Regulating Your Emotions Quotes

When you have a persistent sense of heartbreak and gutwrench, the physical sensations become intolerable and we will do anything to make those feelings disappear. And that is really the origin of what happens in human pathology. People take drugs to make it disappear, and they cut themselves to make it disappear, and they starve themselves to make it disappear, and they have sex with anyone who comes along to make it disappear and once you have these horrible sensations in your body, you’ll do anything to make it go away.

If you have control over yourself, you have no desire to control others.

Dr. Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, concludes, “Your grades in school, your scores on the SAT, mean less for life success than your capacity to co-operate, your ability to regulate your emotions, your capacity to delay your gratification, and your capacity to focus your attention. Those skills are far more important—all the data indicate—for life success than your IQ or your grades.

If you can’t regulate your own emotional temperature, you’ll regulate everyone around you to keep yourself comfortable.

Blame is a Defense Against Powerlessness Betrayal trauma changes you. You have endured a life-altering shock, and are likely living with PTSD symptoms— hypervigilance, flashbacks and bewilderment—with broken trust, with the inability to cope with many situations, and with the complete shut down of parts of your mind, including your ability to focus and regulate your emotions. Nevertheless, if you are unable to recognize the higher purpose in your pain, to forgive and forget and move on, you clearly have chosen to be addicted to your pain and must enjoy playing the victim. And the worst is, we are only too ready to agree with this assessment! Trauma victims commonly blame themselves. Blaming oneself for the shame of being a victim is recognized by trauma specialists as a defense against the extreme powerlessness we feel in the wake of a traumatic event. Self-blame continues the illusion of control shock destroys, but prevents us from the necessary working through of the traumatic feelings and memories to heal and recover.

Your grades in school, your scores on the SAT, mean less for life success than your capacity to co-operate, your ability to regulate your emotions, your capacity to delay your gratification, and your capacity to focus your attention. Those skills are far more important—all the data indicate—for life success than your IQ or your grades.

when you avoid solitude, you miss out on the positive things it brings you: the ability to clarify hard problems, to regulate your emotions, to build moral courage, and to strengthen relationships.

Our words allow us to enter each other’s affective niches, even at extremely long distances. You can regulate your friend’s body budget (and he yours) even if you are an ocean apart—by phone or email or even just by thinking about one another.

More specifically, the coolheaded ability to regulate our emotions each day—a key to what we call emotional IQ—depends on getting sufficient REM sleep night after night. (If your mind immediately jumped to particular colleagues, friends, and public figures who lack these traits, you may well wonder about how much sleep, especially late-morning REM-rich sleep, they are getting.)

This might surprise you, but one of the best ways to manage your emotions is simply to experience that emotion and let it run its course.

If you pay attention, when you are seeking something, you will move towards your goal. More importantly, however, you will acquire the information that allows your goal itself to transform. A totalitarian never asks, “What if my current ambition is in error?” He treats it, instead, as the Absolute. It becomes his God, for all intents and purposes. It constitutes his highest value. It regulates his emotions and motivational states, and determines his thoughts. All people serve their ambition. In that matter, there are no atheists. There are only people who know, and don’t know, what God they serve.

Alterations in regulation of affect (emotion) and impulse: Almost all people who are seriously traumatized have problems in tolerating and regulating their emotions and surges or impulses. However, those with complex PTSD and dissociative disorders tend to have more difficulties than those with PTSD because disruptions in early development have inhibited their ability to regulate themselves. The fact that you have a dissociative organization of your personality makes you highly vulnerable to rapid and unexpected changes in emotions and sudden impulses. Various parts of the personality intrude on each other either through passive influence or switching when your under stress, resulting in dysregulation. Merely having an emotion, such as anger, may evoke other parts of you to feel fear or shame, and to engage in impulsive behaviors to stop avoid the feelings.

We can make our partners into the source of our hope, love, strength, ability to feel or regulate our own emotions, as well as the source of our meaning and purpose in life. Our partners can be the inspiration for these things, as well as the objects or focus of our love, but they should not be the source of it. You are the source of your happiness, love, courage, emotional regulation and purpose, and the sooner that you can release your partner from being the source of these experiences the better for everyone involved

when you change your emotions, you can change the expression of your genes (turning some on and others off) because you are sending a new chemical signal to your DNA, which can then instruct your genes to make different proteins—up-regulating or down-regulating to make all kinds of new building blocks that can change the structure and function of your body.

In between every action and reaction, there is a space. Usually the space is extremely small because we react so quickly, but take notice of that space and expand it. Be aware in that space that you have a choice to make. You can choose how to respond, and choose wisely, because the next step you take will teach your child how to handle anger and could either strengthen or damage your relationship.

The emotionally cold or distant trait also rears its head during arguments when one person is experiencing and expressing significant emotion and the narcissistic person just checks out and does not respond—or does so in a cold and clipped manner. At such times you may find yourself spinning—and actually feeling as though you are “going crazy”—because the coldness of the response makes it even more difficult to regulate yourself in that moment. The emotional coldness can be confusing for you and may result in attempts to jump through hoops to generate warmth and connection with your partner. I have observed people wearing themselves out over decades, trying to create a fire where there was no possibility.

In nature, it is not only the physically weak but the mentally weak that get eaten. Now we have created this modern society in which we have every comfort, yet we are losing our ability to regulate our mood, our emotions.

Developing mental strength is about improving your ability to regulate your emotions, manage your thoughts, and behave in a positive manner, despite your circumstances.

Meditation is one of Mother Nature’s most powerful medicines and has no apparent side effects. It’s been scientifically proven that meditation helps calm the mind and de-stress the body. It also helps regulate blood pressure, lowers depression, induces the ‘relaxation response’, rewires the circuitry of your brain, enhances positive emotions, increases overall life satisfaction . . . And that’s just for starters!

Effectively dealing with stress depends upon achieving a balance between the smoke detector and the watchtower. If you want to manage your emotions better, your brain gives you two options: You can learn to regulate them from the top down or from the bottom up.

Goleman identified the five components of emotional intelligence as self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills.

It is worth pointing out that feeling things (which usually means feeling them painfully) is at some level linked to the acquisition of knowledge.

Certain emotions drive certain thoughts and actions. Knowing your emotional drivers is essential to regulate behavior.

Self-regulating your emotions can be beneficial to your present and future self.

When you feel an emotion, you can ultimately bypass your neocortex—the seat of your conscious mind—and activate your autonomic nervous system. Therefore, as you get beyond your thinking brain, you move into a part of the brain where health is regulated, maintained, and executed. So

Anxiety’s arousal, triggered by the stress response, will alert you to something that’s bothering you—a sudden change at home or work, for instance. You pay attention and think through what’s at stake: What does this change mean for you? For your loved ones? Can you control the situation? By organizing your thoughts around what you can control, you draw upon serotonin, dopamine, and cortisol to keep you focused on next steps. This action keeps you emotionally regulated and goal-driven.

