A 2020 paper from top researchers in neuroscience, cognitive science, and psychology is inspiring wisdom for happiness and wellbeing.
Researchers state:
“There is overwhelming evidence that well-being can be learned and that core dimensions of well-being may thus be likened to skills and trained through various forms of self-regulation.”
Along the lines of training different muscles and movements – we can “workout” the “muscles” that support happiness and wellbeing. These include four core dimensions identified by the researchers: awareness, connection, insight, and purpose.
Happiness is learned.
What is “meta-awareness”?
The researchers describe awareness as a heightened and flexible attentiveness to our environment. This includes our internal (thoughts, bodily sensations, and emotions) and external environment (perceptions of the world around us).
The researchers pay special attention to what they call “meta-awareness”.
This is awareness of conscious experience itself. When we realize we are angry or daydreaming and “snap out of it” or realize that we’ve been driving on “autopilot” — that’s meta-awareness. Our capacity for meta-awareness is key to wellbeing.
In fact, “a large-scale study of more than 5,000 people from 83 countries revealed that, on average, people spend an estimated 47% of their waking life in a state of distraction and that states of distraction are typified by lower levels of well-being.” The researchers go on to write that distraction is associated with stress and anxiety, ADHD symptoms, and depression.
Imagine – almost half of the time we’re in a state that directly contributes to stress, anxiety, and depression!
Awareness Training
Thankfully we can train for increased awareness.
“Awareness-based interventions improve a range of outcomes related to the self-regulation of attention as well as workplace and educational outcomes… Attentional meditation and mindfulness interventions also improve outcomes related to the self-regulation of emotion, including lower levels of stress, decreased subjective reactivity to pain, improvements in symptoms related to anxiety, depression, and other mental disorders, and increased positive emotions and overall psychological well-being.”
These interventions are almost always some form of mindfulness training in which we bring our attention over and over again back to an object of focus. This object is meant to anchor our awareness to the present moment – it might be the breathe during vipassana meditation, the body during yoga, the feet during walking meditation, etc.
It’s shown that training in this way produces altered patterns of brain activity and connectivity. Focused attention meditation in particular, reduces the activation of the default mode network (DMN) which is the sort of “autopilot setting” in the brain. It’s the network that switches on when we’re not actively engaged in something that usually leads to daydreaming, mind wandering, and over-thinking.