The School of Greatness - 207 How to Hardwire Your Brain for Happiness with Dr. Rick Hanson

Episode Date: July 27, 2015

"Our passing thoughts and feelings leave lasting traces behind." - Dr. Rick Hanson If you enjoyed this episode, check out show notes and more at http://lewishowes.com/207

This is episode number 207 with New York Times best-selling author Dr. Rick Hansen. Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, former pro-athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin. This episode is brought to you by Onnit.com.

If you're looking to achieve total human optimization, then make sure to head over to Onnit.com. That's O-N-N-I-T.com. They have some of the best fitness foods, workout gear, and supplements in the world to optimize your body and your mind to achieve total human optimization. Again, make sure to check out Onnit.com for more and use the checkout code greatness to receive 10% off on all supplements. Check out Onnit.com. Welcome everyone to this episode today. Very excited about our guest. His name is Dr. Rick Hansen and he is a New York Times bestselling

author. He's also a psychologist, senior fellow of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley and his books include Hardwiring Happiness, which is in 14 languages, Buddha's Brain, which is in 25 languages, Just One Thing in 14 languages, and Mother Nature. He is a fascinating human being. I loved having a conversation with Rick and really figuring out what it means to be happier, to love more, and to have deeper wisdom by hardwiring happiness in our brain. And really, the differences between happiness and depression and sadness and why sometimes we become into this sadness cycle, let's say, and how you can actually get out of that sadness

cycle by hardwiring happiness. Rick really talks about how to do some simple, practical things that you can do throughout every single day, the mantras, the rituals for achieving happiness in your life, and it's all backed by some incredible research. LewisHouse.com slash 207 to get this information, to get more information about Rick and to share this with your friends online for people that want to learn really about how to live a happier life. Again, LewisHouse.com slash 207. And without further ado, let's go ahead and dive into this episode with the one and only Rick Hansen. Welcome everyone back to the School of Greatness podcast. Very excited about our guest today. His name is Dr. Rick Hanson. How's it going, Rick? It's going great, Lewis. I'm happy to be here. Yeah, we've been trying to make this happen for I think a few months now, trying to get our schedules timed up for this. So we finally made it happen. And I'm excited to dive in more because you're

a thought leader in happiness, really. And you've got a book called Hardwiring Happiness, The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence. And you also have another great book called Buddha's Brain, which is the Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and wisdom. So I read somewhere that you have been meditating since I think 1974. Is that right? That's right. It is actually right. I was at the end of college, I was, you know, long hair, wire rimmed glasses, and it just seemed kind of cool. And what I found was that, you know, when you do that, if you, you know, you slow down a little bit, maybe it's a minute, maybe it's 40 minutes, but you slow down and you suddenly discover all kinds of really interesting things about your own mind, including a fair amount of

craziness there. So that was really valuable. But you also more and more, I sure did settle into a place of calm strength inside, which I think is our fundamental calm loving strength, let's say that. Fundamental place inside from which then we can meet life a lot more effectively. Meet life more effectively. I like that. And with the whole mindfulness movement happening over the last, I guess, really five years more in the mainstream. Are you saying to yourself, finally, that this is actually coming around? You've been doing this since, you know, for 40 years now, I guess. Right. And other people have been teaching it for thousands of years, right? Yeah. Like a lot of people, you know, when the Pentagon starts teaching mindfulness to recruits in bootcamp to kind of inoculate them against trauma, let's say in a combat zone, you know there's been a sea change.

When Fortune 500, 100 companies are routinely, somewhere in America right now, in a Fortune 500 company, someone's taking a class in mindfulness. As a manager, seeking peak performance, looking for an edge, trying to manage stress, you know, trying to understand themselves and others better and so forth. That's pretty cool. I think that's very cool. I think it's cool to relate to this stuff in a very practical way, which is your bent and mine too. Yeah, exactly. And as a neuropsychologist, what does that exactly mean? Sure. It means I'm a licensed psychologist, and I have a special interest in the underlying hardware. So most psychologists, most therapists, you know, they're dealing with software. But if you know more something, if you know, you know, a little bit about the underlying hardware of, you know, neurons and neurotransmitters and neural circuits and stuff like that.

It actually can help you be a lot more skillful because you can start to use your mind to change your brain directly, to change your mind for the better. And the underlying idea there, which we may get into, is that our passing thoughts and feelings leave lasting traces behind. our passing thoughts and feelings leave lasting traces behind. They especially do so if we're having negative experiences, because the brain is like Velcro for the bad, but Teflon for the good, because that's what helped our ancestors survive in harsh conditions. But today leads to a lot of unnecessary unhappiness and makes it harder to learn from our experiences

and hardwire in ordinary experiences of accomplishment, self-worth, feeling liked, feeling successful, feeling motivated, so that we internalize those useful experiences and they become more and more part of ourselves. And there's a famous saying, I'll just finish on this point, that neurons that fire together wire together. So deep down in your brain, it becomes a very practical thing. How do you get the good neurons firing? How do you get them to keep firing so they really wire together and fire intensively so that you can actually take beneficial experiences, like I was saying, and weave them into the fabric of your brain and therefore weave

