How To Develop A Resilient Mind | Dr Rick Hanson

Dr Rick Hanson is a psychologist and New York Times Best Selling Author. We are often told that the world is a vicious place, with this in mind, how do you grow an unshakeable core of calm, strength and happiness to help weather the inevitable storms? This is the topic of Rick's new book Resilient. I loved this discussion, finding someone who bridges practical application of psychological techniques & research with an understanding of the esoteric view of the mind is very rare, a sequel episode will likely be coming soon. More Stuff: Resilient: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0451498844/ Rick's Website: https://www.rickhanson.net/ - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/modern-wisdom/id1347973549 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0XrOqvxlqQI6bmdYHuIVnr?si=iUpczE97SJqe1kNdYBipnw Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - I want to hear from you!! Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Chris Williamson?

  Hello friends. Before I introduce today's guest, I wanted to give a massive shout out to everyone who shared and supported the episode from last week. We ended up in the top 100 on Apple Podcasts worldwide chart for three days off the back of one episode, which is absolutely insane. We've also now crossed 3.6 million listen minutes in under a year. So, thank you very much. Please continue to share the episodes. Tell a friend who you think would enjoy them and rate the podcast if you would, wherever you're listening. It does massively help and it makes me very happy. Today, I'm sitting

• 0:44Chris Williamson?

  down with Dr. Rick Hanson, who is a psychologist and New York Times bestselling author. Now, what's particularly interesting about Rick was that he has a very deep understanding of the esoteric meditation and wellness side of the brain and how life can be conducted, but also has a very strong academic background in the science as well. So, he is a serious contender for understanding how the brain works. And today, we're talking about Resilient, his new book. It's a very novel topic that I've never actually thought of all that much. And relating it to how we experience everyday life and how it can improve our wellbeing

• 1:27Chris Williamson?

  was a big eye opener. And I would be very interested to know if you agree. So, if you do, or if you don't, drop me a message on Instagram, Twitter, wherever you find me, at Chriswellx. For now, we're going to learn how to be resilient with Dr. Hansen.

• 1:57Chris Williamson?

  Dr. Rick Hanson, how are you today?

• 1:59Dr. Rick Hanson?

  Chris, I'm very happy to be here. By the way, please call me Rick, or I'll have to call you Mr. Williamson or something.

• 2:05Chris Williamson?

  That's fine. We'll stay informal today. So, Rick, what are we going to learn about today? What are you teaching us about?

• 2:13Dr. Rick Hanson?

  Well, you've asked me here to really talk about resilience, which for me is a word that's kind of easy to dismiss, like a cliche we've heard it a million times. But the essence for me is how do you grow? How? How do you grow? An unshakable core of resilient happiness. That's the question. It's easy to be happy when everything's going your way, but in the core of your being, how do you build up an unconditional well-being that can deal with the challenges of life and still feel content and at peace inside? So that's what I hope we can talk about.

• 2:45Chris Williamson?

  Well, that would be, if I can come up with that by the end of this episode, I'll be an incredibly happy man. So many listeners will probably know you for Hardwiring Happiness. That was a New York Times bestseller, right? Was there much overlap between that and the current book you're writing?

• 3:02Dr. Rick Hanson?

  That's a great question.

• 3:03Chris Williamson?

  The current book that you've just released.

• 3:04Dr. Rick Hanson?

  Yeah. That book, Hardwiring Happiness, you kind of, you get it from the title. It's about the fundamental how of growing qualities inside that you care about, like grit, or gratitude, or happiness, or self-worth, love for others, skills of different kinds. In other words, how do we actually hardwire passing experiences that are mostly usually wasted on the brain, but instead, how do we capture them? How do we harvest them and wire them into our own bodies so we become stronger and happier in general? So that's like the general method, how to fish. And then the book Resilient, it's going to be a dumb metaphor here, is about catching 12 fish. You know, one of the 12 fish of 12 strengths.

• 3:47Dr. Rick Hanson?

  That book's about 12 strengths, 12 factors that are based in the evolution of the brain as a kind of framework, but then we get into the practicality of it. 12 strengths inside that bring a resilient well-being in the face of life. One of the 12 strengths is learning. So that's the how to fish in general. And then the other 11 are specific fish, like mindfulness, compassion, aspiration, courage, that the book teaches you how to catch, in effect, and weave into your own body and so that you have them with you wherever you go. So that's kind of the difference between the two books.

• 4:21Chris Williamson?

  I get you. So is learning the foundation upon which all of the others are built?

• 4:27Dr. Rick Hanson?

  Yes, and isn't it true that that's the foundation of everything? You know, I had this experience when I was a teenager that when I look back on it, it was like a lot of things that happen when you're a teenager. You blow right by it and you hardly realize that something has happened that's important for you. You know, but you look back at it later, I was about 15. And I realized that I was utterly unhappy. I was miserable, I was neurotic, I was seriously messed up. Um, I was a mess and I was kind of in despair in a way. Like, what am I gonna do? My crummy family, my crummy school, I'm dead in the water, no one likes me. It was, it wasn't horrible abusive, like some childhoods are, but it was pretty bad, pretty miserable.

• 5:07Dr. Rick Hanson?

  But the light bulb went off that I could always grow and heal and learn and develop from here, going forward. In other words, I could learn every single day, how to be a little happier, how to talk to girls, how not to be such a dork, how to not get so bothered by my parents. You know, I could learn and grow every day. And that is the essence of self-reliance, where you take it on every day. How can I learn? How can I grow? How can I be a little happier, a little stronger, a little wiser when I go to bed tonight? And that got me really, really interested in that fundamental process of how do you actually develop yourself? Cause then that's the strength of strengths, right? Learning broadly defined, not memorizing multiplication table.

• 5:51Dr. Rick Hanson?

  I mean, like body learning, emotional learning, social learning, spiritual learning. That is the strength of strengths, cause it's the one that grows the rest of them. So if you get good at learning, oh, you know, then you can apply it to anything you want to develop inside yourself, or if you want to help other people.

• 6:07Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I think certainly for me, the friends that I'm closest with and the people that I resonate with the most are others that have a passion for learning things. And that's, that's not restricted to academic learning or useless fact learning. It's a, a virulent hunger for just wanting more, more knowledge or understanding, whether that be.

• 6:33Chris Williamson?

  Understanding ourselves and why we operate the way we do, or understanding why there's debris from the bottom of the sea on the top of Mount Everest. Like, you know, you just, just wanting to know stuff. And I think I feel very fortunate that I'm one of the people that's wired in a way that I enjoy learning. However, I definitely wish that my capacity for retention and recall was improved.

• 6:57Dr. Rick Hanson?

  Yeah. Now, if I could, though, as a guy, I am a, I don't, I, well, I'll, I'm a total geek myself. I love learning of the kind that you're describing. And the kind I'm going to focus on here is, in a way, a different kind of learning. It's more of becoming, in other words, becoming stronger, becoming happier, becoming more patient, becoming, you know, more at peace in a deep and profound way, becoming more skillful with other people. You know, developing habits, having it be easier to exercise, or not drink too much, or not be so bothered by other people.

• 7:41Dr. Rick Hanson?

  That's the kind of learning I really want to focus on here with you. That, you know, the development of kind of who we are, including the background experience of living, the development of traits inside us over time. Because to me, as a guy who's well educated, and I love learning in an ongoing kind of way, day to day, most of that kind of more intellectual learning is interesting, but it doesn't have a big effect on our day to day wellbeing, or our footprint on the planet, or our effect on other people. The development of who we are in terms of psychological traits of happiness, or calm, or lovingness, or self compassion, grit, things like that.

• 8:25Dr. Rick Hanson?

