Top Highlights

• In essence, worrying is thinking about a potential problem, and anxiety is feeling it.
• check it off when you complete it. Planning activates the prefrontal cortex, and checking it off the list releases dopamine. Win-win. On the other hand, the exercise group had a different brain response to looking at cigarettes. Remember the two groups were exactly the same except for a ten-minute period of exercise. And yet after biking, the exerc...
• We now know that what you do with your mind—how you focus your attention, intentionally shape your thoughts, and purposefully calm your emotions—can directly change your brain. That’s the key to neuroplasticity—how our experiences, including what we do with our minds, actually change the activity and even the lifelong remodeling of our brains.
• in his brain. Just fifteen minutes of biking is sufficient to increase activity in circuits responsible for emotional control and to raise levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin.2
• In a hospital in Pittsburgh, as patients recover from spinal surgery, doctors measure the amount of sunlight in each room. They find that the patients moved to sunny rooms suddenly have a higher tolerance for pain and need less medication.