Dr. Rick Hanson
Appearances
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
I'm really glad for you and I'm really happy to be here.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
Big picture is that there are neural correlates of the stream of consciousness. So we're having experiences, and those patterns of mental activity correlate with underlying patterns of neural activity. Maybe there's some X factor that's supernatural or even divine, ultimately, that's getting in the mix there. Science accepts mysteries.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
So I have a business background and a practical background. I've been really struck by how people are really pretty clear about making things better over time in the outer world. but they kind of feel helpless or even uninterested in the process of making things better over time in the inner world. That's what you're talking about.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
And your whole work, I think a lot of it is helping people realize they do have that power inside themselves and they can use that power in skillful ways. That's exactly right. And it's a plain fact that the essence of it is a two-step process that's incredibly simple. It's under our control most of the time, and people usually forget the second step.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
First, you have to experience whatever you want to grow. You want to feel better about yourself? You want to feel more committed to exercise? you want to be less self-critical, you want to be more confident in public speaking, whatever it might be, you first have to experience what you want to grow or factors of it. Okay, that's a state.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
But the second step is there must be an internalization of that momentary patterning of neurological activation that leaves a lasting trace in the body, especially in the brain. That's the second step. But if people actually engage that second step a handful of times every day, for typically a breath or two, maybe longer, then they are steepening their growth curve. And
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
influencing in lasting ways who they're becoming. The dirty secret in the clinical world is that we routinely leave out that second step. We kind of hope that something will stick to the walls. Even in Barbara Fredrickson's, for example, wonderful work on broadening and build, the build aspect of emotionally positive experiences is described as incidental. Me, I don't like that.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
I want deliberate. You know what I mean? I want deliberate. You're going to leave this up to chance. Yeah, that's exactly right. And this is no knock on Barbara. I'm really speaking actually about my own errors as a therapist over time to be good at promoting certain experiences in people, but ignoring the question of whether they're sinking in in any kind of a lasting way.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
And so anyway, people can appreciate That it's a two-step process, state to trait, and you actually have the power to slow down and take in the good, as it were, of that experience. Keep the neurons firing together so they wire together. Feel it in your body. Track the reward value of the experience.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
Right there are three neurologically-based, evidence-based methods for heightening internalization of whatever you want to develop in yourself.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
stay with it feel it in your body track what's been a track what feels good about it highlight what feels good about it and there are other methods as well like be aware of what's novel about it or salient personally relevant um you know give over to it allow yourself to receive it feel like it's sinking in these are all evidence-based factors that increase learning um but in the moment um
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
you're really helping yourself harvest what you've earned in the experience you're having at the time. And you're being kind to yourself. You're getting bonus benefits for doing this. You're treating yourself like you matter along the way. Yeah. And it's as simple as that. It's not a quick fix. It takes time, but
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
But meanwhile, it's really clear that there's a very high level of correlation, moment to moment to moment. So we have states of being, moment to moment, and we have underlying traits, underlying tendencies that foster states. And the states, the experiences we're having, can then leave lasting traces behind for better or worse that foster the traits, the underlying tendencies of who we are.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
Less than a few minutes a day, people can profoundly change who they are becoming based on durable changes in their own brain.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
First, if you're going through your day and think of them as ordinary jewels, you know, ordinary experiences that feel good. You know, like right here, I have an opportunity to feel respected by you, appreciated by you. Okay? It's not more than what it is, but it's not less than what it is. Or you're going through your day, you get something done. You complete a workout.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
You feel good about yourself for doing that. You accomplish something at work. Someone smiles to you. Anything. In the course of your day, slow down a handful of times every day to take in the good on the fly.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
Right there, you've probably spent about a minute total, maybe two minutes total doing what I'm suggesting here, probably closer to a minute, a breath at a time, which is about 10 seconds, plus or minus. That itself will change a person. If they said, okay, I'm going to follow this guy's prescription. I think he's a maniac, but I'm going to try it. There's no harm. It's secret, it's private.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
No one is knowing that I'm slowing down and taking the good, even though I'm a really tough person, you know, and super stoic and all the rest of that, right? Try it. Just the fact that you're looking for the good facts, and then you're letting yourself have a good experience from the good facts,
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
Yeah, and we could do it together if you want. So notice that something good is happening or could be happening. Like that's revelatory for a lot of people. Because, again, negativity bias and the pell-mell pace of modern life were just blowing right past all kinds of jewels. So if you were to become someone who said, hey, fuck that, I want to deliberately let it land.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
And I don't want to be manipulated by all these people who are blasting me with threat messages, very level orange all over the place, or dragging me into the next thing or trying to compel my attention. No, I'm in control of my own attention. I want to rest my attention on ordinary, small, usually, but real good stuff in my life. And I want to, second, help myself feel something.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
So I finish a challenging email. I hit send before racing on to the next thing. I take half a breath. while I'm inhaling, to register, hey, I finished that, and good on me, and a sense of relief, I got it done. I'm feeling something useful, okay? Additionally, the longer you stay with that experience, half a breath, now a few seconds have ticked by.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
Boom. My work has been extremely focused on how to grab hold of and take charge of who we are becoming and that fundamental process of helping beneficial states of being, emotions, sensations, attitudes, motivations, and thoughts become embedded as underlying beneficial traits of
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
You know, neurons typically are firing five to 100 times a second, You know, giant coalitions of neurons in the brain are synchronized in their firing, you know, 5 to 80 times a second. Or, you know, there are a lot of stuff happening in your brain over the course of an inhalation. Add the exhalation. Now you're up to about 6 or 8 or 10 seconds. You're staying with it. Just that.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
is increasing the consolidation of that experience in your brain. Stay with it. The second technique I mentioned, try to feel it in your body. Sometimes there's a place for just absorbing a new idea. It's purely conceptual. Okay. In my early 20s, I realized that growing up, I had been a nerd but not a wimp. That idea had a lot of implications for me. but that was an idea.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
But much of the time, what we really want to internalize is more felt in the body. It's more somatic. So we want to just feel. What's it like to feel a sense of accomplishment and relief that I handled that tricky email? Or what do I feel in my body when I have a sense of fellowship, friendship, community with another person I like and respect, like I'm experiencing here? What's that feel like?
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
So the more you feel it in your body, the deeper the learning. We're going after emotional learning, emotional learning, somatic learning, motivational learning. even spiritual learning if we get to that. Third thing you can do is be aware of what is meaningful or enjoyable about it for you.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
Because as soon as you track the reward, as soon as you highlight the reward value of an experience, technically, it increases activity of dopamine and norepinephrine, two neurochemical systems in your hippocampus, which is the front end of the process of emotional learning in your brain.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
And as dopamine and norepinephrine activity increase in the hippocampus, that flags the experience at the time as a keeper. in long-term storage as it sinks into you gradually. We will not remember the event, but the emotional residues will sink into us.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
So those would be three things that people can do in the flow of life that are evidence-based that increase emotional learning from experiences, increase impact. lasting value. I could name other people. I published a paper called Learning to Learn from Positive Experiences that summarizes all the evidence for this and how to do it.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
And I've written about it and talked about it in other kinds of ways. People can check that out. But just those three, stay with it for a breath or longer, feel it in your body, highlight for you what's enjoyable about it, what's meaningful about it, Bingo. You are increasing the trace. You're heightening the trace in physical structures and functions that's left behind by the experience.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
Thanks for being a really good student in my stuff.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
That's right. Super briefly, the HEAL acronym. So I did not invent any of these methods. Now, really good teachers and people often on their own who have a fairly steep learning curve. I would imagine that you've yourself been just doing this naturally along the way. Do these processes of internalization.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
inner strengths of various kinds, including a positive mood, since we're focused on happiness here, that then foster beneficial states in a positive upward spiral. And being in charge of that process rather than just kind of willy-nilly being swept along, including with a brain that has a big negativity bias. Like Velcro for bad experiences, Teflon for good ones. Okay. Pause for breath.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
What I have done is to pull them together in a comprehensive framework and embed it in evolution and
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
then apply it which we'll get to in a second about the second big thing that people can do with this which is to identify particular strengths they want to grow inside not just kind of move through life harvesting you know here and there useful experiences which is great in its own right but going after things in particular so i'll get to that so heels stands for have and
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
That's the have the beneficial experience in the first place. Either you notice it's happening or you create it. And then the second necessary step, right? The one that I and others routinely forget of installation. I call it activation installation because I read too much science fiction installation and still do probably. The E stands for enriching.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
You're helping the experience be big, powerful, lasting in your brain. And A for absorbing. You're sensitizing. the neurobiological machinery of memory. So the enriched experience is landing on a more sensitive system that can really internalize it. That's the basic process.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
Then the fourth step is optional, but very powerful, is to link in the moment a beneficial experience with some negative material you're trying to soothe and ease and eventually even replace. Right. That's the overall structure. I think of it as like the brain and mind are like a garden. You can be with it, which is fundamental, but you can also work with it.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
And working with it means pulling weeds and planting flowers. And my focus a lot is how do you plant the flowers, but you can use in the linking step, you can use flowers not just to gradually crowd out the weeds over time, but to actually uproot the weeds.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
Well, yeah, let's get to the L. That'd be cool. But the second way people, you said, okay, Rick, great, thanks. How does this translate into daily life? I think of this as like the five-minute challenge. Three parts. The first part I've said already, as you go through the flow of your life, Look for a handful of useful experiences, beneficial, good moments, and slow down and let them sink in.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
Most of them are not million-dollar moments. Those are bread and butter of daily life. But if you start looking for them and taking them in, that will change your day a lot. And you've only spent a minute doing that. Spread, distribute it over the course of your day. Second, what do you want to grow more inside? What would make a big difference if it were more present in your mind?
