DR. JAY KUMAR

 HAPPY HOLIDAYS! As you enjoy and celebrate the exuberance and merriment of the Holiday Season, let’s face it the Holidays for many can also bring about the unwanted burden of stress and anxiety. Even the most calm, relaxed, organized, and centered of us can find it challenging to cope with all the family responsibilities, social obligations, and gift expectations of the season. We all could use a little extra help to maintain the Holiday cheer. Below are some helpful suggestions that I’ve shared over the years with my private clients and have taught to my college students as ways to experience greater joy and wellbeing in life. These proven and insightful tips from the growing fields of social neuroscience and positive psychology can help you continue that inner sense of Holiday joy and cheer in brain, body, and being! 

Do you know what the number one Holiday stressor is? According to a study by Mental Health America, the number one stressor during the Holidays is money. It probably comes as no surprise to you that with the emphasis during the Holidays on buying gifts and the pressure to get that perfect present for a loved one, an extra dimension of stress can become compounded onto your already hectic life. During the Holidays 40% of Americans feel the extra financial burden and experience greater psychological and emotional stress. It is during these tough economic times that you might be additionally burdened with lack of means to celebrate the Holidays, as you once were accustomed. For some of you, this could mean cutting back on gifts for the kids, not having the money to visit your relatives, or quite possibly spending the Holidays literally without a home. All of these factors can make us feel unworthy or ashamed for not having enough. In turn, these feelings of unworthiness, guilt, and shame when left unchecked can lead to stress, anxiety, and depression!

The key to alleviating this financial Holiday stressor is to understand that generating happiness for self and others isn’t measured by higher price tags on a present or desiring more material objects. Instead, studies in neuroscience and psychology indicate that genuine, deep, and long-lasting happiness results not from “buying more, but from being more!” While we all agree that money has its purpose, more studies reveal that true wealth is not always monetary. In fact, economists who study the economics of happiness and quality of life point that better indicators to determine happiness might actually be psychologically, spiritually, and emotionally measured by the quality of your relationships, the richness of social bonds, and your greater purpose in life.

The reason why this might be the case has to do with recent findings in the brain that happiness actually comes in two distinct forms. This concept, now being backed by neuroscience, states that your brain distinguishes between what I call short-term versus long-term happiness. We now know that different parts of the brain are responsible for short versus long-term memory. In that same manner, recent discoveries into the structure and function of the human brain advance a similar notion between short-term versus long-term happiness.

Let’s put this in context of the traditional Holiday gift giving. Think about the time you received a beautiful piece of jewelry, the latest new tech gadget, or the trendiest popular video game. The moment you receive the new gift, your brain releases an immediate rush of the pleasure neurotransmitters dopamine, serotonin, and endorphins. You probably are aware, however, that the emotional rush and immediate feeling of euphoria you feel disappears rather quickly. Receiving Holiday gifts and experiencing that temporary and fleeting sense of joy is an aspect of your brain’s short-term happiness mechanism. While I’m not advocating in any way for you not to buy gifts for your family, friends, and loved ones, doing so doesn’t appear to achieve the deeper and more permanent state of long-term happiness.

There is, however, some good news. Amazing new research into mapping happiness in the brain indicates that another important neurotransmitter, oxytocin, is what neuroscientists suggest account for us to experience gratitude, compassion, empathy, trust, nurture, and genuine happiness. These studies suggest that one of the easiest ways to experience the release of oxytocin and to generate long-term happiness is through all aspects of social bonding. Some of the simplest and cost-free ways to generate the brain to release oxytocin is through laughing, singing, hugging, loving, and smiling, which pretty much sums up what the Holidays are all about, don’t you think?

So even if financial constraints don’t allow you to buy the perfect presents for everyone on your Holiday list this year, it turns out that the best and most precious gifts that create long-term happiness don’t cost a dime! Learn more helpful tips on how to stay happy and healthy these Holidays in my article “How to Be Happy During the Happy Holidays” or hear my recent podcast on the Doug Stephan Good Day Show on “Keeping the HAPPY in Happy Holidays”

Whether you celebrate Christmas, Hannukah, or simply revel in the Holiday Spirit, a phrase to remember is that “happiness is not something that happens to you, but rather it is something you create.” I hope you enjoy integrating these tips for happiness and wellbeing into your Holiday season. 

