EP 114: The Neurobiology of Well-Being & Resilience | Dr. Richard Davidson

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In this episode of the Radical Responsibility Podcast is my pleasure to share with you an interview I did with Richard Davidson, Ph.D. better known to many as Dr. Richie Davidson, one of the leading neuroscientists in the world, who has focused his research in the area of mindfulness and positive emotions and how we can cultivate well being. In this interview, we explore a deep neuroscientific neuropsychological understanding of what well being is, the neuronal substrates of well being, and how we can begin to see well being as a skill that we actually know how to train in, rather than something we're either lucky to have or not have.

Very happy to be here with Dr. Richard Davidson, better known as Richie Davidson, the founder and director of the center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. So welcome, Richie.

Thank you, Fleet. Delightful to be here. Thank you for having me.

Yeah, really good to see you, as always. Let's get started.

From your work. I'd really like to ask you about, from a neurobiological perspective, what is resilience? What does it look like in the brain and the nervous system? How is a resilient brain or nervous system different from a less resilient brain or nervous system?

The way we think about resilience is.

Resilience can be defined as the speed with which you recover from adversity, the rapidity with which you recover from adversity. A person who's highly resilient recovers quickly from a stressful experience. Someone who recovers slowly, we would say, is not resilient. And it really is.

In many ways as simple as that. Although, of course, that is enormously complicated because we can actually measure the speed with which a person recovers from adversity in many different systems. And this is something that is really fundamentally important for our emotional balance, our mental health, our psychological well being, and also our physical health. Because when we fail to recover quickly from adversity.

Our reactions linger. And when our reactions linger in that way, it could really be toxic, particularly when it accumulates over time. One of the really important things is to appreciate that resilience doesn't involve having a blunted response to stress. In fact, it's quite appropriate if some challenge occurs, to respond that we're built to respond to threats and to challenges. It would be abnormal if you will to not show a real response to that. When we talk about resilience, we're not talking about diminished reactivity to stress. We're really primarily talking about the recovery.

We can measure this in the brain. We can measure this in different bodily systems. One of the fascinating things that we've learned over just the last few years is that the speed with which you recover from adversity across these different systems which operate on different timescales is actually correlated. So that if a person is slow to recover in the brain, they're also slow to recover in bodily systems which may operate on a longer timescale. This gives us an insight that this parameter, if you will, of the speed with which you recover is something really important and is pervasive across different biological systems.

Well, when we think about resilience, we might think of it in the dimensions of physical, mental or cognitive, emotional and spiritual resilience and fitness. So to take the simplest example of physical resilience, if I start jogging in place, get my heartbeat up to 115 or something and then stop, how long does it take to come back to my normal baseline? Right. So that would be at least one measure of physical fitness or resilience. So are these things tied together as you. It sounds like what you were saying was that a resilient brain is going to be connected to greater physical fitness and physical health.

Well, not exactly so to, but it's a really important question. So when we talk about these systems being correlated, what we're referring to is in response to a psychosocial challenge. Let's say you've had a difficult conversation with a co worker in the morning. How long does that emotional response to that difficult conversation persist?

Many of us, at least I certainly would include myself, have had many experiences where you've had a challenge, say early in the morning, and then you have to go into another meeting immediately after that. To what extent are the emotions which were elicited in that first meeting, which may have been a difficult conversation, coloring or bleeding over or influencing your experience in that second meeting that you have to do immediately after.

When it bleeds over in that way? We would say that that is a lack of resilience. Being able to recover quickly is associated with increased resilience. And when you get your heart rate up through exercise, that's a different kind of challenge. That is an aerobic challenge and that's associated with aerobic fitness. And you can be very aerobically fit and very psychologically unfit. And so aerobic fitness and mental fitness if you will, are not necessarily correlated. But what I would say is that mental fitness and being resilient in response to psychosocial challenges does have health consequences because we. One of the ways in which we can recover is in our bodily system. So when a stressful challenge occurs, we know that stress hormones are secreted. They're secreted from the adrenal glands, which are glands that sit over our kidneys, and these are regulated by our brain. And it's adaptive to have cortisol be released in the moment, but it's not adaptive. In fact, it could be very deleterious if cortisol remained elevated for the entire day after some acute challenge that you may have in the morning, say. And so to the extent that we fail to recover in response to these kinds of challenges, that is.