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
You know, there are these four questions. Chris had routinely... Clinicians should think about and people can think about in daily life. What's your challenge? What's a challenge, especially what's the experience of it inside you? Right. Then second, the money question. What would help if it were more present in your mind? Right.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
So now, you know, like, for example, my story, feeling respected for not being a total loser athlete. I'm not great, but I'm kind of good. All right, I want to feel that. I want to look for that. Or I want to feel more included, more comfortable. Fairly manly men like you were scary to me when I was like a skinny, dorky guy in school to feel fine and comfortable.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
That's something I want to grow inside, let's say, whatever it might be. And there are many other things. I'm working on patience. And being less exasperated by some people. Whatever you're working on, know what that is. I think of it as like, I call it the vitamin C. You know, if you have scurvy, iron won't help.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
You need vitamin C. What are the specific inner resources, inner strengths that are matched to the challenges you have? And as you know from Hard Miring Happiness, I think- of challenges in a certain framework relating to the evolution of the brain or three basic needs for safety, satisfaction, and connection. And what are the strengths that are specifically matched to those particular challenges?
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
Any questions so far? Keep going. You're on a roll. Okay. So you're exactly right. How do we foster in ourselves or those we care about more beneficial? I prefer beneficial to positive because sometimes a beneficial state of being is healthy remorse. or open-hearted sorrow, or being real about something that's painful to look at and hard, but you really need to look at it inside yourself.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
If you, a lot of it is just, what does your heart long for? Or when you were growing up, what would have made all the difference in the world? That, That identifies, okay, now that you know what you're trying to grow, one or two key things. Look for ways to, step one, experience it or factors of it. And second, slow down and really take it in. That might take another minute a day.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
That's the second aspect of my five-minute challenge. And then last, if people are real about it, at some point in your day, maybe part of your meditation, maybe when you first wake up or go to sleep, marinate in what I call deep green. The natural setting of our species and mammals in general. It's why zebras don't get ulcers, you know, Sapolsky's wonderful book on stress.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
The natural setting, when we feel that needs are met enough in the moment, is the body settles down in its equilibrium state, in which it's undisturbed, and the mind is saturated in terms of our three needs with a broad sense of peacefulness, contentment, and love related to safety, satisfaction, connection.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
Whatever for you feels like a kind of homecoming to your natural state of sense of your own inner goodness, deliberately take one to three minutes to just marinate in it every day. Just help yourself come home to it, help it land, sink in, stabilize, and establish itself in you, and give it a minute to three every day. That will gradually build up a resilient core of well-being inside you
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
that you can return to increasingly. And that core will gradually build out, even with stresses and frazzled and irritation and worry and so forth, around the edges.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
Most people will easily spend five minutes a day on their workout or, you know, doom scrolling on Twitter, uh, spend five minutes a day influencing who you are becoming.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
So that, that's a quick summary. And just the first three steps have enrich and absorb here. I like that relate to what I've said so far. And if you want, then you can move into linking to clear out the negative crud.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
Oh, definitely. Kind of inevitably talking about it can sound kind of like professorial or didactic. Because I'm like a coach here. I'm saying, well, you want to ski? These are some things to do. Lean into it rather than back. Things like that. Beware of your edges. When you're doing this, it feels really quite intimate with yourself and kind. I mean, we're hungry. We're big, scared monkeys.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
Life is hard. We're rattled. Shit happens. Most of us have been treated unfairly in different ways. Less so if you're kind of more privileged and so forth. But still, shit happens. So you're really standing up for yourself. You're helping yourself. You're being good to yourself. You're treating yourself like other people should have treated you. It's real. We want to take in. Okay.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
And in the process of that, there's been very little research on the deliberate internalization of beneficial experiences. There's been a lot of research on the impact of sustained experiences that are beneficial and how they change the brains of humans and especially non-human animals. There's a lot of evidence for this. And one of the things I'm really interested in is retuning the amygdala.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
So how do we foster beneficial states and beneficial traits? What's the actual how of that? And what's going on in the machinery under the hood? That's what you're getting at. So operationally, we're talking about reduce. I'm going to use the word bad, not morally, but pragmatically here. Reduce the bad, grow the good. Less sadness, less unnecessary sadness, fear, anxiety, and shame.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
And the parts of the brain that are biased negatively and then get very sensitized negatively, how can we retrain them over time so that they become, you know, reactive to red lights and assholes, but they are on the other hand, much more opportunity focused and have more of what's called an approach orientation, which you know is more associated with mental health, uh, and, and wellbeing.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
And the lack part is really important because people are aware of how they were mistreated. Like the woman at 80 who was bullied or harassed as a kid, that creates wounds. Alongside those wounds, it could well have been, there could also well have been a lack of of inclusion in groups where she was with kids she liked. She may not have had a good friend.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
Maybe her parents were busy and old school and decent, but not very touchy-feely. And so there may have been a lack of positive social supplies. We can be just as affected by the lack of the good as the presence of the bad. That's really important when people kind of reflect on themselves. What are they working with? Either way, there's quote-unquote negative material inside.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
So if you know about your own negative material, I really enjoyed listening to you use the metaphor in going through therapy of learning about all kinds of new rooms in the mansion of your being. When you start to know what's in those rooms, then you can start to identify what are the resources inside, the strengths inside that would be a good match for that wound or that lack.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
that would help to fill that lack inside, that hole in your heart, maybe, or would soothe and ease and gradually mend that wound inside. So you identify a particular strength. So I'll give an example. Let's suppose that someone, either based on their history or just their temperament, is anxious about stuff.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
let's say, anxious in work environments about sticking their neck out, speaking up, and even making presentations. Very common, okay? Or being, let's say, vulnerable, speaking from the heart with someone they care about, letting someone know, hey, you know, it's really scary when you're a kid to go to some house, knock on the door, will Johnny come play or Susie play? You know, do you like me?
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
It's really scary. Okay, so let's say there's an anxiety there. What's the psychological resource that would be matched to it? Well, one is being able to calm yourself, especially calm your body when you're nervous about something. That's good. Another is a sense that you're strong, that, yeah, you're anxious about something or it's threatening or challenging, but you're strong. You're determined.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
You're capable. You've got moxie. You're going to get through it. You can deal with it. Either one of those so far. So in my extended example, sorry about this. Let's say you're going through life and you know that you have anxiety and you know that you value a sense of calming in your body or a sense of and or a sense of personal strength.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
So then when you have that positive matched resource like calming or sense of strength, and you're feeling it in the present, you could deliberately bring it into contact with that anxiety. Maybe anxiety going back to your childhood, maybe more like your temperament, and be aware of both of them at the same time. Neurons that fire together wire together.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
So if you keep the positive experience bigger in your mind while you're aware of that negative off to the side and a sense of the positive connecting with the negative going into it, both of them are present in your awareness at the same time where you're toggling back and forth pretty quickly. Linking is central to therapy, trauma work, passive healing in general.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
The four major negative emotions, so-called negative. Less of that, less crippling anxiety, less negative rumination, less of that, and more sense of underlying well-being that's resilient, even as you deal with the challenges of life. So what's going on in your brain?
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
I'm talking about how to do it on your own very specifically. If the negative material is so powerful like in trauma that it's going to hijack you, you're not ready to do linking with it. But if you can do it on your own and regulate yourself while you're doing it, this is top five, top three mental health method I know. terms of its far-reaching impact.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
So that's one in which you start with the matched strength, and you deliberately connect it with the negative material, or a few breaths, maybe longer. You can explore it. You can do longer versions of this if you want to, and it's done in longer ways in structured therapies, but you can do it on your own. And It's incredibly powerful.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
The other way is if you're sucked into the negative, after you be with it for a while, the three main ways to work with your mind are to let be, let go, and let in. So you let be, you be with it, you feel it mindfully, then you move into some kind of release, then what do you want to replace it with? You've released, let's say, the anxiety, but you want to replace it with, for example, calm,
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
or a sense of being strong, or other matched resources. So then what you would do in linking is you would deliberately bring up some resource that's matched to the negative material and being aware of both of them at the same time, keeping the
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
You got it. It's really, it's cool. And you got to keep, you got to be on your own side to do this. You got to want the positive to win. You start to discover sometimes that there's an inner traitor inside you. that is allied with the negative and wants to keep it around, maybe because it serves some function for you. So a lot of stuff gets stirred up when you try to do this.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
It's really useful to be aware of in yourself. But if you stay with it, you know, you want the strong to prevail, not because you're trying to bypass the negative or suppress it. No, you're being kind to yourself. You're easing it. You're soothing it. You're... You're helping yourself not feel unnecessarily anxious. It's useful to be anxious in proportion to threats.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
And then it's useful to move past anxiety and deal with the threat without feeling nervous. I've done a ton of hardcore rock climbing in very dangerous situations. And most of the time, I'm really happy because I feel resourced. I have a rope. I know what I'm doing. I have my buddy. I'm scruffy and determined, and I'm going to get up to the top of the darn thing.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
So on the negative side, we have a brain that is already biased toward negative learning because that helped our ancestors survive. So, and that very much involves, I'll jump into it now. Actually, I got to do it. Sorry, bear with me. Brain evolved like a house, three floors, okay? There's the brainstem, the subcortex, and then the cortex sitting on top, all right?