Dr. Jay Kumar
www.drjaykumar.com
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"THE SHIFT IS ABOUT TO HIT THE FAN!" Whether you believe in the Mayan prophecy that the world will end on Dec. 21, 2012 or not, you will definitely enjoy the latest podcast with Dr. Jay Kumar on the Doug Stephan Good Day Show as we discuss the great shift in humanity's evolution. Learn what quantum mechanics, human consciousness, and your brain all have in common as humanity shifts into a new paradigm of global consciousness!  

Dr. Jay Kumar
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Happy Holidays to All!

Dr. Jay Kumar
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However you ultimately choose to mark and honor Thanksgiving and the upcoming Holidays, I invite you to remember their original significance–that is to give thanks and cultivate an attitude of gratitude for all the abundance in your life. In fact, researchers in neuropsychology, who study the intimate connection between the brain and emotions, state that gratitude is one of the easiest and healthiest ways to experience overall wellbeing in brain, body, and being. In the past few years, neuroscientists have now begun to recognize that gratitude and compassion are among the most powerful and healthiest of human emotions. Studies at Stanford University and other universities successfully demonstrate that embodying compassion and remembering to be grateful for what we have in life can greatly outweigh any sadness, stress, or challenges we might currently experience. 

The reason why expressing gratitude has such a strong effect is its ability to connect you to other people. Generally, when you express thanks you acknowledge the actions of others. Being grateful enables you momentarily to expand your thoughts away from your own individual concerns so that you remember the joy and happiness that others provide. You can learn more about the Neuroscience of Health & Happiness here. Basically, when you experience gratitude or express compassion you hit the proverbial “pause button” in your mind. You shift away from your repetitive thoughts, your worries, and anxiety and begin to focus on authentic happiness, joy, and love. From the perspective of neuroscience, the part of your brain that fires when you give thanks is the left prefrontal cortex, a region just above your left eye that brain scans appear to correlate with feelings of love, compassion, and self-worth. In addition to boosting your emotional and psychological health, cultivating an attitude of gratitude has physical benefits. As you experience greater levels of gratitude, studies show that neurotransmitters in the brain release chemicals to stave off stress, depression, and anxiety.

One of the easiest ways that I find to generate feelings of gratitude is to make a list of all that you’re grateful for in life. Your list might include your family, spouse, partner, children, pet, or possibly even your health, the beauty of nature, and the very fact of being alive. Make copies of this list and place them by your bed, on your office desk, or on the fridge, or places where they are most visible to you. Every time you look at this list, repeat out loud to yourself one thing on your list that you are grateful for in life. Not only verbalize the statement, but truly feel it! Envision that person, place, or idea in your thoughts and connect to the emotion of gratitude and joy that accompany the memory. Like with your body, neuroscience also states that your brain is also a muscle that can be trained and developed. As you cultivate greater gratitude for what you have in life, you automatically experience a healthy attitude toward life!

As you enjoy and commemorate this Thanksgiving always remember all that you have to be grateful. Never forget that the greatest gift is actually your presence in the world. In the beautiful and timely worrds of Melody Beattie: "Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow.”

Keep on Living Your Light® as you enjoy Thanksgiving in gratitude, abundance, joy, and wellbeing.

Dr. Jay Kumar
www.drjaykumar.com
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Curious to know how your brain, thoughts, and emotions all play out in the Voting Booth and in life? Discover the fascinating way our emotional brains and unconscious mind bias our political decisions and reinforce our actions in every day life. Catch the full podcast with Dr. Jay Kumar on the most recent Doug Stephan Good Day Show.

Happy Voting!