  That's what really affects us every day. And so that, as a psychologist and as a psychotherapist, that's especially what interests me. Also, as a long term mindfulness teacher and spiritual practitioner, that's what has also really interested me. You know, in my own path of awakening over this lifetime.

• 8:42Chris Williamson?

  Wow, yeah. So where do we begin? Where do we start? If we want to, we want to develop ourselves into a better fish catcher? And we've got 11 fish and we want to get them all. Where are we starting?

• 8:57Dr. Rick Hanson?

  That's right. A useful framework for me is to think of, think in terms of the three fundamental needs of any animal, which are related to the three stages of evolution and the three levels or stages in the brain. And those needs give us an overarching organizing framework. Because if you think about it, we are resilient in the service of needs. And if we don't meet our needs, we can't sustain well-being. Needs are a kind of deep idea in biology and then in psychology. And I think it's really useful, actually, to move them back into the front foreground of the conversation. What are our needs?

• 9:41Dr. Rick Hanson?

  And to be vulnerable enough and brave enough to accept the fact that you really do have needs. So, needs. Three needs: safety, satisfaction, connection, in broad umbrella terms. Most of what we need and want, and I'll blur the distinctions there, most of what we need and want falls into one of those three categories or some combination. We need to be safe. Rule one in the wild is eat lunch today, don't be lunch today. Live to see the sunrise, right? And then, we also need to be satisfied, whether it's, you know, a little worm that needs to get food, or a complicated human that's, you know, seeking different goals and different kinds of pleasures and trying to accomplish things and be successful in life. And we also need to be connected.

• 10:26Dr. Rick Hanson?

  Again, whether it's a worm just having sex with another worm, or very complicated humans dealing with politics and grievances and tribalism and attachment and social emotions like shame and inadequacy or feelings of self-worth. So that's the territory here. So, we need to address our needs. So the first thing I would just suggest to people is to look inside and ask yourself, given the challenges that you're facing out in the world and inside yourself, what are the key needs that are really addressed, that are being tapped here? Are you dealing with challenges to safety? Are you dealing with challenges to satisfaction, to goal attainment? Are you dealing with challenges in relationships?

• 11:09Dr. Rick Hanson?

  And then that takes you, it's really useful. That takes you diagnostically, as a kind of roadmap, into spotlighting the particular resources that would help you with your particular challenges. So let me be really concrete about it. So I'll do it kind of fast in a summary way. So you think about challenges to safety. They're indicated a lot by fear, or anger, or feeling immobilized, or you're outgunned, outnumbered, you're helpless. So if in yourself or other people, those red lights are flashing on your inner dashboard, you know, anxiety, any kind of spectrum, including subtle uneasiness, or irritability,

• 11:48Dr. Rick Hanson?

  anger, or a sense of being frozen, you know, you can't, you're up, you can't do anything. That indicates needs for safety. And it's important, obviously, to act out in the world. My focus is going to be about how do you act inside your own mind? How do you grow strengths inside yourself, the good inside yourself? So to deal with safety, it's really incredibly useful to know how to calm yourself down. How good are you at calming down? How good are you, what's your resting state of relaxation and ease inside yourself? How, how rapidly can you drop into tranquility at will? Those are key strengths to develop. Another key strength, obviously, is grit, determination. I have a lot of background in wilderness.

• 12:29Dr. Rick Hanson?

  I've done a lot of things where you really had to suck it up and dig deep to survive. That's a strength, to deal with safety challenges. And then a third big one is to notice that actually, most of the time, you're all right in the moment. We're designed through evolution, as you well know, to be paranoid, right? Always looking around the corner, what's about to bite us, or eat us, or leave us. And instead, the truth is, most of the time, though, in the moment of now, we're actually okay. And as you develop that felt sense of being okay in the moment, you're more able to deal with challenges without having them invade the core of your being. I've done a lot of things in rock climbing where it's really hazardous, but I'm not freaked out inside. So I'll stop right there.

• 13:11Dr. Rick Hanson?

  I've spoken to one of the three needs, but that gives you an illustration of what I think is really useful to do.

• 13:17Chris Williamson?

  I totally get it. I, I, I really do. I recently did a podcast with Alex Hutchinson, who wrote a book called Endure. If you haven't read it yet, I would, I would highly advise getting it. I was very fascinated by that. What I like and what some of the listeners at home may resonate with is you are breaking down a very overwhelming nebulous, kind of ephemeral, global sensation of discomfort, which the sum is greater than the whole of the parts sometimes. And by breaking this down into its component constituent parts, you see them for what they are and nothing

• 13:59Chris Williamson?

  more. And you're also given a clearer path as to what you need to fix. So I like the idea of identifying what emotions are coming up, then attaching those to, okay, so if I am feeling X, then downstream from that, what is it, or upstream from that, should I say? What is it that's causing that? What is it that I need to potentially spend a little bit more time looking at?

• 14:25Dr. Rick Hanson?

  I'm very glad you clarified that, Chris, because you're totally right. I tend to make assumptions, because I'm a therapist a long time, you know, that in terms of self-awareness, but you're absolutely right. The foundation is self-awareness. You've got to be aware of the fact that you're feeling uneasy, or unsettled, or anxious, or you feel threatened in some way. And if, because if you don't recognize that, then you won't be able to deliberately identify, you know, the tools you need for it. It's kind of like if your car has a flat tire, and you think you're going to solve that problem by putting gas in the tank, that's not going to be helpful. You've got to identify, yeah, that it's a flat tire. I'll give you a little example. If people, and a lot of people have a background

• 15:08Dr. Rick Hanson?

  sense of anxiety, they're anxious. You know, we live in turbulent times, we're, you know, invaded by a lot of media. There are a lot of reasons that are externalized that people feel anxious. And also, different groups are being kind of shoved up against each other, that tends to stir things up. And then in everyday life, people often have a nagging background sense of, am I good enough? Am I performing? Will I get everything done? What do I need to do about this? Blah, blah. So it's helpful to look inside and realize, you know, if you are at all nervous, or edgy, or uneasy, and that often will then lead people to move into anger, especially men, because it's a way to manage anxiety, to move into aggression and anger. But at root, there's an anxiety. So here's the thing.

• 15:53Dr. Rick Hanson?

  If you practice gratitude, will that make you less anxious? No.

• 15:58Dr. Rick Hanson?

  Gratitude addresses satisfaction. That's like putting gas in the tank, right? But if you've got a flat tire because you feel threatened by something you're you got to deal with or inside yourself, you feel uneasy, just in general. Gratitude is not going to serve you. You need to build up those kind of resources that I talked about previously that are specifically addressed to managing needs for safety.

• 16:22Chris Williamson?

  So what's the anxiety response? What would you recommend to someone who's got this kind of pervasive, low, low level, consistent anxiety or unease, general feeling of concern?

• 16:34Dr. Rick Hanson?

  Yeah, which is 40% of the population, for sure.

• 16:37Chris Williamson?

  Is that the start?

• 16:38Dr. Rick Hanson?

  I'm sure it is at least that. I'm being a little conservative because we're speaking about a background sense of kind of uneasiness or a tendency to go there. Maybe it's not in your mind all the time, but you can go there pretty fast. And and then you have 10% easily the population that are pretty clinically anxious. Well, the three resources that I named a moment ago are really good internal strengths. And to repeat the point, which bears repeating, this does not mean not doing things to make the world safer, you know, like put a stop sign at an intersection or have a, you know, a good criminal justice system or healthcare system. I'm in America and we're working on all these right now.

• 17:19Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you got a little way to go.

• 17:21Dr. Rick Hanson?

