Cultivating Inner Strengths: The Power of Positive Neuroplasticity

In our current environment, it's normal to experience moments of anxiety and worry. Fear is a natural response designed to safeguard us through the flight, fight, or freeze instinct. However, prolonged stress and anxiety, when not in imminent danger, can take a toll on body and mind. These feelings often lead to insomnia, emotional strain, and bodily tension, and can contribute to a sense of helplessness and potential risks of depression and burnout. It is therefore crucial to learn how to foster a sense of safety and resilience within our minds.

Cultivating your inner garden

While mindfulness teaches us to acknowledge and accept our feelings, it's equally vital to actively nurture our mental landscape. The mind is actually like a garden. It needs not only to be witnessed, but also to be actively cultivated. If you leave it unattended, it will grow all kinds of unwanted weeds. Weeds need to be pulled out and new seeds need to be planted in your brain, just like we need to grow muscles if we want to be physically strong.

Neuroscience has identified safety, satisfaction, and connection as the three basic human needs. When these needs are met, we feel safe, content and loved. When they are not met, we feel anxious, worried, stressed (the safety system), frustrated, driven, craving (the satisfaction system), rejected, unworthy or lonely (the connection system). Positive neuroplasticity is a method that teaches you to cultivate inner strengths, by repeatedly taking in positive experiences in those areas. The good news is that even in uncertain times, you can learn to feel safe.

You can notice or call up a feeling of safety in your mind

So how can you cultivate a feeling of safety and strength? There are numerous small opportunities in a day when you can tap into a feeling of safety. Sometimes it is already present in your awareness such as a feeling of cosiness when you take a warm bath or crawl under your blankets at night. In such moments it is important to become more consciously aware of it and explore how safety feels like. What do you feel in your body when you feel safe? Is it a feeling of warmth, relaxation or heaviness? Does your posture change? Which emotions are present? Is it relief or calm or maybe just the absence of fear? What kind of mood are you in?

You can also call up feelings of safety, for example, by imagining yourself in a safe place where you feel protected or recalling a situation where you were strong, where you stood up for yourself or someone else. If visualisation supports you you could call up the image of a mountain and tap into the feeling of sitting, grounded like a mountain, perhaps using a guided mountain meditation. There are no limits to the creativity in your mind. It’s important to remember that in the beginning, it requires a bit effort to stay present with the experience and to noticing, enriching, and absorbing it. Neuroscientist Dr. Rick Hanson has developed the so-called "HEAL method" with these steps, which you can practice with my meditation of feeling strong.

Taking in repeatedly small experiences of safety can make you stronger over time

As you go through your day don’t forget that even small feelings of safety taken in over the course of your day can flip your mood if you take the time to notice them and fully take them in. Even neutral feelings such as the absence of pain, anger, or fear are in fact already positive feelings when you think about it. On a scale from 0 to 10 there are so many moments of plus 1 or 2 that pass unnoticed while we are very much aware of the minus 1 or 2 and allow them to increase in our mind. So why not use this process for the positive experiences? When you become aware of a tiny positive feeling, such as feeling protected, strong, or safe, take a moment to notice it, feel it in your body, make it become bigger in your mind, and keep your attention on it for at least a dozen seconds. It might sound silly, but neuroscience shows that by taking in the good through those micro-moments you are installing inner strengths in your brain. Repeatedly embracing feelings of strength and safety contributes to internal resilience, allowing you to stand firm amidst life's uncertainties and challenges. In other words: by repeatedly taking in feelings of strengths and safety you will BECOME stronger.

In conclusion, by actively nurturing moments of safety and strength, you can fortify your inner resilience. Through these practices, you empower yourself to navigate these challenges with a greater sense of stability and strength. You can practice the same approach with feelings of satisfaction and connection so that over time you feel more and more grateful and loved.