Christina Costa

Every time I went to radiation and 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 practiced gratitude, the more peace I felt in 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.

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 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 healthcare, 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.