New Techniques
to
Reshape Our Brains
From Fear to Flourishing
We need our fear brain. Without it our lives would be accident prone and probably very short. When the fear system becomes hyperactive, however, people can become overwhelmed by feelings of anxiety and despair. Such pathological levels of fear can all too easily turn into anxiety disorders and depression, with devastating consequences. Psychology and neuroscience have spent decades developing a variety of methods—from drugs to talking therapies—to help people keep these insidious problems under control.
Eliminating abnormal levels of fear and despair from our lives is one thing; boosting well-being and a flourishing way of life is another. An encouraging finding emerging from recent research is that most of us are surprisingly resilient. When the worst happens—a terrorist attack, a serious illness, the death of a loved one—most of us recover from the profound shock quickly. Some even find that they have become better people, experiencing post-traumatic growth, as opposed to post-traumatic stress. Advances in psychological science tell us that, with some effort, we can resculpt our brain not only to reduce abnormal fear but also to set us on the way to truly flourishing.
The American aviator, engineer, and industrialist Howard Hughes experienced a severe disorder of the fear system, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), which consumed much of his energy right up until his death in 1975. OCD affects millions of people around the world. Interestingly, people with OCD know that all is fine—they know that they turned off the stove or locked the door—but they still have a compulsive need to check and check and check again. OCD begins when a basic fear—I am going to die from germs—becomes an obsession that, in the mind of the sufferer, can only be countered by repetitive behaviors such as incessant hand washing. Like most anxiety disorders, OCD wreaks havoc in people’s lives, as it becomes an all-consuming preoccupation.
Thirty years after the death of Hughes, the actor Leonardo DiCaprio played him in the movie The Aviator. To fully engage with the role, DiCaprio spent several days with psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwartz to learn more about OCD. DiCaprio also spent time with some of Schwartz’s patients so that he could see up close what it is like living with the illness. So immersed in the role did he become that DiCaprio developed many of the thoughts, feelings, and symptoms of OCD. A transient case of OCD had been induced in his own brain. It took almost three months of intensive therapy and practice to rid himself of OCD after filming had stopped.
The National Institute of Mental Health estimates that more than 20 million Americans are affected by fear disorders, most commonly by phobias, generalized anxiety disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder, panic attacks, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Sometimes the overwhelming fear and worries seem to emerge from out of the blue; sometimes they are linked to a specific event. Either way, anxiety disorders are invasive and often become the defining feature of a person’s life.
To get a better understanding of fear system disorders, let’s have a look at the following accounts of two women who were treated for anxiety problems at a UK clinic in which I conduct some of my research.
One woman—let’s call her Angela—survived a vicious attempted rape. Out jogging one day, Angela was grabbed on an isolated woodland trail. She remembers clearly that a man standing by the side of the path looked a bit self-conscious as she ran toward him. When she passed, he grabbed her and tried to drag her into the bushes. Angela struggled, but she was overcome with terror and anger, kicking and screaming for what seemed like an age. “I eventually managed to get away and just ran and ran back towards town,” she told me.
Angela managed to bang on the door of a house but doesn’t remember much else. The next thing she knew, she was waking up in the hospital with her parents at her bedside. She had multiple injuries, including a broken nose, a black eye, and a fractured rib. These injuries healed in time, but as is often the case, it was the trauma that took longer to get over. “I was always nervous in my flat,” she explained, “constantly checking that windows and doors were locked.” For months she was too terrified to go out alone and would only venture out with a friend. She eventually moved to a new house with some other people, but even here she was nervous and became more and more socially isolated.
During a visit to her local supermarket, Angela experienced her first panic attack: “I was overwhelmed by panic and intense fear. I felt sick to the core of my stomach and could not wait to get home to the safety of my room.”
Even at home, there was little respite, for soon she started having flashbacks of the attack. “I would see his face, smell his sweat,” she said, and she would wake up regularly in the night in a state of terror. “I kept imagining a knife,” even though she was not sure that he had had a knife. Angela stopped eating and stayed in her room almost all the time.
Eventually, she sought help, and after much time, her symptoms, typical of post-traumatic stress disorder, began to subside. She still has some problems and is still too nervous to go out running or walking alone, but her life almost four years after the attack is more or less back to normal.
Jayne’s anxiety is more pervasive and difficult to explain. “It just came out of nothing,” she told me. At the age of thirty, she began to worry about all sorts of things, constantly feeling apprehensive and nervous. “I was overwhelmed with the feeling that something bad was going to happen,” she said. Jayne could not think of anything specific that had sparked off these fears, but they became more and more entrenched as time went on. Just like Angela, she began to retreat into her room, becoming nervous about going out.
She experienced a couple of terrifying panic attacks, but it was the feelings of dread and worry that bothered her most. Jayne was experiencing the typical symptoms of generalized anxiety disorder, which is one of the most common problems that clinical psychologists are faced with. Jayne also had problems with depression, fearing that things would never get better. She was often overcome by negative thoughts and beliefs. “I really think I’m a useless person,” she said. “I feel like I’m a waste of space.”
When fear takes over, it’s virtually impossible to live a normal life, let alone nurture an optimistic mindset. Finding ways to get rid of fear is one way to stem the rising tide of these distressing emotional disorders. As DiCaprio’s experience shows, the brain circuits underlying our rainy brain are highly plastic, allowing us to form difficult-to-shake habits and ways of thinking very quickly. The good news is that these dysfunctional circuits can also be reversed and set on a more positive direction.
Psychology and neuroscience have now developed several techniques that are capable of making real changes to the dysfunctional brain circuits that underlie many of the disorders of the affective mind. These are not, I’d emphasize, the superficial sort of “positivity” or “just think happy thoughts and everything will be fine” kind of thing that you find in many self-help books. What I am talking about is the possibility of a real change, reflected at the level of neurons and their connections deep within our brains. Everything that makes us ourselves—our memories, our beliefs, our values and feelings, even our habits and character—are all linked with patterns and connections of neural networks within our brain. If we can change these connections, we can also change ourselves. These techniques can help not only rid us of fear disorders, like OCD or PTSD, but also move us from just getting by to leading a life of genuine flourishing and well-being.
Overcoming Fear and Anxiety
As many veterans coming back from Afghanistan and Iraq can testify, experiencing a severe trauma can lead to the formation of seemingly indelible memories that constantly reignite the trauma. Reliving the bad memories prevents people from moving on with their lives. Angela’s flashbacks of the face of her attacker are an example of how these memories play a crucial role in maintaining conditions like PTSD. The science of fear has established a number of ways to help rid ourselves of these types of fears. The phenomenon of extinction that occurs in fear-conditioning procedures provides one obvious way in which fear can be reduced. As we know, if a feared object, such as a tone in a laboratory study, is presented many times in the absence of electric shock, then the fear gradually diminishes. Just like getting back on the horse after a fall, repeated exposure to a scary thing will eventually result in new learning that this is now safe.
