10% Happier: How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help That Actually Works--A True Story

by Dan Harris

A blockbuster MRI study from Harvard found that people who took the eight-week MBSR course had thicker gray matter in the areas of the brain associated with self-awareness and compassion, while the regions associated with stress actually shrank. This study appeared to confirm the whole respond-not-react superpower. The regions where the gray matter shriveled were, evolutionarily speaking, the oldest parts of the human brain, which sit right atop the spinal column, and are home to our most basic instincts. (As one person has called it, these are the “want-it-don’t-want-it, have-sex-with-it-or-kill-it” zones.) Conversely, the areas that grew were the newer parts of the brain, the prefrontal cortices, which evolved to help us regulate our primal urges.