Modern Wisdom - #903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable

Episode Date: February 15, 2025

Dr. Rick Hanson is a psychologist, author, and speaker. Our brains are more adaptable than we realise. With a bit of understanding, patience, and the right techniques, you can rewire your brain for greater happiness and well-being. So what are the best ways to make this happen? Expect to learn what positive and negative mental states are from a neurological perspective, if human brains are predisposed to being happy or peaceful, how to convince someone that they actually can change their mind, what the process for making our brain more likely to be happy, how to stop ruminating on bad experiences, how to not focus on negative self-talk, and much more… Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at https://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom Get a 20% discount on Nomatic’s amazing luggage at https://nomatic.com/modernwisdom Get a 20% discount on the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dr. Rick Hansen, welcome to the show. Chris, it's great to talk with you again. We were chatting briefly beforehand and it was literally over six years ago. Your whole work has skyrocketed. I'm really glad for you and I'm really happy to be here. I appreciate that. Yeah. Episode 47 was you and this is going to be episode 902, something like that. You were like a protoplasm.

You were just a mere amoeba at the beginning of this journey. And look, look now is where dinosaur sized diplodocus plotting around. I'm a fan of mammals. I feel like I have a lot of empathy for our rats, our kind of like rat like ancestors running around in Jurassic Park that lived through the catacombs. of mammals. I feel like I have a lot of empathy for our rats, our kind of like rat-like ancestors running around in Jurassic Park that lived through the cataclysm. Yeah. You know, the asteroid came, that was it on the 90% of the species, but our ancestors were crafty and sly and, you know, warm-blooded and had babies they took care of. And we are here today.

The progeny continues on. So I want to go through the neurobiology of happiness today. This is maybe taking you back to sort of the beginning of your work, which I've become hugely obsessed by neurobiology, especially as it relates to well-being, interpersonal stuff. It really does feel like we sort of go around the houses, finding explanations and personifying and coming up with interesting descriptions and titles for things. around the houses, finding explanations and personifying and coming up with

interesting descriptions and titles for things to just come back to the nervous system and to just come back to sort of neurobiology. And I kind of really want to get this year into the nuts and bolts of this. So I guess maybe a good place to start would be what are positive and negative mental states from a neurobiological perspective? Big picture is that there are neural correlates of the stream of consciousness. So we're having experiences and those patterns of mental activity correlate with underlying patterns of neural activity. of mental activity correlate with underlying patterns of neural activity. Maybe there's some X factor that's supernatural

or even divine ultimately, that's getting in the mix there. Science accepts mysteries. But meanwhile, it's really clear that there's a very high level of correlation moment to moment to moment. So we have states of being moment to moment, and we have underlying traits, underlying tendencies that foster states. And the states, the experiences we're having,

can then leave lasting traces behind for better or worse that foster the traits, the underlying tendencies of who we are. Boom. My work has been extremely focused on how to grab hold of and take charge of who we are becoming and that fundamental process of helping beneficial states of being, emotions, sensations, attitudes, motivations, and thoughts become embedded as underlying beneficial traits, inner strengths of various kinds, including a positive mood, since we're focused on happiness here, that then foster beneficial states in a positive upward spiral. And being in charge of that process rather than just kind of willy-nilly being swept along, including with a brain that has a big negativity bias like Velcro for bad experiences,

Teflon for good ones. Okay. Pause for breath. Any questions so far? CB Keep going, go on a roll. RG Okay. So you're exactly right. How do we foster in ourselves or those we care about, more beneficial? I prefer beneficial to positive because sometimes a beneficial Beneficial, I prefer beneficial to positive, because sometimes a beneficial state of being is healthy remorse or openhearted sorrow, or being real about something that's painful to look at and hard,

but you really need to look at it inside yourself. Okay, so how do we foster beneficial states and beneficial traits? What's the actual how of that? And what's going on in the machinery under the hood? That's what you're getting at. Right? So operationally, we're talking about reduce, I'm going to use the word bad, not morally, but pragmatically here. Reduce the bad, grow the good. Less,

less sad, less sadness, less unnecessary sadness, fear, anxiety, and shame. The four major negative emotions, so-called negative. Okay. Less of that, less crippling anxiety, less negative rumination, less of that, and more sense of underlying wellbeing that resilient, even as you deal with the challenges of life. So what's going on in your brain? So on the negative side, we have a brain that is already biased toward negative learning because that helped our ancestors survive. And that very much involves, I'll jump into it now. Actually, I got to do it. Sorry, bear with me. Brain evolved like a house, three floors. Okay. There's the brainstem,

the sub cortex, and then the cortex sitting on top. Right. The, so what we're trying to do is tune that brain more positively. Problem is the lower regions of the brain are hard to train. They're very reptilian, very automatic, right? And so it takes a certain amount of effort to change them for the better. So essentially someone who is unhappy, let's say a lot of the time, is often having an overreactive is often having an overreactive subcortical region of the amygdala, the hippocampus, and the basal ganglia that's tilted and tuned in a negative direction toward negative emotion and trapped in certain loops, sometimes motivationally as well in terms of what people want and the rewards they're seeking that are negative. And for that person, there's not

enough cortical prefrontal top-down regulation of that negative stuff, right? And also, there's a lack of the positive. There's not enough production or activity related to healthy opioids, natural opioids that are the well-being chemicals in the brain or other little slippery small molecules called peptides such as oxytocin. There's an under-production of that. And what we're trying to do basically with people is to increase top-down regulation of negative factors, A. B. We're also trying to really promote more emotional learning of that which is positive so that there's more of a tilting in effect in the brain toward healthy opioids, you know, in general, oxytocin in particular, you know, related then finishing on that, more broader capabilities in terms of integration of cortical systems of different kinds with these underlying more ancient parts of the brain that began to emerge 200 million years ago.

Fantastic. I can say more about that. I'll say one more thing if I could. What's super cool is like, if we want to get good at something, study people who are good at it. So more and more we're able with different forms of brain scanning, MRIs, EEGs, and even invasive experiments that are ethically challenged on non-human animals still. We're starting to reverse engineer what's going on in the brains of people who are resilient in the face of challenge, who are in combat situations side by side with somebody else, but they don't develop post-traumatic stress disorder. What's happening there? What's happening in the brains of super meditators, Tibetan monks with 60,000 years lifetime practice,

let's say, of meditation? What's going on there? And we can study more and more what changes in the brain over time with long-term meditation. You've been a meditator for a number of years. I can tell you probably if you're like other people have meditated for a while, significant changes that have occurred in your own brain that then map to changes in your mind. So maybe we could talk about that too. talk about that too. So it seems like we have a couple of systems going on here. We have the state changes that are, how can we interject during an experience

while something is happening? How can we top down try to dictate a little bit more with the newer bit of the house toward the back of the house. How can you learn from that experience? The goal is to change as best we can to enhance and latch on to good things, to mitigate or beneficial things, to mitigate the impact of bad things, to also begin to retrain the house to move away from this predisposition it has of being negative in that direction. And that, I mean, everybody is aware in one form or another about the negativity bias, you know, if you get nine compliments and one criticism, you forget the compliments and you remember the criticism and that sticks with you maybe for the rest of your life.

