Inner strengths are the supplies you’ve got in your pack as you make your way down the twisting and often hard road of life. They include a positive mood, common sense, integrity, inner peace, determination, and a warm heart.

to help our ancestors survive, the brain evolved a negativity bias that makes it like Velcro for bad experiences but Teflon for good ones.

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.

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.

Because they lived in small bands, it was uncommon for them to meet people they didn’t know, and often dangerous when they did. While some bands interacted peacefully with each other, on average about one in eight men died in conflicts between bands, compared to one in a hundred men who died due to warfare in the twentieth century.

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

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