How Brain Activity Reveals What Makes You Thrive

By Paul J. Zak

Children get annual checkups with a pediatrician to determine if they are thriving. This is done by assessing if their height and weight are progressing at expected rates.

But how do we measure thriving in adults? Increasing body mass is not the right measure. Rather, adult thriving is often evaluated by clinicians and social scientists as engagement in daily activities. That term engagement is a bugaboo because it is hard to measure, and hard to figure out how to increase it. 

People cannot make decisions that will increase their thriving without a consistent metric for it. Those who thrive are happier, healthier, and live longer, according to a 2011 study, which is why my lab has spent 20 years doing research to identify a brain-based metric of thriving. This has led to the discovery of the brain network that values social-emotional experiences. This knowledge enabled us to objectively quantify thriving as the amount of neurologic value people need to fully enjoy life.

In order to make this finding useful, we created a free app that captures neural activity by applying algorithms to signals pulled from smartwatches and fitness wearables. The app shows users the experiences that give them the most value — indications of what they love to do and who they most enjoy being with — so they can make choices to flourish and create a fulfilled life. The lessons we’ve learned along the way might help you thrive, as well.

Measuring Thriving in the Brain

Happiness is an acute state of pleasure. Thriving or flourishing captures a longer-term notion that requires pursuing goals and sustaining relationships. When people thrive, they typically have more happy experiences than unhappy ones. I will interchange the terms thriving, flourishing, and satisfaction here, as their meanings are quite similar.

Let’s start with the problem of measurement. Is an afternoon with my children a 10 out of 10? Maybe not; sometimes my kids are cranky. My dog, now he’s a perfect 10 out of 10!  Not only is it hard for people to rate experiences, but ratings do not reflect what is actually going on in the brain. 

Neuroscience solves this dilemma. Changes in neural responses above baseline (resting activity) are comparable within an individual and comparable across individuals. The brain only invests the energy to activate neural processes when an experience is sufficiently valuable given that neural activity has a strong tendency to return to baseline.

The brain has around 86 billion neurons, and I spent 20 years doing research to find the brain network among all these neurons that would measure if people were thriving. My lab initially traced people’s behavior to changes in neurochemicals in blood, which told us where to look for neuroelectrical signals in the central and peripheral nervous systems that have high densities of receptors for those neurochemicals. 

We started with 140 neural signals measured at 250 to 1,000 times a second. We then used statistical techniques to hone in on the signals that consistently predicted people’s actions. Finally, we combined multiple neural signals into an overall measure we call Immersion, because people appear to get lost in peak Immersion experiences.

The Immersion brain network strongly activates when a short message or experience is sufficiently important that it provokes people to take an observable action. Since we were collecting data all day, we saw that this same valuation network reveals which experiences are most valued neurologically.

The Immersion network is primarily driven by two neural responses: being present and experiencing emotional resonance. We traced the former to the binding of dopamine to the prefrontal cortex and the latter to the activity of another neurochemical, oxytocin, in the brainstem and subgenual cortex.

Finally, we traced out the pathways from the Immersion network in the brain to the brain’s “output file,” the cranial nerves. Once we found the cranial nerve signature of Immersion, we wrote algorithms to capture this from smartwatches and fitness wearables. With the algorithm and a scalable way to measure Immersion, we built an app so anyone could measure how well they are thriving.

Lessons From the Thriving Brain

Analyzing peak Immersion experiences from over 50,000 free-roaming humans using the app, our published research showed we could predict whether people were happy or sad, and had high energy or low energy, with 98 percent accuracy. When people had no or few peak Immersion experiences, they reported depression-like symptoms — low moods and low energy.

To make it simple for people to use the data, I wondered if we could quantify how many peak Immersion experiences people need to maintain positive moods and, beyond that, build up the capacity to weather negative events without becoming unhappy. It turned out to be six. The research showed that those who had six peak Immersion experiences per day lasting three minutes or longer were happy for many days in a row. And, of course, we named the free app SIX so people had a clear goal to reach.

These data show a number of actions people can take to increase thriving. When we examined what was most valuable to users’ brains, nearly all of their peak experiences involved other people, particularly activities that brought others joy. These include:

Investing in Relationships: Making time to serve others is one of the best ways to strengthen social ties. When you are of service to another, the other person will nearly always reciprocate, thereby strengthening the relationship. For example, it is a privilege to treat friends to a meal. There is no reason this has to even out over time — these are your dear friends; treat them as much as you can.

Practicing Virtues: Relationships are also strengthened when we put others’ needs ahead of our own. Such actions are called virtues and can be practiced so they get easier. This is just what founding father Benjamin Franklin did — he created a program for himself to practice being virtuous in order to become happier.

Embrace Confelicity: This is an archaic word meaning celebrating the joy of others. Susan just finished her first 5K race: Let’s celebrate! Bob won a prestigious award for his work: Let’s celebrate!

Volunteering: Around 50 percent of Americans have three or fewer close friends, according to the American Survey Center, so getting enough social interaction can be difficult for many. A solution is to volunteer to help others. This will build new relationships and strengthen the Immersion brain network.

Getting a Dog: Individuals with social anxiety or other difficulties in forming relationships can strengthen this brain pathway by adopting a dog. My research has found that dogs induce peak Immersion experiences and reduce stress. Just walk a dog, and people will approach you to start a conversation and pet Fido.

Acting on Your Life Purpose: People who have identified their purpose in life and act on it have high levels of satisfaction in their lives. Purpose activities nearly always involve other people, providing a platform to have key moments doing something you love and to accentuate its value by adding a social component.

The SIX app links to users’ calendars and locations so they can see exactly which activities and people promote flourishing for themselves. These insights enable users to curate their lives for greater satisfaction by leaning in to those experiences that generate happiness. My goal is to get one billion people around the world to use the free app we built to increase their ability to thrive.

Through our investigations, we learned that the brain works harder on things that matter, strengthening the Immersion network. This is the same mechanism that increases physical fitness when you lift weights: The body acclimates by getting stronger. These energetic responses are precisely how emotional fitness is built. With small shifts in how you spend your time and who you spend it with, you can cultivate your ability to thrive.

This article originally appeared on Greater Good, the online magazine of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley. Click here to read the original article.