The Psychology of Obsession, Rumination & Letting Go – Dr Rick Hanson (Transcript)

Again, hunter gatherer times in our biology is to not be able to possess very much because you can only own, quote unquote, what you carry with you. And in many native cultures there’s no sense of ownership, particularly it’s the group, the band, or it’s… You don’t really own it. Mother Nature gave it to you for a little time. Right. So there’s that.

So our modern culture, that’s very much about ownership and property and accumulating wealth and in a sense the properties of status, including in our very status seeking culture, your reputational property, the amount of likes you get or followers more and you know, people write about the molecule more and dopamine and it’s more complicated than that, of course, but that’s a good part of it. So I think that’s another reason why is hard for people to let go.

The Possession of Thoughts

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Mm. It’s the weird thing is it’s not only letting go of things that exist, it’s even letting go of thought patterns. You know, we have this sort of obsessive ruminative thinking, these well trodden paths that we go through. Oh, and now I’m here and then I’ll think this thing and then I’ll think that and… Oh, that really got to me and da da da da da.

How many times do you want to replay the same insult that that person threw your way at the water cooler two months ago? Oh, if I… And then this weird fantasy comes in. If only if they… I would have said this and then they would have said that, but I would have said this thing and then that would have happened. And yeah, we are oddly even possessive over our own thoughts, even the ones that are mean to us.

The Challenge of Identity and Views

DR. RICK HANSON: Wow, there’s so many… That’s so cool. I’m tuning into the way that when we ruminate, you know, we feel identified with. That’s another extremely difficult thing to let go of is identity. And yet in some ways it’s one of the most useful things to let go of because then you can let in, you know, there’s this whole dynamic obviously of releasing and receiving.

We can’t, you know, the old… a true story, you know proverb, you may know it, I’ll say it quickly. A great scholar of Buddhism in Japan and the history of Japan went to go see a great Zen master for a conversation. And they sat down and they had tea and it was very elegant and the Zen master was preparing it, you can imagine the movie of this.

And they began chatting and the scholar asked the teacher a little question and the teacher started to talk and then the scholar would jump in and propound and expound for a while and then the pause, they ask another question, the Zen master would start to talk a little bit and scholar would say so many things and ah, meanwhile the Zen master was preparing tea. Preparing tea.

And so he started pouring it into the cup, beautiful cup, lacquer table, thousand year old mug, something starts pouring it in, tea starts to rise. And the scholars watching the slow rising of the tea in the cup gets closer and closer to the lip. And then he’s just thinking, what? And the sand master gave sporing all the tea starts flowing over on this beautiful table.

And the scholar says, “Wait, wait, wait, you can’t put any more into a cup that’s already full.” Zen master puts down the cup and says, “Exactly.”

So we tend to get so involved with our stuff right in our own minds. That’s part of it. And then another part… I’m just reflecting on you and me as people who, to put it kind of bluntly, are paid to be, right to be, or paid to know in a way, get valued and paid in praise, not just in money and so forth.

And so then what do we do with our attachment to view? One of the three major things that Buddha talked about, people get attached to is their view. The other is sense, pleasure and identity. But viewers, how do you deal with that? You form a view, you think it’s right. I’m the same way. And yet that attachment to our view about politics or sports or people we’re with or even ourself, we have a lot of view about ourself, we get attached to it. How do we let go of these views, including our righteous case? I’m very aware of that myself. About this or that. How do you work with that?

The Jester’s Privilege

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I think I have a little bit of a get out of jail free card, at least publicly, because no one typically is coming to me as the expert. I’m mercifully sort of made a career out of being the most stupid person in every conversation that I’ve had.

DR. RICK HANSON: So brilliant strategy.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It is. So there’s something called jester’s privilege, which is kind of what all of the comedians have at the moment. You know, from medieval times, the jester being able to say the thing to call out to the courtesans and maybe even to the king or the queen themselves, to be able to say the unspeakable thing. And they had a particular privilege.

Now, I imagine that if you push it too far, the jester’s privilege, it turns out that there’s only so many times that you can do that, or there’s a limit to it too, and they may need a new jester who takes his privilege slightly less seriously.

But there is holding opinions lightly and sort of being prepared to change your mind, at least for me publicly, is not that hard. I don’t find it too hard, largely, again, because curiosity’s quite a nice salve to this. It’s a really lovely antidote. If you’re curious about stuff, you just want to find out, you want to know as opposed to, I suppose it’s the difference between proselytizing or giving some sort of a sermon and interviewing or asking questions. Because on one side I just want to know, and on the other side I want to tell. And for the most part, I’m pretty good at wanting to know. And the telling thing is cool, but slightly less so for me.

However, when it comes to my own sense of self, the level of attachment I have to how I know me about what I am, even in its positive and negative aspects, you know, we’re attached to the negative stories that we tell ourselves about things because it’s a safety blanket. Oh, no, I… that’s, I don’t do, I don’t do that. I don’t… I don’t dance. I don’t… I don’t public speak. I don’t, you know, I… I… I’m not built for big crowds or whatever it might be.

DR. RICK HANSON: I’m not a racist.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Rick, you’ve betrayed yourself. You’ve betrayed yourself in the first sentence. It’s very, that is an area, I think, that identity. How do I see myself? That is something that’s very, very difficult to let go of.

Turning Points in Identity

DR. RICK HANSON: Yeah. Yeah. It’s really interesting looking back. I think it’s useful to note turning points in your life, key moments that were good, Maybe somebody opened a door for you or you realized something in particular yourself. And a key mom for me was in the middle of my twenties. I realized in terms of thoughts about identity that growing up I had been a nerd but not a wimp. I don’t know if that translates to British slang.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Oh, no, I understand. I understand entirely. Yeah. Someone interested in quirky intellectual pursuits, but not someone who was a coward.

The Psychology of Identity Shifts

DR. RICK HANSON: That’s exactly right. I was president of the dork club. You know, I was very young, going through school, and introverted and kind of shy, and my parents didn’t really help me with social skills. So that led to a lot of feelings of being an outsider.

And I thought of myself as a wimp. I felt cowardly. I felt inadequate as a male, you know, in terms of male identity, in terms of physicality and all the rest of that. And yet I had this kind of moment where it’s almost like, you know, your life passes before your eyes, where episode after episode after episode, retrospectively in some major episodes, I realized no way. I fought back. I stood up for myself. I was assertive and I was a nerd, but not a wimp.

Anyway, that was a shift of identity. And I think that’s helpful for people to reflect on times when things were a big shift for you so you could appreciate that and learn from them.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s interesting. I think a problem people have, letting go, can often feel like giving up.

DR. RICK HANSON: Correct.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And this is very painful to feel. Oh, this is me admitting defeat here.

The Challenge of Surrender

DR. RICK HANSON: That’s funny. I guess I’m in story mode a little bit. Hope it’s okay. I’m a little sleep deprived because of all the things I’ve been doing lately. Anyway, so you’re reminding me. So I have a dear friend. I’ll spare his name. Many years ago, we were talking and he was very attached to a particular woman. He was pursuing her, he was chasing her. She was kind of interested, but she wasn’t that into him. He’s really suffering, you know, he’s going into it.

And by the way, for the record, men talk about their relationships too. You know, guys do this as well. So I remember we had gone to a restaurant and we were walking home and we were half drunk, not fully drunk, but half drunk. He was probably more than half drunk, going on and on and on. And I said to him, “Well, man, maybe you just need to surrender here.” And he turned to me angrily, he said, “I don’t do surrender.” And I’m like, whoa. And he was kind of reflective on that, but “I don’t do surrender.” And then a little later, he threw up all over my feet. But, you know, that was part of it all.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, your stomach has just surrendered your dinner all over the pavement.

DR. RICK HANSON: I know, but he did, he had enough insight. We were both involved in kind of a personal growth world at the time and back in my 20s actually, and he came to realize what I was talking about. But you’re exactly right, it was part of his male identity. And as a person, hyper self reliant, libertarian kind of person, “I don’t do surrender,” but yeah, we have to surrender.

