In short
Neuroplasticity and how caregivers can promote children’s flourishing through relationships, emotional regulation, and a daily mindfulness practice.
Guests
Dr. Elisa Pressman (host; psychologist/author, “Raising Good Humans”); Professor Richard Davidson (neuroscientist and psychologist; researcher on flourishing and brain change; author of Born to Flourish; co-developer of the Healthy Minds program app).
Key claims
Neuroplasticity happens unwittingly but can be directed intentionally. Sensitive periods include around birth, ages 5–7 (school onset), and adolescence. Prenatal maternal emotional balance (especially second trimester) is associated with infant brain development. Caregiver flourishing is “contagious” via social learning; caregiver reactivity can increase infant stress physiology (e.g., cortisol) and reinforce reactivity. Flourishing skills: awareness, connection, insight (changing relationship to negative self-narratives), and purpose. A five-minutes-a-day protocol, done daily for weeks, produces measurable flourishing changes and brain effects; benefits are larger for people starting more distressed.
Notable examples/tools
outward-facing infant lap meditation/sending love; reframing “I’m sad/anxious” for school-age kids; digital hygiene for adolescents; 10-minute nature walks affecting brain activity; Healthy Minds app; “five minutes like brushing teeth.”
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOUnderstanding Neuroplasticity
1:19 to 2:47
Discussion on the concept of neuroplasticity and its implications for personal responsibility in brain development.
“So I want to start with neuroplasticity.”
The Infant Brain and Early Influences
2:47 to 4:56
Exploring how prenatal and early childhood experiences shape brain development.
“Well, I'm a neuroscientist and a psychologist by training, and so I have really grown up during the time that neuroplasticity was discovered.”
Sensitive Periods of Brain Plasticity
4:56 to 7:30
Examining critical periods in brain development and how they affect learning.
“How are we influencing that little brain?”
The Role of Emotional Style in Development
7:30 to 10:12
Discussing the importance of a caregiver's emotional style and its impact on the infant's growth.
“So we're going to start with nurturing early in life, and then we'll get to the later brains.”
Cultivating Skills of Flourishing
10:12 to 14:00
Identifying skills necessary for human flourishing and their relevance for parents.
“The most important thing we can do for our developing offspring is to embody these qualities ourselves.”
The Four Skills of Human Flourishing
14:00 to 19:46
Discover four essential skills for human flourishing and well-being.
“Okay, so what are these flourishing skills?”
Parenting Tools for Negative Beliefs
21:06 to 28:00
Learn strategies to help children deal with negative beliefs and emotions.
“So I want to take the example that you used of a negative belief system, and I want to think about it.”
Digital Hygiene and Its Importance
28:00 to 31:26
Learn how modeling digital hygiene can benefit kids' mental well-being.
“One way to say this is to develop better digital hygiene.”
Cultivating Flourishing in Adolescents
31:26 to 34:07
Discover essential practices parents can adopt to nurture their children's flourishing.
“One of the things that I often remind people is I'm sure every viewer of this podcast spends a few minutes every day brushing their teeth.”
Cultivating Flourishing in Adolescents
35:09 to 36:38
Discover essential practices parents can adopt to nurture their children's flourishing.
“The New York Times Wirecutter has named it as one of the three best meditation apps for several years in a row.”
Show all 13 chapters
Understanding Brain Plasticity
37:40 to 42:01
Explore how brain plasticity impacts individuals differently and its implications for mental health.
“yes you know we often have people tell us what's the shortest amount of time that you think you can make a commitment to do this every day uh that's what's really important you know if on some days you can do it longer.”
The Impact of Neuroplasticity on Flourishing
42:01 to 43:50
Learn how neuroplasticity interacts with environment to influence well-being.
“And that's also very hopeful news, because it means that, you know, this is something that is really useful for people that are showing this kind of more active suffering.”
Mindfulness as a Parenting Tool
43:50 to 45:08
Explore the benefits of mindfulness practices for parents and children.
“I mean, there are things that are more easily within our control, things that are less easily within our control.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:04Dr. Richard Davidson:You've probably all heard the term neuroplasticity and yet it's kind of hard to actually understand how you can influence the actual plasticity of the brain in your everyday life. And so I have the guy, the brilliant Professor Richard Davidson, giving us those kind of nuggets that really help you translate science from page to stage. And I just love those. He's talking about the relationships we have with our infants, what happens when you have negative beliefs, and how we can help shift those negative beliefs in ourselves, in our children, in our adolescence. And the most important nugget is a five-minute-a-day protocol.
