How to build a more resilient brain

Welcome back to Inside Your Head 🧠, a weekly newsletter exploring why your brain makes you think, feel, and act the way you do, written by Dana Smith, Elemental’s senior writer and a former brain scientist. Forwarded by a friend? Subscribe here so you won’t miss the next one.

A lot has been written about the mental health toll of the pandemic, and for good reason. The latest numbers from the National Center for Health Statistics estimate that nearly 40% of Americans are currently experiencing symptoms of either anxiety or depression, a 50% increase over pre-pandemic times.

In some ways, though, it’s surprising that this number isn’t even higher given the stress, trauma, loss, and loneliness of the past year. The vast majority of us have spent the last 12 months locked inside our homes, terrified of catching a deadly virus, and trying not to kill our spouse, children, or roommates — in more ways than one. People living alone have marked births, deaths, graduations, and layoffs with no one to hug but their pillows. And yet the majority of Americans seem to have made it through with their mental health still intact. How?

Your resilient brain

• If the root of much of the mental illness that’s emerged during the pandemic is unrelenting chronic stress, the opposite is also true: Resilience to trauma lies in your ability to adapt positively to stress.
• In the brain, resilience means protecting against many stress-induced changes, particularly in regard to the size, activity, and connectivity of the amygdala, hippocampus, and prefrontal cortex — the brain’s fear, memory and mood, and executive control centers, respectively.
• How does one prevent these neural changes? Some of it is genetic; gene variants affect the levels and activity of circulating stress hormones, as well as the hormones that counteract them. But perhaps more importantly, behavioral interventions can build resilience and serve as a buffer against stress for those important brain systems. A few strategies are outlined below, and you can read more tips (plus the science behind them) here.
• Taking a positive outlook — what one expert calls “realistic optimism” — can help build resilience. Reframing a negative situation to see a threat not as an insurmountable problem but as a challenge to be solved requires cognitive flexibility, and this type of executive control is associated with activity in the prefrontal cortex. Stronger executive control from the region, particularly over the threat response triggered by the amygdala, is important for not letting stress and anxiety run wild and can protect against the negative impacts of chronic stress on the brain.
• Another resilience strategy that exercises the prefrontal cortex is meditation. Every time your mind wanders while you meditate, it requires cognitive control exerted by your prefrontal cortex to bring it back to focusing on your breath. And just like working out your biceps will make them stronger, so will working out a brain region in this way. Activate an area enough times, and your neurons start to wire new connections there, making the thought process more automatic.
• You can also train your brain to handle stress better through exposure to smaller stressors, particularly early in life. Scientists call this stress inoculation: Just like exposure to a tiny amount of a virus will educate your immune system on how to respond to it better next time, learning how to deal with mild stressors teaches your brain how to handle bigger stressors later.
• Maintaining good physical health is also critical for your mental capabilities. If you’ve heard it once, you’ve heard it a million times: Exercise is one of the best things you can do for your brain. Physical activity helps the brain grow new connections between brain cells and maybe even new neurons themselves. Much of this growth takes place in the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus, and the new growth can help offset the loss of connections that occurs in those regions with chronic stress.
• A crucial resilience strengthener experts bring up again and again is social support. In many ways, social connection counters the stress response from the sympathetic nervous system. Being with a friend or family member, especially during a stressful situation, dampens the activity of noradrenaline and cortisol. It also activates the reward center of the brain, providing a boost in dopamine.

Thanks for reading! Today’s newsletter is an excerpt from the second in a two-part series on “Your Poor Pandemic Brain” to mark the one-year anniversary of the U.S. going into shutdown and what it’s done to our mental health. Read the full version here, and the first article on how the pandemic changed your brain here.