Hard times knock everyone down. This book teaches brain-based practices that train you to get back up.
Graham says resilience is innate in the brain, but bad conditioning can impair it. What once seemed hardwired can be rewired.
That is the book's target state: stay calm in a crisis, see clearly, reach out for help, use your skills, and persevere until you reach resolution or acceptance.
Her recipe for self-directed neuroplasticity: presence primes the brain to learn, intention activates the change, and perseverance installs it. Small practices, repeated little and often, are how the brain learns best.
Her re-conditioning method: light up the old negative memory while holding a new positive experience in awareness at the same time, so the new experience rewires the old one.
De-conditioning works through rest, daydreaming, and open attention. Defocused time creates a mental play space where old wiring loosens and new insights and behaviors can form.
Mindfulness, from the 2,500-year-old Buddhist contemplative tradition, builds self-awareness. Empathy, from Western relational psychology, builds connection and self-acceptance. Together they strengthen the prefrontal cortex, the brain's CEO of resilience.
The rest of this summary — and the one thing to do this week — is in the PDF.
Download the free PDFLinda Graham, a psychotherapist and mindfulness teacher, defines resilience as the ability to face and handle life's challenges, from everyday disappointments to extraordinary disasters. Resilience is innate in the brain, she says, but our capacity for it can be impaired by conditioning: unhelpful patterns of response get learned over time and fixed in our neural circuitry. The hopeful news from neuroscience is that what previously seemed hardwired can be rewired - resilience can be recovered.
The engine of the book is self-directed neuroplasticity. Because neurons that fire together wire together, repeated reactions become automatic. Graham teaches readers to reverse the process using three mechanisms of brain change: new conditioning (focused attention on new experiences), re-conditioning (holding an old painful memory alongside a new positive experience so the new rewires the old), and de-conditioning (de-focused attention that loosens old patterns). Her tools come from two paradigms she calls the most powerful agents of brain change known to science: mindfulness and empathy. The goal is what she calls the five Cs of resilient coping - calm, clarity, connection, competence, and courage - all run by the prefrontal cortex, the brain's CEO of resilience.
