Modern Wisdom - #047 - Dr Rick Hanson - How To Develop A Resilient Mind

Episode Date: January 14, 2019

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/ Check out everything I recommend from books to products and help support the podcast at no extra cost to you by shopping through this link - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 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 well-being 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 Chriswelex. But for now, we're going to learn how to be resilient with Dr. Hanson.

Dr Rick Hanson, how are you today? Chris, I'm very happy to be here. And by the way, please call me Rick or I'll call you Mr. Williamson or something. That's fine. We'll stay informal today. So Rick, what are we going to learn about today? What are you teaching us about? 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 of 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. Wow. That would be, if I can come up with that by the end of this episode, it'll be an incredibly happy man. So many listeners will probably know you for hardwiring happiness. That was a New York Times best seller, right? Was there much overlap between that and the

current book you're writing? That's a great question. Yeah, that book hardwiring happiness. You get it from the title. It's about the fundamental how of growing qualities inside 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, that book's about 12 strengths, 12 factors that are based in the evolution of the brain as the 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 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. I get you.

So is learning the foundation upon which all of you are there's a built? 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, it was about 15.

And I realized that I was utterly unhappy. I was miserable, I was neurotic, I was seriously messed up. I was a mess. And I was kind of in despair in a way. Like, what am I going to do? My crummy family, my crummy school, I'm dead in the water, no one likes me. And it wasn't horrible abusive, like some childhoods are,

but it was pretty bad, pretty miserable. 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? Because then that's the strength of strengths, right? Learning, broadly to find not memorizing the multiplication table I mean like body learning, emotional learning, social learning, spiritual learning Dad is the strength of strengths because it's the one that grows the rest of them So if you get good at learning, you know, then you can apply it to anything you want to develop inside yourself or if you want to help other people Yeah, I think certainly for me

The friends that I'm closest to 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 a useless fact learning. It's a virulent hunger for just wanting more, more knowledge or understanding whether that be 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're 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. Yeah. Now, if I could though, as a guy, I am a, I don't, well, 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 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. That's the kind of learning I really want to focus on here with you. 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 well-being or footprint on the planet or affect on other people. The development of who we are in terms of psychological traits of happiness, or calm, or loving ness, or self-compassion, grit, things like that, that's what really affects us every day. 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, in my own path of awakening over this lifetime. Wow, yeah. So where do we begin? Where do we start?

If we want to develop ourselves into a bento fish catcher, and we've got 11 fish and we want to get them all, where are we starting? That's right. A useful framework for me is to 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 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 combinations.

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 a little worm that needs to get food or a complicated human that's 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. 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 this is a 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? 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, anger or a sense of being frozen. You can't do anything. That indicates needs for safety. 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? Good inside yourself. 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, what's your resting state of relaxation and ease inside yourself?

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 and willingness. I've done a lot of things where you really have 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 will 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 not a lot of things in rock climbing, where it's really hazardous, but I'm not freaked out inside. So all it's stopped right there. I've spoken to one of the three needs, but that gives you an illustration of what I think is really useful to do. I totally get it. I really do. I recently did a podcast with Alex Hutchinson, who wrote a book called In Jure. If you haven't read it yet, I would highly advise

getting out of it. 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 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. And then attaching those to, okay, so if I'm 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? I'm very glad you clarified that, Chris, because you're totally right. I tend to make assumptions, because I'm a therapist 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 you don't recognize that, then you won't be able to deliberately identify

the tools you need for it. It's kind of like if your car has a flat tire, and you think you're gonna solve that problem by putting gas in the tank, that's not gonna be helpful. You gotta 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 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 to people who appeal 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 on my performing? Well, I get everything done.

What do I need to do about those? 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 man, because it's a way to manage anxiety to move into aggression and anger, but it rooted there's an anxiety. So here's the thing. If you practice gratitude, will that make you less anxious? No.

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

Yeah, which is 40% of the population for sure. 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 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 added intersection or have a good criminal justice system or healthcare system.

