Caring for and Nourishing Your Amazing Brain
Lifestyle Choices That Support Resilience
The human brain is the most dazzlingly complex entity in the entire known universe: eighty billion brain cells, with additional neural cells throughout the body. Each neuron connects across synaptic gaps to thousands of other neurons, resulting in trillions of connections responsible for all of the brain’s internal communications and processing and all of our external behaviors and creations. Neuroscientists are beginning to map those connections, drawing the brain’s neural “connectome,” much as molecular biologists have mapped the human genome. There are as many neuronal connections in a single cubic centimeter of brain tissue as there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy. All this in what my friend Rick Hanson calls “3½ pounds of tofu in the coconut.” Contemplating the brain boggles the mind.
Protecting and nurturing the functioning of your brain is important for your long-term health and well-being. You can make lifestyle choices that protect, exercise, and strengthen the physical brain, which in turn supports the complexity of all of your emotional, relational, and cognitive functioning, which supports your resilience.
This chapter differs from the preceding ones, presenting seven lifestyle choices you can make that support the health and functioning of your physical brain:
exercise and movement
sleep and rest
nutrition
laughter and play
hanging out with healthy brains
digital vacations
All of the exercises are still organized by the processes of brain change you use to get the most benefit for your brain — new conditioning, reconditioning, deconditioning — at any level of challenge to your resilience. Begin “little and often,” enjoy the process, and savor the way your brain’s increased flexibility and vitality support your resilience.
Exercise and Movement
Research in the last ten years has made it abundantly clear — we need to move our bodies not just for the health of our heart, lungs, muscles, and joints, but also for the health of our brain. One of the best things you can do for your physical brain is to break a sweat with aerobic exercise.
Vigorous exercise makes your brain release brain-derived neurotropic factor (BDNF). This is the hormonal growth factor that causes your brain to grow new neurons, particularly in the hippocampus, the structure of the brain that consolidates learning from new experiences into long-term memory. BDNF also stimulates those new neurons to increase the length, density, and complexity of their dendrites (the extensions of the neurons that receive input from other neurons), creating “thicker,” more complex networks in the brain. In addition, BDNF speeds the maturation of new neurons into fully functioning brain cells. This protects related structures, like the prefrontal cortex, from brain atrophy and cognitive decline. Exercise makes you smarter. It can help you think more clearly well into old age. Exercise can even help reverse memory decline as you age.
The adult brain weighs only about three pounds, but it uses 20 percent of all of the oxygen consumed by the body. Regular exercise also stimulates the heart to pump more blood to the brain, increasing the flow of oxygen and glucose in the brain that fuels all of the brain’s activity. Furthermore, exercise causes the release of essential neurotransmitters like serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine that stimulate various types of brain activity; endorphins that make you feel better (the source of the “runner’s high” or “athlete’s flow” that some people experience); and acetylcholine, which increases alertness. Because of these effects, exercise has been shown to be as effective an antidepressant as Prozac in head-to-head clinical trials.
Exercise regenerates our telomeres, the protective protein sheaths at the ends of our chromosomes, likened to the plastic caps on the ends of our shoelaces that keep our shoelaces from unraveling. Because telomeres keep our chromosomes from unraveling as they replicate, protecting our telomeres prevents copying errors in our DNA and extends our span of healthy life. Exercise also extends our span of healthy life because it acts as an anti-inflammatory, reducing the underlying causes of many systemic diseases and delaying the onset of degenerative diseases.
The body needs to move for about thirty minutes for the brain to release feel-good endorphins. Three times a week is good enough. Five times a week is great. Little and often applies here, too: moderate exercise over several days is more effective (and safer) than a big workout once a week.
Activities like running, vigorous walking, bicycling, swimming, and using the stair climber at the gym are bilateral movements (moving the two sides of the body alternately, thus stimulating the two hemispheres of your brain alternately) and have an especially calming effect on your nervous system while nourishing your brain. Exercising with others — dancing, tennis, basketball, and volleyball — activates your social engagement system, creating a sense of safety in the brain and priming its neuroplasticity. Activities like these also engage the dopamine pathway of pleasure and reward in the lower brain that keeps you motivated. Mix it up to keep your exercise routine interesting. Recruit a buddy or join a good gym to expand your options and enhance your motivation.
If aerobic exercise is reaching beyond your body’s physical capacities, see exercise 8-2 for gentler exercises that help you move your body and nourish your brain.
New Conditioning
It’s a lot easier for your brain to create a new habit than to override or eliminate an old one. Using tools of new conditioning, you can create new, healthy habits, knowing that you are choosing to work out and protect your precious brain every day.
EXERCISE 8-1: Four-Minute Brain and Body Workout
When there’s simply not enough time in the day to work out at the gym, or go for a swim, hike, or bike ride, try these simple four-minute exercise routines to stimulate growth and health in your brain. You can repeat them several times a day if you wish.
1. Walk up and down flights of stairs to your favorite upbeat song for four minutes.
2. Do a combination of desk push-ups and squats at work. Invite a friend or coworker to do this exercise with you.
3. While you are brushing your teeth, do a set of deep leg squats and side bends. Face the mirror and slowly lean your torso to the right and to the left, stretching out the ribs on the side opposite to the direction you are leaning.
4. Play a four-minute game of tag with your kids, or borrow a friend’s kids to play tag with. Be a kid again yourself by spinning a hula hoop for four minutes. It’s an amazing aerobic workout for your abdominal and core muscles.
5. Set a timer for four minutes, and clean up as much of your home or office as you can as fast as you can. Try cleaning the bathtub or do some speed vacuuming or mopping; that can really work up a sweat, and the chore will be over in four minutes!
Though you may not trigger a runner’s high in four minutes of exercise, your brain is getting many of the other benefits of vigorous exercise, including protecting its long-term functioning.
EXERCISE 8-2: Life Is a Gym: Exercising through Daily Activities
There is a poster in my doctor’s office at Kaiser Permanente showing a woman carrying two bags of groceries walking down a sidewalk with the caption “Life Is a Gym.” Whatever your lifestyle, you need to move your body every sixty to ninety minutes to refresh your brain. Incorporating frequent movement into your daily routine is essential for maintaining brain health and it’s easy to do.
1. If you work at a desk, get off the computer, get up, and walk down the hall or around the block. You can get hyperfocused or feel the stress of a deadline and forget, but taking regular breaks helps your brain refresh and reset itself; you avoid brain fog or brain fatigue.
