these dopamine neurons not only go into prediction mode when we are triggered, but also fire when an unpredicted reward is received. This might sound confusing. Why would our brains fire both when predicting a reward and when something unpredicted happens? Let’s return to the “I’m smart” example from chapter 3. If we come home from school for the

mental tools to ride the wave of…

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I taught them how to surf. I used an acronym that a senior meditation teacher named Michelle McDonald had developed (and had been widely taught by Tara Brach), and that I had found helpful during my own mindfulness training. In particular, it helped when I got caught up in some obsessive thought pattern or was stuck yelling at somebody in my head:

elegantly simple solution as well: paying attention to the perceived rewards of our actions. Seeing the outcomes of actions more clearly helps us reduce our subjective biases, and this reorientation naturally leads to our stepping out of unhealthy habits, moving from stress toward a type of happiness that isn’t dependent upon our getting something.

the Buddhist psychologists may have stumbled on a solution when they examined the same processes as Skinner. Focusing on the self and the development of subjective biases through reward-based learning as the core of the afflictive process, they may have identified not only a key component (craving and reactivity) of the process, but an elegantly

The beautiful thing here is that simply by paying attention to how we are causing our own stress—simply by being mindful—we can begin to train ourselves to walk the other way.

In any type of addictive behavior, reactivity builds its strength through repetition—resistance training. Each time we look for our “likes” on Facebook, we lift the barbell of “I am.” Each time we smoke a cigarette in reaction to a trigger, we do a push-up of “I smoke.” Each time we excitedly run off to a colleague to tell her about our latest and

Acting in an automatic or knee-jerk manner to quickly satisfy a craving just feeds it.