0:59Dr. Richard Davidson:If you do it every single day, it actually changes your brain. five minutes a day, even the busiest of us can do. So I love when research is actually able to be applied to our real lives. I'm Dr. Elisa Pressman, and this is Raising Good Humans podcast.
1:24Okay.
1:25Dr. Richard Davidson:So I want to start with neuroplasticity. What is it? What is it really?
1:30Dawn Huebner:Neuroplasticity is the brain's capacity to change in response to experience and in response to training. And one of the things I often say is that neuroplasticity happens wittingly or unwittingly. Well, most of the time neuroplasticity happens unwittingly. Most of the time we are not actually aware of how our brains are being literally sculpted, shaped, and hijacked, if you will, by all the forces around us. And the invitation in our work and in this new book, Born to Flourish, is simply that we can take more responsibility for our own neuroplasticity, for our own brain, and direct the brain in healthy directions, as opposed to allowing it to be just randomly influenced willy-nilly by the forces around us.
2:37Okay, so before we get into how to do that, which we definitely will, can you help us understand how you came to understand neuroplasticity? Sure.
2:48Dawn Huebner:Well, I'm a neuroscientist and a psychologist by training, and so I have really grown up during the time that neuroplasticity was discovered. We can say really that that is one of the key insights of modern neuroscience and particularly discovering the different mechanisms of neuroplasticity. And in my own work, neuroplasticity became a very central concept because we were interested in strategies that can promote human flourishing, strategies that lead to personal transformation. and if they are changing how we experience the world, how we behave in the world, then they have to also be changing the brain.
3:45Dawn Huebner:And so that led us to consider the underlying mechanisms of neuroplasticity and how these simple mental strategies, we can think of them as mental exercises are literally changing the brain, not just the function of the brain, but literally the wiring of the brain. Okay.
4:09Dr. Richard Davidson:So I want to do this kind of with a developmental lens and start with the caveat that you can't really separate infant and caregiver, but let's say you could. Can we talk about the infant, like the most plastic time for the brain, and then we could go from there, but just those first couple of years. And also I know, you know, we will address, I hope that the brain remains plastic if it does and how, but I really want to start with infancy because we don't really, I mean, you probably do, but, but generally speaking, the infant brain in those first couple of years. How are we influencing that little brain?
5:00Yeah.
5:00Dawn Huebner:Well, first, I love taking a developmental lens. And you talked about starting in infancy. We actually need to start before infancy.
5:11Dr. Richard Davidson:Ah, great. You're even better.
5:13Dawn Huebner:Because there's very good evidence, including some of our own work, showing that there are influences that are prenatal that begin to shape the function and structure of the brain. And a mother's demeanor, her emotional balance during pregnancy is a significant influence on early infant brain development. And so we've actually done empirical studies looking at the relationship between mothers' experience during pregnancy and infant brain outcomes. We put the babies in the scanner and scan them over the course of the first two years of life. And we see very strong associations between the mother's emotional style and emotional balance during that period, particularly the second trimester of pregnancy and subsequent brain development.
6:22Dawn Huebner:But let me just say that there are really three major periods that we call sensitive periods that have been very well documented. The first is around birth, but that would include the prenatal influences. The second is at the onset of schooling between the ages of five and seven. And the third is around adolescence. Those are three sensitive periods of development where we know that the brain is especially plastic. It's especially sensitive to plasticity during those periods. But as you said in your introduction to this segment, plasticity happens throughout life. And there is really good evidence for that now, unequivocal evidence.
7:14Dawn Huebner:and so we know that plasticity doesn't stop. It is enhanced during these early developmental periods, but it doesn't mean that an adult cannot learn these new skills. They can. It's just easier to do if we do it earlier in life, just like it's easier to learn a second language or easier to learn to play a musical instrument, it's easier to nurture qualities like kindness and compassion and pro-social behavior if they are nurtured early in life.
7:50Dr. Richard Davidson:So we're going to start with nurturing early in life, and then we'll get to the later brains. And I also just want to check in because you mentioned emotional style. And so I want to start with just explaining emotional style And so what can we do thinking about emotional style, even the maternal emotional style, and then during infancy to help support that plastic, delicious, growing brain?