However, do not confuse distraction with avoidance. When you avoid a distressing situation, you choose not to deal with it. But when you distract yourself from a distressing situation, you still intend to deal with it in the future, when your emotions have calmed down to a tolerable level. The

Self-harm or substance abuse being common ways in which BPD sufferers tend to block their unwanted emotions; this is not weakness but simply that the condition makes it so difficult to regulate your reactions.

People who struggle with overwhelming emotions often feel vulnerable. At any point, the smallest trigger can lead to a tidal wave of emotions that leaves them feeling confused, angry, alone, hopeless, and in pain.

The key with boundaries is that you always set them around those things that are yours: your body, your mind, your emotions, your time, intimacy with you. You always have a right to regulate access to what is yours. But by the time the boundaries of your self have become blurred with those of your partner, setting boundaries and defining your self feels like taking something away from her that she had come to regard as hers.

Non-alcoholic ways in which parents may not 'be there' for the children can include: - violence and sexual abuse - workholism - gambling - transquilliser addiction- - womanizing - frequent journeys abroad - death - suicide - being unemployed or unemployable - frequent hospitalisation - mental or physical handicap - excessive religiosity - rigid rules and regulations - homes where children are never allowed to be themselves but must always be pleasing to adults

Emotions Individuals who experience self-loss often struggle to self-regulate, self-soothe, or emotionally connect—they lack inner grounding. As a consequence, they begin to cope through mechanisms of avoidance, suppression, or escapism.

What meaning our lives may seem to have is the work of a relatively well-constituted emotional system. As consciousness gives us the sense of being persons, our psychophysiology is responsible for making us into personalities who believe the existential game to be worth playing. We may have memories that are unlike those of anyone else, but without the proper emotions to liven those memories they might as well reside in a computer file as disconnected bits of data that never unite into a tailor-made individual for whom things seem to mean something. You can conceptualize that your life has meaning, but if you do not feel that meaning then your conceptualization is meaningless and you are nobody. The only matters of weight in our lives are colored by rainbows or auroras of regulated emotion which give one a sense of that “old self.” But a major depression causes your emotions to evaporate, reducing you to a shell of a person standing alone in a drab landscape. Emotions are the substrate for the illusion of being a somebody among somebodies as well as for the substance we see, or think we see, in the world. Not knowing this ground-level truth of human existence is the equivalent of knowing nothing at all.

Even when emotions seem to overtake life, such as when we are depressed or anxious or angry, it is important to remember that those emotions still give us important information. Rather than judging our emotions, practice acceptance of them and open your mind to their messages. Rejecting emotions or trying to push them away usually intensifies them. If the message is not heard, it needs to get louder. As an example, invalidation by others tends to intensify emotions, and self-invalidation has the same effect.

Just as your body has self-regulating mechanisms, like perspiring to cool you down and shivering to warm you up, you can regulate your emotions according to the circumstances. You can abstain from over-reacting, and you know how to set boundaries and how to say "no.

the magic happens once you accept that you can’t regulate others’ emotions or experiences that’s when you begin to live your most authentic life some people will not “get” you, but what matters is that you get you be kind, help others, and don’t forget to live for yourself

If you want to manage your emotions better, your brain gives you two options: You can learn to regulate them from the top down or from the bottom up. Knowing the difference between top down and bottom up regulation is central for understanding and treating traumatic stress. Top-down regulation involves strengthening the capacity of the watchtower to monitor your body's sensations. Mindfulness meditation and yoga can help with this. Bottom-up regulation involves recalibrating the autonomic nervous system...we can access the ANS through breath, movement, or touch.

If your child is a teenage empath, you might like to try introducing them to self-inquiry. As sensitive beings, empathic teenagers struggle greatly to differentiate their emotions from those around them. One of the best ways to help your child regulate their emotions is by teaching them to ask, “Is this feeling mine?

When a feeling happens in your body, you are responsible for exploring, understanding, and regulating that emotion.

Trauma isn’t a difficult event; rather, it’s the imprint of an event on our brain and body. It’s what happens when we have a strong emotional response that we can’t regulate.

How would you feel if the person you're talking to shared a similar level of detail with you?

Scientists now understand that there is a specific “contentment pathway” that is completely separate from the pleasure or reward pathway in the brain and under completely different regulation. Pleasure (reward) is the emotional state where your brain says, This feels good—I want more, while happiness (contentment) is the emotional state where your brain says, This feels good—I don’t want or need any more.

For many of us with emotion regulation issues, they can also be super challenging and emotionally draining. We may have never learned how to have healthy relationships and are trying to figure it out now as adults.

our ability to feel our feelings as they move as energy through our body with our ability to talk about what we feel. We can sit in therapy, tell sad stories, and talk about feeling sad without ever having the bodily experience of sadness. Psychology has historically focused too much on cognition and behavior while neglecting the process that underlies them both: emotion. But current neuroscientific research reveals emotion (also called affect in the scientific literature) as the central driver behind why we are the way we are, and how we develop and heal.2 We now know that most psychopathology, or mental illness, is the result of the inability to effectively regulate emotion.

sexual addiction. During their initial period of abstinence, abusers often find themselves flooded with emotions they do not yet have the mental or spiritual maturity to regulate, and as a result, quickly return to their old habits.

Happiness" alone does not guarantee mental health and well-being. A tempering dose of disappointment- an occasional taste of frustration and learning that you do recover from it- goes a long way toward producing long-term contentment. Indeed the ability to ride out the bad times without feeling doomed is essential to survival. When happiness is not taken for granted, and when one is acquainted with its opposite it is more easily savored and has more lasting effects.

Work by Martha Farah of the University of Pennsylvania, Tom Boyce of UCSF, and others demonstrates something outrageous: By age five, the lower a child’s socioeconomic status, on the average, the (a) higher the basal glucocorticoid levels and/or the more reactive the glucocorticoid stress response, (b) the thinner the frontal cortex and the lower its metabolism, and (c) the poorer the frontal function concerning working memory, emotion regulation, impulse control, and executive decision making; moreover, to achieve equivalent frontal regulation, lower-SES kids must activate more frontal cortex than do higher-SES kids. In addition, childhood poverty impairs maturation of the corpus callosum, a bundle of axonal fibers connecting the two hemispheres and integrating their function. This is so wrong—foolishly pick a poor family to be born into, and by kindergarten, the odds of your succeeding at life’s marshmallow tests are already stacked against you.34

If you pay attention, when you are seeking something, you will move towards your goal. More importantly, however, you will acquire the information that allows your goal itself to transform. A totalitarian never asks, “What if my current ambition is in error?” He treats it, instead, as the Absolute. It becomes his God, for all intents and purposes. It constitutes his highest value. It regulates his emotions and motivational states, and determines his thoughts. All people serve their ambition.