I was having a conversation with Canada's lead chair of the anti-bullying psychologist association. She's like evidence-based bullying intervention. She's telling me this story about an 82 year old woman who was diagnosed with something and she maybe didn't have too long to live. And she was opening up to Tracy about the fact that she still remembered when she was 12 years old and the girls who picked on her in school. And Tracy's response was that those bitches are dead. Like you don't need to be, but it kind of shows just how competent we are. You know, we don't need, there is no training course out there for people

to become more anxious or more concerned or more sad or more worried or more shameful. Mother nature has taken good care of that already. We are black belts in that from the womb. Uh, but we need to work in, we're all white belts in the rest of it. So I think, um, maybe to just sort of dig a little bit deeper into the negativity side, can you take us through the phases of the neurobiology of that negativity bias, sort of how it occurs step by step? So five things we're hardwired to do

that were really good for survival back in Jurassic Park, the Stone Age. One, continually scan for bad news, outside and also inside. Look for the bad. Two, when you identify it, over-focus upon it. So that's one reason why Barbara Fredrickson's work in positive emotions is called broaden and build. The broaden part is that while we're having emotionally positive experiences, our perceptual field is wider.

That's, which also promotes greater creativity and productivity at work. That one light on the inner dashboard mosaic, 10 by 10, a hundred little lights starts flashing red. We ignore all the other green lights and the gray ones, the neutral ones to focus on that one thing. Third, we overreact to it. People react more to loss and to gain. That's Kahneman's work on prospect theory and all the rest of that. Just think about the emotion. Somebody gives you $100. Oh, that's nice. On the other hand,

what happens when you realize someone has stolen a hundred dollars from you? The intensity is great. So overreact. And then fourth, really important, over learning. We're much more impacted typically by negative interactions with a friend or a lover or family member than we are by positive interactions. That's why positive interactions need to outnumber significantly by people debate the number, the factor, but by three to one, five to one, or more in a long-term relationship. And when I stumbled on that fact in grad school, I revisited the last three days with my wife and realized I needed to raise my game in terms of

the ratio of positive and negative. So that's four things right there. That's really natural. And then fifth, as a result of that, the brain gets sensitized. It's designed to become sensitized to negative experiences. So when we're identified with anxiety, when we're hijacked by it or anger or frustration, or feeling inadequate, that gets reinforced very quickly in the brain and we become even more vulnerable to that kind of experience in the future.

Now, that's different from mindfully experiencing negative emotions, which actually then tends to neutralize them because we're starting to associate a kind of undisturbed observing of the negative experience with the negative experience, which tends to calm it down. So those are five things that we're just naturally hardwired to do, which then sixth outside of the neurobiology in the world tends to create vicious cycles with other people. And that's the negativity bias in the nutshell. There are certain situations where it's really useful. You know, the negativity bias in the nutshell. There are certain situations where it's really useful. You know, you grow up in a war zone or you live in a war zone, it's really handy. But for most people, modern life most of the time, it creates all kinds of

needless suffering and needless aggravation with other people. And so practically, if we tilt toward valuing beneficial experiences in a kind of hard-nosed clear-eyed way, not out of airy-fairy positive thinking, but in a hard-nosed clear-eyed way, we're trying to grow strengths inside. In part to deal with the bad is we lean into beneficial experiences and we help ourselves disengage from negative experiences to the extent that it's useful for us to do that and not get ruminating about them. So far if we tilt in those ways we're just leveling the playing field. Yeah so the best argument for the neurobiology of positivity and of trying

to hardwire the stuff that you advocate for is that, well, this just brings you back to baseline. This, this just sort of levels the playing fields because you've been fighting an uphill battle your entire life. That's part, that's part one of it. And in me, I don't like bullies and in effect, we're being bullied by our brain. You know, so there's a part of me that's like, fuck you. That's one part of it. You're exactly right. But there's the other part, which is in addition to just leveling it and no

longer swimming upstream, how do you grow the strengths inside? How do you influence who you are becoming from the inside out? And to me, that's very interesting. You know, I grew up really a shy, dorky kid, decent parenting and so forth. I was very young going through school. And so I really felt nobody cared about me or saw me and I was shit. I was a loser and I was never gonna be any good.

And so it became really important for me to develop strengths inside of various kinds that compensated for that, that healed that such as feeling just included. Or I still remember a million dollar moment, you know, because I was super young in school. I was picked last for sports. In college though, I kind of discovered I was a pretty good athlete. I was playing intramural football, American football, not soccer, but you got it. And this stud of a quarterback on our team, who is just a little too small to play division one football, but was still a manly man. And he walked past me one day as we were coming back to our dorms after practice and he just grunted at me, like dudes do, hey Hanson, you're good.

I'm going to throw to you more. Oh man, that was a million dollar moment. That was so good to take in, to let it sink into me, to specifically heal wounds and lacks inside and also grow normal range, you know, self-worth and self-confidence. So for me, these are the two reasons to tilt toward what's beneficial and to take in the good, to grow the good that lasts inside. One, definitely compensate for Mother Nature's bias, but also to develop whatever you want to grow inside you. Yeah. I think people feel like this stuck with their mind. Like it just is the way it is.

This is my programming. Does that piss you off to feel stuck? Well, look, I, the most important thing in mine and a lot of my friends lives is agency. important thing in mine and a lot of my friends lives is agency. It's our ability to change the outcomes, to win the computer game no matter what the boss is that's put in front of us, to be, to not need permission, to do it completely permissionlessly. And yet there is a couple of pound wet thing between my ears, that I'm prepared to, much of the time, move the world out of the way in order to get the things that I want.

But because you can't see it happening internally, because there's no, this is to be done, this is being done, this has been done, sort of widget criteria that you can track. It's all ephemeral and difficult to work out. this has been done sort of widget criteria that you can track. It's all ephemeral and difficult to work out. Am I better? Is this better now than it was back then? Have I, is, am I actually doing anything?

It's, it's tough. So yeah, I think, um, convincing people that they can change their minds at a fundamental level is, um, something that's probably pretty important. I've been really struck, so I have a business background and a practical background. I've been really struck by how people are really pretty clear about making things better over time about making things better over time in the outer world. But they kind of feel helpless or even uninterested in the process of making things better over time in the inner world.

That's what you're talking about. And your whole work, I think a lot of it is helping people realize they do have that power inside themselves and they can use that power in skillful ways. That's exactly right. And it's a plain fact that the essence of it is a two-step process that's incredibly simple. It's under our control most of the time and people usually forget the second step. First, you have to experience whatever you want to grow. You want to feel better about yourself, you want to feel more committed to exercise, you want to be less self-critical, you want to be more confident in public speaking, whatever it might be, you first have to experience what you want to grow or factors of it.

Okay, that's a state. But the second step is there must be an internalization of that momentary patterning of neurological activation that leaves a lasting trace in the body, especially in the brain. That's the second step. But if people actually engage that second step, a handful of times every day, for typically a breath or two, maybe longer, then they are stippling their growth curve and influencing in lasting ways who they're becoming. The dirty secret in the clinical world and influencing in lasting ways who they're becoming.

The dirty secret in the clinical world is that we routinely leave out that second step. We kind of hope that something will stick to the walls. There, you know, even in Barbara Fredrickson's, for example, wonderful work on broadening and build, the build aspect of emotionally positive experiences is described as incidental. Me, I don't like that.

