Rewire Your Brain: Think Your Way to a Better Life

Commitment:
People feel invested in what they are doing. 
They have energy for and are interested in their duties.
2.
Control:
People have the realistic sense that what they 
are doing is in their realm of control; that is, they consider 
themselves to be active participants in their work instead of 
feeling hopeless and victimized by the work conditions. This 
is in contrast to developing learned helplessness.
3.
Challenge:
People view change as an opportunity to act 
differently rather than as a crisis from which to defend 
themselves.
These three C ’ s are the attitudes that can help you to stay healthy 
despite having to deal with high levels of stress. They are essential 
in developing what Maddi and Kobasa have called a stress - hardy 
person. By developing stress hardiness, you will be able to deal with 
stress that many people fi nd unbearable. 
When you cultivate stress hardiness, keep in mind that you still 
need social medicine in the form of the support of friends and fam-
ily members. Maddi and Kobasa found that stress - hardy people tap 
into social support, which helps them to blunt the impact of stressful 
events. The social support must be directed toward caring and encour-
agement rather than fostering self - pity and dependence, however. It 
should help you to explore your options and to challenge yourself. 
Consistent with the principle that a moderate degree of stress will 
help you to rewire your brain and inoculate you from greater stress, 
challenge focuses your energy on goals that require extra effort. 
This moderate stress activation can also keep you from becoming 
bored. Mihaly Csikszentimihalyi of the University of Chicago has 
described how people can avoid being overwhelmed with anxiety 
from stimulation while also avoiding boredom. By investing your 
energy in fi nding a healthy balance between the two, you can experi-
ence fl ow, which means enjoyment. 
Your attitude not only affects how you feel about your life and 
how you approach stress, it also has a great deal to do with how 
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you think and whether you believe your options are infi nite. Do you 
invest your energy in becoming greater than you have been in the 
past? Such an investment can have a major bearing on your capacity 
to rewire your brain and respond with resiliency to stress. 
Ambition and curiosity play a dynamic role in how well your 
brain thrives. Cultivating these two characteristics enables you to 
approach the future with vitality and a hunger for life. They open the 
door to your future and say yes to new experiences. By cultivating an 
insatiable curiosity, you make whatever environment you encounter 
an enriched environment. Enriched environments stimulate neuro-
plasticity, whereas impoverished environments damage the brain. 
You need the emotional fuel and the motivation to turn possi-
bilities into actualities. This is where ambition comes into play. By 
cultivating ambition, you ’ ll reach for a bright future with vast pos-
sibilities. Healthy ambition is
not
competitive or aggressive. It does 
not involve stepping on or over other people to attain one ’ s goals. 
Healthy ambition involves curiosity and a goal - driven sense of pur-
pose to expand beyond your current understanding.
My Father and Beethoven 
My father admired and listened to Beethoven ’ s symphonies until 
the last days of his life. When I spoke at his memorial service, 
I described how his life was similar in theme to that of his favorite 
composer. My father ’ s life and Beethoven ’ s life carried the same 
themes of resilience and transcendence over adversity. 
For Beethoven, resiliency emerged from struggles with his family. 
After Beethoven studied briefl y with Haydn in Vienna, his mother 
died, so he returned to Bonn to care for his two younger brothers. His 
father should have managed the responsibility of raising his children, 
but his alcoholism destroyed any capability for or interest in doing 
so. Beethoven drove his father out of town and raised his brothers by 
himself. After being his brothers ’ father fi gure, he returned to Vienna 
to launch a self - made career as the fi rst composer who was not on 
the payroll of the nobility. He transformed Western music. Then trag-
edy hit. By the time of his Fifth Symphony, he was becoming deaf. 
How could a composer with such great promise lose his hearing? 
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Transcending this incredible limitation, Beethoven went on to 
write revolutionary symphonies, piano sonatas, and piano concertos. 
Each piece of music surpassed the last. There was only one con-
stant: that each piece of music feel transcendent. The culmination 
of all his work, the Ninth Symphony, was itself about transcendence 
and unity. Just days before my father died, he exclaimed, “ How 
could he write something so magnifi cent? ”
My father, too, transcended many potentially limiting obstacles. 
He and his two brothers were born soon after his father and his 
mother fl ed to the United States as refugees. His parents were 
deeply traumatized by having barely escaped genocide. Many of 
their close relatives were slaughtered by the Turks — some right in 
front of them. My father began his life in a household with parents 
who spoke no English and who had experienced terrible trauma, but 
this did not hold him back. 
After growing up during the Depression and serving in the U.S. 
Marine Corps in the Pacifi c during World War II, he became a 
prosecuting attorney who took two cases to the Supreme Court and 
convicted three people of murder even though the victims ’ bodies 
were never found. After serving as a judge, he retired and became a 
graduate student in art. Throughout his life he earned enough col-
lege credits for three Ph.D.s. He earned the title by which he was 
described in the front - page headline of the newspaper: “ Superstar 
Judge Dies at 81. ”
Beethoven and my father defi ed limitations; they both made 
major efforts to activate their left PFC, transcending potentially 
limiting factors and pushing forward until the very end. 
The characteristics of a resilient attitude will rewire your brain. 
If you abide by them, you ’ ll be engaged in a strong effort to attain 
your goals, keep yourself from giving up, and be open to the world 
around you along the way. 
You may say that all these concepts sound great when you have 
few limitations, but what if the changes that you need to adjust to 
include an aging body and mounting physical limitations? Does 
aging challenge the entire concept of resiliency? How can you 
bounce back if you can ’ t become younger?
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Aging Youthfully 
Ponce de Leon is remembered for his futile attempt to search for the 
fountain of youth. He was sent on a wild goose chase in an area that 
is now Florida by people from the Seminole tribe. The Seminoles 
needed a good way to get the band of Spanish conquistadors out of 
their territory. They might have known that the myth of a fountain 
of youth emerged from a common human fear that aging brings 
on bad things, including death. A fountain of youth could stop the 
negative effects of aging from happening. Perhaps they knew that no 
such fountain existed, but they did know that the Spaniards would 
think of such a fountain as more valuable than gold. 
Even though no such fountain exists, there are things you can 
do to slow down the aging process. Despite the fact that certain 
limiting changes occur in the brain with age, as I will explain, you 
can still minimize their effects and maximize the potential for neu-
roplasticity as well. 
Brain Changes in Aging 
During midlife, the brain goes through several structural changes in 
degrees, depending on how well you have taken care of your brain. 
Up until age thirty, the back of the temporal lobe increases in density; 
thereafter it decreases. This means that processing speed and remem-
bering slowly decrease after age thirty. Between the ages of twenty 
and ninety, the overall processing speed for verbal tasks declines by 
50 percent, whereas the speed for visual spatial tasks declines 
more rapidly. Language skills therefore don ’ t slow down as quickly as 
visual spatial skills do. There is also a slow decrease in the density and 
the volume of the neurons in the PFC. This means that you can be 
more focused and effi cient. 
As you age, you also go through changes in your sleep cycle: you 
wake up more and spend more time in light sleep. This problem 
is complicated by the fact that many older people spend more 
time indoors and are therefore exposed to less natural light, which 
dysregulates their circadian rhythms. Also, when older people lose 
social cues, such as eating dinner at a set time, it negatively impacts 
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the sleep cycle. These changes must be buffered by the sleep 
hygiene practices I described in chapter 6 . 
Your overall health plays a large role in how well your brain 
functions as you age. Body fat located at the waist appears to be