I had no particular problem about getting divorced. For all intents and purposes we already were divorced. And I had no emotional hang up about signing and sealing the official documents. If that's what she wanted, fine. It was a legal formality, nothing more. But when it came to why, and how, things had turned out this way, the sequence of events was beyond me. I understood, of course, that over time, and as circumstances changed, a couple could grow closer, or move apart. Changes in a person's feelings aren't regulated by custom, logic, or the law. They're fluid, unstable, free to spread their wings and fly away. Like migratory birds have no concept of borders between countries. But these were all just generalizations, and I couldn't easily grasp the individual case here-that this woman, Yuzu, refused to love this man, me, and chose instead to be loved by someone else. It felt terribly absurd, a horribly ugly way to be treated. There wasn't any anger involved (I think). I mean, what was I supposed to be angry with? What I was feeling was a fundamental numbness. The numbness your heart automatically activates to lessen the awful pain when you want some-body desperately and they reject you. A kind of emotional morphine.

People who are used to constant attention and flattery become inured to the merely pleasant and become "peak seekers." They expect the highs, and when their unrealistic goals or expectations are not met, they are not simply disappointed, they are devastated.

The word dialectic (in dialectical behavior therapy) means to balance and compare two things that appear very different or even contradictory. In dialectical behavior therapy, the balance is between change and acceptance (Linehan, 1993a). You need to change the behaviors in your life that are creating more suffering for yourself and others while simultaneously also accepting yourself the way you are. This might sound contradictory, but it’s a key part of this treatment. Dialectical behavior therapy depends on acceptance and change, not acceptance or change.

Most psychologists agree that a child has to develop a secure attachment with at least one primary caregiver in order to learn how to effectively regulate her own emotions for the rest of her life, and in order to learn how to become attached in a healthy way in adult relationships.

Some scientists refer to the control network as an “emotion regulation” network. They assume that emotion regulation is a cognitive process that exists separately from emotion itself, say, when you’re pissed off at your boss but refrain from punching him. From the brain’s perspective, however, regulation is just categorization. When you have an experience that feels like your so-called rational side is tempering your emotional side—a mythical arrangement that you’ve learned is not respected by brain wiring—you are constructing an instance of the concept “Emotion Regulation.”19

Imagine your child has an emotional bank account. The currency in this bank account is connection, and their behavior at any moment reflects the status of their account, how full or depleted it is. I mentioned earlier the idea of this “connection capital”—when we really connect with a child, see their experience, allow for their feelings, and make an effort to understand what’s going on for them, we build our capital. Having a healthy amount of connection capital leads kids to feel confident, capable, safe, and worthy. And these positive feelings on the inside lead to “good” behavior on the outside—behavior like cooperation, flexibility, and regulation. So in order to create positive change, we have to first build connection, which will lead kids to feel better, which will then lead them to behave better. But note, behavior comes last. We cannot start there. We must start with connection.

Having our minds sanctified is an ongoing, lifelong process, but absolutely nothing will have a greater harvest in your life. So many people try to get hold of their emotions, but they don't realize the emotions are usually regulated by the mind. If we don't start thinking differently, we will never feel differently.

These practical and cultural challenges are further complicated if the illness is too invisible or too conspicuous. Further still if it makes others uncomfortable or if it requires specialized equipment or rare expertise. The complications increase exponentially for those who do not have the emotional and financial support systems that I enjoy, those, for example, who navigate the labyrinthian regulations of federal disability programs, where funding can be stripped away for such missteps as finding someone you wish to marry or saving too much money. Our legal policies surrounding disability funding carry a clear message. If you need your civilization’s help to stay afloat while disabled, you must be careful to live in the abject poverty society feels you deserve or the help you need will be withheld. Such is our cultural love of billable productivity and our general disdain for everything else. It’s a concept that many of us internalize without a second thought. Our worth is our productivity.

The Liver needs movement!! Nothing will move your stagnation like exercise. Regulate sleep, with a goal of being asleep before the Wood (Liver-Gall Baldder) hours begin at 11 p.m., and no late night eating or overeating as this burdens the Liver’s patent flow of Qi and contributes to stagnation of energy. We know that the emotions associated

So you don’t have an inner lizard or an emotional beast-brain. There is no such thing as a limbic system dedicated to emotions. And your misnamed neocortex is not a new part; many other vertebrates grow the same neurons that, in some animals, organize into a cerebral cortex if key stages run for long enough. Anything you read or hear that proclaims the human neocortex, cerebral cortex, or prefrontal cortex to be the root of rationality, or says that the frontal lobe regulates so-called emotional brain areas to keep irrational behavior in check, is simply outdated or woefully incomplete. The triune brain idea and its epic battle between emotion, instinct, and rationality is a modern myth.

But you . . . confront a client or a stranger on the street and your heart is liable to burst out of your chest; or you are called on to address a crowd and your stomach crashes through the floor. It’s time to realize that this is a luxury, an indulgence of our lesser self. In space, the difference between life and death lies in emotional regulation.

Children who are accustomed to being treated well internalize that treatment and have a permanent sense of well-being. But children whose every need is instantly gratified and who are constantly praised to the skies do not have the same sense of well-being; rather they may feel despair or rage when that gratification is withheld, or when everyone doesn't glorify them in the same way.

Time-in and the mindful awareness and presence it creates will enable your brain to literally grow more integrative fibers that create your ability to regulate emotions, attention, thinking, and behavior, and your sense of well-being and connections to others will be optimized. If carefully conducted scientific studies did not reveal this, I myself would look at this list and say, “That is too good to be true!

Some narcissistic leaders are models of icy reserve while others have the emotional self-control of a two-year-old. … the essential narcissistic defect is not something people generally outgrow. In fact, narcissism may become more entrenched with age and expanding power. To the extent that power becomes more secure, the moody Narcissist may have more insulation from the shame that is the principal regulator of bad behavior. The more powerful you are, the more you can get away with. . . . Such people never developed the ability to calm themselves, and their unrealistic expectations and need to control what is often uncontrollable can keep them in a constant state of agitation. If you and others feel you must walk on eggshells to avoid setting off a landmine, suspect underlying narcissism and tailor your responses accordingly.

The therapist attunes to, empathetically reflects, and clarifies cycles of affect regulation (e.g., numbing flips into rage which dissolves into shame and hiding) and cycles of interactions with others (as I hide, you harangue me and I shut you out more, triggering an increase in your aggression, and so on). The focus here is on how clients are, in the present, actively and most often without awareness, constructing inner emotional and interpersonal interactional realities into

Let’s pause for a minute here, because there’s one vitally important thing you have to remember when you enter a negotiation armed with your list of calibrated questions. That is, all of this is great, but there’s a rub: without self-control and emotional regulation, it doesn’t work. The very first thing I talk about when I’m training new negotiators is the critical importance of self-control. If you can’t control your own emotions, how can you expect to influence the emotions of another party?

