How God Changes Your Brain - Andrew Newberg, M. D_ [81]
Recently, a team of National Institutes of Health researchers concluded that “a moderate optimistic illusion” appears to be neurologically essential for maintaining motivation and good mental health.104 They also found that highly optimistic people had greater activation in the same parts of the anterior cingulate that are stimulated by meditation. If you recall from previous chapters, the anterior cingulate plays a crucial role in controlling anxiety, depression, and rage, as well as fostering social awareness and compassion.
Even the medical researchers at the Mayo Clinic stress the importance of optimistic thinking for maintaining optimal health. They found that positive thinking decreases stress, helps you resist catching the common cold, reduces your risk of coronary artery disease, eases breathing if you have certain respiratory diseases, and improves your coping skills during hardships.105 An optimistic attitude specifically reduces the stress-eliciting cortisol levels in your body,106 and many other studies have demonstrated how optimism improves behavioral coping in a variety of physical illnesses.107 In a forty-year follow-up conducted at Duke University, optimists had increased longevity when compared to pessimistic individuals.108 Indeed, the role of optimism is so important in maintaining psychological health that the University of Pennsylvania has an entire institute—the Positive Psychology Center, headed by Martin Seligman—dedicated to this research.109
Faith is essential for maintaining a healthy brain, but if you exclude exercise and companionship, you are going to cripple your health. So my advice is to nurture all three. And if religion is high on your list, then I suggest that you include meditation, since it appears to be the best way to make spiritual values neurologically real. For those who don't value religion, meditating on hope, optimism, and a positive future will have similar neurological benefits.∗2 Best of all, meditation undermines the everyday doubts and anxiety we all harbor when we reach for new goals and ideals. In other words, meditation will strengthen your faith—in yourself, in people, and in God.
THE PRINCIPLES OF AFFIRMATION
Before I close this chapter, I want to briefly address the widespread popularity of the “power of positive thinking,” especially as it relates to the notion that you can use your thoughts to attain anything you want in the materialistic world. Overly simplistic books and CDs like The Secret have been turned into million-dollar best-sellers when they're touted by television talk-show hosts, but do they really work? From a neuroscientific perspective, the answer is yes, but not in the magical ways implied.
In fact, nurturing a fantasy is the first step in the neural process of achieving success in the world. It begins with creative imagination, a process that takes place in your frontal lobe, the area in your brain that has the unrelenting capacity to dream up virtually anything. If you can't imagine a specific goal, you won't make it to second base, which is figuring out how to make your dream come true.
Now, as I have emphasized throughout this book, truth can only be approximated by the brain. Instead, what the brain does best is calculate the odds of success. Here is where faith kicks in, because it is essential to remain optimistic about your chances of reaching your goals.
So what do you do when all of the subtle, and not so subtle, self-doubts kick in? You can do several things: suppress them, evaluate them, or ruminate on them. Neurologically, it's actually easier to suppress them, because the more you keep your mind focused on your optimistic belief of success, the more you will inhibit the functioning