them into your life. So right now, are most people in the world holding on to negative experiences from the past more so than they are focusing on the positive that happens on a daily basis? That's right. And there's actually a lot of research about it. People can just Google the term negativity bias and you'll find a lot of stuff about it. People can just Google the term negativity bias and you'll find a lot of stuff about it. A few examples. Let's say you get a job review. Your boss tells you 10 things. Nine are really great. One is room for improvement. What do you obsess about for the rest of the day? Yeah, exactly. Or studies show in relationships, negative interactions have much more impact than positive interactions. Some people say some scientists have found you need at least a five to one ratio of positive interactions to negative interactions in important relationships, especially romantic relationships, or you're in deep trouble.

That's cautionary, isn't it, to think back on the last week or two from your partner's perspective. Yeah. Or there are many other examples in terms of we learn fast, really fast from pain, kind of slowly from pleasure. Long story short, a lot of what I think is really useful is to appreciate that as you go through your day, half a dozen or so times a day, if you just stay with a useful, beneficial experience you're already having. Not a million-dollar moment, not pie in the sky, but you feel like you've got good friends. They like you, right? Or you accomplished something.

You got this tricky email done, and it's out, and you can have a sense of satisfaction there. Or you went for a walk with your dog, and it was fun. Or your daughter said, I love you, Daddy. Whatever it might be, don't waste it on your brain. Let your brain stay with that experience longer than you normally stay with it. 5, 10, 20 seconds in a row, in other words. Keep those neurons firing together so they really wire together. And then every day becomes full of opportunities to truly steepen your learning curve. You know, we learn all kinds of things.

People teach us all kinds of things, but we rarely learn how to learn, given a brain especially that's biased toward overlearning from bad experiences, but underlearning from good experiences, even though learning from good experiences is the main way to grow the good stuff inside ourselves. Sure. Yeah. I mean, that all makes sense, but it seems so challenging for us to do when there's negative experiences that we hardwire and hold on to those things so much more easily. And it's easier to talk negatively about the things we don't like. So how does someone, you know, it sounds simple the way you're saying it,

just like focus on the good things longer. But how does someone really do that? Is there a strategy or is it just allowing your brain to be in the moment longer? The surface, the four-word summary is have it, enjoy it. In other words, have a beneficial experience, which usually feel good. Their enjoyability is a marker of their benefit for us because, again, in evolution, as lizards, mice, and monkeys, and early humans, and so forth, we're having experiences, let's say, of feeling confident or feeling successful or feeling close to other people or feeling loving toward other people or feeling grateful, what have you. Or the monkey equivalent of those experiences. When they were having those experiences, those experiences were good for them. They promoted survival and passing on genes that passed on genes. So the enjoyability of an experience is not trivial. It's not like some new age Hallmark card, you know, pie in the sky thing.

It's often an indicator in your inner dashboard, the green light flashing, yo, dude, slow down, you know, take this one in, give it an extra 10 seconds inside your own mind, no big deal. So what I'm saying is that if you recognize the value to you, and this is where it really starts, you're right, it sounds sounds simple because it is simple, but people have to value it. Otherwise, they won't do it. If you recognize that your brain is being changed by your experiences, especially biased toward negative ones, then you start to realize, wow, the half a dozen times in my day or more when I'm having an ordinary beneficial experience, like the ones I've said, you know, let's say maybe you're tend toward being kind of anxious about stuff, you know, therefore experiences of calm or inner strength or relaxation, that's good. Or maybe you feel frustrated or driven a lot, you're real type A personality, and you're just getting too stressed out, you know, well, experiences of gratitude or you've already accomplished a lot and yeah, keep going, but without getting attached to the results,

you know, when you have those experiences, don't waste them, stay with them. Or maybe people feel, you know, self-doubting, you know, not confident, you know, not, you know, not willing to swing for the fences. They dream small dreams because they're, you know, not, you know, not willing to swing for the fences. They dream small dreams because they're, you know, not very confident. Well, when you do have experiences that people value you, or you could value yourself, or you, you know, they like you, they listen to your idea. You know, your dog likes you. Don't waste it. So yeah, that's what I'm talking about. I'm talking about, you know, 10, 20, 30 seconds at a time, keeping those neurons firing together. So you actually, actually internalize that experience.