The connection between childhood adversity and frontocortical maturation pertains to childhood poverty. Work by Martha Farah of the University of Pennsylvania, Tom Boyce of UCSF, and others demonstrates something outrageous: By age five, the lower a child’s socioeconomic status, on the average, the (a) higher the basal glucocorticoid levels and/or the more reactive the glucocorticoid stress response, (b) the thinner the frontal cortex and the lower its metabolism, and (c) the poorer the frontal function concerning working memory, emotion regulation, impulse control, and executive decision making; moreover, to achieve equivalent frontal regulation, lower-SES kids must activate more frontal cortex than do higher-SES kids. In addition, childhood poverty impairs maturation of the corpus callosum, a bundle of axonal fibers connecting the two hemispheres and integrating their function. This is so wrong—foolishly pick a poor family to be born into, and by kindergarten, the odds of your succeeding at life’s marshmallow tests are already stacked against you.

The core components of high EQ are the following: The ability to self-soothe. The key to managing emotion is to allow, acknowledge, and tolerate our intense emotions so that they evaporate, without getting stuck in them or taking actions we’ll later regret. Self-soothing is what enables us to manage our anxiety and upsets, which in turn allows us to work through emotionally charged issues in a constructive way. Emotional self-awareness and acceptance. If we don’t understand the emotions washing over us, they scare us, and we can’t tolerate them. We repress our hurt, fear, or disappointment. Those emotions, no longer regulated by our conscious mind, have a way of popping out unmodulated, as when a preschooler socks his sister or we (as adults) lose our tempers or eat a pint of ice cream. By contrast, children raised in a home in which there are limits on behavior but not on feelings grow up understanding that all emotions are acceptable, a part of being human. That understanding gives them more control over their emotions. Impulse control. Emotional intelligence liberates us from knee-jerk emotional reactions. A child (or adult) with high EQ will act rather than react and problem-solve rather than blame. It doesn’t mean you never get angry or anxious, only that you don’t fly off the handle. As a result, our lives and relationships work better. Empathy. Empathy is the ability to see and feel something from the other’s point of view. When you’re adept at understanding the mental and emotional states of other people, you resolve differences constructively and connect deeply with others. Naturally, empathy makes us better communicators.

We are all conditioned by the Newtonian notion that life is dominated by cause and effect. When something good happens to us, we express gratitude or joy. So we go through life waiting for someone or something outside ourselves to regulate our feelings. Instead, I’m asking you to take control and to invert the process. Rather than waiting for an occasion to cause you to feel a certain way, create the feeling ahead of any experience in the physical realm; convince your body emotionally that a “gratitude-generating” experience has already taken place.

When we are frustrated, it is easy to blame another person, but doing so means we miss a chance to see where we need to heal, seek comfort, get out of a situation, or understand ourselves more deeply. Believing that a feeling is about someone else might make us think that the other person, or the situation, has to change. That can trap us in a cycle of codependency, making us think that we can never be okay until the other person changes. When a feeling happens in your body, you are responsible for exploring, understanding, and regulating that emotion.

The good news: We can start practicing new skills in life anytime we want. Here are some examples of things I'm always practicing: 1. How to say what I mean, as simply as possible, and not make people guess (even if I think they should). 2. How to reach out when I want to shut down. 3. How to just let myself feel sad, lonely, confused, a mess, when I would rather do this thing I always do and check out. 4. How to not be impatient or careless with the feelings of people I love. 5. How to listen and not try to solve someone else's problems. 6. How to take a break when I'm overwhelmed, and promise to return to the conversation a little later.

The mother is downloading emotion programs into the infant’s right brain. The child is using the output of the mother’s right hemisphere as a template for the imprinting, the hardwiring, of circuits in his own right hemisphere.”2 You’re even determining the size of his hippocampi3 (more development confers better learning, stress management, and mental health), anterior cingulate (emotional regulation), and amygdala (emotional reactivity). This early brain wiring influences happiness levels and mood later in life, because better wiring means a better ability to connect with others, regulate positive or negative emotions, and soothe ourselves.

Jerry Hirshberg, in his book The Creative Priority: Putting Innovation to Work in Your Business, writes, No one in a corporation deliberately sets out to stifle creative thought. Yet, a traditional bureaucratic structure, with its need for predictability, linear logic, conformance to accepted norms, and the dictates of the most recent “long-range” vision statement, is a nearly perfect idea-killing machine. People in groups regress toward the security of the familiar and the well-regulated. Even creative people do it. It’s easier. It avoids the ambiguity, the fear of unpredictability, the threat of the unfamiliar, and the messiness of intuition and human emotion.

If you’re consistent in helping your young child learn to regulate his or her emotions and behaviors in soothing and supportive ways, something rather magical will begin to happen: in time, you might watch your daughter seem to be silently reassuring herself: ‘Those kids are having fun, I can go over there.’ He or she is learning to self-regulate fearfulness and wariness.” If you want your child to learn these skills, don’t let her hear you call her “shy”: she’ll believe the label and experience her nervousness as a fixed trait rather than an emotion she can control. She also knows full well that “shy” is a negative word in our society. Above all, do not shame her for her shyness.

Now you are divesting your energy from that familiar past and predictable future. You are no longer firing and wiring the same circuits in the same way, and you are no longer regulating and signaling the same genes in the same way by feeling the same emotions. If you keep doing this process, you are continuously calling all that energy back to you by breaking the energetic bonds that keep you connected to your past-present reality. This happens because you are taking your attention and your energy off your outer world and placing it instead on your inner world, and you’re building your own electromagnetic field surrounding your body. Now you have available energy that you can use to create something new.

As mentioned, once implicit memories are formed, they may be triggered by present events. Because these memories are not managed by the logical mind, they resurface with the same emotions and sensations as when originally experienced. Thus, your boss’s criticism might feel just like being severely scolded as a child by a critical parent. Never mind that the adult being criticized is now “successful.” Because implicit memories are not settled and situated in the verbal and logical brain, they are only marginally affected by words or logic. Other approaches are called for, as we’ll soon see. These approaches do not target primarily the logical, verbal left brain, but the regions of the brain that regulate emotions, images, and bodily sensations.

1. Ask yourself what emotion you’re having and focus on not responding from the emotion. As you saw in Chapter 4, regulating your own emotion is always the first step in responding effectively to someone with BPD. This is true no matter which of the faces of BPD described in Part II you’re seeing. But it’s paramount when your partner is being pulled down by emotional vulnerability. Let’s say your spouse or sibling or best friend is going back and forth between extreme sadness and despair that her life is not different and anger at you. It’s only human to have emotional reactions to being attacked. In addition, believing that your loved one might actually lose control of her emotions and the consequences might be dire is frightening. It’s these high emotions of your own that can cause you to make frantic attempts to fix things or to withdraw from your loved one.

This is also true in defining spirituality. The infatuation one feels toward another when one first falls in love is a mixture of dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine. This feeling is exhilarating and intoxicating and it brings joy to most people. The fact one knows the chemicals are involved does not lessen the experience when one is with that person. But it does help regulate your emotions if you know that the person you feel for is negatively affecting you. Oxytocin is another example of a “love” drug found in the human body that brings a greater chance of long term sometime moments. [...] It does not matter if it is the chemical or not, the tantalizing excitement and astounding exhilaration of life long sometime moments makes one grateful to be alive and breathing. These events enliven us and make us feel transcendence and in turn makes one feel transcendent in the merging.

