Probably like many people, I had a sense as a young child that there was a lot of unnecessary unhappiness in my school, family and the world. But I didn’t know what to do about it. Then, as I got older and learned about psychology, brain science and contemplative wisdom, I became excited about practical tools for using the mind alone to improve the brain.

I started out in the human potential movement, then went on to a:

1. Near Master’s in Developmental Psychology

2. Master’s in Clinical Psychology with an emphasis on family systems, plus Jung

3. PhD in Clinical Psychology from the Wright Institute, which was heavily psychodynamic

Along the way, I got a lot of training and education in Buddhist psychology, especially its Theravada roots. In a weird way, all these diverse influences were helpful. I suspect that like a lot of therapists, I think developmentally and psychodynamically and act in a cognitive-behavioral way in a field of attention to the relationship between the client and me – while hoping for a measure of luck and grace!

As the brain evolved, it was critically important to learn from negative experiences – if one survived them! “Once burned, twice shy.” So the brain has specialized circuits that register negative experiences immediately in emotional memory.

On the other hand, positive experiences – unless they are very novel or intense – have standard issue memory systems, and these require that something be held in awareness for many seconds in a row to transfer from short-term memory buffers to long-term storage. Since we rarely do this, most positive experiences flow through the brain like water through a sieve, while negative ones are caught every time. Thus my metaphor of Velcro and Teflon – an example of what scientists call the “negativity bias” of the brain.

In layperson’s terms, explain how the brain evolved (as in question two above). Then offer this simple exercise: several times a day, take in the good by really savoring a positive experience for 10 to 20 seconds or more.

Over time, much as repeated negative experiences make the brain more sensitive to them, repeatedly savoring positive experiences can train your brain to internalize them increasingly rapidly – in effect, making your brain like Velcro for the positive and Teflon for the negative.

When something bad happens, the brain sometimes starts to associate neutral stimuli with negative stimuli. There’s been a lot of study on this with animals. A few human examples might be:

• Being in an elevator after having a panic attack in one

• Working with an authority figure when you’ve had issues with authority in the past

• Being outside in the dark after being assaulted out in the dark

• Speaking from the heart when that was shamed when you were young

These situations are not inherently bad, but over time, we build up negative associations with them because we’ve been hurt in the past. It’s the classic idiom of “once burnt, twice shy.”

See the simple exercise in question three!

Stress, chronic anxiety and trauma are examples where the negativity bias has gotten hold. These can occur in relationships, family dynamics, work situations, or any event or experience that we feel overwhelmingly challenged by.

Taking in the good (as opposed to the more popularly used terminology of “positive thinking”) has two kinds of benefits:

1. Explicitly, it internalizes key positive resources in emotional memory

2. Implicitly, it involves being active on your own behalf

Studies have shown that key inner resources such as “an attitude of gratitude,” positive emotions, and skills with your thoughts and feelings all have significant mental and physical health benefits. For example, these resources calm down the stress response, which strengthens your immune system. They also lift wellbeing and protect against depression. Further, when you are active on your own behalf, this reduces what’s called “learned helplessness.” You are being a hammer instead of a nail inside your mind.

Try this: when engaging in a basic sensual pleasure like eating a strawberry or enjoying a warm shower or bath, give yourself over to savoring the pleasure without anxiety. It’s natural for your mind to wander slightly; you needn’t be anxious about this; you’re still encoding the experience in implicit memory. Also, try focusing on breathing and giving yourself over to it. You can then apply the learning from these experiences to receive other positive experiences.

Fundamentally, experience-dependent neuroplasticity is the capacity of mental activity to change neural structure. In other words, the brain can change based on what you experience.

For example, researchers studied cab drivers who had to memorize London’s spaghetti snarl of streets. At the end of training, their hippocampus – a part of the brain that makes visual-spatial memories – had become thicker. Much like exercise, the cab drivers worked a particular “muscle” in their brain which built new connections among its neurons. Similarly, another study found that long-term mindfulness meditators had thicker cortex in parts of the brain that control attention, enabling them to tune into their body.

In the saying from the work of the Canadian psychologist, Donald Hebb: “Neurons that fire together, wire together.” Fleeting thoughts and feelings leave lasting traces in neural structure. Whatever we stimulate in the brain tends to grow stronger over time.

A traditional saying is that the mind takes the shape it rests upon. The modern update would be that the brain takes its shape from whatever the mind rests upon – for better or worse. The brain is continually changing its structure. The only questions are: Who is doing the changing: oneself or other forces? And are these changes for the better?