I want deliberate, you know what I mean? I want deliberate. You're gonna leave this up to chance. Yeah, that's exactly right. And this is no knock on Barbara. This is, I'm really speaking actually about my own errors as a therapist over time to be good at promoting certain experiences in people, but ignoring the question of whether they're sinking in in any kind of a lasting way. And so anyway, people can

appreciate that it's a two-step process, state to trade, and you actually have the power to slow down and take in the good as it were of that experience. Keep the neurons firing together so they wire together. Feel it in your body. Track the reward value of the experience. Right there are three neurologically based, evidence-based methods for heightening internalization of whatever you want to develop in yourself. Stay with it, feel it in your body, track what feels good about it, highlight what feels

good about it. And there are other methods as well, like be aware of what's novel about it or salient, personally relevant, give over to it, allow yourself to receive it, feel like it's sinking in. These are all evidence-based factors that increase learning. But in the moment, you're really helping yourself harvest what you've earned in the experience you're having at the time. And you're being kind to yourself. You're getting bonus benefits for doing this. You're treating yourself like you matter along the way. Yeah. for doing this, you're treating yourself like you matter along the way.

Yeah. And it's, it's as simple as that. It's not a quick fix, you know, takes time, but less than a few minutes a day, people can profoundly change who they are becoming based on durable changes in their own brain. In other news, Whoop is the best fitness tracker I've ever used. It's a 24 seven health and fitness coach that tracks your sleep, your strain, your recovery, your stress, and more to provide you with personalized insights that help you reach your goals.

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slash modern wisdom. That's join.whoop.com slash modern wisdom. That's join.woop.com slash modern wisdom. Let's go through in painstaking detail the process for making our brains more likely to be happy than somebody is going through their normal day. They think this Dr. Hanson guy sounds pretty good. He was on episode 47 of modern wisdom. I can trust him. Uh, I, I, I, I reckoned he knows what he's Chris whined at him back, oh my. I reckon he knows, yeah, six years later.

I reckon he knows what he's talking about. Take us through it. Take us through the evidence-based processes. Three things. First, if you're going through your day and think of them as ordinary jewels, ordinary experiences that feel good. Like right here, I have an opportunity to feel respected by you, appreciated by you.

Okay. It's not more than what it is, but it's not less than what it is. Or you're going through your day, you get something done. You complete a workout, you feel good about yourself for doing that. You accomplish something at work. Someone smiles to you. Anything. In the course of your day, slow down, handful of times every day, to take in the good on the fly. Right there, you've probably spent about a minute total, maybe two minutes total,

doing what I'm suggesting here. Probably closer to a minute, a breath at a time, which is about 10 seconds plus or minus. That itself will change a person. If they said, okay, I'm going to follow this guy's prescription, I think he's a maniac, but I'm going to try it. No harm, it's secret, it's private. No one is knowing that I'm slowing down to take in the good, even though I'm a really tough person, I'm super stoic and all the rest of that, right? Try it.

Just the fact that you're looking for the good facts and then you're letting yourself have a good experience from the good facts. Just on the let yourself have the good experience and allowing it to sort of sink in. Sink in. Yeah. That alone. Can you just, with a little bit more description, what is the process of doing that? Or what have you found to be the best way to do that?

Yeah. And we could do it together, you know, if you want. But so, notice that something good is happening or could be happening. Like that's revelatory for a lot of people. Because again, negativity bias and the pail mail pace of modern life were just blowing right past all kinds of jewels. So if you were to become someone who said, Hey, fuck that. I want to deliberately let it land. And I don't want to be manipulated by all these people who are blasting me with threat messages, very level orange all over the place or dragging me into the next thing or trying to compel my attention. No, I'm in control of my own attention.

I want to rest my attention on ordinary small, usually, but real good stuff in my life. And I want to second, help myself feel something. So I finish a challenging email, I hit send before racing onto the next thing. I take half a breath while I'm inhaling to register, hey, I finished that and good on me. And a sense of relief, I got it done. I'm feeling something useful. Okay. Additionally, the longer you stay with that experience, half a breath, now a few seconds have

ticked by, you know, neurons typically are firing five to a hundred times a second, you know, neurons typically are firing five to eight, a hundred times a second, you know, giant coalitions of neurons in the brain are synchronized and they're firing, you know, five to 80 times a second or, you know, there are a lot of stuff's happening in your brain and over the course of an inhalation, add the exhalation. Now you're up to about six or eight or 10 seconds. You're staying with it. Just that is increasing the consolidation of that experience in your brain.

Stay with it. The second technique I mentioned, try to feel it in your body. Sometimes there's a place for just absorbing a new idea. It's purely conceptual. Okay. In my early twenties, I realized that growing up, I had been a nerd, but not a wimp.

That idea had a lot of implications for me, you know, but that's just, that was an idea. But much of the time, what we really want to internalize is more felt in the body. It's more somatic. So we want to just feel, what's it like to feel a sense of accomplishment and relief that I handled that tricky email? Or what do I feel in my body when I have a sense of fellowship, friendship, community with another person I like and respect like I'm experiencing here? What's that feel like? So the more you feel it in your body, the deeper the learning. We're going after emotional learning, emotional learning, somatic learning, motivational learning, even spiritual learning if we get to that. Third thing you can do is be aware of what is meaningful or enjoyable about it

for you. Because as soon as you track the reward, as soon as you highlight the reward value of an experience technically, it increases activity of dopamine and norepinephrine to neurochemical systems in your hippocampus, which is the front end of the process of emotional learning in your brain. So, and as dopamine and norepinephrine activity increase in the hippocampus, that flags the experience at the time as a keeper in long-term storage as it sinks into you gradually. We will not remember the event, but the emotional residues will sink into us. So those would be three things that people can do in the flow of life that are evidence-based

that increase emotional learning from experiences, increase impact, lasting value. I could name others people, I published a paper called Learning to Learn from Positive Experiences that summarizes all the evidence for this and how to do it. And I've written about it and talked about it in other kinds of ways people can check that out. But just those three, stay with it for a breath or longer, feel it in your body, try, you know, highlight for you what's enjoyable about it, what's meaningful about it. Bingo. You are increasing the trace.

You're heightening the trace in physical structures and functions that's, that's left behind by the experience. How does that process or where does this map onto HEAL your acronym framework? Thanks for being a really good student. I've only had six years to prepare. So that's right. Super briefly, the HEAL acronym.

So I did not invent any of these methods. Now really good teachers and people often on their own who have a fairly steep learning curve, I would imagine that you've yourself been just doing this naturally along the way, do these processes of internalization. What I have done is to pull them together in a comprehensive framework and embedded in evolution and then apply it, which we'll get to in a second about the second big thing that people can do with this, which is to identify particular strengths they want to grow inside. Not just kind of move through life, harvesting, you know, here and there, useful experiences, which is great in its own

right, but going after things in particular. So I'll get to that. So HEALS stands for have, that's the have the beneficial experience in the first place. Either you notice it's happening or you create it. And then the second necessary step, right? The one that I and others routinely forget of installation. I call it activation installation because I read too much science fiction installation and still do probably. The E stands for enriching. You're helping the experience be big, powerful, lasting in your brain. And A for absorbing, you're sensitizing the neurobiological machinery of memory. So the enriched experience is landing on a more sensitive system that can

really internalize it. That's the basic process. Then the fourth step is optional but very powerful is to link in the moment a beneficial experience with some negative material you're trying to soothe and ease and eventually even replace. Right. That's the overall structure. I think of it as like the brain and mind are like a garden. You can be with it, which is fundamental, but you can also work with it. And working with it means pulling weeds and planting flowers. And my focus a lot is how do you plant the flowers, but you can use in the linking step, you can use flowers, not just to gradually crowd out the weeds over time, but to actually uproot the weeds.