WHAT IS CALMNESS? Calmness is not a character trait, it’s simply a skill. You have to decide that it matters, that the quality of your presence would be better if you slowed yourself down and were really connected to people and the moment you are living in. Then you practise until gradually it becomes part of you. It benefits everyone around you – they feel peaceful and happy in your presence. It’s exactly what children need in a parent. And it benefits you – with less stress hormones, you live longer and feel better. Calmness is well worth cultivating. Calmness is made up of certain actions; breathing deeper, dropping your shoulders, settling your muscles, feeling your feet strongly planted on the ground, focusing your thoughts on the job in hand in a steady easy way, and not going off into panicked thoughts. Even just counting three or four breaths, in and out, will slow your heartbeat and calm your mind down. Calm people are actually doing these things automatically; when an emergency strikes they intentionally calm themselves more in order to counter the tendency to panic and do the wrong thing. Self-regulating your level of emotional arousal is an incredibly valuable skill for life. All you have to do is notice, am I calm? If not, breathe a couple of times consciously, feel your feet on the ground, and notice how, as the last burst of adrenaline clears away, the calmness response starts to kick in. Practise this for a few days, and soon the natural appeal of calmness will pull you more and more to that peaceful and steady place. Everything is better – the taste of food, the scent of flowers, the feel of the water in your shower, warm on your skin. You will find that time slows down, and you can think more in the pause before you open your mouth. And that has real benefits!

In a healthy body, this synchronicity is perfectly regulated. Healthy people are firmly locked into these rhythms. When disease occurs, one of those rhythms has gone awry. Stress is the biggest disrupter. If you’re stressed, if you’re feeling hostility, your body’s balance gets thrown off. Stress breaks our nonlocal connection with everything else. When you are experiencing disease (“disease”), then some part of your body is beginning to get constricted. It is tuning itself out from the nonlocal field of intelligence. There are many emotions that can cause a disruption of the electromagnetic field in the heart, but the ones that have been most precisely documented are anger and hostility. Once this synchronization is disrupted, your body starts to behave in a fragmented manner. The immune system gets suppressed, which leads to other problems, such as increased susceptibility to cancer, infections, and accelerated aging. This effect is so strong that animals can pick it up. If a dog sees a person who is harboring hostility, it will bark and act ferocious. Wherever you go, you are broadcasting who you are at this very intimate level.

The most obvious way that defensive motivational states make themselves known to us is, in fact, through our own behavior. The ability to observe one’s behavior and thus create representations of behavior in working memory is called monitoring.77 By directing our attention to our behavioral output, we can acquire information about what we are doing and intentionally adjust our behavior in light of thoughts, memories, and feelings. As an executive function of working memory, monitoring, not surprisingly, involves circuits in the prefrontal cortex.78 We use observations of our own behavior to regulate how we act in social situations.79 If you become aware that your behavior is negatively affecting others, you can make adjustments as a social situation evolves. Or if you notice you are acting in a biased way toward some group, you can make corrections. In addition, through monitoring one can observe undesirable habits and seek to change these through therapy or other means. Not everyone is equally adept at using monitoring to improve self-awareness. The field of emotional intelligence is all about how people differ in such abilities and how one can be trained to do better.80

That’s exactly a summary of what it does. To get more jargony: it does impulse control, emotional regulation, long-term planning, gratification postponements, executive function. It’s the part of the brain that attempts to tell you, “You know, this seems like a good idea right now, but trust me, you’ll regret it. Don’t do it.” It’s the most recently evolved part of our brains. Our frontal cortex is proportionately bigger and more complex than that of any other primate. And, most interesting, it’s the last part of the brain to get fully wired up. The frontal cortex is not fully online until people are, on average, about a quarter century old. It’s boggling, but it also tells you a lot about why adolescents act in adolescent ways; it’s because the frontal cortex isn’t very powerful yet. And that has an interesting implication, which is that if the frontal cortex is the last part of the brain to fully mature, by definition it’s the part least constrained by genes and most shaped by experience. So the frontal cortex is your moral barometer, if that’s the right metaphor. It’s the Calvinist voice whispering in your head. So, for example, the frontal cortex plays a central role if you’re tempted to lie about something; and if you manage to avoid that temptation, your frontal cortex had something to do with it. But at the same time, if you do decide to lie, your frontal cortex helps you to do so: “Okay, control my voice, don’t make eye contact, don’t let my face do something funny.” That’s a frontal task too. This is a very human, very complicated part of our brains.

John Glen, the first American astronaut to orbit the earth, spent nearly a day in space still keeping his heart rate under a hundred beats per minute. That's a man not simply sitting at the controls but in control of his emotions. A man who had properly cultivated, what Tom Wolfe later called, "the Right Stuff." But you...confront a client or a stranger on the streets and your heart is liable to burst out of your chest; or you are called on to address a crowd and your stomach crashes through the floor. It's time to realize that this is a luxury, an indulgence of our lesser self. In space, the difference between life and death lies in emotional regulations. Hitting the wrong button, reading the instrument panels incorrectly, engaging a sequence too early- none of these could have been afforded on a successful Apollo mission- the consequences were too great. Thus, the question for astronauts was not How skilled a pilot are you, but Can you keep an even strain? Can you fight the urge to panic and instead focus only on what you can change? On the task at hand? Life is really no different. Obstacles make us emotional, but the only way we'll survive or overcome them is by keeping those emotions in check- if we can keep steady no matter what happens, no matter how much external events may fluctuate. The Greeks had a word for this: apatheia. It's the kind of calm equanimity that comes with the absence of irrational or extreme emotions. Not the loss of feeling altogether, just the loss of the harmful, unhelpful kind. Don't let the negativity in, don't let those emotions even get started. Just say: No, thank you. I can't afford to panic. This is the skill that must be cultivated- freedom from disturbance and perturbation- so you can focus your energy exclusively on solving problems, rather than reacting to them. p28-9

HARRIS: It’s worth emphasizing the connection between perception and action. It’s one thing to talk about it in the context of catching a cricket ball, but when you talk about the evolutionary logic of having developed perceptual capacities in the first place, the link to action becomes even more explicit. We haven’t evolved to perceive the world as it is for some abstract epistemological reason. We’ve evolved to perceive what’s biologically useful. And what’s biologically useful is always connected—at least when we’re talking about the outside world—to actions. If you can’t move, if you can’t act in any way, there would have been very little reason to evolve a capacity for sight, for instance. SETH: Absolutely. The sea squirt—a very simple marine creature—swims about during its juvenile phase looking for a place to settle, and once it settles and starts filter feeding, it digests its own brain, because it no longer has any need for perceptual or motor competence. This is often used as an unkind analogy for getting tenure in academia. But you’re absolutely right: perception is not about figuring out what’s really there. We perceive the world as it’s useful for us to do so. This is particularly important when we think about perception of the internal state of the body, which we mentioned earlier. Brains are not for perceiving the world as it is. They didn’t evolve for doing philosophy or complex language, they evolved to guide action. But even more fundamentally, brains evolved to keep themselves and their bodies alive. The most basic cycle of perception and action doesn’t involve the outside world or the exterior surfaces of the body at all. It’s all about regulating the internal physiology of the body and keeping it within bounds compatible with survival. This gives us a clue about why experiences of mood and emotion, and the basic experiences of selfhood, have a fundamentally nonobject-like character.