8:22Dawn Huebner:So first, emotional style is simply consistent ways of responding to emotional information. And in a previous book of mine, The Emotional Life of Your Brain, I delineated different kinds of emotional styles that we've gleaned from modern neuroscientific research. It would take us far afield to really describe in detail those emotional styles. But for the present conversation, it's simply important to know that how we respond to emotional information in our environments is not something that's fixed. we can modify that. We can learn to become more emotionally balanced, to become more resilient by nurturing these simple skills of flourishing.
9:20Dawn Huebner:And really the best way to support the developing infant is for caregivers around the infant to embody these qualities of flourishing. One of the things that we know, which is super important for this conversation, that we and others have discovered is that flourishing is contagious. And if the caregivers are flourishing, you can be very sure that the infant will osmotically absorb those skills and will learn those skills through social learning mechanisms and does not need to be taught those skills explicitly. The most important thing we can do for our developing offspring is to embody these qualities ourselves.
10:23Dr. Richard Davidson:So when you said flourishing is contagious, first, I just want to thank you because we spent a lot of time talking about the more challenging, you know, like anxiety is contagious or, you know, generally speaking, your nervous system is a bit contagious. But I don't know that anybody has emphasized that flourishing is contagious. So I really appreciate that framing.
10:49Dawn Huebner:Yeah. So just on that point, people, there's a lot of work that I'm sure you're well aware of on the intergenerational transmission of trauma. And that's true. And there is very good scientific evidence for that. But if that is true, there also needs to be the intergenerational transmission of resilience, the intergenerational transmission of flourishing, because they operate through the same basic mechanism.
11:17Dr. Richard Davidson:So this is like a tiny little departure question. And if it's too much, we can drop it if I'm throwing this out there. But if you came into this world with a particular emotional style, and so you have a harder time learning some of these, like it's not as natural to your particular way to embody some of the things you're talking about. And of course, now we're talking about infants, so it may sound silly, but anybody who's had more than one kid probably knows that maybe one seemed like they had an easier time in the world right away than another one.
12:00Dawn Huebner:It's for me as a parent, yes. I have one more challenging one. Yeah.
12:07Dr. Richard Davidson:So let's say that you're, and in fact, you might even think that this conversation is even more important for the ones for whom you really want to take advantage of the plasticity of the brain. If you have an infant who's struggling more, you have just like kind of a harder kid, what are some of the tools that the parents can embody to be able to lend that flourishing to this infant?
12:36Dawn Huebner:Yeah, I mean, that's a critically important and practical question. And I don't, you know, I don't really think there are any magic bullets. I think that the more skilled the parent is in cultivating basic qualities of flourishing and is resilient in the face of adversity, then that will be helpful to the infant who is experiencing more challenges. Because it's often the case that when an infant is experiencing more challenges, that sets off a parent and increases their level of stress and anxiety. And they become more reactive, which further exacerbates whatever challenge or difficulty the infant is having.
13:28Dawn Huebner:And so it becomes a really negative spiral. And so, you know, there's, I can't emphasize enough the importance of cultivating these skills of flourishing for optimal parenthood and optimal child development.
13:48Dr. Richard Davidson:I mean, it's certainly a good add for taking care of yourself. It benefits so much the babies that we're okay.
13:58Dawn Huebner:Absolutely. Yes.
14:00Dr. Richard Davidson:Okay, so what are these flourishing skills?
14:04Dawn Huebner:So in our book, Born to Flourish, we survey four skills that we have studied extensively that are the key necessary ingredients for human flourishing. And these come from both the neuroscientific literature as well as another body of work that we draw upon importantly is from the contemplative traditions, particularly the Asian contemplative traditions, which have not received that much attention in the West, but who have really developed strategies for cultivating flourishing in their own cultural context. So the four skills are these. The first we call awareness. And awareness is about being present.
15:01Dawn Huebner:It's about showing up fully in an undistracted way. It also includes the skills of self-awareness, being aware of yourself and what psychologists and neuroscientists call meta awareness and meta awareness is the capacity to know what your mind is doing and now some viewers may sound may find that sound strange don't we always know what our mind is doing but i'm sure many viewers have had the experience of um of this reading a book where they might be reading each word on a page and they're reading and going along from one page to the next. And after a few minutes, they realize they have no idea.
