Hardwiring Happiness: Dr. Rick Hanson at TEDxMarin 2013 (Transcript)

Here is the full transcript of Neuroscientist Dr. Rick Hanson’s TEDx Talk: Hardwiring happiness at TEDxMarin 2013 conference

Dr. Rick Hanson – Neuropsychologist

Wow! So what I want to do here, if I could, is share with you a very simple, yet powerful method, grounded in neuroscience, for turning passing experiences into lasting structure, useful structure, inside our brain.

In other words, turning experiences into the happiness, or the resilience, or the other inner strengths that we really want inside ourselves. I sort of stumbled on this method when I was in college, but to explain the context, I have to take you back a little before, into my own up-and-down childhood.

So, I grew up in a loving home – good parents, intact family – but I was very, very young going through school – I have a late birthday and I skipped a grade. And that combined with my kind of shy and seriously dorky temperament – you know, skinny, glasses, picked last for baseball, the whole thing. Well, what it led to were lots of experiences of being left out or put down by the other kids in school.

Now, what happened to me was very small compared to, unfortunately, what happens to many, many other people, but we all have normal needs to feel cared for, to feel cared about. We’re the most profoundly social species on the planet. You know, as we evolved in the Serengeti, exile was a death sentence. Causes have effects. And if we don’t get the supplies that we need, bit by bit, it’s kind of like we’re living on a thin soup.

You can survive, you can make it, but there’s a hollowness, an emptiness inside. In my own case – hopefully this will work; yes – I ended up with lots of bad thoughts and feelings inside of me as a result.

Then I went off to college, and I began to notice something really powerful and interesting. You know, some small, good thing would happen. You know, a girl would smile at me in the elevator, some guy would throw me the football at intramural football and say, “Good catch, Hanson,” that was really good.

Or guys would invite me to go out for pizza – you know, basic stuff of everyday life. And then I would have an experience, right? I would feel a little included, or a little wanted, a little appreciated. Then the question is, what would I do with that experience? If I dealt with it like I usually did, which was to kind of ignore it, you know, let it pass along, I kept feeling lonely and inadequate. But I began to notice that if I did something different, if I stayed with it a dozen or so seconds in a row, it felt like something was gradually coming into me that was actually good.

And I began feeling better and better and better, and more confident. Any single time I did this wasn’t a mind-blowing moment – I had a few of those through other means – but the good things really did add up over time for me, definitely.

And now, years later, many years later, as a neuropsychologist, I began to understand what I was actually doing. I wasn’t just changing my mind, I was actually changing my brain. That’s because, as the neuroscientists say, “Neurons that fire together, wire together.” Passing mental states become lasting neural traits. Bit by bit, I was actually weaving these resources into the fabric of my brain and therefore my life.

There are many examples of the ways in which mental activity can change brain structure. For example, taxicab drivers in London at the end of their training have a thicker brain in a key part called the hippocampus that does visual-spatial memory.

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In a different kind of example, I don’t know if anybody in here experiences stress, right? Occasionally. Well, if we have the experience of stress, that releases cortisol in the body, it goes up into the brain. Cortisol gradually stimulates the alarm bell of the brain, the amygdala, so it rings more loudly and more quickly, and cortisol weakens, it actually kills neurons in the hippocampus, which besides doing visual-spatial memory, calms down the amygdala and calms down stress altogether.

So this mental experience of stress, especially if it’s chronic and moderate to severe, gradually changes the structure of the brain, so we become progressively more sensitive to stress. The mind can change the brain to change the mind. Knowing this is really valuable because the inner strengths – to go back to the beginning of my story here – the inner strengths that we all want: happiness, positive emotion, determination, feeling love, confidence, the virtues, the executive functions, those are all built out of the brain.

The question is how to actually get them into the brain. The interesting thing is that most of the wholesome qualities of mind and heart that help us cope with life, including coping with hard things, and have a lot inside ourselves to give to other people, most of those inner strengths are built from positive experiences of those strengths.

If you want to feel more confident, for example, have more experiences of accomplishment or coping. If you want to have a more loving heart, practice more moments of compassion or kindness for others. The problem is that to get these experiences into our brain, we have to overcome the brain’s hard-wired negativity bias. This negativity bias means that the brain is very good at learning from bad experiences but bad at learning from good ones. In other words, good experiences kind of bounce off the brain unless we do a little thing that I’m going to tell you about in a moment; meanwhile, bad experiences sink right in.

The reason for the negativity bias is that our ancestors had to pay a lot of attention to bad news. Because if they survived it, they had to remember it forever, right? Once burned, twice shy. These days we have ordinary experiences of this – think about a relationship you’re in with someone you live with, work with, sleep with, whatever. You know, let’s say ten things happen in a day with that person. Five of them are positive, four are neutral, one is negative. Which is the one we tend to think about as we go to sleep?

That’s why a lot of studies show that a good long-term relationship typically needs at least a five-to-one ratio of positive to negative interactions. That’s a cautionary tale, right? All right, so that’s the negativity bias. It creates a fundamental bottleneck in the brain that creates a weakness in both informal efforts and formal efforts to grow, to heal, to train ourselves in different ways.

