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

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.

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

As they say in neuroscience: Neurons that fire together wire together. Mental states become neural traits.

we end up preoccupied by threats that are actually smaller or more manageable than we’d feared, while overlooking opportunities that are actually greater than we’d hoped for.

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

mindfulness meditators have increased gray matter—which means a thicker cortex—in three key regions: prefrontal areas behind the forehead that control attention; the insula, which we use for tuning into ourselves and others; and the hippocampus.

Whatever we repeatedly sense and feel and want and think is slowly but surely sculpting neural structure.

If you fail to get a carrot today, you’ll have another chance to get one tomorrow, but if you fail to avoid a stick today—whap!—no more carrots forever.

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