The Fertile Ground of Romantic Attachment

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I think the chasing of a partner or the getting over of a breakup I think is probably pretty fertile ground to use as an example for this emotionally charged sense of accomplishment or defeat, attachment to self worth. What does this say about me? What does it mean about my place? You know, it’s probably a good sandbox to keep going here.

So to me, rumination. What are we getting out of rumination? Why is the brain so tuned to ruminate in that way?

The Evolution of Mental Time Travel

DR. RICK HANSON: Well, wanting to stay in this beautiful sandbox. Well, it is really interesting because our closest genetic relatives, chimpanzees, say, and bonobos, they don’t ruminate. It’s possible that the cetaceans, you know, big brains, we don’t quite know what’s going on there, but they don’t certainly chimps don’t ruminate because they don’t do mental time travel.

They don’t have the neurological basis for it in their cortex to systematically envision a future. You know, “If I do X, will she like me? If I do Y, will she like me?” You know, they don’t do affective forecasting on the one hand, nor do they reflect a lot on the past. “Why did I do that? How could I have done that better next time? Why did they treat me that way?” They just don’t do that.

And one of the great advantages in human cortical evolution as the brain tripled in its size over the last several million years, was the development of the neural substrates for mental time travel and the ruminator, in which we simulate different potential futures and we generate little mini movies about the past.

So on the one hand, when you think about trying to survive in Stone Age times, it’s really useful to be able to systematically learn lessons from your past or systematically anticipate or project different futures. So on the one hand, we have this incredible thing, what a great piece of hardware. And it’s really saturated as well with a sense of self, which again, seems much more elaborated and developed in humans compared again, to our closest primate relatives.

The Inner Ad Agency

And so, on the one hand, thank you, Mother Nature, we’re blessed by this. On the other hand, it’s really easy to get lost in it. And what I notice about it is that there’s a lot of anticipatory reward embedded in the ruminator. If we just solve the problem that we’re anxious about, there will be a reward. Or if we just revisit the past and work it through, there will be some realization around it or some release around it where we will get the reward of establishing that, yeah, I was right all along and they’re assholes for having done that.

To me, there’s a kind of a subtle. I think of it as like the inner ad agency in which these reward systems that are quite ancient are exaggerating how good it will be to have figured this out finally, after looping around the ruminator track several dozen times. And no, because once you loop around the track a few dozen times, for one, it’s painful to loop the track. And even if you do eventually kind of sort of resolve something like, how great did that feel? How great was that benefit compared to the cost of running around the ruminator track?

And then the other thing. So you’re asking kind of why we do it. And part of the why is because it also tends to reinforce and reify the sense of self, the me, you know, both the witness of the little mini movies of future and past. And that’s the sort of I. The subjective point of view. And then there’s the character me in those movies, what they did to me, that me, or what could happen for that me in the future.

So there’s a lot of that. That’s very rewarding. People get in that, especially if you feel beleaguered in your sense of self, if you feel attacked or. A lot of the content of rumination is negative. It’s around resentment or hurt or guilt. And it kind of shores us up weirdly, as a self to do that.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I mean, shores us up as a self. Can you dig into that a little bit for me?

The Frame and the Figure

DR. RICK HANSON: Yeah, it’s sort of. It’s useful to observe what’s implicit. What’s the ground distinct from figure. So the figure, quote unquote. What I mean is the story, the event, like, let’s go back. Something happened in a restaurant, maybe with a person you were interested in romantically. So there you had this conversation, didn’t go quite well. You felt misunderstood. You reacted a little bit. They seemed to overreact. Maybe you were missing something.

So that’s the figure, that’s the content. But what’s the frame in which you’re ruminating about that content? In that frame, there tends to be an implicit background, strong sense of self, including the somatic sense of self, which, again, because it’s in the frame, we don’t tend to notice it. It’s the sky. We notice the cloud, the figure, the content. But the sky is what’s really important because also neurologically we are reinforcing the frame by going through it again and again and again.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Why is reinforcing the frame in relation to the self a bad idea?

DR. RICK HANSON: Great question. I think sometimes it’s good if you’re reinforcing a frame of a sense of your own innate goodness and that you’re a nerd but not a wimp. That’s good. But from a wisdom standpoint, this is. Yeah. From if to the extent we get attached to self and identified with it, that tends to lead fairly quickly into forms of craving like self wants things, or it tends to lead quickly into a pretty developed sense of, you know, me, myself and I that others are not treating well.

And we tend to take. We tend to take things more personally. That’s a good way to summarize that. So self is a. We want to use the sense of self, but we don’t want to be used by it. That’s a deep topic.

Taking Things Personally

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I’m interested to learn more about that. I think this relationship between taking things personally, because I don’t understand really how you can ruminate without taking things personally. They seem to be intrinsically linked.

DR. RICK HANSON: That’s exactly right. And that’s part of the problem. So when you ruminate. So why. What are the problems with rumination? One, it’s affectively unpleasant. It’s not an enjoyable experience to be in the ruminator. A, B, whatever you’re ruminating on, which tends to be emotionally negative and things like resentments or, you know, deep guilt, feelings of hurt that gets reinforced. Neurons that fire together wire together in the ruminator. So you’re reinforcing it.

You’re reinforcing reactivity and you’re sensitizing your brain to reactivity because little bits of cortisol are released. You know, they go into your brain and sensitize the alarm bell, the amygdala there, and make it more reactive to stress. So you’re. It’s not good to do laps around the rumination track.

Also, functionally, rumination often has the function of keeping at bay softer, more vulnerable feelings. You know, while we’re rehashing that argument in the restaurant with this, let’s say a woman we were pursuing, you know, and we’re kind of right about it and we’re going through the movie and we’re having the repetitive thoughts about it in our case. And then we’re thinking about how other people would think about it and why haven’t they thought about it the right way and been a better friend to me about it.

While we’re doing all that, what’s underneath it? All that’s being avoided as an experience. Softer feelings of hurt, despair, feeling like a failure, feeling defeated. What you’re saying, projecting that sense of defeat into the future. “I will always be defeated. I will never find love.” Those deep or even younger. Going all the way back to, “Oh, I never got a good girlfriend when I was in high school.” You know, going all the way back.

Rumination functions as a defense often against the deeper experiences which we need to open to, to get a complete release and move on to the next good thing. That’s not good either.

Survival Mechanism Gone Rogue

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Rumination feels stiff, tight, this sort of obsessive. It’s very. You’re right. It’s got structure to it. It’s not free flowing. And it seems to me like going back to your hominids, chimps. When did we get the ruminator room installed into all of our brains?

It feels like rumination is kind of a survival mechanism gone rogue. Feels like it’s a useful tool, the effective forecasting. “What do I, what should I have learned from that thing that just happened? What’s the lesson to take away?” Well, that thing was emotionally salient to me. That thing was really. That thing made me feel something. I should pay attention to it. Maybe I should think about, maybe I should think about it a lot. I should mine this well deep. There must be insights and gems and treasure deep down in there.

So yeah, it seems to me that rumination is hijacking the brain’s desire to do problem solving whilst usually probably not solving a problem.

The Neuroscience of Rumination

DR. RICK HANSON: Yeah, I love the fact that you deep in practice tuned into the feeling in your body of ruminating, you know, as you put it, tight contracted. Right. And you know, and even there can be a kind of, depending on our temperament, a certain aggressiveness and attack mode in the rumination.

Other people maybe by temperament are more fearful in their nature and they would be more like withdrawal mode. Others might be more centered in a kind of anxious, insecure attachment style in which there’s a beseechingness. I’m speaking to the frame of the rumination, the backstory in which the plot is unfolding of what we’re talking about.

So, yeah, you’re very alert to that in the bodily sense. And I agree that what we’re seeking and the brain is seeking in the rumination is some kind of result. Except the way it’s going about it is preventing a result. We don’t get to clarity. We don’t get to “Okay, I sorted it out.” You know, effective problem solving. You work it through. “Okay, I know exactly. I have felt this fully. I’ve clarified the facts. I have clarified my values here. I know what my plan is going forward. I know what the lesson is going forward. And I’m released. I’m free.”