2. Walk to work. Park a few blocks away from work and walk from there. Walk up the stairs. Walk at lunch. When you move your body, you nourish your brain.
3. Do your chores mindfully: pay attention to your movements when you make the bed, do the dishes, fold the laundry, pick up the kids’ toys, take out the garbage, weed the garden, mow the lawn, or wash the car. Notice the stretching, the bending, the flexing. Notice the changes in sensation, in balance, in energy. These tasks may not be aerobic, and they may not last thirty minutes, but they can all count. Study after study has shown that mindful movement brings extra benefit to the brain: the focused attention keeps the brain awake and engaged, giving it a workout, too.
4. A wonderful way to pay attention to movement is forest bathing (exercise 2-14). Walk through nature, noticing the feel of the air or sun on your body, hearing birdsong, smelling a flower or a pine needle, touching a stone or a leaf or the bark of a tree, seeing the changes in colors and shape, light and shadows. A walk of ten to sixty minutes is healing to the brain.
5. If your mobility is more limited, practice yoga, chi gong, or tai chi at home. This is mindful movement par excellence. The regular practices of gentle movements integrated with breath awareness benefit the brain more than exercise without awareness, or meditation practice without movement.
Keeping your body flexible and limber helps keep your brain flexible and agile, too, ready to meet the ever-changing challenges of life.
Reconditioning
Reconditioning uses a positive experience in one direction to rewire or reverse a negative experience from the opposite direction. Anat Baniel has developed neuromovement exercises based on the Feldenkrais Method, which uses very small movements in the body to reprogram the brain, helping it create new pathways from new experiences.
Our brains are organized through movement . . . . As we introduce new patterns of movement, combined with attention, our brains begin making thousands, millions, and even billions of new connections. These changes quickly translate into thinking that is clearer, movement that is easier . . . and action that is more successful.
— ANAT BANIEL, Move into Life: The Nine Essentials for Lifelong Vitality
1. Sit on the edge of a chair with both feet flat on the floor, a comfortable distance apart — approximately hip width. Rest your hands, palms down, on the tops of your thighs. Call this your neutral position. Turn your head to look to the right. Do so easily, always within your comfort range, without forcing anything. Notice how far you can turn your head comfortably. You might want to note a visual reference point you can use to measure changes as you go along. Now turn your head to the left and find a similar reference point.
2. Still sitting on the edge of the chair, place your right hand a few inches behind you on the seat of the chair and lean back on it so it’s bearing some of your weight. Turn your head to the right and then turn your head back to look straight ahead of you. Making sure you stay within your comfortable range of motion, notice how far to the right you can see. Repeat this movement two or three times. Then come back to the middle, placing both your hands back on your thighs, and rest for a moment.
3. Again, sit on the edge of your chair and place your right hand behind you and lean on it as before. Now lift your left arm, bend your elbow, and rest your chin on the back of your hand. Gently turn your head and your arm together, as one unit, to the right, and then come back to center. As you turn, make sure that your chin is in contact with the back of your left hand all the time. Do this movement three or four times. Stop, come back to your neutral position, and rest for a moment. Notice if there are any changes in the way you are sitting or feeling.
4. Using the same position as above, with your chin on the back of your left hand, turn to the right as far as is comfortable for you and hold that position. Now gently move only your eyes to the right and to the left. Repeat the movement three or four times, then stop and rest in your neutral position.
5. In the same position as step 4, turn as far as you comfortably can to the right and stay there. Now lift your left buttock off the chair an inch or so and put it back down three or four times. Feel how your ribs move on your left side, coming closer together and then moving farther apart as you lift and lower your left buttock. Stop, come back to neutral, and notice whether you are sitting differently on your right buttock than on the left.
6. Once again, lean on your right hand behind you and turn your head to the right. Notice whether your neck moves more easily and whether you can see farther behind you than before.
7. Now return to your neutral position, with both hands, palms down, on the tops of your thighs. Gently turn your head to the right, then to the left, and notice whether you turn your head more easily to the right than to the left. You have just experienced the power of movement with attention to stimulate the brain to reorganize its circuitry and learn new patterns.
8. Wait thirty to sixty minutes so that the improvement of the neuromovement on the right side of the body really installs in the brain. Then repeat the entire exercise for the left side of the body.
While we think of the motor cortex of the brain as directing the movements of the body from the top down, you can also use these micro movements to communicate new information to the brain, to “reverse engineer” new circuitry in the brain, creating pathways that make any movement easier and easier for the brain to direct.
Deconditioning
When your body moves playfully, your brain gets to play, too. You refresh your brain, allowing you to see yourself and events in your life from a new perspective.
EXERCISE 8-4: Dancing Your Brain to Health
To dance is to be out of yourself. Larger, more beautiful, more powerful.
— Agnes de Mille
Dance of any kind is good for the brain. Free-form dance is spontaneous movement that allows the brain to play. Whether you’re dancing to music, dancing with others, or dancing on your own to music in your head, the joy and delight evoked is as good as a coffee break to reset the brain.
1. You can dance anywhere — in your living room, in a ballroom, in a parking lot, on a playground, even lying on your couch. You can begin to dance spontaneously as the mood in your body moves you. Expressing grief or angst through movement is a powerful way to shift the bodily felt sense of those emotions.
2. Over time, you can build a playlist of music that helps you express or process various moods (light, heavy, open, closed) and various states (agitated, flowing, peaceful). Give yourself permission to dance through difficulties, even disasters. Playful movement is not a luxury; it’s an essential cultivator of response flexibility and a key component of our resilience.
Music and dance are older than spoken language. For millennia, human beings have expressed and communicated their innermost truths and met their most challenging struggles through music and dance. Tap into your body’s energy: dancing creates some breathing space in your brain to reset and restore.
Sleep and Rest
Enough sleep, and deep sleep, is essential to brain and body health. Many of us routinely don’t get enough sleep; our lives are too busy, too stressed. Young people especially don’t get enough sleep. Teenagers may get five to six hours of sleep a night at a stage of development when their brains need eight or nine hours to finish growing. Lack of sleep affects your metabolism, immune system, and genetic health — and especially brain health. If you get only five to six hours of sleep every night for a week, you likely have the same level of cognitive impairment as if you were legally drunk.
While you are sleeping, doing “nothing,” the brain is doing vital tasks:
1. Consolidating learning and memories from the day and storing that learning in long-term memory. Sleep optimizes cognitive functioning, restoring your ability to process information and retrieve information quickly when you are awake.
