The Neuroscience of Mindfulness and Fear with Tara Brach, PhD

When a client is afraid, there’s a practice that can help them stay grounded in the present . . .

. . . instead of getting hijacked by panic and “worst-case scenario” thinking.

And that practice is mindfulness.

In this video, Tara Brach, PhD will get into how mindfulness disrupts the neurobiology of fear, and she does it with a powerful metaphor that you could share with your clients.

[lolafalana]

Power to the integrading mind. Thank you brilliant 👏

[stephenarmiger]

I have been in a meditation group for a little over a year. Sometimes we do something called metta. May I be safe, may I be happy. We expand to include others. The most challenging is including others that we have problems with. In our current political atmosphere it is quite challenging to include those who vote differently than we do. I am happy to see that this video is posted.

[prema]

Thank you. I am leading a book group of dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk's book The Body Keeps the Score, and I am showing this talk in my discussion today. This was very resourceful. Thank you so much Tara.

[dk]

Thank you for this simple and effective explanation 🙏

[enoughstuff]

Many thanks for the visual explanation of activating / cultivating our muscle of mindfulness. A good visual to carry in my mind.

[Cecilia]

Very clear explanation from Tara Brach, thank you!

[suesalach]

Yes..TO that visual and explanation of the process what happens to the brain With anxiety and stress. What happens with trauma ?
Severe trauma? Just wondering, THANK YOU for this information and video! I hit the Subscribe button!!

[ajmarr]

Mindfulness and Positive Affect Explained in 2 minutes: A new perspective and procedure from affective neuroscience.

It has recently been demonstrated (link below) that reward uncertainty or novelty can enhance the sensory experience of high value reward. In other words, popcorn actually tastes better when we are watching exciting movies, and tastes worse when we are attending a funeral. This is due to what are called dopamine-opioid interactions, or the fact that dopamine activity (elicited by positive novel events, and is responsible for a state of arousal, but not pleasure) interacts with our pleasures (as reflected by opioid release), and can actually stimulate opioid activity, which is reflected in self-reports of greater pleasure.

Opioid release occurs when we are consuming food and drink, but it also occurs when our musculature is in a state of inactivity or rest, which is why relaxation feels good. Thus it follows that any behaviors which have a lot of positive reward uncertainty (creating art, climbing mountains, etc.) will stimulate naturally occurring opioid activity in concurrent resting states, with subsequent self-reports of high arousal and pleasure, which precisely describes all peak or flow experiences. In other words, peak experience is simply opioid-dopamine interactions due to pursuing or anticipating positive novel events during a state of rest. Furthermore, as dopamine release scales with the salience of the activity, so will the resulting peak experience. We also see this for peak or flow experiences, where the pleasure and arousal scales with the importance of the task. Thus a rock climber who is risking his life would have a more intense experience than if he were attached to a tether that would break his fall.

The procedure to replicate this is simple, just follow a relaxation protocol such as mindfulness and alternate it with doing productive or meaningful activity. The awareness of subsequent meaningful behavior will act as a ‘prime’, and increase dopamine activity, which will make the pleasure of relaxation greater, reciprocally stimulate dopamine activity to boot.


The book is based on the work of the distinguished affective neuroscientist Kent Berridge, who was kind to review for accuracy and endorse the work.

[havadatequila]

Why doesn't NICAMB offer referrals? People are dying to find trained therapists and it would be a great selling point for practitioners.