to engage in conscious reflection so that the resources of resilience you create are retrievable and usable. Conscious reflection is not exactly the same as thinking. It has more to do with knowing what you’re experiencing while you’re experiencing it. You’re becoming aware of your perceptions of experience and your responses to experience all part of firing of your neural circuitry) so that you can rewire any patterns of beliefs, attitudes, identities, or behaviors that are blocking your resilience.
Cultivating a mindfulness practice is a reliable method of increasing your conscious reflection. Mindfulness not only focuses your attention and allows you to experience the consciousness that can hold and reflect on any content, but it also strengthens the structures of the brain that you use to focus attention, to reflect on experience, to shift your perspective, to discern options, and to choose wise actions. I present this invaluable, self-strengthening practice in chapter 6.
It may seem a stretch to claim that employing the tools that support these processes, intelligences, and practices can really enable you to cope with anything and everything, but that is what you will practice in chapter 7: integrating the practices that can lead to a rewired brain and full-on resilience.
The underlying theme of this book is that you can choose to choose experiences, moment by moment, that develop your neural circuitry and build greater resilience. You can learn to “change your brain to change your life for the better” in ways that are often immediate and permanent. And learning how the brain works to create those moments of choice and change gives you a genuine sense of mastery and competence.
Catch the moment; make a choice.
— JANET FRIEDMAN
Every moment has a choice and every choice has an impact.
— JULIA BUTTERFLY HILL
The goal of this book is precisely to give you these tools and choices.
Let’s continue.