2. Restoring the equilibrium of the nervous system. Sleep absorbs the stress hormone cortisol. REM sleep is the only time the brain is clear of norepinephrine (adrenalin), processing memories of the day but without emotional charge. There’s less anxiety in the morning.
3. Regular housekeeping, cleaning out dead and atrophied neurons.
4. Allowing the prefrontal cortex to rest from its executive functioning and from controlling your impulses, making it better able to function again the next day. You have probably noticed that your judgment and impulse control are impaired when you are tired.
New Conditioning
EXERCISE 8-5: How to Get Enough Good Sleep
The stress hormone cortisol binds to BDNF in the hippocampus, killing newly forming brain cells. When you’re stressed, you have less brain power available to manage emotions and cope with challenges. Loss of brain cells leads to depression; lack of sleep can double recovery time from depression.
Many of the exercises in chapter 2 are designed to help you manage the stress that can derail your resilience anytime in your life. You can further enhance your resilience by destressing at night. In Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, Robert Sapolsky points out that the brain is not like the engine of a car that you turn on and off with a switch: it’s more like a jet plane that needs a long runway to take off and to slow down on landing. Similarly, the brain needs time to land in a good night’s sleep. Here are some ways to improve sleep.
1. Stop daily activities one hour before bedtime. Destressing may mean not watching the evening news; watch a movie instead. Turn off the computer and your phone — the content is too stimulating, and the blue light of an LCD screen (like daylight) inhibits the release of melatonin, the hormone that tells your brain it’s time to sleep.
2. Develop a bedtime routine. Putter around, talk with family members, read a book, do your bathroom routine. Let the brain settle down and relax and begin to rest.
3. Before going to sleep, try practices that will counter negativity bias or anxiety in your brain. You can do progressive muscle relaxation (exercise 2-11). You can do a gratitude practice for the blessings of the day (exercise 3-8). You can take in the good (exercise 3-10) or the sweet resonance of a moment of meeting (exercise 5-2). You can place your hand on your heart and remember a moment of feeling safe, loved, and cherished (exercise 2-6). Use these practices to intentionally let go of any worries from the day. Whatever problem you need to resolve will still be there in the morning. (Though sometimes the default mode network will resolve an issue for you while you’re asleep.) You can take a fresh look at the problem tomorrow, when you’re rested.
4. Cuddle with a partner or a pet if possible. Warm, safe touch releases oxytocin, the brain’s direct and immediate antidote to the stress hormone cortisol. (It really helps when the relationship feels safe at the moment, not strained or anxious.)
5. Go to bed at the same time every night and get up at the same time every morning, even on weekends. This trains the brain to know when it’s time to go to sleep and when it’s time to get up. Plan for enough time to get seven to eight hours of sleep.
6. Sleep in a cool, dark, quiet room. Reduce noise: install double-paned windows, decorate with heavy curtains and rugs, use earplugs. Use your bed only for sleeping and making love.
7. Monitor your intake of coffee (a stimulant) and alcohol (a depressant), trying to avoid both after 6 PM. If you habitually use over-the-counter or prescription sleep medications, experiment with not taking them. Instead, try taking a melatonin supplement to trigger the sleep response or gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) to calm down the stress response. Both are available at health food stores.
8. Above all, don’t worry too much if you have an occasional bad night; don’t worry if you think you haven’t slept well. In The Secret Life of Sleep, Kat Duff tells the story of a sleep science researcher who woke up one morning ready to complain to his wife about how poorly he had slept, but then he noticed that his chest was covered with chunks of plaster. There had been an earthquake in the middle of the night, causing part of the ceiling to fall in, and he had slept through it.
Cultivating new behavioral habits creates the neural circuitry in the brain to support them. Notice how a good night’s sleep becomes easier over time.
Sleep researchers have long known about the brain’s two main forms of normal sleep. REM (rapid eye movement) sleep is a slight activation of the sympathetic nervous system. We dream during REM sleep (nightmares result from too much activation). Slow-wave sleep is a deeper, nondream sleep, an activation of the parasympathetic nervous system. Through imaging technologies used in sleep study labs, scientists have discovered that the brain has a third form of sleep. If your brain gets overtired during the day, it will shut itself down for a fraction of a second — a break so short you don’t notice it — and then turns itself back on so that you keep functioning.
EXERCISE 8-6: Give Your Brain a Mini-Break
You can give your brain deliberate little breaks as you go through your day.
1. Any time you need to, take a ten-breath mini-break. Inhale fully and deeply to activate the sympathetic nervous system and wake up your brain. Exhale fully to relax your brain, pushing every last bit of breath out of your lungs to make room for fresh oxygen.
2. Stop what you’re doing and do something else with your brain for five minutes. Just switch the channel. Think about something else: plan a dinner, or daydream. Get up and do something else: wash the dishes, take a bathroom break, do a quick crossword puzzle. Talk to someone else during a coffee break. Play with your pet if you’re at home. Go for a walk, in nature if possible. (Researchers at the University of Michigan found that walking for ten minutes in a park led to better cognitive functioning than walking for ten minutes downtown or in a shopping mall.)
3. Take a twenty-minute nap sometime between 2 PM and 4 PM. This is long enough to revitalize your brain, and it’s timed so that it doesn’t interfere with a good night’s sleep.
Even a mini-break can reset your brain, making you feel fresher and sharper when you return to your task.
As much as your dreams are interesting to your psyche, and probably do help process unresolved experiences from the day or from the past, slow-wave sleep is what is restorative to the brain, bringing the deep peace of equanimity.
EXERCISE 8-7: Deep, Deeper, Deepest Sleep
1. To maximize your chances of experiencing deep, slow-wave sleep, use the new-conditioning tools of exercise 8-5 to destress your brain as you are falling asleep. At first, keep your focus on falling asleep, not anything else, then gradually let go of any focus at all, trusting the process of letting go.
2. If you wake up in the middle of the night, intentionally let go of any worry or anxiety about that. To help yourself do this, focus on the positive through a gratitude practice, savoring, or placing your hand on your heart. Trust that you will get all the sleep you need to function the next day.
3. Savor the refreshment when you wake up from deep sleep in the morning. Let that savoring reinforce the benefit of these practices.
As you begin to trust your skills in creating the conditions for a good night’s sleep, you’ll have less and less anxiety about not sleeping (insomnia). You will have actually rewired your brain to get the good sleep it needs.
