RACHEL: So hi, everybody. Thanks so much for coming. I am here in Mountain View, and
we've got a full packed room. Our room is a little tight,
but thanks for being here. And on the livestream,
I know there's many of you joining us from
around everywhere at Google. And just thrilled
that you're here. So thanks so much. Today we are hosting Dr.
Rick Hanson, who is here. He is a local in the
Bay Area, and he's going to be talking about his
new book, "Resilient," which has a lot of really good
data, where he blends in his expertise in
neuroscience, mindfulness, positive psychology, his
clinical psychologist background. And like [? Van ?]
said, speaks to what we can create for ourselves
if we are conscious to what we want to create. So I'm just really
excited to learn more. And I also want to thank you,
Rick, on behalf of Google for being here. And I also have learned
through the [? depos ?] program and the work in
emotional intelligence that I do that if we change
our mind, we change our lives, we change our brain. And that is the mantra
that my mentor Judith Wright has taught
me, and that is what Rick is here to tell us today. I'm just thrilled to hear more,
and it's all about savoring, right, Rick? We're going to be savoring. So as you are here
for the hour, this is our practical
application of the hour is to savor what you learn today. How are you going to apply it? Just know that you're in
the here and now with Rick and all of us, and we can change
our lives, change our minds, change your brain. It's really, really cool. With that, I'll hand
it over to you, Rick. Thanks. RICK HANSON: Thank
you very much. That was a really
enthusiastic introduction. Thank you. I appreciate it. That's great. It's an honor for me to be here. I am a complete fan and
actually very grateful for Google's place in the world
and to have a full house here of really, really smart people
interested in this material just really touches me. What I want to explore with
you fundamentally is the how of changing the
brain for the better. And that general
purpose how can then be applied to any
particular thing we want to develop,
any particular form of skillfulness, any
beneficial state of being, any useful attitude. Happiness altogether
is something that we can to develop as well. And to make a point
at the beginning that I'll make
again in the middle, it's really striking
for someone like me, who's been in the growth
business, the growth game for pushing 50 years now almost. I started young in the
human potential movement, and along the way, became
a mindfulness teacher, a clinical psychologist,
a neuropsychologist. It's really interesting to
me that for those of us that are in the business of
growth, and by growth, I mean the term quite
broadly to include learning of skillfulness,
social skillfulness, healing, personal development,
that for those of us who are in this territory,
we still lack a general theory of growth. We have a general
theory of attachment, we have a general theory
of how people, for example, might develop particular
things, such as self-compassion. But there's actually
no general theory of growth, which in
a funny kind of way would be the most
useful thing to have, because then it could be
applied to any particular thing to develop. And so what I'd like to
do in a fairly brisk way, moving right along here is
to explore this material with you, particularly
with an emphasis on pragmatic, immediately
applicable tools. And I know the slides will
be available to you later. There's also a lot of
supportive material about this on my website, including
our kind of greatest hits collection of scientific
papers in the public domain and other resources there, too. You can learn more
about it there as well. So here, I'm going to try to
move straight into a fairly direct summary of how to engage
volitional, psychological mental factors
inside your own mind that increases the
registration of experiences that you're having,
and thereby increases their conversion into
lasting physical changes of neural structure
and function, which is the fundamental
process of any kind of lasting change for the better. So that's what I'm going to
be exploring with you here. OK? So here we go. They said the way to do this
is to zip along, and then at about-- when there are about
15 minutes left, slow down for questions
and discussion. I'm also going to do a little
bit of experiential practice, utterly voluntary along the way. And as Rachel said in the
beginning, the opportunity inside our own minds, in a sense
is to do experiments there, to treat it as a kind of
laboratory in which we see the results from what's
called the first person perspective of subjectivity,
while at the same time being able to draw plausible
conclusions from a third person perspective about actually what
might be happening physically inside our own brain. So that's my intro. Let's get to it. So I want to talk
with you to begin with about the notion
of inner resources, psychological strengths
of various kinds. If we are to have any
kind of lasting well-being in a changing world, we need
to be resilient, not just for surviving the
worst day of our life, but thriving every
day of our life. Or to use a traditional
saying, through resilience, we're able to walk evenly
over uneven ground. I think of resilience a
lot like having a deep keel in your personal sailboat. Having capsized a sailboat when
I was learning how to sail, I've really come to appreciate
the value of a deep keel. Resilience is our deep keel. It enables us to
recover fairly rapidly, and in particular, over the
course of a day, or at work, or in a relationship,
we can keep on going with that
deep keel in the water. So to have any kind of lasting
happiness, well-being broadly, we need to be resilient. All right, what do we
need to be resilient? Where does resilience come from? Fundamentally, resilience
comes from internal resources, and the development and
use of internal resources is in a larger frame
that's commonly used in health care
and psychology that says that the
course of a person's life over a day, a week,
or the entire lifetime is, in effect, an equation
with three variables. It's the result
of the combination of three factors,
the challenges that wear upon a person, the
vulnerabilities they penetrate through, like
chinks in a person's armor, and the
resources the person draws upon to deal
with those challenges and to shore up vulnerabilities. It's a nice and very
useful and simple model. All three are opportunities