CB Is there anything else to say on here before we get to all? RL Well, yeah, let's get to the L, that'd be cool. But the second way people, you said, okay, Rick, great. Thanks. How does this translate into daily life? I think of this as like the five minute challenge, right? Three parts. The first part I've said already, as you go through the flow of your life, look for

a handful of useful experiences, beneficial, good moments, and slow down and let them sink in. Most of them are not million dollar moments. They're the bread and butter of daily life. But if you start looking for them and taking them in, that will change your day alone. And you've only spent a minute doing that, spread distributed over the course of your day. Second, what do you want to grow more inside? What would make a big difference if it were more present in your mind. You know, there are these four questions. Chris said routinely clinicians should think about and people can think about in daily life.

What's your challenge? What's a challenge? Especially what's the experience of it inside you, right? Then second, the money question, what would help if it were more present in your mind? Right? So now you know, like for example, my story, feeling respected for not being a total loser athlete.

I'm not great, but I'm kind of good. All right. I want to, I want to feel that I want to look for that, or I want to feel more included, more comfortable. Uh, barely manly men like you were scary to me when I was like a skinny dorky guy in school to feel fine and comfortable. That's that's something I want to grow inside. Let's say whatever it might be.

And there are many other things. I'm working on patients and being less exasperated by some people, whatever you're looking, working on know what that is. I think of it as like, I call it the vitamin C. You know, if you have scurvy, iron won't help. You need vitamin C. What are the specific inner resources, inner strengths that are matched to the challenges you have?

And as you know, from hard-miring happiness, I think of challenges in a certain framework related to the evolution of the brain or three basic needs for safety, satisfaction and connection? And what are the strengths that are specifically matched to those particular challenges? A lot of it is just what does your heart long for? Or when you were growing up, what would have made all the difference in the world? That identifies. Okay, now that you know what you're trying to grow, one or two key things, look for ways to step one,

experience it or factors of it, and second, slow down and really take it in. That might take another minute a day. That's the second aspect of my five minute challenge. And then last, if people are real about it, at some point in your day, maybe part of your meditation, maybe when you first wake up or go to sleep, marinate in what I call deep green. The natural setting of our species and mammals in general, it's why

zebras don't get ulcers, you know, Sapolsky's wonderful book on stress. The natural setting when we feel that needs are met enough in the moment is the body settles down to in its equilibrium state in which it's undisturbed and the mind is saturated in terms of our three needs with a broad sense of peacefulness, contentment and love related to safety, satisfaction, connection. Whatever for you feels like a kind of homecoming

to your natural state of sense of your own inner goodness, deliberately take one to three minutes to just marinate in it every day. Just help yourself come home to it, help it land, sink in, stabilize, and establish itself in you. And give it a minute to three every day. That will gradually build up a resilient core

of wellbeing inside you that you can return to increasingly. And that core will gradually build out even with stresses and frazzled and irritation and worry and so forth around the edges. Okay, right there. That five minutes. Most people, you know, will easily spend five minutes a day on their workout or, you know, doom scrolling on Twitter. Sp spend five minutes a day influencing who you are becoming. Right.

So that that's a quick summary and just the first three steps have enrich and absorb here. I like that relate to what I've said so far. And if you want, then you can move into linking to clear out the negative credit. Yeah. I suppose, you know, in the word heal, maybe most people would think about there being an issue which is being made better. And so far, three quarters of it, we've been engendering more of what we want to see in

our lives. We have been finding the particular areas that we may feel deficient in or that we would just like to bring more of into our experience. And we're moving toward that, but everything kind of changes. Oh, we move more into the remediation part when we look at the linking. So talk to me about the neurobiology of that. Oh, definitely. Kind of inevitably talking about it can sound kind of like professorial or didactic.

Cause I'm like a coach or I'm saying, well, you want to ski? This is what these are some things to do, you know, lean into it rather than back, you know, things like that. Be aware of your edges. And when you're doing this, it feels really quite intimate with yourself and kind. You're, I mean, we're hungry. We're, we're big scared monkeys. Life is hard. feels really quite intimate with yourself and kind. You're, I mean, we're hungry. We're big scared monkeys. Life is hard. We're rattled, shit happens.

Most of us have been treated unfairly in different ways, less so if you're kind of more privileged and so forth, but still, shit happens. So you're really standing up for yourself. You're helping yourself. You're being good for yourself. You're helping yourself. You're being good to yourself. You're treating yourself like other people should have treated you. That's right. It's real. We want to take in. Okay. And in the process of that, there's been very little research on the deliberate internalization of beneficial experiences.

There's been a lot of research on the impact of sustained experiences that are beneficial and how they change the brains of humans and especially non-human animals. There's a lot of evidence for this. And one of the things I'm really interested in is retuning the amygdala and the parts of the brain that are biased negatively and then get very sensitized negatively. How can we retrain them over time so that they become reactive to red lights and assholes, but they are on the other hand much more opportunity focused and have more of what's called an approach orientation, which you know is more associated with mental health and that has either a wound or a lack. And the lack part is really important because people are aware of how they were mistreated.

Like the woman at 80 who was bullied or harassed as a kid, that creates wounds. Alongside those wounds, it could well have been, there could also well have been a lack of inclusion in groups, or she was with kids she liked, she may not have had a good friend, maybe her parents were busy and old school and decent, but not very touchy feely. And so there may have been a lack of positive social supplies. We can be just as affected by the lack of the good as the presence of the bad. That's really important when people kind of reflect on themselves. What are they working with? Either way, there's quote unquote negative material inside. All right. So if you know about your own negative material, I really enjoyed listening to use

the metaphor in going through therapy of learning about all kinds of new rooms in the mansion of your being. When you start to know it's in those rooms, then you can start to identify what are the resources inside, the strengths inside that would be a good match for that wound or that lack that would help to fill that lack inside, that hole in your heart maybe, or would soothe and ease and gradually mend that wound inside. So you identify a particular strength. So I'll give an example. Let's suppose that someone, either based on their history or just their temperament is anxious about stuff. Let's say anxious in work environments about sticking their neck out, speaking up,

and even making presentations, very common. Okay. Or being, let's say, vulnerable, speaking from the heart with someone they care about, letting someone know, hey, you know, it's really scary when your kid to go to some house and knock on the door. Will Johnny come play or Susie play? You know, do you like me? It's really scary. Okay. So let's say there's an anxiety there. What's the psychological resource that would be matched to it? Well, one is being able to calm yourself, especially calm your body when you're nervous about something. That's good. Another is a sense that you're strong, that yeah, you're anxious about something or it's

threatening or challenging, but you're strong. You're determined, you're capable, you've got moxie. You're going to get through it. You can deal with it, you know, either one of those so far, right? So in my extended example, sorry about this. Let's say you're going through life and you know that you have anxiety and you know that you value a sense of calming in your body and or a sense of personal strength. So then when you have that positive matched resource like calming or sense of strength and you're feeling it in the present, you could deliberately bring it into contact