Nutrition
You truly are what you eat. Everything that nourishes the body and the brain comes from the food you eat and drink. The bottom line about a diet good for the brain comes from Michael Pollan, author of In Defense of Food: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”
New Conditioning
Researchers have identified foods that promote good brain health. The MIND diet (standing for Mediterranean Intervention for Neurodegenerative Delay) is a good example, recommended to help prevent, reduce, and reverse cognitive impairment from aging and dementia. It includes lots of vegetables, dark leafy greens, nuts, berries, beans, whole grains, fish, poultry, and olive oil. The omega-3 fatty acids found in fish and some nuts and seeds are particularly important nutrients for the brain.
EXERCISE 8-8: Choosing Healthy Foods for a Healthy Brain
1. If you’re already eating healthy foods in healthy amounts, consciously acknowledge that to yourself. Reinforce your good habits.
2. If you know your eating habits or patterns of thinking about eating aren’t so great, don’t panic, and don’t try to radically change your diet overnight. Your body won’t like that, and your brain may even resist the changes. Introduce new healthy foods to your taste buds and your digestive system little and often, repeated many times. Start with what appeals to you the most — more salads, more nuts, more fresh wild-caught fish. Let the new foods become your new automatic choices.
3. Reinforce good eating habits by combining these practices with other lifestyle choices recommended in this chapter:
• Enjoy the good company of other healthy eaters. Be creative and playful in trying new recipes. Try hosting a potluck dinner sharing your dishes, enjoying good conversation as well as good food.
• Eat a healthy snack as part of giving your brain a mini-break during the day or to reenergize your body and brain after a vigorous walk in nature or a workout.
• Practice gratitude for the abundance of healthy food you get to eat, and perhaps even a little awe at the biological processes that allow food to become the energy that nourishes everything you think and do.
As you become more conscious of what you eat, you can make better choices about what you eat. Seeing ourselves as having choices and choosing wisely is part of strengthening resilience.
Reconditioning
Here, reconditioning is not about losing weight, though many people could benefit by becoming aware of the costs to their physical energy and mental sharpness of eating too much sugar and too much processed (junk) food. Instead, it’s about reconditioning our taste buds, learning to prefer the brain-healthy foods that bring energy to the body and sharpness to the mind.
EXERCISE 8-9: Choosing More Juice, Less Junk
1. Begin eating more healthy foods such as those recommended in the MIND diet.
2. Give up an item on the not-so-healthy list for a week — donuts, processed lunch meat, soda pop. Couple that renunciation with the awareness that giving up this item is beneficial to your physical health and mental functioning.
3. As an experiment, reinstate the item after one week or longer. Notice whether your taste buds, digestive system, or energy levels register any change. Try giving up the same item for another week or two, or longer, gradually getting out of the habit of eating this item, especially if you have been in the habit of eating it somewhat mindlessly.
4. Gradually try giving up additional less-healthy items as you continue to add healthy foods to your regular diet. Little and often could make quite a difference in your brain and in your functioning.
By cultivating practices that promote the health and functioning of your physical brain, you’re also creating habits of wise choice and self-discipline. Seeing yourself as someone who can do that strengthens your response flexibility and resilience.
Deconditioning
As with exercise, your body-brain gets more benefit from eating food when you bring mindful awareness to eating by slowing down, paying attention, and savoring every mouthful. You get to enjoy nourishing your body and brain.
EXERCISE 8-10: Savor a Raisin Meditation
This exercise is taught in meditation centers worldwide to help practitioners come into a sense of presence and mindful awareness. You can apply the exercise to mindful eating of anything. Here we start small, with one raisin.
1. Hold one raisin in the palm of your hand. (You can also practice with one grape, one peanut, or one cherry tomato if you don’t like raisins.)
2. Focus your attention on the raisin. Bring your curiosity to this exercise. Notice the raisin’s size, shape, and color; feel the weight of it in your hand. Roll it around in your hand with your finger. Notice your own reactions to the raisin. Are you experiencing any desire or anticipation of eating it? Any disgust?
3. Put the raisin in your mouth, but don’t bite it yet. Roll the raisin around in your mouth with your tongue. Notice its presence in your mouth; notice any hint of flavor.
4. Now bite into the raisin; notice the burst of flavor. Chew the raisin slowly, noticing the ability of your teeth to chew.
5. When you’re ready, swallow the raisin. Notice its absence in your mouth. Notice your own reactions to its absence. Do you feel desire for another raisin? Relief that the exercise is over?
6. Notice your noticing — any shift in your relationship to your food that comes from focusing your attention on it.
Eating more mindfully helps you enjoy your food. It also nourishes the brain with the awareness of the nourishing. To bring even more mindful awareness to eating, another helpful practice is to eat one meal a day without doing anything else, simply savoring the food that is nourishing your body and brain. Try that awareness practice for one meal a week, at least, and notice whether you enjoy your meals more.
Learning Something New
The brain learns and rewires itself from experience all the time. The more complex the experience or the learning, the more integrated the functioning of the brain, because more of our senses and regions of our brain are engaged in taking in the new information and processing it. That work of integration and complexity, which harnesses the brain’s neuroplasticity, is a protection against brain atrophy — losing brain cells as we age. It’s called building cognitive reserve. You did that when you were younger by going to college or mastering a craft. By keeping your brain active, you have more brain cells in the bank, so to speak, to buffer the loss of brain cells that comes naturally with aging.
To create a surplus of gray matter, try:
learning to play a musical instrument
learning to speak a foreign language
learning to play a complex game like chess or go
learning your way around a new city
learning your way around a new relationship
learning your way around a new service activity in the community
All of these examples involve procedural learning: the brain is learning how to do something and processing that experience, not just memorizing new facts. The more complicated the learning, the better. The first two examples, learning to play a musical instrument and learning to speak a foreign language, can reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s by 50 percent (because you build a reserve of healthy brain cells). According to the neuroscientist Tracey Shors of Rutgers University, “A colossal number of brain cells, hundreds to thousands, are born each day, but most die within weeks unless the brain is forced to learn something new. Learning rescues these new cells from death. Then more neurons revive and sprout connections to their brethren. The harder the task, the more survivors.”
EXERCISE 8-11: Give Your Brain a Workout
1. Choose one option from the list above, or identify your own new focus of procedural learning — knitting, woodworking, making pottery — as long as your choice is something challenging for you and complex for your brain, and something you will enjoy learning over an extended period.
