Hardwiring happiness | Dr. Rick Hanson | TEDxMarin

Hardwiring Happiness : The Hidden Power of Everyday Experiences on the Modern Brain

How to overcome the Brain's Negativity Bias

Rick Hanson is a neuropsychologist and the author of Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence, best-selling author of Buddha's Brain, 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.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx

Wow.

So what I want to do here, if I could,

is share with you a very simple,
yet powerful method,

grounded in neuroscience,

for turning passing experiences
into lasting structure, useful structure,

inside our brain.

In other words, turning experiences
into the happiness, or the resilience,

or the other inner strengths
that we really want inside ourselves.

I sort of stumbled on this method
when I was in college,

but to explain the context,
I have to take you back a little before,

into my own up-and-down childhood.

So, I grew up in a loving home -
good parents, intact family -

but I was very, very young
going through school -

I have a late birthday
and I skipped a grade.

And that combined with my kind of shy
and seriously dorky temperament -

you know, skinny, glasses,
picked last for baseball, the whole thing.

Well, what it lead to

were lots of experiences of being left out
or put down by the other kids in school.

Now, what happened to me was very small

compared to, unfortunately,
what happens to many, many other people,

but we all have normal needs
to feel cared for, to feel cared about.

We're the most profoundly
social species on the planet.

You know, as we evolved in the Serengeti,
exile was a death sentence.

Causes have effects.

And if we don't get the supplies
that we need, bit by bit,

it's kind of like
we're living on a thin soup.

You can survive, you can make it,

but there's a hollowness,
an emptiness inside.

In my own case - hopefully
this will work; yes -

I ended up with lots of bad thoughts
and feelings inside of me as a result.

Then I went off to college,

and I began to notice something
really powerful and interesting.

You know, some small,
good thing would happen.

You know, a girl would
smile at me in the elevator,

some guy would throw me the football
at intramural football and say,

"Good catch, Hanson,"
that was really good.

Or guys would invite me
to go out for pizza -

you know, basic stuff of everyday life.

And then I would
have an experience, right?

I would feel a little included,
or a little wanted, a little appreciated.

Then the question is,
what would I do with that experience.

If I dealt with it like I usually did,
which was to kind of ignore it,

you know, let it pass along,
I kept feeling lonely and inadequate.

But I began to notice
that if I did something different,

if I stayed with it
a dozen or so seconds in a row,

it felt like something
was gradually coming into me

that was actually good.

And I began feeling better
and better and better,

and more confident.

Any single time I did this
wasn't a mind-blowing moment -

I had a few of those
through other means - but ...

(Laughter)

the good things really did add up
over time for me, definitely.

And now, years later, many years later,
as a neuropsychologist,

I began to understand
what I was actually doing.

I wasn't just changing my mind,
I was actually changing my brain.

That's because,
as the neuroscientists say,

"Neurons that fire together,
wire together."

Passing mental states
become lasting neural traits.

Bit by bit, I was actually
weaving these resources

into the fabric of my brain
and therefore my life.

There are many examples of the ways

in which mental activity
can change brain structure.

For example, taxicab drivers in London
at the end of their training

have a thicker brain
in a key part called the hippocampus

that does visual-spatial memory.

In a different kind of example,

I don't know if anybody in here
experiences stress, right? Occasionally.

Well, if we have the experience of stress,

that releases cortisol in the body,
it goes up into the brain.

Cortisol gradually stimulates
the alarm bell of the brain, the amygdala,

so it rings more loudly and more quickly,

and cortisol weakens, it actually
kills neurons in the hippocampus,

which besides doing visual-spatial memory,

calms down the amygdala
and calms down stress altogether.

So this mental experience of stress,

especially if it's chronic
and moderate to severe,

gradually changes
the structure of the brain,

so we become progressively
more sensitive to stress.

The mind can change the brain
to change the mind.

Knowing this is really valuable
because the inner strengths -

to go back to the beginning
of my story here -

the inner strengths that we all want:
happiness, positive emotion,

determination, feeling love, confidence,
the virtues, the executive functions,

those are all built out of the brain.

The question is how to actually
get them into the brain.

The interesting thing

is that most of the wholesome
qualities of mind and heart

that help us cope with life,
including coping with hard things,

and have a lot inside ourselves
to give to other people,

most of those inner strengths

are built from positive experiences
of those strengths.

If you want to feel
more confident, for example,

have more experiences
of accomplishment or coping.

If you want to have a more loving heart,

practice more moments
of compassion or kindness for others.

The problem is that to get
these experiences into our brain,

we have to overcome
the brain's hard-wired negativity bias.

This negativity bias means

that the brain is very good
at learning from bad experiences

but bad at learning from good ones.

In other words, good experiences
kind of bounce off the brain

unless we do a little thing

that I'm going to
tell you about in a moment;

meanwhile, bad experiences sink right in.

The reason for the negativity bias

is that our ancestors had to pay
a lot of attention to bad news.

Because if they survived it,
they had to remember it forever, right?

Once burned, twice shy.

These days we have
ordinary experiences of this -

think about a relationship you're in
with someone you live with, work with,

sleep with, whatever.

You know, let's say ten things
happen in a day with that person.

Five of them are positive,
four are neutral, one is negative.

Which is the one we tend
to think about as we go to sleep?

That's why a lot of studies show
that a good long-term relationship

typically needs
at least a five-to-one ratio

of positive to negative interactions.