And at the end of the day, you are measurably, you know, more confident, calmer, happier, wiser, more loved and loving than you were when the day began. And is this part of the four steps to taking in the good as well? Yeah. So I have this simple acronym. I'll slow it down a little bit here. You know, it's really interesting that in the world of personal development, self-help, human potential and transformation transformation psychotherapy i'm a licensed psychotherapist all that there's a lot of attention paid to um you know helping people have beneficial experiences useful good ideas feelings attitudes and so forth but we pay little attention to getting those darn things to stick to sink into the brain that's why

people routinely uh you know they are they get really inspired they do a weekend workshop they read a book they think yeah yeah and then 10 days later we've all had the experience it's kind of same old same old what causes lasting change almost nobody ever looks at that. And that's taken me into a study of the fundamental neuropsychology of learning, especially emotional, motivational, attitudinal, maybe spiritual, social learning. How do we learn? And it's a two-step process. And understanding this has huge implications. The first step is activation. We got to have some kind of useful thought, feeling, body sensation, desire, et cetera, going, right? We don't have brains like Neo in the Matrix where you just jack and

your Kung Fu, you know, mastered out. No, you got to experience it. It's like a record, you know, old school cassette recorder. We record the song by playing it. All right. But the second step is a critical step. You can't just have that useful experience. You need to install it in your brain. You need to encode it into some kind of lasting change in neural structure or function. Otherwise, it's wasted on your brain. That good experience, that nice moment, that sense of accomplishment, that motivation, that new insight, it's wasted on your brain because there's no learning. How do you maximize learning? How do you maximize the installation

of our useful thoughts, feelings, attitudes, body sensations, behaviors, and so forth? Isn't that an interesting question? Nobody ever talks about that. So my book, Hardwiring Happiness, is really about that. How do you actually do the installing? And that takes it to an acronym I created called HEAL, H-E-A-L, that basically summarizes the fundamental process of life learning. Important learning we really care about. Long past learning, long division. So H-E-A-L stands for have. You need to have the experience in the

first place the activated mental state usually because you notice you're already having some kind of useful experience you know a moment of relaxing a moment of connection with others a moment of feeling good about yourself and then or maybe sometimes you deliberately create it you know you think of somebody who likes you you think of a past accomplishment you think of somebody who likes you. You think of a past accomplishment. You think of something to be grateful for. You call up a feeling of compassion. Okay, fine. Either way, you have the experience. And then you move a new installation.

You know, 5, 10, 20 seconds at a time. Not a big deal. The E in HEAL stands for enrich. There are five known factors that steepen the learning curve from our experiences. And I'll maybe swing back to them if you want me to. But that's E for enrich. You enrich the experience. You kind of stay with it and you let it become big. 5, 10, 20 seconds. You savor it. You kind of marinate it. You enjoy it. And then A in HEAL stands for absorb, where you really sense and intend that the experience is sinking into you.

You give yourself over to it. You let yourself be changed by it. In other words, Lewis, I'm really zeroed in on the how of self-help. How, actually, can we turbocharge the change process that we're all working? How can we steepen our learning curve hour by hour, day by day? And then that's the fundamental essence of emotional learning. Have the experience in the first place, enrich it in your mind, and then really receive it. And then the L and link is the optional step.

It's very powerful, but it's a little riskier because you're holding both negative and positive material in your mind at the same time. And because neurons that fire together wire together, if you skillfully keep the positive material more prominent in the foreground of awareness, it will gradually ease, neutralize, and even replace that old negative material. For example, maybe in the moment, in the back of your mind is this feeling, no, I don't dare, you know, fill in the blank, ask for a raise at work, start a company, ask someone out on a date. I don't dare to do that because it's, you know, it's going to go badly, right? The positive material, maybe, you just accomplished something. Maybe somebody praised you. Maybe your boss gave you a compliment.

Maybe you're feeling like, you know, strong. Hey, go for it. You've been listening to Lewis, right? And in your heart, it's like, go for it, man. You feel Lewis is in your head. Go for it. You can do it. So you're in that experience of positive material,

while at the same time, kind of off to the side of awareness, you have those nagging self-doubts and insecurities. If you're aware of both of them at once, positive bigger than the other one, the positive material will gradually link to and transform the negative material. So that summarizes as heal, H-E-A-L, which I summarize as have it, enjoy it, or really summarize in two words, MoBeta. In other words, more episodes per day of some kind of useful, you know, life learning. And then in those episodes, MoBeta, more depth of engagement, more encoding in your brain, more, you know, taking in the good for lasting value. I love that, yeah. And what happens, let's say you've been practicing this for a long time

and you've hardwired happiness into you. You've got it down, but you still get insecure or you have worthiness conversations or you have doubt or fear with certain situations. Maybe it's a speech you're giving or an event or a new job interview or whatever it may be. You have some type of fear that holds you back. What would you say to someone in that situation on a process, a mantra, a ritual, a thought process to follow to break that negative thought and move in towards confidence?

That's a really great question. Well, the first part is that, you know, the person is changing over time and recognize that you've changed, right? Okay, we're still on the path, this side of enlightenment, so we're still growing and changing, but okay, but I'm, it's, you know, I'm on this process, I'm in this process, I'm on the path. That right there is reassuring to a person. Second, I call up resources in my own mind that are targeted at the particular situation. So let's say I'm afraid or I'm anxious. I'm feeling kind of nervous. I'm insecure.