  Yeah, we got we're a little behind the curve. We'll just kind of set that aside for the moment. So building up the felt sense in the visceral core of your body of calm strength, that's a really useful thing to look for, you know, a handful of opportunities every day to feel and then take the 10 or so seconds, a breath or two or three, to begin the process of hardwiring that experience of the resource, the calm strength.

• 17:53Chris Williamson?

  So can you give us, could you give us an example of that?

• 17:56Dr. Rick Hanson?

  Yep. Okay. So.

• 17:59Dr. Rick Hanson?

  Let's, if, whatever you want to grow in the neuropsychology of growth has two necessary and sufficient steps. First, we must experience what we want to grow, or some factor of it. So we must experience calm strength. If we want to grow calm strength, we must experience skillfulness with another person. If we want to learn how to be more skillful, especially with a certain kind of person. All right, we start with the experience. But then, second, necessarily, we must turn that passing pattern of mental neural activation. Think of it as a very rapidly changing, you know, swirling Eddie in the stream of consciousness that lasts only a few seconds before it becomes something else.

• 18:42Dr. Rick Hanson?

  We must help that passing pattern of activation leave a lasting physical change behind. Otherwise, by definition, there's no learning.

• 18:50Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so how do, how do we do that? How do we embed it?

• 18:52Dr. Rick Hanson?

  How do you do it? Yeah, that's, hardwiring happiness is all about that. There are a lot of, there's a lot of detail about it. The essence is summarized in this great saying from the work of the Canadian psychologist Donald Hebb. Neurons that fire together, wire together. That's the two stages right there, firing and wiring. So if you want to help them wire together, three major keys. First, keep them firing. Stay with the experience for a breath or two or longer, instead of what people routinely do, which is to skitter onto the next thing, especially in our kind of Jack Rabody, ADD-ish culture.

• 19:26Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 19:26Dr. Rick Hanson?

  Uh, and also where our attention is being continually hijacked by other people. And attention's our most fundamental property. So it's important to claim your property and rest your attention for a breath or two or longer on the experience you want to internalize. Cause that's how you make it stick to you physically in part one. Stay with it, don't waste it, handful of times a day. Two, if you also want to turbocharge what's called, as you know, experience-dependent neuroplasticity, where you're helping your brain be changed for the better, in effect, which is an incredibly cool thing to realize you're doing. You are taking charge of who you are becoming. You are taking charge of the brain change process.

• 20:09Dr. Rick Hanson?

  So a second major way to do that is trying to feel the experience in your body. In other words, move out of this merely conceptual, like an idea, oh, I'm a strong guy. You know, that's good. That's better than the alternative, but much better to feel it in your body. Cause the more an experience is embodied, the more of a neural trace is going to tend to leave behind, especially with repetition.

• 20:31Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 20:32Dr. Rick Hanson?

  So feel it in your body. And um, third thing, that's a great hack for your brain, is to focus on what's rewarding about the experience. What's enjoyable about it or meaningful to you? Because when you highlight the reward value of an experience, that increases activity of dopamine and norepinephrine, two key neurotransmitter systems that then flag the experience you're having at the time for priority in storage, for protection in the long-term processes over days and even weeks of long-term consolidation into neural networks of this experience you're internalizing into yourself. Those three things are great. You don't need to do them all. Uh, the more, the better. It's accumulative, you know?

• 21:17Dr. Rick Hanson?

  But those three, stay with it, feel it in your body, feel what's rewarding about it, will tend to steepen your growth curve, uh, your learning curve in general as you move through your day.

• 21:28Chris Williamson?

  So that is trying to reverse the, our minds are Teflon for good thoughts and Velcro for bad thoughts. That's stepping in and you're, you're strapping some Velcro to some Teflon there a little bit, I suppose.

• 21:44Dr. Rick Hanson?

  Yeah, let, let's speak to that. So you know my, my shtick. Um, there, there are two reasons to, to do what I'm saying here. Number one, this is how to grow strengths and including happiness inside yourself. You have to turn states into traits, passing experiences, neurons are firing. You have to help them wire into you. And this is profoundly important. And people constantly skip the second step in their personal life or when they're helping coaching or therapizing, et cetera, other people. That's the fundamental process. That's worth doing in its own sake. If you want to help yourself grow and change for the better every day, this is how to do it. Second, doing this will compensate for what

• 22:27Dr. Rick Hanson?

  you're bringing up here, Chris, which is the brain's evolved negativity bias, which, as I put it, makes the brain like Velcro for bad experiences, but Teflon for good ones. And obviously, we need to register threats. And I say, I don't believe in positive thinking, nothing in what I'm saying is about looking at the world through rose colored glasses. It actually, what I'm talking about here is old school. It's about self reliance. It's about becoming stronger, tougher, wiser, smarter, braver, happier, more loving, to deal with the crud of life, as well as just everyday opportunities. So there are two reasons to do this. One, to grow the good in general. And two, to compensate for the ways that Mother Nature wants to make us more anxious and irritable and uptight over

• 23:12Dr. Rick Hanson?

  time for broad purposes of survival. But most of the time, that negativity bias just creates a lot of excess suffering and unneeded conflicts with other people.

• 23:23Chris Williamson?

  And within ourselves as well, I suppose.

• 23:25Dr. Rick Hanson?

  Yeah.

• 23:26Chris Williamson?

  So we've talked about how we can reinforce positive learning. How can we dampen the effect of negative learning?

• 23:36Dr. Rick Hanson?

  That's a great question. Well, and when I say positive, I want to be again really clear. It's not about just smell the roses. That's good. But when we say positive learning, we're talking about becoming grittier, becoming more patient, becoming more compassionate for other people, you know, becoming more capable at work.

• 23:55Chris Williamson?

  As a point there, I guess a flag in the ground that most of the listeners could use is, did that particular situation make me feel good? If so, sit with the situation, allow it to, like how you would smell a nice glass of wine, right? Or how you'd savor a good meal. You'd sit and you'd let it percolate and you'd reflect on the experience briefly for, like you say, the 10 seconds or so. That's how we identify, or that's one of the strategies, I'm going to guess, that we can use to identify, should I be spending some time reflecting on this?

• 24:33Dr. Rick Hanson?

  Um, I, I, that's totally true. And the reason I'm a little twitchy here is that I've just learned in talking about this that framing it in that way tends to take people fairly quickly into a kind of trivial or superficial take on this.

• 24:50Chris Williamson?

  Got you. So how can we, how can we frame it differently then?

• 24:53Dr. Rick Hanson?

  Yeah, it's legit what you're saying. Why not? Obviously savor that glass of wine or that moment, you know, with your partner or you're just, you know, relaxing at the end of a workout, you know, why not? But what I'm getting at more generally is what do you want to grow inside yourself these days? What are you trying to develop? Not just head learning, like knowing more things about, you know, the universe, but inside yourself, are you trying to become more patient, more skillful and so forth? So one example is, I've been married a long time. Something will happen with my wife. We're having an interaction. It's getting a little heated. I'm getting irritated. And I suddenly realize, hey, Rick, it'll go better if you do X instead of Y.

• 25:39Dr. Rick Hanson?

  And that doesn't mean knuckling under my, to my wife or walking on eggshells. I just realized, oh, I could be more skillful in some way in the future. And I got to clean up the mess of this argument, but in the future, I'm going to, you know, be more skillful. There's a moment there to help that learning land inside yourself so that the next time your partner is doing their thing and maybe they're being a little irritating, you're not going to react the same way next time. You've actually learned how to be different. You've learned how to be more skillful. So that would be an example.

• 26:11Chris Williamson?

