Introduction to The Science of Feeling Good & Generation Bounce Back
We've all been through a lot. Is getting back to normal enough? Or can we evolve toward something better?
I have an idea that I play around with sometimes: a sci-fi plot.
What if every generation is the one that experiences the proverbial "end of the world"? Some catastrophe happens: climate destruction, aliens jealously seeking to inhabit our planet and destroy us all, or we blow ourselves up in a conflagration of war and nukes. Maybe the religious prophecies come true? Whatever it is, in this sci-fi story, each generation ends, only to be brought back in a new timeline on Earth. This time to get it right. Kind of been done, I suppose, in the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. This time though, we'll all be baaack!
And when we return, we all attempt to set things right in the new timeline. We address colonialism's unfairness. Decide to end all wars. Create religious storylines that support all of us seeking to treat our neighbors as we wish to be treated. Maybe the invention of the gun or nuclear weapons is stopped. The electric car becomes the hot commodity, and Nikola Tesla's theories of electromagnetism rule, giving us plenty of energy and, look -- streets with no ugly power lines!
But in my thinking, we go way, way back in time. We go to early human development, the early days of the rise of Homo sapiens. Our species, for some reason, rose in prominence, taking over the Denisovans and assimilating with the Neanderthals. Perhaps the success of our species had to do with our nervous systems. A nervous system, built through evolution to be highly attuned to danger and quick to act in fight or flight -- it may have been the game changer. And that nervous system was always looking for ways to gain safety: first with fire, then weapons, then aggressive tactics to prevent others from gaining any ground. We kill you first, before you kill us (said in caveman-speak).
"...that nervous system was always looking for ways to gain safety: first with fire, then weapons, then aggressive tactics to prevent others from gaining any ground. We kill you first, before you kill us (said in caveman-speak)."
In this story, I would pinpoint those moments and highlight another trait that arose too, sometime in our ancient past: the ability to work together, to think our way through problems, and to negotiate harmony and peaceful co-existence with others.
There are many early humans who did this. They had to overcome their brain's desire to label and "other" the stranger, in the same way we might label a particular fruit that we think might make us sick. We learn its shape, color, which tree it comes from, and what time of year it ripens.
This is really just our nervous system and survival mechanism trying to predict or discern whether "that kind" was safe or dangerous. We looked for differences in people that might give us a clue. Did they come from our area? Did they look like us? Was their skin color different? Their customs? Did they worship different gods?
The othering of people seemed necessary. It would be weak to let them in and help them survive in our land. How, in that moment, could we have overcome our fear of the Other? Our nervous system was sending off alarms, "danger, danger!", that stranger can turn on you.
"This little thought experiment gets at something that's at the root of trauma healing today, both on a community and an individual level. It can help us see how our fabulous, protective, automatic, subconscious nervous system, which has kept us alive for eons, has also created social and emotional circumstances that have filled our lives with stresses, dangers, and traumatic events."
We entertain leaders who "make us feel safe" by promising to protect us from the Others. We see enemies in anyone different. We interpret kindness and empathy as weakness, and zero-sum gamesmanship as the rule of survival.
But, we also learned the value of cooperation, of belonging, that we survive and even thrive together, over the long run.
In my sci-fi end-of-the-world generation, we don't need to go back in time. This generation, today, can see that our survival mechanism has become part of destructive patterns. Let's say they see the asteroid heading toward us, instead of falling into avoidance patterns and pointing fingers of blame, they may seek to work together to send an international rocket ship to space to blast it out of our solar system.¹ Cooperation is a human superpower, not a liability.
They could learn how their nervous system is affecting their day-to-day life; how a mean email can be received as an existential threat, leaving them feeling angry, wanting to escape, or frozen in fear. They'll notice that they have surrounded themselves with information outputs on our phones, TV screens, social contacts, and ubiquitous experiences of the many things that stalk us: bills, viruses, disinformation, and constant surveillance. They can recognize that childhood hurts and harms continue to affect them into adulthood.² No wonder 1 in 7 people have a mental health disorder globally.³ These disorders are surpassed by physical health concerns like cardiovascular disease and respiratory illness, which coincidentally are also greatly influenced by stress.⁴
That's the story ending I imagine for my sci-fi plot: it's the one where each generation doesn't need a catastrophe to start over. Where we learn, this time, to notice the ancient alarm system running underneath every decision, every flinch, every guarded glance at a stranger, and instead of obeying it blindly, we get curious about it. We ask, "What is this protecting us from?" We ask if that threat is even real anymore.
This is what I mean by emotional evolution. We don't need to become a new species; we don't need a new brain. We need a new relationship with the one we have: wiring built for tigers and floods, now firing at social media posts and headlines and neighbors who look, pray, or vote differently than we do. Emotional evolution is the work of catching that old system in the act, understanding what it's really responding to, and choosing, over and over, to recognize the long game we are playing. What did Gandhi say? Our zero-sum thinking means "an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind."
We are smarter now. I always think of the old introduction to The Six Million Dollar Man: "We can rebuild him. We have the technology." We do now. Brilliant scientists in the areas of neurobiology, psychology, sociology, anthropology, and physics are showing us the world is not what it seems.
Scratch beneath the layers of what we see, and there are things we don't see, but that still exist. Trauma travels generations; genetics can impact behavior patterns; stress affects our bodies, minds, and psyches; reality exists at subatomic levels in ways that make no sense at first glance, but have given us supercomputers we carry in our pockets. All we need are ways to make these connections work toward a better, calmer, more harmonious world, and more joyous individuals.
That work is what has been called emotional intelligence, but it's more than that. It's the ability to notice what you're feeling, understand why, and use that understanding to guide how you think, act, and connect with other people, instead of being run by unexamined, knee-jerk feelings. It's understanding (through science) how our brain functions when we change beliefs, how hormones affect our ability to set and pursue goals, how quantum connections might inform how we set and achieve goals, and the power of storytelling to reshape millions of minds from survival of the fittest to survival of the cooperative.
It is not easy, especially for a nervous system built for a much older, much more physically dangerous world. But it's learnable, the way a language or an instrument is learnable: with practice, feedback, and the right tools. That's the whole premise behind Generation Bounce Back. It's to teach the science that lets each of us, right where we are, become a little more like the people we'd want running the next generation.
Maybe this time we'll save the world, who knows?
About the Author
Jennifer Dhillon is an attorney, resilience educator, and founder of Generation Bounce Back and its sister nonprofit, Bounce Back Generation. For more than two decades, she has worked in high-risk, high-stress communities, developing evidence-based programs that help people heal from trauma and build lasting resilience. She is the author of How to Bounce Back: Emotional Evolution and the Science of Feeling Good and How to Get Calm Before You Lose Your Cool.
¹ Nautilus: How to Stop a Killer Asteroid ² PMC: Childhood adversity and adult health ³ World Health Organization: Mental Disorders ⁴ CU Boulder Today: Mental, physical illnesses often go hand in hand
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