The Four Keys to Well-Being
This article is derived from a talk given by
Richard Davidson, neuroscientist and founder at the Center for Healthy Minds at
the University of Wisconsin-Madison, at the Greater Good Science Center’s Mindfulness & Well-Being at Work conference.
Well-being is a skill.
All of the work that my colleagues and I have
been doing leads inevitably to this central conclusion. Well-being is
fundamentally no different than learning to play the cello. If one practices
the skills of well-being, one will get better at it.
Based on our research, well-being has four
constituents that have each received serious scientific attention. Each of
these four is rooted in neural circuits, and each of these neural circuits
exhibits plasticity—so we know that if we exercise these circuits, they will
strengthen. Practicing these four skills can provide the substrate for enduring
change, which can help to promote higher levels of well-being in our lives.
1.
Resilience
Richard J. Davidson at Mindfulness & Well-Being at
Work
To paraphrase the bumper sticker, stuff
happens. We cannot buffer ourselves from that stuff, but we can change the way
we respond to it.
Resilience is the rapidity with which we
recover from adversity; some people recover slowly and other people recover
more quickly. We know that individuals who show a more rapid recovery in
certain key neural circuits have higher levels of well-being. They are
protected in many ways from the adverse consequences of life’s slings and
arrows.
Recent research that we’ve conducted in our
lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison—very new work that’s not yet
published—asked whether these specific brain circuits can be altered by regular
practice in simple mindfulness
meditation.
The answer is yes—but you need several
thousand hours of practice before you see real change. Unlike the other
constituents of well-being, it takes a while to improve your resilience. It’s
not something that is going to happen quickly—but this insight can still
motivate and inspire us to keep meditating.
2. Outlook
The second key to well-being—outlook—is in many
ways the flip-side of the first one. I use outlook to refer to the ability to
see the positive in others, the ability to savor positive experiences, the
ability to see another human being as a human being who has innate basic
goodness.
Even individuals who suffer from depression
show activation in the brain circuit underlying outlook, but in them, it
doesn’t last—it’s very transient. Here, unlike with resilience, research
indicates that simple practices of loving kindness and compassion
meditation may alter this circuitry quite quickly,
after a very, very modest dose of practice.
We published a study in 2013 where individuals who had never meditated
before were randomly assigned to one of two groups. One group received a
secular form of compassion training and the other received cognitive
reappraisal training, an emotion-regulation strategy that comes from cognitive
therapy. We scanned people’s brains before and after two weeks of training, and
we found that in the compassion group, brain circuits that are important for
this positive outlook were strengthened. After just seven hours—30 minutes of
practice a day for two weeks—we not only saw changes in the brain, but these
changes also predicted kind and helpful behavior.
3.
Attention
The third building-block of well-being may
surprise you. It’s attention.
To paraphrase the title of a very important
paper that was published several years ago by a group of social psychologists
at Harvard, “A wandering mind
is an unhappy mind.” In this particular study, researchers used
smartphones to query people as they were out and about in the real world,
essentially asking three questions:
·
What are you doing right now?
·
Where is your mind right now? Is it focused
on what you’re doing, or is it focused elsewhere?
·
How happy or unhappy are you right now?
Across a large group of adults in America,
researchers found that people spend an average of 47 percent of their waking
life not paying attention to what they’re doing. Forty-seven percent of the
time!
Can you envision a world where that number
goes down a little, by even 5 percent? Imagine what impact that might have on
productivity, on showing up, on being present with another person and deeply
listening.
This quality of attention is so fundamentally
important that William James, in his very famous two-volume tome The Principles
of Psychology, has a whole chapter on attention. He said
that the ability to voluntarily bring back a wandering attention over and over
again is the very root of judgment, character, and will. And he went on to say
that an education that sharpens attention would be education par
excellence. But, he continues, it is easier to define this ideal than to
give practical directions for bringing it about. Today, we have practical steps
for educating attention. And I think if James had had more contact with
contemplative practices, he would have instantaneously seen these as vehicles
for educating attention.
4.
Generosity
There are now a plethora of data showing that
when individuals engage in generous and altruistic behavior, they actually
activate circuits in the brain that are key to fostering well-being. These
circuits get activated in a way that is more enduring than the way we respond
to other positive incentives, such as winning a game or earning a prize.
Human beings
come into the world with innate, basic goodness. When we engage in practices that are designed to
cultivate kindness and compassion, we’re not actually creating something de
novo—we’re not actually creating something that didn’t already exist. What
we’re doing is recognizing, strengthening, and nurturing a quality that was
there from the outset.
Our brains are constantly being shaped
wittingly or unwittingly—most of the time unwittingly. Through the intentional
shaping of our minds, we can shape our brains in ways that would enable these four fundamental
constituents of well-being to be strengthened. In that way, we can take
responsibility for our own minds.
By Richard J.
Davidson
http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/the_four_keys_to_well_being?utm_source=Newsletter+Mar+23%2C+2016&utm_campaign=GG+Newsletter+Mar+23+2016&utm_medium=email
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