Rumination, we’re bound. A traditional metaphor is a dog chained to a stick. You know, it can orbit the stick, but it doesn’t get released. It’s not free. It’s not truly autonomous. We’re captured by our ruminations. They seem so beguiling, right? They’re seductive. We get caught up in them and we’re captured by them. That’s not good.

Three Keys to Productive Reflection

So, yeah, think productively about things and feel the feelings along the way. I’ll say for me that there are a couple keys that can be really helpful. So when you find yourself starting to ruminate about something, be aware of it, and what you can do is to continue to reflect on whatever that was or let that movie play. But go wide. Try to get a sense of your whole body, your whole mind.

Because when we ruminate, we’re locked onto that particular tile in the mosaic of consciousness. Other stuff’s happening, but we’re sucked in to that part. And so it’s good to kind of go wide because when you go wider, you don’t suffer so much and you take more into account and what that does.

Technically, rumination typically involves a lot of activity in the midline cortex, including the rearward portions, the default mode. And so when we go wide, that tends to engage networks on the sides of the brain, especially right hemisphere for right handed people, because that’s gestalt processing, holistic processing. And that tends to quiet activity in midline cortices.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Wow.

DR. RICK HANSON: So go wide. And including go wide too. All the many things that were involved in that conversation at dinner that didn’t go well, you know, this. Where she was coming from, where you were coming from. The other people, the stuff that was happening. Big picture going wide really helps.

And then also, especially as you can try to feel below the surface, what’s really going on here that’s being kept at bay by the hamster wheel of ruminating what’s underneath the surface. And then third, try to come to a conclusion. What’s the takeaway? You know, what’s the takeaway? What’s the wisdom from here? How are you going to operate from now on? What have you realized?

So those three things going wide, feeling below the surface, and going after the takeaway, then that makes rumination productive. And you’re using this incredible neurological hardware.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: For its best purposes, not being trapped by it. Yeah. Why is repetition and compulsion weirdly comfortable in a way? You know what I mean. It’s like putting on an old leather pair of shoes. You know exactly how they squeak. They’ve sort of molded around that weird big toe you’ve got from when you kicked a football wrong in 8th grade.

The Comfort of Familiar Suffering

DR. RICK HANSON: So funny. Well, another story. Sorry. I was talking. I was hanging out with a friend who was talking to a buddy. And let’s see, my friend was saying, “Oh, man, I’ve had my head up my ass lately,” talking about mistakes he’s been making and so forth. And his buddy replied on the volley, just really quickly, “Yeah, but it’s great to be home again.” Right.

There’s Freud called it the repetition compulsion. Familiarity. We’re drawn to familiarity because it’s safer. Again, from a evolutionary standpoint, the known is safe, even if it’s the known bad thing, the devil you know, that’s known and what’s not yet known. That’s where threats could lurk back in the Stone Age or Jurassic Park. And so I think that’s one part of it, certainly.

I think in the background as well, it’s sort of. There’s this reassuring continuity of selfing. Even though the content is being. When the content is familiar, the frame in which the content is known or experienced is familiar as well. And that, I think, that gives us a comfort.

Then, of course, biology. Some people are, you know, a little more tilted toward OCD or compulsion or, you know, other people. And then there’s another element which is really interesting. I hope it’s okay that I’m just kind of going through a lot of stuff fast, but. Well, you’re familiar with the Big Five Theory of Personality Factors. Great. So acronym ocean, O, C, E, A, N. The first one is openness. And people vary on a range both by genetics and then acquired tendencies and how open they are. And people who tend to be more toward the rigid end of the range, they will be trotting more familiar paths in their own mindstream again and again and again. So I think that’s part of it too.

Choosing Catastrophe Over Uncertainty

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. I’m intrigued about why. Not only with rumination, but with sort of planning for the future. We’re so prepared to keep ourselves trapped inside of something that we don’t enjoy. We’ve been here before, we’ve been across this terrain and we know that it’s filled with upturned tacks and we keep stepping on them and all of them are painful. And you go, “Yeah, I know, but it feels familiar.”

And I wonder whether there’s a relationship here between the fear of a lack of control, that uncertainty.

DR. RICK HANSON: Oh, very nice. Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Uncertainty is so abhorrent to us, to our brain. Not knowing that we would rather fantasize a catastrophe than deal with uncertainty.

DR. RICK HANSON: That’s super brilliant. And do you think that’s particularly common in people who have a career or a life history in which they’ve been rewarded a lot for being in control and having control and directing things in particular ways?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Certainly, certainly. I think for people who have been rewarded for being right, for performing, there is a particular sort of free flowingness that you have around the friends that, “Ah, I don’t know what I’m going to do tomorrow. Ah, you know, I don’t have the thing.”

And in some ways their outcomes in life can be a little bit more high variance, you might say diplomatically, because they don’t plan for the future in the same sort of way and they don’t necessarily foresee all of the potential pitfalls and they don’t have the structure that at least in the modern world for most people bears a lot of fruit. Right.

Being able to know what tomorrow looks like, iterating on habits, compounding interest of saving money and knowing when you’re going away and knowing what time you need to wake up in order to be able to make it to work on time so you don’t get fired. You know, all of these things are really, really important. So you say, “Okay, the more control I have.”

DR. RICK HANSON: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: The better my life gets, the less.

DR. RICK HANSON: Including about many of the things you talk about, you know, your own optimization, your own physical fitness, your own workout routines, your vitamin intake and all the rest of that. Yeah, you know, or for me, a lot more around the mind, you know, the more control I have over my own consciousness, you know, the better it goes. Right.

So yeah, we, those of us who yeah. And I think also just to go into it, there was a lot about my childhood that was. Was fine. And I just felt a. Like, “Whoa. I got dropped in to a stream in which there wasn’t that much control. They were bigger than I was. Right. They had more power. They were doing all these things. They were upset about this and that they like.”

And so, yeah, then internally, for me, a refuge was to develop a growing sense of autonomy where I did have control. And I would increasingly create little domains in which I was in charge, including what I was thinking about or paying attention to. So maybe in part, if people have a turbulent, dysregulated childhood or youth, then they’re going to be more particularly appreciative in healthy ways. Even that can then hijack us in not so healthy ways to, you know, have to be in control. Have to be. Have to know.

Thinking in Superpositions

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. I think it’s just a. It’s such an ironic tragedy that we would rather fantasize a catastrophe way worse than anything that could reasonably happen in the real world. I guess we’re sort of going into forecasting as opposed to ruminating here.

DR. RICK HANSON: That’s a kind of ruminating where you’re caught up in imagining a future and.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Right.

DR. RICK HANSON: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And, yeah, just. I. I had this. I read this sentence which. It’s kind of funny. I’m such an addict to memes or aphorisms that I’ll happily take something that didn’t mean what the author meant and then repurpose it into my own.

It’s kind of like when I first read Harry Potter when I was a kid and I’d never heard the name Hermione read out loud. I’d only ever seen it written down. So I went four and a half books of Harry Potter convinced that it was Hermione. And then they released the movie and they called her Hermione. And I sort of rejected their interpretation of the author’s. Like a word that. You know, a name that’s relatively common or whatever, but that I’d never heard. And I was like, “No, no, no. This is the way that. This is the way that I do it. Right. This is the. This is the way that I’m going to see it.”

And it’s kind of the same. It’s kind of the same with this, that we have our. We have our perspective on things. “This is. This is the way that this thing is going to be.” And for me, I saw this sentence written and it was this. This author talking about thinking in superpositions, you know, you have this Schrodinger’s. There’s a degree of uncertainty. We don’t know whether the cat is dead or alive.

And then he was talking about how most people abhor the uncertainty so much that they need to collapse the superposition down into an answer. And this is what we do when we fantasize catastrophe. We. We are collapsing the superposition of uncertainty. So, yeah, the idea of thinking in superpositions, I think, is a. Is a nice. It’s also.

DR. RICK HANSON: I love that.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. Thinking in superpositions is.

DR. RICK HANSON: Oh, I’m going to take that away.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Feel free. Feel free. It’s bastardized. From someone that didn’t mean it to mean what I meant it to mean.

DR. RICK HANSON: Oh, I’ll be quoting you. You know, respect your sources.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Let’s go. It’s like the human centipede of plagiarism.

