Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
Sat, 15 Feb 2025
Dr. Rick Hanson is a psychologist, author, and speaker. Our brains are more adaptable than we realise. With a bit of understanding, patience, and the right techniques, you can rewire your brain for greater happiness and well-being. So what are the best ways to make this happen? Expect to learn what positive and negative mental states are from a neurological perspective, if human brains are predisposed to being happy or peaceful, how to convince someone that they actually can change their mind, what the process for making our brain more likely to be happy, how to stop ruminating on bad experiences, how to not focus on negative self-talk, and much more… Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at https://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom Get a 20% discount on Nomatic’s amazing luggage at https://nomatic.com/modernwisdom Get a 20% discount on the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: Who is Dr. Rick Hanson?
Dr. Rick Hansen, welcome to the show.
Hey Chris, it's great to talk with you again. We were chatting briefly beforehand and it was literally over six years ago and your whole work has skyrocketed.
I'm really glad for you and I'm really happy to be here.
I appreciate that. Yeah, episode 47 was you, and this is going to be episode 902, something like that. So yeah, you were like a protoplasm. You were just a mere amoeba at the beginning of this journey. And look now as we're dinosaur-sized Diplodocus plodding around.
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.
The progeny continues on. So I want to go through the neurobiology of happiness today. This is maybe taking you back to sort of the beginning of your work, which I've become hugely obsessed by neurobiology, especially as it relates to well-being, interpersonal stuff. It really does feel like we sort of go around the houses of
finding explanations and personifying and coming up with interesting descriptions and titles for things to just come back to the nervous system and to just come back to sort of neurobiology. And I kind of really want to get this year into the nuts and bolts of this. So I guess maybe a good place to start would be what are positive and negative mental states from a neurobiological perspective?
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.
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.
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Chapter 2: How can we rewire our brain for happiness?
Less than a few minutes a day, people can profoundly change who they are becoming based on durable changes in their own brain.
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Let's go through in painstaking detail the process for making our brains more likely to be happy than somebody is going through their normal day. They think this Dr. Hansen guy sounds pretty good. He was on episode 47 of Modern Wisdom. I can trust him. I reckon he knows what he's talking about. Take us through it. Take us through the evidence-based processes.
Three things.
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.
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.
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Chapter 3: What are the positive and negative mental states from a neurological perspective?
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.
Right.
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.
Yeah. I suppose, you know, in the word heal, uh, Maybe most people would think about there being an issue which is being made better. And so far, three quarters of it, we've been engendering more of what we want to see in our lives. We have been finding the particular areas that we may feel deficient in or that we would just like to...
bring more of into our experience and we're moving toward that. But everything kind of changes or we move more into the remediation part when we look at the linking. So talk to me about the neurobiology of that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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