I'm self-doubting, whatever. I'm getting preoccupied with this talk I've got to give, imagining the worst and all that. So I think about what is the nature of that situation? I could, you know, bring to mind things I'm grateful for, but that doesn't target the challenge, you know, that I'm dealing with here. What would target the challenge is to probably reassure myself more related to relationships. In other words, people like me. I'm sincere. I'm calling to mind resources inside my head. But I'm not just doing the typical thing where we're trying to do affirmations or positive thinking. I don't believe in positive thinking. I believe in realistic thinking. And especially, I believe in, you know, positive experiencing. When you realistically call up resources inside or

recognize things, you know, you don't want to just do it at the purely conceptual level. It's so important to feel it, to, you know, open to the experience in your body, open to the related emotions. So you're having a rich experience in which, let's say, you're calling up reassurance in your mind to deal with this thing that you're nervous about. And if you want, the link step is really, really powerful, Lewis. I mean, it's really powerful. People do it naturally, but I think that, you know, it's good to do it deliberately. So in other words, call up like the last time you were successful giving a talk or call up the knowing in your mind that you're just there to do the best you can for the people in the room. And what they think of you is outside your control, which is one thing I do when I give a talk.

I give a lot of talks. Then let that sink in. Or, you know, if you have a friend who's just telling you, look, you're going to be fine. You're always fine. They always like you. Let your friend's reassurance really sink in. Most of us, honestly, I think of, you know, it's like our minds are like dry voice that the rain just runs off of rather than having minds like sponges, letting the good news land inside us so that, um, we're gradually changed for the better in a steep way over the course of our lifetime. Right. Wow. You have such a calming voice. I feel like I'm in a meditative state just

listening to you. I love it. Oh, really? It's what is calm, even though I'm pretty excited about it. Because I, you know, it's like for me, if like I feel in the, like I love being outdoors. I've done a ton of rock climbing, for example. And there I am. I'm in the outdoors. I'm off trail. I'm alone in wilderness. One of my favorite things. It's easy to be happy in that setting. Right. But how do you handle it when you're stuck in traffic? You're late for a show. You don't have you know, you can't get any bars. You can't tell them that you're stuck in traffic or whatever your version is, you know. And that's a first world problem what if you're dealing with something really serious like you were just in a serious physical accident or um you're growing up and you're targeted for racial at whatever religious sexual who knows what discrimination serious stuff right how do you stay strong you're playing professional football you know people are trying to crush you as you reach for a pass um you. You know something about that from the inside out that I don't know. How do you stay centered and strong in those situations?

That's what really interests me. And I think you do it by relentlessly building up inner strengths in your own psychology. There's this, you may know it well already, there's this famous model in healthcare that says basically everything in life boils down to a combination of three things, challenges, vulnerabilities, and resources. And the bigger the challenges and vulnerabilities, the more we need to scale up our resources. and vulnerabilities, the more we need to scale up our resources. And also, where resources can be mostly grown is inside our own mind. We can grow them in our body, you know, fitness, okay, that's good. We can grow them in the world, all right, get some money in the bank, you know, have good people in our lives. But out in the world and in the body, it's kind of hard to do that, you know,

it's they're slow to change. but growing resources in your mind, especially through the usually enjoyable process, half a dozen times a day of taking in the good half a minute at a time, less than five minutes a day. Man, my head exploded when I started realizing that I could grow and develop in this way. You know, look for those useful experiences. They're authentic. They're real. Slow it down for those useful experiences. They're authentic. They're real. Slow it down for a dozen seconds. Enjoy them. Take them in. Why not? You know, when you

start to realize that that's possible, it changes your whole day. You start looking for those good key experiences that are what your heart really longs for or what you know or your therapist told you or your girlfriend told you or your girlfriend told you is what you really need to work on right now. You look for them. And then when you have them, whoosh, really, really, you know, bring a big spoon, gobble those suckers up and chew them slowly and really digest them. Yeah, that's great. And on the back of the Buddha's brain, there's a little quote here that says, if you can change your brain, you can change your life, which is what you're speaking into right now. What is the brain capable of creating in the world? That's such a great, huge question.

Well, a couple of things here. Huge question. Well, a couple of things here. So the brain, you know, it's part of the body. So I think it's important to take care of the body and all that stuff. Okay, that said, the brain is an amazing organ. I mean, it's got, you know, 1.1 trillion cells. Right now, as people listen to this, it's really kind of trippy to just realize. 1.1 trillion cells, 100 billion neurons.

