One of the more exciting findings of contemporary brain research has been the recognition of the brain’s inherent plasticity. Neuroscientists have long seen that neurons and their dendrites—the physical structures behind thought and perception—act together to create brain patterns that we experience as thoughts and feelings. What they have now disc

Brain science shows neurons that fire together wire together. The more you engage in certain patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting, the stronger those patterns become.

And when he watched what was actually going on in the brain, he discovered that the original theory had it all backward: We don’t learn helplessness. The brain assumes helplessness when exposed to adverse conditions. If we want to feel that we have any control over our own outcomes, we have to learn that we have power.

This is how you produce a sense that the future can be fruitful and pleasant: by interpreting the shit the Feeling Brain slings at you in a profound and useful way. Instead of justifying and enslaving yourself to the impulses, challenge them and analyze them. Change their character and their shape.

You can probably get close to understanding it by considering other situations in which your awareness and plasticity are firing on all cylinders. When you’re an alert traveler in a new land, you drink in the sights of the foreign country, experiencing more novelty, more learning, and more distributed attention. After all, at home you pay attention

Neuroplasticity, which is the power to physically change our brains by changing our thoughts, means that the solution to overthinking isn’t to stop thinking. Why would we ever get rid of such a powerful, efficient tool? Wouldn’t it make more sense to just run our brains with different soundtracks instead of the broken ones?

From time to time, consider how a particular experience could be changing your brain bit by bit, for better or worse.