Dr. Jay Kumar
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The Political Brain Is an Emotional Brain: 

Recent developments in brain imaging scans indicate that it is your emotional brain, and not your rational brain, that ultimately makes decisions on whom you marry, what brand of cereal you buy, the movies you see, and even the final choices you make in the voting booth. Anyone who keeps up with the news can tell you that politics, like religion, is an emotional trigger that greatly affects human behavior and decisions. The long-held view by neuroscientists and psychologists that your brain is largely a cool, rational, dispassionate thinking machine is no longer true. In fact, the human brain has more in common with those of our animal cousins when it comes to how we arrive at important decisions. Studies consistently show that human emotions and our primal instincts play more of a role in deciding who our next president is than the facts and figures of policy issues, political maps, or polling data. It is exactly this reason why candidates spend inordinate amounts of money on TV ads, in billboards, and through social media – they all are affective strategies that tap into your base emotional centers of the brain and influence how you will vote! 

When it comes to politics and how people vote, whenever you pit the thinking rational brain against the intuitive, emotional brain, the latter invariably wins. Despite our human superiority in logic, reasoning, mathematics, and science, when it comes down to the final decision in the voting booth, your deeper emotions and primal passions ultimately win out. When you look at all the political ads, debates, and campaign speeches made by the candidates, it’s their innate ability to connect to the emotions of the electorate that ultimately wins the vote. This concept of the political brain as the emotional voting brain is now being substantiated by a growing number of neuroscientists and psychologists.  

In the ground-breaking book The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation, the author Drew Westen argues that there are three things that ultimately win over voters: emotions toward a particular party and its platform, feelings toward a particular candidate, and emotional reactions toward a candidate’s policy positions. The reason why your emotions play such a crucial role in political elections is due to a concept known as the unconscious confirmation bias. Basically put, when your brain has made an opinion or already reached an unconscious decision, it will then employ the rational brain to gather selective facts and figures as evidence to support your decisions and validate your beliefs. 

This aspect of the human brain reveals exactly why liberals and conservatives hold such strong and divergent beliefs on the same political topics such as abortion, gun control, taxation, health care, and marriage equality. No matter how many hard facts and figures candidates use to convince a person otherwise, once a predetermined opinion is grounded in your unconscious emotional brain, will it rarely be swayed by dispassionate logic or rational argument. As a result, this reason accounts for why both liberals and conservatives become equally convinced that existing evidence validates their fundamental respective views. This unconscious confirmation bias explains that even when presented with an overwhelming body of contrary evidence, our subliminal brain will always biasly pick and choose evidence that substantiates and confirms our original beliefs while discarding or reinterpreting the facts that threaten these opinions. It is why the human brain is always biased toward our emotions and deeper passions when it comes to whom and how we vote. (Full article in Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience Vol. 18, No. 11, pp. 1947-1958 

Logos versus Pathos in the Brain: 

With the recent breakthroughs in brain scans and neural imaging, we now have a clearer window that identifies where exactly in the brain we make our decisions and how we ultimately vote. The human brain, like the human psyche, has both a rational and empirical logos area and a subjective and emotional pathos part, which are often in conflict. In Westen’s study, a number of partisan test subjects, each affiliated with one particular political party, were shown videos of political candidates from the opposing party expressing a contrary argument for a specific policy position. The brain scans of these volunteers showed something completely novel and fascinating. When people were exposed to images of candidates, whom they disliked, presenting clear and objective facts on a certain policy point, the area of the brain associated with logical and rational decision making (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex) was relatively inactive and quiet. The areas of the brain connected to our emotions (orbital frontal cortex), conflict resolution (anterior cingulate), and our pleasure-reward system (ventral striatum) were all highly active when test subjects were reacting to the policy facts and figures presented by the opposing candidate.

The research concluded that the brains of people watching political videos showed no increased activity in the rational and logical areas connected with processing facts and figures or asscociated with empirical reasoning. Rather, the parts of the brain that appeared to be the most active during the experiment were the areas connected with primal emotional responses, conflict resolution, and in the rewarding of selective behavior. It argues the point exactly how the unconscious confirmation bias actually occurs in our brain and in our decision making. When already having made a firm decision, your brain will take the facts and figures to either validate that belief or twist and manipulate the data to support your existing opinion, a process that takes place not in your rational and empirical logos brain, but exclusively in your subliminal emotional pathos brain. It is this neurological process that manfests in the political arena and accounts for why political candidates have a greater success of victory when speaking to the unconscious, emotional brain of a potential voter. 