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
So just because there's a threat, we don't have to feel anxious as we cope with it.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
You know, Chris, I appreciate you immensely. You know, I just, because I knew I was doing this, I would start watching you. And you're so clear. And the clarity comes from the inside out. It's just really a pleasure. Thank you. You're exactly right. And I reflect on that a little bit as, you know, like a kid. You're not the boss of me. You know, who am I?
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
Who and what do we let boss us around, including our own habit tendencies, to chase the next thing? And as you know, my own background is increasingly kind of Buddhist in which there's a real respect for the intelligence and the Buddha's original drive theory of suffering. We let craving, chasing the next shiny object, you know, drag us away from the present. And getting control of that, in part,
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
by repeatedly internalizing the felt sense of needs met enough in the present to undo the biological machinery of craving, which is based on deficit and needs met enough, right? There's a lot in that. But to me, it becomes very profound to do exactly what you're saying, to be able to marinate in the bounty of the present, right? With a sense even of contentment
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
in the present, even as we pursue worthy goals.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
So what we're trying to do is tune that brain more positively. Problem is, the lower regions of the brain are hard to train. They're very reptilian, very automatic, right? And so it takes a certain amount of effort to change them for the better. So essentially, someone who is unhappy, let's say, a lot of the time is
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
Yeah. I mean, it really is so true. It's funny for myself. I thought I would have issues with, in terms of the three main needs, safety, satisfaction, connection. I thought I would have issues with safety, like I'm kind of anxious by temperament. Or as a lonely, kind of introverted person, I thought I'd have issues with connection.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
And by issues, I mean having stable experiences of feeling safe enough or connected enough in the present. But no, my issues really have been around contentment, have been around feeling satisfied enough in the present, because I'm very goal-directed, I want to accomplish things, and I'm hedonistic, you know, I'm
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
on the Enneagram on the 7, if that's relevant to you in terms of that system of modeling. So it's been really startling to appreciate how much automaticity there is in my fairly well-trained brain at this point to look for the next thing to want. It's like endlessly foraging, even though my belly's already full, looking for the next new thing to want. And
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
it's really quite profound for people to explore. Can you actually feel like there's enough right now, even as you pursue wholesome goals to feel already content, even as you pursue important ambitions, um, It's pretty challenging. And probably because it's challenging, it's been really interesting. I've really wanted to do that.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
And to me, that's the name of the game, to feel content already, enoughness already. You know, I have a meditation thing online and I did a talk just on the word already, like the profound wisdom in the word already. You're already safe. You're already enough. You are already enough.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
is often having an overreactive subcortical region of the amygdala, the hippocampus, and the basal ganglia that's tilted and tuned in a negative direction toward negative emotion and trapped in certain loops, sometimes motivationally as well in terms of what people want and the rewards they're seeking that are negative.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
And on the basis of that, yeah, accumulate more knowledge, become more skillful, become more able to help more people, good stuff. But to feel already enough, it's just hard for people, and yet it's really important.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
What's it feel like to be motivated by a sense of something missing?
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
I mean, Maslow got to that with this, as you know, hierarchy and so forth. And self-actualization, the lower needs are called D needs, deficiency needs, something's missing, there's a lack. But self-actualization is a B need, B in need. You know, there's a fullness already. And I think a lot of people, and in their culture,
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
And for that person, there's not enough cortical, prefrontal, top-down regulation of that negative stuff, right? And also, there's a lack of the positive. There's not enough production or activity related to healthy opioids, natural opioids that are the well-being chemicals in the brain, or other little slippery small molecules called peptides, such as oxytocin.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
Dare I say, as a generalization, maybe a lot of men have a fear that they'll lose their edge. You know, the great ads, I don't know if you saw the beer ads for Dos Equis, this like really manly man, stay thirsty, my friends. You know, that if we don't stay thirsty, if we don't stay hungry, then we're going to lose our edge and not pursue.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
And it's interesting that in early Buddhism, the root of the word for craving is thirst. in the language of early Buddhism, thirst, something's missing. It's a drive state, biologically, hypothalamus-based.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
It's quite something for people to realize that they can shift out of a flawed vehicle that they're familiar with, you know, deficit-based motivation, into a fullness, a different vehicle that you can still be motivated. You can still be a top performer. You can still have a work ethic. You can still have standards.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
You can still achieve based on a sense of fullness already, good enough already, accomplished enough already, content already. And it helps people to realize I can step out of this rowboat. It's working for me, but it's costly. It's toxic over time.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
Yeah, in this other vehicle that I can increasingly trust over time, you know, as the basis for my motivations going forward.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
There's tremendous evidence for the ways in which beneficial experiences can gradually shift people over time, and there's tremendous evidence for that. There's large evidence for the underlying neurological implementation of that process increasingly, what's happening in the hardware. That's really great.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
There's been almost no study at all about internal factors in individuals, whether in formal clinical settings or informal life in general. What are the internal factors that lead to greater response to treatment or greater rate of change? It's kind of crazy. schools, there's the learning to learn movement that got interested in classroom settings for fifth graders.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
How do we teach kids to be self-directed learners from the inside out? So there's a growing sense of that in educational settings. But it's crazy that we've had 100 years of people in the growth business
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
formally, you know, psychotherapy and counseling and now coaching, who are interested in producing change that have generally operated in a growth 1.0 model in which the person is regarded as a passive recipient of experiences and information in the hopes that something will stick. And for some, it does. But we have ignored
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
in any systematic way, the agency of the individual in how they are engaging their experiences at the time. I've been talking about how do we engage the experiences we're having at the time in ways that promote positive neuroplastic change. What do we do on the inside out with the experience we're already having?
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
Because we have tremendous influence at the front end of the learning process, the formation of memory in the broadest sense, emotional, somatic memory included. The most important factors in terms of what actually lands is what we do at the front end of the experience we're having at the time. When you say front end, what do you mean?
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
Oh, I mean, while you're experiencing something beneficial, while you're experiencing it, whatever you do in your mind or whatever's being made to happen in your mind by a skillful teacher or therapist or coach, that's going to most affect the impact of that experience, whether it sinks in or not. The dirty secret is that
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
I'm a fan of mammals. I feel like I have a lot of empathy for our rats, our kind of like rat-like ancestors running around in Jurassic Park that lived through the cataclysm. Yeah. You know, the asteroid came. That was it on the 90% of the species, but our ancestors were crafty and sly and warm-blooded and had babies they took care of. And we are here today.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
The delta, the rate of change from session to session in therapy or counseling or rate of change, listen to a podcast. I do a podcast too. It's really humbling. I write books. I teach meditation. What change is actually happening? It's humbling to stare hard at that.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
And point being, the most powerful factors in change are what people are doing inside their minds at the time with how they engage the experiences they're having. And yet, my whole profession, clinical psychology, broadened out to counseling and coaching, has...
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
There's an underproduction of that. And What we're trying to do basically with people is to increase top-down regulation of negative factors, A. B, we're also trying to really promote more emotional learning of that which is positive so that there's more of a tilting in effect in the brain toward healthy opioids, you know, in general, oxytocin in particular.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
basically ignored the agency of the person and and not systematically certainly taught people how to steepen their own growth curve based on how they're engaging the experiences they're having at the time that to me is the growth 2.0 model and to as you can tell i'm kind of revved up about it can i feel about it but here's a here's a weird fact um 40 years ago
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
Really good research on psychotherapy for, say, anxiety and depression showed that on average, there was a moderate effect size on average. Some people got more, some people got less, but the average in numerical terms, the way this is done, about 0.6. That's moderate. That's legitimate. It's credible. It doesn't work for everybody. Average benefit, pretty good. 40 years later,
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
New theories, new understanding, new personalities, new charisma. What's the average response to psychotherapy for anxiety or depression? It's the same. There's no trend whatsoever of average improvement. So we've gotten a lot better at helping people have various experiences. We've gotten no better at helping them learn from them. And so to me, there's a call for action here.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
So when I tell you candidly, yeah, there's been very little research on one paper and a couple other related papers so far that have to do with teaching people how to deliberately internalize useful experiences, you know, to grow the good that lasts inside. And there's been no research on the underlying neurobiology of that. So to me, it's not a critique of what I'm trying to say.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
It's a plea for more investigation in this really important area.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
They're all better today than they were 40 years ago. There are improvements. We want to see improvements in certain areas.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
it's really strange if you think about it that, and you see this in the spiritual traditions as well, certainly the ones I'm familiar with, mindfulness training, Buddhist-y kinds of situations, very sincere teachers, very good at helping people have experiences. And sometimes in a growth 1.0 model, um,
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
those different settings or different kinds of trainings engender certain experiences in people that tend to have more impact, like being in groups of others or having intense experiences. Like Tony Robbins is a master at himself engendering states and factors that promote emotional learning in people. Phenomenal. And still, and this is no critique of him.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
I did the firewalk with him like 30 years ago. I've made it through it. It was cool stuff. But he's not teaching people on the inside out how to deliberately internalize the experiences they're having at the time so that they really land in some kind of system.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
And that, of course, would be how to do more research on it, where you take two standard interventions and you add these approaches of deliberate internalization to one, and hopefully you see greater impact and so on. But the broad point I would make about the fields is that I don't think there's much more upside to be had in getting better at fostering shiny experiences for people.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
Where the real upside is investigating how does learning actually happen in the broadest sense and how can we help it happen well.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
There's tremendous activation in the default mode network. So briefly, and you're familiar with this, there are different networks in the brain. There are probably three major networks that are relevant kind of sort of right here. One is when we're... You know, the salience network is tracking what matters, very amygdala-based.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
And then when we identify what matters, like in survival situations back in the jungle, we see the snake, you know, we've detected the snake. Then the second network, task network, gets engaged. Better do something about the snake. Jump back or prevent snakes or in the future go a different trail. Fine. And then when things settle down,
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
The brain defaults to a third network, which is where we go when we're kind of just spacing out or daydreaming or ruminating. And that network is kind of in the midline toward the rear.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
And, you know, related then finishing on that, more broader capabilities in terms of integration of cortical systems of different kinds with these underlying more ancient parts of the brain that began to emerge 200 million years ago.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
So when people are ruminating, there's activity there. I think of it as the simulator, the ruminator, you know, very involved with what's called mental time travel, imagining the future, reflecting on the past. So when people are stuck, there's a lot of activity there. And a lot of that activity, we haven't talked about this yet, it's super cool, is self-referential.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
Very me, myself, and I. And since neurons that fire together wire together, when people are in the default network in the ruminator, they're reinforcing what they're ruminating about and sensitizing their brain to what's negative along the way. So one of the, for me, takeaways from what I've really learned over the last 30 years about the brain is to get out of the ruminator as fast as I can.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
Feel the feelings. This is not about avoiding feelings, but feel them mindfully in a framework of spacious awareness. So you're not so glued to that angry case about other people or that resentment, you know, take poison and wait for others to die, as they say, right, resentment. You know, when you do that, you're reinforcing it.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
But if you're witnessing it more and naming it to yourself mindfully, you actually reduce reinforcement more.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
Yeah. Okay. So one is to take action. take action. And very often people ruminate to avoid certain experiences, particularly experiences related to taking action. So if you're ruminating about a meeting with your boss, or you're ruminating about a workplace presentation, or you're ruminating about a mistake you made, whatever, what's appropriate action related to what you're ruminating about?
