The One You Feed - Dr. Rick Hanson

Episode Date: June 24, 2015

This week we talk to Dr. Rick Hanson about hardwiring happiness into our brainRick Hanson, Ph.D., is a neuropsychologist and author of Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence as well as Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love  and Wisdom and Just One Thing: Developing a Buddha Brain One Simple Practice at a Time.He is the Founder of the Wellspring Institute for Neuroscience and Contemplative Wisdom and an Affiliate of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley, he's been an invited speaker at Oxford, Stanford, and Harvard, and taught in meditation centers worldwide.An authority on self-directed neuroplasticity, Dr. Hanson's work has been featured on the BBC, NPR, CBC, Fox Business, Consumer Reports Health, U.S. News and World Report, and O Magazine, and his articles have appeared in Tricycle Magazine, Insight Journal, and Inquiring Mind.In This Interview Rick and I Discuss...The One You Feed parable.His latest book: Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence.That feeding the good wolf is a daily habit.How it's our responsibility to feed our good wolf- no one can do it for us.How frequently our brain changes.Experience-dependent neuroplasticity.That our brains are like velcro for the bad and Teflon for the good.Deciding what we cultivate and what do you restrain.   For more show notes visit our webite  Some of our most popular interviews that you might also enjoy:Dan HarrisMaria PopovaTodd Henry- author of Die EmptyRandy Scott HydeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You know, as I put it, we've got a brain that's like Velcro for the bad, but Teflon for the good. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit.

But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction. How they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like... Why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor? What's in the museum of failure? And does your dog truly love you?

We have the answer. floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest this week is Rick Hansen, PhD, neuropsychologist, and author of Hardwiring Happiness, The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence. His other books include Buddha's Brain and Just One Thing.

Rick is the founder of the Wellspring Institute of Neuroscience and Contemplative Wisdom and an affiliate of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley. He has been an invited speaker at Oxford, Stanford, and Harvard, and teaches meditation worldwide. And before we start the interview, a lot of you might have noticed that Eric has been doing some one-on-one coaching, which we've mentioned on various episodes. And up next, real quick, I just wanted you to hear one of Eric's coaching clients, Anthony, describe what was going on in his life that prompted him to sign up for the One You Feed coaching program. Some of you might be able to identify with him as you listen to this story.

Here's Anthony, followed by the interview. Basically, I'd been listening to the podcast for a while, and I had a bunch of goals set for myself that I wanted to accomplish, but was just sort of falling short, I guess, in general. So I wanted to get a little bit of encouragement and accountability from an outside source. You know, maybe it wouldn't be so easy on me. If you're interested in learning more about this program, send an email to eric at oneufeed.net. Here's the interview. Hi, Rick. Welcome to the show. Eric, it's a pleasure to be here, truly. Here's the interview. compelling together. So I'm excited to get to talk through some of that. Great. I think of the intersection of that as neurodharma. Yeah, I don't think it'll ever be

a household word, but it does kind of sum up what we might be talking about here. Exactly. So our show is called The One You Feed, and it's based on the parable of two wolves where there's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second and he looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that

parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Yeah. Well, I've heard that story in different formulations, including the one that you offered there. And it touches me deeply every time. I literally sometimes in talks, I'll tell that story. And I get the shivers every time I tell it, because to me, it speaks to two really important things. One, the presence of the wolf of hate, or the wolf of bad or the bad wolf, as you put it, you know, that capacity or inclination, and almost everyone, certainly me, for, as you say, hate, violence, aggression, jealousy, envy, ill will, etc. And the second thing, though, really more to our point, is that everything depends on who you feed, what you feed, and especially what you feed each day. And that gets to something that I think is extremely

hopeful, that we truly can cultivate wholesome qualities of mind and heart based on our daily efforts. And no matter what's happened in the past, and no matter how tough our circumstances are, no one can stop us from feeding the good wolf inside our own mind. And in addition to that being very hopeful, it also takes responsibility. It's on us because no one but us really can actively feed that good wolf every day. And that's our job to do. And as a neuroscience guy, I'm a very practical neuroscience guy. I produce a little research. I consume a lot of research and I especially apply it.