I'm in America and we're working on all these. Yeah, you're going to let way to go. Yeah, we're all behind the curve. We'll set that aside for the moment. So building up the felt sense and the visceral core of your body of calms strength, that's a really useful thing to look for, a handful of opportunities every day to feel

and then take the 10 or so seconds of breath or two or three to begin the process of hard wiring that experience of the resource, the calms strength. Can you give us an example of that? Yep. Okay. So, 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 eddy in the stream of consciousness that lasts only a few seconds before it becomes something else We must help that passing pattern of activation leave a lasting physical change behind otherwise by definition. There's no learning Okay, so how do we do that? How do we embed it? How do you do? Yeah? leave a lasting physical change behind. Otherwise, by definition, there's no learning.

Okay, so how do we do that? How do we embed it? How do you do it? Yeah, that's hard-wiring happiness is all about that. 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 wanna help them wire together, three together. That's the two stages right there, firing and wiring. So if you want to help them wire together, three major clues. 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 Jackrabbitty, ADD-ish culture. 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. Because that's how you make it stick to you physically, in part one. Stay with it. Don't waste it. Handful at times of day.

Two, if you also want a turbocharged, at what's called as you know, experienced 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. 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 because the more an experience is embodied, the more of a neural trace is going to tend to live behind, especially with repetition. Okay. So feel it in your body.

And 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 neuro-epinephrone to 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. The more the better, it's accumulative, you know. But those three, stay with it, feel it in your body, feel what's rewarding about it. We'll tend to steep in your growth curve,

your learning curve in general as you move through your day. So that is trying to reverse the, our minds are Teflon for good thoughts and Velcro for bad thoughts. I'll break it. That's stepping in and you're strapping some Velcro to some Teflon there a little bit, I suppose. Yeah, let's speak to that. So you know my, my stick, there are two reasons 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, neuronesure, 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 therapising, etc. 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 you're bringing up your crest, which is the brains 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 color glasses. It actually, when 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, and 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 time for broad purposes of survival. But most of the time, that negativity buys just creates a lot of excess suffering and unneeded conflicts with other people. And within ourselves as well, I suppose. So we've talked about how we can reinforce positive learning. How can we dampen the effect of negative learning? That's a great question. Well, and when I say positive on me 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, becoming more capable. As a point, 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 save a, you'd save 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, oh, 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? 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 essentially quite until we frame it differently then. 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 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. And that doesn't mean nothing 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 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 learn how to be more skillful. So that would be an example. I totally get it. I think maybe if my, what I was, I was analogizing between you, savoring a nice glass of wine, I'm 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. That's that's right. The savoring is a tricky word because here's 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.

Also, if you're like I was a shy, dorky, nervous kid, we all were, I don't know about all of you guys. I don't even anyone to run for their money as a shy, don't you? Oh, I'm not going to say here. So but then in young adulthood, you know, 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, boop, hear on the planet or pulling over and overhang or, you know, making a fire in the rain and rrrr. And I would just kind of try to help those experiences sink in because they compensated for those old feelings of inadequacy and worthlessness. 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. That's a nice, but if clarification that we've got there for that. So we've felt like a saying, we're more, more, more remorse. Sometimes you just got a register that you were a jerk. Oh, it's not a pleasant experience. You're not going to savor healthy remorse. The wins 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. I just like, man, never do that again. Like, you know, that's something too.

We've got to let sync in, but it's not something we would quote, quote, quote, saver. Totally correct. I did a podcast. I think the listeners will probably know about the mean number 14 or 15 with Corey Allen. And he coined this term, which I absolutely love, and you may like as well.

But you referred to as the mindfulness gap. And it's that breath in between action and your interpretation of it, either from yourself or from someone else. And 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 is this and

what should I do with it? 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 to inner resource for. The other thing you've named here is that space of mindfulness where there's like a place in which you can witness what's happening rather 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 by exploring themselves over time. And then on the basis of those two traits, then you can really steep in your growth curve as you go through your day. It's very interesting that although it obviously makes sense because the science reflects real life, but it's interesting that me as someone who and my friends and other experiences that were 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 natural,

but it's nice to hear 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, right, oh, no, what you're doing, missing the mark. So we mentioned about bad sensations and. Oh yeah, thank you for that.