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
Now, that's kind of tough-minded. Been a therapist a million years. I'm, I think, more compassionate, but I'm kind of tougher. You know, there's no replacement for action. Action binds anxiety, and action breaks people out of the rumination cycle. And it satisfies you. Hey, you took the action you could.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
I mean, right there, know that you did what you could, and then you have to work on becoming at peace with what you can't control. But you did what you could control. That's really important. One. Two, there are a couple of fantastic hacks. One is to do what's called interoception.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
Tune into the internal sensations of your body, like the sensation of the air coming in as you inhale and flowing out as you exhale, chest rising and falling. That engages a part of the brain called the insula, and it acts like a circuit breaker.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
I could say more about that. I'll say one more thing if I could. What's super cool is like, if we want to get good at something, study people who are good at it. So more and more, we're able with different forms of brain scanning, MRIs, EEGs, and even invasive experiments that are ethically challenged on non-human animals still. We're starting to reverse engineer.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
When people are tuning into interoception, they're in the present, and that reduces activity in the default mode network, which tends to be very often, like I said, focused on the future or the past. That's really a very, very powerful hack right there. Third thing people can do is tilt towards some kind of intensely positive experience. Whatever it is that's energizing for you. Jump up and down.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
Eat something good. Look out the window. Watch a cat video on YouTube. There is a place for literally snapping out of it. You want to reduce the reinforcement of the rumination cycle. And then I'll say one more hack that's really great. It's one of my favorites.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
You can get a sense of the sensations of breathing in your chest as a whole rather than in one little part or your body as a whole. Or get a sense of the volume of your room as a whole. Or raise your gaze to the horizon visually. Or kind of deliberate, yeah, I would just say that. When you do that, when you get a sense of things as a whole, two good things happen.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
One is that you start to engage, for most people, the right hemisphere of the brain, which does holistic, gestalt processing. That's why it does a lot of visual, spatial reasoning, distinct from the sequential, step-by-step specialization of the left hemisphere, which is why it's specialized for language, because language is sequential.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
Much rumination is saturated with inner speech, inner language, talking to yourself or ideating. But when you get a sense of things as a whole, you're immediately drawing on that right hemisphere of your brain, which reduces rumination activity. The other thing that happens, including when you especially lift your visual gaze to the horizon or above,
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
you shift out of what is called an egocentric frame of perceptual processing into an allocentric frame. There's a lot of science about this. And a large fraction of the brain is dedicated to visual processing, not just the occipital cortex, but other areas as well. So when you fiddle with visual processing, you're affecting your brain. A lot of real estate is getting affected.
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#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
So you can just notice it. In evolution, it makes sense. When things are close to you, when your gaze looks down to what's within a meter or two, That's where friend and foe live typically. Going to eat me or can I eat it? Self-referential processing increases. What saturates rumination is self, me, right?
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#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
The me that it's happening to or could happen to or did happen to or should have done a better job. Me, me, me, me, me. Okay. On the other hand, and you can just observe this, when you start getting a sense of things as a whole, And especially when you lift your gaze out to the bigger picture, you shift into a more impersonal frame of reference. You're not privileging your perspective.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
You're taking a sense of things as a whole, in which you're certainly a part of that whole, but there's a lot more going on in that whole. The sense of self immediately starts reducing. And as the sense of self starts reducing, just like as the sense of inner language is reduced, rumination starts to reduce as well.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
That's kind of my bottom line.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
What's going on in the brains of people who are resilient in the face of challenge, who are in combat situations side by side with somebody else, but they don't develop post-traumatic stress disorder? What's happening there? What's happening in the brains of super meditators, Tibetan monks with 60,000 years lifetime practice, let's say, of meditation? What's going on there?
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
One of the reasons people ruminate is a defense against feeling certain things. And the feelings keep coming up because they're incompletely experienced.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
So one thing a person could do to help themselves, if they keep ruminating around, let's say, a loss or a regret or there's something they have remorse about, is to really open up to that feeling and to resource themselves so they can tolerate it and are not overwhelmed by it. But once you're able to feel it, if only for a few minutes in a row, really let yourself feel it.
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#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
And as you feel it, help it to flow. Blow it, in effect. That's really a crucial thing. The hacks I've mentioned are more situational. Taking action on the things that you ruminate about, including reaching out to someone you've harmed and really apologize to them, or write a letter that they'll never read because they're dead.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
or they'll never open your mail, but you at least wrote the letter and shared it with people. You know, take the actions that you can, as well as feel the feelings fully and help them out the door. In the last few years, I've been just stunned by the amount of
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#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
mistakes that i've made in my life that have resurfaced for me to consider it's not like people brought them to me it's just my mind has gotten quiet enough that that stuff in some of those rooms you know in the mansion of the mind has started to open their doors on their own And push their way into the living room. Hello, Rick, you really fucked up there. How do you feel about it now?
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#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
And I've had to really come to terms with it. But the key to that is to let it to flow. So that's a deep aspect to it. And then your other question, there's tremendous evidence that people can really change over time. They really can, as you talk about, go into those different rooms and gradually clear them out. You know, they really can. And so what are the factors that help people do that?
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
One is to just like anything is to bring effort to it. How much time are you spending really productively on, you know, releasing old pain? you know, and replacing it with something beneficial, including things like kindness toward yourself and compassion for yourself and respect.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
I've been with people, a lot of whom are men, in business settings and also in wilderness settings who are really fierce, really tough, really prepared to deal with a lot of challenge who are are completely undone at the prospect of being at all emotionally vulnerable with another person. Like that is staggeringly hard for them.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
You know, I think of interpersonal cowardice as a certain particular kind of cowardice. I'm not trying to shame it. I'm just sort of naming it. We're scared, right? admire yourself, respect yourself for doing that kind of noble work. So that's one factor. How much effort do you bring to it? Second, how skillful are you?
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
Are you listening to, you know, your podcast, which is an incredibly dense repository of wisdom about how to change for the better over time? You know, being skillful. And do you reach out to experts about it? It's so interesting. People understand they have to fix their
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#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
And we can study more and more what changes in the brain over time with long-term meditation. You've been a meditator for a number of years. I can tell you probably, if you're like other people who've meditated for a while, significant changes that have occurred in your own brain that then map to changes in your mind. So maybe we could talk about that too.
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#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
faucet um you need an expert let's say someone who knows how to do it maybe you already know how to do it but if you don't know how to do it you want to get someone who knows how to do it well if you want to uh fix the leaking faucets you know and they're spewing that are dripping crud in your mind talk to an expert uh as best you can given the expenses involved do the best you can there i think that's that's also important and then there's another thing which is uh
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
In wisdom traditions, it's considered that the path and the cart of healing, growing, and awakening, I think of those three, healing, growing, awakening, is like a cart with two wheels. They're two tracks. And one is the track that we've been entirely focused on, which is developmental change over time, which means you've got to be changing your brain over time.
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#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
But the second track is true nature already. what's always already a word again, already true underneath it all of who you really are. And can you get in touch with that? Can you believe in it? Uh, can you use it as a refuge that you can return to so that the two tracks support each other? You know, um, The phrase gradual cultivation, sudden awakening, gradual cultivation.
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#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
It's a progressive process. And so for people to really, really change over time, I think what's really helpful is, like I said, effort as in any domain and skillfulness as in any domain. And along the way, as that change is happening, see if you can get increasingly in touch with your own fundamental good heartedness.