15:46Dawn Huebner:Haven't heard it. Yeah. And that's an example of not knowing what your mind is doing. But the moment you recognize it, it's a moment of awakening. That's meta-awareness and that can be trained. And it's very important because we know that any form of human transformation requires meta-awareness. You can't transform your mind unless you know what's going on in your mind, how your mind is working. So that's awareness. The second pillar is connection. Connection is about being connected to others and to your sense of place. It includes skills that are important for healthy social relationships, skills like appreciation and gratitude and kindness and compassion and love.
16:39Dawn Huebner:And all of them can be nurtured and all of them are essential for well-being. The third skill is one that is less commonly identified in the West, and we call it insight. And it's insight into the narrative that we all carry around in our mind. We all have a narrative about who we are. It's a set of beliefs and expectations of ourselves. And we know that there are some people who have very negative beliefs about themselves with low expectations of themselves. They're on sort of one end of a continuum. And we know that that is a prescription for depression. But what's really important for well-being is not so much to change the narrative, but it's to change our relationship to this narrative so that we see the narrative for what it is.
17:36Dawn Huebner:What the narrative is, is a set of beliefs and expectations that literally filter how we perceive the world. And having that understanding really helps us gain some distance so we're not totally fused with our beliefs and expectations, but we can see that there are other ways of seeing the world that may also be valuable. It's key to empathy, for example. And finally, the last pillar of flourishing is purpose. And purpose is about identifying kind of our true north in life, connecting our values and meaning to our activities of daily living. So purpose here is not so much about finding something more grand and purposeful to do with your life, but how can you find meaning and purpose in even the most pedestrian activities of daily living?
18:36Dawn Huebner:Can taking out the garbage be directly connected to your sense of purpose? And of course it could be. Everything could be. It just requires a little bit of reframing, and that's a learnable skill. And when you learn each of these four pillars of well-being, you will be flourishing. And it actually is not that hard. It's easier than you think.
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21:17Dawn Huebner:Well, there's a lot of things that can be communicated non-verbally and osmotically to infants and young toddlers. So, for example, if a parent is very reactive, and let's say that the parent has some challenge, it may be with their spouse, it may be a work-related challenge, and they are worrying about it or they're anxious about it, that anxiety is something that the babies will experience. one way or another. So, you know, I'm sure that every parent watching this podcast, you know, their conscious intention is to do only good things for their children. And, you know, of course, that's what we all wish.
22:15Dawn Huebner:But unfortunately, there's a lot of stuff that gets communicated that is under the hood, so to speak. In fact, I would say most of our emotional life is communicated in that way, not particularly to infants, because they don't understand what you're talking about. So for young infants, it's all nonverbal. And so if the parent is showing a kind of perseverative reaction where they're not recovering quickly and they're anxious, the infant's going to feel that. The infant's going to feel that in their body, and they're going to learn to be unnecessarily reactive. It's going to upregulate their autonomic nervous system.
23:03Dawn Huebner:It's going to increase their cortisol output, which is a stress hormone. And it's going to have all these deleterious consequences that, of course, the parent wishes that it's not happening, but it's all happening just through the course of parent-child interaction. Okay.
Read the full transcript
23:24Dr. Richard Davidson:So just to like relieve some parents, can you give us a couple tools for the parents who are experiencing that right now that can sort of give space between that reaction?
23:38Dawn Huebner:This was advice given at a meditation retreat by a Tibetan lama who happens to be, you know, he's not a monk. He's married and has two children. and he said the best way to work with your infant is take the baby, put them on your lap, have them face outward so that they can explore the world and just sit there. You can meditate or just, you don't even have to consciously meditate, but just be relaxed and send love to the baby. And the baby will feel the love, will feel secure, and also be able to explore at the same time that they're feeling this security from the parent. And so that's a simple thing.
24:33Dawn Huebner:Yeah.
24:34Dr. Richard Davidson:Delighting in your baby and sending out that love and letting them sit and look outward is very concrete. And anytime you can just sort of, you talked about being present, but just reminding yourself like, I've got this baby right here. It's even just thinking about it right now is making me smile because I'm thinking back to when I had my babies. So now just thinking just about the school, like early school age, four or five, six, if you're noticing that I'm just keeping with the theme of negative beliefs, just for a concrete way to look at this. You have a little one who's already articulating negative beliefs.
