Before we talk about the keys to well-being, let’s remember who Richard J is. Davidson. Il holds a bachelor’s degree in psychology from New York University and a doctorate. psychopathology and psychophysiology at Harvard University; He studied emotions for many years, mainly from a neural point of view. What characterizes it is that it studies cases of a lifetime, not just a few interviews or an experience.
From his research and studies, Richard J. Davidson suggested that through brain neuroplasticity it is possible to learn happiness and compassion, as well as learn one language or other knowledge, so it offers the four keys to well-being.
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- Davidson is also one of the Dalai Lama’s great friends and a meditation scholar.
- It practices meditation on a daily basis and approaches it as a discipline that promotes neuroplasticity.
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- We’ll present a brief summary of what Davidson sees as the keys to human well-being.
“I’ve seen that the basis of a healthy brain is goodness. “Richard J. Davidson?
In general, resilience is the ability to recover from adversity and be strengthened by that experience. For Davidson, this capability is closely linked to the Buddhist concept of “detachment. “Therefore, the real difficulty is resistance to change.
Resilience is one of the keys to well-being: we are all exposed to adversity, so if a person is able to accept these bad times and live with them, interpreting them as a growth space, it will be harder to get caught up in discomfort.
The positive outlook has nothing to do with self-deception. In this case, we are not talking about exaggerated optimism, which involves denying the existence of the negative, but the conscious choice to give more importance to the positives of each situation, however unfavourable.
According to Richard J. Davidson, people who practice meditation experience a change in their brain circuits that transforms the way they see reality. In a Davidson study, he identified differences between the brains of those who meditated and those who did not, and concluded that his hypothesis was true.
He says half an hour a day for two weeks is enough to feel the benefits of a change of perspective.
In general, an abstract effort to develop a positive outlook usually produces very short-term effects over time and therefore would not have much influence on our mood, however, those who meditate, the effects are more lasting, having a permanent impact on the mood. emotional state.
Another Richard J. Davidson study showed that a normal person doesn’t pay much attention to 47% of the things he does during the day.
One of the triggers of this disorientation is multitasking or shared attention work: performing multiple tasks at once without dedicating yourself to any of them, in those cases the mind wanders, as if jumping from one idea to another without a defined pattern.
Davidson found that those who think so are more likely to feel dissatisfied and unhappy, so he emphasizes that one of the keys to well-being is mindfulness, which can be defined as mental and physical location exclusively in the present.
The ability to bring the mind into the present is a skill that is also acquired through meditation. In general, categorically thinking about the future easily leads to anxiety, while thinking about the past leads to depression. Living in the present costs less emotionally.
The last of the four keys to well-being, according to Richard J. Davidson, it’s compassion or generosity. According to this researcher, the active gift of many areas of the brain linked to happiness and joy, if you look, you will see that generous people are always at peace with themselves and tend to be calmer and carefreer.
For Davidson, generosity, like selfishness, has a boomerang effect. This does not necessarily mean that anyone who gives something receives equivalent compensation, but simply “giving” is a matter of physical and mental well-being. Who benefits most from a gift is precisely the one who gives.
These keys to Richard J. Davidson’s well-being match many theories of psychology and also Buddhism. If so different aspects have led to similar conclusions in many respects, it is certainly because it is not simply a personal opinion; are the pillars to build what we generically call happiness.