Let's get back under that. 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 long-time 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're trying to prevent it in the first place or decrease it or just release it entirely. And the third great 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 flesh toilet. It's more like a septic tank, you know, that stuff is around. So you have to be able to feel it. And that's where, like, you're

getting it earlier, these other resources inside of self-awareness and mindfulness actually 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 50% 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. But then we need to let go. So then I would say 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 know, you yell a little bit, not freaking anybody out, but you get it out of your system. Be in real. 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, or I'm getting attached to a certain goal. And it's just not happening. I need to let it go. It's not going to 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, 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 one to register again and again and again, successful goal attainment, including in small bits like each individual email as you go through to let that in. Or then if what you released, I'll finish.

So 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? 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 have 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 to that negative. So you would be, let's say in my example,

aware simultaneously, a 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, 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. That's a very nice prescriptive framework for dealing with thoughts that arise. I'm currently reading five ways to know yourself by Shenzhen.

Oh, I know Shenzhen. He's the real deal. Shins and is a, 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 else who's read Shins and's work will know that he's suffering as pain times resistance. Actually, it's getting to 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 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. That's exactly right. There's a teaching in Schindsend's Buddhist, and I am as well, and he would certainly know this.

The Buddha made this great distinction between the first dark and the second dark. The first start is, there's a Buddha 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. 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 side swipes it out of the way. I know in 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 that more you're sucked into the simulator or you could call it the ruminator where you 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 Yeah, I love ruminator. I'm gonna. I'm gonna have to kind that So I think what what might be nice?'ve talked about, a lot of the stuff is, it 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 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 take away to that? 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 the most important thing to get good at, get good at growing, right? Because then I can grow whatever else I want to 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. So that would be

a real strong suggestion for people. It may seem abstract, but it's right in the middle of every day. 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 do what I'm about to say, you would totally change their life. And I'll put it out as a challenge

and you tell me if I'm wrong. First, three things. First, as 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, 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 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 is it? 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? No 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, right? That will organize your day and give you hope because no matter how tough the world is, if you know what you're focused on developing yourself, that kind of organizes what you're doing. And then the third thing I would suggest, 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 brainstem sub cortex 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. And rest in that for two or three or five minutes in a row to really hardwired into your body. And that is actually what I just described there. That felt sense of safe enough, satisfied enough, and connected enough marked by a feeling broadly of peace, contaminant love. That home, 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, butronic mild to moderate stress. Yeah. 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, deep, clean.

So, um, all right, 10 minutes a day, that's it. That's what I do. 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. That's fantastic.

For the listeners at home, if you listened to, I want to say, Lifehack's one of five, which is around about a month ago, you've mentioned an app app which is called Remembrance. Have you heard of this? No, but I like the idea. So, the little icon is a bit of string around someone's finger, and it's essentially just a reminder's 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 use if likes to use it for which is relate 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 to 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 dantian, which is below 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 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,

it'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 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 status, that living status doesn't sound like it. That sounds like what I aim to achieve, 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 I've had Bernie, it's been written at the very top of my notes since we've been talking, is if you 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? Man, Chris, I just feel these topics and questions are right at the heart of the personal and the political. In other words, the right at the heart, the personal well-being and functioning, and they're right at the heart of what our species is dealing with in the 21st century. So I'll try not to blather on. So we have to take care of it. We're all going to enjoy it a month. So first off, 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, 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 wanna 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 that and really embodied that. And generally they tend to be people who've done a lot of inner practice. You know, they're...

We're just talking about shins and practice. You know, they're just talking about shins and here aren't we? We're just everyone needs to sit in a circle and shins and shins and can be in the middle and we can just all look at him. Well, sure, or think about the lady, think about a new taught year 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 including in the body, 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 their being. You can just tell, there's an inner peace and inner calm, they hold onto 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 and quickly, one way or another. In other words, most stress in the wild and 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. 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, where our makings are no lines 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. Our resting state, when needs feel sufficiently mad, 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 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. 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.

Jindun. Yeah, Jindun. That's right. Or your kindergarten teacher who is always patient, You know, you know, and that to me is the 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. So what we've done is we've done a lot of things that we've done, and we've done a lot of things that we've done, and we've done a lot of things that we've done, and we've done a lot of things this increasingly unshakable core in which in your essence, you're fine, no matter how much crap you're dealing with. So what we've one point there that leads us quite nicely under that final

question about humans that have been that were around a long time ago is that you mentioned that a systems natural state, what was it, a systems natural state is the one which it's most comfortable in 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 bound 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, how would you characterize the temperature in your home?