Associated with health consequences that really could be detrimental.

Well, that brings up a couple of questions for me. One is, you mentioned we have a difficult situation early in the day or a difficult meeting, and then we have another meeting. And are we able to let that go? Or the emotional, even if there was a bit of an emotional hijack, is that still coloring how we're showing up in the next meeting? And so my understanding, and it's going to be very simplistic from some of the mindfulness research, one of the benefits of mind training and mindfulness training is that our ability to sort of turn off, not maybe turn off, but an emotional, especially a negative emotional response or an intentional response, that's really no longer warranted. It's just kind of carrying on our ability to turn that off appropriately, to put the brakes on that is in the frontal lobes. And mindfulness kind of gives us better breaks, in a sense, a better ability to not have those things continue on beyond what's meaning, what's appropriate.

Yeah, I would say that in rough form, that that's very reasonable. Rather than using the phrase turning it off, which I have used myself in the past, I think it's more appropriate to say just letting it go.

And I mean, the thoughts may still be there, but they don't hijack us in the same way. So we may not change the thoughts or may not really need to change the thoughts or even change the feelings. It's changing our relationship to them so that they no longer.

Grip us in the same way and take over our entire system.

And so what would be the underlying neuronal resilience that would allow us to let things go more easily?

So the frontal lobes have a lot to do with that. And, you know, it's the frontal lobes are an interesting part of the brain. If you look over the course of evolution and you look at the ratio of the mass of the frontal lobe compared to the rest of the brain, that ratio is higher in humans than it is in any other species. The frontal lobes allow us to do many of the things which we would think of as being characteristically human. One of those things is a capacity that we call mental time travel. By mental time travel, we we mean that we can anticipate the future and we can reflect on the past. And clearly being able to do that is advantageous. We can have a long term goal, whatever that goal might be, and we can organize our experience and our behavior toward that goal. And sometimes that goal could be way off in the future. I mean, think of a student who's in school and has the aspiration to become a physician. That requires a lot of schooling. And being able to organize her or his activities to accomplish that goal is an enormously complicated set of tasks. And that's something that we humans are very good at. And it's because of our prefrontal cortex. But it's also the case that our prefrontal cortex gets us into trouble because of that.

It is what.

Is critical for taking us out of the present moment, because we can be worrying about the future and ruminating about the past. And so in our evolutionary past, when threats occurred, they were typically physical threats that actually were in our immediate environment and were consequential for our literal survival in today's world. I mean, putting aside the pandemic that we're currently in. But in most cases, when the world is sort of in its baseline state, so to speak, the threats that occur to us, for the most part, for most people, are not immediate physical threats in the environment. They're threats that we create in our mind. And we worry about stuff in the future and we ruminate about stuff in the past. And that gets all of these ancient systems hijacked so that we're responding as if there's a tiger in front of us. But it's all in our mind, so to speak. And so mind training allows us to retrain the prefrontal cortex, if you will, and be able to deploy it when it's needed, which we certainly want to do. We don't want to become zombies.

But we also don't want to be slaves to.

The ruminations and worry that our brains are so good at.

When we engage in mindfulness and other kinds of mind training, we can retrain the brain so that we have more voluntary control over the prefrontal cortex, and it is less hijacking us by these spontaneous worries and ruminations.

Well, you seem to be pointing there to something that is being talked about a lot these days. And I know the popularization of neuroscientific ideas sometimes gets ahead of the curve. I hope I'm not guilty or contributing to that too much. I try to be careful, but we hear a lot about the default mode network or the task negative network versus the task positive network. And certainly mindfulness and attention training seems to have to do with being able to more constantly make that shift from that ruminating, time traveling default mode network into a state that has stabler attention.