Don’t Know Mind

DR. RICK HANSON: So this is so cool. So in the sandbox of relationships, let’s say. And hurts about that. Unfulfilled longings, you know, the normal range. How can not knowing be helpful? Long pause here.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s a good.

DR. RICK HANSON: Don’t know mind. Yeah, don’t know mind. Beginner’s mind. Don’t know mind. Receiving the next moment as it arises, not knowing. I had a friend, very deep in practice, longtime teacher. Say to me quite a while ago. I certainly was asking him, “So what’s your core practice these days?” That’s a really useful question, I think, for people that engage in practice. Like, “Come on, what’s a primary focus for you?”

He said, “Living with absolutely no expectations.” And to really track what absolutely no means. That’s really something. Because the brain is an expectation generator. It wants to know. It freaks when it doesn’t know, you know, about people in these sensory deprivation tanks who would start to hallucinate because the brain needs content. It wants content. It’s quite a deep thing to just not know.

So I think back on people that I’ve been in wrangles with, let’s say, of one kind or another, who, let’s say, have truly mistreated me. Or I have myself felt sad and remorseful about something and I did a mistake I made. Or there’s some tangle where “I can’t believe they did that. I did not see that coming.”

I have found it really helpful to. When I can just say, “Okay, all that and don’t know. What’s it feel like to don’t know, don’t know. Not without labels. Don’t know the meaning, the implication. Just don’t know.” Suddenly it feels freer and looser. It’s kind of not knowing is like a kind of solvent that dissolves the congealed crud of rumination.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Being comfortable with that.

DR. RICK HANSON: Yeah. How do you uncertainty to cultivate don’t know mind? I mean, that’s a major practice in some traditions. Cultivate don’t know mind. And I think it’s. For me, it’s really fun because I’m a kind of scruffy, autonomous type person, you know, And I don’t want my brain to control me. I don’t want the program.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I want autonomy, even from myself.

Embracing the Unknown

DR. RICK HANSON: That’s right. I want to be the ghost in the machine. I don’t want the machine to control me.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Right.

DR. RICK HANSON: I’m living in the machine. My inner being, whatever. And so I like disrupting. It’s disruptive to not know. Maybe so. Or another way of putting it is maybe so, don’t know. Maybe so. And I just wonder how for you, for example, if we apply this to relationship issues. Don’t know. Don’t know what the future will be. Don’t know what the past has meant. You know, just so much I don’t know. To me, that feels like unpacking.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s very expansive.

DR. RICK HANSON: Yeah, it feels that way.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, it’s very open. The resistance can really only be generated once you’ve planted a stake in the ground somewhere. Once you’ve made a position. And then you’ve dug this thing in. “This is what I think was right. This is what I think happened. This is what I think will occur.” And then everything begins to exist in relation to that, and that’s where the resistance comes from. Because there’s something to resist against, like the dog running around the pole. But if you don’t, it’s total free flowing.

DR. RICK HANSON: That’s really nice. Do you write poetry by any chance?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I’ve actually started. I did it for the first time a couple of months ago. I really enjoyed it.

DR. RICK HANSON: That was just an intuitive sense of how your mindstream unfolds.

The Power of Poetry and Imprecision

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. I’ve been hanging around with musicians a lot more over the last few months and I always had this sense, maybe everybody has this, that they assume that their particular mode of communicating or their particular art form is the one that sort of maximally allows for effective communication.

And I knew that music was able to say things that words can’t because there is emotion and there is tension and release and there is swelling and there is harmony and there is rhythm and there is all of this stuff, but I don’t think I’d ever considered fully that lyrics can say something that prose can’t.

That words, in absence of words, you’re actually able to say more than if you need to be more explicit, that vagaries can be sort of more educating and insightful than precision can. And yeah, I guess if you’re not musically minded, which I’m not, the closest approximation that you can get to doing that is poetry.

DR. RICK HANSON: That’s really lovely. Yeah, I don’t think… Well, I wrote a paper in college that was an epic poem. That was the closest I ever got to ever doing poetry. And I’m not sure it was any good.

Yeah, the best poetry is like what we’re talking about. It stops your mind. Humor is the same way. The jester. I’m thinking of Lear’s fool. King Lear’s fool. The jester who has privilege. You have that moment where your mind stops and in that space is possibility. And the best poetry does that for us.

Letting Go of Emotionally Charged Memories

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What about letting go of emotionally charged memories? You know, stuff that has happened a good while ago, and yet when we’re at our… When we’re sleep deprived, when we’re feeling scared, when we’re a little bit more vulnerable or we’re a bit more agitated or whatever, this is the sort of thing that keeps coming back up. How do you come to think about letting go of emotionally charged memories from the past?

DR. RICK HANSON: Yeah, well, that’s been personally important to me. And it’s also professionally comes squarely in my wheelhouse. And short version for me here would be we can’t let go until we let in fully.

And so very often when we go back to things, it’s because there is some non-experienced experience that has been trapped in the neural nets of memory that needs to be released. And so the revisiting of that material, sometimes in the frame of a kind of doomed quest, like “if only I could do this or that, I’d get finally the blood from the star I’ve been seeking.”

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, that’s right. Or redemption, absolution, et cetera.

DR. RICK HANSON: Exactly. So we tend to go back to it again and again and again. And so therefore, to truly let go, we have to really open and then resource ourselves so we can feel it most fully. But what typically happens when you feel it most fully is it moves through you.

You have to be a little careful with the white hot core of trauma. So what I’m saying here is not necessarily true for that because there are certain experiences that once they do get into emotional memory, they are not going to go. What’s around them can change over time. The context, the understanding, the sense of self related to that terrible trauma can shift and you can become more regulated about not being so hijacked by that memory.

But I think realistically for people, sometimes you can get a complete release, but just sometimes we have to live with it. And then how do we live with it? Well, that’s a whole topic which I think a lot involves letting ourselves turn a corner from it after we’ve really worked it through. Every time we recall that episode, we feel like crap. So we deliberately help ourselves to turn a corner so we don’t keep revisiting that episode. That’s a piece of truth. But I think that’s hard won wisdom.

Facing the Monster Under the Bed

Another story. So I was a kind of fearful kid and lying there in bed, very active imagination as an adult. I was prepping for the psychology license in America, where they grill you on things and you have to know about the Rorschach, the ink plots. And so I took a Rorschach to prep for the license exam.

I’ll reveal something that I hope will not come back to haunt me. So I did the Rorschach with someone who knew me well as a grad student. Grinding away, parent of young kids, getting a lot of stuff done, late 30s at the time. And then she came to me with the results. She said, “Are you feeling okay, Rick?”

Well, I’m busy. I’m doing my dissertation. I’m trying to get licensed. I got two young kids and I’m the sole provider of my family. But yeah, I’m feeling okay. She said, “Well, there are some kind of psychotic features here.” And I was like, what?

And she said, “Well, this is why, because when you looked at an inkblot, you would give like six different possible images and you could elaborate a lot of why you saw it and all the rest.” And that sometimes happens with people who are crazy. And I said, “Huh, I’m not.”

She said it also happens with people of a very rich imagination and are kind of creative and have a lot of access. At that point I’d done a lot of psychedelics, a lot of inner work, and I’m a performance kind of guy. I’m like, “Hey, how much can I see? I’m going to see a lot of things. I want to get a high score.”

So my point is, I have a good imagination. So there I was, 10 years old, in bed, scared to death because I was convinced there was a monster under my bed and I could hear little sounds and I was alone. And I finally did one of the most… the bravest things I’ve ever done. I kind of screwed up my courage. I said, “Okay, I’m sick of this. If you’re under there, eat my face.”

And I tucked my head, I leaned over the bed to what was underneath it, knowing I could eat my face and… nah, just a bunch of dust bunnies under there. But I had to enter into it. I had to be brave enough to go into it. And I think that’s what we have to do sometimes to get a full release from some of our deep material, to face it.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And I imagine that the experiences that you had in psychedelics probably reinforced that as well.