2. Begin little, repeat often, and extend your practice for a significant length of time. If you devote ten hours a week for one full year to mastering the game of chess, you can achieve a fully satisfying level of competence at the game, and you will greatly build your cognitive reserve. (You may have already devoted this much time to mastering a skill or craft.)
3. Pursue your learning with a partner or small group of people if you wish. The social engagement can be powerfully motivating, encouraging, and rewarding.
You already know that if you don’t move your body, your muscles can weaken and atrophy. The same “use it or lose it” principle applies to the brain. You create new neural circuitry by learning something new. You lose that circuitry if you don’t repeat the firing of those neurons. These practices, which my friend Ron Siegel calls “dementia prophylaxis,” not only preserve neurons needed for new learning but also build a cognitive reserve so that extra neurons are available for other cognitive tasks: paying bills, doing your taxes, choosing new colors to repaint the house.
Reconditioning
It is not hard to learn more. What is hard is to unlearn when you discover yourself wrong.
— MARTIN FISHER
Throughout this book, we have used reconditioning to rewire negative emotional experiences, memories, thoughts, and beliefs by juxtaposing them with stronger, more positive experiences. That process catalyzes the deconsolidation of the old neural networks and reconsolidates them into new neural networks more supportive of your resilience. It’s also often important to leave the previous neural network deconsolidated, dissolved, faded — to let your brain “unlearn” that pathway. When you’re sleep-deprived, tired, or stressed, the brain can still default to those old pathways if they are still accessible.
You can help your brain unlearn or lose its previous learning by intentionally not going there when an old negative memory first comes into consciousness again. You don’t try to deny it: you simply choose not to reinforce it. You can counter the memory with something positive, as you learned to do in exercise 6-11, or simply be aware of it, acknowledge it, and let it go, as you learned to do in exercise 6-16.
When we don’t feed unskillful patterns of response by reusing and reinforcing the neural pathways that sustain them, they can fade away and be unlearned. In the following exercise, you’re making a conscious choice to lose a pattern you no longer wish to use.
1. Identify a mental habit you would like to unlearn simply by letting it fade away, by not going there. As always, choose something little and not very triggering to begin with, something just present enough to allow you to notice it and work with it successfully. Maybe you want to let go of associating a rainstorm today with a bad storm you were caught in ten years ago, let go of a grudge triggered by your neighbor’s car blocking your driveway a year ago, or let go of assuming someone doesn’t like you if they don’t respond to your email for three days.
2. Identify a positive thought or antidote to juxtapose with this habit. It can be a generic thought like “I’m learning to do it differently now” or “Yup — there’s that sensation/feeling/thought again. Don’t need to do that anymore.”
3. Practice pairing the new positive with the old negative, gradually focusing more on the positive and letting the negative fade.
4. Notice the fading. This can be a little bit like watching yourself fall asleep, but the focus on the fading keeps you from focusing on the content of the thought. Someday you may even notice that the old habit of thought is completely gone.
You’re doing your own mental housekeeping here. Less time spent on old unneeded mental activity creates more bandwidth for the new.
Deconditioning
The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi suggests that flow is the sweet spot of mental activity between too much anxiety or stress and too much boredom. Flow happens in the default network mode of brain processing, the source of the brain’s creativity. And creativity is a special form of procedural learning, exploring what’s not yet known, not yet manifested. Any creative endeavor — stream-of-consciousness journaling, process painting, mixing ingredients together without a recipe, making up a new game with your children — pushes the functioning of the brain into new territory and puts the brain in a state of flow. That puts new brain cells to good use. Curiosity can be an important part of creativity — following one idea, one turn in the road after another, with open-minded interest and without preconceptions or judgment.
Curiosity is a great spur to creativity. Children tend to approach their world with uninhibited curiosity and wonder at the most ordinary rainstorm or bug.
When I look at a patch of dandelions, I see a bunch of weeds that are going to take over my yard. My kids see flowers for Mom and blowing white fluff you can wish on.
When I feel wind on my face, I brace myself against it. I feel it messing up my hair and pulling me back when I walk. My kids close their eyes, spread their arms and fly with it until they fall to the ground laughing.
When I see a mud puddle I step around it. I see muddy shoes and dirty carpets. My kids sit in it. They see dams to build, rivers to cross, and worms to play with.
— ANONYMOUS
EXERCISE 8-13: Exercise Your Curiosity
1. You can cultivate curiosity about anything — the ant crawling across the page as you read this book; the sudden dimming of the lights in a power blip; why you tripped on a crack in the sidewalk (or flubbed a presentation in a meeting) but didn’t fall or fail. Pursuing any new source of wonder will benefit your brain.
2. Focus your curiosity on your brain itself. When are you most alert during the day? When an automatic negative belief came to consciousness or a startle response arose in your nervous system, how did you respond this time? Was that different from other times today, last month, or last year?
3. Commit to practicing any tool in this book for thirty days, with the intention of noticing any difference in the functioning of your brain at the end of that period.
Both curiosity and creativity have been shown to extend a person’s longevity by up to four years. They can certainly amplify the enjoyment of the miraculousness of our brain minute by minute.
Laughter and Play
A person without a sense of humor is like a wagon without springs — jolted by every pebble in the road.
— HENRY WARD BEECHER
Many people think of laughter as an emotion, or something akin to one. Not so. Laughter is a physiological mechanism that reduces stress in the body and the brain. Laughter releases catecholamines, dopamine, and norepinephrine — neurotransmitters that make the brain feel sharper and brighter. Laughter is often a good way of breaking the ice and bonding with people, and bonding with people is super good for the brain.
Play — encountering or creating new situations, dropping into the default mode network in the brain, making up new rules, new characters, or new worlds — gives the brain a good workout. Play often also engenders laughter, a sense of connection with other people or things in our world, and a sense of relaxation and ease. All of those are good for the brain, too.
Those who play rarely become brittle in the face of stress or lose the healing capacity for humor.
— STUART BROWN, Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul
We can be so busy and pressured that we forget to laugh and play, and then we forget how to. If you experienced a lot of trauma in your early life, you may never have learned how to safely laugh and play. This capacity is fully recoverable with practice.
New Conditioning
EXERCISE 8-14: Relearning How to Play
1. There are many “little and often” ways to recover laughter and play:
• Watch little kids, puppies, or kittens play.
• Play with kids or pets yourself; borrow your relatives or neighbors’ kids and pets to play with to give yourself more options.
• Watch some of the endearing videos on YouTube of babies singing or animals taking care of each other across species: dog and horse, cat and ducklings, tortoise and hippopotamus.
