How mindfulness changes the emotional life of our brains | Richard J. Davidson | TEDxSanFrancisco

Richard J. Davidson explores how mindfulness and neuroplasticity can transform emotional resilience and mental well-being.

Key Takeaways

Mindfulness can reshape the brain and improve emotional resilience through neuroplasticity.
Modern challenges like distractibility and loneliness significantly harm mental and physical health.
Positive mental qualities such as kindness and compassion can be scientifically studied and cultivated.
Increased awareness and meta-awareness are crucial for mental well-being.
Taking responsibility for our minds can help counteract societal mental health issues.

What the video covers

Richard J. Davidson investigates why some people are more resilient to stress while others are vulnerable.
His meeting with the Dalai Lama in 1992 inspired him to study positive qualities like kindness and compassion using neuroscience.
The brain is constantly changing through neuroplasticity, often shaped unwittingly by external forces.
Modern society faces four critical challenges: distractibility, loneliness, depression, and loss of purpose.
Distractibility is increasing, especially among women and teens, leading to reduced happiness and attention deficits.
Loneliness is a significant predictor of early mortality, surpassing obesity in impact.
Depression rates, especially in women, have risen sharply in recent years, alongside increasing suicide rates among teens.
Loss of meaning and purpose negatively affects both psychological well-being and physical health.
Davidson proposes a framework for a healthy mind based on four pillars, starting with awareness and meta-awareness.
Mindfulness and training the mind can harness neuroplasticity to improve emotional health and resilience.

Chapters

How does mindfulness affect the brain according to Richard J. Davidson?

Mindfulness leverages neuroplasticity to reshape the brain, enhancing emotional resilience and promoting positive qualities like kindness and compassion.

What are the main societal mental health challenges discussed in the video?

The video highlights four key challenges: distractibility, loneliness, depression, and loss of meaning or purpose, all of which negatively impact mental and physical health.

Why is loneliness considered a serious health risk?

Loneliness is a more significant predictor of early mortality than obesity, affecting both psychological well-being and physical health.

Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown

Speaker A

Transcriber: Eunice Tan Reviewer: Tanya Cushman. I'm a psychologist and a neuroscientist by training. When I first began my career, I began with a question: why is it that some people are more vulnerable to life's slings and arrows and others more resilient?

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And that question is still central to all the work that we do. And we're particularly interested in how we can nudge people along this continuum to nourish and nurture the qualities that promote human flourishing.

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And that question is still central to all the work that we do. And we're particularly interested in how we can nudge people along this continuum to nourish and nurture the qualities that promote human flourishing.

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And then something very significant happened in my life. In 1992, I first met His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

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In the early part of my career, I focused almost exclusively on the negative side of the equation, on adversity, on the brain circuits that were important for understanding why some people are more vulnerable to stress, why others may be more likely to develop depression or anxiety.

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And he was the chief inspiration in our turning toward the positive. And in that critical moment, in 1992, he challenged me, and he said, "Why can't you use the same tools of modern neuroscience to study kindness and to study compassion

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And then something very significant happened in my life. In 1992, I first met His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

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But you know, when we first began to study kindness - when we first began to study anxiety and depression, that was hard too, and we've made some progress in that area.

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And this picture of His Holiness was taken in Madison, Wisconsin, and he's visited us several times.

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Our brains are constantly changing, constantly being shaped by the forces around us. But we have, typically, very little awareness of what those forces are.

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And he was the chief inspiration in our turning toward the positive. And in that critical moment, in 1992, he challenged me, and he said, "Why can't you use the same tools of modern neuroscience to study kindness and to study compassion

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And the invitation in the work that I'm sharing with you today is that we can actually take more responsibility for our own brains by transforming our minds.

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in addition to studying anxiety and fear and depression and stress?" And I didn't have a very good answer for him on that day other than that it's hard.

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And I'd like to focus on four challenges that have been critical in our society today.

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But you know, when we first began to study kindness—when we first began to study anxiety and depression, that was hard too, and we've made some progress in that area.

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Research indicates that if we take people out and about in the world, and we text them - and this has been done in a study that was published a number of years ago, very influential study with several thousand people -

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So the work that we and others have been doing is predicated on a critical insight in modern science: the insight concerning neuroplasticity.

