Dr. Goldstein on Neuroscience and Mindfulness

As we begin loosening the grip of mental and behavioral habits, something quietly opens up: a little room between us and the shame of the loop. You know the loop. It's the way we get caught inside the same emotional reactions over and over, whether that's depression, anxiety, agitation, or plain anger. Working with those patterns does more than pry us loose from them. It lets a kind of confidence surface, and the confidence I mean is close to what I'd call happiness: a growing sense that life feels okay, that the ground under you is steady.

Happiness, in that sense, isn't manufactured. It gets uncovered. And once it does, we can start reaching for what I think of as the natural antidepressants.

Take mindfulness, which we touched on earlier, including what it does inside the brain. It produces a shift toward the left prefrontal cortex. Research also shows it quiets the amygdala, and that quieting carries an antidepressant effect of its own. But here's a practical catch. When someone is deep in depression at a given moment, mindfulness may not be the right door to walk through, simply because the mental strength, or you could say the ego strength, needed to practice it isn't there yet. That's fine. It's the whole reason there are five of these natural antidepressants rather than one. People arrive by different routes.

So mindfulness is one. Self-compassion is another. Give someone who has carried trauma or depression for years a self-compassion assessment, the kind that asks how kindly you treat yourself in a hard moment, or how isolated you feel, whether some part of you believes you're the only person who has ever gone through this, and the score tends to come back very low. Self-compassion, as it's defined, has a few pieces: noticing your own suffering, feeling moved to support yourself right in that moment, and recognizing you aren't alone in it, that thousands or millions of others share some common thread of the same experience.

Kristin Neff writes about this beautifully. She's among the leading researchers on self-compassion, a field that keeps picking up speed as more people in our culture dig into the science behind it. For how much it matters, it remains strangely underdeveloped.

There's also connection through touch. The research points especially to touch with other people, though contact with ourselves counts too, and it likewise calms the amygdala. If the goal is reversing the pattern of activation we see in a traumatized or depressed brain, then quieting that region, dialing down the activity firing inside it, is exactly one of the moves we're after. When it stays overactive, something in us is, in a real sense, inflamed.