These insights from fear-conditioning studies with animals have led to the development of exposure therapy, which is a highly effective treatment for specific fears, like spider phobia. Exposure therapy works by teaching people how to confront and suppress scary memories. People with phobias go to great lengths to avoid what they are afraid of, so they never put themselves in a position to realize that nothing too bad is going to happen. But forcing people to confront the terrifying object over and over is a highly effective way of eliminating the fear. The phobic’s racing heart, sweaty palms, and panicky feelings, which they have when first exposed to the feared thing, begin to subside. After a few sessions, most people with spider phobia get to the point where they can pick up the spider.
This type of exposure seems to work along the same lines as the extinction of conditioned fears we see in laboratory studies. In recent developments, an antibiotic called d-cycloserine, originally used as a treatment for tuberculosis, has been found to speed up this process; people administered the drug require far fewer sessions of exposure therapy to overcome their fears. D-cycloserine by itself has no effect at all on fear reactions, but in combination with exposure therapy the drug escalates the new learning that the feared thing is now safe.
To understand how this works, we need to revisit what happens when neurons talk to each other at the crucial point of synaptic transmission. During a synapse, brain cells communicate with each other by squirting neurotransmitters out from one neuron to another. If this chemical comes into contact with an appropriately shaped receptor, then any neuron with that shape receptor will also become activated, creating waves and ripples of activity in the brain. A class of receptors known as glutamate receptors have been discovered to play a particularly important role in laying down fear memories. These receptors can be divided into two types: AMPA, which control rapid excitatory synapses, and NMDA, which play a critical role in the longer-term plasticity and development of neural circuits.
When NMDA receptors are activated, a sequence of changes is initiated throughout the brain that creates a semipermanent trace. Much as a river carves out a channel, regular thoughts create new pathways through the neural networks that make it easier for messages to slide around the brain. This is the mechanism that many neuroscientists now believe underlies the development of PTSD. The idea is that PTSD is caused by the formation of an indelible pathway from the senses to the amygdala by means of NMDA receptors. This is why the flashbacks and fearful memories of PTSD are so hard to shake. While D-cycloserine has many effects in the brain, we know that it directly influences the NMDA receptors in the amygdala, the heart of our fear brain, which is why it boosts the unlearning of embedded fears. In this way, the NMDA receptors loosen and become more malleable, allowing the psychological therapy to have a greater impact.
Research is ongoing, but there is little doubt that combining psychological therapies with drugs like D-cycloserine will provide powerful new ways to combat the devastation caused by disorders of the brain’s fear system.
We know from fear-conditioning studies that extinction does not erase the original fear, however, but seems only to suppress the fear, which means that it can be easily reinstated. My friend Sandra discovered this when a backfiring car made her dive for cover. This is why the hunt is on for more permanent ways of erasing fear.
Liz Phelps and Joseph LeDoux, the New York University fear researchers, exploited the dynamic nature of human memory to find a way to permanently erase our fears. Psychologists used to think that memories were laid down in a fairly inflexible and rigid way in our brain. Now, it has been discovered that memories, especially emotional memories, are reactivated when they are recalled, leaving them in a temporarily vulnerable state in which new information can be added to the original memory. This means that every time we bring a memory to mind, it gets slightly changed and laid down again as a newer member, subtly different from the original. Technically called reconsolidation, this reactivation period, which lasts for about six hours, opens a window of opportunity in which the memory can be altered.
The New York team discovered that reactivating a fear memory did indeed allow them to update the memory trace with new non-fearful information. By attaching small electrodes to the wrists of sixty-five volunteers, a fear memory was created by associating a mild electric shock with the appearance of a blue square: this was the CS+ stimulus. A yellow square, in contrast, was never accompanied by a shock: the CS- stimulus. All the volunteers developed a fear response to the CS+, the blue square, as measured by their galvanic skin response.
The next day, during the extinction period, volunteers were divided into three groups. Two groups were reminded of the feared item by being shown a single presentation of the CS+; this was intended to get the reconsolidation process going. For one group, the extinction trials began ten minutes later, during the critical reconsolidation period. For the second group, the trials began six hours later, when this window of opportunity should be closed. A third group was given no reminder and went straight into the extinction trials, which consisted of a series of presentations of blue and yellow squares with no further electric shocks.
Twenty-four hours later, all volunteers were tested again to see whether the fear memory remained. When the CS+ item was presented, there was a spontaneous recovery of the fear memory in the group that had received no reminder as well as in the group that had received extinction training outside the reconsolidation window. But for the group that had extinction training when the memory was unstable, during the reconsolidation window, fear responses did not return. In other words, when a feared item was brought to mind and then presented over and over again without anything bad happening, the original fear memory was erased.
A small number of the volunteers were tested again a year later, and the fear memory was still not present in the group who had had their extinction training during the critical reconsolidation window. This suggests that the old fear memory had been permanently changed.
Richard Huganir, along with his postdoctoral assistant Roger Clem at Johns Hopkins University, have followed up on this work with mice and found startling evidence that the complicated molecular machinery that consolidates fear memories in the first place may also be the key to how they can be undone. They discovered that neurons in the amygdala are replete with glutamate receptors—the AMPA variety—and that during the critical period when fear memories are being laid down, these receptors undergo a major overhaul, with a constant reshuffling of receptors among different neurons. During this reshuffling, the glutamate receptors slip on and off neurons easily. This is what Huganir and Clem speculate makes the fear memories so fragile. Support for this notion came when they injected mice with a drug that prevented this reshuffling of receptors and found that fear memories became impossible to erase.
The finding that reminding people of their traumatic memory prior to extinction training can permanently erase memories of fear presents an exciting opportunity for the development of new treatments for anxiety. The new technique gives a noninvasive way to remove the traumatic memories for good.
Our knowledge of the anatomy of the fear system suggests another way to tackle the development of pathological fear. Rather than focusing on the amygdala and the fear itself, perhaps we can target the higher cortical centers that dampen down the amygdala. By strengthening the emotional control centers of the brain, fear can be suppressed and perhaps diminished for good. With this in mind, many pharmacological and cognitive therapies have been designed to improve people’s ability to regulate their emotions.
We know that standard fear extinction effectively establishes a new memory in the brain, and that this inhibition of fear is achieved by activation of a brain area toward the middle, or what’s called the medial prefrontal cortex. Nerves from this area are linked directly with the amygdala, an anatomical arrangement that provides a means by which the fear response can be suppressed. Directly stimulating cells in this region of the PFC leads to a strong reduction in the activity of the amygdala. Once activated, the cortical control center can quiet the emergency brain, which in turn suppresses fearful and traumatic memories. Conversely, rats with damage to this area of their PFC are unable to unlearn fear.
It seems that people with post-traumatic stress disorder may have an underdeveloped control center. When people who experienced a severe trauma, like Angela, were asked to look at trauma-related pictures in the brain scanner, it was discovered that the medial PFC was smaller and less active in those who had PTSD compared to those who did not. Those who had more active control centers also had less severe PTSD symptoms like flashbacks and hot sweats. If we can figure out ways to activate this middle part of the PFC and other human brain control centers, we would have a vital weapon in the battle again anxiety disorders.
