ONE DAY AT A TIME
How to Make Kindness Your Default Response
Daily insights on life in the face of uncertainty, by psychiatrist and habit change specialist Dr. Jud Brewer
Scientists are working furiously these days on testing therapies and vaccines to treat the coronavirus, but it will take time and focused effort before they’re ready. In the meantime, we’re all wrestling with a lot of emotion. Fortunately, there is already a way to vaccinate ourselves against panic, anxiety, and selfishness. It’s called loving-kindness.
How does it work? Here’s the science.
There is a component of our brain called the default mode network that gets activated when we think about ourselves — especially when we regret the past or worry about the future. It also gets activated when we get caught up in craving things like cigarettes. My lab has found that the feeling of getting caught up in our experience — the closed down, contracted feeling that arises when we’re afraid or anxious — aligns with increased activity in the default mode network. Meditation, by contrast, makes this same network quiet down.
60 Minutes visited my lab a few years ago, and you can actually watch Anderson Cooper’s default mode network getting activated on camera. His brain…
