The Practice of Groundedness: A Transformative Path to Success That Feeds--Not Crushes--Your Soul

by Brad Stulberg

Judson Brewer, a Brown University neuroscientist and author of Unwinding Anxiety, found that when we shift from worrying about and trying to control a situation to accepting and being with it, activity in the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) decreases. The PCC is a brain region associated with self-referential thinking, or getting caught up in one’s experience. The more PCC activity, the less likely we are to enter a high-performance flow state. “In a sense, if we try to control a situation (or our lives) we have to work hard at doing something to get the results we want,” Brewer writes. “In contrast, we can relax into an attitude that is more like a dance with the object, simply being with it as the situation unfolds, no striving or struggling necessary, as we get out of our own way.”