There are more neurons in your head than there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy. And a typical neuron makes about 5,000 connections with other neurons, giving you your own personal internet inside your head with several hundred trillion little microprocessors. Each one of those synapses or little connections between the neurons that are very active and busy. Neurons are firing 5 to 50 times a second. You know, the underlying neural substrates of consciousness are kind of refreshing. They're re-updating four to six times a second that's why you can kind of have you know around four to six discrete mental events per second

especially if your mind's pretty quiet it's crazy it's so much is going on you know and that's happening right now as people listen to all this there's a famous metaphor that the brain is the enchanted loom continually weaving this moment of experience. So in that context, then, you know, I myself am not I mean, I read a lot of sci fi as a kid, you know, hey, superpowers sound pretty neat. If I had a choice, you know, I've got my list and all that. But really, where we have opportunity, you know, with the brain is to, in Mike's view, is to reverse engineer the most inspiring, inspired, developed, extraordinary beings on the planet. Which, you know, we could decide who those are, right? And, you know, people might have different lists and then work backwards. Like what in the world is going on? Because I live in San Francisco and I was up here during the heyday of the 49ers and Joe Montana and Steve Young and all that.

You know, what in the world is going on in the mind and the brain of Joe Montana in those four to six seconds when he's being rushed and he's calm and cool and happy and totally in the zone and throwing the perfect pass to his third checkoff receiver. What is going on in that brain? Or, you know, I work backwards. What's going on in the brain of a Buddha or whoever your favorite hero is? Gandhi, Aung San Suu Kyi, you know, Albert Einstein. What is going on in the brains of these people? What is going on in the brains of these people? And increasingly, we are beginning to have pretty good ideas of what's going on in their brains. So we can do the reverse engineering and stimulate the neural substrates, the neural networks or processes, muscles, metaphorically speaking, that support peak performance or peak love, even when you're dealing with totally aggravating people.

Right, right. You know, right? Or recovery from a setback. You've gone through bankruptcy. It was horrible. It was humiliating. Most of it was not your fault, but oh well, here you are. How do you recover from that, you know?

And what we can do is we can stimulate through mental activity, mostly by just resting in these beneficial experiences. We can stimulate those underlying neural circuitry, et cetera, and by stimulating them, strengthen them because neurons that fire together wire together. Isn't that great? It sounds so simple. Again, by just sitting on and emphasizing those positive experiences, that's what makes our brains grow and become more powerful is what I'm hearing. Yeah, that's right. We do learn. I think negative experiences we can learn from. And I think there are certain important learnings you only get from negative experiences of a certain kind. you only get from negative experiences, you know, of a certain kind. Yeah. Like there's, I've been in life and death situations in the wilderness and there's a kind of toughness and confidence that's developed. I think only getting through that sort of thing, but on the whole one,

negative experiences have costs because they're stressful, gradually wearing down performance and long-term health and longevity. Also, a fair question, could I have gotten the same learning, broadly defined? Could I have developed, grown, matured, and so forth in the same ways without paying that huge price through more beneficial experiences? And then last, if you think about it, you know, we become more courageous over time by having experiences of courage that we internalize. We become more confident over time by having experiences of worth that we internalize. You see, we grow the strengths by having experiences of them that are then installed in our own brains. And so the takeaway for me about this is not to resist negative,

because then you just have more negative. And I, like I said, I believe in realistic thinking, I want to see the whole mosaic of reality, including the tiles that suck, including the tiles inside myself, you know, that still suck, or not yet, you know, worked out. Okay. But also, that still suck or not yet, you know, worked out. Okay. But also see the good facts that are real, do what you can to create more good facts. And when you see the good facts, let yourself have a proportionate good experience, you know, not a million dollar moment, but like, oh yeah, you know, I'm, I, I turn a little knob and water comes out. I push a little lever and the toilet flushes and my, you know, waste products go far away. Right. You know, like I go outside.

I live in a country that, you know, is not far from perfect, but it's got civil society. You know, generally speaking, bombs are not going off in pizza parlors in my hometown. Right, right. You know, kids are laughing. Flowers are blooming. Ain't dead yet. My boss is not the world's greatest, but I've got a job. You know, there's money in the bank.

Reckon I'm a good person. I get stuff done. You know, I'm no saint, but I'm not a total looner. Right, right. Yeah. When you see the good facts, let yourself feel something. So many people, number one,

they don't see the good facts because they're preoccupied with the negative or just kind of numb. Second, if they see the good facts, they don't feel anything. Oh, I got that done.

Whatever. Oh, you smiled at me. Whatever. Oh, I have friends. Whatever. Oh, you know, I have some money in the bank. Whatever.

They don't feel anything. Feel something. And then when you feel it, take it in. Stay with it a dozen, two dozen seconds in a row to help your brain really begin to encode that experience. Right, right. So for someone who's been practicing this for, it sounds like over four decades now. For a while. For a while. What is your – what's the optimal daily ritual for you to continue growing? Is there a morning ritual? Is there a throughout the day ritual? Is there a nighttime ritual that you experience? And if so, what is that? That's really good.