You'd say, well, it's 20 degrees, you know, it's the resting state. 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 and enoughness of safety, satisfaction and connection, become nicer, you know. They become more generous, armor, 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 bond bonds, chanting home. 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 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. Yeah, exactly. 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 grand father from 5,000 years ago, how do you think what do you think his mind sets like? It's a great question. So the the key answer to that is they're 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 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 a 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 into low grade mild to moderate stress every day, which

is not their home base, in which accumulates wear and tear on their body. Why do you think that's happening? What's happening? What's causing this? I think the deep roots of that are in wealth inequality since agriculture came in. I think 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-g 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.

I like ESVS. You don't even know how you're an inline. I'm here or wherever you are. You know, we're communicating. I love that stuff. But the problem is, 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 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, 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 month, you know, you know who's eating, you know who's legit, you know who's eating more food and sneaking some food away from the group, you know who's screwing who, you know it's going on in a hunter-gatherer band. But when you start having agriculture and big cities and 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 gather bands, there's common truth. There's also common welfare, you know, their 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 a band, 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 surplus has came in and inequalities of wealth and power that are big, rich people can get richer, it doesn't trickle down. Poor people can have a can have a famine.

It doesn't mean that it infects the people behind the castle walls. Totally right. 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. The one last thing, you don't have common justice. The third condition in a hunter-gatherer ban, common truth, common 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. You know what I mean? Or we'd just say, see a leader asshole, we're gonna 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 want to protect their wealth and power, they attack these three conditions. Common truth, commonwealth, or 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. Would that be... So I agree with all of your points.

However, 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. Yeah. So it's not like I don't I'm sure that there's a lot of people who are very wealthy and very successful who feel even worse than the proletariat like down in the streets. So 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 LA around Beverly Hills, the Tibetan metaphor is

the hungry ghosts, you know, who have God-like 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, you know, have it 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, 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, 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 own search for a lasting happiness, which he's never found. He's harming lots of other people. 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 re-normalize to whatever increased state of nicer possessions 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, well, I wanna speak to that, though, because the research shows that people can actually change the setting on their hedonic treadmill Okay, 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, but it's not based on an underlying lack or scarcity inside, which is the root of the work for want, as you know. You know, instead you meet the next pleasure feeling already contented. And that really changes things. 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 thing, we're gonna interview, you're gonna run a little experiment, you're gonna sit down, you're gonna put them on the couch, I know this isn't your usual way, but you're gonna pop him on the couch, and he's gonna be, let's say 10,000 years ago, just before agricultural revolution. Great grandfather.

Great, great, XXX grandfather. What do you think his mind sets like if we were to compare him to a modern human? 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 66, so I've had things in my body that probably would have killed me, you know, 10,000 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. 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. And then a typical person probably experiences these days loneliness is epidemic. And it's interesting research. Maybe you had had other people talk about it. Loneliness, not like I'm an introvert, I like solitude. But that's, yeah, that's not being lonely, loneliness as a, as a unpleasant experience has roughly the equivalent health consequences to

smoking half a pack of cigarettes a day. Is that crazy? In terms of 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 reminator, 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 rainforest, or Serengeti plants, 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 dropped into the present moment. Okay, those are my guesses. What are yours? What do you think? I don't know.

So I think that I definitely agree, 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 trying to 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 difference. Being in nature certainly makes a huge difference for me. So 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. Those ones are potentially being less well met, but then the ones further up the pyramid are being better met. And oddly enough, that's interesting. Oddly enough that's been flipped now. I don't know whether you'd agree with that in one society. I think that's deeply insightful and really interesting. And you know, it's really poignant, but in other words, it's poignant that so many people that

lead lives of quiet desperation, you know, to quote Thoreau. And yet the typical person who's the 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, 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 us 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. Rick, I think that's a fantastic point to finish on. I get the impression that, meaning 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? Chris has been a pleasure. I could keep growing myself. The simplest way to find me online is rickhansen.net. My name is rickhansen, 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 from 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 Rick Hansen.net, SOM. Fantastic.

Well, the link to Resilient, How to Grow, an Unshakable Core of Com strength and happiness will be in the show not to 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. 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. Thank you very much. I'll catch you next time. Okay, good.