to make things better. I tend to focus on resources,
because it's forward looking and tends to
be positive and also because challenges and
vulnerabilities can often be intractable. And yet, we're surrounded
by opportunities one way or another to grow resources. OK, so where are
challenges, vulnerabilities, and resources located? Out in the world, in the
body, and in the mind. This gives us-- my inner geek-- a three by three matrix,
if you think about it, obviously, nine cells,
challenges, vulnerabilities, resources, world, body,
mind, bing, bing, bing. The ninth cell, resources in the
mind, is full of opportunity, because we can intervene
there directly, and we take the fruits
with us wherever we go. So that's what I'm
going to focus on here in this larger frame. I'm not against helping things
be better in those other eight ways, if you will,
but I'm going to focus on resources in the mind. Resources in the mind
include familiar things like mindfulness. Mindfulness is a fundamental
mental or psychological resource. Other resources include
classic character virtues, like modesty or thrift. I was a Boy Scout in a
very rebellious troop. We caused a lot of trouble. I remember four things, I think. A Boy Scout is thrifty, brave,
clean, and reverent, something like that. I didn't remember
the rest of them. Those are virtues. Skills are inner resources,
know how, both technical know how applied on the job, as
well as inter-personal know how and intrapersonal
know how, knowing how to manage one's own
reactions and to manage the thoughts, the flow of
one's thoughts and feelings. That's procedural learning. That's learning how to. Other inner resources include
positive emotions, love, moral commitments,
good intentions. Those are inner resources, too. So the question then becomes,
how do we develop them? The harder a person's life
is, the more important it is to develop
inner resources. It's easy to think about
this sort of material as cherries on the frosting
of the cake of life. Oh yeah, when everything's fine,
I'm going to savor the moment. Well, the worse things are-- think about it-- and the more
that a person is on their own. The calvary is not coming. Many people experience
life this way these days. The more important it is as the
foundation of self-reliance, a kind of old school scruffy
determination to do what we can in any moment to grow
as much as possible from here, because
there's nothing we can do about the
past, the more important it is to have inner resources. So that's a key
context here that I'm speaking about this material
not as some sort of add on for people who
are very privileged. OK. Researchers generally
have focused on identifying and using
psychological resources, such as workplace mindfulness. Really good. It's good to identify it. It's good to apply it. But what about acquiring
it in the first place? That's actually
been really lacking in most of the research
on inner resources, including recent
research on things like character strengths. So how do we develop them? What's the possibility here? Well, if you look at research
on the nature nurture question, the ballpark is
that at least half, if not even up to
about two-thirds of the variation in
human attributes, psychological attributes, is
not due to heritable factors. In other words, roughly
a third to a half of the variation on average has
to do with heritable factors, kind of woven early into DNA. The other opportunity,
though, is what we can acquire over time. That is really,
really good news. It also takes us to a
fundamental responsibility. No one can stop us from growing
resources inside ourselves, from learning and growing
over the course of the day. No one can stop us
from trying to do that inside the inner
sanctuary of our own mind. But no one can do it for
us as well, which to me, gives a kind of credibility
to the results of those forms of inner practice. So if we are to grow inner
resources in the mind, that fundamentally means
changing the brain, because inside the natural
frame, whatever mysteries may lay outside the natural frame,
inside the natural frame, which is certainly where I'm
going to be speaking today, and where I generally
operate, any kind of lasting change of mind
must involve a lasting change of body in particular
in the nervous system and its headquarters, the brain. So how do we do it? How do we get those green
balls into the brain? This takes us to
self-directed neuroplasticity, a term coined by Jeffrey
Schwartz at UCLA 15, 20 years ago. To put things in context,
neuroscience is a baby science. So much has been just discovered
in the last year or two, let alone and definitely
the last decade or two. So new things have
been seen all the time, and it's really an
exciting, to me, territory. So an overview of
current research. What is very well known is
that mental practices A, produce mental results, C,
presumably via the black box, B, of the brain. That's the first point. There's much research
that mental efforts produce psychological results. Can. There's also a tremendous
amount of research that's invasive and
ethically questioned mark on non-human animals that
various stimuli, presumably with experiential
correlates, lead to lasting changes
in their brains. And through very
invasive research of the granularity of
what's been discovered is really quite extraordinary. So there's here, too,
a lot of evidence that the experience of any
kind of a complex animal can lead to lasting physical
changes in the nervous system. This is the basis of
what's called experience dependent neuroplasticity. There is some research on
humans that their experiences, including meditative practice,
mindfulness practice can change their brains over time. There's a little research
on, to me, the stuff that's really, really
useful to know about, which is how can people relate
to the experiences they're having, how can they relate to
the emotions they're having, the sensations in
their body, the ideas that they're having,
the intentions, the wants that they're experiencing. How can they relate
to those experiences to maximize the gain from them,
to maximize the lasting impact? There's a little bit
of research about that, which is scattered
here and there and which I've tried
to pull together, but I want to be modest
and appropriate about what is and is not known
with regard to that. And last, there's one study,
my study actually, disclosure, on the systematic training
and the mental factors, volitional mental
factors, that plausibly can steepen people's