with that anxiety. Maybe anxiety going back to your childhood, maybe more like your temperament, and be aware of both of them at the same time. Neurons sit fire together, wire together. So if you keep the positive experience bigger in your mind while you're aware of that negative off to the side and a sense of the positive connecting with the negative going into it. Both of them are present in your awareness at the same time where you're toggling back and forth pretty quickly. Linking is central to therapy, trauma work, paths of healing in general. I'm talking about how to do it on your own very specifically. If the negative material is so powerful like in trauma

that it's gonna hijack you, you're not ready to do linking with it. But if you can do it on your own and regulate yourself while you're doing it, this is top five, top three mental health method I know in terms of its far reaching impact. So that's one in which you start with the matched strength and you deliberately connect it with the negative material

or a few breaths, maybe longer. You can explore it. You can do longer versions of this if you want to. And it's done in longer ways than structured therapies, but you can do it on your own. And it's incredibly powerful. The other way is if you're sucked into the negative, after you be with it for a while, the three main ways to work with your mind are to let

be, let go and let in. So you let be, you be with it, you feel it mindfully, then you move into some kind of release, then what do you want to replace it with? Right? You've released, let's say the anxiety, but you want to replace it with, for example, calm or a sense of being strong or other matched resources. So then what you would do in linking is you would deliberately bring up some resource that's matched to the negative material and being aware of both of them at the same time, keeping the positive bigger. This episode is brought to you by Nomatic.

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can return or exchange anything within 30 days for any reason. So you can buy your new bag, try it for a month. And if you don't like it, I'll just give you your money back and get a 20% discount and see everything that I use and recommend by going to the link in the description below or heading to nomadic.com slash modern wisdom. That's nomadic.com slash modern wisdom. It's interesting to think about that cognitive superposition of holding both the positive and then to sort of add this in without collapsing it down into one, but allowing them both to sort of sit together. And then that's very good.

Yeah, you got it. Yeah, totally. It's really, it's cool. And you got to keep, you ought to be on, you ought to be on your own side to do this. You got to want the positive to win. You start to discover sometimes that there's an inner traitor inside you that is allied with the negative and wants to keep it around maybe because it serves some function for you. So a lot of stuff gets stirred up when you try to do this. It's really useful to be aware of in

yourself. But if you stay with it, you want the strong to prevail, not because you're trying to bypass the negative or suppress it. No, you're being kind to yourself. You're easing it. You're soothing it. You're helping yourself not feel unnecessarily anxious. It's useful to be anxious in proportion to threats. And then it's useful to move past anxiety and deal with the threat without feeling nervous. I've done a ton of hardcore rock climbing in very dangerous situations and most of the time I'm really happy because I feel resourced. I have a rope, I know what I'm doing, I have my buddy, I'm scruffy and determined and I'm going to get up to the top of the darn thing. So just because there's a threat, we don't have to feel anxious

as we cope with it, that's a detail, but an important one. It seems like one of the most, no matter what your outcome goal is here, being able to slow down around experiences seems central. So quickly moving beyond experiences to the litany of new novel things, or the next achievement that you're trying to do is fundamentally like amputating our capacity for embedding happiness in this way. You know, Chris, I appreciate you immensely. You know, I'm just, because I knew I was doing this, I would start watching you and you're so clear and the clarity comes from the inside out. It's just a really a pleasure.

Thank you. You're exactly right. And I reflect on that a little bit as, you know, like a kid, you're not the boss of me. You know, who and what do we let bosses around, including our own habit tendencies to chase the next thing. And as you know, my own background is increasingly kind of Buddhist in which there's a real respect for the intelligence and the Buddha's original drive theory of suffering. We let craving, chasing the next shiny object, you know, drag us away from the present and getting control of that in part by repeatedly internalizing the felt sense of needs met enough in the present to undo the biological machinery of craving, which is based on deficit and needs met enough.

Right. There's a lot in that. But to me, it becomes very profound to do exactly what you're saying, to be able to marinate in the bounty of the present, right? With a sense even of contentment in the present, even as we pursue worthy goals. Yeah. I've been spending a lot of time thinking about conspicuous productivity recently, being obviously busy and the social rewards that you get for that, whether it's internally within a company, whether it's externally with the people around you. Look at how much I'm doing, see how frenetic and how quickly I move.

But if you look at what happens in systems that are very, very tuned up, you remember the ever given that a big tanker that got stuck in the Suez Canal a couple of years ago? That's still paying off the supply chain issues that that caused. It was tens of billions of dollars. I think it was maybe stuck sideways in the Suez Canal for four days, five days, something like that. But the system is tuned up so tight

that there is no tolerance left and the smallest error causes massive, massive repercussions and everything falls apart. And I think about the way that a lot of people, myself too, over tune our lives. We try to overclock our speed run through what we... how many thoughts can I think at once? How much work can I do at once? I'm going to wash the dishes whilst listening to a podcast at two times speed and I'll have my emails open over the far side.

So while the world is getting hot, I'll quickly go and do this thing. And in some ways it's exhilarating to do that. You know, it's, it's, it's exciting. It's rushy. Uh, it's very obvious the ways in which you are moving toward something. But when you actually ask yourself, okay, what, what did I get done today? When you look back, the dishes weren't washing dishes, maybe a bad example, because it's pretty difficult to do it badly, but maybe the dishes weren't

washed thoroughly, you don't remember anything from the podcast and you didn't send any emails, but you kind of looked at them a little bit. So my point being that we can, we can prioritize, we can optimize for trying to do very obvious things that in no way meaningfully move us toward the goals that we have in life, the actual outcome that we're trying to achieve. And much of the time, the thing that we're looking for is right under our nose. Like, why is it that you're trying to do the very next thing? Why is it that you're rushing toward this next set of novelty or this next task that

you can tick off or to achieve the next whatever target it is that you've set yourself? Well, presumably it's because you want to try and achieve an enjoyable emotional state. Like, that's really all there is, just enjoyable emotional states. Yeah. You just, I just want to be in the present moment and feel good about it. Okay. What if by chasing the next shiny new thing, you are denying yourself the very thing that you're trying to achieve by doing that thing. So you're sacrificing the thing that you want for the thing, which is supposed

to get the thing that you say that you thing, which is supposed to get the thing that you say that you want. And, uh, every time I think about it. Trying to put out a fire with gasoline or satisfy your thirst with saltwater. Exactly. Yeah. It's like, um, I can't stop to look at the

sunset whilst I'm driving in the car. I must drive quickly toward the sunset so I can see it, um, like I've must have my eyes down at the steering wheel so I can get toward the sunset. It's like,. Like I must have my eyes down at the steering wheel so I can get toward the sunset. It's like dude it's right fucking there and you know the more that I hear about the importance of slowing down the fact that you do need to something good has happened. Allow it, notice it, allow it to sink into you, build it up, build it up, allow it to be felt in your body. Okay. You cannot do that.