Well, it is interesting how this has changed me you know and to make a point the the harder the worse the tougher a person's life the more they need to do what i'm describing the more important it is to register beneficial experiences and use them to grow strengths inside to deal with what sucks about your life you know people often take the kind of thing I'm talking about as smell the flowers and, you know, eat, you know, enjoy your cupcakes. I'm my response is, well, sure, sure. Enjoy the flowers, smell the flowers, eat the cupcake. Great. I'm talking about growing toughness inside determination, moral commitments, you know, care and concern for others, you know, a bone deep sense of self-worth and inner peace. That's what, you know, I'm talking

about the important stuff of life. First point. Second point, it's really useful to know what you're working on these days. I ask people, what if it were more present in your mind these days would really help? What are you developing? What's your growing edge? You know, when I interview people, when I turn the tables, one of the questions I usually ask them is, what are you working on these days? You know, what's your own personal growing edge? What are you trying to call more into being or consolidate and stabilize more inside your own, you know, psyche, your own mind and heart, your own way of being in the world. So know what that one thing is. And then every day is an opportunity to experience it. And by

experience it, experiencing it, you can then install it in your brain. Right? So that's the second thing I do, you know, and I have mine these days, you might have yours these days, you know, what's that one, I call it your vitamin C. You know, what's that one thing you're working on these days? Get that one. And then I would say that often when I first wake up, I kind of center myself based on a model I have of how the brain works. model as well. It's the idea that inside each one of us is a little lizard, mouse, and monkey, which are metaphors for the brainstem, subcortex, and cortex, which link to the reptile, mammal, and primate-human stage of evolution, which link to our basic needs for safety, satisfaction, and connection. So I repeatedly, in the morning, I kind of center myself in what I call the green zone related to those three needs, safety, satisfaction, connection, which are big umbrella terms. So I establish myself in a basic sense of kind of confidence and peacefulness around

safety. I'm not at war with anyone. I'm not feeling more threatened than is actually true. I'm not living in threat level orange inside my own head even when the world is mostly green okay i also try to you know and this takes me about 15 seconds you know per because i've been doing it for a while but it's okay to take longer but it's kind of kind of like i'm i'm wanting to warm up the circuitry or get that song playing in the background of my mind. So peace. And for me,

peace is not being a wussy. It's like a strong, a peaceful warrior, you know, like that kind of peace. Okay, then contentment, you know, in terms of our needs for satisfaction, reward seeking, I want to approach life with on the basis of an underlying sense of fullness and enoughness rather than scarcity or deficit so that I can aspire. And I do aspire. I am ambitious. I dream big. I have big dreams.

I go at it. But I do so on the basis of an unconditional, already inside me, sense of fullness and enoughness and contentment, you know, through gratitude for what I've got, gladness, a sense of accomplishment of the things I've accomplished, knowing that whatever has been good in my life can never be taken away, because it's already occurred. So I established myself, you know, contentment. And then last love, in terms of our needs for connection, you know, word, you know, I bring to mind people who care about me, people who've seen me, appreciated me, liked me, loved me, and also my own warm heart. So

I kind of center in love rather than feeling hurt, resentful, ashamed, inadequate, less than other people. And it's a little bit like, you know, my imagination, at least what I see on TV, again again you would know from the inside you know football players in the locker room before a game pounding on each other's pads you know getting kind of centered and like okay game on baby put it get into the zone for me it's kind of like in the morning peace contentment love in the zone baby ready for life and then boom i go out in life and i meet it on the basis of what I call the green zone. You know, you're dealing with challenges.

You're dealing with threats in terms of safety, dealing with losses or blocks or obstructions in terms of satisfaction, accomplishment, and so forth. And you're dealing with, you know, idiots and people who hurt you and don't understand you and don't want to be with you, whatever, in terms of our needs for connection. You're dealing with these real things. People will give your book a one-star review on Amazon. Trust me, you will have that enjoyable experience someday, even though you don't deserve it. It will come your way.

And it will probably be because Amazon didn't deliver the book on time, you know, and they're mad at Amazon. So they're going to give your book a one-star review. Can you believe that? But so in other words, dealing with the challenges of life, staying in the green zone, not accumulating the gradual wear and tear on your heart, your body, your immune system of stress, let alone the way it makes you grumpy and gives you pimples and puts lines in your face before they really need to be there. Right, right. I hope I haven't been going over long there. No, that's great. I was excited about that stuff.

I love it. I'm curious. What has a bigger effect on the other, the mind on the heart or the heart on the mind? That's such an interesting question. And, of course, what do you mean by heart? Do you mean it literally or metaphorically? Your emotional heart yeah i mean you know your emotion you you mean it as like heartfelt feelings like is that what you mean yeah yeah yeah it really is interesting how people mean these words like the way i use mind is you know like neuroscientist type. I guess mental versus the emotional, I guess. Okay. So first off, so far I've been using the word mind to include emotions and sensations, images, desires, all of our experience.