Whether you’re a psychologist like me or a meditation teacher like me, or a corporate trainer, or a coach, a parent – I’m also a parent, with my wife – or you’re trying to help people in one way or another, we tend to be very good at “activating” positive mental states, but are we very good at helping people install them in the brain? I don’t think so. There’s been this longstanding assumption that if we just get a good thing going, somehow it will sink in.

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What can we do? We can learn to take in the good, to pop open this bottleneck in the brain, and gradually weave good experiences into the fabric of our brain and our life. So I thought we could actually do it here right now – something experiential. It is Marin county, we could go for it. We’ll just try it right now. It’s a little weird, a little artificial – why not? Just go for it.

So I’ll take you through this kind of informally, then I’ll explain what we just did. So if you could, bring to mind someone that you know cares about you. It could be a pet, it could be a group of people, it could be a person in your life, in your past, doesn’t really matter. What you’re trying to do is have a good experience, a simple good experience of feeling cared about. You’re trying to help the idea of this person, or the image, or a memory become a feeling.

Okay, want to try it? And then once you get it going – you’re moving out of concept to experience – stay with it. It’s kind of a critical mass of time, a threshold. Things have to last long enough in our experience to transfer from short-term memory buffers to long-term storage, including emotional learning. And meanwhile, you could sense that this experience is going into you, you’re absorbing it. It’s sinking into you, feeling loved, as you sink into it.

A simple moment – 10, 20 seconds usually won’t change our life. But bit by bit, it can really make an enormous difference. I’d like to tell you the little steps of taking in the good, they’re very simple – I even have a clever acronym that you can use to remember them. Our daughter thought of the last word in the acronym – very important, so I want to give her credit.

So, in the first step, have a good experience. We’ve got to activate it, we’ve got to get it going. The brain is like an old-school cassette recorder. It records the music by playing it – we have to have an experience.

In the second step, enrich the experience. Help install this activated mental state into your brain as a neural trait. You know, let it last, help it grow in your body, help it become increasingly intense, give yourself over to it.

And in the third step of taking in the good, absorb it. Sense an intent that it’s sinking into you. This will prime memory systems. This will sensitize them so they’ll be more efficient at encoding the experience into neural structure.

And then, if you want to, the optional step, is to link the positive experience with something negative. You’ve got to be a little careful about this because you don’t want to be hijacked by the negative, but if you can stay strong with the positive, it will gradually associate with the negative – “neurons that fire together, wire together” – and it will go into the negative to soothe it, ease it, even gradually replace it. And you can use this step of taking in the good, where you’re linking positive and negative, for yourselves, or for children, or for clients, students or others you care about, you can use this method to heal old pain or neglect, whether in adulthood or childhood, even reaching down into young parts of yourself.

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To kind of sum it up here, we have four steps that become an acronym: HEAL. It’s an easy way to remember it. Have it. Enrich the experience to begin installing it in your brain once it’s activated in your mind. Absorb it, and, if you like, link it so it really becomes a part of you.

Now, this may seem a little complicated, we all know how to take in the good, we all know how to help some good life lesson land, some good experience with other people. We know how to let these things land.

In a nutshell, this whole thing boils down to – all my verbiage here – to four words: Have it and enjoy it All right? Especially enjoy it so it becomes a part of you. This is not about covering over negative truths, right? Paradoxically, the more we take in the good, we’re more able to see the bad and do something about it. In fact, this is about taking control of the brain’s stone age bias in the 21st century to excessively focus on the bad and over-worry about it. Any single time we do it isn’t going to change our life.

But the gradual accumulation, both in the flow of our day and at special times if we want to, like at meals, or at nighttime before bed, or after meditating or a workout, we can gradually build this up inside ourselves. You know, I think of it as the law of little things, right? It’s usually lots of little bad things that take us to a bad place. And it’s lots of little good things that take us to a better one. There’s this saying they have in Tibet – I think about it often. They say, “If you take care of the minutes, the years will take care of themselves.”

I find that so helpful, isn’t it? What’s the most important minute in your life? It’s the next one. Can’t do anything about the past. A few minutes in the future, we start losing a lot of influence. But the next minute is a phenomenal opportunity for us. Like me back in college, or any one of us today, or over the course of this evening, what will we do with the most important minute in our life? And especially, what will we do with the good that’s authentically available to us in it? Will we waste it? Or will we, a few times a day, or even more, actually take it into ourselves?

For me, there’s a Buddhist saying that really speaks to the heart of the opportunity in the most important minute of our life. It goes like this: Do not think lightly of good, saying, it will not come to me. Drop by drop is the water pot filled. Likewise, the wise one, gathering it little by little, fills oneself with good. So, may you, and I, and all beings everywhere, little by little, fill ourselves with good.

So, thank you.

Hardwiring Happiness: Dr. Rick Hanson at TEDxMarin 2013 (Transcript)

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