Kiss your brain The science of gratitude
when i was a 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 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 a 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 brain 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 roll
fighter i look at myself in the mirror
it felt
okay 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 brain tumors suck cancer sucks
and cancer fighter i understand
completely why those hashtags exist but
i was so eager to find the hashtag
hi i have a brain tumor that might never
go away and i’m still living and
thriving 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 want 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 biopsych
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 ah
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
brains 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 stay for a later date
every time i went to radiation it 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
from 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 practice gratitude the more
peace i felt 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
but what’s interesting is there are
actual physical outcomes as well
like having a stronger immune system and
experiencing less pain
when we express gratitude our brain
releases dopamine and serotonin
two important neurotransmitters
responsible for our emotions
and our mood expressing gratitude also
helps us regulate stress hormones
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 the 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 as a t 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
in 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 therapists 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 is 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