25:16Dr. Richard Davidson:What are some of the tools that we can use to help support? Yeah.
25:21Dawn Huebner:You know, I think that this is the beginning of an age where a child can begin to understand that they have thoughts and to help a child appreciate that if they have some negative belief about themselves, that that's simply a thought. It's not necessarily who they are. And so being able to make that distinction. And, you know, a child may say that they're sad at, say, six years old or that they're worried about something. And they can use a phrase like, I'm sad or I'm anxious. And, you know, Karen can explore when you say that, does that mean that all of you is sad? Can you touch a part of your body that's not sad and really connect with whatever part that may not be sad?
26:20Dawn Huebner:Because it's usually not everything that's sad, right? There's some part of you that is not. And so that helps to loosen the grip that this excessive over-identification has.
26:36Dr. Richard Davidson:And how great if you're starting that early so that that little one maybe turns into an adolescent who knows they're feeling a particular way in that moment, but that doesn't mean that that is their whole being.
26:49Dawn Huebner:Yes, exactly. And another thing that's helpful here is to help to instill a kind of curiosity about how the mind works, that it's not something fixed. It's very fluid. And having an attitude of curiosity to really investigate how things are working. And that helps to loosen things up. Okay.
27:18Dr. Richard Davidson:So that was a really good tool, just even in shifting the language and getting curious. And so now we're deeper into school age, almost at the transition of adolescence. What are you seeing and what is one tool that can support flourishing?
27:34Dawn Huebner:Yeah. So, you know, with adolescence, it's a very challenging age and there are a lot of things that we can do. I mean, I would be irresponsible if I didn't mention the documented deleterious impact of social media on our adolescents' mental health. And so, you know, I do think that working with your kids and helping them to regulate, to really be better. One way to say this is to develop better digital hygiene. And the best way to teach our kids digital hygiene is to have good digital hygiene ourselves. to walk the talk. There was a recent study that reported that the average American adult opens their phone 152 times a day.
28:36Dawn Huebner:I think most viewers would agree that that is unnecessary. And if you can model being more present for your kids, where you're not on your phone all the time, you really put it away, that will be enormously beneficial. So, you know, that's something really concrete that I think is imperative that we need to do with adolescents in particular.
29:04Dr. Richard Davidson:And so if you have a young person who is prone to negative beliefs, this would be even more amplified by that technology, right? So what can we do? It's hard because the kids who probably are going to have the worst impact from exposure are the ones more likely to sort of deep dive into social media.
29:30Dawn Huebner:Yeah, it's very challenging. And my own view is that education and digital hygiene needs to start earlier. It really should be part of our educational curricula as well as something modeled by parents. But, you know, in terms of other components of flourishing, there are lots of things that we could do with teenagers. One is to simply increase the likelihood that they have positive experiences in nature. We know that being outside, being around nature is actually incredibly good for the brain. You know, studies show that if you have people walk for 10 minutes in green space versus walk for 10 minutes on city streets and then put them in the scanner, their brains look totally different.
30:26Dawn Huebner:And so this is something we can encourage our adolescents to do, to spend a certain amount of time outside and appreciating nature. Okay.
30:40Dr. Richard Davidson:I just actually watched my daughter, my youngest daughter, who's 16, yesterday and the day before, because it started to be lighter outside. she was like, I'm going to take the dog for a quick walk down the street both days at the same, you know, evening time. And it's like a 10 minute walk. And I swear, I was thinking, God, sometimes research really is cool. Like I saw a complete transformation of her mood. And I was like, every once in a while, you have those moments where you're like, the real world and research aligns so beautifully and in a positive way. And it just made me so happy. And she was able to notice it.
31:24Dr. Richard Davidson:I didn't have to say a word.
31:26Dawn Huebner:Yeah, that's beautiful. I love that.
31:28Dr. Richard Davidson:Okay. So now onto this other, the fourth period of brain growth, the transition to parenthood seems like increasingly we're finding out it's certainly not like at the level of infancy or adolescence, but it does seem to have the right opportunity for the vulnerability and growth, because I imagine many parents have a lot of incentive to support their development in a way that didn't matter as much to them before. So since there's so much at stake, and I think you've alluded to this, but given those four buckets of flourishing, what would you want a busy, overwhelmed parent to absolutely unequivocally commit to in this sort of season of life?