Yeah, so what you're referring to there, Fleet, is actually a body of modern neuroscientific evidence that finds that there is this.

Phenomenon that we call the default mode, which is a mode that the brain goes into when it is not.

Challenged with a demanding task, when we're kind of in neutral. So that if you put a person in an MRI scanner and instruct them to please just rest.

They will exhibit default mode activity. And the networks in the brain that tend to be active during the default mode are networks that are involved in.

The self narrative. We all carry around this narrative about ourselves, and when we're not doing anything else, we tend to revert to this self narrative.

There are times when the self narrative can be.

Negative. For example, among people who are prone to depression, they have very negative self beliefs and they actually hold those beliefs to be a real description of who they are. And that can really ensnare them. And so one of the things that we learn to do with contemplative training is not so much to change the contents of the default mode, but again, change our relationship to the default mode mode so that we can see it for what it is. You know, there are a bunch of thoughts and they don't necessarily define who we are. And by taking having some distance. In the cognitive therapy literature, that's often referred to as de centering or de reification. Both of those mechanisms are important in helping to give us some distance. And so then gradually over time, the default mode might change, but initially what's changing is our relationship to the default mode.

Just a follow up question on that. So I know you're a meditator and as I am, and many of our viewers will be. So when we initially are able to.

Develop some awareness, some, some witnessing capacity that decentering and sort of just observe the, the flow of discursive activity that all the self narrative, the ruminating about the past, the time travel, all that that goes on and that part of our brain that makes it hard to meditate when we first start, right? And people say, I can't meditate, my mind's too busy. And so, so we can witness that which is for me, the first step in our freedom, because from there we can choose how to respond, right? And then it seems we can also, as our attention stabilizes in practice, we can. We can relax that witness or watch or somewhat and drop into more just a direct sensing, direct feeling, or almost like in terms of the body and breath being the body being the breath, what seems to be another switch, a different sort of neural networks in the brain which can go into a less, maybe a less dualistic kind of meditation practice. Curious about your thoughts on that?

Yes, that's a great question, Fleet. And I would completely agree with you that you are naming two distinct modes. And initially there is a dualistic quality where there is a witness and there are activities that are being witnessed. But then there is the possibility of reflexively resting in awareness.

Which can be non dual, where the division between.

The observer, if you will, and that which is observed is obliterated.

I believe that that's something really important and real. However, from a scientific perspective, there is preciously little that is known about that.

And so that's definitely part of the agenda for the future in terms of scientific research. But there's very little we can say about that with any confidence from a neuroscientific perspective. As a practitioner, I resonate with it and.

I think that it is something really important, but we really don't know a lot about that scientifically.

Yeah, I don't want to take you outside the bounds of the research too much. In my own experience, that second mode, which is less dualistic, is more connected with a kind of felt experience of embodiment and enhanced interoceptive awareness. So which seems to have some connections with emotion regulation and resilience. So it just seems like it's a good area for future resource research because it may be a modality that goes further into developing resilience.

Yes, I agree with that. And.

It may well help to accelerate the processes of resilience in terms of interoception, that is the awareness of what's going on in the body. That is something we have studied and it's very complicated. And.

You can objectively measure interoceptive accuracy in different ways. And there's a lot more that we scientists need to do in terms of devising other strategies for measuring it. But I could tell you that in the standard ways in which scientists have measured interoception, there's not a lot of evidence that interoceptive ability is enhanced even in really long term practitioners.

So it's still an open question. And it may be that the tools that we have for measuring it are simply impoverished and we don't have the right tools at this point.

But one of the ways we measure it is a person's ability to sense their own heartbeat. And we can measure that really precisely. And I could tell you pretty definitively that.

And we've looked at this in several different styles of practice with very long term practitioners. And the only thing we found is that the meditators report that they're quite confident that they're accurately sensing their heartbeat. But when we measured objectively, they're no better than the average person on the street who's had no practice.