That's a cautionary tale, right?

(Laughter)

Alright, so that's the negativity bias.

It creates a fundamental
bottleneck in the brain

that creates a weakness
in both informal efforts

and formal efforts to grow, to heal,
to train ourselves in different ways.

Whether you're a psychologist like me
or a meditation teacher like me,

or a corporate trainer,
or a coach, a parent -

I'm also a parent, with my wife -

or you're trying to help people
in one way or another,

we tend to be very good
at "activating" positive mental states,

but are we very good at helping people
install them in the brain?

I don't think so.

There's been this longstanding assumption

that if we just get a good thing going,
somehow it will sink in.

What can we do?

We can learn to take in the good,

to pop open this bottleneck in the brain,

and gradually weave good experiences
into the fabric of our brain and our life.

So I thought we could actually
do it here right now -

something experiential.

It is Marin county,

(Laughter)

we could go for it.

We'll just try it right now.

It's a little weird,
a little artificial - why not?

Just go for it.

So I'll take you through this
kind of informally,

then I'll explain what we just did.

So if you could, bring to mind someone
that you know cares about you.

It could be a pet,
it could be a group of people,

it could be a person in your life,
in your past, doesn't really matter.

What you're trying to do
is have a good experience,

a simple good experience
of feeling cared about.

You're trying to help the idea
of this person, or the image, or a memory

become a feeling.

Okay, want to try it?

And then once you get it going -

you're moving out of
concept to experience -

stay with it.

It's kind of a critical
mass of time, a threshold.

Things have to last
long enough in our experience

to transfer from short-term memory buffers
to long-term storage,

including emotional learning.

And meanwhile, you could sense
that this experience is going into you,

you're absorbing it.

It's sinking into you, feeling loved,

as you sink into it.

A simple moment -

10, 20 seconds usually
won't change our life.

But bit by bit, it can really make
an enormous difference.

I'd like to tell you the little steps
of taking in the good,

they're very simple - I even have a clever
acronym that you can use to remember them.

Our daughter thought
of the last word in the acronym -

very important,
so I want to give her credit.

So, in the first step,
have a good experience.

We've got to activate it,
we've got to get it going.

The brain is like an old-school
cassette recorder.

It records the music by playing it -
we have to have an experience.

In the second step, enrich the experience.

Help install this activated mental state
into your brain as a neural trait.

You know, let it last,
help it grow in your body,

help it become increasingly intense,

give yourself over to it.

And in the third step
of taking in the good,

absorb it.

Sense an intent
that it's sinking into you.

This will prime memory systems.

This will sensitize them
so they'll be more efficient

at encoding the experience
into neural structure.

And then, if you want to,
the optional step,

is to link the positive experience
with something negative.

You've got to be
a little careful about this

because you don't want
to be hijacked by the negative,

but if you can stay strong
with the positive,

it will gradually
associate with the negative -

"neurons that fire together,
wire together" -

and it will go into the negative
to soothe it, ease it,

even gradually replace it.

And you can use this step
of taking in the good,

where you're linking
positive and negative,

for yourselves, or for children,
or for clients, students

or others you care about,

you can use this method
to heal old pain or neglect,

whether in adulthood or childhood,

even reaching down
into young parts of yourself.

To kind of sum it up here,

we have four steps
that become an acronym: HEAL.

It's an easy way to remember it.

Have it.

Enrich the experience
to begin installing it in your brain

once it's activated in your mind.

Absorb it,

and, if you like, link it
so it really becomes a part of you.

Now, this may seem a little complicated,

we all know how to take in the good,

we all know how to help
some good life lesson land,

some good experience with other people.

We know how to let these things land.

In a nutshell, this whole thing
boils down to - all my verbiage here -

to four words:

Have it and enjoy it.

Alright? Especially enjoy it
so it becomes a part of you.

This is not about covering over
negative truths, right?

Paradoxically, the more
we take in the good,

we're more able to see the bad
and do something about it.

In fact, this is about taking control
of the brain's stone age bias

in the 21st century to excessively focus
on the bad and over-worry about it.

Any single time we do it
isn't going to change our life.

But the gradual accumulation,

both in the flow of our day
and at special times if we want to,

like at meals, or at nighttime before bed,
or after meditating or a workout,

we can gradually
build this up inside ourselves.

You know, I think of it
as the law of little things, right?

It's usually lots of little bad things
that take us to a bad place.

And it's lots of little good things
that take us to a better one.

There's this saying they have in Tibet -
I think about it often.

They say, "If you take care
of the minutes,

the years will take care of themselves."

I find that so helpful, isn't it?

What's the most important
minute in your life?

It's the next one.

Can't do anything about the past.

A few minutes in the future,
we start losing a lot of influence.

But the next minute
is a phenomenal opportunity for us.

Like me back in college,
or any one of us today,

or over the course of this evening,

what will we do with the most
important minute in our life?

And especially,
what will we do with the good

that's authentically
available to us in it?

Will we waste it?

Or will we, a few times
a day, or even more,

actually take it into ourselves?

For me, there's a Buddhist saying

that really speaks
to the heart of the opportunity

in the most important minute of our life.

It goes like this:

Do not think lightly of good,
saying, it will not come to me.

Drop by drop is the water pot filled.

Likewise, the wise one,
gathering it little by little,

fills oneself with good.

So, may you, and I,
and all beings everywhere,

little by little,
fill ourselves with good.

So, thank you.

(Applause)