When we have poor vagal tone, we have higher sensitivity to perceived threats in our environment, which overactivates the body’s stress response and leads to reduced emotional and attentional regulation overall. Those of you who experience the discomfort of social anxiety might recognize this disconnect. Imagine walking into a party filled with strangers. You might have obsessed over what to wear to the party, planning every detail, every possible conversation topic, or you may have felt totally neutral about the party—no warning signs that you might feel uncomfortable and act accordingly. Either way, none of it matters once you actually walk into the room. Suddenly, all eyes are on you. Your face grows hot and red when you hear laughter, which you’re certain is about your outfit or your hair. Someone brushes past you, and you feel claustrophobic. All the strangers seem to be leering. Even if you know rationally that this is not a hostile place, that no one is looking at or judging you (and if they are, who cares?), it’s nearly impossible to shake the feeling once you’re trapped in it. That’s because your subconscious perceives a threat (using your nervous system’s sixth sense of neuroception) in a nonthreatening environment (the party) and has activated your body, putting you into a state of fight (argue with anyone and everyone), flight (leave the party), or freeze (don’t say a word). The social world has become a space filled with threat. Unfortunately, this kind of nervous system dysregulation is self-confirming. While it is activated, anything that doesn’t confirm your suspicions (a friendly face) will be ignored by your neuroception in favor of things that do (the stray laugh you felt was directed at you). Social cues that would be seen as friendly when you were in social engagement mode—such as a pause in the conversation for you to enter, eye contact, a smile—will be either misinterpreted or ignored.

The good news is that positive construal can be taught. “We can make ourselves more or less vulnerable by how we think about things,” Bonanno said. In research at Columbia, the neuroscientist Kevin Ochsner has shown that teaching people to think of stimuli in different ways—to reframe them in positive terms when the initial response is negative, or in a less emotional way when the initial response is emotionally “hot”—changes how they experience and react to the stimulus. You can train people to better regulate their emotions, and the training seems to have lasting effects. Training people to change their explanatory styles from internal to external (“Bad events aren’t my fault”), from global to specific (“This is one narrow thing rather than a massive indication that something is wrong with my life”), and from permanent to impermanent (“I can change the situation, rather than assuming it’s fixed”) made them more psychologically successful and less prone to depression. The same goes for locus of control: not only is a more internal locus tied to perceiving less stress and performing better but changing your locus from external to internal leads to positive changes in both psychological well-being and objective work performance. The cognitive skills that underpin resilience, then, seem like they can indeed be learned over time, creating resilience where there was none. Unfortunately, the opposite may also be true. “We can become less resilient, or less likely to be resilient,” Bonanno says. “We can create or exaggerate stressors very easily in our own minds. That’s the danger of the human condition.” Human beings are capable of worry and rumination: we can take a minor thing, blow it up in our heads, run through it over and over, and drive ourselves crazy until we feel like that minor thing is the biggest thing that ever happened. In a sense, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Frame adversity as a challenge, and you become more flexible and able to deal with it, move on, learn from it, and grow. Focus on it, frame it as a threat, and a potentially traumatic event becomes an enduring problem; you become more inflexible, and more likely to be negatively affected.

A different approach was taken in 1972 by Dr. Walter Mischel, also of Stanford, who analyzed yet another characteristic among children: the ability to delay gratification. He pioneered the use of the “marshmallow test,” that is, would children prefer one marshmallow now, or the prospect of two marsh-mallows twenty minutes later? Six hundred children, aged four to six, participated in this experiment. When Mischel revisited the participants in 1988, he found that those who could delay gratification were more competent than those who could not. In 1990, another study showed a direct correlation between those who could delay gratification and SAT scores. And a study done in 2011 indicated that this characteristic continued throughout a person’s life. The results of these and other studies were eye-opening. The children who exhibited delayed gratification scored higher on almost every measure of success in life: higher-paying jobs, lower rates of drug addiction, higher test scores, higher educational attainment, better social integration, etc. But what was most intriguing was that brain scans of these individuals revealed a definite pattern. They showed a distinct difference in the way the prefrontal cortex interacted with the ventral striatum, a region involved in addiction. (This is not surprising, since the ventral striatum contains the nucleus accumbens, known as the “pleasure center.” So there seems to be a struggle here between the pleasure-seeking part of the brain and the rational part to control temptation, as we saw in Chapter 2.) This difference was no fluke. The result has been tested by many independent groups over the years, with nearly identical results. Other studies have also verified the difference in the frontal-striatal circuitry of the brain, which appears to govern delayed gratification. It seems that the one characteristic most closely correlated with success in life, which has persisted over the decades, is the ability to delay gratification. Although this is a gross simplification, what these brain scans show is that the connection between the prefrontal and parietal lobes seems to be important for mathematical and abstract thought, while the connection between the prefrontal and limbic system (involving the conscious control of our emotions and pleasure center) seems to be essential for success in life. Dr. Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, concludes, “Your grades in school, your scores on the SAT, mean less for life success than your capacity to co-operate, your ability to regulate your emotions, your capacity to delay your gratification, and your capacity to focus your attention. Those skills are far more important—all the data indicate—for life success than your IQ or your grades.