So just so people know, that's how I've been using it. That said, now kind of more like how you're using it in terms of kind of conceptual versus emotional, right? It's a really interesting scientific question. For a long time, people thought that our thoughts preceded our emotions, you know, kind of like your attitude or interpretation affects how you feel. But it's now understood that there's also a flow in a circular way, bottom up, that our underlying mood, whether we're cheerful or grumpy, you know, anxious or confident, angry, let's say, or peaceful, our underlying mood shapes how we see the world and other people. So my point of view about that, again, I'm practical, you know,

bottom line, is to intervene in the circle wherever you can opportunistically. A lot of people start with, you know, concepts like, you know, thinking clearly, positive attitudes, you know, new ideas. I think a lot of self-help is in that area. Personally, I think that there's really a place for it. You know, hearing from teachers, I was watching a little thing recently where a guy pointed out something about, you know, what's the most important thing in your day, knowing what that is, and then making sure that it's non-negotiable. Like, okay, that was cool. That was a good idea. I like that idea.

But often, I think mostly where the real action is, is bottom up. You know, the modern conceptual brain, if you think about it, it's like a tine. It's like if you boil milk, you get that little skim on the top. That's like thoughts, you know, to the brain and mind, you know, the way I'm using mine, all together. A lot of the action is, what's it feel like in your body? For example, let's say you want to motivate yourself to do something, like exercise routinely.

That might be easy for you. I'm kind of wiry and reasonably fit, but I'm getting old enough. I've got to exercise in ways that are kind of boring. I've got to grind it. When you get older, you lose it faster and it's harder to gain. So you've got to stick with it. Okay, how do I motivate myself to do that? Or you could say, how does a person motivate themselves to speak up more in a meeting in the face of criticism?

Or how do you motivate yourself to not drink so much or to stop with one beer and not slip into six how do you do that well one way to do that is to associate uh link in effect that fourth step of the heel process h-e-a-l to link uh and an actual or anticipated experience of reward to what you want to motivate. So what I do, for example, is before I get on that treadmill, I pound away for half an hour, I think to myself of how many ways it'll be rewarding, and I feel it. And the point is, the idea of a reward is not very motivating.

The feeling of it, the sense of it in your body, the emotional juic feeling of it, the sense of it in your body, you know, the emotional juiciness of it. Now that's rewarding. That's going to get you to do the thing. Right. And so, uh, that's an example for me of where, you know, a lot of the action is, I think, bottom up to answer your question, you know, that emotions shape, uh, thoughts, you know, uh, at least as much as thoughts shape emotions. I love it. Uh, I've, this has been fascinating. I've got a few questions left for you. Uh, one of his, one of them is, I'm just curious, what are you most grateful for in your life recently, Rick? Wow. Wow. Well, I'll be, I'll tell you honestly, Louis, I've done a deep dive just very recently in this question of, the way I'd put it is, you know, reverse engineering enlightened mind. purely secular frame, or we bring in something transcendental. Either way, what in the world is going on in the brains and minds of the saints and sages who've ever lived? And so I just did a

recent deep dive into that. And I'm very grateful for the thread in human history of profundity, if you will, in all traditions, you know, many, many traditions, including some that are purely secular, this interest in what is most profound. And I'm grateful to them. I'm grateful to these people who, you know, spent 40 nights in wilderness or years, right, who did deep practice of one kind or another, or who really gave themselves over to loving service for others, and what they learned in that process. And I'm thankful for them. So I guess I'm very grateful for those people. And, you know, grateful for the chance to learn what I can from them in this life.

A couple of questions left that I ask everyone at the end. One of them is you've written a New York Times bestselling book. You've got multiple books. You've got a lot of different things you're up to, and you've been writing and doing radio for a long time. If you could boil everything you've learned down to three truths that you would leave behind to people right now, what would those three truths about the world, your experience, life, happiness, what would it all boil down to? Wow. That's such a beautiful question, Lewis.

You know, what's coming to me there is, well, one would be never lose sight of the extraordinary possibilities. You know, just I think most people, they just live lives that are so much smaller than they need to be. And the extraordinary possibility doesn't need to be, you know, Joe Montana in the huddle or Lewis Howes, you know, catching that pass. The extraordinary could be this local manager of your hardware store, you know, who's just super calm and helpful and cheerful and nice. Like, great. But never lose sight of the extraordinary possibilities of human potential, the life you can have, the world that we all could have together. Second, it would be no deep down that you're a fundamentally good person. So many people have doubt about that. And it's kind of one of the last taboos to actually believe

and stand up for to yourself and to others that you are a good person. You don't need to be a perfect person to be a good person. We can see that others are good people, but to know in your bones, which took me a while, I was well into my twenties, thirties, you know, in some ways, really even almost even my fifties, where I really became bone deep and unshakable that I was a good person, that I that I was a good person. I knew I was a good person. Know that you're a good person. And then the last thing I would just say is go for it. Keep going. You know, keep churning, keep plowing, give up, take a break if you need to, and then get back at it. Keep going. You know, I think there too i'm a plugger do you know the have you heard