The evidence is growing that we can learn to regulate our emotions effectively by simply reevaluating how we interpret things. If overwhelmed by distressing thoughts, we can attempt to modulate them by using strategies to tell ourselves that maybe they aren’t that bad after all. Not only can this reduce our fears, but it also can change the brain circuits that make up our rainy brain.
In the 1960s Richard Lazarus was among the first to show that reappraising how we interpret a distressing scene can quell the fear response. He presented people with distressing video clips—of aboriginal circumcision rites, for instance—telling some, “This was real: the boy is in great pain,” and others, “This is an educational video: the boys are actors and are not really in pain.” Those told the boys were acting showed less fear as measured by their galvanic skin response, and they also said they were far less upset than those who thought it was for real. How people interpreted the scenes made a difference.
Sophisticated brain-imaging technologies are now revealing that these attempts to control our fears cognitively are implemented within our brains. A network of brain areas—our rainy brain—sends inhibitory messages from cortical areas to lower, more reactive areas that help us regulate our emotions. Thoughts alone, it seems, can influence the control centers of our prefrontal cortex.
By merely giving a label to an emotional thought or picture, the brain’s control center—the PFC—can be activated, which in turn dampens down responses in the amygdala. Ahmad Hariri, the Duke University neuroscientist, scanned the brains of eleven healthy volunteers while they looked at lots of pairs of images—say, a snake and a pointing gun—and then matched the picture to another target picture. This forced them to concentrate on the perceptual aspects of the scenes, and because the images were fearful, the assumption was that their emergency brain would sit up and take notice.
In the more interesting set of trials, the same pictures were presented, but instead of matching the pictures, the volunteers had to select one of two simultaneously presented words to indicate whether the negative scene was “natural” (e.g., sharks, snakes, spiders, etc.) or “artificial” (e.g., guns, knives, explosions, etc.). This forced the volunteers to interpret the scenes linguistically rather than emotionally.
The pattern of activation in the brain turned out to be very different for these two situations. As Hariri’s team expected, the “match” condition led to a strong and intense response of the amygdala. The “label” condition’s response was fascinating, showing that the natural reactivity of the amygdala was subdued in tandem with a strong increase in parts of the prefrontal cortex. When people had to label a picture, the strong response in the PFC led to a weaker response in the amygdala.
This linked pattern shows us that the dynamic interactions between the PFC and the amygdala provide a system that allows us to regulate and direct our emotional responses through consciously evaluating our experiences. When faced with a threat—a growling dog, for instance—we do not just react in line with what our amygdala, the panic button, is telling us; instead, areas of the PFC allow us to evaluate the degree of threat, such as whether we can easily escape. In this way, activity in the Stone Age part of our brain—the amygdala—can be subdued. These circuits underlying our rainy brain are critical in helping us to regulate our emotional responses to fear, and it is these same circuits that become dysfunctional in a wide range of disorders, such as anxiety, panic, phobias, PTSD, and depression.
To investigate how well we can implement control, volunteers are shown upsetting images when they are in the brain scanner—severely injured people following a bomb blast or a blood-stained, severed hand are typical examples. If the word “Attend” appears, people are told that they should let themselves become aware of the emotional elements of the scene. If the word “Reappraise” appears, the volunteers have to do their best to regulate their emotions and try to find ways of feeling less negative about the scene. You might tell yourself, for instance, that the severed hand is just a plastic dummy; it just looks realistic. When we take a peek inside the brain when people are doing this, the results are remarkable. When concentrating on the emotional aspects of a scene, the “attend” condition, the amygdala becomes active, but when people are “reappraising,” areas of the PFC become active, and the amygdala activity is reduced.
The truth is that we regulate our emotions all the time, but we are often not aware of what we are doing. Maria, a friend of mine, once explained how she dealt with observing surgery in her early days as a medical student. Concentrating totally on the anatomy, naming each internal organ as she could see it, helped her to suppress the queasiness and revulsion that she experienced. She had learned a powerful way to control the distress that her emergency brain was telling her was appropriate. When in danger of being overcome by revulsion, for instance, Maria might have thought about how the patient would have no more pain after her surgery, how her quality of life would dramatically improve. All of us develop techniques like this to control our emotions in difficult situations, and brain science is now showing that these mental techniques make real differences to how our brain responds.
This ability differs markedly among people. Some panic in the face of mild danger, while others remain calm and focused in the most trying of times. Neuroscience research is now beginning to tell us why.
Justin Kim and Paul Whalen, working at Dartmouth College, used fMRI and a newer technique called diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) to map the connections between different areas of the brain. DTI is similar to fMRI, but instead of telling us which areas of the brain are in current use, this technique allows us to see the actual connections between different brain areas by observing how water molecules diffuse around brain tissue. By observing these patterns of dispersion, a map begins to emerge of networks throughout the brain, revealing which area is linked to which.
The Dartmouth team asked twenty volunteers to look at various facial expressions while lying in the brain scanner and found that activity increased in a general way when people were looking at fearful expressions, as opposed to any other kind of facial expression. They traced this increased activity back to a thick bundle of nerve fibers called the uncinate fasciculus (UF), which connects the area of the brain containing the amygdala—the temporal lobe—to the PFC. An intriguing finding was that the thickness of the connecting fibers was inversely related to individual differences in the level of self-reported trait anxiety. The more anxious people were, the thinner or weaker the connection. The low anxious had a strong connection.
Structural differences in how the amygdala connects to the PFC means that a low-anxious person can quiet their amygdala quickly and effectively by activating the control centers in his PFC. Inhibitory messages are fired down the strong interconnecting fibers—the UF—to quell the panic reaction. In a highly anxious person, things become more difficult. Not only is there a more reactive panic center to start with, there is also a weaker PFC, which makes it more difficult to implement control. To make matters worse, the connection, or relay station, between the emergency brain and the control center is also weaker, making it even harder to quell one’s fears.
It is possible that low-anxious people are born with a stronger UF, so that they have a head start in learning how to control their emotions. But given what we know about neuroplasticity, this seems unlikely. Chances are, experience and learning over the years bolster and shape the connections between emotional and control centers. Just as we can strengthen muscles and increase our physical flexibility by working out in the gym, practice can strengthen the connections between different areas of our brain. These shifts of cognition can lead to real changes in how our brain reacts when confronted with fears and with pleasures.
The evidence now indicates that all therapies for emotional disorders target these same fundamental brain circuits underpinning our rainy brain. Once these begin to move and become malleable, the principles of neuroplasticity can take over, strengthening the “good” circuits and weakening the “bad.” The classic talking therapy—cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT—causes a reduction in the activity of the emergency brain alongside an increase in activity in the areas of the PFC. These treatments improve people’s ability to control their emotions and are often the treatment of choice for anxiety and depression. CBT is a highly complex psychological intervention that operates on a conscious level, providing people with guidelines and strategies to change dysfunctional patterns of thinking and ways of behaving. While highly effective in the treatment of anxiety and depression, the complexity of CBT makes it difficult to pinpoint the precise mechanism of change. The assumption is that CBT works, at least in part, by changing the low-level biases in cognition that divert the minds of the anxious and depressed toward the negative aspects of life.