Am I mistaken to think that even back then, in the vivid present, the fullness of life stirred our emotions to an extraordinary extent? Has anywhere since so engrossed you in its ocean of details? The detail, the immensity of the detail, the force of the detail, the weight of the detail—the rich endlessness of detail surrounding you in your young life like the six feet of dirt that’ll be packed on your grave when you’re dead. Perhaps by definition a neighborhood is the place to which a child spontaneously gives undivided attention; that’s the unfiltered way meaning comes to children, just flowing off the surface of things. Nonetheless, fifty years later, I ask you: has the immersion ever again been so complete as it was in those streets, where every block, every backyard, every house, every floor of every house—the walls, ceilings, doors, and windows of every last friend’s family apartment—came to be so absolutely individualized? Were we ever again to be such keen recording instruments of the microscopic surface of things close at hand, of the minutest gradations of social position conveyed by linoleum and oilcloth, by yahrzeit candles and cooking smells, by Ronson table lighters and Venetian blinds? About one another, we knew who had what kind of lunch in the bag in his locker and who ordered what on his hot dog at Syd’s; we knew one another’s every physical attribute—who walked pigeon-toed and who had breasts, who smelled of hair oil and who oversalivated when he spoke; we knew who among us was belligerent and who was friendly, who was smart and who was dumb; we knew whose mother had the accent and whose father had the mustache, whose mother worked and whose father was dead; somehow we even dimly grasped how every family’s different set of circumstances set each family a distinctive difficult human problem. And, of course, there was the mandatory turbulence born of need, appetite, fantasy, longing, and the fear of disgrace. With only adolescent introspection to light the way, each of us, hopelessly pubescent, alone and in secret, attempted to regulate it—and in an era when chastity was still ascendant, a national cause to be embraced by the young like freedom and democracy. It’s astonishing that everything so immediately visible in our lives as classmates we still remember so precisely. The intensity of feeling that we have seeing one another today is also astonishing. But most astonishing is that we are nearing the age that our grandparents were when we first went off to be freshmen at the annex on February 1, 1946. What is astonishing is that we, who had no idea how anything was going to turn out, now know exactly what happened. That the results are in for the class of January 1950—the unanswerable questions answered, the future revealed—is that not astonishing? To have lived—and in this country, and in our time, and as who we were. Astonishing.

Myth 1: Infants don’t remember anything, so experience in infancy doesn’t really matter. Reality: The infant brain has a huge capacity for memory. Memories from infancy are stored in the brain as implicit memory, which makes up the emotional brain, the unconscious mind, and the foundation for lifelong mental and physical health. Myth 2: Responding to cries spoils an infant or teaches an infant to be dependent. Reality: Responding reliably strengthens a baby’s emotional brain circuits, helps them grow confidently independent, and gives them the gift of stress regulation for life. Myth 3: Babies can and need to learn to self-soothe, which means go from a state of high stress to a state of safety on their own. Reality: Babies cannot self-soothe because they do not have the brain parts to do so until way beyond infancy. Myth 4: Babies are resilient, so experience in infancy doesn’t matter. Reality: Experience in infancy matters. It interacts with genes to influence mental health. Myth 5: We can’t make a difference to our baby’s mental health outcomes if our baby inherits mental health genetics and intergenerational trauma through epigenetics. Reality: Nurture makes an impact on inherited DNA and epigenetics to reduce or silence mental health effects. Myth 6: Everyone falls in love with and knows what to do with their baby right away. Reality: Lots of time touching, smelling, and looking into your baby’s eyes slowly builds your love, knowledge, and relationship with your baby. Myth 7: Having a baby impairs your brain function. Reality: Having a baby changes your brain to give you nurturing superpowers. Myth 8: Being with my baby is doing nothing. Reality: Being with my baby is vital brain-building, circuit-sculpting, cycle-starting activism for my baby’s future. Myth 9: Only pay attention to your baby’s stress and emotions when there’s a reason for them. Reality: All of your baby’s stress and emotions need to feel welcome and safe. Myth 10: Since my baby will be with a grandparent, a nanny, or at daycare, I should reduce my care at home to prepare them. Reality: Providing my baby with as much nurture as possible when we are together is what they need to build their brain. Myth 11: You need to buy things for your baby’s brain development. Reality: Your presence is the key to your baby’s brain development. Myth 12: I need swings, seats, and containers to take care of my baby. My baby needs lots of classes and socialization to thrive. Reality: The sensory experiences from my body are the only thing my baby needs. Myth 13: I should feed my baby on a schedule. Reality: Feed your baby when their body is experiencing physiological signals of hunger and showing hunger cues. Myth 14: Breastfeeding or body feeding past six or twelve or twenty-four or thirty-six months is extra, spoiling, or for no reason. Reality: Breastfeeding or body feeding at six or twelve or twenty-four or thirty-six months is brain-building and nurturing. Myth 15: Holding a baby is doing nothing. Reality: Holding a baby is seriously hard and brain-building work. Myth 16: Newborn babies are happy with a swaddle, hat, pacifier, and bassinet. Reality: Newborns are happy on someone’s skin, chest-to-chest, covered by a blanket—no swaddle, hat, pacifier, or bassinet needed. Myth 17: Babies’ stress and emotions don’t matter and can be ignored. Reality: Babies feel transformational stress and a huge range of emotions that influence how their brains and bodies develop. Myth 18: If we respond to our crying, clinging babies, we teach them that that behavior is good, so they learn to cry and cling more. Reality: When we respond to crying and clinging, babies cry less, and we build the infant brain to be more independent later. Myth 19: There’s no difference if I hold my crying baby; they’re crying anyway. Reality: Holding my crying baby provides a nurture bath to their brain regardless of how long they cry...

For one thing, when you avoid solitude, you miss out on the positive things it brings you: the ability to clarify hard problems, to regulate your emotions, to build moral courage, and to strengthen relationships. If you suffer from chronic solitude deprivation, therefore, the quality of your life degrades.

The scientists found that the areas of the brain which regulate pain and emotion were significantly thicker in meditators compared to non-meditators.

The vagus nerve plays a central role in ANS regulation because it connects your brain to your digestive system, heart, lungs, throat, and facial muscles. Dr. Stephen Porges introduced polyvagal theory, which proposes your nervous system reflects a developmental progression with three evolutionary stages:

People who lack this mirror keep looking outside of themselves for emotional regulation. In short, it’s like being a forty-year-old man and still hoping someone will stick a pacifier in your mouth.

When we find ourselves on the low road, metaphorically the PFC has come unhinged. Neurologically it has become less efficiently connected to the other parts of the brain that are sending messages to it. On the low road we do not regulate our bodies well; we do not attune to others’ emotional states; our emotions are unbalanced and our responses are rigid. We leave no space for empathy and therefore limit our insight; fear becomes our gyroscope, overwhelming our capacity to attend to our bodies and making it impossible for us to intuit internal and external situations with wisdom. Ultimately this leads to poor moral choices. This entire process gives new meaning to the expression “He flipped his lid.

when you avoid solitude, you miss out on the positive things it brings you: the ability to clarify hard problems, to regulate your emotions, to build moral courage, and to strengthen relationships. If you suffer from chronic solitude deprivation, therefore, the quality of your life degrades.

Much of maturity is marked by increased emotional self-regulation. This is when the prefrontal cortex is conscious of what you’re doing and in charge. You can inhibit. But when a kid senses a threat, say, in the form of a stressed or grumpy dad, he doesn’t have a fully developed Pilot to say, “No big deal. The bumps will pass, and we’ll just fly at a different altitude in the meantime.” Instead, he panics. His amygdala takes over. And before you know it, he’s stressed and grumpy, too. If this happens too much, his amygdala becomes larger and even more reactive. In Robert Sapolsky’s words, if stress persists for a long time, the amygdala becomes more and more “hysterical.

Co-regulation is not only a learning experience for the mind, it’s also a learning experience for the body. This is when our parent-figures teach us how to moderate our emotional reactions and return to the social engagement mode baseline.