  I totally, I totally get it. I think maybe if my, what I was, I was analogizing between you savoring a nice glass of wine and thinking this is nice and you feeling a sensation in your body after you have done something which you yourself value by the values you've given yourself and savoring it in that same manner.

• 26:33Dr. Rick Hanson?

  That's it. That's right. The savoring is a tricky word because here's a, here's a another. I'm glad we're getting into the weeds here. Sometimes what we have to register is not pleasant. It's not something we would savor. Like, for example, if you recognize how to be more skillful with somebody, you don't really savor that, if you think about it.

• 26:51Chris Williamson?

  Agreed.

• 26:51Dr. Rick Hanson?

  Also, um, if you're, if you're, like I was a shy, dorky, nervous kid.

• 26:58Chris Williamson?

  We all were. We all were.

• 27:00Dr. Rick Hanson?

  I don't know about all of you guys. I was, you know.

• 27:02Chris Williamson?

  I didn't even, I didn't even anyone to run for their money as a shy dork.

• 27:05Dr. Rick Hanson?

  Oh, good. Then you know what I'm gonna say here. So, but then in young adulthood, you know, I, I started doing stuff in wilderness. And I began having, I was very young going through school, so I didn't realize I was at all athletic. And I felt inadequate and not manly and whatnot. So then, starting in college and beyond, I did a lot of stuff in wilderness in which I would have many experiences of being strong, you know, even feral, like, here on the planet, or pulling over and overhang, or, you know, making a fire in the rain and, and I would just kind of try to help those experiences sink in. Cause they compensated for those old feelings of inadequacy and worthlessness.

• 27:45Dr. Rick Hanson?

  And they were also a way to build up grit over time. So now, it's not so much that I was savoring them. It was I was really trying to help them land inside and shift myself along the way. That would be.

• 27:57Chris Williamson?

  I understand. That's a, that's a, a nice bit of clarification that we've got there for that. So, we've, like I say, we.

• 28:04Dr. Rick Hanson?

  One more, one more. Remorse. Sometimes you just gotta register that you were a jerk.

• 28:10Dr. Rick Hanson?

  It's not a pleasant experience. You're not gonna savor healthy remorse, the wince of healthy remorse, where you realize, like, I yelled at our daughter once when she was like two and I didn't think I was that loud, but I freaked her out. And I just, so bad at the look on her face. So I was just like, man, never do that again. Um, like, you know, that's something too, we've got to let sink in, but it's not something we would quote unquote savor.

• 28:35Chris Williamson?

  Totally correct. I did a podcast, I think the listeners will probably know it better than me, number 14 or 15 with Corey Allen. And he coined this term, which I absolutely love, and you may, you may like as well, which he referred to as the mindfulness gap. And it's that breadth in between action and your interpretation of it, either from yourself or from someone else. And I often, I often think about that mindfulness gap. When you're talking there, you're in an argument with your wife, or you, there's an emotion or a sensation or a thought that's arising inside of you. And before you allow it to fully burst up from the water as the fully formed bubble that it is, you just catch it and just think, for one second, I'm just going to use this mindfulness gap to work out, actually, what

• 29:20Chris Williamson?

  is this? And what should I do with it?

• 29:23Dr. Rick Hanson?

  It's great what you're saying here, because you're naming a second key condition for what I'm really jazzed about, which is the general process of growth. How do you grow? Because then when you know how to grow broadly, you can apply it to anything you want to grow, right? And you've named already two key conditions for that. One is self-awareness. You have to be aware, like if you're anxious about something, you're uneasy, you have to recognize that. Because then you realize what the challenge is inside that you need your inner resource for. The other thing you've named here is that space of mindfulness, where there's a, there's like a place in which you can witness what's happening, rather

• 30:02Dr. Rick Hanson?

  than be hijacked by it. And I think of those, by the way, as two fundamental resources also to grow inside. I use the term inner resource or inner strength interchangeably. Mindfulness is a resource. It's a trait. People can develop trait mindfulness. And people can also develop the trait of greater self-awareness, you know, by exploring themselves over time. And then on the basis of those two traits, then you can really steepen your growth curve as you go through your day.

• 30:32Chris Williamson?

  I it's very interesting that although obviously it makes sense because the science reflects real life, but it's interesting that me as someone who and my friends and other experiences that we're drawing upon here that aren't informed about the science, the approaches that we are finding which are beneficial and that help are reflected in the science. Obviously, that's it. It's natural, but it's nice to hear that that's that you're not you're not as we would say, you're not stood in the wind with your dick out, which is the equivalent of just not knowing what you're doing and missing the mark. So we mentioned about bad sensations and

• 31:15Dr. Rick Hanson?

  Oh, yeah. Thank you for that.

• 31:16Chris Williamson?

  Let's get back on to that.

• 31:18Dr. Rick Hanson?

  Okay, 100%. So first, I'll do it this way. For me, there's this fundamental three ways to work with your mind. Just about all the methods I've encountered as a therapist and a longtime meditator fall into three categories. First, you just be with what's there. You feel the feelings, you let them flow, you explore them, you have to tolerate your own experience, you just be with what's there. The second great way to practice with your mind is you're trying to reduce the negative. You know, you're trying to prevent it in the first place, or decrease it, or just release it entirely. And the third great

• 32:00Dr. Rick Hanson?

  way to practice with your mind is you're trying to grow the good. You're trying to create it, to protect it, to increase it. In effect, if your mind is like a garden, you can witness it pull weeds or plant flowers. Let be, let go, let in. And that framework, let be, let go, let in, really is clarifying. So the first thing to do with the negative is to let it be. And I suppressed the negative a long time, which just made it worse because the brain, the mind is not like a flush toilet. It's more like a septic tank, you know, that stuff. So you have to be able to feel it. And that's where kind of like you're getting it earlier, these other resources inside of self-awareness and mindfulness actually

• 32:42Dr. Rick Hanson?

  enable us to be with our own experience and not be overwhelmed by it. The thing is that I've seen for a long time, I've been working with people for a really long time. And Fifty percent of the battle is to be able to step back from your experience, not act it out, not react to it, and witness it in a space of awareness, to be with it. And that's half the battle right there. It's so important.

• 33:10Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 33:10Dr. Rick Hanson?

  But then, we need to let go. So then, I would say, this, these three ways to practice with your mind gives you a natural sequence that maps to what's happening in the brain as well. So first, we be with what's there. That helps it become immediately less upsetting because we're kind of stepped back from it. We're witnessing the movie. We're not in the movie. And then, we move into releasing, where, like, you let tension flow out of your body. You, you know, you yell a little bit, not freak anybody out, but you get it out of your system, being real. Um, maybe there are ideas floating through your mind that you realize, you know, I don't need to believe that crap, you know, I can't let that go. Or you realize, I'm getting caught up in proving my point, you know?

• 33:52Dr. Rick Hanson?

  Or I'm getting attached to a certain goal, and it's just not happening. I need to let it go. It's not gonna happen. All right, that's the second great way to practice with the negative. And then, the third is to replace what you've released with some positive alternative. That's partly where this idea of matching the resources you're growing to the nature of the challenge and the, in terms of the need that was addressed, is really useful. So if you're letting go, let's say, of negative that's more anxious and angry, you can replace it and focus on things like calm strength, feeling protected by others, relaxing your body. If what you released was more related to satisfaction, like disappointment, or frustration,

• 34:35Dr. Rick Hanson?

  or a sense of your life being depressive, or blah, you can then bring in, in the third practice, replacements that are things like gratitude, gladness, healthy pleasure, savoring that good glass of wine, or that sunset, or accomplishment. That's a really important one, to register again and again and again. Successful goal attainment, including in small bits, like each individual email, as you go through your day. Let that in. Yeah. Or then, if what you released, I'll finish on this one, is related to connection. So maybe you released feeling hurt by other people, or mistreated, or resentful, or you're getting caught up in kind of grievances and vengeance, speaking of politics these days, but anyway. And instead of, you know, so after you've released that, what do you replace it with?

