Inner Strength
The brain
is the organ that learns, so it's designed to be changed by your experiences.
It still amazes me but it's true: Whatever we repeatedly sense and feel and
want and think is slowly but surely sculpting neural structure for better or
worse. Sure, most of our mental and therefore neural activity flows through the
brain like ripples on a river, with no lasting effects on its channel. But
intense, prolonged, or repeated mental activity—especially if it's
conscious—will leave an enduring imprint in neural structure, like a surging
current reshaping a riverbed. Day after day, your mind is actually building
your brain (scientists call this “experience-dependent neuroplasticity”).
Inner Strengths: Growing the Good Inside Ourselves
I've
hiked a lot and have often had to depend on what was in my pack. Inner
strengths are the supplies you've got in your pack as you make your way
down the twisting and often hard road of life. Inner strengths include a
positive mood, common sense, integrity, resilience, love, or determination.
So what's
the best way to develop greater happiness and other strengths? It's to simply
have experiences of them, which help these good mental states become good
neural traits. This is taking in the good: activating a positive
experience and installing it in your brain.
You Can Use Your Mind to Change Your Brain
The
science shows that each person has the power to change his or her brain for the
better—what research psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwartz calls self-directed neuroplasticity.
If you don't make use of this power yourself, other forces will shape your
brain for you, including pressures at work and home, technology and media,
pushy people, the lingering effects of painful past experiences—and Mother
Nature herself.
Why Is
This So Important?
To
survive and pass on their genes, our ancestors needed to be especially aware of
dangers, losses, and conflicts. Consequently, the brain evolved a negativity
bias that looks for bad news, reacts intensely to it, and quickly stores the
experience in neural structure. We can still be happy, but this bias creates an
ongoing vulnerability to stress, anxiety, disappointment, and hurt.
Inner
strengths such as happiness and resilience come mainly from positive
experiences. But unless we pay mindful, sustained attention to them, most
positive experiences flow through our brains like water through a sieve.
They're momentarily pleasant but leave little lasting value in terms of
changing neural structure. The brain is like Velcro for negative experiences
but Teflon for positive ones. And while the negativity bias is good for
survival in harsh conditions, it's lousy for quality of life, fulfilling
relationships, personal growth, and long-term health. The best way to
compensate for the negativity bias is to regularly take in the good.
Take in the Good in 4 Steps: H.E.A.L.
Taking in
the good is the deliberate internalization of positive experiences in implicit
memory. It involves four simple steps (the fourth one is optional).
1) Have
a positive experience.
Notice a
positive experience that's already present in the foreground or background of
your awareness, such as a physical pleasure, a sense of determination, or
feeling close to someone.
2) Enrich it.
Stay with
the positive experience for five to 10 seconds or longer. Open to the feelings
in it and try to sense it in your body; gently encourage the experience to be
more intense, and find something fresh or novel about it.
3) Absorb
it.
Intend
and sense that the experience is sinking into you as you sink into it. Perhaps
visualize it sinking into you like water into a sponge—know that it's becoming
a part of you, a resource that you can take with you wherever you go.
4) Link
positive and negative material. (Optional)
While
having a vivid and stable sense of a positive experience in the foreground of
awareness, also be aware of something negative in the background. (Whenever you
want, let go of the negative and rest only in the positive.) Get a sense of the
positive going into the negative: putting it in perspective, soothing it,
easing it, and even replacing it – like flowers crowding out and even pulling
weeds.
Step 1
activates a positive experience, and steps 2 to 4 install it in
your brain.
Remember:
You can take in good experiences both in the flow of daily life and during
special times.
Red Brain vs. Green Brain
As the
brain evolved, so did its capability to meet our three core needs—safety,
satisfaction, and connection—through, respectively, three "operating
systems" that avoid harms, approach rewards, and attach
to others.
When you
experience that your core needs are met in any system, it returns to its
resting state, its "green," responsive mode, where your body
refuels and repairs itself. Meanwhile, your brain rests in a basic sense of peace,
contentment and love. You still engage life with all of its challenges, but
with an underlying sense of security, fulfillment, and caring.
When your
brain goes green, you are not disturbed by threat, loss, or rejection, and thus
there's no real basis for aversion, grasping, or clinging. In the responsive
mode, there's little or no fuel for stress, anxiety, irritation, hurt, envy or
conflicts.
On the
other hand, when you experience that a core need is not met, your brain quickly
shifts into its "red," fight/flight/freeze reactive mode. In the red
zone, your mind is colored by fear, frustration, and heartache. Taking in the
good draws you out of reactive episodes and strengthens the responsive
capacities of your brain.
Find Your Vitamin C
We know
we can benefit from taking in the good and making it a regular part of our
lives—but how can you focus on the experiences that will help you the
most? If you have scurvy, for example, you need vitamin C. Similarly, some
experiences are particularly valuable to take in if they address your core
needs.
For
example, if you feel worried, tense, or helpless, this triggers the avoiding
harms system, so you'd be particularly helped by resource experiences such as
protection, safety, relaxation, strength, and agency. If you feel left out,
hurt, inadequate, lonely, or resentful, this involves the "attaching to
others system," and your antidote experience would include belonging,
self-compassion, friendship, and kindness.
  
Use the Power
Drawing
on the hidden power of seemingly ordinary experiences, this deceptively simple
practice builds resilience, heals distress and dysfunction, improves
relationships, promotes physical health, and grows a durable happiness.
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