5 Tips to Rewire your Brain for Resiliency
Moving BEYOND pandemic stress:
As we approach one year from the day when Covid-19 was declared a global pandemic and the United States began shutting down, I have started to reflect on how this past year has impacted not just our lives but the wiring of our brains.
This past year brought rapid changes to all of our daily lives. For my colleagues in healthcare, our entire practice shifted. Expanded Telehealth services offered improved care access while hospital units were full and critical care needs surged. My patients and clients faced questions about managing their neurologic recovery while maintaining safety against a virus with so many unknowns. .
A year later, I see colleagues with more creativity and resilience to treatment approaches and patients/clients with enhanced expectancies for care management expectancies. We have all changed and evolved over this past year, for the better, in my opinion.
This change is not coincidental; however, it demonstrates our brain’s ability to adapt and rewire based on our experiences.
Each of us shares a very different experience of how this last year impacted our lives, family, and relationships. It is easy to want to push the chapter of this past year to the rear of our minds and not look back. Our brain, on the other hand, may not let us do so easily. We may have to build resilience (the capacity to adapt successfully to acute stress, trauma, or chronic adversity (Russo et al., 2012). Our ability to boost resilience relies primarily on neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity is the term for “the mechanism by which the brain encodes experience and learns new behaviors.” Neuro=brain and neural connections; Plastic = adapt, mold and change. Medaglia et al. (2017) introduced the concept of brain resilience.
Brain resilience or vulnerability following a stressor is influenced by our predisposing biopsychosocial factors, the experiences or exposures throughout our life. (Stern et al., 2018).
Improving our brain resilience can be impacted by how we respond to stress. We can harness neuroplasticity by improving our emotional, cognitive, and behavioral responses to stress, so our brain learns to react to new experiences better.
Some critical brain structures that impact brain resilience include the insula, nucleus accumbens, amygdala, hypothalamus, hippocampus, medial prefrontal, and anterior cingulate cortex (Gupta et al., 2017).
So how do we build our resilience?
Here are 5 tips to begin cultivating resilience from our experiences of the past year.
Cultivate self-awareness by spending intentional time reflecting on the past year. Journaling is a helpful way to focus your thought and improve Self- awareness. What have you learned, and how has your life changed in the past year? What has improved? What stood out? Is there anything you are still grieving? Notice what you feel as you move through this journaling. Take pride in your abilities and what you’ve done. Recognize your strengths.
Practice self-care by taking care of yourself and your health through healthy eating, getting 7-9 hours of sleep each night, exercise, walking or running, yoga, dance, martial arts. Physical activity or exercise can have a positive impact on brain resilience through the effects of aerobic exercise of low and moderate intensity or resistance exercise. Physiological markers, including heart rate variability, blood pressure, and cortisol, might be regularly used as an indicator of stress to determine the impact of exercise on brain resilience. (Mario & Lavinia 2018) Self-care can also look like getting a massage, stretching, and taking time for mental downtime with activities such as drawing or coloring.
Nurture your close relationships by making positive connections with others. Whether it is a socially-distance dinner or walk with a friend or family member, a Zoom or phone call with someone you love, or writing a card to a friend you haven’t spoken to in a while. All of these connections help develop resilience.
Look for opportunities for mindfulness in your day. Mindfulness is simply paying attention on purpose. Try to be more present by intentionally observing your surrounding through daily life.
Cultivate your passion and purpose by taking action toward your goals and look for opportunities that allow growth to give more meaning to your daily life. Having a sense of purpose can make you feel stronger.
Remember, resilience is not the absence of adversity or struggles but the ability to bounce back from it. Your brain registers that sense of being able to soothe yourself after setbacks, and this is the hallmark of developing true resilience.
Brain Changing = Life Changing. Live Beyond! 🧠
References:
Russo, S. J., Murrough, J. W., Han, M. H., Charney, D. S., and Nestler, E. J. (2012). Neurobiology of resilience. Nat. Neurosci. 15, 1475–1484. doi: 10.1038/nn.3234
Medaglia, J. D., Pasqualetti, F., Hamilton, R. H., Thompson-Schill, S. L., and Bassett, D. S. (2017). Brain and cognitive reserve: translation via network control theory. Neurosci. Biobehav. Rev. 75, 53–64. doi: 10.1016/j.neubiorev.2017.01.016
Stern, Y., Arenaza-Urquijo, E. M., Bartrés-Faz, D., Belleville, S., Cantilon, M., Chetelat, G., et al. (2018). Whitepaper: defining and investigating cognitive reserve, brain reserve, and brain maintenance. Alzheimers Dement. 16, 1305–1311. doi: 10.1016/j.jalz.2018.07.219
Gupta, A., Love, A., Kilpatrick, L. A., Labus, J. S., Bhatt, R., Chang, L., et al. (2017). Morphological brain measures of cortico-limbic inhibition related to resilience. J. Neurosci. Res. 95, 1760–1775. doi: 10.1002/jnr.24007
Mario, A., Lavinia, T. (2021). The Contribution of Physical Exercise to Brain Resilience. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience. 14 . 1662-5153. 10.3389/fnbeh.2020.626769