• 35:19Dr. Rick Hanson?

  You replace it with self-worth. Or feeling cared about or connected with other people, or you grow compassion or self compassion or confidence that are specifically related to negative material related to connection. So all right, so those three give you a great roadmap for dealing with stuff in the moment. And if you want to, as a bonus, you can do what I call linking, in which you're aware of both positive and negative in your mind at the same time. You have to keep the negative small and off to the side, like old feelings of hurt, or feelings of resentment. And then in the foreground of your awareness, you focus on the positive material, the beneficial material, that's kind of the matched antidote

• 36:03Dr. Rick Hanson?

  to that negative. So you would be, let's say in my example, aware simultaneously of feeling kind of hurt, off to the side, like ignored, dismissed, disrespected. But in the foreground, you would be really aware of people who like you, your buds, your buddies, your comrades, you know, your friends, your allies, who really care about you and love you. And since neurons that fire together, wire together, when you're aware of two things at once, especially if you keep the positive bigger, it will gradually soothe and ease and even replace the negative material over time.

• 36:37Chris Williamson?

  That's a, that's a very nice prescriptive framework for, for dealing with thoughts that arise. I'm currently reading Five Ways to Know Yourself by Shinzen Young.

• 36:48Dr. Rick Hanson?

  Oh, I know Shinzen. He's the real deal.

• 36:50Chris Williamson?

  Shinzen is a, is, yeah, he's definitely the real deal. That's a great way to put it. So I'm currently reading Five Ways to Know Yourself. And anyone who, anyone else who's read Shinzen's work will know that he cites suffering as pain times resistance. Actually, it's, yeah, it's pain times resistance. But what you have to remember is that that is pain to the power of resistance, because it's not pain plus resistance. It's for each element of pain that you have, it is multiplied by how much you resist it. And what I, I like about the approach that you've come up with there about being with the thoughts and about allowing them to sit in your mind and not resisting them, is that it restricts this down to its smallest possible number.

• 37:34Dr. Rick Hanson?

  That's exactly right. And there's a teaching in Shenzan's Buddhist, and he and I, I am as well. And, you know, he would certainly know this. The Buddha made this great distinction between the first dart and the second dart. You know, the first start is, there's a Buddhist saying, you know, pain is necessary, suffering is optional. In other words, in life, there are going to be things that happen, physical pain, social pain. But that's the primary experience. In and of itself, it's not so bad if we don't fight it. Just like you're saying, it's when we fight it that we add the second, third, fourth, fifth darts of our own reactions. And that's where the bulk of our suffering really comes from.

• 38:11Chris Williamson?

  I think as well, and the listeners at home will probably know, know this sensation as well, is the, the awful kind of Bayesian updating gone wrong echo chamber that is you getting irritated by something, and then very quickly getting irritated by getting irritated. And very soon, you've forgotten what you got irritated by, and your irritation at your irritation is just this self-sustaining kind of like unlimited energy machine that carries you through the next however long until something else comes and kind of sideswipes it out of the way.

• 38:51Dr. Rick Hanson?

  I know. And so much of that, I call it being lost in the simulator. You know, we have these recent neural evolution in the middle and in the cortex on top that is like a virtual world, where sucked into these little mini movies. And you know, probably a lot of research says the more you're sucked into the simulator, or you could call it the ruminator, where you're just sort of disconnected from the present moment, lost in your own little mind movie. The more people tend to be lost in the simulator, the more saturated with negative emotion they tend to be.

• 39:24Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I love ruminator. I'm gonna, I'm gonna have to kind that. So I think what might be nice, we've talked about, a lot of this stuff is, is quite prescriptive, but still conceptual, and application, actually getting after it and having some tacit strategies for how people can potentially implement some of this stuff is, is going to be key. So are there some habits or routines or approaches which can be easily understood and easily applied that the listeners may be able to, to take away today?

• 39:59Dr. Rick Hanson?

  Sure. Oh, yeah. I mean, the one thing I would Bang on is get interested in growing. In other words, get interested in the process of growth itself. It's weirdly difficult, Chris, for people to focus on the process of growing, even though it's obviously logically, everybody would go, oh yeah, that's, that's, that's the most important thing to get good at. Get good at growing, right? Cause then I can grow whatever else I wanna grow. Get good at growing. But a lot of people don't pay much attention to actually the process of helping learning land, especially emotional learning, you know, body learning, you know? So that would be a real strong suggestion for people. It may seem abstract, but it's right in the middle of every day.

• 40:41Dr. Rick Hanson?

  You know, when you go to bed, are you any wiser, any stronger, any happier than when you woke up? So that would be a key suggestion. Then I would say a second thing, if I could be kind of very concrete, less than 10 minutes a day, if people did what I'm about to say, it would totally change their life and I'll, and I'll put it out as a challenge and you tell me if I'm wrong. First, three things. First is you go through your day, half a dozen times a day, a handful of times each day, slow down for a breath or two or three to take into yourself something beneficial that you're experiencing, something that's useful, something that feels good,

• 41:21Dr. Rick Hanson?

  some coming home to a calmer, happier place inside. You know, a connection with a friend, you finish a task, you get the kids in bed finally, you look at the sunset, slow it down for a breath or two or three, right? Okay, that's a minute or two a day. Second, pick one thing you're trying to grow in yourself these days. That's of an inner strength that matters to you. Like one thing I'm trying to do myself is build up more and more of the habit of complete patience in the moment, even at a pretty subtle level. So I'm working on that. I'm going after that, you know? And what else? What is it?

• 42:04Dr. Rick Hanson?

  You know, my wife's working on not being so anxious about stuff. You know, different people are working on different things. What are you trying to develop in yourself? Know one thing that you're trying to grow each day. And then look for in the two stages of learning, opportunities to experience it that second you take into yourself.

• 42:23Dr. Rick Hanson?

  Right? That will organize your day and give you hope. Because no matter how tough the world is, if you know you're focused on developing yourself, that kind of organizes what you're doing. And then the third thing I would suggest, um, which really goes to our animal nature and the ways in which, deep down inside each one of us, is a little lizard, mouse, and monkey, related to the brain stem, subcortex, and neocortex, and the three stages of evolution. You know, for a few minutes every day, drop into what I call deep green, the deep green zone, where your body and mind feel deeply peaceful, contented, and loved and loving, in terms of the three needs.

• 43:06Dr. Rick Hanson?

  And rest in that for two or three or five minutes in a row to really, um, um, hardwire it into your body. And that is actually, uh, what I just described there. That felt sense of safe enough, satisfied enough, and connected enough, marked by a feeling broadly of peace, contentment, and love. That home ba- that's our home base biologically. Mother Nature's plan is for her little creatures to rest in the deep green most minutes of most days, because that's how you conserve biological resources, stay out of trouble, you know? And that's your best odd strategy for a long and happy life. Problem is, in modern life, most people are jostled out of that home base by low-grade but chronic mild to moderate stress.

• 43:51Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 43:52Dr. Rick Hanson?

  And so, yeah. So what I'm describing, three to five minutes a day, is a training, where you're training the visceral core of your body, your heart rate, your lungs, your, your belly, your gut, the core of your being, to rest in this place of deep, strong well-being.

• 44:09Chris Williamson?

  I get that.

• 44:10Dr. Rick Hanson?

  Deep green. All right, 10 minutes a day, that's it.

• 44:13Chris Williamson?

  That's what I was.

