Well-being and resilience
Well-being and resilience
Everyone loves to feel that sense of well-being on a daily basis. Well-being, for psychology, can be defined as the subjective part of mental health, as opposed to its objective part (absence of mental disorder), accompanied by that feeling of satisfaction with life, happiness and fulfillment. But what can that kind of sensation bring us? This question can be very relative because it is something very interpersonal, which will depend on what each person considers a state of well-being. However, one thing that can apply to most people that is directly associated with personal well-being, is the ability to adapt to a wide range of situations, also called resilience. As we saw in our blog "Neuroscientific Foundations of Resilience", resilience can be defined as a process of cognitive adaptation that allows individuals to resist the adversities they face in their daily lives. In this way, the same events (or environmental changes) can have entirely different consequences for different people. A practical example of this is the life of ex-combatants in the armed forces after returning to their season homes in war zones. While some of these are able to adapt and be resilient, others have mild psychological consequences, and a large number develop post-traumatic stress disorder.
Knowing this, can resilience be trained in order to achieve personal well-being or is it an innate process? One way to check brain activity widely used by neuroscientists and psychologists is the electroencephalogram (EEG). In the study proposed by Curtis & Cicchetti, a way of measuring the resilience of children with EEG was proposed and, in addition, they found that cognitive resilience was related to mistreatment in early childhood.
In addition, as we saw in our blog "Meditation increases Well-being", meditation, for example, positively induces mental and physical health (Cognition and social interactions). Practicing regularly, meditation promotes a feeling of compassion and resilience. In addition, works carried out with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fNIRS), showed greater activity of the prefrontal cortex, an area responsible for decision making and attention, in individuals who practice meditation. The modification of activity in this through meditation can also induce a decreased chance of developing diseases such as depression.
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