And in that context, it's amazing to appreciate how much your brain is continually changing, right? We're always feeding one wolf or another inside our brain because our brain is designed to be changed by our experiences, by what we pay attention to and how we relate to what we're paying attention to. So to me, the kind of bottom line takeaway, using the fancy phrase these days, experience dependent neuroplasticity. It's the idea that your brain is continually taking its shape in a very real, concrete, material sense from whatever you rest your mind upon routinely, particularly given the bias of the brain toward taking its shape from negative experiences, the negativity bias of the brain.

That's why I think it's so important to do what you can to rest your mind and therefore change your brain by resting your mind upon the authentically real beneficial experiences of everyday life that are usually enjoyable, little moments of feeling connected or grateful or peaceful or mindful or happy or accomplished or loving and caring toward other people. And through repeatedly resting your mind on those things, you will gradually wire those strengths into your brain, thus fundamentally feeding the good wolf. I've got a bunch of questions for you based on what you just said there. And I'm going to start with one that I've been pondering out loud a couple times lately.

And you talk a little bit about the negativity bias. You talk about how, and we talk about it on the show a lot, we're kind of wired that way, right? It's better to be safe than sorry, so to speak, as far as what you pay attention to from a survival basis. Is there any sense of, does anybody know, or is there any way to think about when do our brains start to actually catch up evolutionarily?

Now, I know it's been an enormously large amount of time, but we've seen in things like studies with people breeding foxes and trying to turn them closer to dogs that in a relatively short time period, they were able to make pretty substantial changes there. Are our brains ever going to catch up? Well, let's see. First, you're talking about biological evolution, you know, in terms of breeding foxes into, let's say, wolves or something like that. And, you know, biological evolution is pretty slow. It, you know, resets on the clock of the generations, maybe you get four or five generations per century. So I think that it's gonna be a long time before we no longer have this hardwired negativity bias in the brain. You know, as I put it, we've got a brain that's like

Velcro for the bad, but Teflon for the good, because that's what kept our ancestors alive, to live to see the sunrise, you know, and pass on genes that passed on genes. So, I think in terms of pure biological evolution, it'll be quite a while before, if ever, we somehow, as it were, breed that bias out of the brain. Got the three Bs there, you know, a little alliteration. But meanwhile, we have cultural evolution, and we have opportunities for psychological evolution. The real question is not, you know, what kind of wolves do you have in your inner kennel? The real question is, as you put it from the very beginning here, what do you cultivate and what do you restrain? And even if we do have a hardwired tendency to overlearn from our bad experiences and underlearn from our good experiences, which is unfortunate because learning from our good experiences or beneficial experiences, which are usually enjoyable, is the primary way to hardwire those psychological mental resources into ourselves for coping with difficulties and feeling happier and also having more to offer other people. Even though all of

that is true, we still have opportunities many times a day using mindful attention to tilt toward beneficial experiences and make sure that we, in particular, install them, that we don't just have them, because merely having beneficial experiences is momentarily pleasant, but it produces no lasting value because those beneficial experiences are not installed. They're not encoded in some way as a lasting change of neural structure or function. But if we do the dozen seconds or so of really savoring, really kind of marinating in our ordinary, authentic, beneficial experiences

a handful of times every day, in effect, given that we have a brain that's tilted toward survival but against quality of life, when we tilt toward beneficial experiences, and in particular, really take the dozen or so seconds to internalize them, take them in, if we do that tilt, then we just level the playing field. But if we do that, and we can all do that, even though we've got a stone age brain, if we do that, over the course of a day, we learn a lot more from that day. We grow, we develop through this installation of beneficial experiences. We hardwire happiness as well as other inner strengths into ourselves. And then if you add that up over time, a handful of times a day, day after day after day, the years of our lives, it makes an extraordinary difference for people over the

lifespan. And you call this process taking in the good. And I'd like to get a little bit further into how to do that. But let's start off by, you know, the people who listen to the show know that I am notoriously skeptical of positive thinking, which I know this isn't so but help me understand the difference between taking in the good, which you're saying is resting your brain on the good things that do happen, versus sort of delusional positive thinking. Yeah, absolutely. I don't believe in positive thinking like you. I believe in realistic thinking. So, I want to see the whole mosaic of reality. And, you know, given our common interests, let's say in Buddhism, it's, I think, no accident that it's said in Buddhism that the fundamental deep root