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Second question, "Where is your mind right now? Is it focused on what you're doing or is it focused elsewhere?" And the third question is "At this very moment, how happy or unhappy are you?" Here's what was found: the average American adult

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Our brains are constantly changing, constantly being shaped by the forces around us. But we have, typically, very little awareness of what those forces are.

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Folks, we could do better. (Laughter) And when they were not paying attention to what they're doing, they were significantly less happy.

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Our brains are changing, wittingly or unwittingly. Most of the time, it's unwittingly. Most of the time, we're not aware, and we also have little control over those forces.

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This is a graph showing a trend over the last decade. There are many reasons for this increase, but some of them have to do with a genuine increase in distractibility.

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And the invitation in the work that I'm sharing with you today is that we can actually take more responsibility for our own brains by transforming our minds.

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We also are suffering from loneliness. Despite the fact that we're all so much more interconnected, 76% of middle-aged Americans report that they have moderate to high levels of loneliness.

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But first, let me share with you what some of the consequences of having our brains being shaped unwittingly are.

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Recent research shows that loneliness is actually a more significant predictor - by more than a twofold magnitude - of early mortality compared to obesity.

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And I'd like to focus on four challenges that have been critical in our society today.

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Negative self-talk and depression. We all have a narrative in our mind that we carry around about who we are, and sometimes we have negative beliefs about ourselves, which can culminate in depression.

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And these challenges are failures of well-being in very important ways. The first is distractibility.

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If you look at trends just over the last few years, what you see is a very large increase, particularly among women.

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Research indicates that if we take people out and about in the world, and we text them—and this has been done in a study that was published a number of years ago, a very influential study with several thousand people—

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And this trend is occurring in teens as well. These are disturbing trends in kids ages 12 through 17, and the gender difference also is, very unfortunately, robust, where the incidence is much greater in females, and this trend is getting worse over time.

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we text them, and we ask them three questions. The first question is, "What are you doing right now?" And they check off from a list of activities.

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Suicide rates are very disturbing. During the Great Depression, there was a huge elevation, and those rates have come back down.

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Second question, "Where is your mind right now? Is it focused on what you're doing or is it focused elsewhere?" And the third question is, "At this very moment, how happy or unhappy are you?" Here's what was found: the average American adult

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And, again, this is not something restricted to adults. Our teens are showing more than doubling over the last 10 years in suicide, so that today in the United States, unfortunately, more than one teenager, every single day, is taking her or his own life.

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spends 47% of her or his waking life not paying attention to what we're doing.

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Research shows that a lack of purpose predicts an early death. In a recent study, people who are in their 60s with a low sense of purpose had more than twice the likelihood of dying within five years compared to people who reported a high sense of purpose.

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Folks, we could do better. (Laughter) And when they were not paying attention to what they're doing, they were significantly less happy.

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We're not thriving, but the invitation is that we really could be. So we've developed a framework for understanding a healthy mind, and this framework includes four pillars.

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The scientific paper upon which this is based was titled "A Wandering Mind is an Unhappy Mind." In addition, there is a huge increase in the incidence of attention deficit disorders in children in this country.

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It also includes a quality that psychologists and neuroscientists call "meta-awareness." Meta-awareness is knowing what our minds are doing.

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This is a graph showing a trend over the last decade. There are many reasons for this increase, but some of them have to do with a genuine increase in distractibility.

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(Laughter) That is an example of a lapse in meta-awareness. But the moment we recognize that we've been lost and come back, that is a moment of meta-awareness.

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If we're all honest with ourselves, our nation is suffering not simply from a fiscal deficit but from an attention deficit.

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The second pillar of a healthy mind is connection. Connection refers to those qualities which nurture harmonious interpersonal relationships, qualities like appreciation, like kindness, like compassion, having a positive outlook.

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We also are suffering from loneliness. Despite the fact that we're all so much more interconnected, 76% of middle-aged Americans report that they have moderate to high levels of loneliness.

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The third pillar of a healthy mind is insight. And insight is about insight into the narrative that we all have about ourselves.

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And this loneliness is not an ephemeral, subjective state; it also impacts our bodies, our physical health.

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They have negative self-beliefs, and they hold those beliefs to be a true description of who they are.

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Recent research shows that loneliness is actually a more significant predictor—by more than a twofold magnitude—of early mortality compared to obesity.

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Not so much changing the narrative itself but changing our relationship to it so that we can look at the narrative and see it for what it is.