That's very interesting. That's very interesting. Yeah. Well, it could ultimately have something to do with approaches to practice. Maybe as practice seems like a lot of practice directions are going in the direction of being more embodied. But I guess we'll have to wait and see about that.

Yeah, and it may be that it's not so much the heartbeat that's being sensed, it may be more, you know, internal muscle activity, deep muscle activity. There's so many, you know, the body is so enormously complicated and you know, there are just thousands, probably hundreds of thousands of signals in the body. And you know, we're measuring one among, you know, literally thousands and thousands. And so the fact that we don't see accuracy in this one signal doesn't mean anything about the possibility of sensing other signals. It's just that some of those other signals are hard to get at. And so they pose a more difficult challenge from a measurement perspective. But this is definitely be something that.

Will be spawning a lot of new scientific research over the next few years.

Well, in just a moment I want to move on to your model of well being. And we've already addressed two of the four underlying constituents in terms of resilience and attention, either mindfulness or mind wandering. But just before that, I go back to resilience for a moment. So could you talk about a little bit from a. This is kind of this connection between again, the physical and the psychosocial, emotional and so forth. Resilience, a state and trait. Look at it. So we're all pretty familiar with if we're not sleeping well, using too much caffeine Other substances, you know, a sugary diet, you know, we're jacking our system all around. You know, we're going to be a lot more irritable, more triggerable, probably less resilient just because we're not taking care of ourselves. When we do take care of ourselves physically and sleep well and have a good, good healthy diet and not using too much of the substances that jangle up our system, we're generally more resilient in the moment. So that could be more of a, of a state. And then what is that? What moves into resilience becoming more of a trait that we have access to?

Well.

When resilience becomes more of a trait, when we refer to something as a trait, we think of it as a more enduring characteristic. And one of the things that we found is that with longer term practice.

Primarily practices that, excuse me, that cultivate awareness and also connection practices, for example, like compassion practices.

That resilience is strengthened in a trait like way. And what we mean by a trait like way is that.

It doesn't depend on us being meditating. This is a quality that can be observed during one's.

Ordinary baseline or default state. And so we can measure very precisely how long it takes a person to recover from a stressor. And I can give you a very specific example that we've studied. One of the ways in which we can bring this into the laboratory and study in a very realistic way using a.

Something that everyone has had experience with is pain. We've all had experience with physical pain. We know.

In an introspective subjective way what physical pain feels like. We could deliver physical pain in a safe way in the laboratory. The way we do is with heat.

We have a device which is basically a metal plate that gets strapped onto the underside of your wrist, which is a very sensitive area. It's called the ulnar area and it's very rich in nerve endings there.

Through this metal plate we can very rapidly, in an automated way circulate water through, through it. And we can regulate the temperature of the water very precisely. So in that way we can control the temperature and we can increase or decrease the temperature really quickly.

And we know what the safe limits are with this. And so we can produce a burning sensation that really is intense but is, is just on the appropriate side of not causing any physical damage. And so we've done this with long term meditators. And the experiment that we did is really simple. We give them one experience of this pain. So everyone knows what it is and it goes on for 10 seconds and the first few seconds most people can take and then it gets super intense and really feels like it's burning.

And you want to, normally you would withdraw, but this thing is strapped onto your wrist so you can't withdraw. And so the way the experiment works is they come into the laboratory, they go into the scanner and we have this thing strapped onto them. And then we tell them that when they get a tone of a certain frequency, like beep. When they hear that beep, they know in 10 seconds they're going to get zapped with the pain. And the pain lasts for 10 seconds. And then there's a recovery period. That's the experiment. And we bring in novice practitioners who are just learning to meditate, we bring in long term practitioners and we've done this experiment with many different levels of practice experience in including.

People on the planet who are among, who've done more than.

10 years of continuous retreat. So super long term practitioners.

