Rewire Your Brain: Think Your Way to a Better Life

particular emotional style, referred to as
affective style.
For example, 
people whose left frontal lobe is dominant tend to be more positive, 
take a more active role in their lives, and embrace a more “ can do ”
attitude than people whose right frontal lobe is dominant. In con-
trast, people who overactivate the right frontal lobe tend to have a 
more negative affective style. They tend toward anxiety, sadness, 
worry, passivity, and withdrawal. 
These asymmetrical emotional tendencies have been shown to 
occur early in life. Even infants who are crying or sad show greater 
right frontal lobe activity, whereas infants who display approach 
emotions, such as happiness, show more left frontal lobe activity. 
Another study found that female undergraduates who rated them-
selves as quite shy showed right frontal lobe overactivation and left 
frontal lobe underactivation. Their more socially oriented counter-
parts, in contrast, displayed left frontal lobe dominance. 
One of the key features of a positive (left frontal lobe) affective 
style is the capacity to neutralize negative emotions. The connec-
tions between the PFC and the amygdala play a signifi cant role in 
this type of affect regulation. In other words, your stress tolerance 
is based on your ability to inhibit negative emotions, including the 
fear that is generated by the amygdala. Resilience is the ability to 
maintain positive emotions in the face of adversity. 
The capacity to recover from negative emotional states is an 
important aspect of resiliency. Davidson has proposed that indi-
viduals who
practice
positive moods and well - being — for example, 
through mindfulness meditation — become more resilient. They eas-
ily bounce back to what may be regarded as the brain - based default 
mode of functioning. In one study, Davidson put a very experienced 
Tibetan meditator through a thorough electrophysiological assess-
ment and found that the activity in his left PFC was associated 
with positive moods. This man was actually six standard deviations 
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172 Rew i r e
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higher than the average Western subject in the measure. These 
studies indicate that the tendency toward resilience is a left rather 
than a right hemispheric function. 
The idea of an emotional, or affective - style, set point is consistent 
with this research on hemispheric asymmetry and resiliency. A
set 
point
is a sort of emotional gravitational force. Although you might 
experience a great tragedy, such as the loss of a loved one, or a great 
fortune, such as winning the lottery, you will eventually move back 
to your set point after a period of adjustment. 
If your set point is not as positive and calm as you want it to be, 
you ’ ll have to feed your brain by inducing increased activation of 
positive left frontal states long enough to induce a new trait. The 
difference between states and traits represents two critical steps 
in inducing neuroplasticity. A
state
is a mood, such as happiness or 
sadness. Most people fl uctuate among different states throughout 
the day, depending on what is going on in their lives. A
trait
, how-
ever, is an enduring pattern. For example, most people experience 
an anxious or depressed state from time to time, but not all people 
experience anxiety or depression as an enduring trait. 
If your affective - style set point tends to be anxious or depressed, 
you can rewire that trait by using the FEED technique (see chapters 
3 and 4 ) to activate the fundamental neuroplastic connection 
between state and trait. The more frequently you induce a par-
ticular state, such as calmness or hope, the greater is the chance 
that that state will become a trait. The more often you activate the 
neurons that represent that state, the easier it will be to induce that 
state again, and the more likely it will be that the feeling of calm-
ness or hope will become a stable trait of your affective - style set 
point.
Shifting Your Attitude 
Your attitude has a signifi cant effect on your stress level and whether 
you can shift your set point. Your attitude is your way of approach-
ing your life. To explore the range of differences in attitude, Salvator 
Maddi and Suzanne Kobasa, two research psychologists from the 
University of Chicago, identifi ed attitudinal characteristics that help 
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a person deal with stress. They studied busy and successful execu-
tives and identifi ed three characteristics they had in common: 
1.