• 44:14Dr. Rick Hanson?

  First day you do it, it'll feel different. Do it for three days in a row, you'll feel really different. 10 days in a row, change your life.

• 44:20Chris Williamson?

  That's fantastic. For the listeners at home, if you listened to, I want to say, Life Hacks 105, which is around about a month ago, Youssef mentioned an app which is called Remembered. Have you heard of this, Rick?

• 44:35Dr. Rick Hanson?

  No, but I like the idea.

• 44:36Chris Williamson?

  So the little icon is a bit of string around someone's finger and the it's essentially just a reminders app, which you could use on your phone, but this one's a little bit different in that you set daily repeated reminders, or you can set them at periods throughout the day. And what Yusuf likes to use it for, which is relates nicely to the strategy that you've just mentioned there, is he has a very particular sound. It's got a library of just like chimes and stuff, but it doesn't sound like a text message. It's a very specific kind of sound. And it's a sound that you will know and that you can relate to whatever it is that you're trying to do. So for instance, at the moment Yusuf is trying to focus on deepening the breath, on breathing into his dantium, which is below

• 45:18Chris Williamson?

  the navel. And what he's using it for is whenever it goes off, I think it may be three or four times a day. It's this weird little chime that anyone else in the room will think it's an email or it's a whatever. But he knows that it's focused on the breath. And using that app, it's free to download. And, you know, if you were to try and come up with a solution to remind yourself to do something a couple of times a day, that's a great option there. I've got a couple of questions that's been kind of one of them's been burning since the beginning and you've almost touched upon it there. You mentioned that our, our zero point setting, our natural setting as animals is to be in this deep

• 46:00Chris Williamson?

  green where we feel safe and content and connected. I would wager that the vast majority, and this is kind of a sad comment, I guess, but the vast majority of the listeners will think, that sounds pretty alien to me. Like that, that, that status, that living status doesn't sound like, that sounds like what I aim to achieve, not, not what I own on a day to day basis. So firstly, do you think it's possible to live a consistent life that is in that state? And then secondly, the question, the question I've had Bernie, it's been written at the very top of my notes since we've been talking, is if you, if you

• 46:43Chris Williamson?

  were to take humans from 5,000 years ago, how do you think their feelings of satisfaction and daily happiness would compare with us now? And why do you think it might be different?

• 46:55Dr. Rick Hanson?

  Man, Chris, I just feel these topics and questions are right at the heart of the personal and the political. In other words, they're right at the heart of the personal wellbeing and functioning, and they're right at the heart of what our species is dealing with in the 21st century. So, um, I'll try not to blather on.

• 47:15Chris Williamson?

  Oh, man. Blather away, Rick. We're all enjoying it, man.

• 47:19Dr. Rick Hanson?

  So, first off, uh, let's, I'll make two points. One, if you want to get good at something, study people who are really good at it, right? So, uh, I've done a lot of rock climbing, and I'll watch people who are much better climbers than me, and I'll imagine moving in my own body like them. And then when I go up on the cliff, I climb better, all right? Study people who are really good at things. In the same way, if we want to get good at happiness and functioning, so we want to be able to operate at a high level while simultaneously feeling really good inside and being good in our relations with others. I think that people would like that. Well, study the people who've really developed

• 48:03Dr. Rick Hanson?

  that and really embody that. And generally, they tend to be people who've done a lot of inner practice, you know, they're, uh...

• 48:09Chris Williamson?

  We're just talking about Shenzhen here, aren't we? We're just, everyone needs to sit in a circle, and Shenzhen, Shenzhen can be in the middle, and we can just all look at him.

• 48:18Dr. Rick Hanson?

  Well, sure, or think about the lady, think about who taught your preschool when you were in kindergarten. Sometimes a lot of the people that are really far along in their practice, they're not famous, and they're not even quote-unquote spiritual, but how do they do it? How do they do it? So you reverse engineer it. That's what I'm getting at. How do you reverse engineer enlightenment? Reverse engineer peak functioning or self-actualization? Reverse engineer it. And, um, including in the body, uh, right? So, if you look out at the world, there clearly are people who, in the face of enormous challenge, oppression, discrimination, racism, refugee camps, the worst of the worst, still in the core of

• 49:01Dr. Rick Hanson?

  their being, you can just tell, there's an inner peace, an inner calm, they, they hold on to their love, they don't get corroded by hate. It's possible. So, the key point is, it's possible, how do they do it? Right? Okay, point one. Point two, there's this great, great quotation from Robert Sapolsky, the researcher on stress. You may know it. He says, "Most episodes of stress in the wild end quickly, one way or another." In other words, most stress in the wild is brief. You know, an animal is attacked, it either escapes or it doesn't. It ends quickly one way or another.

• 49:41Dr. Rick Hanson?

  And the problem is that modern humans, we don't end our stress episodes quickly. So, the natural resting state is to really be centered into this feeling of biological well-being, in which there's enough food, you know, we're looking around, we're making sure no lions are attacking. We're okay, we're rubbing up against the other zebras, maybe we'll get lucky tonight. We're okay, it's okay. And it's great to appreciate that that's our home base. That rather, there's a long debate, what is human nature? I think we have two natures, you know, green zone, red zone. The green zone is our deepest nature, because it's our resting state. The resting state of a dynamic system is what most characterizes it.

• 50:26Dr. Rick Hanson?

  Our resting state, when needs feel sufficiently met, is the body calms down and the mind defaults to a sense of peace, contentment, and love. That's a key point. And so, through internalizing repeated experiences that are authentic of the felt sense of needs met sufficiently, we grow, we build out this green zone core inside ourselves, which then makes us more able, in a positive cycle, to meet our needs without getting sucked into upsetting stress. We're able to deal with the world from this unshakable core of resilient well-being. And that makes all the difference in the world.

• 51:10Dr. Rick Hanson?

  So for me, the key question, just to summarize, is how do we face the challenges of life without getting invaded and hijacked into the red zone of fear in terms of safety, frustration in terms of satisfaction, and hurt, or resentment, or vengeance in terms of connection issues? How do we do that? And I think the possibility is to move through each day. Deliberately as individuals, growing these strengths inside so that more and more we are like these people who are models, exemplars, Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama.

• 51:45Chris Williamson?

  Jindan.

• 51:48Dr. Rick Hanson?

  Yeah.

• 51:50Dr. Rick Hanson?

  Or your kindergarten teacher who is always patient, no matter what assholes, you know, the parents were, well, not alone, the kids, you know, and that to me is a great opportunity that's realistic in this life. And to develop this increasingly unshakable core in which, in your essence, you're fine, no matter how much crap you're dealing with.

• 52:14Chris Williamson?

  So what we've, one point there that leads us quite nicely onto that final question about, about humans that have been, that were around a long time ago, is that you mentioned that a system's natural state, what was it, a system's natural state is the one which it's most comfortable in?

• 52:30Dr. Rick Hanson?

  The resting, the, what, it's interesting to think about it. Imagine a mobile in a breeze, moving lightly, right? It's a dynamic system. What most characterizes a dynamic system, it's not what it goes into when it's disturbed, because that's just an out of bounds state. It's its resting state that most characterizes a dynamic system. You could think also of a thermostat setting in your home in Celsius, let's say you set it at 20 Celsius, that is the resting state around which the temperature varies by a degree or two. But, so you would not say, if you were to say, what's the, you know, how would you characterize the temperature in your home? You'd say, well, it's 20 degrees, you know, it's the resting state.

• 53:11Dr. Rick Hanson?