• Play with your food — be curious! Notice when you are surprised by something and a little “Ha ha!” comes out.
2. Schedule a play date with yourself, with a partner or friend, or with your children. Spend two hours deliberately being goofy or watching a goofy movie.
3. Join a laughing yoga class — thirty minutes of facilitated movement and laughter. The positive effects of resetting your nervous system have been known to last for up to five hours.
You have permission to have fun while you’re retraining your brain to be more flexible. Joy and laughter create an upward spiral supportive of resilience.
Reconditioning
This book has suggested many ways to juxtapose positive and negative experiences to shift out of or rewire negative thought patterns or emotions. It may seem counterintuitive to experience moments of laughter or play even in times of deep grief or intense fear. But giving yourself permission to notice and savor glimmers of humor and joy even in the midst of truly difficult times can provide a healing respite. And it’s common to experience a moment of ironic humor, or even a fit of the giggles, in the midst of troubling times.
EXERCISE 8-15: Savoring Joy, Even in Grief
When you’re going through something difficult, try these suggestions for giving yourself a break and experiencing some joy.
1. Watch a lighthearted comedy or romance with an empathic friend who can help you hold both the lightness of the movie and the darkness of whatever you’re facing simultaneously.
2. Play games that have brought you delight and laughter in the past: wiffle ball or your children’s favorite card game. Both the memories and the interaction with other people now can bring a little lift to your spirit.
3. Play with a puppy, a kitten, or a toddler, as in exercise 8-14. Their joy in their own play is emotionally contagious: you may laugh out loud in spite of the heaviness you’re carrying. And these young beings, so full of life and energy, remind you that life continues, life changes; your life can, too.
Trying to play or find joy in hard times can seem like work, but it is the work of resilience to be flexible, to shift gears, to see things from a different perspective. Play helps strengthen your response flexibility, sometimes even when that’s the farthest thing from your mind.
Deconditioning
Creating fantasy worlds and imaginary roles for ourselves is not used as a way to avoid dealing with the real world and its challenges. But using the mental play space of deconditioning to envision new roles and new futures can be a form of unpressured rehearsal of responses that creates new circuitry and response flexibility in your brain that you can use later.
EXERCISE 8-16: Future Fantasies
1. Imagine at least three different future versions of yourself, five, ten, or fifteen years from now. To begin with, these future selves can be anchored in reality, natural extensions of who you are and what you are interested in now.
2. Begin to imagine two more future selves with a little more playfulness or whimsy in them — futures that would be quite a stretch for your present self.
3. Imagine two more futures for yourself that could never happen, like winning an Olympic gold medal in downhill skiing or discovering a cure for breast cancer (unless that vision belongs in the lives you’ve imagined in step 1 or 2). The point is to let your imagination run wild and lift your mood, shifting the functioning of your brain as it does so.
Giving your brain permission to play gives your unconscious brain permission to surprise you with new possibilities, new insights, new “aha!” moments. You’re accessing the intuition that might reveal the germ of a new direction in life and serve as a tool in discerning wise choices.
Hanging Out with Healthy Brains
You’ve been learning to hang out with healthy brains throughout this book — through social engagement in chapter 2, mindful empathy in chapter 3, finding a true other to your true self in chapter 4, creating healthy relationship dynamics with other people in chapter 5, and exploring the skillful, playful spaciousness in your own brain in chapter 6, which allows you to see others spaciously as well.
Here we focus on the power of social interactions with people, casual as well as intimate, to foster brain health and psychological health.
This is what our brains were wired for: reaching out to and interacting with others. These are design features, not flaws. From an evolutionary perspective, perhaps the smartest among us are actually those with the best social skills. These social adaptations are central to making us the most successful species on earth. And . . . increasing the social connections in our lives is probably the single easiest way to enhance our well-being.
— MATTHEW LIEBERMAN, Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect
New Conditioning
You may already participate in social groups — book clubs, choirs, bowling leagues, volunteer organizations, or political campaigns. What may be new to you is discerning who among the like-minded people in these groups has also developed their skills of relational intelligence and can engage in resonant conversations with you from their own secure interdependence. This isn’t true of everyone you encounter all the time, of course, but such people are well worth seeking out.
EXERCISE 8-17: Breaking the Ice
If you find it difficult to strike up conversations with people you don’t know well, try these approaches.
1. I learned this practice from a client who told me he uses it when attending an out-of-town conference. Simply say to someone, “Hi, I don’t know anyone here. Would you be willing to talk to me?” (Use your mindful empathy, of course, to discern the other person’s receptivity to your approach; you want to create safety in this moment of meeting.) This easy experiment often has surprisingly successful results. It’s useful on occasions where there are likely to be like-minded people — standing in line at a film festival or book signing, getting your annual flu shot, eating in a family-style restaurant while traveling, or volunteering at a soup kitchen.
2. As a variation, still among like-minded people, try “I’m not sure where to find [a person or place] or where to return [an object] . . . . Could you help me?” Most people want to feel helpful, useful, and needed and to experience a moment of shared humanity.
Nourishing social connections helps keep our spirits — and our brains — healthy as we get older. Even when, as Ron Siegel says, “it takes a village to complete the end of the sentence,” we thrive when we belong to supportive social communities.
Reconditioning
To exist is to change; to change is to mature; to mature is to go on creating one’s self endlessly.
— HENRI BERGSON
We continue to evolve as we mature and move through life in new ways. Sometimes we coevolve with others, and marriages, friendships, business partnerships, social groups stay intact and flourish. Sometimes shared interests and life paths diverge, and we find ourselves drifting out of touch with people who were once close and significant to us. Sometimes in our own maturing and healing we are no longer as tolerant as we once were of hanging out with unhealthy brains.
EXERCISE 8-18: Taking Stock of Healthy Social Connections
There’s a poignancy to doing a periodic inventory of where you want to allocate your time, energy, and relational skills to people in your life. You use your own mindful empathy and self-compassion to consciously choose to nourish, prune, or set new boundaries in relationships.
