04/23/2025
Tip for Mental Health Transformation:
1. vase = $1.25
2. flowers = $12-$15
3. blessing someone (everyone loves flowers) PRICELESS
From a neuroscience perspective, shifting your focus from your own troubles to helping or blessing someone else can trigger a cascade of beneficial effects in the brain and body. Here’s how that works:
1. Activation of the Prefrontal Cortex (PFC):
The prefrontal cortex, responsible for executive function, decision-making, and empathy, becomes more active when you consider someone else’s needs. This shift can override the default mode network (DMN)—a brain network associated with rumination and self-referential thinking (i.e., focusing on your own problems). Helping others essentially “disrupts” your brain’s loop of negative thoughts.
2. Boost in Oxytocin and Dopamine:
Acts of kindness or compassion can increase oxytocin, the bonding hormone, which reduces stress and promotes a sense of connection and safety. Helping others also boosts dopamine, the brain’s reward chemical, which is associated with pleasure, motivation, and hope.
3. Reduction in Cortisol (Stress Hormone):
Focusing outward and engaging in prosocial behavior has been shown to lower cortisol, the hormone elevated during stress. This helps calm the sympathetic nervous system (fight-or-flight) and engage the parasympathetic nervous system (rest-and-digest), promoting physiological calm.
4. Strengthening Neural Pathways for Compassion and Resilience:
The more often you engage in helping behavior, the more you strengthen neural circuits associated with empathy, compassion, and emotional regulation. Over time, this rewiring can make you more resilient to stress and increase your overall emotional well-being.
5. Meaning and Purpose Networks Are Engaged:
Helping others activates areas in the medial prefrontal cortex and ventral striatum, which are associated with finding meaning and value. When you operate from a sense of purpose, it reorients your brain toward what’s bigger than your current struggle, which in itself can be healing.
Helping others quiets the noise of self-focus, lowers stress hormones, boosts feel-good chemicals, and rewires your brain for empathy and resilience. From a neurobiological standpoint, it’s one of the fastest ways to shift your mental and emotional state toward healing and wholeness.♥️🧠♥️🧠
This lovely recipient is having a birthday. And she happens to be a brilliant therapist who specializes in Internal Family Systems. She has helped countless people heal (including me as she was my therapist many years ago)
She is training her brain for stress resilience Harmony Neurofeedback