  The resting state of human beings is where we go, and also other animals. It's where we go when needs are met. And where we go when needs are met is a really good place. Most people, when they feel an enoughness of safety, satisfaction and connection, become nicer, you know, they become more generous, calmer, they're happier, they become more ambitious. They also look around for more things to fix in the world. They don't just sit on, you know, their cushion and eat bonbons chanting "Oh", you know, they want to help. It's when people... Are, as you said, drawn into what I call inner homelessness, where they're not in touch with their core, they're not in this resting state, they feel kind of desperate

• 53:55Dr. Rick Hanson?

  inside, they feel uneasy and frustrated and disconnected. That's when people develop long-term health issues that are stress-based, but also that's when people are vulnerable to the classic manipulations of authoritarian leaders.

• 54:08Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, totally. We have the answer. So, why is it in that case, if that's our natural state, if that's the way that a dynamic system is supposed to be, firstly, why is it that so few people feel that in the modern world? And secondly, if we're talking to Rick Hansen's great-great-great-to-the-power-of-25-grandfather from 5,000 years ago, how do you think, what do you think his mindset's like?

• 54:35Dr. Rick Hanson?

  That's a great question. So, the key answer to that is there basically, humans have two natures. So, one, there's our resting state, I call it the green zone for simplicity. But we also, and our animal cousins, the monkeys, the mice, and the lizards, also have a second nature, the red zone, which is fast response, stress response, in which we fire up into fighting, fleeing, or freezing. We are very vulnerable to getting triggered into a burst of red zone stressful activity. Mother Nature's blueprint is that those episodes

• 55:14Dr. Rick Hanson?

  of red zone, fight, flight, freeze, stress activity are supposed to end quickly, and then we're supposed to return to the green zone for a long period of recovery. And you can look out into nature, and you can see that most of the time, that's the template out there in nature. All right? The problem is, in modern life conditions, since agriculture came in 10,000 or so years ago, we chronically are pushed into red zone situations, including in modern life. You know, we're modern, we have refrigerators, we have pain medication and all the rest of that. And yet, you're exactly right. I think most people are jostled

• 55:58Dr. Rick Hanson?

  into low-grade, mild-to-moderate stress every day, which is not their home base, and which accumulates wear and tear on their body.

• 56:07Chris Williamson?

  Why do you think that's, why do you think that's happening? What's causing it?

• 56:11Dr. Rick Hanson?

  I think the deep roots of that are in wealth inequality since agriculture came in. I think the constructed, the socially constructed sources of chronic mild to moderate stress are largely rooted in inequalities of wealth and power that emerged after agriculture enabled our ancestors 10,000 years ago to accumulate surpluses and then cities and all the rest of that, the deep causes. Because if you think about it, the way that society operates today is a vast departure from the hunter-gatherer template. And I want to be really clear. I like my modern conveniences. I like pain control. I like a cold beer. Me too.

• 56:56Dr. Rick Hanson?

  I like, I like ESV ad, you know what I mean? Yep. You're in England, I'm here, or wherever you are, you know, we're communicating. I love that stuff. But the problem is, if you just look at it, in a hunter-gatherer band, that's the natural template for human politics and life. That's a band of 50 people, about 30 adults, most of whom you know your entire life. Now just think about that as the ways in which we evolved until barely just 10,000 years ago, for 300,000 years of our species, another 2 million years of tool manufacturing, ancestors, close relatives, that's the template. A small band of 30 to 50 people, interacting with other bands, many of whom are dangerous

• 57:40Dr. Rick Hanson?

  because we're competing for scarce resources. So we need to cooperate internally and be fearful and aggressive externally much of the time. That's our template. In those bands, so bear with me briefly, there are three conditions enabled healthy politics. Common truth, you couldn't hide the facts. You saw, you know, when you live together with people day in and day out, you see the truth. You know who's lying, you know who's trustworthy, you know who's legit, you know where the money, you know, you know who's eating more food and sneaking some food away from the group, you know who's screwing who, you know, you know what's going on. In a hunter gatherer band, but when you start having agriculture and big cities and

• 58:23Dr. Rick Hanson?

  Game of Thrones and even modern life, you can hide the truth. And in fact, in modern times, we have people who attack truth seeking and truth protecting. But in hunter gatherer bands, there's common truth. There's also common welfare. You know, there are minor inequalities of wealth and power in a hunter gatherer band, but on the whole, you're kin. You are relatives. And also because you're banned, you really need each other. So if you go down, that hurts me. On the other hand, if you prosper, that helps me. So we have common welfare. We're really tied together. Again, in a way that is not the case because since surpluses came in and inequalities of wealth and power that are big, rich people can get richer, it doesn't trickle down.

• 59:07Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 59:08Dr. Rick Hanson?

  Poor people can have a famine. It doesn't mean that it infects the people behind the castle walls.

• 59:13Chris Williamson?

  Totally right. Yeah. The quote from the Bible, which is, from those who have nothing more will be taken, from those who have everything more will be given. It's a very, very old concept. One part I-

• 59:26Dr. Rick Hanson?

  One last thing. You don't have common justice. The third condition in a hunter gatherer band, common truth, common welfare, is common justice. You know, the leaders, they're leaders, they have power. But eventually, honestly, if our band had a leader who was a jerk after a season or two, you and I and some other men would go whoop them.

• 59:44Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 59:44Dr. Rick Hanson?

  You know what I mean? Or we'd just say, see you later asshole. We're going to form a new band. Politics would change. But now you don't have common justice. You have rich man's law, poor man's law. So for me, to summarize a lot of this stuff, the challenge in the 21st century is how with 7 billion plus interconnected people, can we recreate the objective conditions for healthy human politics, healthy human governance, which is common truth, common welfare, and common justice. And if we can lay that foundation, which you see some societies, like the EU imperfectly, the UK imperfectly, you know, are moving in that direction. But you can also see that elites that are wealthy and

• 1:00:26Dr. Rick Hanson?

  want to protect their wealth and power, they attack these three conditions, common truth, common welfare, and common justice, because that's what enables them to continue living their sweet life to their own advantage, but to the disadvantage of the great majority of other humans.

• 1:00:41Chris Williamson?

  Would that be- So I I agree with all of your points. However, the the thing that sticks out in my mind is that I don't think that the people who are at the top of the tree are unbelievably happy either. So the inequality.

• 1:00:54Dr. Rick Hanson?

  True, isn't it?

• 1:00:55Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, so it's not like I I don't I'm I'm sure that there's a lot of people who are very wealthy and very successful who feel even worse than the the proletariat like down in the down in the streets. So.

• 1:01:06Dr. Rick Hanson?

  I think you're right, and that gets to a really deep point, which is we can't just fix the objective conditions. We need to internalize the feeling of needs met. Otherwise, you're right. Where I grew up in L A around Beverly Hills, the Tibetan metaphor is the hungry ghosts. You know, who have godlike powers and enormous appetites, but they can't satisfy their appetites. And I agree, that does seem to be the case with a lot of people caught up in wealth and fame. They're not deeply contented. And to me, the trick is to be able to do both is to be reasonably.

• 1:01:43Dr. Rick Hanson?

  You know, have like a to not live in grinding poverty, to have good medical care, to have enough food, you know. A billion humans go to bed hungry every night in this planet today. In America, in my country, a million children go through homelessness every year. You know, one in four, one in five children in America lives below the poverty line and has to face hunger, not infrequently. So, yeah, we need to do those things. But on the other hand, if we don't have a transformation of the heart, if we don't internalize the felt sense of safe enough, satisfied enough, connected enough, then we're always hungry. Then we're caught up in the Buddha's second noble truth of craving.

• 1:02:23Dr. Rick Hanson?