32:22Dawn Huebner:Yeah, it's a great question. One of the things that I often remind people is I'm sure every viewer of this podcast spends a few minutes every day brushing their teeth. Mm-hmm.
32:36Dr. Richard Davidson:Hope so.
32:39Dawn Huebner:When humans first evolved on this planet, none of us were brushing our teeth. And it's something we've learned to do because we think it's important for our personal physical hygiene. And we know it's important for our personal physical hygiene. And what we're talking about here, I think most of your viewers would probably agree is probably more important than your teeth. And yet we don't treat it with the same respect. And so if we took even as short a time each day as we spend brushing our teeth, nourishing our mind and our heart, this world would be a different place. That's really what it would take.
33:18Dawn Huebner:Our data, hard-nosed randomized controlled trials show that five minutes a day, if you do it consistently for four weeks, is enough to produce measurable changes in hard -nosed metrics of human flourishing, including biological metrics. And so you ask what a parent should commit to, and what a parent should commit to is five minutes a day to really nurture these critical skills of flourishing because flourishing is contagious. And so when they nurture their own flourishing, it will have outsized effects on their kids. And it's really every parent's responsibility to do that. And the cool thing is that you can do this in a way that is piggybacked onto activities of daily living.
34:17Dawn Huebner:So for the busy, even crazy busy parent who says that she or he has no time for anything else, you can do this while you're commuting. You can do this while you are doing physical exercise. You can do this while you're brushing your teeth. you just need to intentionally use your mind during those periods rather than allowing your mind to be hijacked willy-nilly by the forces around you and so it simply requires a reminder and we have an app that we've produced called the healthy minds program it's produced by a nonprofit organization that I founded that's called Human, H-U-M-I-N. And it's freely available.
35:06Dawn Huebner:And it's totally free. The New York Times Wirecutter has named it as one of the three best meditation apps for several years in a row. And it teaches all four of these skills of flourishing. And I would encourage people, if they're interested, to try this. There's really no downside. I mean, you don't need the app to do it. You can do it on your own, but it often helps to have a reminder. Love that. And yes, there are changes in the brain that we've observed with just five minutes a day, but the key is doing it every day.
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36:49Dawn Huebner:And now for a quick break so I can tell you about Great Wolf Lodge.
36:53Dr. Richard Davidson:Are you trying to think of a fun weekend with the family? Do you want to find a place that has everything under one roof and a room that has a little room where everybody can hang out in and then a bunk room for the kids and a room for you? Because that's what Great Wolf Lodge has. So you can have a great time and unforgettable memory with the kids go down gazillions of water slides they have very cool things like the magic quest a live action game kids can play throughout the lodge to the northern lights arcade they have so much fun dance parties at night tons of restaurants everything is easy you just need to pack and get in the car learn more at greatwolf.com and strengthen the pack you'd rather five minutes a day every day than you know intermittent lengthy commitments
37:49Dawn Huebner:yes you know we often have people tell us what's the shortest amount of time that you think you can make a commitment to do this every day uh that's what's really important you know if on some days you can do it longer. That's great. And if you want to, wonderful.
38:07Dr. Richard Davidson:Are there some brains, without being too deterministic, are there some brains that are just a little bit more stubborn than others?
38:19Dawn Huebner:Yeah, I think putting it that way, first of all, I appreciate how you put it. And yeah, I would say that some brains are going to be less flexible than other brains. But that's different than someone saying, are there some brains which can't be changed? That's very different. And to someone who says that there's some brains that can't be changed, or there's some people that have certain characteristics that are irrevocably scarred, if you will, and cannot be changed, I will say to them, show me the data. And, you know, I think it is irresponsible of us to say something like that because it is not based on real evidence.
39:12Dawn Huebner:It's just based on some belief system that certain kinds of people may be unchangeable. But again, as you said, and you put it, I think, in the right kind of nuanced way, yeah, there are some brains that are more challenging than others that just require, they may require a little bit more or a little bit differently to work with. But to the best of my knowledge, no one has ever shown that a brain shows no plasticity.
