Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - Three Tools to Help You Get Through This | Dr. Rick Hanson Bonus Talk

Episode Date: May 8, 2020

Three best practices for coping and resilience, based on neuroscientific and psychological research from Rick Hanson. You can find Rick Hanson's talk, titled "We Will Get Through This" and much more on our app. Visit tenpercent.com to download the Ten Percent Happier app and kickstart your meditation practice. You can go directly to Rick's talk in the app here: https://10percenthappier.app.link/u1uV5jt1e6 To learn more about Rick and his new book, Neurodharma, go to https://www.rickhanson.net/ See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

What does it even mean to live a good life? Is it about happiness, purpose, love, health, or wealth? What really matters in the pursuit of a life well lived? These are the questions award-winning author, founder, and interviewer Jonathan Fields asks his guests on the Top Ranked Good Life Project podcast. Every week, Jonathan sits down with world renowned thinkers and doers, people like Glenn and Doyle, Adam Grant,

Young Pueblo, Jonathan Height, and hundreds more. Start listening right now. Look for the Good Life Project on your favorite podcast app. Hey y'all, it's your girl, Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, singer, and entrepreneur. On my new podcast, Baby This is Kiki Palmer. I'm asking friends, family, and experts the questions that are in my head. Like, it's only fans only bad.

Where did memes come from? And where's Tom from MySpace? Listen to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon music or wherever you get your podcast. From ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey guys, it's Friday and as has become our custom, we are dropping some bonus material from the 10% happier app. Normally, we drop guided meditations, but this week, we're going to try something a little different. We're going to drop one of our talks.

So in the app, we do guided meditations, of course, since it's a meditation app. We also do courses where we combine the meditations with short videos that teach you something valuable about the practice. And we do talks which we call kind of wisdom bombs, three to ten minute talks from meditation teachers, researchers, thinkers of all sorts with practical, actionable advice or just something super interesting. And this week we're featuring a talk from Rick Hansen, who's both a psychologist and a meditation teacher. He's also an author written a series of books about sort of the overlap between meditation and the neuroscientific research. And he's got a new book called NeuroDharma.

And this week he's talking about three best practices for coping and building resilience based on neuroscientific and psychological research. So here we go, Rick Hansen. Hi, this is Rick. This is a scary time. We're all being tested as individuals, families, and communities, and countries. Yet we will get through this. There will be another side. Even after the worst

events in human history, there is always eventually another side. The question is, how do we get there? On a personal level, I can offer three suggestions that are grounded in research on coping and resilience. First, find your footing. I've spent a lot of time in wilderness, rock climbing and in the mountains, and this moment in history feels like walking along a knife-blade ridge in a blizzard when you can't see more than a few feet in front of you. Until the storm eases a bit and we can see more clearly, it's simply prudent to slow

down and stay safe and take careful steps. Personally, I've been alarmed, worried about my family and other people, and trying to figure out what to do. As a psychologist, I know it's natural to feel frozen by threats and to look for an escape. But hope is not a plan. So, to find your footing, look for expertise, doctors and scientists and others who understand what we're in for.

Then make a plan, if only for today. Knowing that you have a good plan and that you're following it is comforting and calming. Action can lower anxiety. Right now, there's so much we can't control, and it's all too easy to develop what's called learned helplessness, which is a slippery slope into depression. So it's vital to focus on what you can influence, including little things. Stuck at home, maybe now is the time to finally organize the kitchen drawer. Perhaps it's the time to play more games with your kids or to get more exercise.

These little things obviously are not gonna solve the larger problems in the world, but at least there's something that we can do in the circle that we have some influence over. And then when you do have the feeling of making a choice or being effective in some way, slow down to experience that antidote to helplessness. Important choices also include what we are not doing these days. I try to remember that some of the people who get COVID-19 will die. Remember what's at stake in your own personal choices.

Second, calm and center. So much of what we normally took for granted is no longer available, like the ground suddenly dissolving underfoot. It's sinking in that we'll be stuck with this pandemic for many months at least, and dealing with the financial and other consequences for years to come. People naturally ask, what's going to happen to my job? What should I do if I get sick?

Will my hospital have a bed for me? It's awful not to know the answers. From a mental health standpoint, these stresses wear on people where they're most vulnerable. For example, the isolation of social distancing can be especially hard for people who are trying to stay sober, or who have a history of being rejected or abandoned. It's really important to turn to professional help if only on the telephone if you feel very distressed or that you might be a danger to yourself. The more challenging the outer world is, the more important it is to draw on and grow

inner strengths such as grit and compassion. Based on how the brain works, here are some simple things that we can do. 1. Is to bring awareness into your body. For instance, be mindful of three brass center row, feeling your chest rising and falling. This naturally reduces activity in the verbal centers of the brain, so there's less anxious chatter in the mind. This practice of body awareness also quits the brain's default mode network, and this will pull you

out of repetitive ruminations about the past or the future. And for a bonus, make one or more exhalations longer than the inhalations, which will engage the parasympathetic branch of the nervous system. This slows the heart rate as you breathe out and is naturally calming. Another way to calm and center is to bring to mind times when you felt strong and determined. It might have been when you pushed through the hardest day or year of your life, or kept standing hour after hour at an elderly parent's bedside, or just kept in during a tough childhood or illness or job and so forth. There could be a sense of

I'm still here, no matter what has happened. Tune into that sense inside and feel it again. Because of neuroplasticity, the capacity of the nervous system to be shaped by what we feel and think, we have the power to change our brains for the better. Many times a day, we have opportunities to notice beneficial experiences that we're already having, such as a sense of calming and relaxing as we exhale, or a feeling of gratitude for what is good in our own lives. And as we grow more of the good inside ourselves, then we have even more to offer to others. Third, I'd like to encourage you to take heart.

With social distancing, we're pulled away from people we enjoyed being with, while often being crowded together with other people, who, if your family is like mine, just might be starting to get on each other's nerves. Consequently, it's a kind of double whammy. Meanwhile, there can be a creepy worry that the next person you might meet just might make you sick. As challenging as this is, still, we have a fundamental power inside ourselves to open and to strengthen the heart.

For example, I was walking down the street of my neighborhood the other night and saw a father and his teenage daughter coming toward me with their dog. My first reaction was to be wary of them, and I stepped farther to the side, and then I wondered if they were afraid of me as well. He looked tired and preoccupied, and she looked uncertain. I found myself slowing down to say hello. I could see them relax, and there was a shared shrug and grim smile at the weird days we're in. It was just a moment, and we passed on by, but I felt a little better afterward. In the brain, positive social experiences can, in effect, ripple down the vagus nerve complex

that reaches into the heart and lungs and gut to calm and soothe them. This is one reason we relax around people we like. Oxytocin activity also tends to increase, which studies show, can help to lower anxiety. Simple practices really do work. We are in natively empathic, but under pressure we tend to hunker down and put up walls. Instead, you can take that extra beat to listen a little more closely to the other person and to imagine what they're experiencing behind their words. This can give them the sense of feeling felt in Dan Siegel's lovely phrase while helping you to feel closer as well. This is certainly a time these days to be a little extra generous with our attention, patience, kindness, and love.

As you are hearing these words, hundreds of millions of people around the world are working hard to deal with this pandemic and its effects. They could be cleaning a hospital floor, taking care of a child who is now home from school, scrambling to find another job, or putting another patient on a ventilator. We can take heart in their efforts, and they can take hard in our efforts. And we will get through this together. We'll put a link to that in the show notes and don't forget Rick's got a new book called NeuroDharma and we're back on Monday with Freshy. We'll see you then. Hey, hey, prime members.

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