Hang on to those happy thoughts
Teaching your mind to be resilient can help you cope with challenges
How often during your day do you stop to notice a fleeting moment of happiness or positivity? It might be a colleague smiling at you with genuine warmth, making you feel momentarily appreciated; or perhaps you accomplish a small task that leaves you quietly satisfied; or your child takes your hand in theirs and for a few seconds. These transient instances of pleasure occur all the time, for most of us. Yet, according to mindfulness pioneer Rick Hanson, we are poor at harnessing them. As the California-based psychologist writes in his new book, Resilient, “Most of the beneficial experiences that people have are wasted on their brains. But with just a little effort, you can help them leave enduring traces.”
The book, which follows his 2013 bestseller, Hardwiring Happiness, promises to show the reader just how to do this — and how, in doing so, we can make ourselves more resilient, creating an “unshakable core of happiness” to guide us through our ever-changing world. If it sounds like just another selfhelp title purporting to improve our well-being, there are neuroscientific grounds for his theories. Put simply: “You must work the brain the same way you would work a muscle to change it for good,” writes Hanson, explaining how we can hardwire our minds to be more resilient and develop the mental strength to deal with specific challenges, such as illness or divorce. So how can we turn a fleeting moment of joy into something that can help us develop long-term psychological resources? Let’s say I’m sitting on the floor with my baby daughter; she’s happy and we’re enjoying each other’s company. Then what?
“First, simply stay with the experience for a breath or two longer,” Hanson says during a phone interview. “You’re having a nice moment together — stick with it. I’m talking 10 or 20 seconds. The brain can internalize an experience quite quickly, but we have to give it enough time — the seconds it takes to be physically changed. “The second thing you can do when you’re with your daughter, or when you’re trying to help anything else positive ‘land,’ is feel it in your body. Research shows that the more you do this, the more it will leave a lasting trace. So you’re watching your daughter — now bring attention to your body. Ask: what am I feeling right now? Warmth in my heart? Relaxation in my face? What about emotionally?
“Move out of something that’s merely conceptual to something like relief, reassurance, love.” The third thing we can do, he adds, is to “notice what is rewarding about the experience — specifically what is enjoyable or meaningful. What feels good about it? What do I like about it? What is pleasurable? That, in turn, increases its registration.”
Except by the time I’ve done all this, my daughter will have got into a fight with my son, and my phone will be pinging with emails that need answering, while I’m trying to break them up. That is precisely the problem, Hanson says. “Modern life drowns us in mild to moderate chronic stress: rushing about, being continually interrupted, having to switch between multiple tasks, feeling pressured and being bombarded by news of threats,” he says.
“People in the developed world are much safer than their parents were, but research shows there’s more anxiety than previously — there’s a disconnect.”
So what can we do about it? “We need to grow resilient resources inside ourselves to cope,” says Hanson, who believes the key is allowing ourselves to profit from our positive experiences. Hanson learned this at a young age. Growing up in rural Illinois, he lived in what he calls a “pretty good environment.” But something was lacking.
“There were some important things missing for me psychologically,” he says. “My parents were very loving people, but they were very busy and not good at empathy.” He was young for his school year and struggled to fit in. “I often felt left out and rejected,” Hanson says. “Like many people, I was highfunctioning on the outside but miserable on the inside.” That was until he discovered the solution right under his nose. “If I let myself feel something when I noticed good around me. For example: She smiled at me; They invited me to breakfast. If I marinated in the experience, it felt I was learning from it.
“I had no idea what was happening, but I started to feel more confident, one little episode at a time.” The other factor, Hanson says, is our inbuilt “negativity bias.” In Resilient, he writes, “Our brains are like Velcro for bad experiences but Teflon for good ones.” So we naturally tend to focus on the negative, but this tendency “mainly creates lots of unnecessary suffering, stress, irritation, anxiety, hurt feelings, feeling inadequate and sadness,” Hanson says. “And those accumulate.”
With more than three decades of clinical work to his name, Hanson’s interest lies in ideas at the intersection of psychology, neuroscience and contemplative wisdom. By blending these, he arrived at what are billed as his “12 fundamental inner strengths that will help you thrive, no matter what life throws at you.” Each one of these — compassion, mindfulness, learning, grit, gratitude, confidence, calm, motivation, intimacy, courage, aspiration and generosity — has its own chapter in Resilient.