growth curves as they grow through life. This study is in process. I'm running up the
results with collaborators from the University
of California. It's not yet peer reviewed. All disclaimers said happily. We've gotten really
good results. It would be so
embarrassing if we hadn't. But anyway, that's the
status of the research. In this context, then,
I want to talk with you about what's plausible. And then we can start
engaging the laboratory immediately inside ourselves
to see what real results are. So in this context of some,
you know, modesty the learning process, the change
process fundamentally happens in two stages, two
necessary and sufficient stages. We begin in almost all
cases with an experience. There is some
learning that occurs through unconscious
processes, but the great bulk of human development, healing,
transformation, even awakening begins with an experience
of one kind or another. There are different terms that
are used for the experience. I like experience, because
it's kind of direct. It makes it clear. Neurologically, we could
talk about encoding. We could use the general term
I use for activation in terms of a phase, or an old
fashioned word, state, some kind of state of
being, state of mind, state of attitude, state of
intention, state of sensation, some kind of state. That's the necessary first
step, but it's not sufficient. There must be the
second stage of learning for any kind of lasting value. And you're probably
starting to see the critique that I'm mounting here of
most efforts, including my own to help people have some kind
of lasting value, some kind of lasting benefit
from something. We must engage the
second stage of learning. Call it what you will. I call it the
installation stage. I have a cybernetic kind of
view of things in many ways. To me, it makes sense,
activation, installation. In neurological terms, we
would speak of consolidation, or kind of in simple language,
the movement from state to trade. This is a fundamental
two stage process. The second stage is
necessary and it's one we routinely forget. This two stage process
is summarized in kind of increasingly
well known saying from the work of the Canadian
psychologist Donald Hebb, "Neurons that fire
together wire together." I've actually had some
grad students turn that into a rap video for me. It's pretty cool. But I don't sing myself. People pay me not to sing. But here's this fundamental
process, fire together, wire together. It's actually more
complicated than that. I won't go through every
little bit on this slide. You can look at it
later if you like. It's a summary of the major
mechanisms of experience dependent neuroplasticity. The many ways in which
the nervous system is designed to be transformed,
in effect, by the information flowing through it, that as
immaterial information does, it is represented
by some material substrate, the flows
of information that are the basis for experiences
moving to the nervous system enlist underlying neural
processes to represent them and repeated patterns of
underlying neural processing leave lasting traces behind,
leave lasting changes behind. And the fundamental
notion of experience dependent neuroplasticity
is not breaking news. It's been presumed
for a long time that any kind of
learning, broadly defined, learning to
walk, instead of crawling, learning how to be more patient
while raising teenagers-- I had to work on
that one myself-- any kind of real
learning must involve a physical change, presumably
primarily in the brain. That's not a new idea. The real news in neuroplasticity
is the extraordinary degree to which these
changes can proceed and the breadth and depth
of the remodeling process of the nervous
system, especially the cerebral cortex
that can occur, as we develop and change,
for better or worse in life. So the essence of the process
I just went through that moves from state to trade,
and you can apply it to many ordinary experiences,
think about the acquisition of greater trait mindfulness. Begins with the
experiences of mindfulness, which then, in some way,
incidentally or deliberately, leave lasting traces
behind in the body, especially in the
nervous system. We become more compassionate,
more resilient, more grateful, more skillful with other people,
more skillful with ourselves by having experiences
of these things, which then are internalized,
installed in some way, leading to lasting
changes behind. But here's a key
point, a key critique. Knowing does not
equal experiencing, and experiencing does
not equal learning. Think about the large percentage
of useful experiences we have, useful moments, where we're
happy about something, or we understand something, or
we feel committed to something, or we kind of move into a really
nice state of being or kind of in a zone, and then
whoosh, it's gone. We can't find our
way back to it again. For me, as a longtime
clinical psychologist, longtime therapist, and
teacher and other roles, including in
business consulting, it's humbling to appreciate
how many hard won moments that people were having, useful
thoughts, good intentions, ways of feeling at ease
released in some way, et cetera, et cetera, how
large a fraction of them washed through the brain
like water through a sieve without leaving any
lasting value behind. And if anybody, like
myself, is involved in helping others change for
the better, as a manager, as a parent, as an
educator, as a coach, as someone engaged
in the larger world, it's really, to me,
right at the bullseye of what we should
focus on, which is how to increase
the conversion rate from states to traits. How do we help
useful moments really land in the heart of
ourselves and other people, so they take root there and
really, really, really sink in? So that's what I want to
focus on with you now, the plausible, practical
neuropsychology of actually how to do this. How do we actually steepen
the conversion rate from state to trait? Without doing that, we
tend to flatten the gains from programs. We also, in particular,
if you think of the distribution of results
in various trainings including formal mindfulness trainings,
usually about a third to half the people in them don't
get much out of them, drop out, they don't practice,
or they get gains. They say well, that was amazing,
but then 10 days later, they're as neurotic as ever. I can speak from some
personal experience there about myself there. So if we don't pay attention
to this installation phase of learning,
