This month’s monthly dose dives into the world of mental health and wellness. There are a lot of behavioral and psychological strategies that can boost our mental wellness and resilience. Whether it’s feeling overwhelmed, stressed and anxious to feelings of depression and low self-worth (or anything in between), there is a growing literature on both short-term and long-term strategies to support these areas of mental health and wellness. We also know that yoga and mindfulness practices help us feel good! What we are less sure of, however, is the underlying pathways that link specific strategies to wellness and resilience outcomes. Yes, my friends, we’re talking about biological pathways here! Let’s dig in. We’ll talk about a few networks that are most relevant to resilience and some new models that have been recently proposed that might explain our experiences. Specifically, we’ll discuss practices that tap into the brain’s fear/emotion pathways (that we want to down-regulate), the brain’s reward pathways (that we want to up-regulate), and the default mode network (which we also want to down-regulate). We hope you’ll explore the many classes this month that offer one or more of these approaches!

Click the links below to read the research referenced throughout this lecture:

Targeting Overall Resilience
• Neuroscience Model of Boosting Resilience in Adults

Example Practices:
1. Emotional Resilience Meditation
2. Building Resilience by Lingering in Transitions
3. Purposeful Resilience

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Why incorporate practices that up-regulate the positive?
• Effects of Performing Acts of Kindness on Well-Being
• Brain Reward Pathways in Stress Resilience
• Self-Affirmation Reward-Related Mechanism
• The Social Salience Hypothesis of Oxytocin
• How Dopamine Enhances an Optimism Bias in Humans
• Resilience Training That Can Change the Brain

Example Practices:
1. Confident & Capable
2. Mood Lift
3. Shake It Out & Let It Go

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Why incorporate practices that down-regulate the negative?
• Stress- & Allostasis-Induced Brain Plasticity
• Neuroendocrine Alterations in Major Depressive Disorder
• Increased Amygdala Response to Masked Emotional Faces in Depressed Subjects
• Effects of Self-Affirmation on Sympathetic Nervous System Responses

Example Practices:
1. Mood Lift
2. Bringing Awareness to Common Tension
3. Deliberate Rest for Brain Health

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Why incorporate practices that down-regulate the default mode network?
• Meditation Effects in Non-Experienced Meditators
• Self-Referential Processing & Mindfulness
• Flow State, Depressive Symptoms & Burnout
• The Default Mode Network & Self-Referential Processes in Depression
• The Varieties of Self-Transcendent Experience

Example Practices:
1. Present Moment Flow
2. Mindful Movement for a Mental Break
3. Flow for Embodiment

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