Christina Costa: How gratitude rewires your brain | TED

Christina Costa: How gratitude rewires your brain | TED

Transcriber: When I was middle school science teacher, I would often ask my students
to kiss their brain. I got this idea from visiting
my friend’s kindergarten classroom. She would ask her students
to kiss their brain, and they would take their fingers, tap them to their mouth
and then to the top of their head. And it truly was as cute
as you can picture it to be. So I decided to bring it back
to my middle school classroom, which could have gone one of two ways, but it ended up being a really
fun ritual for us, too. And I would ask them to kiss their brain
for all the work they did in class as a practice of gratitude. After teaching middle school, I came back to grad school
to get my PhD in psychology. My research is within the area
of positive psychology, which is the science that investigates
the strengths and factors that allow individuals
and communities to thrive. I also get to teach psychology
to undergrad students and high school students. I love teaching psych, and my absolute favorite unit to teach
In Intro Psych is the brain. But while I love teaching about the brain, I thought it would be pushing it
to ask my undergrads, aka adults, to kiss their brains. So three years would go by before I would remember that fun phrase. One day after teaching last year, I had a terrible migraine
that left half of my face numb and blurred my vision. The migraines kept happening. I saw multiple doctors, and then I started
experiencing dizzy spells. The neurologist ordered an MRI, and I remember being so excited because then I would be able
to use my own brain pictures when I taught brain imaging
to my students. But as it turns out, my MRI wasn’t too picture perfect. The doctor called me
and asked me to go to the ER because there was a large mass
in the right hemisphere of my brain, and that’s where I saw
the image for the first time. I have never been more scared
in my life than I was that night, and with tears dripping down my face, in the hospital, I kissed my brain for the first time since I had left
my middle school classroom. I made it my mantra, and I kissed my brain every single day, leading up to and after surgery. Then, two weeks later, after surgery, the pathology reports came back and I was diagnosed
with an anaplastic astrocytoma. The weeks following were very difficult. I tried to figure out
what I was struggling with the most by looking back on all the things
I had been writing about this experience. I wrote and posted this on Instagram about a week after I received
that pathology report: “I will keep fighting. I will keep loving, I will keep living, I will keep loving. I will keep living.” And then about a week
after that, I wrote this: “Fighter. I tried it on to see how it felt because I kept hearing
those words next to my name, like a job, like an identity, like a role. Fighter. I look at myself in the mirror. It felt OK at first, but soon it became exhausting, too heavy to lift, too much to carry, too burdensome to bear. I took it off and left it on the floor. War was not for me. A body is not a battlefield.” I realized that I had been introduced
to the fight narrative. When people heard my diagnosis,
I became a fighter. “You’re a fighter,” “Keep fighting,” “Beat this tumor,”
were the top comments. And then there was the internet, the place I so desperately searched for people who were doing well
with their diagnosis. But the top hashtags to search for
were #braintumorssuck, #cancersucks and #cancerfighter. I understand completely
why those hashtags exist, but I was so eager to find the hashtag #hiIhaveabraintumorthatmightnevergoaway
andImstilllivingandthriving and I guess there just
isn’t a ring to that one. I hated the idea that I was going to be
at war with my brain because I had spent months
and years kissing it instead. I hated the suggestion
of naming my tumor something awful because the reality is that it was going to be my neighbor
for the rest of my life, and I hated the guided imagery training that asked me to picture chemo as an army
coming to battle the cancer cells because I didn’t want to spend
over a year of my life at war with my own body. I can see how these elements
of the fight narrative can be empowering for people, but for me, I knew
it wasn’t going to work. So I started to reference
well-being practices that I had learned from my own studies. Doctors always laugh with me when they find out that I’m a bio-psych
and neuroscience major and psych PhD student. Then when they ask what I’m studying and I tell them I study
resilience and well-being, they either laugh again,
say something like, “Oh, that’s irrelevant,” or go, “Aw.” The irony was never lost on me. I have read so many stories
and studies of resilience, but I never pictured the day that I would
have to personally experience it. I read and taught
about gratitude practices, specifically as a well-being strategy, and even though I knew
the positive effects, I had never seriously
practiced them myself. I started to incorporate