This notion is supported by the correlation between changing these biases and the symptoms of anxiety and depression. If a negative bias is shifted in a more positive direction—by CBM, say—the symptoms decrease, and mood stabilizes. CBM techniques operate at a preconscious level, the idea being that by retraining our basic tendencies to interpret or attend to the negative, this technique can glide in under the radar of conscious control to change our brain without us even knowing it. What this means is that, as our brain forms a habit of noticing the positive rather than the negative, the underlying brain circuits will gradually begin to change.
While much more research is needed here, there is growing evidence that CBM procedures do change brain circuits, and, like CBT, it seems to be the control centers in the PFC that are changed rather than the amygdala itself. Thus, psychological interventions like CBT and CBM may alter dangerous biases by actively strengthening the ability to regulate and control the spilling over of our fear brain.
In one study in my laboratory, we wanted to see whether CBM could boost the brain mechanisms that lead us to avoid danger as well as boost the brain mechanisms that lead us to approach reward. A large number of electrodes were strapped onto people’s heads so that we could measure the pattern of electrical activity that occurs in the brain when they observed positive and negative images. Would the degree of electrical activity shift in a more leftward or rightward direction depending on the type of CBM training? More activity in the left half of the brain, relative to the right, is related to the tendency to approach good things, while more relative activity in the right half is associated with the avoidance of bad things. If we train people to notice positive images, and this changes the brain circuits underlying the sunny brain, then brain activity should shift leftward following the procedure. Alternatively, if we train people to notice negative images, and this changes the rainy brain networks, then the pattern of brain activity should shift toward the right.
Using highly emotive pictures of positive and negative scenes, we gave different CBM training interventions to two groups of people. One group was trained to orient toward the positive images and avoid neutral scenes, while the other group saw highly negative as well as neutral scenes and was trained to orient toward the negative images and away from the benign. EEG measures were taken both before and immediately after the CBM.
FIGURE 6.1 The results of our study on the effects of cognitive bias modification training on cerebral asymmetry. Positive CBM training induced an increased leftwards asymmetry, whereas negative CBM training resulted in a higher degree of cortical activity in the right side of the brain.
The results (see Figure 6.1) suggested that we had succeeded in changing not only people’s biases but also their brain circuits. Those who were encouraged to notice the pleasant pictures showed more activity in the left half of their brain after training. The direct opposite was found for those who had been through the negative training. CBM training, it seems, can modify our brain’s reaction to both fear and fun.
Psychological interventions, like CBT and more recently CBM, are likely to play increasingly important roles in the treatment of severe emotional disorders, but psychoactive drugs are still often the treatment of choice for depression and many other disorders of the affective mind, such as anxiety. There is a real conundrum surrounding how these drugs actually work. At a molecular level, most antidepressants lead to a sharp increase in the amount of serotonin and other neurotransmitters at synaptic junctions. This effect can be detected almost immediately, although clinical changes like improving mood and other symptoms do not occur until several weeks later. Also, antidepressant drugs do not enhance mood in people who are not depressed, while drugs that do enhance our mood, like cocaine for instance, typically are not effective in treating depression. This suggests that antidepressant drugs do not work by improving a person’s mood state.
An intriguing explanation of how they do work has come from Oxford University psychologist Catherine Harmer and her colleagues. Realizing that antidepressant drugs reduce the negative cognitive biases that are typical of anxiety and depression, they put forward the idea that this shift in processing to a more positive direction leads to a gradual change in social reinforcement and mood over time. In other words, once a bias is shifted in a more positive direction, the depressed person responds more positively in social situations; this, in turn, is reinforced by more positive and friendly social interactions, which eventually lead to an upward spiral of positivity. Findings from animal studies showing that antidepressant drugs promote synaptic plasticity fits nicely with this idea that changing a toxic bias is the first step on a path of relearning and retraining the brain to respond in a more healthy and positive way.
Even the slightest tendency to avoid negativity and approach pleasure and positivity becomes second nature over time, which leads to fundamental changes in how we react to the world. At a cognitive level, then, it seems that drug treatment and psychological therapies all work by changing negative biases. While the psychological therapies affect our ability to regulate and control our emotions, drugs like antidepressants seem to have a more direct impact on the amygdala. These drugs, via changing cognitive biases, directly subdue the overactivity of the fear brain that is a common feature of emotional disorders.
Many psychologists are energized by the findings that we can change these deep-rooted distortions. Neither our genetic makeup nor our experiences should set the course of our life in stone. The world is full of stories of people overcoming adversity to lead happy and fulfilled lives, just as many have thrown away advantage and squandered their opportunities and talent. While our nature and our nurture certainly make it more likely that we will react in one way or another, the science suggests that there is nothing inevitable about this. By shifting our mindscape—the patterns of biases and distortions unique to us—we are able to shift the way we see the world.
A particularly impressive demonstration of this comes from the brain scans of a group of Buddhist monks who agreed to meditate while their brains were being analyzed. The practice of meditation is at least 5,000 years old and forms an essential part of many spiritual traditions, including Tibetan Buddhism. People who regularly practice meditation speak of how they can train their minds to be still, thereby dissolving the negative influence of destructive emotions such as anger and jealously. Once these “mental irritants” have been quelled, the mind can then be set free to pursue a pure form of concentration and insight, ultimately leading to a more fulfilled and happier life.
Focused attention, or FA, is a form of meditation that requires the practitioner to concentrate on a single object—it might be one’s own breathing, a candle, or a single word—so that one can block out the clatter of thoughts and images that usually occupy one’s mind. Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin wanted to find out whether this type of meditation could improve our brain’s ability to resist distraction. As many a parent will testify, it is extremely difficult to concentrate when children are screaming and arguing among themselves, but for those who master the FA form of meditation, ignoring the distracting noise and screams seems to become easier.
With his colleague Julie Brefczynski-Lewis, Davidson found that people who practice FA meditation do indeed strengthen the brain circuits that allow them to concentrate and avoid distraction. They studied a group of expert meditators, who had an average of 19,000 hours of practice, and compared them with novices who were just starting meditation. As expected, the brain circuits in the PFC that help ignore distraction were much stronger in the experts, whose brains were able to switch into focus mode in an instant. The more intriguing finding was that for experts with even more practice—an average of 44,000 hours of meditation—there was less activation of these same circuits, even though their powers of concentration and resistance to distraction were much better. It seems that the extensive mental training that these meditators had undergone had strengthened their brain circuits to such an extent that now they needed less effort to concentrate.
Another common form of meditation is known as open monitoring, or mindfulness meditation. The aim here is to monitor the ordinary experiences of the present moment, allowing all of the sounds, smells, feelings, and thoughts to pass through your mind without judging or reacting to them, which allows the mind to be sufficiently open and free to fully experience the nature of self-awareness. A common strategy used in this form of meditation is labeling of some aspects of your experience. By labeling your feelings, it is thought you can create a sense of detachment that allows you to regulate your emotions more effectively.