the teaching story about the frogs in the in the vat of cream uh no i'm not sure it's a great little story bear with me it's ready here we go and it's a famous kind of it's a it's and it's like a fairy tale shows up in different traditions it's kind of funny i looked it up one time the way i heard it was basically this a bunch of frogs fall into a vat of cream. And because it's stainless steel sides, they can't get out of the bucket of cream, the vat of cream. And they gradually get tired and they start drowning. But one frog is really determined. Froggy. Froggy keeps going forward. Froggy will not give up. Froggy keeps treading, treading cream, treading cream, treading cream until finally he churns it into butter. Now the cream is solidified and he can jump out of the vat and save himself. And I'm with Froggy. You know, they're going to put on

my tombstone still churning. That would be my fourth offering for people. Go for it. Keep going. I love it. Awesome. Well, I've got two final questions for you, but before I ask those, I want to see where can we connect with you online and what do you have going on that you're most excited about? Oh, thank you. My website, rickhansen.net, is chock full of really practical resources of all kinds that are for free. Talks I've given, videos, articles, slide sets from tons of workshops I've done. People are very welcome to take any of that material, use it however they like. You know, it's solid. It's grounded in science.

It's got some contemplative wisdom. And it's relentlessly practical and friendly and all that good stuff. So rickhansen.net. And most recently, I've gotten really interested in this online program I'm doing called the Foundations of Wellbeing. It's basically a fundamental transformation of your mind-brain system to build 12 pillars of well-being inside yourself. It's $29 a month for a year. It's very affordable. If you're a therapist or another kind of person who's looking for continuing education credits, you can get it from it. We've got about 6,500 people in it currently, and it's great. So I'm just really happy about that. It's online. Anybody can do it anytime. Go through it

at your own pace. Very user-friendly, et cetera. And you can learn about that on my website. Awesome. Thanks. Thank you. Well, before I ask the final question, I'd like to acknowledge all of my guests who and your poise and your grace and your therapeutic message. Because for me, I'm experiencing a lot of people in the world who aren't happy and who don't feel like they're good human beings. So I want to acknowledge you for teaching us and for creating this information to show us really simple, practical ways that we

can be happier. Because I believe when we become happier, we treat each other with a lot more respect and ourselves individually with respect. And that's going to create a ripple effect of love, connection, community around the world. So I acknowledge you for all of the incredible work that you do. Wow, Lewis, thank you. People don't do this normally on a podcast. I really appreciate it. Yeah, my pleasure. And the final question is, what's your definition of greatness? This is really good. Again, I'm really used to being asked, you know, I've done this a ton. Questions I'm familiar with. So to really acknowledge you, Louis, you are bringing up questions that are, I think, really great no one's ever asked. Or you're making comments no one's ever made in a show I've been on. Greatness, you know. Wow. Wow. Wow. Well, that's really interesting. Sorry to stump you. I'll tell you what I think is greatness. I would give two kinds of definitions. One would's unusual. In other words, it's not in the middle of the bell curve.

It's really out there on the tail. And that kind of greatness, so I want to stress, most acts of greatness do not make the front page of the newspaper. They don't make the newspaper at all. There you are in traffic. Somebody has cut you off. They're a complete raving lunatic. And you keep a grip on yourself. And you don't, you know, do something crazy.

And in that moment for you, you've done something great. I think about one of the greatest things a person can do is to speak from the heart when it's scary. You know, that's a lot harder takes a lot more courage for I know a lot of macho people, you know, say's scary. You know, that's a lot harder. It takes a lot more courage. I know a lot of macho people, you know, let's say guys, who, you know, yeah, sure, they can do a tour of combat, but speak from their heart vulnerably in a way that might be, you know, needy or hurt or feeling insecure in some way. They don't have the courage to do that.

So, you know, to find that to do what something that is out there, a total stretch for you, I think it's a conventional kind of conventional definition of greatness. And then that my less conventional definition, maybe to leave you with, is to give yourself over to the best in yourself, to let the best inside you carry you along and to be brave enough and wise enough to surrender to that current and let it carry you through your days rather than stressing and scratching and clawing to get to the top of the mountain. Dr. Rick Hansen, thank you so much for sharing and for coming on. I appreciate it. It truly, truly, Lewis, was an honor to be here.

You're great at this. There you have it guys. Thank you so much to Rick for coming on. And again, make sure to check out the show notes or lewishouse.com slash 207 to learn all about Rick, his books, his programs, and connect with him online. He's got some great resources for you. Again, share this with your friends, lewishouse.com slash 207. Also, big thank you to our sponsor, onit.com. Again, if you want to achieve total human optimization, mentally, physically, spiritually, then make sure to check out onit.com. Got some of the best fitness foods,

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tours and speaking gigs and everything I can do to get in front and see you guys in person. I want to touch you. I want to high five you. I want to hug you, I want to say hello. So come and support me at greatnessbook.com. Or if you're in the US, you can text the word greatness on your mobile phone to 33444. Again, text the word greatness to 33444. You guys know what time it is. I hope you enjoyed this episode. And it's time to go out there and do something great. you