082: Dr. Rick Hanson

This week we talk to Dr. Rick Hanson about hardwiring happiness into our brain

Rick Hanson, Ph.D., is a neuropsychologist and author of Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence as well as Buddha’s Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love and Wisdom and Just One Thing: Developing a Buddha Brain One Simple Practice at a Time.

He is the Founder of the Wellspring Institute for Neuroscience and Contemplative Wisdom and an Affiliate of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley, he’s been an invited speaker at Oxford, Stanford, and Harvard, and taught in meditation centers worldwide.

An authority on self-directed neuroplasticity, Dr. Hanson’s work has been featured on the BBC, NPR, CBC, Fox Business, Consumer Reports Health, U.S. News and World Report, and O Magazine, and his articles have appeared in Tricycle Magazine, Insight Journal, and Inquiring Mind.

In This Interview Rick and I Discuss…

The One You Feed parable.
His latest book: Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence.
That feeding the good wolf is a daily habit.
How it’s our responsibility to feed our good wolf- no one can do it for us.
How frequently our brain changes.
Experience-dependent neuroplasticity.
That our brains are like velcro for the bad and Teflon for the good.
Deciding what we cultivate and what do you restrain.
The human tendency to overlearn from our bad experiences and under learn from our good ones.
Learning to “install” our beneficial experiences.
His practice of “taking in the good”.
The difference between positive thinking and taking in the good.
The benefits of realistic thinking over positive thinking.
Moving positive memories into longer term memory.
How neurons that fire together wire together.
Ways to deepen our experiences: Duration, Intensity, Multimodality, Novelty and Salience.
The fundamental neuropsychology of learning,
Taking on the good in four words: Have it, Enjoy It.
How self hate and harshness are not motivating in the long term.
Being numb from the neck down.
The three-step way to working with negative emotions.
The analogy of a garden for how we tend to our minds: Be with the Garden, Pull the Weeds, Plan Flowers.
Choiceless awareness.
The power of gradual accumulation.
Why accomplishments can’t fix loneliness.
The Four Noble Truths in reverse.
Safety, Satisfaction and Connection and how those map to the three main evolutions of the brain.