In essence, mindfulness meditation requires a person to take the stance of the detached witness. Imagine that you are meditating and trying to keep your mind open to everything, but a distressing thought comes into your mind. Instead of engaging with the content of the thought, the meditator learns to label the thought this is upsetting and let it pass by. This is not easy to achieve, but people who become expert at this form of meditation can gain great control in regulating their emotional experiences. And this form of mindfulness meditation strengthens the neural networks within the prefrontal cortex that regulate how we respond to emotional events.
Much of the distress and worry we experience in everyday life does not come from external events but from our interpretation of those events. It is what goes on in our head that really affects us. Letting it float away as a nonmaterial thought is a potent antidote to the disruptive effect of anger. This fits with the substantial evidence that any therapy—whether drug or talk—that strengthens the inhibitory powers of the PFC can decrease the activation of the amygdala and thus greatly improve how we regulate our response to stress. This is why trying to normalize these disrupted circuits is the aim of most interventions to treat mood and anxiety disorders. Given the plasticity of brain circuits, even entrenched “toxic” circuits can be normalized by mental practice.
In a pioneering study, this principle was illustrated in one of the most difficult mental disorders to treat, OCD. The constant feeling that something is wrong, which is what really bothers people with OCD, is reflected in hyperactivity in an area of the brain called the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), the brain’s error detector system, which sits on the underside of the front of the brain just below the PFC. The OFC forms a circuit with the amygdala, and in OCD increased activity in both these areas results in a dysfunctional circuit that is difficult to shift.
UCLA psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwartz, who advised Leonardo DiCaprio, has spent a lifetime trying to rid people of distressing OCD symptoms. He made a real breakthrough when he started wondering whether mindfulness meditation might be helpful for these patients. As a practicing Buddhist himself, he knew the personal benefits that meditation could bring. Instead of teaching his patients the details of meditation per se, he decided to develop a form of cognitive behavioral therapy that included aspects of meditation. This has become known as mindfulness-based CBT. Schwartz trains people not to give in to the urge to check the stove but instead to relabel their symptoms as a sign of a disordered brain circuit and not something worth worrying about.
In a pioneering study, Schwartz scanned people’s brains both before and after ten weeks of mindfulness-based CBT. He found that, following the treatment, activity in the crucial OFC area had decreased significantly. Not only did people feel less inclined to act out their compulsions, but the error-detecting system in their brain was subdued, allowing them to get on with their lives. This was a major breakthrough, since standard CBT is generally fairly ineffective for OCD. Adding in the mindfulness component made all the difference.
Mindfulness-based CBT has also been successful in undoing the dysfunctional circuits underlying severe depression. Mark Williams, a psychologist at Oxford University, realized that a difficult problem in depression is not so much dealing with the immediate despair and sadness but preventing relapse. Talking therapies like CBT, as well as drug therapies, are often effective to start with in treating the symptoms of depression, but the vast majority of people plunge into despair and depression again and again. In fact, well over 60 percent of people who benefit from treatment in the short term cannot maintain this benefit over time.
Williams, along with his colleague John Teasdale from the Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, England, have conducted a number of important studies with Zindel Segal, who runs a cognitive behavior therapy clinic at the University of Toronto. All three have battled with the difficulties of helping people who suffer from chronic depression and were often disheartened by their inability to keep people away from the clinic. Teasdale had begun learning and practicing a mindfulness-based stress reduction technique (MBSR) that was being developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn at the University of Massachusetts. The MBSR technique is an eight-week program involving weekly meetings of around two to three hours, along with a home-based practice that people are encouraged to do every day. People are trained to focus their attention on one part of their body after another. “Focus on your left hand,” they might be told; then, “move your attention to your left knee.” The aim is to focus their entire concentration on their own breathing without letting any other thoughts enter their head. This is easier said than done, but if your mind does wander, the instruction is to let it go and not to let yourself get dragged down by the thought.
The three psychologists realized that a mindfulness approach like this might be exactly what was needed to prevent people with depression from triggering the network of depressive thoughts that is a key to relapse. Someone who has suffered depression learns through CBT to challenge and negate their negative thoughts: just because someone did not want to go on a date with you does not mean that you are a worthless person. This is effective for a while, but eventually old habits return, and networks of negativity become activated again. One or two stray thoughts like, “She doesn’t like me,” can spiral into hopeless beliefs like, “I am totally unattractive,” or “Nobody is ever going to love me.” Before you know it, full-blown depression is back.
Teasdale, Williams, and Segal recruited 145 people between eighteen and sixty-five, all with a history of recurring depression. The volunteers came from all walks of life: the rural environs of the small town of Bangor in North Wales; the mixed rural/city environment of Cambridge, England; and the metropolitan area of Toronto, Canada. About half of the patients received mindfulness-based therapy as well as their usual treatment, while the other half received treatment as normal.
The MBSR intervention cut the rate of relapse in half compared to controls, and this was especially the case for those who had had more than three serious episodes of depression. For these severely depressed individuals who could not shake recurring episodes of depression, a mindfulness-based approach had made a real difference. These are incredibly exciting results, suggesting that we might finally have a treatment to crack the most difficult nut of all—preventing relapse in serious depression.
Not long after this landmark study, Jon Kabat-Zinn turned to Richard Davidson to see whether the MBSR technique was changing actual brain circuits. The clinical results were looking positive, but to ensure an enduring change it is necessary to change brain circuits. Was mindfulness training modifying the way the brain worked?
Davidson recruited forty-eight employees of a Madison biotechnology company, assigning half of them to the intervention while the other half remained on a waiting list. The team measured the electrical activity of the brain to see whether the telltale increased activity in the right relative to the left PFC that is typical in those who are withdrawn or depressed could be reversed.
The Madison workers had electrodes attached to their scalp on three occasions: at the beginning of the study; immediately after the eight-week MBSR intervention, which was conducted by Kabat-Zinn himself; and once again four months later. As an added twist, the team also injected all of their volunteers with an influenza vaccine to see whether the mindfulness training made any difference to the number of flu antibodies produced. This was done because Davidson had long suspected that meditation might have a beneficial effect on immune system functioning, too.
With the standard eight-week package, people who had practiced mindfulness meditation showed changes in brain activity as well as an improvement in immunity. Even though a change in asymmetry was not observed on all electrodes across the front of the scalp, the telltale shift to more left-sided activation was present on at least some of the electrodes for the mindfulness group. A pattern of brain activity that is typical of happy, optimistic people was strengthened by meditation. It was also discovered that those who had practiced mindfulness meditation for eight weeks produced far more flu antibodies than those on the waiting list.
The next question to ask is whether this type of intense mental training is affecting the amygdala directly, as psychiatric drugs seem to do, or affecting the ability to control emotions, as both CBT and CBM almost certainly do. The answer comes from a study conducted by David Creswell and Mathew Liberman, two psychologists at UCLA. They selected twenty-seven students and gave them a questionnaire to measure their degree of mindfulness. Even without any meditation training, people differ in the degree to which they are mindful, and the UCLA team capitalized on this naturally occurring variation.
