Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom

Consider how much time you spend thinking—in even the subtlest way, in the back of the simulator—about what others think of you. Be mindful of doing things to get admiration and praise. Try to focus instead on just doing the best you can. Think about virtue, benevolence, and wisdom: if you sincerely keep trying to come from these, that’s about all

As you can see, your brain has a built-in “negativity bias” (Vaish, Grossman, and Woodward 2008) that primes you for avoidance. This bias makes you suffer in a variety of ways. For starters, it generates an unpleasant background of anxiety, which for some people can be quite intense; anxiety also makes it harder to bring attention inward for self-a

Painful experiences are often best healed by positive ones that are their opposite—for example, replacing childhood feelings of being weak with a current sense of strength.

When you regard the world as “not me at all,” it is potentially unsafe, leading you to fear and resist it. Once you say, “I am this body apart from the world,” the body’s frailties become your own. If you think it weighs too much or doesn’t look right, you suffer. If it’s threatened by illness, aging, and death—as all bodies are—you suffer.

As the saying goes, pain is inevitable but suffering is optional. If you can simply stay present with whatever is arising in awareness—whether it’s a first dart or a second one—without reacting further, then you will break the chain of suffering right there. Over time, through training and shaping your mind and brain, you can even change what arise

When you do have lunch, a part of your brain called the cingulate cortex (about the size of your finger, on the interior edge of each hemisphere) tracks whether the rewards you expected—fun with your friend, good food—actually arrive (Eisenberger and Lieberman 2004). If they do, dopamine levels stay steady. But if you’re disappointed—maybe your fri

The best-odds prescription for a long, good life is a baseline of mainly PNS arousal with mild SNS activation for vitality, combined with occasional SNS spikes for major opportunities or threats.

Big Exhalation Inhale as much as you can, hold that inhalation for a few seconds, and then exhale slowly while relaxing. A big inhalation really expands your lungs, requiring a big exhalation to bring the lungs back to their resting size. This stimulates the PNS, which is in charge of exhaling.

Negative experiences create vicious cycles by making you pessimistic, overreactive, and inclined to go negative yourself.