Diving Into the Devouring Faces

DR. RICK HANSON: Yeah, exactly right. I had… This is quite intimate to myself. I’d kind of leave it alone a little bit. But I… I don’t mind talking about it, actually. I had a lot of early experiences in psychedelics in which I’d look at a kind of a screen, like a ceiling, white ceiling. And very quickly there would be these demonic, devouring faces, bloody teeth, just like, whoa. I didn’t like that, and that was fairly recurring.

And then a year or two or three of that passed with probably half a dozen, maybe five to ten trips during that time. Closer to ten. Finally, I was in the desert in California, a place I actually love. Joshua Tree National Park, highly recommended if you make it to California. And I was staring at a bush with thorns. Desert, there’s a lot of thorny bushes, and every thorn was a devouring face coming at me.

And at that point, I just had had enough of it, and I said, “Okay.” And I dove into the face, dove into the devouring faces. Demonic, devouring, kind of feminine, witchy, bloody, sharp teeth, jagged. And then in that moment, I got a release and realized that what that was were these disowned, pushed down and away parts of myself that were witchy.

Kind of the opposite of my masculinized, logical Spock-like top down leading with intellectual ammo. Just looked wild witchy and nice. I was very nice. I’m a nice boy. And this was this disowned part of me. I can feel the shivery in my body right now as I talk about it. And it was disowned, set away. And there was an integration of it in that moment. And ever after, I’ve never had a nightmare since.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Wow.

DR. RICK HANSON: I’ve had dreams that were a little uncomfortable, like someone’s trying to get me. But… So, yeah, that’s another… These are extreme examples that have a heroic… Not to praise myself, but just to say to other people, it’s noble to step into the pain or to go for it, into it. It’s noble, it’s heroic to do this, to feel it fully.

Ordinary Victories

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I love the idea of ordinary victories, sort of mundane successes like that. I’ve been thinking about these more and more recently, that there’s a lot of things that we overcome that are…

DR. RICK HANSON: So…

The Beauty of Mundane Victories

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Kind of normal and unceremonious and unimpressive and inward and idiosyncratic as well. Like, there’s such a part of us that even trying to unpack and explain, which you’ve very successfully managed to do there, but stuff that’s even less grand than that. But you win. You win over this sort of little part of yourself.

And I think that when we’re talking about letting go, about dealing with change, about being brave in the face of uncertainty, these are things that nobody is going to really pat you on the back for. “Oh, you dealt with the inbuilt uncertainty of living in a universe that you don’t have full control over. Congratulations. Well done.” Like, everybody has to do that. You just did it. But this time you did it with more grace. This time you did it with more equanimity. This time you did it more quickly, more deftly, you did it more peacefully. You did it without castigating yourself. You did it without staying up all night ruminating.

And yeah, winning mundane victories, boring successes, I think is something we should congratulate ourselves even more for. Because the big success is everyone else going to congratulate you for. “Oh, the new book was so fantastic. Oh, that podcast episode. Oh, congratulations on the wedding. It was so beautiful. Look at how well your kid’s doing in school.” The things that are kind of obvious but slightly more normal successes all the way up to the Nobel Prize and the most recent title. Job promotion.

Cultivating reducing down the bar of what constitutes worthy of praise and success, even if it’s just inwardly or maybe outwardly as well. Like, “Hey, I did this thing today. I had this great…” I’ll invert you and I’ll do story time.

The Wisdom of Dry Creek Dwayne

So I had this really lovely rancher and wrangler, a guy called Dry Creek Dwayne on the show about last year. He is an older fella from Wyoming, seven kids, old school guy, big beard, permanently got a cigar in his mouth, cowboy hat. Old school as fuck, big man, raw, mangled hands from ranching and wrangling and picking at horseshoes and stuff for an entire career.

And he has spent a long time dealing with what I think is quite a sort of classic that generation anger from sort of masculine discontent. And he’s found himself at a really sort of beautiful place of peace. And he considers himself sort of the anti grind set bro person. He’s very much, “Maybe the answer to your problem is to grab a cigar and sit on the back porch and read a novel and think about it a bit.” He’s not, “Here’s the notion template that you should use and the five step process that will allow you to track time, block the calendar for the next…” He’s none of that.

And he was explaining this day where there’d been a particularly difficult horse and he was trying to break, domesticate, train this particular animal. And he had got up kind of on the wrong side of the bed that day. He wasn’t feeling it but he had to go to work and this is what he does. So apparently he went and he saw the horse not in his best state, horse not in their best state either.

And he went and he said, he sat down and he just looked at the horse. The horse was in its stable. He sat down on this stall and he lit up a cigar. He said, “I smoked the first cigar and then I lit up a second cigar, smoked the second cigar and I potted around a little bit.” And then he came back and his wife asked, “So honey, how was your day?” He said, “Well I didn’t break anything and that’s a success.”

I just thought that was so wonderful to be able to drop down. Everybody loves this idea of grand victories, right? We’ve got this… I think you’ve referred to it as your “one wild and precious life,” right?

DR. RICK HANSON: Mary Oliver’s quote. Yeah.

The Pressure of Making Life Count

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Which is beautiful and inbuilt in that is this kind of pressure. “Oh, I need to make the most of my day. I need to… this needs to be done now. Because if I do this now then I can do something else next. After now and then tomorrow now can also…” It’s almost kind of like a denial of death in a way. It’s like if only I could fit more life into my life, it would be like I pushed death further away from me.

And inherent in that, in a meritocracy, in a capitalist world, in a world where people are growth minded and they want to achieve a lot and want to get things done, want to make… going to fit lots in. There’s a pressure to do lots of things in that. And in some ways that’s impressive, right? There are objective differences between walking a hundred meters in a day and walking a hundred miles in a day. There are differences in the experience.

But on the flip side, if you can be the sort of person like Dwayne, for whom walking a hundred meters is able to generate for you the same level of content and well being as for someone else takes 100 miles, who’s got it better? And I don’t know, I just think it’s a really nice redress to the more, more, more Hungry Ghost type approach that people have for achievement.

And that’s not to say… you’re looking at a poster child for trying to make things happen and agency and autonomy and all that sort of stuff. But I certainly know that when I play with things with grace and ease and sort of more… I don’t grip things so tightly. I’m less attached to the outcomes of stuff that it doesn’t really matter because I’m happy no matter what. It was an enjoyable experience because so much of the unenjoyability of the thing is the gripping of it. And on top of that, the outcomes, oddly enough, in some weird circular way, the outcomes tend to be better as well.

The Shame of Simple Pleasures

So yeah, I’ve been thinking an awful lot about this… another fork on this. I was talking to a friend, Alex. We did this huge four hour long episode a couple of weeks ago and people really liked it and there was this bit in there that I really want to work on. I’m going to try and write about it over the next few months and maybe do an essay on it.

I think a lot of people are quite ashamed about taking pleasure in simple things. It sounds lovely, it sounds like a lovely thing to do. Just a cup of coffee and a fresh morning or whatever it might be. But there’s a little bit, at least in my mind of really, “This is what constitutes impressiveness to you? How pitiful, how shameful, how unimpressive is life for you to only need…” You should be conquering mountains and forging, pioneering forward and doing all of this stuff. It’s that sort of masculine drive for more. This again, very sort of 21st century Western. “I want it, want it, want it. I’m going to build it.”

And the more that I kind of see, “Huh. I actually quite like simple things. I actually don’t need to be all that impressive.” And in the same way as Dwayne saying, “Well, I didn’t make anything worse today. I didn’t break anything.” And for him to go to bed and consider that was a good day, I think cultivating that same thing, being able to get the pleasure from a hundred meters that you could from a hundred miles. Being able to feel a sense of satisfaction in the boring and the mundane successes in overcoming that little part of yourself, even just once today that you did. I just think, yeah, that’s a lovely redress to the hungry ghost that sort of sits inside of all of us.

Accepting Defeat and Letting Go of Heroic Narratives

DR. RICK HANSON: Wow. Really? Wow. And you’re nudging me to reflect on the relationship, the linkage between identifying with a heroic narrative that is your ego ideal that you’re identifying with. Everything has to be big, big, big lights. And the difficulty in actually feeling deep feelings of rejection, failure and defeat.

