Based on scientific studies, happy lives are built on a foundation of equanimity powers.
Equanimity is the capacity to be nonreactive and nonjudgmental to one’s experiences. The practice of equanimity is developing awareness of one’s state of mind, including stress, and then learning the methods to better manage one’s internal response to stressors, including physiological, emotional, and physical responses. When we learn these for ourselves, it's part of learning self-regulation, and we can also learn how to help others through coregulation.
Equanimity is not accepting a situation, equanimity is about accepting your experience of the situation, learning how to work with your own experience and reactions to the situation. By learning these skills, one becomes more agentic.
For over 120 years, we have known about the physiological, cognitive, and emotional effects of stressors. These take root deep in the brain, in the amygdala, and trigger the stress hormones. Long term stimulation of the amygdala and long-term exposure to stress hormones increases incidences of depression, antisocial behavior, cognitive decline, and a whole host of undesirable sequelae.
In the last 15 years, there has been an exponential increase in scientific studies on cognitive stress reduction practices. These work by lowering the amygdala’s stress response and strengthening the connections and signals emanating from the prefrontal cortex. The direct results are an increase in feelings of wellbeing and curiosity, and surprisingly also increased function of the immune system, lower chronic pain, increased happiness, and higher resistance to trauma, PTSD, and addiction.
You can learn more about the scientific studies in the Mind & Life Podcast episode with David Cresswell of Carnegie Mellon University.
You can read about the techniques of equanimity and self-regulation in the book Self-Reg by Stuard Shanker.
You can learn the practices that lead to equanimity and self-regulation, and also techniques to teach these capabilities to others in the Mastering Your Resourceful Brain online course that starts June 4.