How Neuroplasticity Changes the Way We Feel

2 min read

Our brains are remarkable prediction engines.

They help us navigate the world by drawing on the “ingredients” of our past experiences. When those ingredients are mostly positive, we expect one thing. When they are not, our expectations shift.

This is one reason I find the intersection of psychology and neuroscience so compelling: it helps us understand not just our emotions and behaviors but the ways we can reshape them.

Here’s the important part: we have more control over your emotions than you think you do! As Dr. Lisa Feldman Barret says: “It may feel like your emotions are hardwired and they just trigger and happen to you. But instead emotions are just guesses.”

Predictions are the brain’s native language. It is how your brain makes sense of the world, constructing rapid guesses in real time as billions of neurons work together. What fascinates me most is that we have far more influence over those guesses than we tend to realize.

They are primal, automatic, and deeply shaped by our personal history. Your brain does not passively react to the world; it predicts your experience based on everything you have lived, learned, and felt before.

This is why two people can walk through the same moment and experience it entirely differently. Their brains are drawing from different libraries of memories, emotions, and meanings.

We can reshape our experience surprisingly fast in some moments, while in others it requires patience and months of consistent practice before the change takes hold.

One study I often return to is by Jamieson and colleagues (2016). Moments before an exam, students read a simple 5–8 minute pamphlet explaining that stress is not inherently harmful and can actually prepare the body to meet challenges. That tiny shift in interpretation - nothing more - led to significantly higher math scores.

Their stress levels did not change. What changed was the meaning they assigned to stress.

Students who were told to ignore their stress showed no improvement. The effect persisted across semesters and among students with different academic backgrounds. The gains were most profound for those who generally performed poorly - reminding us how powerful even a brief shift in mindset can be.

This is the essence of cognitive reappraisal.

When we reinterpret what we feel, we can transform the experience itself. And with practice, neuroplasticity allows these reframed interpretations to become more natural, more automatic, more integrated into who we are becoming.

Here is what gives me home the most:

We are never fully locked into our first reactions. We are never permanently defined by old emotional habits. We can choose new patterns of interpretation, just like we choose new habits, and those choices reshape our inner world. That is neuroplasticity at its finest - the brain’s remarkable ability to reorganize, rewire, and grow in response to experience. It’s our brain’s capacity to form new pathways and strengthen new patterns through repeatition.

This is, in many ways, the quiet miracle of being human. Our minds can rewrite their own predictions and our brains can learn to tell us a different story.

And with time, those new stories can shift how we behave, how we interpret our emotions, and ultimately who we become.

We have the remarkable ability to rewrite our path. So choose the one that expands you not the one that limits.

References

Jamieson, J. P., Peters, B. J., Greenwood, E. J., & Altose, A. J. (2016). Reappraising Stress Arousal Improves Performance and Reduces Evaluation Anxiety in Classroom Exam Situations. Social Psychological & Personality Science, 7(6), 579–587. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550616644656