Summary of Linda Graham's Bouncing Back

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview:

#1 I have heard many stories from my clients about their resilience in action. For example, Deborah had had a wonderful day at the beach, but was still able to think about her brother who had had a heart attack four months before.

#2 We all deal with stress every day, and we all have to respond to it. Resilience is the ability to cope with pressures and tragedies quickly, adaptively, and effectively. It is not a single best or infallible way to cope with difficulties, but rather the ability to adapt our coping to a specific challenge.

#3 The brain is still being studied, and new discoveries are being made daily. However, these discoveries are still far from complete. We can learn to bounce back better by rewiring our brain’s learned patterns of coping.

#4 In Bouncing Back, I present two powerful processes of brain functioning: conditioning, which determines how our learning of resilience is encoded in the neural circuitry of our brains, and neuroplasticity, which determines how we can use new experiences to rewire those patterns.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: May 11, 2022
• ISBN: 9798822511699

IRB Media

With IRB books, you can get the key takeaways and analysis of a book in 15 minutes. We read every chapter, identify the key takeaways and analyze them for your convenience.

Book preview

Insights on Linda Graham's Bouncing Back

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 4

Insights from Chapter 5

Insights from Chapter 6

Insights from Chapter 7

Insights from Chapter 8

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

I have heard many stories from my clients about their resilience in action. For example, Deborah had had a wonderful day at the beach, but was still able to think about her brother who had had a heart attack four months before.

#2

We all deal with stress every day, and we all have to respond to it. Resilience is the ability to cope with pressures and tragedies quickly, adaptively, and effectively. It is not a single best or infallible way to cope with difficulties, but rather the ability to adapt our coping to a specific challenge.

#3

The brain is still being studied, and new discoveries are being made daily. However, these discoveries are still far from complete. We can learn to bounce back better by rewiring our brain’s learned patterns of coping.

#4

In Bouncing Back, I present two powerful processes of brain functioning: conditioning, which determines how our learning of resilience is encoded in the neural circuitry of our brains, and neuroplasticity, which determines how we can use new experiences to rewire those patterns.

#5

Bouncing Back rewires your brain by focusing attention on new experiences and encoding in its neural circuitry the learning from those experiences. It does this most quickly through interactions with other people.

#6

Resilience is all about surviving and thriving, and the brain begins to learn and encode lessons about coping strategies that keep us alive and safe from the very beginning of brain development.

#7

Our brains develop based on our experiences. When we are able to respond skillfully and adaptively to the outer hiccups and hurricanes of our lives, we build a solid neural foundation for resilience. However, our conditioning can go awry, and we can find ourselves stuck in negative, dysfunctional response patterns that leave us feeling miserable and more vulnerable to stressors and traumas.

#8

The human brain is a social-learning organ that develops and matures most efficiently in interactions with other human brains. The prefrontal cortex develops on a longer timetable, approximately twenty-five years, stimulated by empathic relationships with other mature prefrontal cortices.

#9

The first strategies for resilience are learned in infancy, through interactions with parents, caregivers, and others close to us. These early habits become stably encoded in our neural circuitry by twelve to eighteen months of age and have permanent psychological significance.

#10

The prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain that is responsible for resilience. It is the part of the brain that grows and develops as we experience interactions with other people, which helps us learn how to handle disappointment, stop gossiping, and pull together teams to solve problems.

#11

The process of focusing on any experience and stimulating neurons in various parts of the brain to fire creates a neural network that links the experience to a response. These bursts of neural messaging and connecting may last only milliseconds, but as synaptic connections become stronger and more stable over time, they begin to link up in neural pathways.

#12

We can use conditioning to create positive habits of resilience. For example, when the car won’t start in the morning, we can determine whether we panic or have the presence of mind to call upon available resources.

#13

We can’t change the external stressors, but we can change our internal response to them. We can learn to rewire our previous patterns of response that are less than resilient, or even dysfunctional.

#14

Conditioning and neuroplasticity are two mechanisms that work to encode stable patterns in our neural circuitry. They are powerful enough to not only shape our brain’s software, our learned habits, but also its hardware, the structures coordinated by the prefrontal cortex.

#15

The adult brain, which weighs only about three pounds, uses 25 percent of the energy used by the body every day to process more than fifty experiences per second. The brain learns to be resilient from both the bottom up and