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#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
you know, your own innate goodness, the innate wakefulness, biologically, even without getting new agey or, you know, transcendental about it, just for some reason, biologically, we evolve. level of being inside us underneath personality and gender socialization and history that is unstainable, unbreakable. We didn't make it. We can't break it. It's there.
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#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
And we can gradually get in touch with it, especially as your mind gets quieter. You can recognize it increasingly in yourself and get in Rest in it. Have one of your wheels in your wagon of healing, growing, and awakening. Stay in touch with that track along while doing the work developmentally.
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#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
And most of what I do is freely offered. We have stuff for sale for people who can afford it. It's reasonably priced, blah, blah. But it's kind of the Robin Hood principle, frankly, where a lot of our aim is to make things available for free for people around the world. So I would say that. Also, I got a shout out. You asked about our son, Forrest, who's a superstar.
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#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
And the podcast, Being Well, he's really driven that. And more and more, he's creating his own content. So people could check out that podcast, too.
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#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
Well, you take good care of yourself, Chris, and I hope my wish for you in part is you too can be in touch with really what a good guy you are.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
So five things we're hardwired to do that were really good for survival back in Jurassic Park, the Stone Age. One, continually scan for bad news outside and also inside. Look for the bad. Two, when you identify it, over-focus upon it. So that's one reason why Barbara Fredrickson's work on positive emotions is called Broaden and Build.
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#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
The broaden part is that while we're having emotionally positive experiences, our perceptual field is wider, which also promotes greater creativity and productivity at work. When that one light on the inner dashboard, mosaic, 10 by 10, 100 little lights starts flashing red, we ignore all the other green lights and the gray ones, the neutral ones, to focus on that one thing.
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#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
Third, we overreact to it. People react more to loss than to gain. That's Kahneman's work on prospect theory and all the rest of that. Just think about the emotion. Somebody gives you $100. Oh, that's nice. On the other hand, what happens when you realize someone has stolen $100 from you? You know, the intensity is great. So overreact. And then fourth, really important, overlearning.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
We're much more impacted typically by negative interactions with a friend or a lover or family member than we are by positive interactions. That's why positive interactions need to outnumber significantly by people debate the number, the factor, but by three to one, five to one or more. you know, in a long-term relationship.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
And when I stumbled on that fact in grad school, I revisited the last three days with my wife and realized I needed to raise my game in terms of the ratio of positive and negative. So that's four things right there. That's really natural. And then fifth, as a result of that, the brain gets sensitized It's designed to become sensitized to negative experiences.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
So when we're identified with anxiety, when we're hijacked by it, or anger or frustration, or feeling inadequate, that gets reinforced very quickly in the brain, and we become even more vulnerable to that kind of experience in the future.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
Now, that's different from mindfully experiencing negative emotions, which actually then tends to neutralize them because we're starting to associate a kind of undisturbed observing of the negative experience with the negative experience, which tends to calm it down.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
So those are five things that we're just naturally hardwired to do, which then, sixth, outside of the neurobiology in the world, tends to create vicious cycles with other people. And that's the negativity bias in a nutshell. There's certain situations where it's really useful. You know, you grow up in a war zone or you live in a war zone, it's really handy.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
But for most people, modern life most of the time, it creates all kinds of needless suffering and needless aggravation with other people. And so practically, if we tilt toward valuing beneficial experiences in a kind of hard-nosed, clear-eyed way, not out of airy-fairy positive thinking, but in a hard-nosed, clear-eyed way.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
We're trying to grow strengths inside, in part to deal with the bad, as we lean into beneficial experiences and we help ourselves disengage from negative experiences to the extent that it's useful for us to do that and not get ruminating about them and so forth. If we tilt in those ways, we're just leveling the playing field.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
That's part one of it. And in me, I don't like bullies. And in effect, we're being bullied by our brain. You know, so there's a part of me that's like, fuck you, right? That's one part of it. You're exactly right. But there's the other part, which is in addition to just leveling it and no longer swimming upstream, how do you grow the strengths inside?
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
How do you influence who you are becoming from the inside out? And to me, that's very interesting. You know, I grew up really a shy, dorky kid, decent parenting and so forth. I was very young going through school. And so I really felt nobody cared about me or saw me and I was shit. I was a loser and I was never going to be any good. And so it became really important for me to develop...
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
strengths inside of various kinds that compensated for that, that healed that, such as feeling just included. Or I still remember a million-dollar moment, you know, because I was super young in school. I was picked last for sports. In college, though, I kind of discovered I was a pretty good athlete. I was playing intramural football American football, not soccer, but you got it.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
And this stud of a quarterback on our team who was just a little too small to play Division I football, but was still a manly man. And he walked past me one day as we were coming back to our dorms after practice, and he just grunted at me, you know, like dudes do. Hey, Hanson, you're good. I'm going to throw to you more. Oh, man. That was a million-dollar moment.
Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
That was so good to take in, to let it sink into me, to specifically heal wounds and lacks inside and also grow normal range, self-worth and self-confidence. So for me, these are the two reasons, to tilt toward what's beneficial and to take in the good, to grow the good that lasts inside. One, definitely compensate for Mother Nature's bias, but also to develop whatever you want to grow inside you.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
It's developed, it's acquired over time based on how life influences us and what we do with it. So we have a tremendous amount of influence over who we are becoming and influence over the strengths we are growing. And therefore we have moral responsibility for what it is that we develop inside. So that's for me a really important frame here. And it's a very hopeful one.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
The more that society pushes us around with these large scale forces, we just cannot do anything about the results of an election. We get one vote. The election happens. Large macro systems, economic issues, cultural forces, weather plagues recently, all that we don't have much influence over, if at all. But we have tremendous influence gradually, bit by bit over who we are becoming.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
And for me, very much in the center of my work is not some airy-fairy, loosey-goosey, soft, new-age thing. A hard-boiled clarity about the challenges of life and also our tendency, which we might get into, to have a negativity bias in the brain that tends to obstruct the cultivation of the strengths we need to grow.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
So deliberately focusing on inner strength, psychological strengths, is a really important thing and it's very hopeful because we do have power there. So that's contextual.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
And then in terms of, if I follow you right, the inner strengths, the process of developing inner strengths, and in particular, the inner strengths of mindfulness and compassion, which is where you started, brings us home to ourselves. And it's a remarkable fact, given all the arguments about what is human nature historically and religion and philosophy, things like, are we saints or sinners?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
Well, we're both. And we have these two wolves in our heart, and as the proverb puts it, love and hate. And so we have these two qualities. But still, fundamentally, what are people like? when they're not running for their lives, when they're not stressed out, when they're not overwhelmed with grievances or in great physical or emotional pain, what are most people actually like?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
Most of us, most people, because this is our biology, settle down into a quality of presence and centeredness and good-heartedness. That's who we are in our resting state when we're not disturbed in various ways. And the resting state of a complex system defines the system, not where it goes when it's jiggled one way or another by a threat or a loss or the latest event in the news.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
Who are we when we're at rest? And when we're at rest, we are naturally mindful. and compassionate. That's our home. That's our true home. That's who we really are. And that's so good to realize. It's a hardcore scientific fact that when people settle in, they don't become sociopathic jerks. They typically are scattered all over the place. They become centered and caring.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
That's our nature for most people. And so it's a homecoming. So I think of, long story short here, and then I'll shut up, I think of meditation broadly and inner practices in general as a kind of homecoming in which we We have to come home to ourselves to take those moments of breath or two or three to help experiences really sink in, to grow durable strengths, hardwired into our nervous system.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
We have to be present with ourselves, with compassion and caring toward ourselves. We have to be on our own side to grow the good inside. That's a homecoming.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
And also we in, as we practice, we also uncover the good news that's already true inside ourselves and inhabit it increasingly and feel at home increasingly in who we are and have confidence at it in the face of all the self doubts and feelings of inadequacy and comparison messages from the world. That's a beautiful path.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
Job well done.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
Yeah.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
Well, again, pause for reflection and appreciating the point you're making about the value of various inner strengths. In this case, we wouldn't think about it, but what is developed through mindfulness training, what is developed through the practice of yoga that would be relevant for Navy SEALs, the tip of the spear? as I believe.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
And even in that environment, obviously, it's important to develop various qualities inside, including mindfulness and that sense of centeredness and being in your own body through yoga. So purpose and mission. I'm still haunted, John, by what you said about disease of disconnection not mattering, right? And That's very deep. Maybe we'll circle back to mattering in a bit here.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
But one way into it is to start by connecting with yourself and mattering to yourself. A little bit on that latter point. As a therapist, it took me years to realize that many of the people come to me, their pilot light was out. there I was in a sense with my hot air gassing them up, kind of fuel them. And they would nod pleasantly and they were suffering. They were motivated, but it wouldn't,
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
matter. It wouldn't affect them because their pilot light was out. They were not on their own side from the get-go. They were not for themselves initially. They did not treat themselves like they mattered. They treated other people like those other people mattered. They were loyal to other people, but they were not loyal to themselves.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
So that's the first step to develop that fundamental loyalty to oneself that it Even if you don't feel like you matter in the larger society, even if you feel like, for example, I believe many young men, certain kinds of roles that had been available to young men like you, your father, your grandfather, and so forth, are just disappearing, certainly in the American economy.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