THE HIPPOCAMPUS: TRACKING THREATS AND MAKING MEMORIES The hippocampus is a seahorse-shaped structure in the center of the limbic system. In my live workshops, the analogy I pick for the hippocampus is that of the military historian. Its most vital job is to compare incoming information with the memory of past threats. If there’s a match, it sounds the alarm by activating the amygdala, which in turn switches on the whole fight-flight-freeze (FFF) system. 3.6. The hippocampus: tracking threats and recording memories. By deciding which signals to pass to the amygdala and which to ignore, the hippocampus regulates our emotions. Some people have an active hippocampus that effectively regulates emotion. Others do not; these unfortunates have a hair-trigger response to their own emotions. They become angry, fearful, or anxious at the slightest stimulus. Their behavior is dictated by their emotions. The hippocampus is also the seat of learning. Novel experiences produce the growth of new synaptic connections in the hippocampus. Go take a class in Mandarin Chinese, learn pickleball, date a new love interest, experiment with recipes from a Hungarian cookbook—your hippocampus will start to grow new connections. But the most essential function of the hippocampus is to catalog the bad stuff of the past, and if anything coming our way in the present resembles that bad stuff, it makes a match and turns on the FFF response.

When we learn about threats as children, and they are accompanied by strong emotions such as fear, they can remain embedded in the neural circuits of the hippocampus for life. Neuroscientists call these “deep emotional learnings.” Like the old posters, they may have no use in the present. They may even be triggering us to react to threats that are entirely imaginary. Yet once learned, and reinforced by conditioned behavior, they are hard to change. Like the dusty posters in the pubs, they may hang around long after they’ve outlived their usefulness. When the hippocampus isn’t sure what to make of a piece of information, it refers it to the brain’s prefrontal cortex (PFC). That’s the brain’s executive center, the seat of discrimination and knowledge. It takes incoming information from the hippocampus and determines whether the apparent threat is real. For instance, you hear a loud bang and are immediately alarmed. “Gunfire?” wonders the hippocampus. “No,” the PFC tells it. “That was a car backfiring.” The reassured hippocampus then does not pass the alarm to the amygdala. Or perhaps the PFC says, “That group of young men hanging out in the parking lot looks suspicious,” and the hippocampus then signals the amygdala, which puts the body on Code Red. Using that path from the emotional center of the brain to the executive center is crucial to regulating our emotions. Because it involves a feedback loop with information going first to the PFC and then back to the hippocampus from the PFC, it’s called the long path: hippocampus > PFC > hippocampus > amygdala > FFF. The long path is the default for people with effective emotional self-regulation. 3.8. The long path. 3.9. The short path. In people with poor emotional self-regulation, such as patients with PTSD, this circuit is impaired. They startle easily and overreact to innocuous stimuli. The hippocampus cuts out the PFC. Instead of referring incoming threats to the wise discrimination of the primate brain, where the bang can be categorized as “car backfiring,” the hippocampus treats even mild stimuli as though they are life-threatening disasters and activates the amygdala. This short-circuit of the long path creates a short path: hippocampus > amygdala > FFF. The short circuit improves reaction speed, but at the expense of accuracy.

When we meditate, we activate the hippocampus, in particular a subregion called the dentate gyrus. It’s function is to synchronize emotional regulation in different parts of the brain, and we’ll discover just how amazing it can be in Chapter 6. This synchronization means we’re able to calm our turbulent emotions, activate the long path, and give our consciousness a break from the love and fear, envy and desire, and resentment and attraction sweeping through the Default Mode Network (DMN). Without these emotions to distract us, we create a calm emotional space for Bliss Brain.

If your long path is short-circuited by stress, and your brain is using the short path instead, you might be so alarmed at the mere thought of a shark that you have a panic attack just thinking about taking a swim in the ocean. All the body’s machinery of FFF then gets engaged by this imaginary threat, just as if you were nose to nose with Jaws. Your gut clenches, your heart races, your breathing becomes fast and shallow, and your focus narrows to the point where you can’t think about anything other than the threat. This takes a huge biological toll on the body. High adrenaline produces dramatic reductions in life span. Stressed people have much more disease and live much shorter lives than unstressed people. Whatever form stress takes—depression, anxiety, or PTSD—correlates with higher rates of cancer, diabetes, and heart disease. The deficits in the life spans of stressed people are measured in decades rather than years. In meditators, the amygdala is quiet. It becomes even quieter with practice. The difference in amygdala activation between the longest-term meditators and their less-experienced peers has been measured. The adepts show 400% less reactivity to stressful events. But even in novices who practice mindfulness for 30 hours over 8 weeks, decreased amygdala activity is found. Other structures within the midbrain or limbic system work together with the hippocampus and amygdala. One of them, the thalamus, is like a relay station. Close to the corpus callosum, it identifies information coming in from the senses like touch, hearing, and taste, and directs it to the consciousness centers of the prefrontal cortex. The thalamus typically becomes more active during meditation, as it works harder to suppress sensory input (like “that buzzing mosquito” or “this chair is too hard”) that pulls us out of Bliss Brain. With the hippocampus regulating emotion, the thalamus regulating sensory input, and the long path in good working order, stress-inducing signals aren’t sent to the amygdala. In turn, all the body’s FFF machinery remains offline. This produces corresponding biological benefits. Heart rhythm is even. Respiration is deep and slow. Digestion is effective. Immunity is high. That’s why so many studies show pervasive health and longevity benefits among meditators.

Sitting in your favorite position and closing your eyes, you tiptoe over the threshold of experience and into the mystery. You drop into the heart of the universe. You’re there. The cascade of SONDANoBe floods your brain. You’re hooked, drawn up into the light. When you emerge from meditation, you’re more compassionate, emotionally balanced, mentally coherent, effective, kind, creative, healthy, and productive. The effects ripple through the whole community around you. At the center of that circle is a great-feeling you. The Gregs of this world go for heroin, weed, or alcohol to make themselves feel good. That’s simply because they don’t realize that a far better drug is available. SONDANoBe is what addicts are really craving. They want to feel good, but they’re looking for exogenous chemicals to meet their needs. They don’t understand that what they’re searching for is right inside their own brains. The only reason those drugs feel good to the Gregs of this world is that they’re facsimiles of the substances that their own brains produce. Bliss Brain is a formula, just like the World’s Best Cocktail. It’s the World’s Best High, and it’s just as addictive. The brain that experiences SONDANoBe once can never go back to its old state. By remodeling neural tissue, SONDANoBe consolidates learning and hardwires bliss. While street drugs shrink and damage vital brain regions, SONDANoBe does the opposite. It grows your brain. It expands the brain regions that regulate your emotions, synthesize great ideas, stimulate your creativity, acquire new skills, heal your body, extend your longevity, improve your memory, and boost your happiness. The next chapter shows how a brain bathed in the chemicals of ecstasy starts to change its fundamental structure, as the software of mind becomes the hardware of brain.