we're going to lose all kinds of opportunities. To put it in a
certain way, I think about four schematic
lives, you know, think of anything
you want to develop, mental resource on that side. Happiness, calm,
self-confidence, self-worth, no longer being haunted
by childhood experiences, greater habit of skillfulness
with other people. What do we want to develop? Well, imagine one life
that just goes downhill. That's the decline. There this person at
the end of that period, a day, a year, a life, is less
happy, less wise, less capable than they were than
when they started. Then we have the second
life schematically, flat, no decline, but no gain
in terms of the outcome values on the
y-axis that we care about, the mental
resources axis. What about, then, the person
who has a linear growth? This person is getting
stronger, getting happier, getting more loving, getting
calmer, let's say, over time. That's great. And then we have
the person who's learning how to learn along
the way, a person whose growth curve takes an
exponential course. And to me, where the takeaway is
is to really stare hard at that and go, wow, in things
that I care about or things that, frankly, you
know, my friends and family or therapist tell me I
really ought to care about, what's my trend? Is it an upward trend? What's the delta? How steep is that curve? And can I start moving
into exponential growth. What can we do to steepen
our growth curves? I think of this process
in a kind of old school way, as we're growing
strengths inside, to me, learning,
very broadly defined, especially emotional
learning, not so much book learning or
intellectual learning, but social learning,
intrapersonal learning, motivational learning, learning
how to motivate yourself, learning how to lean into what's
good for yourself and others. This kind of learning,
broadly defined, I think of as the
strength of strengths, because it's the strength
that grows the rest of them. So this point is really
sharpened, the general point about the importance of focusing
on acquisition and development and what aids acquisition
that's under internal control that we can do ourselves. This point is really
sharpened when you face what scientists call
the brain's evolved negativity bias. A simple way of
putting it, I put it is that we've got a
brain, that's basically by design, like Velcro,
for bad experiences, but like Teflon for good ones. We all have experiences of-- what? Well, we all have
a sense of this. You know, you go
through a day, 10 things happen in a relationship with
someone at work or at home. Nine of them are good, one
of them is bad, you know, unpleasant, harmful. What's the one you brood about
as you're falling asleep, right? Or I think about
performance reviews. You know, 19, like 10
points of feedback, you know, nine are really good,
one is room for improvement. What's the one
you just brood on? You just think about,
room for improvement, you know, for the rest
of the week, right? That's the negativity bias. So by design, if
you think about it, our ancestors needed to
get carrots and avoid sticks, carrots like food,
sticks like predators. Both are important. But there's a key difference. If you fail to get
that carrot today, back in the Serengeti
plains, you'll have a chance of one
tomorrow probably. If you fail to avoid that
predator or that aggression inside your band or between
bands, potentially no more carrots forever. Sticks are more
consequential, typically, in terms of raw
survival, and the passing on of genes that pass
on genes, the engine of biological evolution. Sticks have more
urgency and impact. So by design, we've
got a brain that does five things
automatically, routinely, and you can watch your mind,
therefore your brain doing it. Scan for bad news. Overfocus upon it. Overreact to it. Fast track it in the memory,
especially emotional memory, implicit memory. And then along the way, through
the activity of the stress hormone cortisol,
gradually become sensitized to stressful, irritating,
frustrating, annoying experiences, so we're just
a little more reactive to them the day after that,
which then, as you can see, creates a vicious cycle. And in the process of
all this, as our brains change in this way
by design, we tend to create negative
cycles with others that then continue to change
our brain in that way. That's the fundamental
negativity bias. It's a kind of universal,
well-intended learning disability, as a result of
having a brain optimized for peak performance in
Stone Age conditions. We learn very rapidly
from experiences of disappointment or
frustration or self-doubt or self-criticism. We learn really quickly. Once burned, twice
shy, never forget. Those red balls go
right into the brain. They're fast tracked in. But because of the
focus on the red balls draws us away from
sustaining attention to the green balls, which are
not prioritized for storage. So they need extra help
so that they actually can lead to lasting changes of
neural structure and function. And I'm going to talk
about how to do that now. All right, so the
negativity bias, a lot of implications there. Daniel Kahneman,
the psychologist, won a Nobel Prize in
economics for his work on loss aversion, the ways that
people are typically much more motivated by not
losing something rather than by gaining the
equivalent amount or reward. There's been a lot of research
on the negativity bias. By the way, my slides
have, I think, seven slides worth of references and
small print at the back, including a couple
of great papers that are literature reviews
on the negativity bias. It's really interesting to think
of the consequences of that, including in her own life. All right, Velcro, Teflon. OK. So how do we do it? I want to talk
about the how now. How do we get lasting gains
from passing experiences? How can we increase the
conversion rate, in effect, of beneficial states? Now, I use the word
beneficial pragmatically as that which is
useful or that which promotes happiness and welfare
for ourselves and others. How can we increase
the conversion rate from beneficial states
to beneficial traits? Here's where I use a
framework that I've developed called the HEAL
framework that summarizes the plausible, internal factors
we can mobilize to increase over a time scale typically
of a dozen or less seconds, that we can plausibly
engage these mental factors to increase the conversion rate
of experiences we're having into some kind of lasting
change of neural structure and function. This framework is
