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The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others. - Mahatma Gandhi

How to Transform Stress into Courage and Connection

--by Kelly McGonigal, syndicated from Greater Good, Jun 29, 2015

Stress doesn't always lead to fight-or-flight, says Kelly McGonigal. It can also activate brain systems that help us connect with other people.

In the late 1990s, two psychology researchers at UCLA were talking about how the female scientists in their lab responded differently to stress than the men did. The men would disappear into their offices; the women would bring cookies to lab meetings and bond over coffee. Forget fight-or-flight, they joked. The women were tending and befriending.

The joke stuck in the mind of one of the women, postdoctoral researcher Laura Cousino Klein. Psychology research has suggested that stress leads to aggression, but that wasn’t her experience. And it didn’t fit with what she observed in other women either. They were more likely to want to talk with someone about their stress, spend time with their loved ones, or channel their stress into caring for others. She wondered if it was possible that science had gotten stress wrong.

Klein decided to dig deeper into the science, and she made the surprising discovery that 90 percent of the published research on stress was conducted on males. This was true of animal studies as well as human studies. When Klein shared this observation with Shelley Taylor, the director of the lab she worked in, something clicked for her, too. Taylor challenged her lab to study the social side of stress, especially in women. Looking at both animal and human research, they found evidence that stress can increase caring, cooperation, and compassion.

While the tend-and-befriend theory began as an investigation into the female response to stress, it quickly expanded to include men—in part because male scientists said, “Hey, we tend and befriend, too!”

Taylor’s team, along with other research groups, began to demonstrate that stress doesn’t only motivate self-defense, as scientists had long believed. It can also unleash the instinct to protect your tribe. This instinct sometimes expresses itself differently in men than it does in women, but the two sexes share it. In times of stress, both men and women have been shown to become more trusting, generous, and willing to risk their own well-being to protect others.

Why would stress lead to caring?

From an evolutionary point of view, we have the tend-and-befriend response in our repertoire first and foremost to make sure we protect our offspring. Think of a mama grizzly protecting her cubs, or a father pulling his son from the wreckage of a burning car. The most important thing they need is the willingness to act even when their own lives are at risk.

To make sure we have the courage to protect our loved ones, the tend-and-befriend response must counter our basic survival instinct to avoid harm. We need fearlessness in those moments, along with confidence that our actions can make a difference. If we think there’s nothing we can do, we might give up. And if we are frozen in fear, our loved ones will perish.

At its core, the tend-and-befriend response is a biological state engineered to reduce fear and increase hope. The best way to understand how the tend-and-befriend response does this is to look at how it affects your brain:

   *  The social caregiving system is regulated by oxytocin. When this system is activated, you feel more empathy, connection, and trust, as well as a stronger desire to bond or be close with others. This network also inhibits the fear centers of the brain, increasing your courage.

   *  The reward system releases the neurotransmitter dopamine. Activation of the reward system increases motivation while dampening fear. When your stress response includes a rush of dopamine, you feel optimistic about your ability to do something meaningful. Dopamine also primes the brain for physical action, making sure you don’t freeze under pressure.

   *  The attunement system is driven by the neurotransmitter serotonin. When this system is activated, it enhances your perception, intuition, and self-control. This makes it easier to understand what is needed, and helps ensure that your actions have the biggest positive impact. In other words, a tend-and-befriend response makes you social, brave, and smart. It provides both the courage and hope we need to propel us into action and the awareness to act skillfully.

Here’s where things get interesting. A tend-and-befriend response may have evolved to help us protect offspring, but when you are in that state, your bravery translates to any challenge you face. And—this is the most important part—anytime you choose to help others, you activate this state. Caring for others triggers the biology of courage and creates hope.

Whether you are overwhelmed by your own stress or the suffering of others, the way to find hope is to connect, not to escape. The benefits of taking a tend-and-befriend approach go beyond helping your loved ones, although this, of course, is an important function. In any situation where you feel powerless, doing something to support others can help you sustain your motivation and optimism.

The tend-and-befriend theory doesn’t say that stress always leads to caring—stress can indeed make us angry and defensive. The theory simply says that stress can, and often does, make people more caring. And when we care for others, it changes our biochemistry, activating systems of the brain that produce feelings of hope and courage.

I wrote my book The Upside of Stress with that purpose in mind: to help you discover your own strength and compassion. Seeing the upside of stress is not about deciding whether stress is either all good or all bad. It’s about how choosing to see the good in stress, and in yourself, can help you meet the challenges in your life. Tending and befriend is one of the best ways to do this, and to transform your own stress into a catalyst for courage and connection.

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This article is printed here with permission from the Greater Good Science Center (GGSC). Based at UC Berkeley, the GGSC studies the psychology, sociology, and neuroscience of well-being, and teaches skills that foster a thriving, resilient, and compassionate society. You can learn more about the science and power of gratitude at the Greater Good Gratitude Summit.

The author, Kelly McGonigal, PhD, is a health psychologist and lecturer at Stanford University, and a leading expert in the new field of “science-help.” She is the author of The Willpower Instinct and The Upside of Stress.

Be The Change: How can you choose today to see the good in stress?