And here's what we find in this experiment. If you bring the average person in off the street who is either not meditating, who's never meditated, or is just learning to meditate, and you present that tone which indicates that they're about to get zapped. Their brains respond as if they've gotten zapped. All they heard is a tone. They haven't gotten any pain, but their brains are responding as if they really got the pain. Then when the painful stimulus comes on, it shows continued response. Then during the recovery period, it keeps going and it recovers very, very slowly. Among the super long term practitioners, what we find is that when the tone comes on, we know exactly what areas in the brain respond to pain. So we can very specifically measure those areas. What we find in our very long term practitioners is that not a single area that's pain responsive shows significant activation in response to the tone. The brain is essentially flat, it's perfectly calm, they've just heard a tone. Then when the pain comes on, the brain responds robustly. And in fact, in certain areas of the brain, the meditators show a greater response than the controls. They actually show significantly greater, particularly in the sensory regions that are registering the pain. And then during the recovery period, they come right back down to baseline, no lingering, that is the neural signature of resilience.

Wow, that's great. That's very interesting.

I'd like to shift now to the how to. And much of the research on resilience, I believe began with the aversive childhood experiences studies, the ACE studies. And one thing that showed it that some, some of us are just genetically or maybe epigenetically more resilient than others. We have a more default or baseline. But for all of us, given the incredible crisis that we're in of this global pandemic and the fact that in the background of that are a lot of potentially disruptive forces, the climate emergency, you know, life has become challenging. And so how do we, with this well being model, work towards becoming more resilient? And maybe we've talked a bit about resilience and we've talked a bit about attention, mindfulness versus mind wandering. The other two are outlook, positive outlook, and then sometimes generosity or altruistic behavior, caring behavior. So maybe if you could talk about that model a little bit and what we understand, that would help all of us become more resilient and increase our well being.

Sure. And I should say that we have an updated model which.

Is in certain ways simpler. It includes all those components, but in slightly different ways and more directly ties them to specific practices which can be used to cultivate them. But we need not go into those details here. But let me say a few things about this in terms of the extraordinary challenge that we're all currently in together on the planet right now with the.

COVID 19 pandemic. One of the things that we're being asked to do is to practice social distancing. And one of the things that I find is that that's a very unfortunate label.

What we're really being asked to practice is physical distancing. That's what makes a difference. And I think from all the evidence that I have learned that that's really important, that we practice physical distancing. But we're fortunately living in an age where we can be physically distant and socially connected. And I think rather than practice social distancing from, we should all be practicing social connectedness because, and I think many people have reported spontaneously that they're reaching out to friends that they might not have talked to in a long time, maybe living in another country, checking in, how are you doing?

I think many of us are finding that we are touching in with our social networks in a way that, that is perhaps more frequent or maybe more authentic than we might have done in the past. And so I think that reframing the current dilemma or the current.

Instruction that we're being given as, rather than social distancing, physical distancing and social connectedness is really important. The other thing is that why are we being asked to be physically distinct, distant. We're being asked to be physically distant so that we don't spread the virus so that we don't become viral vectors, well, that's an act of generosity.

And if we actually spend some time reflecting on the fact that.

When we adhere to the guidelines that are being recommended when we are homesteading in the way we're being asked to, when we're actually not just doing this to protect ourselves, we're doing this to protect others, particularly those who are, who are especially vulnerable, older people, people who may have pre existing health conditions which render them more vulnerable. And so reframing what we're being asked to do really as an act of generosity can be enormously helpful in.

Supporting our well being during this pandemic. One of the other things that that.

Kind of practice speaks to, which I think is really important and relates to a comment that you made earlier, Fleet. Many people who are new to this often say, wow, I can't meditate, my mind is just going crazy. One of the strategies that we are finding in our scientific work may really be important is very short periods of practice and sprinkling those throughout a day.

For example, if a person is going to devote.

