A viewer asks: “Richard J. Davidson, author of “The Emotional Life of Your Brain”, says understanding the brain increases agency over emotional reactions. He claims you can train the brain to respond differently to challenges and that with the right mental exercises, and habits, it’s possible to reshape neural pathways, enhance resilience, attention, and overall emotional well-being. For example, he claims that naming an emotion activates the prefrontal cortex, which helps regulate the brain’s fear-and-stress center. He says the prefrontal cortex can also regulate other emotion-generating regions (amygdala, insula, hippocampus). How effective are these suggestions in gaining agency over emotional reaction?”

We would say this is more wishful thinking than a useful therapeutic strategy. There are many things the brain can do, especially over a short period of time, when stimulated in a variety of ways. Simple distractions and competing for attention and prioritization with more than one stimulus will change a consequential physiologic response and its magnitude. But that is simply akin to calling a phone that's in use and seeing that the line is busy. That does not mean that the owner of the phone that was called is no longer in need of outside help of a deeper kind, because you are using only a kind of artificial readout and making an assumption as to its greater significance. So this is one of many, many, explorations of epi-phenomena regarding the central nervous system and its workings. While many times, something believed to be helpful can make it so, that will only work for very superficial needs and usually only for a short while, because such beliefs will not be well-entrenched but provisional, and usually fade, so are not a useful and reliable outcome for therapeutic purposes.