If we become more able to tolerate experiences of in the sandbox, rejection, or more broadly, defeat, failure. They won. They scored on me. I will never get justice here. They scored. I was once walking down a hallway in high school. I went to a large high school in California, 2,700 people. And I was just kind of spaced out. And as I was walking past all these kids at transition period, somebody punched me hard in the stomach. I just walked on by.

And I was not a kid who fought a lot. I didn’t have active enemies. Someone just clocked me for no reason. Bam. And I’m stunned. I turn around, a couple seconds are going by. I see a sea of moving heads going down the hallway. I’ll never score on that kid. I’ll never get justice for that boy, I’m sure, who punched me. So do we accept that?

But if we can accept rejection and failure and defeat and not being special, then we get less hijacked by and we have less ruminating about this heroic narrative of the magnificence that our life must be and anything short of which is not acceptable.

The Role of Humor and Play

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: How do you think about the role of humor and sort of play with this? I get the sense that the sort of people who listen to your show with your son, which everyone needs to go and check out. Being Well is awesome. I just had Dr. Scott Eiliz on the depression guy who I learned about from you guys. He’s so good. I imagine lots of people listen to your show. I certainly know lots of people that listen to my show. They’re serious people that are earnest. They want to get… they want to do stuff. They want to make their impact here, and they want to… they really want things to happen. But there’s a kind of brittle fragility that comes along with seriousness as well.

DR. RICK HANSON: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: If that makes sense. And I wonder in the little armory of things that we have to play with… this “I’m okay with uncertainty.” That’s one of the lessons from today, sitting in the… thinking in superpositions. Right. I’m going to allow these worlds. I don’t need to collapse this down. The don’t know mind.

DR. RICK HANSON: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, maybe so. Okay. That’s lovely. That’s a nice area here. I wonder how you come to think about sort of the role of absurdity, humor.

Play as a Factor of Learning

DR. RICK HANSON: Well, for myself, yeah. Playfulness. So one detail is that research shows that little juvenile rats who play with each other have more neurotrophic factors in their brain, which promote new connections. So play is actually a factor of learning. And so if you care about learning broadly, development, healing, what happens in therapy, playfulness is a real aid.

People listen, let’s say to you or to me. And it’s nice in the moment. And is there some interest in an ROI not out of needing to have this magnificent narrative of constant growth in your life, but just plain common sense. Yeah. I’d like to have some kind of lasting gain from listening, let’s say, to you or to me. And so playfulness promotes that kind of learning.

And I think back on how many therapy sessions I did with people that were so somber, so inert and numb. There’s no playfulness. And they didn’t get anything out of it, while they’re nodding their heads. “Oh, yeah, doc, that’s right.” No lasting learning. So play really promotes lasting… on the one hand.

On the other hand, you’re kind of raising the question about certain ways of being, that maybe in particular cultures or gender, socialized types are devalued, like earnestness. It’s sort of embarrassing to be really earnest and sincerely earnest, not just in some problematically ponderous or pompous earnestness, but a kind of vulnerable sincerity in which there’s a wanting the best. “Please, sir, may I have another bowl?” Think of the risks, a little character.

The Vulnerability of Earnestness

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: There’s no escape valve. There’s no get out of jail free time. You’re revealed. Yeah, exactly. You are. You’re seen. You’re seen. There’s no… I didn’t keep half a foot out of this situation. This is me opening up.

DR. RICK HANSON: Now. You are pegged to this stake with the risks that are entailed.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: This is what I wanted, and this is really what I wanted. And I really wanted it and I said it.

DR. RICK HANSON: Yeah. And to me, to go back to… I love what you said about really appreciating small victories so forth to go back to the nobility. And I kind of relate to that in an early Buddhist frame of… These are the truths for noble beings, not noble by birth, but noble by effort. There’s a nobility in letting yourself feel deeply or be revealed deeply.

To go back to that, maybe conversation at dinner that went bad, to say, “At the end of the day, I was there in good faith. Maybe I was unskillful. I said this or that. There’s lessons to learn for the future. I was there in good faith. I was there with my whole heart deep down. And I was brave enough to be earnest and sincere enough to kind of lay it out.” Yeah, take pride in that. Healthy pride. Appreciate yourself for that. The heroism, the nobility in that and the uncommonness of that, to me, that’s where real bravery is.

The Psychology of Authenticity vs. Performance

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That’s really cool. Yeah, I love that. I get the sense as well that this is one of the reasons why allowing yourself to be puppeted by your own fear, to not show up. There’s an equivalent in the world of content creation, which is audience capture. So continuing to throw red meat that is predictably going to be liked by the audience, but doesn’t necessarily resonate with you as a person.

It’s actually, you know the word grifter? Have you familiar with that? Right, okay. So I asked. It’s a word that gets thrown around on the Internet a lot for all manner of different individuals. And I genuinely was interested. I said, hey, for the people that use the word grifter, what is the best working definition of what that word means for you? Because it’s just kind of a slight. It’s a slur. It’s like calling. Yeah, it’s just a very odd, nebulous term that people tend to use for someone that you think might not be fully authentic. I mean, come on, let’s get a bit more specific.

And somebody said, and I actually really appreciated this, and this is currently my working definition. Somebody promoting a product or staking a claim that they wouldn’t use or don’t believe themselves. So it’s: “Here is what I’m doing up front. This is what I believe in private behind.” I was like, huh, that’s okay. I can work with that. That’s like a functional definition, I think, for what people think they mean when they say that word.

And my point is with the audience capture thing, it’s you not being you. It’s you trying to be manipulative in a way. It’s this sort of meta you. It’s playing persona, not person, it’s projecting, et cetera. And that conversation at the restaurant, that was ungainly or didn’t go the way that you wanted. The difference between you showing up with vulnerable sincerity or just straight up sincerity, like, “this is me and this is the position that I hold, and I said it.”

All right. Could I have said it with a little bit more deftness? Yeah, probably. And you know, I could have delivered it, but I tried. Like, I gave it a crack and that was actually what I meant. I said what I meant. And that, you know, I can take some lessons from it.

The difference between that and the lessons that you can take from that situation and a situation where you didn’t say what you meant and you were still rejected is the kind of the last bastion of, “well, I tried and you know, fuck. Like, I guess, you know, you can kind of laugh it off.” There is an ability to do humor in that.

But where is the humor that you find that I compromised myself to try and be somebody else and that was rejected? There’s an additional level of difficulty in getting past it. And I think it’s just a nice justification for showing up sincerely, showing up earnestly, you know, sort of playful seriousness, I think is why I have this additional level of protection for all of the fear that you are going to have by being seen and by this being me and by a rejection of that not being a rejection of a projection, but a rejection of a person, and that person happens to be myself.

What you do gain in that is, “well, at least I was myself.” At least this weird character I tried to play, this role that I tried to perform wasn’t rejected because to be honest, like, that’s kind of more pitiful than the other way around.

The Power of Playful Authenticity

DR. RICK HANSON: That’s so true. I’m thinking the ways in which playfulness is a great aid to aspiration without attachment. And if we’re incredibly not just earnest, but if we’re self righteous or pompous about our pursuit of even a wholesome goal, that’s not so good. But to be playful about it.

I think about I made a play using the word for a woman in my late 20s. I was part of this whole personal growth context, kind of half a cult, I won’t name it now. And so everybody was really deep in each other’s business, kind of all knowing each other. And there was a woman in a relationship with like the head dude. So I was like a layer or two down from alpha, and she was with alpha boy.

And I fully played, went for it. It was public, it was known. I wrote these nice little notes. I told them what I was doing and I went full out. And I didn’t know if I would get it. I didn’t. And she was relatively kind and it was okay. But at the end of the day, I felt good about myself, that I, little Ricky, kind of the dork, had still stuck my neck out and, you know, made a play for a particular woman. And I feel great. You know, I went for it, right.

If I hadn’t gone for it, I’d be thinking, “grr, you wussy. You should have gone for it. Why not take the risk?” But what enabled it is there was a playfulness about it. It was like an improbable goal. And I could be playful about it, which helped me be less attached to the outcome.

The Evolution of Public Discourse

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: My friend Charlie did a wonderful video breakdown of Jordan Peterson’s most recent debate against 20 atheists. It was on the Jubilee YouTube channel. So it’s a series called Surrounded, and it’s doing huge numbers. It’s really cool. Kind of like speed dating for debate, I guess, is kind of the way.