pragmatic and eclectic. I've just pulled a
lot of stuff together. You'll recognize things that
skillful teachers are already doing, or you're already doing
yourself inside your own mind, as I talk through this. And then we'll do a little
experiential practice, explore the implications,
and then I'll shut up, and we'll discuss it. All right? OK. So this is the fundamental
neuropsychology of learning. We begin with an
experience, have some kind of beneficial experience. And then we move into
the installation phase, which has two subjectively and
objectively distinct aspects. I call them enriching
and absorbing. In actual practice, they
sort of mush together, but they're actually distinct. Enriching, subjectively,
is like having a large, sustained,
powerful, intense experience. It's enriched. Absorbing, subjectively,
it's like receiving it into yourself,
giving over to it, feeling like literally it's
sinking in, like almost a warmth spreading inside. The distinction there. Objectively, enriching
an experience presumably means a very large sustained,
spread, and intense pattern of neural activation. Absorbing is about turning
up the sensitivity, the gain, as it were in the internal
memory making machinery of the brain. To use a bit of a
metaphor, enriching is like getting a really
rich, green liquid sitting on top of a
sponge, so now it's really dense and vivid and
bright green and concentrated, and then absorbing is
like picking a sponge or helping a sponge
become especially receptive to the
experiences landing in it. In practice, as I said, these
two sort of mush together, but I'm being opportunistic
here and looking for anything that can help the
registration of an experience. So enriching, we help
the experience be big. There are five fundamental
factors of enriching. I have a lot of slides,
and oh in the back, I have supplementary
slides to get into this. I'll just name these
five factors right now. The longer we
experience something, the more it tends to get
encoded and consolidated. So duration, over
the course, let's say of a breath or two or
longer, second, the intensity. That's another
factor of enriching. The more intensely
we feel something, the more it's going to
tend to be internalized. Third is what I
call multimodality. It's a funny word
for the more aspects of the experience we're
aware of, the more impact it's going to have. So I think of experiences
as having essentially five aspects. The more of these that
we engage the better. There's the thought
track, which includes imagery, the perception track,
particularly body sensations, the emotion track of experience,
like a song has five tracks to it, kind of. So there's the emotion track. Then there's the desire
track-- very important-- the intentions, the wants,
the values, the purposes, the plans, the
longings in the heart. And then there's
the action track, the sense of embodied
behavioral action, including facial expressions
and subtleties of posture. The more of these that are
engaged, as any kindergarten teacher knows, the more impact
experiences are going to have. So that's the third
factor of enriching. And the other two are novelty. The brain is a novelty detector. With the news, it's always
looking for something new. So if we engage our
experiences with what's called beginner's mind, they're
more likely to have an impact. If we bring a
freshness, a child mind, a sense of not
knowing to experience, it's going to tend
to have more impact. And then last,
personal relevance. Why would it matter
to me, for example, to have an experience today of
feeling respected and included by others, given my childhood
and my high school experiences in which I felt like an odd
duck and I was cast out? Why would it be
meaningful to me today to really register that
my tricky conversations with my partner go
better when I lean in and sustain attention, rather
than space out and withdraw? How can I help that
really land inside me? Because it's
personally relevant. OK, five factors of
enriching, then absorbing. Let it sink in. Essence of absorbing
is to intend to receive the experience,
to sense it's coming in, and to focus on its value. Because as we focus on what's
rewarding about an experience, what's enjoyable about it
or personally meaningful, that increases activity of
dopamine and norepinephrine in the brain, these fundamental
neurotransmitter systems. And as their activity increase
in proportion to or in relation to the sense of reward,
as that happens, the experiences we're
having are flagged as keepers for protection
and long term storage. We're more likely
to retain or to be changed for the better
by those experiences that feel rewarding. I think about so many times
I've been a therapist talking with a client like who is
this sort of droning on, and I'm droning on myself. We're both bored. Yeah, your mother, your mother,
my mother, my mother, mothers, my father, my brother, my this. Yeah. Yeah, really. There's no change that's
going to happen usually. There needs to be more
of a sense of reward. OK, that's the fundamental
process of change. To use a metaphor of a fire,
we begin with the fire, we have fire, usually because
it's already happening. We're already having
the experience, or we might
deliberately create it. And then we protect the
fire by enriching it. We add logs to it, so
it burns more brightly. And then in absorb, we
take the warmth of the fire into ourselves. That's the fundamental process. The optional fourth step in the
change process I call linking. Again, I didn't invent
the elements in these. I have invented this
framework, and its application, and its grounding,
as I get to, in evolutionary neuropsychology. But in linking, as we have
familiar experiences with, we're aware of two things at
once, positive and negative. Mindful awareness,
spacious mindfulness is a form of linking, if what
we're aware of is painful. Because we're aware
of what's painful, let's say, while
at the same time being rested in an untroubled
spaciousness of awareness, which is itself never tainted
or disturbed or damaged by what it represents, by
what passes through it. We've also had other natural
experiences of linking where we're mad about something,
and we talk ourselves off the ledge, or we're
rattled in some way, and we reach down for some kind
of memory are very supportive relationship or a previous time
when we handled that challenge to kind of give
ourselves perspective and to soothe ourselves and
to reorient and encourage ourselves. That's linking as well. In really a quite
