Dr. Goldstein on Neuroscience and Mindfulness

Picture the same situation unfolding twice, with your reaction swinging in opposite directions each time depending on the mood you happen to be in. Positive mood states, it turns out, build resiliency. And that pointed me toward something I kept returning to: the shift toward the left prefrontal cortex. If we want to grow more resilience in how we feel, activating that part of the brain looks like a sensible place to begin, so I went digging into what actually produces that shift.

Mindfulness does it. Richie Davidson and Jon Kabat-Zinn published work early in the century showing that a mindfulness practice produces the left prefrontal shift. Compassion does it too. By compassion I mean noticing that another person is suffering and feeling the pull to help them, and that inclination also lights up the left side.

One of the more striking cases came from a man who earned a PhD in bioengineering from the Pasteur Institute, then walked away from all of it to become a monk, and spent years doing exactly that. When researchers at the University of Wisconsin, Davidson among them, studied his brain while he ran compassion practices, they recorded an enormous left prefrontal shift.

So I kept seeing these connections line up: what people tell me they are hungry for, what gives them a sense of resiliency, and that left-side activity in the brain. It changed how I describe the work. This isn't really about lifting someone out of a negative mood and parking them at some neutral midpoint.

By noticing what is hard, by learning how to simply be with it, we don't only arrive at ease or go neutral about it. Something stronger surfaces. One thing in particular: a quiet confidence that whatever shows up, I can meet it, and I'll be okay.

That, to me, is happiness. Not a passing good feeling but a deeper, lasting kind. Life carries 10,000 joys and 10,000 sorrows, and that count never changes. No one stays in a positive mood forever, and we shouldn't want to. We need the low states to even recognize the high ones for what they are.