You Can Train Your Brain To Thrive During Trauma & Stress — Here's How

I designed MMFT with two overarching goals in mind: to help individuals widen their windows and to do so in a stress- and trauma-sensitive manner. To achieve these tailored goals, MMFT draws from two lineages: mindfulness training and body-based trauma therapies for reregulating the nervous system and survival brain after trauma, such as sensorimotor psychotherapy, somatic experiencing, and the trauma resilience model.

When MMFT is taught over eight weeks, the first four two-hour sessions occur in the first two weeks, to front-load the neurobiology context for the skills taught in the course. These sessions focus on the scientific foundations of the neurobiology of stress and resilience. They also introduce the basic exercises for self-regulation. The other four two-hour sessions are taught in the fourth, fifth, seventh, and eighth weeks. These sessions teach content about habitual reactions, decision making, emotions, interpersonal interactions, and conflict. They also introduce more advanced exercises for self-regulation interpersonally. During the third week, participants have an individual practice interview, and during the sixth week, they complete a four-hour practicum to refine mindfulness and self-regulation skills.

Through these exercises, MMFT aims to cultivate two core domain-general skills: attentional control and tolerance for challenging experience. Because these skills undergird other competencies needed for effective decision making and interpersonal interactions—such as situational awareness, emotional intelligence, and mental agility—cultivating these skills can provide a big return on training investment. Attentional control is mostly cultivated through focused attention (FA) techniques, while tolerance for challenging experience is cultivated through both FA and open monitoring (OM) techniques.

Attentional control is the ability to direct and sustain attention deliberately on a chosen target over time. Attentional control leads to improved concentration, more capacity to inhibit distractions, and more capacity to remember and update relevant information.

Tolerance for challenging experience is the ability to pay attention to, track, and stay present with such experience without needing it to be different. Such challenging experiences can be external (e.g., harsh environmental conditions or difficult people) or internal (e.g., physical pain, stress activation, intense emotions, distressing thoughts, nightmares, or flashbacks). Without training our capacity to tolerate challenging experience, many of us default to checking out, distracting ourselves, or trying to "fix" the discomfort with stress reaction cycle habits and other impulsive or reactive behavior. Importantly, tolerance for challenging experience is not the same thing as "sucking it up." That's because sucking it up is actually an aversive form of thinking brain override—which, by definition, means we're not fully present to all of the information available in the challenging experience.

To be clear, if you're confronting profound dysregulation, I believe working with a therapist trained in body-based trauma techniques (such as sensorimotor psychotherapy or somatic experiencing) is essential. They can help you pace your survival brain's bottom-up processing so that it happens gradually and safely. I strongly recommend you seek out a trained professional to help you navigate your way through the process so that you don't inadvertently flood your system, retraumatize your survival brain, and exacerbate your dysregulation.