formal way, for example, a person let's
say could be aware of a beneficial experience in
the foreground of awareness of being really seen and
wanted in a healthy way and valued by another person,
while at the same time, off to the side, having old
feelings of being dismissed and left out and
overlooked and rejected. And because neurons that
fire together wire together, if a person sustains
the positive experience and keeps it big,
while the negative is off to the side of
awareness, then the positive will tend to associate
with it and soothe and ease and eventually even
replace it, sort of like using flowers
to crowd out weeds and then eventually uproot them. Linking is optional,
because it's not inherently necessary for
the change process to occur and also because sometimes that
negative material can really suck you right in. Don't underestimate the
power, et cetera, et cetera. It can really grab your away. The key to linking is to
keep the positive bigger so that it soothes and
eases the negative, rather than the negative
contaminating the positive. The essence is really simple. Have it, enjoy it. The two stage process. Have the experience
and take it in. I like the word savoring,
which Rachel used. But I tend to use
words beyond savoring, because many of the experiences
we're trying to internalize, much of what we're trying
to grow inside ourselves isn't really
relevant to savoring. For example, we
have a clear idea. I had a really powerful
idea in my mid-twenties that growing up I'd been
a nerd, but not a wimp. That was a very useful
idea for me to register. It wasn't that I would savor
it, but wow, do I really want to help that one sink in. Other examples are
where we're more skillful with another person. We don't really savor the
sense of skillfulness. We just want to really help it
land, kind of as a one trial learner, as they
say in behaviorism. So the next time it happens,
we move into that way of being just naturally. That said, I like
the word savoring, but it's not applicable
to everything. But the fundamental process
is one of internalization. So you want to try
something experiential? That'll be good. Try to practice what
I'm preaching here. So let's just try
it really fast. We're going to do a
little, mini experiment. And then I'll move to
a wrap with two kind of overarching perspectives. So most of the time that we
have the beneficial experience, it's already occurring. We just need to notice it. Think of all those
moments where we have a sense of
accomplishment, getting one thing done after another,
or a sense of friendliness or camaraderie with others
or some kind of insight into how to be in the future. We have the experience. We see the flower. We have a moment of ah,
that looks nice out there. But then we just
move on from it. We don't harvest
the value of it. So most of the time, we're
just noticing experiences that are already there. That said, there's
completely a place for self activating states of mind. That's central to
coping, to functioning, and central to spiritual
practice of well, at the other end of the
spectrum, if you will, if that's of interest to you. So to begin with, we'll just-- then I'll move it through,
and I'll say less. Notice that as you exhale,
you are naturally relaxing. The parasympathetic
nervous system handles exhaling, naturally
slowing the heart and relaxing. And then as you foreground
into awareness, this experience that's already happening in
the background of relaxing while exhaling, you don't
need to change your breathing. Your breathing might naturally
change as your focus here. Then you can sink
in increasingly, enriching and absorbing
this sense of relaxation. So be quiet for 30 seconds. Just do a little
internal experiment. You might have a sense
of encouraging relaxation to establish itself more in
you as a kind of resting state. One bit at a time,
one synapse at a time, growing trait relaxation. OK. That was the first experiment. Second one, gratitude, gladness. Here's where we're going
to create an experience. If you like, bring to mind
one or more things you feel glad about or grateful for. And help yourself
move from thoughts of things you are
grateful for or glad about to an increasingly embodied,
emotionally saturated experience of gratitude. And then as you settle
into a sense of gratitude, kind of marinate in it. Let yourself really feel it. Maybe bring a little
smile to your face. So I'll be quiet
here, too, as you take in the good of gratitude. If your mind wanders,
that's completely natural. Just bring it back. In effect, in meditative
language, for half a minute, you'd be taking gratitude
as your object of attention. And as your mind rests
upon any particular thing, that tends to be internalized. OK, finishing up here. As with any practice,
we're doing two things. We're trying to do
something inside our minds, and we're observing the
results inside the laboratory. And if it's difficult to
activate an experience at will, such as gratitude,
that's a bit of a flag to look for opportunities
to build up that trait. And also, if there's any
difficulty sustaining attention to a positive experience or
difficulty really receiving it into yourself, that's a little
bit of a flag to yourself for further investigation. And then the last
one, warm heartedness, perhaps compassion,
perhaps kindness, bringing to mind one or more
beings you care about, have warm feelings for,
could be friends, could be a pet, an
animal companion, could be a group of
people you care about. And then as you do
this, help yourself move from the idea
of this to feelings of warmth, caring, even love. Here too, I'll be quiet
for half a minute. It's a real interesting
process to observe your mind and see what is it like to
help something establish itself more inside yourself. What's the process
of helping kindness to establish itself more in
you or compassion for others? What's that like? It's a really interesting
and useful inquiry. OK, so finishing up
the little experiment. I'm on the homestretch now. I want to sort of step back
a bit and take a wider view and then open it
up for discussion. So there are, I think,
four distinct kinds of benefits for taking
in the good, which is my informal general
term for the deliberate internalization of
beneficial experiences, which is the technical
definition of what we've been exploring here, or what could
be called mindful cultivation, or others, you know, I use the
term positive neuroplasticity. First, we grow specific