And you don't feel like you matter. How do you matter when you don't have access to that kind of role, which would enable you to be a provider and so forth? So these are challenging times. Well, even if things, like I've been saying, outside you or out of your control, what's under your control is to matter for yourself. And same with connection.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
Being connected with oneself is crucially important. And as we connect with ourselves, that can help us manage social factors that disconnect us from others, at least to some extent. Clearly. A simple practice of mindfulness where you're becoming aware of what's going on in your own interior in a deep way brings you into connection with yourself and is an expression of mattering to yourself.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
As a little point here, mindfulness, the way I traditionally define it based on how it was originally taught, is about present moment awareness, period. Sustained present moment awareness of the outer world and the inner world. So we need to be very mindful if we're driving in traffic in the rain. And it's also helpful to be very mindful of our internal reactions.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
When your wife gives you that look and you realize that I need to clean something up here. So mindfulness really helps in those ways. Okay. As we become more mindful of our own interior, we start having more access to what really matters to us inside. What are our deep longings of the heart? What are our core values? What do we care about? What's our personal code?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
Regardless of what other people are doing and the lines they're crossing, What are the lines we don't cross ourselves for our own sake, even if we lose some momentary advantage? And so learning about ourselves through mindfulness, feeling down into our interior, and also giving voice to the different parts of ourselves that we become more aware of that may have been suppressed or pushed away.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
We're pushed around by this or that, including the internalized impact of life experiences going all the way back to early childhood that we don't even remember. Those forces are like strings pulling us as a puppet. With mindfulness, snip, snip, snip, we start cutting those strings and we become more and more our own person, at home, in ourselves, in charge of ourselves.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
The inner child and also maybe parts that have been shunned or decide that they really care about something important, but we haven't been listening to them. So mindfulness, again, lets us do that.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
So in all these ways, mindfulness helps us get more in touch with what we really care about and to start recognizing the difference between the shiny objects out there we might be chasing and the manipulations and persuasions of others and intimidations and threats of others that we're reacting to. We become more able to sort that out. Fundamentally, I'll finish here. Mindfulness brings autonomy.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
I'm a scruffy individualist. I'm a therapist, I'm mellow, and I'm a longtime meditator. I'm very individualistic and determined. And I think that autonomy is crucial. Autonomy is the foundation of intimacy. We can't be connected with others.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
if we don't feel that we're coming from a kind of an internalized secure base inside ourselves, which has a meaning and attachment theory, you probably know it may have a military meaning as well, secure base of operations. Anyway, that's autonomy and without mindfulness, We lack autonomy.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
We're pushed around by this or that, including the internalized impact of life experiences going all the way back to early childhood that we don't even remember. Those forces are like strings pulling us as a puppet. But with mindfulness, snip, snip, snip, we start cutting those strings and we become more and more our own person at home in charge of ourselves.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
Short version, we have a brain designed by evolution over 600 million years of the evolution of the nervous system to be biased. by being like Velcro for bad experiences, but Teflon for good experiences. And that's because in the wild, our ancestors, going all the way back, needed to get carrots and avoid sticks.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
The difference is that if you don't get a carrot today, food or a mating opportunity, you'll have a chance tomorrow. But if you fail to avoid that stick today, that predator, that aggression in your band or between bands, whoop, no more carrots forever.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
So the brain is tilted toward over-learning from painful, stressful, upsetting experiences, including in everyday life, and under-learning from beneficial experiences, including experiences of the strengths we want to grow. They wash through the brain like water through a sieve. Well, negative experiences of feeling criticized, disappointed, less than others, lonely, irritated, aggrieved.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
And we live at the age of grievance. Those, boom, get stuck immediately. That's a fact. And we can recognize that in all kinds of ways. And there's a lot of science about this in detail. Okay, great. Now, what do we do about it? I have a little bit of a saying, three parts, deal with the bad, turn to the good, take in the good. So for sure, we got to deal with the bad.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
And one reason we grow strengths through turning to the good and taking in the good, is to deal with the bad. So there's nothing in this for me that's about positive thinking. I tend to avoid the word positive just because it's so easy to misunderstand as some la-di-da, discretionary, privileged luxury for upper-class yuppies.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
No, the worse your life is, the more important it is to take in the good that's real, including the good that's already present inside you. your own good heart, your own good intentions, your own good qualities, registering them and growing them. Okay. So we got to deal with the bad, that's for sure. That said, first, be careful about ruminating on the negative. Doing labs around
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
I think that autonomy is crucial. Autonomy is the foundation of intimacy. We can't be connected with others if we don't feel that we're coming from a kind of an internalized, secure base inside ourselves. And without mindfulness... We lack autonomy.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
the negativity track in your brain, the resentment track, the grievance track, the self-criticism track, the anxiety track. That's looping. If there's no more, think about it. There's a saying from Sokny Rinpoche as a Tibetan teacher. He says, yeah, think the same. I have him coming on the show in April.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
Oh, what a history. Oh, there's so many levels there. Anyway, one of the things he has said is, yeah, I think the same thing over and over 10 times. 10 is enough. Right? Anyway, pull out a rumination. And one of the best ways to pull out a rumination is to go to the big picture.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
And also another way, at the same time, you can do either or both, is to tune into the internal sensations in your body, interoception, breathing, the sense of your chest expanding or contracting, because both of those neurologically, big picture, and also interoception, act like a circuit breaker that reduces activity in the default mode network of the brain, which is the primary location of the ruminator.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
when we go, when we're ruminating about things, which reinforces them. So pull out a rumination as fast as you can. Think about it to the extent you need to deal with the bad, right? But past the point that's useful, pull out. And that takes autonomy. And that takes what you said from the very beginning, how our internal choices affect our outer actions, including our relationships.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
So that's a big headline for me. When I learned about this brain stuff, I became much more alert to just marinating in crud. My case, my righteous case about other people, my criticisms of myself and so forth. That's huge. Second, when you're experiencing something useful, don't waste it on your brain.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
Think about all the money you leave on the table every day by first hardly noticing the good facts around you, like you did early this morning. How cool. The sky, the early light. the spaceship going up there. Wow, how neat. Notice them. So if people say a nice thing about you or you get something done, don't just blaze past it, hardly noticing it. Try to recognize the good fact.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
And then second, when it's a good fact, it's an authentic, legitimate, good fact, usually a little one. I call them ordinary jewels, but it's real. Let yourself feel it. That's the other thing. So many people, frankly, especially men, not as a generalization, they recognize a good fact. They're not deluded or psychotic, but they don't feel it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
They don't slow down for the two, three seconds it takes to shift from the idea to the experience in the body of feeling. whatever, a sense of relief, a sense of satisfaction, feeling of connection, that moment of awe and ease, spaciousness you had this morning. They don't feel it. So don't feel it. Don't waste it, right? You earned it or it was God's gift to you or the universe's gift to you.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
It would be churlish not to receive the gift, right? Feel it. And then once you're starting to feel it, help your brain. which has this bias. That poor little brain needs your help. Slow down. I've written a lot about this. People can look at my published paper on learning to learn from positive experiences, learning to learn from positive experiences.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
And I go through the neurology of this and eight different factors. But for me, the big three, anyone is good, the more the better. Slow down for a few seconds or more to stay with the experience. Keep the neurons firing together so they have time to wire together. Second, Feel it in your body as much as you can. Open to it in your body.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
The more embodied an experience is, the more it tends to register in the neural nets of memory. And third, appreciate what's meaningful or enjoyable about it. And that quality, the reward value of the experience that you can heighten through this third method, third technique, increases its registration and consolidation in neural memory. Deal with the bad, turn to the good. That is also true.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
And then take in the good to grow the good that lasts inside. Those are fundamental ways. Pull out of negative rumination and take in the good along the way.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
That's great, John. And I want to underline the finding from research and personal experience that most of us come into adulthood with what could be called wounds and lacks. Wounds being ways we've been injured by life, even just without trauma or abuse, just ordinary hassles, disappointments, people making fun of us in fifth grade, an unfortunate loss early in our career.
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Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
We come into it with wounds and also lacks the absence of the good, right? And so for people who often, including me, I'm talking about my own learnings along the way, who, you know, deep down inside feel maybe a little bad about themselves. Deep down inside, there's an ache in their heart. Deep down inside, maybe there's a moral injury. They feel remorse or grief or shame about certain things.
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Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
It's just unresolved. It just sits there. Well, that material truly can be healed. Truly can be healed. The bigger it is, the bigger the job, the more we have to do. But it truly can be healed. And the fundamental process of healing it is to grow the good around it. It's a two-part fundamental strategy. I'm bringing you in to clinical thinking. This is how it works strategically.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
Number one, growing the good around it. that would compensate for and balance and yeah, what was wounded. Like for me, I grew up, I felt very inadequate by the time I went off to college and just like the runt of the litter, as my dad would talk about from his ranch background and like a huge hole in my heart and whatever that might be. I know people who feel deeply guilty about certain things.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
Maybe they allowed their cat to go outside And it was taken by some predator and they just feel terrible about that, whatever it might be. Okay. So one of the most powerful ways to do that, to deal with this as you grow the good around it, that is matched to whatever the issue is.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
Like in my case was growing the sense that people actually wanted me and noticed me and wanted to include me and saw me. Okay. Second. You know this from my material about the heal process. It's this fundamental framework for deliberate healing and growing. The fourth step, L, is to link in which we associate in our minds the positive with the negative.