If your next thought is the next thought, if you're moving toward the next action, the next thing that's going to go on. That's correct. And, uh, yeah, I think I'm at the stage and a lot of my friends are now where we're just like, ah, dude, I'm kind of sick of myself. I'm kind of sick of my patterns. I'm like really kind of bored of this, of using that chasing of the dragon, the dopamine thing, uh, because tried it become very

successful at it, but source code fundamentally, it doesn't change that much. It is, uh, you know, an Ouroboros or it's like a, one of those ancient gods that had an unlimited size stomach. And it's like, it can just continue to eat and continue to eat and continue to eat. And there'll never be an amount of stimulation that's enough. So I think that getting in and actually tinkering with the knobs and the dials at the very bottom seems like a much better strategy. Drop the mic.

I can't touch to it on. Yeah. I mean, it really is so true. It's funny, for myself, I thought I would have issues with, in terms of the three main needs, safety, satisfaction, connection. I thought I would have issues with safety. Like I'm kind of anxious by temperament. Or as a lonely, kind of introverted person, I thought I'd have issues with connection. And by issues, I mean having stable experiences of feeling safe enough or connected enough in the present. But no, my issues really have been around contentment, have been around feeling satisfied

enough in the present. Cause I'm very goal directed. I want to accomplish things and I'm hedonistic, you know, on the, any of grand moment, I'm a seven, if that's relevant to you in terms of that system of modeling. So that's been, it's been really startling to appreciate how much automaticity there is in my fairly well-trained brain at this point to look for the next thing to want. It's like endlessly foraging even though my

belly's already full looking for the next new thing to want and it's really quite profound for people to explore can you actually feel like there's enough right now, even as you pursue wholesome goals to feel already content, even as you pursue important ambitions. It's pretty challenging. And probably because it's challenging, it's been really interesting. I've really wanted to do that. And to me, that's the, that's the name of the game to feel content already

enoughness already. You know, I, I have a meditation thing online and I did a talk just on the word already, like the profound wisdom in the word already, you're already safe. You're already enough. You are already enough. You are already enough. And on the basis of that, yeah, accumulate more knowledge, become more skillful, become more able to help more people, good stuff. But to feel already enough is just hard for people. And yet it's really important. You're good enough already. Whoa.

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I was interested in why personal development seemed to assuage my feelings of insufficiency, uh, even though the insufficiency was still there and the fear of not being enough. And I think that it is the, it's the denial of something like the word already or enough, which is if I know that I'm on a trajectory where every day I'm getting a little bit better and today I might not be good enough, but because tomorrow I know I'm going to be a little bit better, maybe tomorrow will be the day when I feel enough.

And you continually push off the promise of when you will be happy or satisfied with yourself or with the place that you've got to, you continually push that off until the next day, it might not be now, but you know, it'll be tomorrow. And I imagine that, uh, maybe people with eating disorders, you know, maybe, uh, girls suffering from anorexia, maybe, well, you know, my body's not right now, but I, if I, if I don't eat today, maybe tomorrow will be the day that I do this, this sort of anticipatory prediction that we have that something that's going to come up will be the moment at which I'm at peace. That was when it was enough. It's not right now, but the trajectory is moving me in the right direction. Even if it's the wrong direction. Even if it's the wrong direction.

So what's the difference? What's it feel like to be motivated by a sense of something missing? Or on the other hand, to be motivated toward something good with already a sense of fullness? It's a big difference. I mean, it's the, it's a difference between running away from something that you fear and running towards something that you want. Um, and even the thing you're running toward that you want is done in the knowledge that you can have it and it'll be great if you get it, but you don't need it and you're enough without it.

Uh, I think, you know, like that. Whatever cognitive superposition thing, these are two very difficult ideas to hold in our mind at the same time, because so much of what we do is driven by. Fear of insufficiency and uncertainty and wishing that we were. It's, it's a really powerful fuel in the beginning, but it's toxic when you use it for too long. That's right. In long-term, pay a big price. I mean, Maslow got to that with this, as you know, hierarchy and so forth. And self-actual, the lower needs are called D needs, deficiency needs, something's missing, there's a lack, but self-actualization is a be need, be in need. There's a fullness already. I think a lot of people in their culture, dare I say as a generalization, maybe a lot of men have a fear that they'll lose their edge. The great ads, I don't know if you saw the beer ads

for Dulcequise, this really manly man, stay thirsty, my friends. That if we don't know if you saw the beer ads for Dulceckis, this like really manly man, stay thirsty, my friends. You know, that if we don't stay thirsty, if we don't stay hungry, then we're going to lose our edge and not pursue. And it's interesting that in early Buddhism, the root of the word for craving is thirst. In the language of early Buddhism, thirst, something's missing. It's a drive state biologically, hypothalamus based. And it's quite something for people to realize that they can shift out of a flawed vehicle that they're familiar with, you know, deficit based motivation into a fullness, a different vehicle that you can still be motivated.

You can still be a top performer. You can still have a work ethic. You can still have standards. You can still achieve based on a sense of fullness already, good enough already, accomplished enough already, content already. And it helps people to realize, I can step out of this rowboat. It's working for me, but it's costly. It's toxic over time. It's got a hole in the bottom. Yeah, in the center of the vehicle that I can increasingly trust over time, you know, as the basis for my motivations going forward. Looking back at the HEAL framework, I know the most recent paper that you put out was

only 2023 or something. So this thing's like hot off the press in academia terms. How much evidence is there of the impact of these strategies on things like personality, like neuroticism or extraversion, wellbeing, health outcomes? What's happened in the evidence-based literature for this? Yeah. There's tremendous evidence for the ways in which beneficial experiences can gradually shift people over time. And there's tremendous evidence for that. There's large evidence for the underlying neurological implementation of that process increasingly. What's happening in the hardware? That's really great.

of that process increasingly. What's happening in the hardware? That's really great. There's been almost no study at all about internal factors in individuals, whether in formal clinical settings or informal life in general. What are the internal factors that lead to greater response to treatment or greater rate of change. It's kind of crazy. And in schools, there's what's called, there's the learning to learn movement that got interested in classroom settings for fifth graders. How do we teach kids to be self-directed learners from the inside out? So there's a growing sense of that in educational settings. But it's crazy that we've had a hundred years of people in the growth business formally, psychotherapy

and counseling and now coaching, who are interested in producing change that have generally operated in a growth 1.0 model in which the person is regarded as a passive recipient of experiences and information in the hopes that something will stick. And for some it does, but we have ignored in any systematic way the agency of the individual in how they are engaging their experiences at the time. I've been talking about how do we engage the experiences we're having at the time in ways that promote positive neuroplastic change. What do we do on the inside out with the experience we're already having? Because we have tremendous influence at the front end of the

learning process, the formation of memory in the broadest sense, emotional somatic memory included. The most important factors in terms of what actually lands is what we do at the front end of the experience we're having at the time. When you say front end, what do you mean? Oh, I mean, while you're experiencing something beneficial, while you're experiencing it, whatever you do in your mind or whatever's being made to happen in your mind by a skillful teacher or therapist or coach, that's going to most affect the impact of that experience, whether it sinks in or not.

The dirty secret is that the delta, the rate of change from session to session in therapy or counseling or other, or rate of change, listen to a podcast. I do a podcast too. It's really humbling. I write books, I teach meditation. What change is actually happening? It's humbling to stare hard at that. And point being, the most powerful factors in change are what people are doing inside

their minds at the time with how they engage the experiences they're having. And yet my whole profession, clinical psychology, broadened out to counseling and coaching, has basically ignored the agency of the person and not systematically certainly taught people how to steepen their own growth curve based on how they're engaging the experiences they're having at the time. That to me is the growth 2.0 model and to, as you can tell, I'm kind of revved up about it. I feel about it, but here's a weird fact.

