Equanimity Via Mindfulness

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In The Emotional Life of Your Brain, Dr. Richard Davidson and Sharon Begley tell us:

To cultivate greater Resilience and faster recovery from setbacks, I recommend mindfulness meditation. Because it produces emotional balance, mindfulness meditation helps you recover, but not too quickly (just as it helps you focus but not get hyperfocused). Mindfulness weakens the chains of associations that keep us obsessing about and even wallowing in a setback. For instance, losing a job might cause your thoughts to tumble from “unemployment” to “no health insurance” to “lose home” to “I can’t go on.” Mindfulness strengthens connections between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala, promoting equanimity that will keep you from spiraling down this way. As soon as your thoughts begin to leap from one catastrophe to the next in this chain of woe, you have the mental wherewithal to pause, observe how easily the mind does this, note that it is an interesting mental process, and resist getting drawn into the abyss.”

If we are serious about optimizing our lives, we need to meditate. It can be 5 breaths, 5 minutes, or 15 minutes. Meditating strengthens connections between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala, giving us the power of equanimity, resilience, and a faster recovery from setbacks.