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Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
We feel the relevant positive experience, the beneficial experience, such as being valued or cared about or that we accomplish things or our life has meaning or gratitude, let's say, while also feeling the related negative material.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
And by feeling both of those together, for example, your bucket list, feeling the reverse bucket list alongside that sense of emptiness or frustration or disappointment in your life, or even excessive drivenness in your life, you got to achieve there's all this sense of pressure. If you feel them both at the same time, neurologically, they start associating with each other.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
And if you keep the positive experience bigger in your awareness for five, 10, 20, 30 seconds in a row, while also feeling the negative material, the positive will associate with the negative and gradually ease it, soothe it, bring context to it, and even eventually completely uproot it. It no longer burdens you. Yeah, I hope I didn't go into too much detail there.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
That's how you can do it for yourself. That's how I do it for myself. That's what therapists are doing with people fundamentally or other kinds of settings. These two fundamental processes, we grow flowers in the garden of our minds, and then we use those flowers to uproot the weeds in the garden of the mind.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
I appreciate that. And you are right out again, the heart of it, because without that sense of agency, autonomy, including and mattering, right? They all go together. Like if you don't matter at all, why should you take action? And what happens, and I think this is relevant in terms of the early research from Seligman and others on dogs, if it's a very short distance from
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
There's nothing I can do to I don't matter. Very short distance. And I think that's relevant again in our societies, that when people feel they don't have influence over their lives, including being able to find work that's meaningful and would enable them to buy a house these days, let's say, then they start to feel like, well, I guess I don't matter.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
And then they're very vulnerable, you know, to the appeal of various, you know, Ideologies, yeah, that appeal to their sense of grievance. So what do we do about that? I think it's very helpful to also appreciate that for many people, they were punished for agency. In their family, they were punished for having the agency to have a different opinion than the people around them or for speaking up.
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Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
or standing out. So one of the useful things to address is what's the fear inside of taking agency, particularly in areas where you feel hemmed in. People live inside the bars of an invisible cage and they're used to it. They don't like it, but they're used to it. And fears understandably come up and inhibitions that block the fullness of living ourselves.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
including expressing our true self fully when we start getting close to those bars of the invisible cage that were installed through painful experiences in our history or observing painful experiences that others were having if they started pushing out or that we imagined we would have.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
So paying attention to the bars of your invisible cage and what I call dreaded experiences, risks of dreaded experiences. So if you're mindful, circling back to our mindfulness, fundamental theme here, through greater self-awareness that mindfulness can bring you, you can start to recognize where are those bars.
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Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
And then with the sense that you matter and a really underestimated psychological strength of moxie or chutzpah, my scene, this is really useful. I'd rather have a client who's pissed off than a client who's depressed from not for my sake, but for their sake, because at least if you're pissed off, there's some juice you can work with.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
In any case, as you recognize those various bars of your invisible cage, you can then do deliberate, small, one step at a time experiments in which you risk the dreaded experience, let's say, of speaking up or being different or declaring your deep purposes, as you brought up earlier, as expressions of agency, and then notice what happens. And if, as it usually does, goes well,
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
When you take a one-step experiment, risking a dreaded experience by going one step past the bars of your invisible cage, when it goes well, that's a super high value experience to take in. That's gold. You really wanna notice that. You really let it land so that one step, the bars go out. And in that way, gradually, you expand the range of your life in which you feel free.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
and autonomous inside and at cause rather than sell out effect. That's a good way to experience more sense of agency over time.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
We're naturally relational. Arguably, Homo sapiens is the most social species on the planet. Certainly in terms of layers of behavior and also inner experience. Ants are social, but it's a pretty mechanistic kind of sociality. So we're very social. We're naturally social. On the other hand, life happens and we internalize various bars for our invisible cage on the one hand.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
And on the other hand, to navigate significant relationships at work, in love, raising a family, it's very useful to have a whole bunch of inner strengths of different kinds. Empathy, being able to tune into others, being able to regulate ourselves so that we can stay open and connected, even if it starts to feel vulnerable and scary.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
So for both of those reasons, both to deal with the wounds and the lacks, the learning, emotional learning from our childhood that has left us with living inside a suit of armor that's maybe three sizes too small to deal with that. And also to just manage various kinds of relationship issues with other people who themselves had a childhood and a life
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
and are dealing with all kinds of pressures in their life today. To deal with that, it's just so useful to have all kinds of inner capabilities and including skills for how to manage certain kinds of interactions. You think about people who are really good at anything, you want to study them, right? I admit it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
Lately, I've just been so fascinated by watching these short, these interviews on YouTube with people from very high level special forces, SEALs, Delta, and others, and just how they do it at that level of excellence. clear kind of excellence.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
I'm also weirdly fascinated with Magnus Carlsen chess videos and Alex Honnold rock climbing videos, and probably some other things as well about quantum physics, where you have people who are excellent at something. Well, we reverse engineer that. We study, huh, how do they do it? What are they doing that enables them to be so skillful in different kinds of interactions and relationships?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
And how can I develop more of those strengths, more of those skills, more of those attitudes, more of those ways of being myself? So in that sense, clearly the process of inner development
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
has all kinds of benefits in our outer relationships i would flip it around kids are 36 and 34 and if you ask so forrest who's my partner he co-authored resilient with me and he co-hosts the beingwell podcast and our daughter laurel we're all close but we're direct with each other if you ask them on your show so what skills what inner strengths do you wish your dad had more of when you were 14
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
they would have a little list i would agree with what's on the list today so yeah these are good things to develop inside yeah and also one last thing the more that you take responsibility as on a moral standpoint and exercise autonomy and so forth for your side of the street i call that the unilateral virtue whatever they do on their side of the street
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
we need to work on our side of the street too, for all kinds of reasons, including the ways it puts us in a better position to ask them to, could you like pick up the garbage on your side of the street? Because I'm picking up the garbage on my side of the street and haven't been for a while now.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
John, I'm really happy to be here. Truly, not a platitude. I've looked forward to this. I've really enjoyed the connection with you in our few minutes before we started. And I just think this is a great opportunity. And I feel connected already in some ways to the people who are listening as well.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
When we work on developing inner strengths inside ourselves, we become more aware of the process of growth And we understand more that we can be at cause in the black box of our own being, our own mind.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
Well, that then gives us more sense of clarity about, and frankly, a moral standing in asking other people as appropriate that we supervise or that we're parent or that we're made it to ask them to maybe develop something more inside themselves too, much as we've been developing things inside ourselves.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
I'm just laughing again, John. People can see my face if they're watching the video. You're just at it. Well, of course, Buddhism has no monopoly on compassion. And I have friends who are scholars, actually, of contemplative practice. And one of them pointed out to me that in the Quran, the word compassion, in translation from the original Bible,
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
Arabic, appears much more often in the Quran than it does throughout the Old and New Testament in the Judeo-Christian Bible. I'm not saying this at all critically. I'm just pointing out that there's a universal appreciation of compassion. Now that I said that, Trying to recall the exact question. How is compassion natural or how is the value of it? Oh, how do we develop?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
I love, honestly, your framing of this. And it's really central to my own experience because when I grew up, I did not feel I mattered. Part of that was my own constructing as a shy kid who just chose to stay inside the bars of my own invisible cage. I was a kid, but still, I made those choices.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
And one of the things that's been extremely important to me personally is to look for people with whom I can feel Like I am a thou to their I. If you're familiar with Martin Buber's framework of I-thou relationships or I-it relationships or it relationships. And we all have had the experience of being an it to somebody's I. They're selling us or intimidating us, manipulating us.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
They're using us as a means to their ends. compared to feeling like a thou to someone's I, I feel like a thou to your I, that you're with me, you're present, you have a job to do here. We haven't known each other before this. We're getting to know each other here. It's not more than what it is, but it's not less than what it is. It's a genuine I-thou relationship.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
And I actually have a little piece I wrote a while ago called Thou All Others. It's an orientation. It's an aspiration. An asymptote, we don't always reach it, but we approach it increasingly, where we treat all others as a thou to our I, even if we need to oppose them or protect ourselves from them.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
We don't lose sight that there's a being behind those I's who wants to live, doesn't wanna suffer, loves their children, enjoys chocolate, and there's someone over there. And so both of those are true. So I love how you're approaching it. And you said it in a beautiful summary way. And indeed, compassion sounds like a fancy word.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
What it's about essentially is the combination of empathy and benevolence in response to suffering. Kindness does not presuppose suffering. Compassion presupposes suffering. It's a response to suffering in ourselves or in others. And clearly, if we don't give a damn about their suffering, that kind of is foundational for they don't matter, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
Flip the other way, if we're with people who really clearly, they just don't give a darn about our suffering, we don't really matter to them, certainly as our innermost self. Maybe we matter to them as a tool they can use for their purposes, but it's not like our innermost being matters to them. So compassion is really foundational.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
That's partly why you may know I founded the Global Compassion Coalition a couple of years ago. And I think that much as you've said, there's a, as you say, disease of disconnection, but there's a loss of mattering. Part of it has to do with the ways that in our hunter-gatherer bands in which we live with just 40 people our whole lives, more or less,
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
Because everybody mattered in the band. There was common welfare. You needed to function as a team. People brought food in. They shared it. You were related to each other. You had to fight to deal with those marauding other bands who wanted to kill the men and take the women, frankly, and all the rest of that, and take your food and move into your area. You had to really matter. You knew that.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