A person who's just beginning, say they're going to devote 15 minutes a day to practice, is it better to do that practice in one 15 minute period in three 5 minute periods, or maybe in five 3 minute periods? From a scientific perspective, we actually have no idea that that study has, believe it or not, has never been done. But there's a lot of reason to believe that doing short periods of practice that we sprinkle throughout the day may actually be optimal and may help the kind of person who, that you were referring to earlier who just says that their mind is chaotic, but we all can afford a few minutes every now and then throughout the day. One of the analogies that I often use is that when human beings first evolved on this planet, none of us were brushing our teeth. And yet today, virtually every human being on the planet brushes their teeth. And we do this because we understand it's useful for our personal physical hygiene. And I think that if we spent even as little time as we spend brushing our teeth nourishing our mind, this world would really be a different place. And I think most people, when they deeply reflect on it, would agree. And pardon me if there are any dentists or dental hygienists who are listening, but I think most of us would agree that our minds are even more important than our teeth.

So that it's interesting you brought that up because that phenomena where all human beings today brush their teeth that started way back. It's often pointed to as one of the great marketing initiatives that ever happened, both from a public health perspective and from the perspective of the toothpaste makers. But it is.

I'd like to shift now because people can find more about your model for well being and the constituents of well being at your site. Center for Healthy Minds. And it's a lot of other places. So just Google well being and Richard Davidson or whatever search engine you prefer. So I would like to invite you now if you would offer a practice that you'd just like to offer some kind of guided practice for a couple minutes.

If you would do that, I'd be delighted. And let me also just say that our center has, in conjunction with a nonprofit that we started.

Created a scientifically based app based on our model of well being that is being freely offered through generous donations of others. So anyone can download it free. And if you go to the website tryhealthyminds.org, all one word, tryhealthyminds.org, you can learn more about it and you can download it from the App Store or from Google Play. So let's do a little practice together.

We like to sit in an upright posture that is not too tight and not too loose. And we can keep our eyes open or close, whichever is more comfortable.

Let's begin by bringing awareness.

Into our bodies.

And simply noticing whatever sensations may be present.

Whether they are pleasant or unpleasant or neutral, simply infusing our bodies with awareness.

And as our minds and our bodies begin to settle, one of the things that we do in the tradition in which I practice every session is at the very beginning of a session, we remind ourselves, why is it that we're engaging in this practice?

What is our motivation?

And let's see if we can find that place within us where we can recognize.

That calming our mind and opening our heart is beneficial not only for ourselves, but for all the other.

Beings that we connect with directly or indirectly.

And so let's spend a few moments.

Reflecting on this motivation.

As we do this.

Let's bring into mind.

A person in our lives.

Who has been helpful to us in some way.

Maybe a member of a team in which we work, or maybe a member of our family who has been helpful, particularly in this challenging time.

And let's see if we can find this sense of appreciation.

For.

What they have been doing to be helpful and also for who they are.

Maybe even reflect on how you might express your appreciation to them the next time you actually see them.

And let's extend this quality of appreciation to people that we are reading about, but we may not know personally who may be on the front lines.

In helping to.

Deal with the calamity of this pandemic.

Many people who are risking their lives.

To be of benefit, to be of service to others.

And extending.

This appreciation.

To those people.

Then, of course, there are so many people that are suffering.

In this world from the pandemic and for many other causes.

And we know that every human being shares the same wish to be happy and to be free of suffering.

And so let's bring some of these images into our mind, in our heart, and extend wishes.

To these many groups.

May you enjoy happiness and the causes of happiness. May you be free of suffering and the causes of suffering.

You can say these simple phrases in our mind, whatever words feel right to you.

And then simply rest.

And allow our awareness to be open and spacious.

And simply being aware of whatever may arise.

And whenever we close a period of practice.

However short.

We always end.

With a dedication where we.

Invoke the intention to dedicate whatever insight, whatever merit, whatever wisdom we may have gleaned from this short period of practice.

And we dedicate it.

To the welfare of others.

Thank you all and appreciate this opportunity. And I wish you all the best.

Thank you very much. Richie. Dr. Richard Davidson with Center for Healthy Minds at University of Wisconsin, Wisconsin Madison. Thank you very much for your time today. You've been very generous. Thank you.

Happy to do it. Thank you, Fleet. Thank you for all you're doing.

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