Sourced From www.dailygood.org

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Do your little bit of good where you are; it's those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world. - Desmond Tutu

How Our Bodies React to Seeing Goodness

--by Jill Suttie, syndicated from Greater Good, Jun 11, 2015

A new study maps what happens in our bodies and brains when we witness acts of kindness and compassion.

I don’t know about you, but no matter how many times I watch It’s a Wonderful Life, I am moved to tears. Something about that moment when George Bailey, played by Jimmy Stewart, is rescued from financial and emotional ruin by the generosity of his friends gets to me, making me feel deeply moved and hopeful about our capacity for human goodness.

Researchers have a name for that high we get from witnessing human goodness: “moral elevation.” And it has been shown to have many positive benefits. Past studies have found that moral elevation inspires optimism, and makes people want to be a better person and to act altruistically toward others.

Now a new study in Biological Psychology sheds some light on what’s going on in your body and brain during elevation, and why it has a distinct role to play in our human interactions.

In this study, 104 college students watched a couple of videos depicting either heroic, compassionate acts or just amusing situations, while researchers took measurements of their heart rate and medial prefrontal cortex activity. Activity in the medial prefrontal cortex is associated with higher-level cognitive process, such as empathy and “theory of mind” - our ability to predict social behavior - and is thought to be involved in experiences of moral elevation.

The researchers also measured respiratory sinus arrhythmia, an indicator of activity in the parasympathetic nervous system or PNS (our calming, self-soothing system), while heart rate indicates activity in the sympathetic nervous system or SNS (our arousal, “fight or flight” system). Because PNS activity is associated with warm feelings towards others and bonding behavior, the researchers expected activation in the PNS during moral elevation. Their results showed a different pattern: During peak emotional points in the videos, participants who watched the elevation-inspiring videos experienced dual activation—increases in both the PNS and the SNS - while those watching the merely amusing videos did not experience either.

This dual activation during elevation surprised Sarina Saturn, a researcher at the Oregon State University and one of the authors in the study. “This is a really uncommon pattern, where you see both of these systems recruited for one emotion,” says Saturn, a former Hornaday Postdoctoral Fellow of the Greater Good Science Center.

After looking into the literature further, she says, the findings began to make sense. Dual activation of the PNS and SNS occurs in situations that involve attending to others in a prosocial way while also needing to stay alert and aroused, such as during parenting and sexual activity. Moral elevation must involve a similar pattern, which makes some sense: To see a compassionate act, we must witness suffering, and that’s stressful. However, once we see the suffering alleviated through an altruistic act, it calms our heart (through the PNS), allowing us to get past the stress and give us that pleasant, warm glow feeling. This feeling is probably what calms our hearts enough to give us the motivation to “pay it forward” by acting altruistically in the future.

“It’s kind of cool to see that what’s happening in your body is an impetus to prosociality and inspires people to give and be kind,” says Saturn. “I think we’ve known that anecdotally; but now it’s great to see what’s actually happening in the body and the brain.”

Saturn’s team was surprised by study results for prefrontal cortex activity, too: activity levels varied significantly from one elevation scenario to another. This could be explained by the fact that the two elevation scenarios were a bit different - one involved coming to the aid of a physically injured person and one didn’t. In this case, the scenario involving physical injury is what caused the prefrontal cortex to light up, suggesting that the cortex may only selectively play a role in elevation.

“Previous research has shown that when you see someone in pain, that part of the brain lights up - so that may explain it,” says Saturn. “There needs to be more work to see when the prefrontal cortex goes off and online in moral elevation.”

What does this all mean?

It appears that moral elevation inspires altruism because of a mixture of arousal and the desire to protect others. Saturn believes that the hormone oxytocin - the “tend and befriend” hormone - is probably responsible for that, and that it may explain the strong, visceral responses people feel when morally elevated. In her next experiment, she hopes to study oxytocin release during elevation in new mothers - a population where it’s easier (and cheaper) to study it.

Though she and other researchers are learning more about this complex emotion, there are still many unanswered questions. Saturn wonders if future research will show that there are individual differences that account for varying responses to moral elevation. However, her own research seems to be showing the opposite - that moral elevation has a positive effect on people regardless of background, a finding that gives her hope.

“The good news was that we weren’t able to find a lot of individual differences [in our participants] based on life experiences or oxytocin receptor genotypes,” says Saturn. “So in a way I find that heartening, because it seems like it’s accessible to everyone. No matter where we are emotionally, it can uplift all of us.”

So is my annual watching of It’s a Wonderful Life a good thing? Saturn thinks so.

“I think we have a tendency to absorb what we’re witnessing and that it has an impact on our body and brain,” she says. “We’ve found that just showing an inspiring video of people being kind is enough to cause these dramatic events taking place in the body and to allow you to want to pay it forward and be prosocial in turn.”

George Bailey, here I come.

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This article is printed here with permission from the Greater Good Science Center (GGSC). Based at UC Berkeley, the GGSC studies the psychology, sociology, and neuroscience of well-being, and teaches skills that foster a thriving, resilient, and compassionate society. You can learn more about the science and power of gratitude at the Greater Good Gratitude Summit.

Be The Change: Take a few moments today to witness something beautiful -- perhaps the colour of the sky during your evening commute, a smile on your colleague's face, or birdsong outside the window -- and reflect on any impact taking these moments has on your body and mind.

Sourced From www.dailygood.org