Increasing Resilience to Traumatic Stress: Understanding the Protective Role of Well-Being

The brain maintains homeostasis in part through a network of feedback and feed-forward mechanisms, where neurochemicals and immune markers act as mediators. Using a previously constructed model of biobehavioral feedback, we found that in addition to healthy equilibrium another stable regulatory program supported chronic depression and anxiety. Exploring mechanisms that might underlie the contributions of subjective well-being to improved therapeutic outcomes in depression, we iteratively screened 288 candidate feedback patterns linking well-being to molecular signaling networks for those that maintained the original homeostatic regimes. Simulating stressful trigger events on each candidate network while maintaining high levels of subjective well-being isolated a specific feedback network where well-being was promoted by dopamine and acetylcholine, and itself promoted norepinephrine while inhibiting cortisol expression. This biobehavioral feedback mechanism was especially effective in reproducing well-being’s clinically documented ability to promote resilience and protect against onset of depression and anxiety.