some of these exercises into my life. I tried to stop focusing
on what my body had done “wrong” and focus on the gratitude
I had for my body instead. And really, I realized
this is something I had been doing when I was kissing my brain those days leading up to and after surgery. Gratitude became the tool that helped me restructure
my vision of illness and disability when the world was telling me
I should fight it instead. Instead of thinking about if I would
be able to have kids one day, I thought of how amazing it was
that my brain, despite its trauma, was able to deliver the perfect amount
of hormones to my body to produce enough eggs
to save for a later date. Every time I went to radiation
and was put in my mask, I kissed my brain
and I focused on the resident telling me how the healthy cells
would be able to repair over time and the cancer cells could not. And when the operative notes
came back for my surgery, a day that I remember very well
and had been scared to think about, I read the note out loud, sobbing, happy and grateful tears, thinking about what
my neurosurgeon’s team did. I started to feel such an immense
sense of gratitude for science, medicine and my medical team, that those thoughts started to drown out the “What is my life
going to be like?” thoughts. The more I practiced gratitude,
the more peace I felt in my situation, and this got me interested
in what could be happening with the science of gratitude
at a neurological level. There are several positive psychological
and social outcomes of gratitude, like increases in happiness,
decreases in depression, having stronger relationships
and experiencing positive emotion. And fMRI studies show us that several parts of our brain
and pathways are activated when we experience and express gratitude. One of these parts
is the medial prefrontal cortex, an area associated with the management
of negative emotions. Together, these changes
in neurotransmitters and hormones combined with activated neural pathways, help us cognitively restructure
potentially harmful thoughts to better manage our circumstances. And the cool thing is that we can intentionally activate
these gratitude circuits in our brain. In general, the more we do something,
the easier it becomes, and our brains work the same way. The more we activate
these gratitude circuits, the less effort it takes to stimulate
those pathways the next time, and the stronger those pathways become. Neuroplasticity is a term
I teach my students that refers to our brain’s ability to form
new neural connections throughout life. Which means this is something
that anyone can practice and get better at over time. So I kept practicing gratitude
even when it seemed impossible. I continue to thank my brain
for the amazing work it does as I prepare for 12 more rounds
of chemo this year. I write down three things I’m grateful for and why I’m grateful for them,
no matter what, every morning that I wake up. I write “thank you” notes
to my heroes and health care, nurses who get the IV in the first time. The anesthesiology resident, who held my hand during
the awake portions of my surgery, radiation therapist that play
my playlist during treatment and administrative staff
that makes me smile every time I walk into the hospital. I do want to take a second here
and practice what I teach to shout out my doctors and their teams from the Michigan Medicine
Multidisciplinary Brain Tumor Clinic. I have never met such intelligent, kind and patient people. Thank you for making me feel brave when I sometimes felt the opposite. I think the universe
might think it’s funny that a psych instructor and researcher
who studies well-being ended up with a brain tumor. The truth is that we need
more awareness and more research regarding brain tumors and brain cancer. Doctors can’t exactly predict
how my tumor will behave, and really, none of us can predict what our lives
are going to be like exactly. But what I hope I can show you
is that we can also be grateful for the unexpected challenges. I don’t want to dismiss people who may find the fight
narrative empowering. I also don’t want to suggest
that it’s by any means easy to find ways to be grateful
in dealing with adversity. This has been the hardest thing
that I’ve ever had to do. But I do want to empower
those that feel like me, that there’s another way to go through
whatever your journey may be, that loving your body
doesn’t have to be conditional. And that by practicing gratitude we can actually wire our brains
to help us build resilience. And lastly, I hope everyone, no matter where you are
or what you are doing, can take a second to kiss your own brain and thank it for all that it does for you.

When a psychologist who studies well-being ends up with a brain tumor, what happens when she puts her own research into practice? Christina Costa goes beyond the “fight” narrative of cancer — or any formidable personal journey — to highlight the brain benefits of an empowering alternative to fostering resilience in the face of unexpected challenges: gratitude.

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