The Liberal versus Conservative Brain:

Medical research into the brain also reveals another startling piece of information – the brains of liberals and conservatives are actually different! While the subtle dissimilarities between the brains of males and females appear to perpetuate the battle of the sexes, neuroscience now similarly shows that the reason the political parties, like the sexes, always disagree might have a basis in neurology! While it’s not the intention to perpetuate stereotypes and to say that every liberal or conservative thinks the exact same way, more evidence points that there exist distinct correlations with brain and neural processing between the two political parties. Let’s explore just how exactly the brains of liberals and conservatives function differently.

The various studies measured specific involuntary responses in the nervous system, such as eye movement toward disturbing images and physical reaction to loud noises, in order to map their corresponding neurological activity in different parts of the brain. While the findings might be either controversial or comforting to those in both political parties, repeated studies point to an astounding conclusion. In the numerous experiments conducted, liberals appear to have more activity happening in the anterior cingulate cortex, the area in the brain associated with the ability to experience greater resilience to fear and tolerance to the unknown. On the other hand, the brains of conservatives when mapped were shown to have more activity in the right amygdala, the area responsible for greater sensitivity to change and reactivty to uncertainty. This difference in brain activity shows up not in only in how liberals and conservatives communicate and think differently, but also in how their brains are actually programmed to see the world differently!

Duke University psychiatrist Gregg Appelbaum explains the remarkable findings in a different way saying  “the studies point toward conservatives’ tendency to avoid something called self-harm, while liberals avoid collective group harm.” While it’s not fair to stereotype all conservatives and liberals into either general category, the findings concur that there exists a general correlation between brain activity and political opinions, which ultimately determines how we vote. Basically, when exposed to images that illicit fear and uncertainty, if you tend to be a liberal the emotional part of your brain, responsible for feeling greater tolerance, will generally have a stronger capacity to cope with sudden changes in your environment. If you’re a conservative, the same images will trigger activity in the emotional brain associated with the greater need to experience precaution and judicious behavior when confronted with the unknown. As might be clear, both qualities of adaptability and precaution are vital tools for our human survival. In essence, the conclusions are not trying to state that being a liberal or a conservative is better than the other. The findings, however, observe that the brain behaviors of liberals and conservatives offer a profound neurological explanation exactly why the two parties have such a hard time seeing eye to eye.

According to Westen and similar research conducted by other neuroscientists, neuroscience won’t be able to predict one hundred percent of the time how a person will vote. The studies, however, can remarkably indicate within an 80-85% likelihood if a person will tend to have conservative or liberal leanings, based entirely on the different emotional regions in the brain that fire when exposed to certain policy issues. So basically, politics all comes down to emotions! How a person will make his or her decision when voting has more to do with how the right emotions will unconsciously confirm a person’s predetermined beliefs about a candidate or a critical piece of policy. According to what all the neuroscience studies attest, our rational, thinking brain tends to take the back seat in the voting booth. The research can be nicely summarized in a point I’d like to say is true: “Ultimately, the success of a politician isn’t in moving to the left or to the right but moving the hearts and emotional brains of the electorate.” Dr. Jay Kumar. 

HAPPY VOTING!

Dr. Jay Kumar
www.drjaykumar.com
Facebook – Dr. Jay Kumar
Twitter - docjaykumar 

Dr. Jay Kumar
www.drjaykumar.com
Facebook – Dr. Jay Kumar
Twitter - docjaykumar

Neuroscience and global contemplative traditions both affirm the powerful health benefits of being present and living in the fullness of the here and now. Learn how you can experience greater joy, genuine happiness, and a positive outlook on life by "Being the NOW, Living in the WOW!" Learn more in the latest podcast with Dr. Jay Kumar on the Doug Stephan Good Day Show. 

Dr. Jay Kumar
www.drjaykumar.com
Facebook – Dr. Jay Kumar
Twitter - docjaykumar