But now, since agriculture, the last 10,000 years has been much more like Game of Thrones, in which that sense of mattering has just been blown up. And to me, the central challenge of this time and opportunity is to reestablish the sense of mattering, just like you're saying, grounded in connection, like you're saying, at the scale of the whole 8 billion strong human tribe. How do we do that?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
That we have our work cut out.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
If I could underline, I think the power of compassion is a way to expand the circle of us, the circle of caring. I think that in evolutionary terms, the fact that we lived in small bands, in effect, enabled us to be morally lazy. What I mean by that is because it was so natural and easy to care about our kin and our partners and the people we lived with and were in our faces every day.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
And if we didn't care about them, if they did not matter to us, they would throw us out of the band, right? We didn't have to learn. obviously, to care about 330 other million Americans, let's say, or 8 billion other humans on the planet. So compassion is a very powerful way to reestablish that circle of caring at wider and larger scale. So compassion is really central to that.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
And as part of it, if you're with someone and they're basically saying, essentially, I'm not going to have compassion for you, I'm not interested in it. I'm not going to go there. Your suffering is irrelevant to me. And in fact, I might be deliberately creating suffering for you for my own purposes. Obviously, that tells you, you don't matter to that person.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
If they're not prepared to have compassion for you, you don't matter. Flip the other way. If people can sense in you that your heart is closed, they know they don't matter to you. So compassion is absolutely central.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
That's good. The thought arising in my mind is, I hope I didn't suck too bad. But anyway.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
Yeah. And their needs matter and you have a solution for their problem.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
Oh, I agree with all that. And to be clear, my own background, I have a business background and I have a business. So for me, I'm very realistic about this. It's also, though, really important to avoid, there's a term in Buddhism, near enemy. It's the idea that there are these ways of being that are close to something valuable, but not really yet.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
And because they're close to it, people sometimes just go into those things as a way to avoid what they really could do. For example, let's see here. Compassion. A near enemy of compassion would be something like superior pity. It's like compassion. But it's not really it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
And another one, equanimity, a fundamental core of emotional stability, a near enemy would be something like indifference or apathy. And I think it's important because to watch out for people who act like they care about you. I grew up in LA around movie business and stuff, entertainment world. And if you have a hundred best friends, you don't have any real friends. The phoniness of pseudo-caring.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
I've been around people in the consciousness world, the new age psychology world, who they phone in their pseudo-compassion, but they're not prepared to let you land in their heart and to let you matter to them really, right? So I think it's some, yeah, I'll just say all that. Okay, good.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
Like faux compassion, pseudo friendliness, pseudo caring. Yeah. Don't like that.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
Well, I, like you said, I could talk with you for another four hours, you, John, and I could learn more from you. Ah, I'm so sorry. I'm going to take two. So first you, my first takeaway that I would hope people would really get is to appreciate their own innate goodness. You are inherently already innately enough. Okay. Worthy. capable.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
Your inherent nature, particularly deep down, is inherently wakeful, loving, and wise. And that's who you are at peace, deep down inside yourself. And people can see that. they sometimes need to slow down and quiet down so that underlying truth can be evident.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
You know, the metaphor that if we're like a pond and it's often turbulent, full of sediment, but if we let the sediment settle and the water clears and we can see the beautiful bright jewels that have always been there all along, deep down. So that's the first takeaway. And people can look inside and see it. And they can give others the blessing of recognizing that in them.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
And then second, alongside that inherent goodness is the truth that we're all works in progress. And there are things to develop. There are things to clear out. There are things to heal. That's true. Both are true. Inherent, innate goodness and developmental opportunities of various kinds.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
And in terms of that part, the two-thirds of who we are becoming that I alluded to in the very beginning here, we have profound influence in the innermost temporal sanctuary of our being to influence who we are becoming based on what we do in the moment with the experiences we're having. And we can let them be wasted on our brain.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
We can over-focus on painful, stressful, hurtful, harmful, negative experiences, or we can choose to exercise our agency in a framework in which we matter at least to ourselves, to direct our attention, to pull it away from
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
obsessive rumination of various kinds that doesn't go anywhere and instead rest our attention on what is valuable, what is beneficial, what is wholesome, what is beautiful, what is wise that we wish to develop and cultivate inside ourselves. We have that power and no one can take it from us, but no one can do it for us. The deliberate internalization
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
of beneficial experiences so that we can help ourselves with who we are becoming. And so we have a responsibility to use our power, that power for our own sake. And as we grow more of the good inside ourselves, there will be more and more, our cup will runneth over increasingly as we have more and more to offer to others. Those are the two takeaways I would hope people would get.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
That's a kind question. Thank you. Very simply, my website, probably a great place, or just Google my name, Rick Hansen, S-O-N, and you'll find on our website tons of really well-curated short audios, talks, videos, articles, so much there is freely offered. A little bit of what we offer are online mental health programs on different topics. We're, I think, doing one currently on
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
Grief and loss, we're talking now in the very early December. I don't know when this interview will post. Point being there too, these are very excellent programs. And if there's any question of financial need, we offer them for free. And that, for me, is really part of our fundamental purpose here, to be able to offer these kind of skillful means to people around the world, essentially.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
And they're in multiple languages too. So people would just go rickhansen.com or just Google my name and that'll be a portal, all kinds of good stuff.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
Wow. Good for you. Yeah.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
Mutual, John. Real respect. Thank you.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
I've been on a lot of things and no one's ever asked me that. That's such a penetrating, interesting question. So one part of it was that growing up, I was a shy, nerdy person and I skipped a grade and I have a late birthday. So I was very young going through school, a little late into puberty as well. And so I was routinely picked last for PE sports teams.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
And my dad, even though, as I've mentioned, was a cowboy, born on a ranch in North Dakota in 1918. He was not into athletics, so he never threw a ball with me, while being still a very loving and engaged father. And so rock climbing for me became, and that's been my particular entry into wilderness, rock climbing, technical climbing.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
When I started doing it right out of college, it was a way for me... I'm going to use a really funny word here, a term, to claim my manhood. In a sense, I just felt more badass, like I could do this. And I was athletic, and I actually am fairly athletic. And so in a lot of the early rock climbers, especially, they came out of Caltech and JPL and Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
It appeals to a kind of a determined, slightly obsessive-compulsive personality, which I'm sure I have, rock climbing, vroom, vroom, vroom. So it really fed me emotionally. So that was important. But I think also more broadly, as I've come to realize what we feel in nature and you reported it and neurologically, there's some interesting underlying circuitry related to this.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
When you looked up at the sky this morning, And you had a sense of the vastness there. Early in the morning, I imagine it was quiet. And then you saw this SpaceX launch going up further, sense of awe coming through. I believe you've had Dr. Keltner on your show, friendly acquaintance of mine at Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley, wonderful being.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
And when we're out in nature, there's an openness. There's an opening that occurs that itself is inherently calming. When I was a boy, pretty unhappy growing up. There were two great refuges for me. One was science fiction, which also has that sense of vastness and vistas and exploration. And the woods around my home, the hills and the woods around my home.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
And lately I've come to appreciate as well, and this goes to some deep topics related to contemplative practice and just life in general, that the openness and vastness in nature is was akin to the ultimate vastness in the mysterious, underlying, unconditioned, eternal ground of all.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
And there was in me a longing for that ground, and I satisfied, to some extent, that longing through being in nature. And of course, in nature, to finish, certainly rock climbing, you really need to be mindful. You're not really focused. No, you absolutely
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
Yeah. Yeah. Beautiful.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
Yeah, so I'm a quote-unquote senior fellow there. So it's an affiliation that I feel very honored by. And both our kids went to Berkeley, UC Berkeley. So there's a connection, Go Bears, as well. I think that the science... that can intersect with wisdom, including wisdom from First Nations people, indigenous wisdom, and then also certainly contemplative traditions.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
When you bring those two together, it's a very powerful combination. And then when you apply it to the notion of the greater good, what is the greater good for all of us today? It's crucially important at this time in the social history of humanity, which if you look at has had many positive developments, certainly over the last 10 years, 100 years, 1,000 years, notwithstanding
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
Also, some very serious challenges facing us, notably divisiveness that social media enables and various actors exploit that disrupts and erodes the very notion of the common good. that's necessary for a functioning, certainly democratic, civil society.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
So the GSC, the Greater Good Science Center, serves two really important purposes in terms of promoting individual well-being and then linking individual well-being to the societal scale factors that promote individual well-being, including the very idea of the common good.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
Well, I'm pausing because as usual, as I'm getting to know you, you really do get at the heart of the matter, which is great. And for me as a longtime clinical psychologist and parent and now approaching my, I believe, 44th wedding anniversary, and I'm old enough now to have lived through a tremendous amount of social change in America and the world. I was born in 1952.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
You can imagine what I've seen in my life, including in the sixties and the seventies. And it's extremely clear to me in all those ways that we need to have strengths inside. I think a little bit about your background in the Naval Academy, which I of course know very little about, but still in any domain, we need to grow strengths of different kinds.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
Now, some of those strengths are skills, knowing how to do things, Generally speaking, so much research as well as life experience show that the most important inner strengths to develop have to do with emotional intelligence broadly, like determination, fortitude, good-heartedness, empathy, self-regulation, insight into yourself, insight into other people, a warm heart.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
So we need to have these strengths. Strengths are crucial. resilience is what enables us to weather the worst day of our lives and achieve our goals every day of our lives. How do you have resilience? You need to have resilience through inner strengths, factors inside yourself.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559
And again, research shows that roughly about a third of the variation in our inner strengths is baked into our DNA for better or worse, right? I caught a lucky break in some regards and I'm still overcoming some tendencies in other regards. All right, the other two thirds, of who we become is up for grabs.