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So this exacts real tolls on our brains and our bodies. And, again, research shows we can do better.

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Finally, the last pillar of a healthy mind is purpose. And here, we're talking about having a sense that our life is headed in a particular direction.

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Negative self-talk and depression. We all have a narrative in our mind that we carry around about who we are, and sometimes we have negative beliefs about ourselves, which can culminate in depression.

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Can you envision living your life so that taking out the garbage and doing the laundry is still related to your sense of purpose?

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And this turns out to be a very serious problem. Depression is on the rise.

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Have you ever trained your mind? Research from neuroscience leads us to understand that there are two fundamentally different kinds of learning.

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If you look at trends just over the last few years, what you see is a very large increase, particularly among women.

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We can teach people the value of honesty, but this will not necessarily make them an honest person.

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Over the last three years alone, there's been a 33% increase in diagnoses of major depression in women.

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We need both to produce real transformation. The wiring in our brains is not fixed; it's adaptable.

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And this trend is occurring in teens as well. These are disturbing trends in kids ages 12 through 17, and the gender difference also is, very unfortunately, robust, where the incidence is much greater in females, and this trend is getting worse over time.

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This is an example from research that we did, where we randomized people to a group that received compassion training for two weeks, another group that received training from cognitive therapy.

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And, again, the evidence suggests that we can actually train our mind and harness the power of neuroplasticity to change these qualities in our mind.

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Our brains can change in a remarkably rapid period of time. The changes that are displayed here are changes in a circuit that involve the prefrontal cortex and the ventral striatum - a circuit very important for certain kinds of positive emotions,

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Suicide rates are very disturbing. During the Great Depression, there was a huge elevation, and those rates have come back down.

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It doesn't mean that these changes will last, but it means that they can occur, they can begin, and with systematic practice, they will endure.

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And then since the year 2000, there has been, unfortunately, a steep rise in suicide rates.

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I would recommend three minutes a day. When human beings first evolved on this planet, none of us were brushing our teeth.

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And, again, this is not something restricted to adults. Our teens are showing more than doubling over the last 10 years in suicide, so that today in the United States, unfortunately, more than one teenager, every single day, is taking her or his own life.

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And it doesn't take much to start these mechanisms in the brain to change. So, we can do this when we're doing other things.

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There also is a pervasive loss of meaning and purpose that people are reporting. And this loss is not simply, again, a subjective quality but also exacts a toll on our health and other aspects of our well-being.

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We can do this as we're having our first cup of coffee or tea in the morning.

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Research shows that a lack of purpose predicts an early death. In a recent study, people who are in their 60s with a low sense of purpose had more than twice the likelihood of dying within five years compared to people who reported a high sense of purpose.

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So we can nourish our mind, and through it, we can change the world. We can reduce implicit bias, bias that gets under the skin - this is something that we've shown can occur with strengthening connection.

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So, again, there are intimate connections between our psychological well-being and our systemic health. Each of these challenges affects the mind and the brain.

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We can reduce healthcare costs, potentially, by cultivating well-being, as the connections that I've illustrated show.

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We're not thriving, but the invitation is that we really could be. So we've developed a framework for understanding a healthy mind, and this framework includes four pillars.

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And I'd like to end with just a one-minute, short period of practice to give you an experiential taste of this.

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The first pillar is awareness, and awareness includes the capacity to focus our attention, to resist distraction.

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And I invite you to bring a loved one into your mind and your heart.

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It also includes a quality that psychologists and neuroscientists call "meta-awareness." Meta-awareness is knowing what our minds are doing.

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And as you bring this loved one into your mind and in your heart, cultivate the strong aspiration that they be happy and be free of suffering, and they share the same wish for happiness and the same wish to be free of suffering

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How many of you have ever had the experience of reading a book where you're reading each word on a page, and you read one page, you may read a second page, and after a few minutes, you have absolutely no idea what you've just read?

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And simply notice whatever may come up for you. And then we can do this for many categories of people, including a difficult person.

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(Laughter) That is an example of a lapse in meta-awareness. But the moment we recognize that we've been lost and come back, that is a moment of meta-awareness.

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Thank you very much. [Applause]

Topics:mindfulnessneuroplasticityemotional resiliencemental healthlonelinessdepressionattention deficitcompassionDalai LamaTEDx

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