  And we're always chasing and trying to pile up our possessions and build up our empire. Frankly, look at Donald Trump, the epitome of a hungry ghost, someone who has everything. And yet you could see it in his face. He's miserable inside and in his and in his own search for a lasting happiness, which he's never found, he's harming lots of other people.

• 1:02:48Chris Williamson?

  We've got that hedonic treadmill again, haven't we, which the listeners will have heard us mention before as you begin to, your body begins to renormalize to whatever increased state of nicer possessions it is that you get. You get the new car and then after a couple of weeks, it's, oh, well, there's another new one that I need now. So final.

• 1:03:06Dr. Rick Hanson?

  Well, I want to speak to that, though, because new research shows that people can actually change the setting on their hedonic treadmill.

• 1:03:12Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:03:12Dr. Rick Hanson?

  And it goes to what I was getting at earlier about trait. People can build trait happiness. And the external source, that's correct, of a spike of happiness, like a new car, that tends to fade. But as you repeatedly internalize the feeling of the new car, or much more modest things, like the little accomplishments you do every day, as you internalize the feeling of that, more and more, you build up a very strong, unconditional sense of contentment inside you. So then, as you face whether to get the next car, you know, you think about it, and maybe you do need a new car, and you get a new car.

• 1:03:52Dr. Rick Hanson?

  But it's not based on an underlying lack or scarcity inside, which is the root of the word for want, as you know. Instead, you meet the next pleasure feeling already contented, and that really changes things.

• 1:04:08Chris Williamson?

  It allows you to see it with a much more unhindered viewpoint, I suppose, as opposed to, you can, it's this mindfulness gap again, isn't it? So final, final thing, we're going to, we're going to interview, you're going to run a little experiment. You're going to sit down, you're going to put him on the couch. I know this isn't your usual way, but you're going to pop him on the couch, and he's going to be, let's say, 10,000, 10,000 years ago, just before agricultural revolution.

• 1:04:33Dr. Rick Hanson?

  My great grandfather.

• 1:04:34Chris Williamson?

  Great, great XXX grandfather. What do you think his mindset's like if we were to compare him to a modern, modern human?

• 1:04:42Dr. Rick Hanson?

  Yeah, I think the best comparison are those, you could call them Stone Age, Paleolithic hunter-gatherers in the world today that are studied, you know, by anthropologists and others, and that's a pretty good guess. I think that he or she was facing a lot of physical pain. Right. In the wild, we're vulnerable to pain. Myself, age sixty-six, so I've had things in my body that probably would have killed me, you know, ten thousand years ago, were not for a modern medicine. So there's a certain amount of pain. Food sources are not so reliable, maybe a certain amount of hunger.

• 1:05:22Dr. Rick Hanson?

  On the other hand, I think that in his mind, he would feel much more connected in community with his friends and family. There would be much more of a bone-deep felt sense of belonging and being loved than a typical person probably experiences these days. Loneliness is epidemic. And it's interesting research, maybe you had other people talk about it. Loneliness, not like I'm an introvert. I like solitude. You're me too. Yeah, that's not being lonely. Loneliness as a unpleasant experience has roughly the equivalent health consequences to smoking half a pack of cigarettes a day. Isn't that crazy?

• 1:06:06Dr. Rick Hanson?

  In terms of certain impact, yeah, chronic mortality morbidity. Loneliness imposes health burdens. A lot of people are lonely. I don't think that great-grandfather would feel lonely in that way. I think also that great-grandfather would be spending less time in the ruminator, the simulator. There's a lot about life that even though he has the same neural hardware that we have today, the same capacity to go in the simulator. When you're more in the present moment in the nature of your life as a hunter-gatherer, and you're also more in nature, neurologically, a little cool hack, the more you have a sense of things as a whole, including your whole body or the whole physical environment like in the

• 1:06:49Dr. Rick Hanson?

  rainforest or the Serengeti plains, the more you're in nature, that activates networks on the sides of your brain, which draw you into a sense of wholeness and lower activity in these midline neural networks that are the neural basis for going into the simulator, going into these mini-movies. So I think that grandfather would be more, you know, dropped into the present moment. Okay, those are my guesses. What are yours? What do you think?

• 1:07:18Chris Williamson?

  I don't know. So I think that I definitely agree, a better sense of belonging. I certainly know myself that since in the last 18 months to two years or so, since I've started to take more care with my sleep hygiene and try and match, I'm a club promoter by trade, which means that my sleeping patterns can sometimes get slammed and accounting for that has made a big, a big difference. Being in nature certainly makes a huge difference for me. So I'd agree, I'd agree on all of those points. What's interesting is I was thinking about Maslow's hierarchy of needs as you were talking about that there. And it almost, it almost sounds like the bottom rungs, the need for warmth and food and so on and so forth.

• 1:08:03Chris Williamson?

  Those ones are potentially being less well met, but the, the ones further up the pyramid are being better met. And oddly enough,

• 1:08:13Dr. Rick Hanson?

  That's interesting.

• 1:08:13Chris Williamson?

  Oddly enough, that's been flipped now. I don't know whether you'd agree with that in, in one society.

• 1:08:18Dr. Rick Hanson?

  I think that's deeply insightful and really interesting. And, and you know, it's really poignant, but

• 1:08:25Dr. Rick Hanson?

  well, in other words, it's poignant that, that so many people that lead lives of quiet desperation, you know, to quote Thoreau. And yet the typical person, just a lower middle class, working class person even in the world today, lives better than the kings and queens of a couple hundred years ago, you know? So it's like, what's our comparison point? But the opportunity going forward to me is to realize that we really have the power. And it's about claiming the power that you have. It may sound abstract for me. It's extremely gritty and down to earth and scruffy and determined and self-reliant. To claim the power you have, to shape your brain every day,

• 1:09:06Dr. Rick Hanson?

  which really means shaping who you are becoming every day. And as part of that, to claim your power, to not be manipulated by, you know, the forces in society that want to make us hungry ghosts, because that's what drives consumer culture. And that's what makes people docile with authoritarian leaders and caught up in S against them rivalries. Instead, we have the power every day to look for authentic opportunities to feel safe enough, satisfied enough and connected enough, which is how to grow that strength inside of resilient happiness.

• 1:09:41Chris Williamson?

  Rick, I think that's a fantastic point to finish on. I get the impression that me and you could have spent an awful lot more time discussing this, but if the listeners want it enough and if they want to drop me a message and let me know, I may be able to persuade you to come back on. But for now, we are going to have to call it a day there. Would you be able to tell everyone who's listening where they can find you online?

• 1:10:04Dr. Rick Hanson?

  Chris, it's been a pleasure. I could keep going myself. The simplest way to find me online is rickhanson.net. My name, Rick Hanson, H-A-N-S-O-N.net. And that's the easiest way to find my stuff. Tons of freely offered material there, lots of short clips, videos, audios, guided practices, things you can do for free to change your brain for the better. I also have some neat online programs that are highly accessible, grounded in science. You can check them out. And if anybody has any kind of financial need issue, we love giving scholarships. We love making our stuff available for free. So rickhanson.net, S-O-N.

• 1:10:42Chris Williamson?

  Fantastic. Well, the link to Resilient: How to Grow an Unshakable Core of Calm, Strength, and Happiness will be in the show notes below, as will the link to your website. Rick, it's been a blast, man. Thank you so much for coming on. I think everyone's going to have learned an awful lot today.

• 1:10:59Dr. Rick Hanson?

  I hope so, and I appreciate it. And I appreciate you, Chris, for the ways you're helping people. It's a real service to people, what you're doing.

• 1:11:05Chris Williamson?

  Thank you very much. I'll catch you next time.

• 1:11:07Dr. Rick Hanson?

  Okay, good.