While lying in an fMRI brain scanner, each of the volunteers was asked to label photographs of intense facial expressions with either emotional labels (Angry or Scared?) or gender labels (Andrea or Tom?). The gender labeling had little effect, but the emotional labeling created waves of activity all over the brain. The more mindful people showed the classic regulatory response: intense ripples of activity across their PFC with a corresponding reduction in the amygdala. In marked contrast, the students who had scored low on the mindfulness questionnaire showed lots of amygdala activity but almost no increase in the PFC to dampen this primitive fear response. Their emergency brain just kept ringing the alarm bells. Neuroscience had confirmed what the Buddha himself had proposed: that labeling our feelings and treating them as nothing more than objects of attention can encourage a sense of detachment from negative experiences.
Subsequent studies have gone even further and shown that structural changes in the parts of our brain that help us to regulate our emotions, especially fear, underlie the improvements in mood that people report following a course of mindfulness-based meditation. In one study, sixteen volunteers were given brain scans before and after eight weeks of the MBSR program developed by Kabat-Zinn. When compared with control volunteers, who did not meditate over the same time period, the MRI scans of the volunteers who had meditated showed an increased density—more neurons—in several key areas of the brain that help regulate our emotions. Those who said that they experienced the greatest reductions in stress over the period also showed a decreased density in the amygdala. The MBSR program had reduced the physical size of their emergency brain and increased the size of the control centers of the brain.
Given that there are individual differences in how well we can regulate our emotions, it is important to ask whether these differences relate to differences in well-being and happiness. Psychologist Stéphane Côté from the University of Toronto asked precisely this question along with his colleagues Anett Gyurak and Bob Levenson from the University of California, Berkeley. They realized that lots of people know about different mental strategies to keep their emotions under control, but being able to implement these strategies, especially when under pressure, is a different story. They conducted a laboratory study in which volunteers were bombarded by a series of loud, unpleasant bursts of noise, which causes a natural startle reflex, but the volunteers had to try to suppress any expression of fright.
What they found was that some people are much better at hiding their startle than others; in the team’s terms, they were better “emotion regulators.” The more novel finding was that these variations were related to real-life differences in subjective well-being; the best regulators were the happiest.
In a second study, the researchers turned the tables and presented their volunteers with various video clips of graphic scenes like the treatment of a badly burned person or an arm amputation. While watching these clips, people now had to amplify their emotions; rather than trying to hide what they were feeling, they now had to let their feelings show.
As before, there were clear individual differences in how well people could up-regulate their emotional reaction. Those who were better able to amplify their emotions also reported higher levels of well-being and happiness. What was even more startling was that when average incomes were compared, it turned out that the good emotion regulators earned substantially more money than those less able to control their emotions. As the former world snooker champion Steve Davies once commented, “The secret of success is being able to play like it means nothing, when it actually means everything.”
In the heat of the moment, being able to regulate our emotional responses is associated with greater levels of success and feelings of satisfaction with life. And most of us are expert emotional regulators. From the screams and tantrums of our earliest years, over time we learn to gain more control over how we are feeling. The better we can do this, the better we can cope with most of life’s ups and downs. This is why anxiety disorders, while on the increase, afflict only a minority of people. Most people are highly resilient and bounce back from problems quickly.
Following the 9/11 attacks, there was great concern that there would be a pandemic of anxiety and PTSD in New York and beyond. It never happened. While most were anxious and frightened at the time, these fears gradually faded, and people began after a while to return to their normal lives. Some people do experience long-lasting problems after disasters, but for all the hype, and all the anxieties generated by politicians and the media, the fact is that most people are highly resistant to the negative long-term effects of fear. A small number did develop severe anxiety disorders, but a small percentage experienced what has been called post-traumatic growth. These resilient characters claim that they have grown and flourished because of their traumatic experience.
George Bonanno, a psychologist at Columbia University in New York, has spent most of his career documenting how people respond to major trauma, and he finds over and over that people regain their emotional equilibrium after even the most severe trauma and distress. With his colleague Dachner Keltner, he examined the emotions expressed by people who had recently lost a loved one. While sorrow was common, these bereaved people expressed many different emotions—some positive, some negative. Although grief-stricken, most were also capable of laughter and enjoyment from time to time. This ability to bounce back is a key characteristic of our sunny brain. If we can boost our sunny brain mindset, we can also boost our resilience and ability to deal with stress.
Neuroscience and psychology are now trying to understand the mechanisms underlying the resilience and optimism of our sunny brain as much as our rainy brain. One factor that has emerged repeatedly from lots of different areas of research is that feelings of being in control are crucial. If we have a real sense that we control our destiny, this not only helps us bounce back from setbacks but also maximizes our enjoyment of life.
The initial hint that a sense of control is important for resilience came from work with animals. When dogs were given repeated electrical shocks that they could not escape, they developed what Martin Seligman, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, called “learned helplessness.” In his original experiments, Seligman and his colleague Steven Maier placed dogs in a test chamber containing two compartments divided by a low barrier. The floor of the test chamber emitted harmless electric shocks from time to time, which the dog could escape by jumping over the low barrier.
But some dogs were presented with a series of inescapable shocks before being placed in the testing chamber. Dogs were paired together and given a series of mild electric shocks. One of the dogs could cut the shock short by pressing a lever with his nose, while the other dog could not. When this second dog pressed the lever, nothing happened. The key was that both dogs received exactly the same number of shocks, but only one dog had any control over the situation.
When subsequently placed in the testing chamber, it was the dogs that previously had control that did not hesitate to escape the shock by hopping over the low barrier. Those who had had no control didn’t even try to escape; the majority (about two-thirds) just lay there taking the shock, even though the escape route was easily available. The dogs that had had control never developed this depressive style of coping and did not seem to be particularly stressed. These dogs developed resilience, or psychological immunity, to future stress.
The development of this psychological immunity is heavily dependent on the functioning of the areas of the PFC that are involved with implementing emotion regulation. Steven Maier, Seligman’s former colleague, teamed up with Jose Amat at the University of Colorado’s Center for Neuroscience and discovered that the immunity to stress that comes by being able to control shock is completely eliminated if certain areas of the PFC are inactivated. This tells us that increasing the regulation of subcortical areas by the PFC is an important neural mechanism underlying the development of resilience to adversity. Take this ability to control away and immunity seems to disappear.
So control, or even perceived control, of a situation is crucial for well-being. If we believe we have even a small degree of control over a difficult situation, it becomes far easier to deal with. Imagine the terror you might feel on the back of a speeding motorcycle or as a passenger in a skidding car. If you are driving, the fear seems somehow muted: your perceived control of the situation confers confidence. Studies with rats have even shown that a lack of control leads to the development of stress-related illnesses like stomach ulcers.
In a now classic study conducted with the elderly residents of a New England nursing home called Arden House in the 1970s, psychologists Judith Rodin and Ellen Langer from the City University of New York wondered whether the inability to make decisions—common among nursing home residents—was caused by their lack of control over their environment. Mindful of Seligman’s findings of learned helplessness with rats, these researchers thought that the same process might be occurring in nursing home residents.