1. Make a list of all of your current relationships, no matter how close or distant, chosen or obligatory, in person or on social media. This organizational process could be an exercise in itself. You may naturally organize these names into categories:
• family and friends
• neighbors and acquaintances
• colleagues and coworkers
• business and service providers
2. Recategorize all of these people by:
• the joy and delight that you experience from interactions with them, however frequent, however brief, however rare
• the meaning that you derive from the interactions or from giving or receiving care
• the loyalty involved in the relationship: its history, ties of obligation, and memories
• the benefits of the relationship to you and to the other person
3. Draw a mind map on a large piece of paper; you can use different colored pens or pencils if you wish. Draw a bubble representing yourself in the center and then let your brain freely draw bubbles representing the other people in this inventory. You’re not judging them or the relationships, just playing. Use different sizes, shapes, and colors of bubbles for different people. Take ten to fifteen minutes to do this exercise, giving your default mode network time to play.
4. When you finish, step back and reflect. Notice the size of bubbles for various people, their proximity or distance from your bubble, and whether the bubbles are bright or muted colors. Let this map of current connections soak into your unconscious.
5. Let the insights from this map guide you in consciously choosing which relationships you want to nourish, set limits around, or let gently fade into memory.
Just as the brain regularly clears out atrophied neurons to make room for new healthy neurons, just as we clean out our closets or the garage to make room for new things, just as we temporarily clear our calendars to travel and experience something beyond our daily routine, so, too, it is useful to consciously prune the relationships we have accumulated over time, letting go of those that no longer nourish us or support our resilience. Just as gardeners prune trees, shrubs, and flowers to make room for a new season’s growth, we honor what has been, choose what to continue, and make room for the new.
Deconditioning
The brain’s neuroception of safety primes its neuroplasticity for learning. Hanging out with healthy brains (at least like-minded folks) in silence can be a wonderful resource for both resting and nourishing the brain.
EXERCISE 8-19: Communities of Silence
1. Join a meditation group, yoga class, tai chi, or chi gong class where you can practice nourishing your brain in the safety of a mostly silent community.
2. Enjoy the social atmosphere of sitting in a theater, concert hall, or movie theater, knowing that the performance has attracted like-minded people. Even without conversation, there’s a resonance that is nourishing to the brain.
3. Spend time in nature, especially in quiet, open spaces. When you spend that time with a friend or two, designate some of that time to be silent together, sharing a deepening awe and appreciation for the beauty and mystery you are experiencing together.
It’s essential to know how to “use your words” to relate to other people skillfully and efficiently. It is also essential to cultivate and trust the brain’s social engagement system, which reassures you nonverbally that you are safe when you are with safe others. Spending silent time with others restores that capacity, which is essential to your resilience.
I can pull the fire alarm here.
On average, American adults now spend 40 percent of their waking time on their digital devices, checking their cell phones every 6.5 minutes. On average, American teenagers spend 50 percent of their waking time on devices, and 25 percent of teenagers are using a device within five minutes of waking up. Spending that much time on digital devices, though widely accepted as normal, has serious consequences for brain function and person-to-person relating. Our brains are not computers, and interacting with people through computers and phones is not a substitute for face-to-face interactions.
Researchers are documenting our rapidly escalating overuse of digital devices and identifying the increasingly serious effects on our brains, our relationships, and our resilience — especially the effects on young, still-developing brains.
In a world where your brain is constantly bombarded with emails, texts, tweets, and posts, one of the best things you can do for it is to let it rest. Take a break from long periods of energy-consuming focused attention and the overstimulation of incessant incoming messages that can negatively affect several essential capacities of your brain.
Attention, the Foundation of Reflective Intelligence
No matter how fond or proud you are of your capacities for multitasking, over time juggling many tasks at once is costly to the brain’s functioning and efficiency. The truth is, the brain does only one thing at a time. It can shift focus from one thing to another very quickly, but it is not evolutionarily adapted for rapid and sustained shifting of attention. Every shift takes metabolic energy. As you switch from a job-related task to sending a tweet to answering a question from your child to responding to a friend’s email, over time your focused attention gets scattered and fragmented. After sixty to ninety minutes in multitasking mode, your brain’s performance suffers, and you make more mistakes. As your brain goes into fatigue or brain fog, the CEO of resilience, the prefrontal cortex, can’t function as clearly or creatively anymore; it begins to have trouble focusing for three to four minutes on a project, let alone three to four hours.
Reputable scientists are taking this decrease in functioning very seriously. Some suggest that the reduction in the capacity to concentrate may be permanent. At a minimum, the brain that is constantly bombarded by stimulation goes into another kind of overload: it loses the capacity to distinguish the relevant from the irrelevant. You start out looking something up on the internet that you need for work, and forty-five minutes later you’re lost in something else — interesting, but not relevant to the task at hand.
Resonant Relationships, Preserving Our Relational Intelligence with Others
We all have our preferences for how we want to connect and communicate with others, but the situation of having a thousand friends on Facebook but no real-life close friends is becoming true for more and more people. This is a particularly disturbing trend among young people, who feel more lonely and isolated than ever before and often feel bad about themselves when they compare themselves to other people’s posts on Facebook, carefully crafted and polished for public consumption. Young people don’t see the doubts and angst of other people like them; it all looks like MTV.
Sherry Turkle, a professor of psychology at MIT and an early observer of the impact of digital technology on relationships, reports that the style of people relating to each other now is much more superficial, what she calls “pancake” style, rather than the “cathedral” style of perhaps fewer but deeper conversations with people. She calls this “the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship.”
Research does show that teenagers can use social media to maintain a social network when they already have friends. But young people trying to build a social network from scratch through social media generally fare worse. Resonant relationships are essential for harnessing the brain’s neuroplasticity. Without them, resilience erodes; young people feel lonely, isolated, and depressed, and they become vulnerable to shame and cyberbullying.
Mindful Empathy, the Foundation of Emotional Intelligence
Spending less time in resonant person-to-person relating can lead to a reduced capacity for empathy. Turkle and other researchers have observed that people have reduced tolerance for messy emotions and less interest in and compassion for other people’s feelings. People are choosing the protection of distance over closeness and vulnerability. When we spend too much time on devices, we lose the capacity to get in touch with our feelings, to tolerate and accept and learn how to manage difficult feelings, to learn to use our brains and pick up the emotional signals of others accurately, or to assess safety and comfort or danger and toxicity in relationships. Young people may not even know what these capacities are or that they lack them.
Self-Awareness, the Foundation of Relational Intelligence within Oneself
Unfortunately, the ability even to be aware of what capacities might be diminishing is also diminishing. People are becoming less comfortable with solitude, less tolerant of boredom, less able to simply reflect, introspect, or daydream, more superficial in relationships with themselves as well as with others. With so much stimulation, there’s hardly any time left for the brain to consolidate all the learning of the day into long-term memory.