Forty years ago, really good research on psychotherapy for say anxiety and depression showed that on average there was a moderate effect size on average. Some people got more, some people got less, but the average in numerical terms the way this is done about 0.6, that's moderate. That's legitimate, It's credible. It doesn't work for everybody. Average benefit. Pretty good. 40 years later, new theories, new understanding, new personalities, new charisma. What's the average response to psychotherapy for anxiety or depression? It's the same. There's no trend whatsoever of average improvement. So we've gotten a lot better at helping people have various experiences. We've gotten no better at helping them learn

from them. And so to me, there's a call for action here. So when I tell you candidly, yeah, there's been very little research on one paper and a couple other related papers so far that have to do with teaching people how to deliberately internalize useful experiences, you know, to grow the good that lasts inside. And there's been no research on the underlying neurobiology of that. So to me it's not a critique of what I'm trying to say, it's a plea, you know, for more investigation in this really important area. Yeah, not exactly a glowing review for the field of psychotherapy there that you haven't really been able to make any progress. You know, it would be like

finding some sort of a drug and never developing a better one and saying, well, it's kind of all right-ish, but some. Yeah, survival rates for breast cancer. They're all better today than they were 40 years ago. You know, there's improvements. We want to see improvements in certain areas. And I'm, it's really strange if you think about it that, and you see this in the spiritual traditions as well, certainly the ones I'm familiar with, mindfulness training, Buddhist-y kinds of situations, very sincere teachers, very good at helping people have experiences. And sometimes in a growth 1.0 model, those different settings or different kinds of trainings engender certain experiences in people that tend to have more impact like

being in groups of others or having intense experiences. Like Tony Robbins is a master at himself engendering states and factors that promote emotional learning in people. Phenomenal. And still, and this is no critique of him. I did the firework with him like 30 years ago. I've made it through. It was cool stuff. But he's not teaching people on the inside out, how to deliberately internalize the experiences they're having at the time, so that they really land in some kind of system. Wow, so that would be, if Tony was doing the E and the A, you might see even greater responses,

even bigger reactions. That's right. And that of course would be how to do more research on it, where you take two standard interventions and you add, you know, these approaches of deliberate internalization to one and hopefully you see greater impact and so on. But the broad point I would make about the fields is that I don't think there's much more upside to be had in getting better at fostering shiny experiences for people. Where the real upside is investigating how does learning actually happen in the broadest sense and how can we help it happen well. Just getting back into the more negative side of experiences, what is happening in the brain when we can't stop ruminating about some upsetting scenario or memory or fear that we have?

There's tremendous activation in the default mode network. So briefly, and you're familiar with this, there are different networks in the brain. There are probably three major networks that are relevant, kind of sort of right here. One is when we're, you know, the salience network is tracking what matters, very amygdala based. And then when we identify what matters, like in survival situations back in the jungle, we see the snake, you know, we've detected the snake. Then the second network, task network gets engaged, better do something about the snake, jump back or prevent snakes

or in the future go a different trail, fine. And then when things settle down, the brain defaults to a third network, which is where we go when we're kind of just spacing out or daydreaming or ruminating. And that network is kind of in the midline toward the rear. So when people are ruminating, there's activity there. I think of it as the simulator, the ruminator, you know, very involved with what's called mental time travel, imagining the future,

reflecting on the past. So when people are stuck, there's a lot of activity there. And a lot of that activity, we haven't talked about this yet, it's super cool, is self-referential. Very me, myself and I. And since neurons that fire together, wire together, when people are in the default network and the ruminator, they're reinforcing what they're ruminating about

and sensitizing their brain to what's negative along the way. So one of the, for me, takeaways from what I've really learned over the last 30 years about the brain is to get out of the ruminator as fast as I can. Feel the feelings. This is not about avoiding feelings, but feel them mindfully in a framework of spacious awareness. So you're not so glued to that angry case about other people or that resentment,

take poison and wait for others to die as they say, resentment. When you do that, you're reinforcing it. But if you're witnessing it more and naming it to yourself, mindfully, you actually, um, reduce reinforcement. What are some of the ways to break that circuit? You know, sometimes people get stuck in a vicious cycle. Uh, now they don't even have the culpable deniability. They don't know it's further increasing their sensitization to negative experiences in future, which may actually make them more fearful of the experience. Make them more freaked out.

Yeah. Well, look, you've given the poison, now it's time to give the tonic. That's right. I can tell you there's several things that are really cool. Let's get aggressive with the intervention. Someone's been ruminating for a long time. There's something they're worried about. What are some of the ways they can break that circuit? Yeah. Okay. So one is to take action. Take action. And very often people ruminate to avoid

certain experiences, particularly experiences related to taking action. So if you're ruminating about a meeting with your boss or you're ruminating about a workplace presentation or you're ruminating about a mistake you made, whatever, what's appropriate action related to what you're ruminating about? Now that's kind of tough minded. I've been a therapist a million years. I'm I think more compassionate, but I'm kind of tougher. You know, there's no replacement for action. Action binds anxiety and action breaks people out of the rumination cycle. No, and it satisfies you. Hey, you took the action.

You could. I mean, right there know that you did what you could, and then you have to work on becoming at peace with what you can't control, but you did what you could control. That's really important. One, two, uh, there are a couple of fantastic hacks. One is to do what's called interoception. Tune into the internal sensations of your body, like the sensation of the air coming in as you inhale and flowing out as you exhale, chest rising and falling. That engages a part of the brain called the insula and

it acts like a circuit breaker. When people are tuning into interoception, they're in the present and that reduces activity in the default mode network, which tends to be very often, like I said, focused on the future of the past. That's, that's really a very, very powerful hack right there. Third thing people can do is tilt towards some kind of intensely positive experience. You know, whatever it is that's energizing for you, jump up and down, eat something good, look out the window, watch a cat video on YouTube. There is a place for literally snapping out of it.

You wanna reduce the reinforcement of the rumination cycle. And then I'll say one more hack that's really great is one of my favorites, it's so cool. Get a sense of anything as a whole. You can get a sense of the sensations of breathing in your chest as a whole, rather than in one little part, or your body as a whole,

or get a sense of the volume of your room as a whole, or raise your gaze to the horizon visually, or kind of deliberate, yeah, I would just say that. When you do that, when you get a sense of things as a whole, two good things happen. One is that you start to engage for most people, the right hemisphere of the brain, which does holistic, a stalled processing.

That's why it does a lot of visual, spatial reasoning, distinct from the sequential step-by-step specialization of the left hemisphere, which is why it's specialized for language because language is sequential. Much rumination is saturated with inner speech, inner language, talking to yourself or ideating. But when you get a sense of things as a whole, you're immediately drawing on that right hemisphere of your brain, which reduces rumination activity. The other thing that happens, including when you especially lift your visual gaze to the

horizon or above, you shift out of what is called an egocentric frame of perceptual processing into an allocentric frame. There's a lot of science about this and a large fraction of the brain is dedicated to visual processing, not just the occipital cortex, but other areas as well. So when you fiddle with visual processing, you're affecting your brain. A lot of real estate is getting affected. So you can just notice it. In evolution, it makes sense.

