Experiences of worry and anxiety or happiness and love can make real changes in your neural networks. Your attention is like a combination spotlight and vacuum cleaner: It highlights what it lands on and then sucks it into your brain—for better or worse.
There’s a traditional saying that the mind takes its shape from what it rests upon. Based on what we’ve learned about experience-dependent neuroplasticity, a modern version would be that the brain takes its shape from what the mind rests upon.
Consider two mind-focused options & outcomes:
1. Self-criticism, worries, grumbling about others, hurts, and stress = a brain shaped into greater reactivity, vulnerability to anxiety and depressed mood, a narrow focus on threats and losses, and inclinations toward anger, sadness, and guilt.
OR,
2. Resting your mind on good events and conditions (someone was nice to you, there’s a roof over your head), pleasant feelings, the things you do get done, physical pleasures, and your good intentions and qualities = over time, a brain with a different shape, one with strength and resilience hard-wired into it, as well as a realistically optimistic outlook, positive mood, and a sense of worth.
Living mindfully,
2. Resting your mind on good events and conditions (someone was nice to you, there’s a roof over your head), pleasant feelings, the things you do get done, physical pleasures, and your good intentions and qualities = over time, a brain with a different shape, one with strength and resilience hard-wired into it, as well as a realistically optimistic outlook, positive mood, and a sense of worth.
Reflect back over the past hour, day, week. Where has your mind been resting?
Are you creating, thus experiencing a life of weeds or wildflowers?
Are you creating, thus experiencing a life of weeds or wildflowers?
Living mindfully,
Dana
(excerpted -with my amendments- from Dr. Rick Hanson's, Hardwiring Happiness.)
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