How to be more resilient
He brought us mindfulness. Now Rick Hanson wants to make us more resilient, too, finds Rosa Silverman
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 some small task that leaves you quietly satisfied; or your child takes your hand in theirs and for a few seconds, everything is right with the world.
These transient instances of pleasure occur all the time, for most of us. Yet, according to the mindfulness pioneer Rick Hanson, we are poor at harnessing them. As the American 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 “unshakeable core of happiness” to guide us through our ever-changing, unreliable, world.
If it sounds like just another self-help 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 all hardwire our minds to be more resilient and develop the mental strength to deal with specific challenges, such as illness or divorce.
When he speaks to me on the phone from his home, north of San Francisco, I ask him to explain exactly how we can turn a fleeting moment of joy into something that can help us develop long-term psychological resources.
I give him an example: I am 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,” he says. “You’re having a nice moment together – stick with it. I’m talking 10 or 20 seconds. The brain can internalise 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,” continues Hanson. “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, the 65-year-old 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 argues.
“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 explains. “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 any of us 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,” he says. “So when I got to college at 16 it felt like there was a big hole inside my heart and I didn’t know what to do to fill it. Like many people I was high-functioning 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.”
He is at pains to stress he did not invent this method. But, he emphasises that “because we have a culture that is always grabbing our attention with one new thing or another, we move on from positive experiences before they can make their way into our consciousness.”
The other factor, Hanson says, is our inbuilt “negativity bias”. In the book, he writes: “Our brains are like Velcro for bad experiences but Teflon for good ones.” So we naturally tend to focus on the negative. This tendency might have helped our Stone Age ancestors sense and avoid danger, but today it “mainly creates lots of unnecessary suffering, stress, irritation, anxiety, hurt feelings, feeling inadequate and sadness,” says Hanson. “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. It was by blending these that 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.
So does Hanson, who wrote the book with his son Forrest, 30, apply these techniques in his own life?
“I honestly do,” he says. “It changes how you go through your day, because you start looking for and focusing on opportunities to have those beneficial experiences.”
It is not a quick fix; but by “hacking our brains” we can all, over time, he believes, create mental strength. “Life has a lot of negatives; things happen, we’re challenged and we have to be able to adapt, Hanson says. “What enables us to do that is the inner strength we have inside ourselves.”