The brain releases dopamine, the neurotransmitter of anticipation, pleasure, and reward, whenever it hears the ping of an incoming email, phone call, or text. There’s a rush of pleasure along the mesolimbic dopamine pathway in the lower brain, the neural pathway underlying any and all addictions: “I’m connected! I’m wanted! I’m loved!” That’s not just psychological; that’s neurological. As people spend more time communicating through emojis and less time connecting with people’s emotions in satisfying and nourishing ways, we actually lose our capacities to find that nourishment in deep connection. When relationships are difficult, we have less willingness to hang in there through the messy emotions and painful ruptures to repair them and find our resonance again.
Technology can be our best friend, and technology can also be our biggest party pooper. It interrupts our own story, interrupts our ability to have a thought or a daydream, to imagine something wonderful because we’re too busy bridging the walk from the cafeteria back to the office on our cell phone.
— STEVEN SPIELBERG
New Conditioning
EXERCISE 8-20: Practice Your Practices
The practices you’ve learned throughout this book give your brain substantial protection against the ravages of digital overuse. What’s important is to keep practicing them. Let your brain do what it loves to do when you’re not glued to a screen.
1. Mindfulness, staying present and knowing what you’re experiencing while you’re experiencing it, can help keep you grounded in your body and tracking the shifts in your emotions and thoughts. You’re less distracted even while you’re texting or emailing.
2. Mindful empathy can help you monitor your interactions with people, maintain your tolerance of challenging moments in those relationships, and even strengthen your interest in communicating directly in real time, person to person, heart to heart.
3. Positive emotions help you ride the waves of disappointment when people aren’t instantly available or responsive, shifting your perspective back out to the larger picture.
4. Resonant relating, person to person, in real time, maintains the brain’s social engagement system, which regulates our nervous system. Even when engaging with people directly feels riskier than communicating through the buffer of a device, maintaining our interpersonal resonance and relational resilience is more fulfilling in the long run.
Human brains have evolved over tens of thousands of years to process information and communicate well with fellow human beings. They have not had enough time to evolve or rewire sufficiently to cope with the level of stimulation bombarding them from the digital revolution of the last twenty years. These practices help keep your brain functioning well as you navigate these new demands.
Reconditioning
The idea here is simply to counteract all the time that you, and children you may be responsible for, spend on your devices with some intentional, protected time away from your devices, finding it anywhere you can.
1. Consider designating device-free zones and times in your household and family activities: the dining room table, the kitchen, short trips in the car, attending children’s soccer games or piano recitals. In these zones, people can talk to each other directly, sharing the highlights and the low points of the day. Researchers have found that time spent talking at the dinner table every evening is a more significant contributor to children’s academic success than the amount of time spent in school, on homework, on sports, or at religious services.
2. Designate device-free times on the calendar: no devices before breakfast; no devices in the hour before bedtime (a practice that also helps prepare the brain for a good night’s sleep); a regular device-free Saturday afternoon or Sunday morning. It’s most effective to leave devices turned off and in another room.
3. Mute the alerts for incoming messages on your computer and phone. Interact with your device when you choose to, not every time it seems to demand your attention.
The prefrontal cortex is the structure in the brain foundational to our response flexibility. It is also the structure that manages our impulses, that maintains discipline and choice, that says no. Choosing to unplug from our devices regularly creates a buffer in the brain that helps us pause and avoid mindlessly sliding into one more hour surfing the net or just three more emails before turning our attention to the living person in front of us. For children, whose prefrontal cortex is not fully mature and who can’t always manage their impulses well, having someone else say no for them, in a way they can tolerate, helps strengthen the impulse control circuits in the developing brain so that they can learn to say no for themselves. And there are practical payoffs to a digital detox: you remember how to write in longhand, read a map or a newspaper, feel the heft of a book in your hands, make choices about what movie to see in a way that isn’t driven by an algorithm on a social media platform.
Deconditioning
Just as we take a vacation to replenish our well-being in general, we can take a digital vacation to let the brain play and restore itself. With deconditioning, you let the brain “empty” itself in the spacious, daydreaming mode of the default network. Unplug from all devices, all digital input, for a minimum of half a day or longer whenever possible. Just simply let your brain take a vacation, and then spend that vacation time doing what brains used to do and still love to do.
EXERCISE 8-22: Digital Vacation
1. Immerse yourself in nature. Hike in the woods, walk through a rose garden, play on the beach. Let your brain space out as you watch a butterfly or a sunset. The longer you linger in nature, the more your brain relaxes and resets. (One study found that a three-day immersion in a wilderness setting boosted people’s creativity by 50 percent.)
2. Play with your kids; play with your friends. Even fifteen minutes of tossing a football around in the backyard or bicycling through the neighborhood together helps your brain reset. In longer periods of physical play, your brain gets to play, too, opening up to curiosity, imagination, and fantasy and often coming up with new insights, new perspectives out of the blue.
3. Allow yourself to daydream, fall into reverie, reminisce about pleasurable or meaningful moments in the past, and fantasize about pleasurable or meaningful moments in the future. Let the brain meander as it wishes. When you take a vacation from being productive, from demands and expectations, rich insights very often emerge.
These digital vacations restore your brain’s abilities to focus and concentrate, do the deep thinking that both creativity and productivity require, interrupt any possible addictive tendencies, and help you celebrate that your life is already full of “abundant enoughness,” resonant connections, meaning and purpose, laughter and well-being.
This chapter has presented many tools that nourish and strengthen your physical brain, supporting all its capacities, including neuroplasticity and response flexibility. Even though I have consistently recommended practicing exercises little and often, by the time you add up all the practices in this entire book, you will have completed a marathon of learning and rewiring.
A few more thoughts as you take a breath and reflect on your wise and very persevering effort:
Resilience is part of your human birthright, innate in your brain, innate in your being. Anyone can learn to be more resilient — more flexible, more open to new perspectives, growth, and change. You have chosen to do that learning.
I hope you will continue to practice the tools offered here, strengthening your capacities to respond to any adversity with skill and courage. There are no shoulds here. The tools in this book are meant to help you cope better with any challenges to your well-being. As you experience their effectiveness in helping you bounce back from any level of disruption to your resilience, your brain will learn from that success. It will reinforce the neural wiring of your response flexibility in how you respond to any issue. You deepen your trust in yourself as someone who can learn, who can be flexible, who can be resilient.
It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.
— attributed to CHARLES DARWIN
You will do more than survive. You will thrive.