of suffering and evil is ignorance or delusion, not really recognizing what's actually true. So the fundamental framework for me here is to really recognize what's actually true. And as part of that recognition, it's true that we have a brain that is negatively biased, especially in terms of how we learn from our experiences. And second, it's also true that in terms of the mosaic of reality, there's a lot of crap out there, you know, every life has difficult, hard, painful things, and many lives are saturated in difficult, hard, painful things. So it's precisely out of that very clear-eyed, noble take on both the negativity bias of the brain and the reality of the challenges that we will all face in this life.

Based on that, to me, it's really important to recognize in that mosaic of reality in your life, the good facts as well as the bad facts. And we have a brain that's biased as a kind of well-intended universal learning disability to overlook the good facts, generally speaking, while we continually scan for the bad ones. And then if you do recognize a so-called good fact, you know, you finished the dishes, you finally got the kids in bed, that thing you worried about did not happen. Someone has smiled at you, you see a flower blooming, you're still alive today, you recognize something inside yourself, like grit, or resilience, or toughness, or some kind of character virtue like patience and generosity.

Whatever it might be, you see the good fact and you let yourself feel something as a result. Because most people, number one, don't see all the good facts or even a fraction of the many good facts in daily life, including in a tough, hard life. And then second, whatever they tend to see, they usually don't really feel it very much. And then if they even see it and feel it, they usually don't help their brain internalize it, encode it by resting attention on the beneficial experience that they're having for more than a few seconds in a row. But if they don't stay with it for more than a few seconds in a row, that experience minimally, if at all, encodes from short-term memory buffers to long-term storage. The fundamental process of conceptual learning, but more to our purposes here,

the process of feeding the wolf inside or wolf, the wolf back inside that we care about, feeding resilience and determination inside, feeding gratitude and happiness, contentment, feeding a sense of, you know, relaxation inside, a sense of closeness with other people, a commitment to sobriety, commitment to exercise, what have you. If that's what we care to feed inside, that's a two-stage process of learning that moves from short-term memory buffers to long-term storage, from state to trade, from activation to installation. And what I'm talking about is recognizing the ordinary good facts of daily life that are real, that you tend to overlook. And then on the basis of that recognition, or on the basis of any beneficial experience you're already having, like a sense of completion when you get a tough email out the door, or a sense of fun or fellowship

with friends, or a sense of spiritual development of any kind, when you're having those beneficial experiences, at least a few times a day, don't waste them. Don't let them pass through your brain like water through a sieve. Meanwhile, with negative experiences getting caught every time routinely. And instead of that, actually take charge of the structure building processes of your own brain from the inside out. The essence really of a tough-minded self-reliance, at least a handful of times every day, you know, staying with those beneficial experiences to really register them. So you gradually internalize them increasingly as resources you can draw upon when the going gets tough,

and also draw upon just for ordinary happiness. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer.

We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend.

Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really, No Really.

Yeah, Really. No Really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iheart radio app on apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts you call this process taking in the good and you have an acronym for it or for the steps which is heal um have a good experience um enrich it and then it, and then the last is to link the positive

and negative material. I want to talk a little bit about steps two and three. So have a good experience. I think you talk in the book a lot about a big part of that is actually be aware of and paying attention to things that are positive, and I agree with your point 100%. There are good things in nearly every life. I am not good at those next two steps about enriching and absorbing. An example I would give is, like, I will do gratitude,

but it tends to be more of a mental exercise sometimes, which is not, I still think it's better than not having the mental exercise, but how do I take a, you know, somebody says something nice to me during the day, how do I enrich and absorb that? What are, because I've played with that since I've been reading your book, and I'm seeing benefits from the whole process, but I feel like I'm not getting those steps two and three very well. Well, thanks for saying all that, Eric. And you've made me think about using your metaphor of the wolf you feed.

