Over the weekend, the practitioners at The Pagoda Tree all went to a seminar together. It was fun spending more time outside of the clinic together, but more importantly, as all good seminars do, it motivated us to improve our own practices in clinic. This one happened to be on the biology of emotion and ways to improve energy, mood and stress.

Without going into it in too much detail, stress in particular has an effect on brain structure – literally shrinking parts of the brain (hippocampus and prefrontal cortex) and making other parts bigger (amygdala). This in turn has an effect on how much our moods are geared towards happiness and decision-making, or fear and worry.

So how can we enlarge those parts of the brain that make us happy and decisive and shrink the parts that make us worry and have fear?