39:44Dr. Richard Davidson:Oh, I have one last question. I was thinking about how when we talk about brain plasticity, there's evidence that the more environmentally sensitive brains are actually more plastic. So differential susceptibility, more susceptible to flourishing and also more vulnerable to the bad. But then on the other side of it, if we just go with Tom Boyce, the dandelions are more resilient, so they have less plasticity because they're not going to necessarily be all that different based on the environment, but they're going to remain robust. So do you think that means that there are some people for whom meditation is going to be infinitely more impactful, and those people actually might need it more because they have that more reactive system?
40:46Dr. Richard Davidson:Or do you think I'm just like way too out there right now for a real conversation?
40:50Dawn Huebner:No, no, no. I think you're touching upon some really important themes and there's several things that can be said. First of all, there's really good evidence to show that particularly at the early stages with simple kinds of practices of the sort that we have on our app that can be done for five minutes a day, that those practices are more beneficial for people who are more distressed.
41:21Dr. Richard Davidson:Ah, okay.
41:22Dawn Huebner:Come to this with higher levels of stress, of anxiety, and depression. We've demonstrated that robustly so that we see bigger gains among people who start off at a worse baseline, so to speak. And, you know, in a sense, it's not that surprising because there's no room to move. If you take someone who's really doing well and you give this to them, you know, you may see a little bump, but because they're doing so well, it's just there's not that much room to move. they're kind of at ceiling.
41:59Dr. Richard Davidson:Right, right.
42:00Dawn Huebner:So we definitely see bigger gains among people who are more distressed. And that's also very hopeful news, because it means that, you know, this is something that is really useful for people that are showing this kind of more active suffering. Now, in terms of plasticity, one of the things that you implicitly said, which is very, very true is that plasticity is neutral with respect to flourishing. If you have high levels of plasticity and you're in a very toxic environment, it's actually going to make things worse because you'll be more effectively encoding all the toxic cues in your environment.
42:51Dawn Huebner:And so in that sense, neuroplasticity is really neutral. And so what we ideally want is the combination of high levels of plasticity along with an environment that is imbued with opportunities for flourishing.
43:10Dr. Richard Davidson:Well, I mean, yeah, I noticed the cultural language is very much about resilience. And so it's like this confusing message because if you're highly adaptable, but you're not highly plastic, you might not get the same benefits from what you're talking about. I don't know. It's like the language has always confused me because you want your kids to have like natural resilience and be surrounded by opportunities to bolster resilience. But like, if, but the ones that are more anyway, I'm like, it's, I'm going down a rabbit hole.
43:49Dawn Huebner:Yeah. I mean, there are things that are more easily within our control, things that are less easily within our control. The things that for a parent, I think are most easily in their control is their own behavior, their own mind. And so that's really the lowest hanging fruit.
44:12Dr. Richard Davidson:Yes. That is perfect way to end this conversation. That is the lowest hanging fruit. And we could spend a lot less time trying to control other people, which is not even on the tree. Okay, just let's all together commit five minutes a day for a mindfulness-based practice, whether you're using the Healthy Minds program that's the free app that Richie Davidson recommended, or whether you're just having those micro meditations. I have one at the end of every chapter of my book, The Five Principles of Parenting, or whatever suits you. Five minutes a day. Let's all together commit to this. I'm doing it with you.
44:55Dr. Richard Davidson:Five minutes a day. We'll check back in four to six weeks and just do a check-in. How do I feel? Like, is this actually making the changes that I was hoping for it to make? I have a feeling you'll see that it will. If you enjoy this episode, don't forget to write a little review, give it a rating, go to my substack, drlizapressman.substack.com for free articles. And of course, Instagram at Raising Good Humans Podcast. Have a wonderful week. Thank you.
From the publisher
What if the most powerful thing you could do for your child's brain development has nothing to do with them at all?
This episode is for any parent who has worried about screen time, big emotions, or whether they're doing enough — and hasn't realized that the most direct path to a flourishing child runs straight through their own mind. I'm joined by Dr. Richard Davidson, neuroscientist, founder of the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and author of Born to Flourish.
What you'll learn:
Why neuroplasticity is happening to your brain right now whether you want it to or not
The four pillars of flourishing (awareness, connection, insight, and purpose) and the research-backed reason five minutes a day is enough to change your brain.
Why flourishing is contagious — and what that means for the hardest kids, the most overwhelmed parents, and everyone in between.
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