I mean, when you have it, so let's kind of make it real. Let's suppose that maybe in your family, you have a nice sense of connection or closeness with a child. Or let's say that just in an ordinary day, it's been a stressful, rushing about day. Finally, you get a chance to sort of relax. Maybe you take a shower, maybe you work out a little bit, maybe you just sit and watch some TV with your family or by yourself, whatever. And is it relaxing? Okay, you're having some kind of a beneficial experience. So to use the metaphor of the wolf,

you're holding a food against the wolf's mouth. And maybe even the wolf is tasting it. The wolf is now chewing on this experience of closeness with family members or relaxation or accomplishment. But then the question becomes, if you really want to feed that wolf, the wolf has to swallow the food, right? The wolf, yeah, has to actually take it

in and then metabolize it from the inside out. And to a larger point, you know, we continually learn things. And we continually often go about teaching people things. But how often do we learn how to learn? Or how often do we learn how to learn? Or how often do we teach how to learn? In other words, we say, it all depends on the wolf you feed. How do you get that wolf to swallow and metabolize whatever it is we're feeding him or her, let's say. So that's what we're getting at here in the second and third steps. Exactly right. So the neuropsychology of learning has been widely studied in terms of more conceptual material. Unfortunately, it's not been very studied in terms of emotional, motivational, attitudinal, social, somatic, even spiritual kinds of learnings that we really care about, right? So what I've done is apply to those sorts of learnings, very standard findings that come mainly from the realm of cognitive psychology, but are really well established, and they make common sense.

Basically, it says that, look, if you want to steepen the learning curve, including from an experience, let's say, of gratitude, there are five well-known factors that will steepen your learning curve from that experience over the course of 5, 10, or 20 seconds. One, duration. You know, as you know, there's a saying in neuroscience, neurons that fire together wire together. So the longer those neurons are firing, the more they're going to be wiring.

5, 10, 20 seconds in a row. Second, intensity. The more intensely you experience, let's say, gratitude, you know, you really feel it or you really think about it like, oh my god, I am so grateful, you know, for that particular thing. The more intensely those neurons are firing, the more intensely they're going to be wiring. A third factor, I sum it up with the word multimodality. All I mean by that is the richer the experience, the better. There's a place for internalizing thoughts represented by language or more sort of visual or imagery based, like a sense of perspective or a framework for how we look at things.

All right. So there's a place for internalizing the thought of gratitude, like, wow, I'm very fortunate that my parents, you know, made efforts to bring me up in this world, or oh, I'm grateful for living in a time in which you and I can communicate with each other through a technology like Skype. That's great. But it's just a thought. It doesn't have that much impact. The more that we allow the experience to be sensed in the body, and the more that we have it as an emotional component, and even the more that we link a sense of desire to the experience, the more modalities, in other words, of experience that we're engaging, the richer the neural trace, as, you know, any fourth grade school teacher knows. And then really fast, the fourth and fifth factors of enriching are novelty. The more that we can relate to our experiences kind of through the eyes of a child. As you know, there's probably, as you probably know, there's a saying, Zen mind, beginner's mind. Yeah, the more we're going to,

you know, encode the experience. And then last, the more we have going to you know encode the experience and then last the more we have a sense of salience personal relevance why should i care you know why would it matter to me let's say to deepen the experience of gratitude that's those and you don't need to do all of those where it mostly shows up for people is around duration intensity and feeling it in the body the the more the better okay then Then what also can steepen the learning curve from episodes of learning opportunities. When I say learning, I don't mean memorizing the multiplication table. I mean internalizing a growing sense of grit or resilience or loving kindness or compassion for others, that kind of learning. You know, if you sense and intend

that this experience is really sinking into you, in other words, you're absorbing it, that's the A-step and the H-E-A-L, HEAL acronym, you're absorbing it, as you said, the more you sense and intend that the experience is going into you, like water coming into a sponge or kind of giving yourself over to the experience or warmth spreading out into your body, the more that you do that, the more that you will be priming and sensitizing memory making systems. So that's the essence, really, if you think of it, the fundamental neuropsychology of learning. I didn't invent it. I've only tried to kind of summarize and apply this really well-established understanding about learning. And to do so in a context in which I think people in psychology, human resources training, character development of children, self-help, you know, practical wisdom, coaching, mindfulness training, etc., etc., etc.,

me included, have overvalued the activation phase of learning, the initial step around having some kind of beneficial experience. That's important. The brain is not like an iPod. It's like an old-school cassette recorder. You record the song by playing it. We need to have the experience in the first place. That's activation.