DR. RICK HANSON: That I would put a format.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, it rings.

DR. RICK HANSON: We used to call them a fishbowl. You’re in the fishbowl and you’ve got 10 or 20 people around you. Okay.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And each person comes in individually and you do a bit and then they move on and so on and so forth. And he does this comparison between Jordan when he did that Cathy Newman interview in 2019. So “what you’re saying is” that really famous one in front of the purple background and this most recent one.

And Charlie is very interested in charisma and he’s talking about likability, being he’s big into playfulness and he’s very deep into self work and mindfulness, too. So I think that sort of percolates through. And he has this. It just compares them side by side. And I’d never even thought of this, because the way that people change, especially over a long period. It’s been six years, maybe seven years since that first debate came out. And then there’s this new one, and if someone changes slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly, you kind of. You don’t really notice, right? He’s like, “when did you get fat?” It’s like, “I don’t know, one day at a time.”

And he just makes a really lovely distinction between Jordan in that first one, where Kathy’s sort of pointing her finger at him and saying, “so what you’re saying is this thing.” And he goes, “no, I’m not saying that at all. I think that’s silly. I think that’s really. I think that’s. I do. I think that’s really silly.” And you just have this. It’s keeping him regulated. It feels more casual. It’s much easier to get onside. It’s a much more likable approach. Now he’s standing his ground, but he’s standing his ground in a sort of, you know, really fluid sort of Bruce Lee kind of way.

And then you look at the approach in this most recent Jubilee debate, and it’s very rigid. You know, it’s “precisely. What do you mean by the term that you just said?” It’s sort of definitional a lot of the time. And, you know, Jordan is significantly more. He’s been through the wringer, I think, over the last few years, which very well, I imagine, would cause any normal sane person to come out the other side and have their armor up. And he’s now deep into his religion, and this is talking about religion. You know, maybe there’s some real tacit differences between the first debate and the second one, but I think that the example still holds, which is the version of him that was able to be Bruce Lee playful.

You know, he looked like he was having a better time during that debate, and certainly, I think, came across in a more sort of likable manner. And maybe there’s some topics that it’s just hard to do that on. And perhaps faith is one of those ones that people don’t feel like they can be as playful or equivocating with.

But, yeah, when you look those two different worlds, you think like the one that’s, “you know, I think that’s silly. I really do. I think.” And you can see what’s the sort of memory everybody knows. If even in the moment, if you’re able to just drop into the. The insult gets pinged across the table at work or whatever it is. And as opposed to trying to clap back, or as opposed to trying to break the fourth wall and make it really serious, or as opposed to taking it personally and allowing it to ride up, if you just giggle and go, “ah, that’s silly, you’ve been silly.” And you just. Whatever little sort of neutralizing retort comes, I think. I don’t know it.

When I think about the sort of memory it would make for me in the moment, you’re able to begin to sort of reframe the rumination trap that you might get caught in later that day. When you start to think about how it went, it’s like, “yeah, I dealt with that with grace. That was, like, ease and, you know, playfulness.”

The I-Thou Relationship Framework

DR. RICK HANSON: I think people these days, there’s so much phoniness in grift, just like you say. And I go back to my early days in the whole human potential scene in LA in the 1970s, where you’d go to a party and you’d think you’re having a deep conversation with someone about, you know, the inner world and the psych, the psyche, and you began to realize that they were setting up a pitch to enroll you in their workshop. And you’d suddenly realize that you had felt like you were a thou to their I. In Martin Buber’s construction of three kinds of relationships, I, thou, I, it, and it it. You felt like a thou to their eye, and then you realized you were being seduced.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You’re going to have to dig deeper into the I and the it and the.

DR. RICK HANSON: Okay, slowed that down. It’s a very cool model. One of the really useful cool models. Martin Buber said, essentially, there are three kinds of relationships, I and thou, where you’re the I, and to you, they are a thou. They are a being in their own right. There could be a differential of role that you could be a police officer and you are now arresting a suspect and putting them in jail. They are still a thou to you. In the context of your rules, they are being. You are not exploiting them as a means to your own ends.

Then there’s I it, where the other person is there. You might be superficially polite. You don’t care about their inner world at all. They’re irrelevant. You just want to get the answer to your customer service question, or you want to get over to fix your plumbing, that’s it I it.

And then it it is bodies in space, like in an elevator, passing each other. That’s a very cool framework. And it raises a question. Can you thou all beings, can you approach, can you enter into interactions with people, even with your roles as a thou to your I? And can you be aware of the subtle movement into iting them?

And like you and I right here, I feel like we’re an I thou, we’re doing our thing, you’re moving us along. I have a role, you have a role, but we’re like beings, we’re not exploiting each other narcissistically as extensions of ourself. And then there’s something also to realize. Do you feel like a thou to their I, or do you gradually start to feel like an it when you’re on the receiving end of a grift, which is a con. A con. A grifter is a con man or a woman, whatever, being, then you feel like you’re being aided by them.

And in this world in which there is so much with media and consumerism and the us, I’m sure the epicenter of a lot of the worst of this LA, especially where I grew up, it’s about phoniness, it’s about pretense. If you have 300 best friends, you have no real friends, for example.

And so in that context, including which now with AI, it’s so easy to manufacture fakes, deep fakes included. I think increasingly there’s a longing enough for the realness that we evolved in, in our small bands. It was real, it was really real, you know, eye to eye, skin to skin, touch to touch, life or death, every day real. And so we long for the real.

And so when we find the real, when we feel that a person is, as Carl Rogers put it, congruent, that they’re. What’s really true about them on the inside is what they are aware of. They are mindfully self aware. And it’s what they’re showing to the outside, when those three circles line up that are congruent, when we encounter that in other people, that these days is the coin of the realm because it’s rare.

Speed Running Authenticity

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s a lovely point. I heard this term a couple of times months ago, somebody trying to speed run authenticity. And it was in relation to online content creation and, and basically, you know, how do you growth hack relatability? What is that? And that’s, you know, like a meta grift, right? It’s a grift that appears to not be a grift.

DR. RICK HANSON: Yeah.

Cultivating Authentic Relationships

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What are the constituent parts of being an I, of creating an I-thou relationship? And how do I reverse engineer that to make an I-it relationship into an I-thou relationship? Which is terrifying and funny. But no, I really agree.

And that increasingly is especially with where my life’s gone over the last four or five years. I mean, since we spoke nearly seven years ago. Your detection radar needs to become ever more finely attuned because as you ascend in whatever notoriety or the impressiveness or the skillfulness of the people that you’re hanging around with, you need to be able to become ever more attuned to smarter and smarter tricks.

And fortunately, I think to fly the flag for everybody should be a club promoter for a couple of months at one point in their life. Which is still a campaign that I haven’t managed to get off the ground yet. But I think being exposed to a very high volume of people who are largely unencumbered, maybe they’ve had a little bit to drink, maybe they’re out with their friends, they’re not really thinking too much. You learn a lot about human nature by watching people in queues. Very strange. It’s this odd liminal space where they don’t really have much to do. And I spent, you know, I met a million people in queues across my career, decades.

DR. RICK HANSON: That’s super cool that you’re naming that and doing what clips from that. You know, people in queues as it were.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It was just. That would have been great if that was the case. But I was just watching, you know, I’d be seeing, you know, 100 to 500 18 to 24 year old, 28 year old kids talking and jostling for position and guys would be in front of girls and they’d be sort of how are we going to talk to the one behind us? Or they’d be. Some people would be impatient. They’d be thinking about how they get again in. Some people would feel slighted because they were waiting longer than they wanted. Some people were really, you know, whatever all the rest of the stuff.

And yeah, as you continue to sort of, whatever. Ascend up through that, the games that people are able to play in order to be able to access that become more deft. And it’s strange to think about the people that you like the most are the ones that you, you see them and you think that they see you. It’s like, ha. Like, here we are, two people, and it’s oddly really simple to actually get to that stage.