When things are close to you, when your gaze looks down to what's within a meter or two, that's where friend and foe live typically. Going to eat me or can I eat it? Self referential processing increases. What saturates rumination is self, me, right? The me that it's happening to or could happen to or did happen to, or should have done a better job.

Me, me, me, me, me, me. Okay. On the other hand, and you can just observe this, when you start getting a sense of things as a whole, and especially when you lift your gaze out to the bigger picture, you shift into a more impersonal frame of reference. You're not privileging your perspective.

You're taking a sense of things as a whole in which you're certainly a part of that whole, but there's a lot more going on in that whole. The sense of self immediately starts reducing. And as the sense of self starts reducing, just like as the sense of inner language is reduced, rumination starts to reduce as well. So good. So let's say that someone's acquired negative learning across life. They've just found

this insight now, fantastic, but they think that's quite a few decades of accumulating thought patterns in this way of sensitizing myself. How possible is it to get rid of those negative learnings? Is it possible that once those pathways are laid down that we can actually prune them or is it simply a case of us having to create other patterns? Are these bro-science of myelin sheaths never getting, being gotten rid of? I don't know. Give me the truth.

Oh, that's really great. Never bet against the human heart. That's kind of my bottom line. And, you know, there's a lot to this. So, first off in terms of rumination, I want to say one more thing. One of the reasons people ruminate is a defense against feeling certain things. And the feelings keep coming up because they're incompletely experienced. So one thing a person could do to help themselves, if they keep ruminating around, let's say a loss

or a regret, or there's something they have remorse about, it's to really open up to that feeling and to resource themselves so they can tolerate it and are not overwhelmed by it. But once you're able to feel it, if only for a few minutes in a row, really let yourself feel it. And as you feel it, help it to flow, blow it in effect. That's really a crucial thing. The hacks I've mentioned are more situational.

Taking action on the things that you ruminate about, including reaching out to someone you've harmed and really apologize to them, or write a letter that they'll never read because they're action on the things that you ruminate about, including reaching out to someone you've harmed and really apologize to them or write a letter that they'll never read because they're dead or they'll never open your mail, but you at least wrote the letter and shared it with people. Take the actions that you can as well as feel the feelings fully and help them out the door. In the last few years, I've been just stunned by the amount of mistakes that I've made in my life that have resurfaced for me to consider.

It's not like people brought them to me. It's just my mind has gotten quiet enough that that stuff in some of those rooms, in the mansion of the mind, has started to open their doors on their own and push their way into the living room. Hello, Rick. You really fucked up there. How do you feel about it now? And I've had to really come to terms with it,

but the key to that is to let it flow. So that's a deep aspect to it. And then your other question, there's tremendous evidence that people can really change over time. They really can, as you talk about, go into those different rooms and gradually clear them out. You know, they really can. And so what are the factors that help people do that?

One is to, just like anything, is to bring effort to it. How much time are you spending really productively on releasing old pain and replacing it with something beneficial, including things like kindness toward yourself and compassion for yourself and respect. I've been with people men, a lot of whom are men, in business settings and also in wilderness settings who are really fierce, really tough, really prepared to deal with a lot of challenge who are completely undone at the prospect of being at all emotionally vulnerable with another person. Like that is staggeringly hard for them.

You know, they're, I think of interpersonal cowardice as a certain particular kind of cowardice. I'm not trying to shame it. I'm just sort of naming it. We're scared, right? Admire yourself, respect yourself for doing that kind of noble work. So that's one factor.

How much effort do you bring to it? Second, how skillful are you? Are you listening to, you know, your podcast, which is an incredibly dense repository of wisdom about how to change for the better over time? You know, being skillful. And do you reach out to experts about it? It's so interesting. People understand they have to fix their faucet. You need an expert, let's say, somebody who knows how to do it. It's so interesting. People understand they have to fix their faucet. You need an expert, let's say, someone who knows how to do it. Maybe you already know how to do it, but if you don't know how to do it, you want to get someone who knows how to do it. Well, if you want to fix the leaking faucets, you know, and

they're spewing that are dripping crud in your mind, talk to an expert. It's best you can, given the expenses involved, do the best you can there. I think that's also important. And then there's another thing which is in wisdom traditions, it's considered that the path and the cart of healing, growing and awakening. I think of those three, healing, growing, awakening. It's like a cart with two wheels. They're two tracks. And one is the track that we've been entirely focused on, which is developmental change over time,

which means you've got to be changing your brain over time. But the second track is true nature already. What's always already, that word again, already true, underneath it all, of who you really are and can you get in touch with that? Can you believe in it? Can you use it as a refuge that you can return to so that the two tracks support each other. A phrase, gradual cultivation, sudden awakening, gradual cultivation. It's a progressive process.

And so for people to really, really change over time, I think what's really helpful is like I said, effort as in any domain and skillfulness as in any domain and along the way as that change is happening, see if you can get increasingly in touch with your own fundamental good heartedness, you know, your own innate goodness, the innate wakefulness, biologically even without getting new agey or you know, transcendental about it. Just for some reason, biologically, we evolve a level of being inside us under kind of underneath personality and gender socialization and history and that is un-stainable, unbreakable.

We didn't make it. We can't break it. It's there. And we can gradually get in touch with it, especially as your mind gets quieter, you can, you can recognize it increasingly in yourself and get in rest in it, you know, have one of your, one of your wheels in your wagon of healing, growing and awakening, you know, stay in touch with that track along while doing the work developmentally. Rick, you're so great. I can't believe I had to wait six years to speak to you again.

You're really kind. Thank you. Dude, I adore this intersection, the way that you're able to weave between the hard neuroscience, neurobiology stuff, the sort of peaceful, Dharmic side. It's so great. We need to run this back. Let's do another episode at some point this summer. I've got so much more to talk to you about.

I'd love to. Where should people go? Do you want to keep up to date with all of the things that you do and put out and have created, where do you want to send them? Oh, very briefly, just Google my name or go to rickh-N dot net. And most of what I do is freely offered. We have stuff for sale for people who can afford it. It's reasonably priced, blah, blah, but it's kind of the Robin Hood principle, frankly, where a lot of our aim is to make things available for free, you know, for people around the world. So I would say that also I got a shout out.

You asked about our son Forrest, who's a superstar and the podcast being well. He's really driven that and more and more he's creating his own content. So people could check out that podcast too. Heck yeah. Shout out Forrest. Rick, I really do appreciate you. I think you're great. And I can't wait to run this back again.

Uh, I promise it won't be six years. Maybe it won't even be six months. Oh, anytime. Really? Well, you take good care of yourself, Chris. And I hope my wish for you in part is you, you too can be in touch with really what a good guy you are. Thank you. I appreciate that. Until next time. When I first started doing personal growth, I really wanted to read the best books, the most impactful ones, the most entertaining ones, the ones that were

the easiest to read and the most dense and interesting, but there wasn't a list of them. So I scoured and scoured and scoured and then gave up and just started reading on my own. And then I made a list of 100 of the best books that I've ever found. And you can get that for free right now. So if you want to spend more time around great books that aren't going to completely kill your memory and your attention, just trying to get through a single page, go to chriswillx.com slash books to get my list completely free of 100 books you should read before you die.

That's chriswillx.com slash books.