All right. But most people, me included, certainly in the past, in the general territory of psychology or self-help or human development, have not paid enough attention to the installation phase of learning. The second and third steps that you've properly highlighted here. And because we haven't paid enough attention to the installation phase of learning, we've lost many, many opportunities to turn passing beneficial states into lasting beneficial traits. And that's why if a person wants to really steepen their learning curve as they go through daily life, don't just notice the beneficial experiences you're already having or look for natural opportunities to deliberately create them. Don't just do that. That's good. That's just the

beginning. Take the time, a dozen or so seconds at a time, to enjoy the experience, stay with it so you don't waste it on your own brain. Yeah, I mean, I think that is so true, that idea that particularly in our culture today, I think we learn so much, we consume so much information, and so little of it translates into anything that sticks with it or is actually becomes part of our life uh something that we do i i often say it's not what you know it's what you do um or i think i'm i doubt i'm the first person that said that but and i i agree with what you're saying so let's think about this installing process so i have a good experience and i'm looking for duration and intensity. And what I find happens is that, similar to when I'm trying to be mindful, like meditating, I feel the good experience.

I think, okay, I should feel more of this good experience, or I should dive deeper into it, and then my mind wanders or my mind goes into it. It stays. And is it just a matter of continuing to try it and getting better at it like anything else? Yeah, I think that the short version is that we all know how to take in the good. If I was to really summarize all the neuropsychological complexity here, it would be in four words, have it, enjoy it.

In other words, have the beneficial experience, usually because you're already having it. In other words, you already are, you know, feeling close with your partner, or you're already relaxing, or you're already feeling determined and capable, you know, to face a challenge, or you're already having a sense of accomplishment or completion around some task. It's already happening, right? And another key point here is that these experiences and also opportunities for experience are typically mild. These are not million-dollar moments, most of them. You know, on the zero to ten intensity scale, they're the ones and twos of everyday life. But when you're having them, draw upon the natural inclination of the mind to lean toward what's enjoyable. I will say, Eric, just what you're saying. For one of the interesting things is that when people start getting interested in this

practice of actually internalizing, you know, half a dozen times a day or so, if not more, the ordinary beneficial experiences of their day, they start discovering amazing things. One, they're not having experiences. They're completely in their head. That was me, you know, throughout most of my childhood and a young adult that I was numb from the neck down. And Or they are having fleeting beneficial experiences that have more of an emotional and embodied quality and therefore have more of the raw material for truly producing, you know, for truly feeding the good wolves, you know, that we want to develop. I noticed that the good wolf is not about memorizing the multiplication

table or, you know, locating the, I don't know what, the capital. The wolf of Wall Street. Yeah, yeah. No, no, no. These are about character qualities, right? These are experiential character qualities. Anyway, my point is that, you know, what people often bump into as well is they feel a kind of, I don't know what, shame or fear or inhibition about just staying with a beneficial experience for 10 seconds in a row, you know. And what happens, though, is you start this, you initially start like a lot of things with deliberate top-down attention and intention. You know, you say to yourself, okay, I'll listen to Rick. I'm going to try this. No one needs to know I'm doing it. Half a dozen times a day when I'm having this

nice feeling, I'm going to give an extra dozen or two dozen seconds to really sense that it's sinking in, to sink into it and let it sink into me. All right. In the beginning, it takes a little deliberate attention. But what starts to happen is your body knows, your body naturally knows how to stabilize in and rest in a beneficial experience. And so you start shifting from a kind of white knuckle top-down effort into more of a kind of intimacy with your own body, a kind of inside-out receptivity where you just, ah, it's like sitting down next to a warm fire. I think we all know how to come in from the cold and sit down next to a warm fire and just kind of receive it and be humble enough to open to it and let it come

into ourselves. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk

gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Brian Cranston is with us today. How are you, too?

Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really No Really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com

and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You have a part in the book where you say, I'm just going to read it because I think it's said so well, and we talk about this stuff on the show a lot. You say, when something difficult or uncomfortable happens, when a storm comes to your garden,

the three ways to engage your mind give you a very useful step-by-step sequence. First, be with your experience. Observe it and accept it for what it is, even if it's painful. Second, when it feels right, which could be a matter of seconds with a familiar, worried mind, or months or years with the loss of a loved one, begin letting go of whatever is negative. Third, again, when it feels right, after you've released some or all of what was negative, replace it with something positive.

You got it. That was a tricky paragraph to write. It's in, as you know, chapter one, because it creates a framework. And it speaks to, I think, what I just think of as the three great ways to engage the mind, to practice. The first being just be with what's there. The second, reduce what's negative. Third, grow what's positive. And if you use the metaphor of a garden, it means first, witnessing the garden. Second, pulling weeds negative, third, grow what's positive. And if you use the metaphor of a garden, it means first, witnessing the garden, second, pulling weeds, and third, planting flowers. So I'm focusing here with you mainly on planting flowers, but it's in the larger context. And I would point out that to be able to simply be with the mind, even in a radical meditative sense of choiceless awareness, bear witnessing. To be able to sustain

that choiceless awareness, you need to grow a lot of flowers in your mind through training so that you can stabilize that kind of receptive spacious awareness. And then also, if you reduce the negative, if you let's say let go of some belief that you're worthless or you'll never find love, if you cannot fit into your old pair of jeans, if you let that thought go or maybe you release some negative desire like wanting to get hammered every night or what have you, it's not enough to just pull the weed. You need to replace it with a flower. Otherwise, as any gardener knows, the weeds come back, right? So yeah, that's why I think that one of the most powerful personal growth practices I know, and I've been exposed to a lot of them, both in the spiritual traditions as well as in Western psychology. to use positive experiences that are the natural antidote to the old pain or old deficits you carry around inside yourself. And by having an experience today, that's the natural antidote to that old pain.

Using myself as an example, if I were to feel truly cared about today, and especially included in a group, because that's a lot of where my pain was as a very young, shy, isolated kid growing through school. antidote experience for me that addresses directly those early experiences I had. In other words, those old experiences of rejection, shame, feelings of inadequacy, and so forth. And so, if I then use the linking step of holding both of those in awareness at once, in effect, I'm using flowers to pull weeds. I'm using the here and now current experience that's authentic and legitimate of, in my example, feeling wanted and included, let's say, in a group. I'm using that here and now experience today to gradually ease, soothe, bring wisdom to, and potentially replace those old feelings of pain. And, you know, any single time you do this, usually will not be a million dollar moment, it won't change your life. But the

gradual accumulation, again, just like, you know, feeding of the wolves, the gradual accumulation of food and the gradual accumulation of which wolf we choose to feed makes an enormous difference, you know, bite by bite, synapse by synapse over the course of a person's life. Yeah, there was a part in the book where you were explaining, you were talking about exactly that, when you were younger, feeling not connected. And you said something that really struck me. And you said you spent a lot of years thinking that if you piled up enough achievements, that would fix it. And, and I think it's obvious on one level, like, no, that doesniling up achievements or doing positive things, achieving, can't help you feel better in other areas of your life, but it's not going to fix it that way. Right. You're exactly right. And thinking of a way into this, one of the things that motivated me to write the book, which is for a general audience, Heartbarring happiness but but also i was motivated as someone who has a deep interest

in that enormously psychological theory of human suffering and happiness that was created by the buddha 2500 years ago the summary being the four noble truths the idea as you know there is suffering suffering as a cause the cause being craving. That's the second truth. The third being there can be an end to that cause and thus an end to that craving. And then there's the fourth noble truth of what's the path leading to the end of craving and therefore suffering. Well, I work backwards, you know, in terms of reverse engineering, and I try to operationalize what in the world is going on in the brain of a Buddha or, you know, a sage or a saint or any one of us when we're in a really good place, what's going on?