resources inside. That's good, both in general
and for particular purposes, which I'll speak to in a moment. Second, there are
implicit benefits in this practice of
mindful cultivation. For example, it's a
training in mindfulness, and also, implicit
in it is a stance of being for one's self,
treating one's self as if one matters, which
is worthy in its own right, and especially worthy if it's
a corrective to not feeling like you've mattered enough
to others in the past. Third, it's quite plausible
that in this process of internalization of
beneficial experiences, we are sensitizing the brain to
positive beneficial experience, much as the brain can be
very readily sensitized to negative experiences. There is emerging research
that quite possibly, it can become increasingly
sensitized to positive ones, so it becomes more
efficient and effective at converting those experiences
into a lasting change of neural structure
and function. And then last, as we grow
the good inside ourselves, the world tends to look
a little different. It sometimes can
treat us differently, which gives us an opportunity to
grow more good inside ourselves in a positive upward spiral,
or as Lao-Tzu, I think, put it many, many
years ago, "If you keep a green bough
in your heart, a singing bird will come." And now for a wider
perspective, I've spoken here about
the general process of self-directed
neuroplasticity, self-directed brain change. You can apply that
general process to growing particular
resources inside yourself. Resilience is used
to meet needs. What are the needs that
resilience is relevant for, and then how can we
identify and grow resources and signs
that are matched to the needs we might have? If we run out of gas, a
spare tire won't help us. It's not matched to the issue. If we have a flat tire, now
that resource is matched to it. So you might really
ask yourself, I think one of the
most useful questions from a long career in
clinical psychology, what, if it were more present
in the mind of a person, would really help? Would help with this
workplace issue, would help with some kind
of family problem, would help just heal the
residues of the past, or to feel happier all together? What, if it were more present,
would really, really help? I use, as a map for this, the
framework of the three needs that have been identified
in a lot of research as our fundamental needs
for safety, satisfaction, and connection. There are other needs models. I don't think everything that's
important to people fits neatly into this framework. But this is a really
fundamental framework. And we manage safety by
avoiding, in general, avoiding harms,
manage satisfaction by approaching rewards, and
connection attaching to others. You see the general
framework here. These three overarching
motivational and regulatory systems, avoiding,
approaching, and attaching are loosely, but significantly
related to the three stage evolution of the human brain. This is the so-called
triune brain model. It's a little fuzzy
around the details, but the essence is
pretty much there, that as our ancestors
over 600 million years evolved a nervous system,
rule one in the wild is eat lunch today. Don't be lunch today. Live to see the sunrise. That's the reptilian brain
stem, very, very highly focused on safety needs. Then we have the
mammalian sub cortex, very, very focused
on satisfaction. Mammals can sustain pursuit. Reptiles generally can't. Mammals can also hunt at night. I'm very fond of our
scruffy mammalian rat-like, squirrel-like ancestors evolving
about 200 million years ago when dinosaurs ruled the earth,
but they were crafty and tough and they survived
65 million years ago when something big
smacked into the planet, and the dinosaurs
became extinct. And then on top of
all that, especially as the brain has tripled in
volume in just the last couple three million years, are
profound social capabilities of primates and hominids
and humans for relationships of various kinds. So there's a loose relationship
between the management of these needs and our
structure of our brain. That's why I kind of
joke that routinely we need to pet the lizard, feed
the mouse, and of course, hug the monkey. So OK. There's a little chart here
of resources matched to needs. You can go back and
take a look at it later. It just illustrates
the broader point. Routinely, as a person who
works with other people, I see that number
one, people come in with challenges this high,
but resources this high. They need to scale up
resources to match the problem. And second, they're
unclear, often, about what resources
would actually help. And so identifying
resources that would actually help particular
needs is really, really useful. And you can get into the detail
of that later if you like. So finishing up in
roughly the next minute, I want to point to
a wider implication. At the individual
level, as people develop psychological
resources, they are more able to sustain
resilient well-being in the face of the
challenges of life. The point of all
this, for me, is not how to withdraw from the world,
sit on a cushion, go to a cave, bliss out, and bliss out. That's fairly easy and
straightforward to do. The issue for me really is
how to engage life fully, how to dream big dreams, how
to swing for the fences, how to speak truth to power, how
to enjoy the pleasures of life on the basis of an unshakable
core of well-being, a feeling already safe enough inside,
already satisfied enough inside, and already connected
enough inside, in other words, with a kind of unshakable
core deep down of peace, contentment, and love. That's the real challenge,
and therefore, to me, that's the real opportunity. So this process of developing
resources, as I've described, is absolutely key to growing
that increasingly unshakable core. But it has wider implications,
because without getting into any particulars
of politics, throughout human history, we've
seen how vulnerable humans are to manipulations due to fear,
greed, and us against them grievances and conflicts. We've just seen
profound vulnerabilities throughout history,
and I think we've seen great vulnerabilities in
the modern news cycle today. As people develop
internal resources, in addition to changing
the world for the better, but develop resources inside
themselves increasingly, they become less vulnerable
to these classic manipulations of fear, greed,
and us against them rivalries, which has a
lot of wider implications. And I'm hopeful that the
process of internalization and development
