As the nervous system evolved, your brain developed in three stages:
- Reptile -- Brainstem, focused on avoiding harm
Since the brain is integrated, avoiding, approaching and attaching are accomplished by its parts working together. Nonetheless, each of these functions is particularly served and shaped by the region of the brain that first evolved to handle it.
A previous "Just One Thing" -- pet the lizard -- was about how to soothe and calm the most ancient structures of the brain, the ones that manage the first emotion of all: fear. This JOT continues the series by focusing on how to help the early mammalian parts of your brain feel rewarded, satisfied and fulfilled: in a word, fed.
This has many benefits. For starters, when you feel fed -- physically, emotionally, conceptually and even spiritually -- you naturally let go of longing, disappointment, frustration and craving. The hungry heart gets a full meal, goals are attained and the striving for them relaxes; one feels lifted by life as it is. What a relief!
Feeling fed also helps you enjoy positive emotions such as pleasure, contentment, accomplishment, ease and worth. As Barbara Fredrickson and other researchers have shown, these good feelings reduce stress, help people bounce back from illness and loss, strengthen resilience, draw attention to the big picture and build inner resources. [1] [2] [3]
Last, consider this matter in a larger context. Many of us live in an economy that emphasizes endless consumer demand and in a culture that emphasizes endless striving for success and status. Sure, enjoy a nice new sweater and pursue healthy ambitions. But it's also vitally important -- both for ourselves and for the planet whose resources we're devouring like kids gorging on cake -- that we appreciate the many ways we already have so, SO much.
How?
In everyday life, draw on opportunities to feel fed -- and as you do, really take in these experiences, weaving them into the fabric of your brain and being. For example:
- While eating, be aware of the food going into you, becoming a part of you. Take pleasure in eating, and know that you are getting enough.
Then, from time to time -- such as at meals or just before sleep -- take a moment to appreciate some of what you've already received. Consider the food you've taken in, the things you've gotten done, the material well-being you do have, the love that's come your way. Sure, we've all sometimes had to slurp a thin soup, but to put these shortfalls in perspective, take a moment to consider how little so many people worldwide have, a billion of whom will go to bed hungry tonight.
As you register the sense of being fed, in one way or another, help it sink down into yourself. Imagine a little furry part of you that's nibbling away at all this "food," chewing and swallowing from a huge, abundant pile of goodies that's greater than anyone -- mouse or human -- can ever consume. Take your time with the felt sense of absorbing, internalizing, digesting. There's more than enough. Let knowing this sink in again and again.
Turn as well into the present -- the only time we are ever truly fed. In the past there may not have been enough, in the future there may not be enough... but right now, in what the Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh calls the Pure Land of this moment, most of us most of the time are buoyed by so many blessings. Falling open and into the now, being now, fed by simply being, by being itself.
Being fed.
REFERENCES:
1. Frederickson, B. L. 2000. Cultivating positive emotions to optimize health and well-being. Prevention and Treatment Vol. 3: Article 0001a, posted online March 7, 2000. ------. 2001. The role of positive emotions in positive psychology. American Psychologist 56:218-226.
2. Frederickson, B. L. and R. Levenson. 1998. Positive emotions speed recovery from the cardiovascular sequelae of negative emotions. Psychology Press 12:191-220.
3. Frederickson, B. L., R. Mancuso, C. Branigan, and M. Tugade. 2000. The undoing effect of positive emotions. Motivation and Emotion 24:237-258.
Rick Hanson, Ph.D., is a neuropsychologist and author of the bestselling Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom (in 20 languages) - and Just One Thing: Developing a Buddha Brain One Simple Practice at a Time. Founder of the Wellspring Institute for Neuroscience and Contemplative Wisdom and Affiliate of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley, he's taught at Oxford, Stanford, and Harvard, and in meditation centers worldwide. His work has been featured on the BBC, NPR, Consumer Reports Health, and U.S. News and World Report and he has several audio programs. His blog - Just One Thing - has nearly 30,000 subscribers and suggests a simple practice each week that will bring you more joy, more fulfilling relationships, and more peace of mind and heart. If you wish, you can subscribe to Just One Thing here.