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NEW ON THE BEING WELL PODCAST:
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How to Become a Disciplined Person
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"More and more I think about discipline as frictionless contentment: increasingly not having friction between you and the world. If there's a task to do, relax the friction and resistance to it, then surrender — with a sense of feeling already full along the way."
– Dr. Rick Hanson
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Accomplishing something usually takes a combination of motivation and consistency – in other words, discipline. Discipline is both essential and shockingly hard to develop. In this episode, Forrest and Dr. Rick explore how to become a more disciplined person. They talk about whether discipline came naturally to Rick, and the lessons we can learn from his journey with discipline. Key topics include how to make even frustrating tasks rewarding, the relationship between discipline and self-concept, how to identify key wants, needs, and aspirations, and learning to feel good when we do good.
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Watch/Listen to the Full Episode
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ALSO NEW ON THE BEING WELL PODCAST:
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Depression and Self-Care, Accepting Love, and Building Stronger Relationships: July Mailbag
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Dr. Rick and Forrest open the mailbag and answer questions focused on strengthening our relationships. They explore how we can support friends and loved ones who are experiencing depression while also caring for ourselves, managing different levels of capacity within a relationship, maintaining self-worth and trust in the context of body image insecurities, and navigating the often tricky dynamics of a partner’s relationship with their ex.
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Watch/Listen to the Full Episode
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ASK RICK:
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What happens with mindful eating?
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Mindful eating would naturally down-regulate stress activation plus increase experiences of fulfillment and satiation that would reduce craving and thus suffering – of course via the various neural substrates of these mental processes.
The primary identified neural correlate of mindfulness – defined as sustained attention to something, typically with a meta-cognitive element of awareness of awareness (i.e., the Pali term for mindfulness, sati, has its root meaning in “recollectedness”) – is activation of the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and related PFC executive control circuits that manage the deliberate control of attention.
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"The term mindfulness sometimes is reduced to choiceless awareness, which is a common but serious error."
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Choiceless awareness is simply a stance toward the stream of consciousness, and one can be mindful of both that stream and the stance much as one could be mindful of one’s golf swing, the flicker of expressions on the face of one’s partner, or what happens in the mind when one eats slowly and with focused attention. When mindful attention is applied to eating, it’s very plausible that the insula would be activated, which handles interoception.
Mindful eating would plausibly affect the body by:
- Down-regulating sympathetic nervous system and hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis activation, along with their related stress hormones; get benefits of less allostatic load
- Up-regulate parasympathetic activation; benefits of relaxation
- Strengthen ACC and related PFC circuits; benefits of improved attentional control and executive functions
- Strengthen insula; benefits of improved self-awareness and empathy for emotions of others (insula does both)
- Increase signaling to hypothalamus of visceral rewards received; benefits of reducing wanting and craving
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UPCOMING POLITICAL EVENT
(Feel free to skip past this section if it doesn't interest you)
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Save Our Democracy
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This is an online program on July 13 with Senator Cory Booker, Tara Brach, Konda Mason, Jon Kabat-Zinn, and others in support of voter turnout in three key swing states this November. I hope you will join me in attending this program, and telling people about it. It’s free, it’s inspiring, and it’s aimed at protecting our fragile democracy.
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Check It Out
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RICK'S PICKS:
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Hearing Clearly for the First Time
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Aric Hoffmann, a 28-year-old man based in Los Angeles, recently received a cochlear implant, allowing him to hear clearly for the first time since contracting meningitis as a baby. Watch his touching reaction here.
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MindFull of Good is a free newsletter that highlights new and free content from Dr. Rick Hanson and the Being Well Podcast as well as other free offerings to fill yourself up with good.
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