To find out, they designed a clever experiment. Two floors of Arden House (floors 2 and 4) were randomly selected, and all residents on these floors were given a plant as well as the opportunity to watch a movie once a week. Everything was kept as identical as possible between the floors, except for the degree of control that the study participants were given. Those on the fourth floor chose their own plant, and they could decide when to water it. They were also allowed to choose which night of the week to watch their movie. In contrast, those living two floors down were given a plant that was watered by a member of the staff. The nursing staff also informed these elderly residents which night of the week was their movie night.
When Rodin and Langer returned to the nursing home eighteen months later, they were astounded by the results. Not only were the fourth-floor residents happier and healthier, twice as many residents on the second floor had died. Taking control had increased people’s longevity. No one had expected to find such a difference in life span.
Subsequent research confirms that a sense of control is crucial for health and happiness. Intriguingly, the results of several studies show that you don’t have to have any control—the benefits are just as great if the control is illusory. When I spoke to Michael J. Fox, he was keen to point out that he is not unaware of risk, but he has an unshakable confidence that he can deal with whatever happens. “I have the armory to cope with any crisis,” he said. This confidence is a critical aspect of a sunny-brain style, and the science backs this up.
A classic study by psychologists Lauren Alloy and Lyn Abramson published in 1979 shows how this works. Lightbulbs were flashed on and off randomly, and study volunteers could press buttons that had no effect on whether the bulb lit up or not. Mildly optimistic people were convinced that they had some degree of control over lightbulbs—an illusion of control. But those who were mildly depressed were more accurate in realizing that they had no control—a phenomenon called “depressive realism,” or, as the authors put it, the more pessimistic folk were “sadder but wiser.”
Are pessimists really more accurate at estimating control while optimists have an overly rosy view of things? The answer turns out to be a bit more complicated. In subsequent studies, the researchers asked people to estimate the amount of control both they and other people had over events. The pessimists were, once again, accurate in judging their own lack of control, but they overestimated the amount of control that other people had. They were sure that while they had no control, others did. The optimists inaccurately thought that they themselves had some control, especially when the outcome was good. If an optimist throws a pair of dice and wins $10, he assumes he has had something to do with it.
Psychological research now shows us that, in fact, most of us think we have control over many everyday events. This goes some way toward explaining why most of us are mildly optimistic. It also explains why we think we have a better chance of winning the lottery if we choose the numbers ourselves rather than letting a computer choose the numbers. Likewise, most people think they have a better chance of winning if they throw dice themselves, rather than allowing someone else to throw them. The allure of control is a powerful and integral part of optimism.
Psychological research has identified a number of other factors that are also important elements in the quest for happiness. Our rainy-brain and sunny-brain circuits are the critical radars honing in on the motivational landscape that fill our heads with bad stuff or good stuff. The reactivity of these brain areas determine what we tune into and what we respond to. When our rainy brain becomes overly active, it can lead to devastating conditions such as anxiety and depression. Just as our emergency brain evolved in response to what threatened our ancestors, our pleasure brain evolved in response to what was good for them—access to food and shelter, the protection of togetherness, love, forgiveness, compassion, and so on.
In the modern world, our basic needs—food, shelter, warmth—are usually met, but it is the connectedness with others and a sense of meaning in our lives that are often missing. This is the root of what George Easterbrook calls the “Paradox of Progress.” He found that in the United States and Europe, while the level of wealth grew substantially over a fifty-year period from the 1950s onward, happiness levels did not budge, and rates of anxiety and depression soared. Survey after survey reported that people did not feel any happier and were often deeply pessimistic about the future. There is a genuine disconnect between the level of material wealth in a society and the subjective feelings of happiness and well-being of its citizens.
So how do we go about creating happier and more flourishing societies? One way is to tackle the rising tide of depression and anxiety disorders head-on, because these problems cause misery to millions of people across the globe. For every person suffering from one of these disorders, you can be sure there are at least five members of their family also affected by the illness, in addition to work colleagues and others in the wider community.
But it is not enough to focus on how we can rid ourselves of unhappiness; it is also important to identify those factors that help us flourish. There are general things, like being physically fit and active and eating a good diet, that support our well-being. Positive psychological features, like certain patterns of cognitive bias or the feeling of personal control, are also critical to developing a more flourishing lifestyle.
More important, science has found that genuine changes in happiness only come about when three things come together: lots of positive emotions and laughter, being fully engaged in our lives, and finding a sense of meaning that is broader than our day-to-day life.
Of these three components, engagement in what we are doing, whether it is work or leisure, seems to be especially important. One of the most consistent, if surprising, messages to come from happiness research is that things like a better job, a bigger house, a nicer car don’t lead to a lasting increase in happiness. In spite of what the marketers might tell you, that shiny new watch or cell phone doesn’t make you any happier in the long term. Survey after survey shows that once a basic level of wealth has been achieved (having a place to live and having enough food to eat), extra money makes very little difference to people’s sense of well-being. What does make you happier is getting involved in something that is meaningful for you. This is a real hallmark of optimists. They’re able to throw themselves into a cause and strive to obtain a meaningful goal.
The Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced cheek-sent-muh-hy-ee), at Claremont Graduate University in California, calls this type of engagement “optimal experience” or “flow.” In this moment there is no sense of past, no sense of future, just an intense present, an overwhelming feeling of being “in the moment,” or what sports people call “in the zone.” This is the magical moment when the mental and physical merge in an effortless way. When you play tennis, your stance, your grip of the racket, your release of the ball in a gentle arc above your head, a glance at your opponent across the net, your body swaying gently forward, the perfect strike of the ball with the racket, and the perfect follow-through all come together to make the perfect serve. Everything just seems to click in that enchanted moment.
According to Csikszentmihalyi’s research, most of us experience this type of flow about once every couple of months. About 12 percent of people say they never experience flow, while 10 percent say that they experience flow daily. The trick is to find the right balance between your level of skill and the degree of challenge. If the task is too easy, boredom is the most likely outcome. Too hard, it becomes stressful. But when the difficulty level presents you with a genuine but realistic challenge, then a trancelike state where nothing else matters can be entered.
Happiness and optimism research are often linked, but it’s important to remember that they are not the same thing. Happiness is largely about how we feel here and now: the joy we experience when watching our loved ones play in the sea on a sunny day or the contentment we feel about how our life is going. Optimism and hope relate to how we think and feel about the future. If we really do believe that things will work out for the best, all the setbacks become easier to deal with.
Not all optimists flourish, but a sunny-brain take on the world, especially when linked with realism, does seem to be a great starting point. I have interviewed many of these optimistic realists during the course of writing this book, and it was obvious that most of them do get the best out of life. Many were highly successful, some were wealthy, some were not, but all seemed to enjoy what they did and looked forward to the future.
So what does psychology tell us about flourishing, and what does it take to flourish ourselves?