of inner resources is a key part of helping
the world come to a softer landing than the one it's
aiming toward by the end of the century. To finish on my last
slide, if you'll indulge me a quotation from an
ancient text, the Dhammapada. It's a saying that I think
about many times that really summarizes
this process, I think, and why it's so helpful
and why it also speaks to personal responsibility. "Think not lightly
of good saying, 'It will not come to me.' Drop by drop is the
water pot filled. Likewise, the wise
is one, gathering it little by little
fills oneself with good." So thank you very much
for this opportunity, and I'm grateful to you for
what you do each day to help this world be better. Thank you. RACHEL: Thank you. All right. We're going to open
up to questions. Is there-- we have
a [INAUDIBLE].. We're going to put that up. But is there a question? Actually, Ben, do
you want to do that? [INAUDIBLE] AUDIENCE: Hi, Rick. Thank you so much
for being here. I have to tell you that
I've been following you for many years and truly,
truly, truly, this practice has changed my life in many
positive ways, drop by drop. My question to you,
and I've thought about as I've read
your books, and I still have like this internal
doubt within me is, how do we
cultivate the positive and take in the good,
while still allowing space for the negative, the
shadow side and the emotions that we maybe we
don't want to feel, so that this process
maybe doesn't become sort of a cover for that? RICK HANSON: That's right. That's great, and I'm glad for
you that it's been helpful. I'm really glad. Yeah, well, you're getting
on a really, really important question. And to be super clear, nothing
that I'm talking about here is about looking
on the bright side or fake it till you make it. I want to see the whole reality
of life, the whole mosaic. I don't believe in
positive thinking, but I want to see
the whole mosaic with a brain that's designed
to overfocus on that one flashing red tile. All right. So if we fight our negative
feelings, they just grow. If we are to be able to
tolerate them and remain mindful of them, we must grow
resources, like perspective, steadiness of mind,
self-soothing, self-compassion. So resources we grow
inside ourselves help us accept and be
with and bear our pain, including the pain
that lands when we are compassionate for other people. So resources, growing
resources, in part, is a means to an end
of being able to be authentic and inclusive
about everything we feel. One of my great journeys as
I landed in adulthood numb from the neck down was to
wake down, not just wake up, to include my own interior. But to do that, I needed
to grow resources, because otherwise
opening to my experience was like opening a
trap door to hell. [? So that part. ?] The other thing is that what
happens as we grow resources inside, in addition to be
able to bear our difficulties, ourselves, we become
much more able to deal with the negative
things out in the world. We become more confident,
more courageous, spunky, you know, feisty, keep going. We're not going to be stopped,
because we have built up strengths inside. So to me, they really,
really work together. And that's a key
question you're raising. Absolutely key,
absolutely central. Thank you. [INTERPOSING VOICES] AUDIENCE: How does one go
about teaching kids early how to combat negativity
bias, taking in the good, that you talked about
in your research? Could you help outline
three clearly defined simple and effective
steps that one can incorporate into their
parenting starting tomorrow? RICK HANSON: I
wish more questions came to me in this form,
clear, concise, direct. It's really great. Well, for one, I work
with a lot of kids. I have a background there,
and my dissertation actually was on 15-month-olds. So I have a real interest
in early childhood, too. So I think the
question is really apt. So three practical suggestions. One is up to the
age of around 14, when kids no longer will
put up with their parents putting them to bed, that
period just before sleep is a wonderful opportunity for
a couple, three minutes to rest attention on something wholesome
and beneficial for the child, which could be as simple
as just feeling cozy and cuddly with a caregiver
or happy about the dog that's in the room, or talking
about some neat thing that happened in the day. And then for those few
minutes, just sort of marinate in the experience. I've known a number of
families in which they started doing that with
their kids, and there were fairly dramatic benefits. Part of it's
implicit, obviously, keep sustaining a parent's
attention, let's say. But I think in particular,
there is some internalization. That's one. Two, in formal settings, like
school teachers, educators, or mindfulness
coaches, there are so many opportunities that
are natural moments to slow it down and
help it sink in. When kids come back from
recess or after a period or before going home, use
those more formal opportunities for internalization or
similar opportunities, like at meals, in a
family where people just take a moment with or without
any religious framework, and just be grateful
for the food. Just think of something. Or just go around
the room, what's one good thing that
happened today, and it can be the same
good thing every day. That's all right. But what's one good thing
that happened today. People do different things
at formal opportunities. And then the last is with this
particular child or really any child, ask that question,
what resources would really help if they were more present
in the mind of the child, and know what is it we're
trying to develop in this child, not based on Mom or
Dad's infinite wisdom. I speak from some experience
here, some kind of lecture coming at the kid,
that they blow off. But from the
child's perspective, what would the
child be motivated to develop more inside
themselves, especially social emotional
resources, and then if you know what
you're trying to grow, which is where the
issue is in most cases, people don't know what
they're trying to grow. Know what you're trying to grow. If you know what you're trying
to develop and encourage and nourish and
protect in that child, then look for opportunities
to have experiences of that, which then are internalized. OK, good. RACHEL: I know we're at time. RICK HANSON: Thank you. Thank you. RACHEL: Some of
you have to leave. So I just want to give you
another round of applause, and we can stay
for more questions. [APPLAUSE]