And yeah, the people that I find myself hanging around with, with, you know, a lot of an increasing number of options here in Austin. Big scene of stuff that’s going on. And the people that I like to hang around with are often not like the most impressive ones. Not to say that my friends aren’t impressive, but it’s just people that I’m like, “ah, yeah, like, here we are. You’re seeing me, I’m seeing you. There’s not really anything else that’s going on here.” And that’s like an adventure, right. And it feels like a real adventure as opposed to, I don’t know what, like a, you know, allegory of the cave, shadows on the wall type projection.

Authentic Self-Presentation vs. Performance

DR. RICK HANSON: Yeah, so much about that. I think it’s okay. And it’s necessary to select skillfully what is genuinely true in you to present to the world, depending on certain situations. So, for example, if I’m in a presenting a talk to a bunch of scientists or clinicians, I’ll select what’s authentically real in me that’s appropriate to that setting. That’s really different from selecting what’s real in me when I’m hanging out with our kids or adult kids. It’s not the totality of what’s real inside me, but it’s genuinely what’s inside of me. So I think on the one hand there’s a total place for that.

On the other hand, I think that it’s really useful to be aware of how we get kind of identified with and captured by our increasingly polished act in the world and, you know, track that. One thing that has helped me about all that is to realize that it’s in my best interest to be less preoccupied with myself and to be less focused on the controlling or influencing what’s happening in the minds of others in regard to me. The more that I realize that it’s really good for me to kind of like relax that and just accept the risk of rejection and failure. Right. To go back to all that in the sandbox, then it gets a lot easier to just like, let go, you know, release and just not know who you are.

Cultivating Courage and Bravery

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Where do you come to think you. Bravery and courage has sort of been a bit of a theme today. How do you come to think about cultivating that? Someone who thinks, “I feel like I’m being a little bit more cowardly or I’ve been cowardly my entire life. More so than I would like to be.” How do you come to think about where courage, bravery, sincerity comes from?

DR. RICK HANSON: Well, let’s talk about interpersonal courage. So I’ve known a lot of people, men and women alike, who are physically brave or in business settings will move into alpha roles and be strong in those regards, but interpersonally, they’re scared and interpersonal cowardice, if you will.

And so in that area, I think one, it’s helpful to realize, “oh, I would like to be more that way. I would like to be more willing to risk dreaded experiences of defeat, failure, rejection, being laughed at,” you know, and there might exaggerated expectations of how horrible that would be from my childhood when it was horrible or I saw it being horrible for other people. Humiliation in high school is a really big deal most of the time these days in adults, like, you say something dumb, they give you a bad review, the river moves on. Ten minutes later, nobody thinks about it, it’s gone. Right? But we anticipate it being horrible.

So you might say to yourself, “wow, it would be good for me to be more willing to risk that dreaded experience to tolerate that.” So now you know what you’re doing. That helps right off the top. That’s executive function, top down. Okay, I’m going to expand my comfort zone for what I’m willing to tolerate, which means pushing back the bars of my invisible cage and how free I’m willing to be in life. That’s really helpful.

And then what I find is what works again and again is to actually take those risks and occasionally feel what you dread. Feel it, you know, you release it. And then you realize, “I’m still okay. It moved through me. It doesn’t defeat me. I’m not consumed by it. I’m brave, I’m noble, I’m heroic. Yay, me. I got through to the other side.” And then as you do that, suddenly, now your window of tolerance, the bars of the cage continue to expand. That’s been a big thing. And then I think there’s this other incredibly cool. I love how we talk about this.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Stuff, by the way.

Cross-Domain Courage Transfer

DR. RICK HANSON: It’s so much. It’s unusually cool. So I think everyone ought to listen to Chris’s show. Awesome toothpick and all. Awesome.

Okay, so there’s this whole thing in learning, broadly, including personal growth learning, where you generalize from one domain to another, you cross over. So as an example, I got into rock climbing early 20s as a. I experienced myself as kind of an unmanly, unathletic person because of my own background. My dad was A cowboy. Like the cowboy guy you talked about. He grew up on a ranch, North Dakota. But he did. He was a manly man, but he never did sports with me, never threw a ball with me. This was not how it was. If we were on the ranch, we’d go horseback riding, but we lived in suburbia, so, you know, he didn’t throw a ball anyway, rock climbing.

So I would start doing hardcore scary stuff that would boost my sense of being an okay dude in that way. And tons of women climb. They get a lot of value from it in their ways as well. That said, what I would do then is when I was with someone who was being domineering, pompous in relationships, some guy says, “no, man, you got to do this or that.” Or I was maybe scared about entering a group. I would recall the emotional memory like you did kind of early on in the show here, where you tuned into the felt sense in your body of ruminating, while I would tune into the felt sense of climbing, pulling over an overhang, being determined, problem solving my way up the crack, what it feels like.

And I would access that. I would tune into that for a few seconds to mobilize that inner sense that was strong and brave and courageous in that domain. Right. I’d activate those circuits of courage in that area of rock climbing, and then I’d be much more prepared to deal with this really kind of aggressive, assertive in that would be. I don’t know. Would you ever try that, do you. That cross domain thing?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. I mean, the confidence that you get from, for instance, the live shows that I’ve been doing the last few years, I’ve got another tour in around the US And Canada toward the back end of this year. It really does make. If you’ve stood in front of a few thousand people with nothing except for a microphone and patient eyes, maybe impatient eyes staring at you like, “what else is there?” You know, is one of the biggest. One of the biggest fears that. That everybody’s got.

And you go, “huh? Like, I did that thing and it went. Not only did. Was I okay? It kind of went well, that’s pretty good.” And yeah, when you come across that, it’s like, “okay, so really, is this the thing that you’re worried about? Worried about this conversation you’re worried about, like, you did that. Like, can you not remember what that felt like?”

DR. RICK HANSON: Yeah, that’s right.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Oh, okay. Yeah, that was good. That was a. That was a thing.

DR. RICK HANSON: Remember what that felt like, not just remember what it was then you’re in your head, you’re just seeing the image of it, but you’re calling up the somatic markers. The body. Yeah. What it felt like. Yeah.

Closing Thoughts and Resources

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Rick, you’re great, dude.

DR. RICK HANSON: So are you.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I. Every time we get to speak, I love. I. I didn’t know what we were even going to talk about today. I had a bunch of stuff in my head. And then you started soliloquying. So where should people go? Your courses, your online courses are great. The podcast, great.

DR. RICK HANSON: Thank you. Thank you.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Send people in the right direction on the Internet.

DR. RICK HANSON: Well, if so, if people can find me, just Google my name. And by the way, I appreciate that. And I’m really startled also that you’re doing some kind of live thing. I’d love to know more about that and I would really direct people your way.

Certainly a thing I would really just kind of talk about briefly is this Global Compassion Coalition that I started with some friends and colleagues a couple years ago that’s really growing. And the basic idea is if we’re going to actually continue the progress that humanity has made over the last ten hundred thousand years, and especially if we’re going to tackle things like global warming, poverty, children dying of hunger, big stuff that is rooted in ongoing systems that are unjust, we need to grow larger and larger. Collectives, collaborations, coalitions, alliances. Partnerships motivated by compassion, which is a response to suffering that wants to do something about it.

So that’s the idea. Global Compassion Coalition. Across many differences and divisions, at least one thing in common. Yeah. People are hurting needlessly. And we need to become big enough to be strong enough to push long overdue systemic change to happen. So people can go to globalcompassioncoalition.org, it’s free to join, It’s a moral stance, and there’s some nice benefits for yourself along the way for being part of this cause which I’m trying to enroll Chris in.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: We need to talk about that. All right, well, I already want to talk to you again. I’m already ready for the next one. It’s strange, I was saying before, the friends that I like spending the most time with are the ones that they feel like they’re there. And even across the Internet, there’s not many people. This is close to the highest praise that I could give you. There’s not many people that are able to regulate my nervous system virtually. And yet there’s something about your demeanor that’s able to do it. So I hope that we’ve managed to give people 90 minutes of regulation today as well.

DR. RICK HANSON: Lovely. Lovely with you.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. I appreciate you, man. Until next time. Rick. Yeah. Congratulations. You made it to the end of the episode. And if you want more, well, why don’t you press right here? Come on.

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