And that had led me to developing a framework that, you know, is very rested in frameworks that other people have developed that are very solid, connected to the three-stage evolution of the brain from its reptilian brain stem through its mammalian subcortex with stuff in it like the amygdala and hippocampus, and then the primate and especially human cortex that sits on top of that. And that three-stage evolution of the brain gives us a framework, a kind of roadmap for identifying what are those experiences that will help us the most when internalized again and again and again, I say 10,000 times, 10 seconds at a time, gradually reset our personal brain so that we move increasingly from states of underlying, sometimes often subtle background senses of deficit or disturbance

that are the underlying causes of the craving that causes suffering and harm in the second noble truth. And we gradually over time through repeated internalization of certain kinds of experiences, move out of that underlying sense of deficit, not enoughness, to a sense of fullness. And we move out of that underlying sense of disturbance increasingly to a sense of balance. And those three stages of the brain's evolution give us the roadmap in terms of what I think of as our three basic needs for safety, satisfaction, and connection, which are very linked to that reptilian, mammalian, and primate human layering, as it were, of the brain. So, long story short, if you realize, as I did, that my real needs were having to do with connection,

not with satisfaction or with safety, then it means that to address your real need, you need to take medicine, as it were, or vitamins that address your need. And so in my own case, even though my issues were very much in terms of connection and feeling, you know, rejected, excluded, and whatnot, I tried to pile up experiences in which I felt tough and manly and defended to, you know, take care of safety. Well, maybe that's good to a point, but it did not address my need for connection. It was as if I had scurvy in terms of my needs for connection. I needed vitamin C. So I would go out and I would take all kinds of iron as if I had anemia in terms of safety needs,

but it didn't help me. And also, as you said, I tried to pile up a lot of accomplishments, gets lots and lots of satisfaction, have a lot of fun, you know, enjoy my life in a lot of ways. Okay. Maybe there's a place for that too. But that was like taking B vitamins for my scurvy. It didn't work. It was only when I started really, really looking for what would help that things changed for me. That makes a lot of sense. I wanted to ask you, you've written several books. You are a researcher. You're always reading other people's research. I'm curious, what ideas are you being introduced to now or pursuing or reading about that have you really excited? Wow, that's a great, interesting question. You know, I'll tell you a couple.

One is the idea that, and these are linked ideas, that at a macro scale, the human species today, actually planet-wide, has the know-how and the resources for the very first time in human history maybe roughly this has been the case for 20 40 or so years but basically for the very first time in our entire duration on this planet as a species, 150,000 years or so, let alone our ancestors going back another 2 million plus years to ancestors that first began making stone tools. During that entire time, there were not the objective conditions that would enable us truly to take care of the safety, satisfaction, and connection needs, you know, the inner lizard,

mouse, and monkey inside us all of every human being on the planet. And yet now we actually have the resources to be able to do that. We as a species lack the will. We're not making sure, for example, that a billion people don't go to sleep hungry every night, which is the case worldwide. We have not made sure in the richest country on the planet, America, that we don't have one in five children nationwide living below the poverty line. So obviously, we have to bring will to bear. And it's not just enough even to have the physical resources available for people, we have to help people really register the felt sense of core needs, safety, satisfaction, and connection being met. Otherwise, we have lots and lots of people who,

even though they have plenty of safety, they still feel afraid. Even though they have plenty of resources, money in the bank, food in their fridge, consumer goods hanging in their closet, they still feel an emptiness inside, you're trying to fill with various pleasures. And even though they're, you know, really well connected to other people, and they're not actually being threatened, they still are very attached to us versus them, tribalisms of various kinds. But the net of it all is that new science is showing we really do have the wherewithal to make a fundamental change in the course of human history so that we have the actual material conditions that would enable every brain on the planet to actually rest in what I

call the green zone, which is a kind of quick and dirty approximation to the third noble truth in Buddhism, a mind in which there's not much basis, if at all, if any at all, for craving. That's one thing that gets me jazzed. Well, I think that is a great place to end. This has been really enjoyable, Rick. I thank you for taking the time. I know you're getting ready to go on some extensive travels. So, thanks for freeing up some time. Eric, it was truly a privilege to be here. I mean, what you're doing is a big service. And I look at the quality of your other guests, and I'm very honored to be in their company. Well, thank you so much. I appreciate it. Take care.

Take care of you too. Bye. you can learn more about rick hansen and this podcast at one you feed.net slash rick also if you're interested in the one-on-one program don't forget to send an email to eric at one you feed.net thanks bye