The Hidden Pathway in the Brain from Stress to Joy

The emotional brain is the ultimate nurturer. Its role is to save us from stress and return us to a state of optimal wellbeing – joy. How can we tap into our natural drives to get from stress to joy? It takes using emotional tools as the resilience pathways reside in the emotional brain.

- LAUREL MELLIN, PHD

Advances in healthcare are emphasizing the importance of moving away from focusing on thoughts and actions, and instead – going under them to the emotions that control both. More than 100 years ago, Sigmund Freud postulated that the unconscious mind, the emotional brain, was what controlled the quality of our lives. Unfortunately, his psychoanalytic therapies to treat that emotional brain were viewed by other psychologists as fanciful and capricious. That criticism led to behaviorism and cognitive behavioral therapy. Both have kept us from learning how to control our emotions and our emotional brain. Often, we have learned to suppress our emotions, which only adds to our stress.

By now, Sigmund Freud’s theory that our focus should be on changing the pathways in the emotional brain has been proven by neuroscientists. What has been missing is a practical way to change that brain by processing our emotions. Over the last 30 years, my colleagues at UCSF and I have developed a simple, structured, and safe way to do just that. We call it emotional brain training (EBT).