The Secret Ingredient to Better Mental Health + How Kindness Changes Your Brain

AHA Publisher — Thu, 08 Apr 2021 07:00:20 +0000

Dr. Caroline Leaf – In this podcast (episode #268) and blog, I talk about the neuroscience of kindness, the impact kindness has on our mind, brain and body and how to use mind management to be more kind! Kindness is a powerful weapon. Not only does it make the world a better and safer place for everyone, it also is a great way to improve intelligence and brain health! As renowned author Henry James once said, “three things in human life are important: the first is to be kind; the second is to be kind; and the third is to be kind.” The brain functions best with a flexible, dynamic balance between specialized, locally segregated activity, and more generalized global integration. Too much segregation and excessive integration can lead to suboptimal functioning. What does all this science mean? Research has shown that training yourself to be more kind (to both yourself and others!) can increase your positive emotions, sense of social connectedness and pro-social behaviors, while decreasing your negative feelings, stress and social biases, all of which improve your brain integration, balance and health. The reality is that our brains love it when we are kind! Kindness has several really great effects in the brain and body, including: Activating reward systems in the brain and body. Kindness can make us happy and give us a sense of purposefulness! “Switching on” our mirror neurons, which help improve our ability to relate to and communicate with others by helping us become more understanding and perceptive. Activating our perceptual, affective and cognitive capacities, which increases integration among different networks in the brain, leading to a better use of the brain’s abilities, as well as an increased processing efficiency. In short, being kind can help us think faster and more intelligently! Boosting serotonin and dopamine, which are neurotransmitters in the brainthat make us feel safe and at peace. They can cause the pleasure/reward centers in our brain to light up. Endorphins (the body’s natural pain killer) may also be released when we are kind! Positively impacting brain chemistry. Acts of kindness can release hormones that contribute to our mood and overall wellbeing, as well as our ability to connect with others (for example, by releasing the “love hormone” oxytocin). Reducing stress. Kindness to ourselves can prevent shame from corroding our sense of identity, reduce our stress and anxiety levels, and help boost self-esteem. Kindness can even improve feelings of confidence and optimism! Improving our overall health. Compassion has been shown to improve our overall wellbeing and how we age!

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How Does Your Brain Process Emotions? Answer Could Help Address Loneliness Epidemic

AHA Publisher — Tue, 09 Mar 2021 08:00:18 +0000

University of California – San Diego via EurekAlert – Research over the last decade has shown that loneliness is an important determinant of health. It is associated with considerable physical and mental health risks and increased mortality. Previous studies have also shown that wisdom could serve as a protective factor against loneliness. This inverse relationship between loneliness and wisdom may be based in different brain processes. In a study published in the March 5, 2021 online edition of Cerebral Cortex, researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine found that specific regions of the brain respond to emotional stimuli related to loneliness and wisdom in opposing ways. “We were interested in how loneliness and wisdom relate to emotional biases, meaning how we respond to different positive and negative emotions,” said Jyoti Mishra, PhD, senior author of the study, director of the NEATLabs and assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry at UC San Diego School of Medicine. The study involved 147 participants, ages 18 to 85. The subjects performed a simple cognitive task of determining which direction an arrow was pointed while faces with different emotions were presented in the background. “We found that when faces emoting anger were presented as distractors, they significantly slowed simple cognitive responses in lonelier individuals. This meant that lonelier individuals paid more attention to threatening stimuli, such as the angry faces.” “For wisdom, on the other hand, we found a significant positive relationship for response speeds when faces with happy emotions were shown, specifically individuals who displayed wiser traits, such as empathy, had speedier responses in the presence of happy stimuli.” Electroencephalogram (EEG)-based brain recordings showed that the part of the brain called the temporal-parietal junction (TPJ) was activating differently in lonelier versus wiser individuals. TPJ is important for processing theory of mind, or the degree of capacity for empathy and understanding of others. The study found it more active in the presence of angry emotions for lonelier people and more active in the presence of happy emotions for wiser people. Researchers also noted greater activity to threatening stimuli for lonelier individuals in the left superior parietal cortex, the brain region important for allocating attention, while wisdom was significantly related to enhanced happy emotion-driven activity in the left insula of the brain, responsible for social characteristics like empathy. “This study shows that the inverse relationship between loneliness and wisdom that we found in our previous clinical studies is at least partly embedded in neurobiology and is not merely a result of subjective biases,” said study author Dilip V. Jeste, MD, senior associate dean for the Center of Healthy Aging and Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry and Neurosciences at UC San Diego School of Medicine. “These findings are relevant to the mental and physical health of individuals because they give us an objective neurobiological handle on how lonelier or wiser people process information,” said Mishra. “Having biological markers that we can measure in the brain can help us develop effective treatments. Perhaps we can help answer the question, ‘Can you make a person wiser or less lonely?’ The answer could help mitigate the risk of loneliness.” The authors say next steps include a longitudinal study and an intervention study. “Ultimately, we think these evidence-based cognitive brain markers are the key to developing better health care for the future that may address the loneliness epidemic,” said Mishra. To read the original article click here.

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The Secret Ingredient to Better Mental Health + How Kindness Changes Your Brain

How Does Your Brain Process Emotions? Answer Could Help Address Loneliness Epidemic