ATTITUDE CAN MAKE HUGE DIFFERENCE

World in my mind - Attitude can make huge difference - Do you know? attitude can affect your health and it's really crucial. You probably know at least one spirited soul who, no matter what, trucks through life's muck and always comes out clean and smiling. Those are the people who have psychological resilience.

Maintaining perspective is also crucial. "The people who can transcend the (nagging, unfinished tasks) and move on to bigger issues, those are the people who will make it through hard times."

Meditation is also a great way to stay mentally buoyant, says Richard Davidson, PhD, director of the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin. He is studying why some individuals do better than others when exposed to adversity and believes the difference has to do with how the brain, particularly the prefrontal cortex (involved in emotions and memory), regulates negative emotions.

Some people are rigged with a genetic advantage, but, says Davidson, the gray matter can definitely be trained. In one of his best-known studies, a group of average Americans took an eight-week meditation course. Afterward, brain scans showed increased activation in their prefrontal cortexes, compared with a control group. "These are individuals who, when adversity occurs, will recover more quickly," says Davidson. "They can't isolate themselves from the adversity that's impossible.

But what can be changed is how they react. And one of the things that distinguishes resilient people from vulnerable people is the extent towhich a stressful event elicits a persistent response versus a more acute, short-lived one." As an interesting aside, Davidson's subjects were injected with flu vaccine.

The ones who went through the training had a significantly greater rise in antibodies than the nonmeditators. Talk about resilience! Stay healthy and keep our good attitude, and love will come to approach when we have passion and better spirit in our body, mind, and soul. It's World in my mind.