Hardwiring Happiness: The Practical Science of Reshaping Your Brain—and Your Life

the brain takes its shape from what the mind rests upon.

each person has the power to change his or her brain for the better—what Jeffrey Schwartz has called self-directed neuroplasticity.

Our ancestors could make two kinds of mistakes: (1) thinking there was a tiger in the bushes when there wasn’t one, and (2) thinking there was no tiger in the bushes when there actually was one. The cost of the first mistake was needless anxiety, while the cost of the second one was death.

positive experiences use standard-issue memory systems, in which new information must be held in short-term buffers long enough for it to transfer to long-term storage. “Long enough” depends on the experience and the person, but loosely speaking it’s at least a few seconds, and the longer the better.

Unlike fleeting mental states, inner strengths are stable traits, an enduring source of well-being, wise and effective action, and contributions to others.

intense, prolonged, or repeated mental/neural activity—especially if it is conscious—will leave an enduring imprint in neural structure,

This is a problem because the hippocampus helps you put things in perspective while also calming down your amygdala and telling your hypothalamus to quit calling for stress hormones.29

what you pay attention to—what you rest your mind on—is the primary shaper of your brain.

Over time, negative experiences make the amygdala even more sensitive to the negative. This snowballing effect occurs because the cortisol that the amygdala signals the hypothalamus to call for enters the bloodstream and flows into your brain, where it stimulates and strengthens the amygdala.