Psychologist Barbara Fredrickson is an expert on flourishing and has been an advocate of finding ways to bring more positive emotions into our lives. In her research she discovered a critical 3 to 1 ratio, indicating that we need to have three positive emotions for every negative one in order to thrive. Positive emotional experiences include things like a sense of wonder, compassion, contentment, gratitude, hope, joy, love, and sexual desire, while negative feelings are those like anger, contempt, disgust, embarrassment, fear, sadness, and shame, to name just a few.
Fredrickson has found out that if we really want to prosper, we shouldn’t try to eliminate negative emotions; rather, we should work on keeping the ratio at three positive for every one negative. Most of us, she has found, have two positive experiences for every negative. This gets us by, but it is effectively languishing. Once we can get this ratio up to three positive for every bad experience, we can begin to truly flourish.
In an important study with Brazilian mathematician Marcial Losada from the Universidade Catholica de Brasilia, Fredrickson discovered not only that the 3 to 1 ratio was critical but that the experience of positive emotions and human flourishing are linked by a precise mathematical formula. To flourish means living at the top of your range, enjoying a life filled with goodness, growth, and creativity, and, when things go wrong, a strong resilience to get over the hump. Fredrickson and Losada pinpointed such “flourishing” mental health in 45 people from a survey of 188 university students. Forty-five out of 188 (23 percent) may seem very few, but several surveys have shown that only about 20 percent of Americans are flourishing in this sense.
Once they had identified their “flourishers” and “nonflourishers,” Fredrickson and Losada asked everybody to log on to a secure website every evening for an entire month. Each evening all the volunteers filled out a form indicating the number of different emotions they had experienced over the previous twenty-four hours. At the end of the month, the number of positive and negative emotions people had experienced was tallied, and a “positivity ratio” was computed by dividing the total number of positive emotions by the total number of negative emotions experienced. If I had felt “angry” 15 times, “afraid” twice, “sad” 7 times, “happy” 10 times, “content” 14 times, “grateful” 6 times, and “filled with love” 10 times, my positivity ratio would be: 40 (total positive emotions) / 24 (total negative emotions) = 1.66. For every negative emotion I experienced, I would have had almost two positive emotions (1.66 to be precise) to compensate.
When the researchers compared the positivity ratios for their flourishers and nonflourishers, they found a large difference: those who were flourishing had a positivity ratio of 3.3, whereas the average for the rest was 2.2. As found in other studies, the 3 to 1 ratio was the critical dividing line between those who were getting the most out of life and those who were not.
Positivity ratios are also important for a happy marriage. Dr. John Gottman from the Gottman Institute in Seattle has applied strict scientific principles to how couples relate to each other. Through his extensive research on happiness within marriage, he learned that a key predictor of who stays together and who doesn’t is the ratio of positive to negative experiences that couples have with each other. The magic ratio seems to be five positive interactions for every negative. As the number of negative episodes creeps up relative to positive experiences, divorce becomes more and more likely.
Positivity ratios seep out into every aspect of our lives, affecting how we deal with other people, how effective we are at work, and even how healthy we are. Perhaps this line of research answers the paradox of why most of us say we are happy even though pessimism has a more powerful draw. We know that fear wins over joy, that danger cues are stronger than pleasure cues, making optimism relatively more difficult than pessimism to take hold. In spite of this, most people report that they are optimistic about the future and happy and contented with their lives.
The critical ratio of good to bad things might be the answer to this paradox. The truth is that we do pay more attention to negative events, but this is trumped by the greater frequency of the positive in our lives. To overcome the potential toxicity of negative emotions, we need to ensure that for every negative we have at least two, preferably more, positive experiences. In order for happiness and optimism to stay with us, we need to aim higher and have at least three positive experiences for every bad.
Having a healthy and responsive rainy brain as well as a healthy and responsive sunny brain is crucial. Research conducted by psychologist Tali Sharot with her colleague Liz Phelps shows that elements of both the emergency brain and the pleasure-seeking brain are essential for a happy outlook on life. They asked people to recall past negative events when their brains were being scanned. Someone might recall how she had felt when her mother died or how she felt when she split up with a partner. As people brought these bad experiences to mind, their amygdala responded strongly. Then people were asked to imagine how they might feel if these same negative experiences were to occur in the future. This time the response of the amygdala was much weaker, especially for those who reported that they were optimists. The optimists simply found it harder to imagine bad things happening in the future. Sharot and Phelps speculated that this weakened consideration of a dark future might be a neural mechanism underlying the optimism bias.
The work of developmental psychologist Anthony Ong and his colleagues at Cornell University fits nicely with this account. They find that resilient and optimistic people experience more positive and negative emotions than less resilient folk when they are going through a difficult patch. When people are dealing with the death of a spouse, the most resilient will pass through a range of emotional highs and lows. Lots of researchers are beginning to believe that being able to experience positive emotions is an important way of coping that helps us to regulate our negative emotions. Good times, in other words, can neutralize the effects of the bad. As Barbara Fredrickson found in the aftermath of September 11 in New York, it’s not the ability to suppress negativity that’s critical; rather, it’s getting the balance right.
Creating Healthy Minds
Positive thoughts that are not connected to real changes in brain circuits are unlikely to support us when the winds of adversity sweep through our lives. “Into every life, a little rain must fall” is surely true. None of us can escape disappointments and sadness completely. Therefore, having the capacity to experience lots of emotions, alongside the ability to apply the brakes to these emotions if need be, is one of the keys to a well-balanced life. We need a responsive sunny brain that happily cohabits our mind-space with a healthy rainy brain.
Both aspects of our affective mind are influenced by what life throws at us, our genetic makeup, and which genes are turned on and off by the experiences we have. Most importantly, the crucial biases or quirks of mind that set our affective mind into solid foundations can be sculpted by mental training, whether it is through mindfulness-based techniques, cognitive bias modification techniques, drug treatments, or traditional talking therapies. Our mind is highly plastic, and the affective mind is no exception. While it’s not necessarily easy to change, the possibility of shifting our fundamental affective mindset is always there.
As I was coming to the end of writing this book, I visited Richie Davidson at the Waisman Center for Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin to see his new Center for Investigating Healthy Minds for myself. Like many psychologists, Davidson started his career trying to understand and change the type of emotional styles that lead people into anxiety and depression; now, like many of us, Davidson concentrates much of his research efforts on what allows people to flourish. “We know a lot about unhealthy minds,” Davidson said, “but almost nothing about healthy minds.”
“So what is a healthy mind?” I asked.
“I couldn’t tell you,” he said. “But you know it when you see it.”
The day I was due to leave, Davidson showed me around his new center, which had just been built and was still being decorated. The centerpiece is a large atrium made of soft-colored wood flooded with natural light.
“This is the meditation center,” he said, “and here are the rooms that will house the state-of-the-art fMRI machines.”
The center was an intoxicating mix of an ancient contemplative tradition with cutting-edge contemporary neuroscience. As I walked away, I realized how far we have come in recent years in learning ways to overcome anxiety and fear as well as discovering ways to boost flourishing and optimism. By capitalizing on new approaches emerging from psychology, neuroscience, and genetics, and integrating them with ancient wisdoms from Eastern traditions, we are well on the way toward creating people and societies that will allow healthy minds to truly flourish.