A3: Individual Written Assignment

The Science of Happiness and Well-Being

Resiliency and Mindfulness

Day 6

Beth Peak (sequoiayoga.co.uk)

Courtesy: Kate Pickert, TIME

Doing things intentionally and mindfully. If distraction is the preeminent condition of our age, then mindfulness is the most logical response.

• Quiet our busy minds, become more aware of the present moment and less caught up in what happened earlier or what’s to come afterwards.

• Opposite of driving home on “auto pilot” or browsing TV channels listlessly or eating without savoring.

• Focusing on one thing at a time, without multitasking.

What is Mindfulness?

Courtesy: Kate Pickert, TIME

Image: TIME

Does this even make sense?

How should the past and future fit with the present?

• Mindfulness is a strong element of some religions that originated in the Indian subcontinent – Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism. However, mindfulness is NOT religion.

• Mindfulness has strong backing from science. • Mindful practices like meditation can help lower cortisol levels and

blood pressure, improve immune responses (and maybe even gene expression, though more research is needed).

• Athletes and software coders report feeling “in the zone”, which is a good example of mindfulness.

Mindfulness - Spirituality

• Neuroplasticity refers to the brain changes that occur in response to experience.

• Meditation refers to a variety of practices: • Focused Attention (FA) meditation - focus on an object or event. This is

where you start with meditation.

• Open Monitoring (OM) meditation - focus on the monitoring of awareness itself.

• Loving Kindness meditation. Has elements of FAM and OMM. Focus on developing love and compassion first for themselves and then gradually extend love to ever more “unlikeable” others.

Terms

Meditation (FMRI, Matthieu Riccard)

Davidson, Lutz (2004); Buddha's Brain: Neuroplasticity and Meditation

Insight #16 – Meditation Can Alter the Brain!

Studies of Tibetan Buddhist monks, and related research efforts, suggest that, over the course of meditating for tens of thousands of hours, the long-term practitioners had actually altered the structure and function of their brains.

Experiment Setup (FA Portion Only) • Participants were amateurs, Tibetan Buddhist monks with 19,000 hours

of meditation practice and Tibetan Buddhist monks with 44,000 hours of meditation practice.

• Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and a high-density recording system with between 64 and 256 electrodes on the scalp surface.

• The FA Meditation experiment compared FA meditation on an external visual point to a rest condition (no meditation).

• Activation pattern stronger for medium- term-practitioners but less for novices and long-term practitioners.

• Inverted u-shaped curve means that after extensive FA meditation training, minimal effort is necessary to sustain attentional focus.

• Expert meditators showed less activation than novices in the amygdala during FA meditation in response to emotional sounds. So advanced levels of concentration are associated with a significant decrease in emotionally reactive behaviors that are incompatible with stability of concentration.

Findings (FA Only) • When meditating, multiple brain regions implicated in

monitoring (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex), engaging attention (visual cortex), and attentional orienting (e.g., the superior frontal sulcus, the supplementary motor area, and the intraparietal sulcus) were activated.

Can meditation practice make us happier?

• Take a potato chip. Hold it in your hand for 3 minutes. • Reflect on it using as many of your senses as you can. • Look at it closely. Are there ridges? Air bubbles? What is the texture

like? Is it stiff or soggy? Visualize the potato from which it was made.

• What does it smell like? • Does it make a faint sound when you press on it? • Taste it. Salty? Sour? Sweet? Bitter?

Focusing Exercise – Potato Chip

Sit comfortably. Back fairly erect. Hands resting gently on your knees. Close your eyes.

1. Take a deep breath. Hold it for a few seconds. Exhale gently. Take another deep breath. Hold it for a few seconds. Exhale. Stretch your toes as much as you can without hurting yourself. Keep them stretched (10 seconds).

2. Take a deep breath. Hold it for a few seconds. Exhale gently. Take another deep breath. Hold it for a few seconds. Exhale.

Tense your calf muscles. Hold for 10 seconds.

3. Repeat cycle of deep breath and focus on a body part with thigh muscles, lower abdomen, chest, shoulder, arms, hands.

4. Sit quietly for 2 minutes.

5. Open your eyes.

Focusing Exercise – FA Meditation

A Range of Meditation Apps

Richard Davidson: The Neuroscience of Happiness

• Resilience (Plasticity)

• Capacity to Savor positive Emotion (Outlook)

• Attention – Mind Wandering

• Generosity and Altruism

• All underpinned by our own self- awareness

Resiliency

Insight #14 – Resiliency is a Learned Skill • Happiness is strongly connected to how well you rebound

from setbacks (Mandy Oaklander). • Resiliency is the ability to bounce back.

Images: Time Special Edition on The Science of Happiness

Mandy Oaklander, Resilience, TIME

Understanding Resilience

• Humans get stressed far more than they realize. The hot-and- cold boss, the traffic delays, the spat with their spouse, the monthly bills— these are all registered as stress in the brain.

• The vast majority of us will be faced with one or more major traumatic stressors during a lifetime, but the countless smaller stresses also take a toll. (Southwick)

• Resilience, research shows, can help with that

Stress: the gap between Expectation & Reality

Emmy Werner, UC Berkeley, 1955

Understanding Resilience

• Most important longitudinal study over 40 years • 700 Hawaiian children, many with alcoholic parents • One-third of most vulnerable children adapted very well. What helped? • Having a tight-knit community • A stable role model and • A strong belief in their ability to solve problems

Sources: TIME and Albuquerque Journal

Richard Davidson

Davidson found a brain connection that is important for resilience: the path from the prefrontal cortex - the seat of cognition and planning - to the amygdala, an emotional part of the brain that responds to threats.

Source: TIME

Resilience: The Science of Mastering Life’s Greatest Challenges (2012).

Charney: “For resilience, there’s not one prescription that works; you have to find what works for you.”

• After interviewing many survivors, Charney and Southwick became convinced that anyone could train to be more resilient.

• Like the animal whose pulse returns quickly to normal once it has outrun a predator, resilient brains seem to shut off the stress response and return to baseline quickly.

• Feelings of social pain - rejection and loneliness – work on the same neural pathways as fear.

Martin Paulus • In brain-imaging experiments on resilient Navy SEALs,

Paulus showed them a color cue that signaled they were about to see an emotional picture. The SEALs’ brains anticipated the emotion more quickly than the average brain, letting them jump nimbly between emotion types.

• Brains of people with anxiety or depression suggest they have a hard time letting go of emotions and are often too engaged in emotional processes.

Expert Tips to Build Resiliency

Image: TIME

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