Thinking your way to a better life

Chicago Tribune:

“Life’s slings and arrows” is Harvard-educated neuroscientist Richard J. Davidson’s phrase for the events we spend our days ducking, sometimes unsuccessfully.

Losing out on that promotion. Getting dumped. Navigating a cocktail party of boors (or bores). The stuff that conspires to keep us in a foul mood, despite our best intentions.

And Davidson argues that our response to such events — and even to full-on tragedies, such as the death of a loved one — is as much a part of our identity as our fingerprints.

“Each of us is a color-wheel combination of the resilience, outlook, social intuition, self-awareness, context and attention dimensions of emotional style,” he writes in his new book, “The Emotional Life of Your Brain” (Hudson Street Press), “a unique blend that describes how you perceive the world and react to it, how you engage with others and how you navigate the obstacle course of life.”

Read the whole story: Chicago Tribune