#128: Growing Into Yourself with Dr. Rick Hanson

Welcome to The Conscious Pivot Podcast with international speaker, business mentor, bestselling author of Pivot, and your host, Adam Markel. The Conscious Pivot shares the stories and wisdom of people who have successfully reinvented some area of their business and personal life. You'll gain powerful insights into how you can fully embrace new opportunities, increase your performance, and master the art and science of innovation and resilience. So please join Adam as he guides you on your conscious pivot.

Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of the Conscious Pivot podcast. I'm your host, Adam Markel, and as I sit here today, I'm again just filled with gratitude. I love the fact that I've got a guest that I will call simpatico, somebody I've just met, so he's brand new in my world, and you'll get to meet him in just a second. I'll introduce him and read a little bit more about his formal background and all of that. But in the moment, I was first introduced to that word simpatico, which is Italian, and I don't think there's a real clear definition of what it means. It's just sort of a kinship, I suppose, a feeling that you have something in common with somebody else. And that feels great when you meet people like that. You can just— the energy feels right and you know there's going to be sort of a fun and interesting interaction between you. From this old Evil and Law book, and it's— I'm throwing down now to my roots as an English major way back before I went to law school and stuff like that. So simpatico is the word to launch our podcast today. I've got a great guest. His name is Dr. Rick Hanson. He's a PhD. He's a psychologist, senior fellow of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley, and New York Times bestselling author, which is no joke. Thank you. Having had a couple of books and hit some lists and things like that, that is no joke to get on that list as well. His online Foundations of Well-Being program helps people to use positive neuroplasticity to grow inner— their key inner strengths like resilience, something that we've been talking a lot about lately. It's in fact what I'm hired more often these days to speak to corporations. It's on the topic of resilience. We'll have some conversation about that. So resilience, self-worth, compassion, and anyone with a financial need can do it for free, which I think is terrific that it's not— there's no barrier of admission based on money. Dr. Hanson has spent decades helping people turn everyday experiences into lasting happiness, love, and inner peace hardwired into the brain. So we'll get into that as well. First of all, welcome. Thank you. Rick, I'm gonna— I already asked Dr. Hansen if I could call him Rick. He said, absolutely, what are you kidding me? What am I gonna call you, Mr. Markel? I said, nope, nope, you can't call me Mr. Markel. You'd have to say Mr. Markel. In any event, Rick, welcome to the show.

Great to have you. Adam, Mr. Adam, it's a pleasure to be here.

Whenever we've been to the islands, and my wife, 30, and I, Randy and I, 30 years ago this summer will be married, we honeymooned in Jamaica. There's something really beautiful about being in certain places of the world, in areas of Asia and often in the islands where you are Mr. followed by your first name. And it's so endearing. I didn't know quite when I was 20-some years, 23, 24 years old, had a sort of— didn't feel— because I didn't grow up in that environment of Mr. Adam. But I've come to love that. It's respectful and yet it's personal. Yeah.

Yeah.

You know, your surname is a little more formal. Your first name is obviously more casual, but the Mr. kind of creates a harmony between those 2 things. I never intended to go off on that little tangent to start the show. What is not written in this bio that includes a lot of what I suspect is many, many years of work and determination and discipline? What's not written in that bio that you would love for people to know about you?

Oh, man. Well, the last little part you added there that I would love people to know about, I mean, You know, that's kind of the thing. Well, let's see. I have a longtime rock climbing background, wilderness, done a lot of intense things, done a lot of stuff in business. And that background and also growing up really pretty miserable and unhappy for a lot of reasons, that has led me to have an orientation to this topic area of growing inner resources, inner strengths. It's really hardheaded and kind of clear-eyed about how life is challenging and tough. And cavalry is often not coming. Before we began this formal interview or conversation, we were talking about our crazy political situation right now, which is really alarming in a very, very visceral kind of way to many, many people, you and me included, clearly. And so, given that the cavalry doesn't seem to be coming, given that traditional institutions are breaking down, given that for various reasons, there's a Deadlock at the leadership level in this country, you're more and more clear we're on our own. And what do you do? So you got to grow strengths inside. So while I'm a longtime therapist, and that can seem really soft and whooshy and kind of airy-fairy and like a luxury, really I think of it in a very tough-minded kind of way.

Resilience. It's the unsung hero in every success story that you will ever hear about. And in times of massive change and disruption, the kind of rapid change that we're all experiencing as leaders, as business owners, as entrepreneurs, we have to learn how to not only increase our own resilience, but that of our teams. So right now we have a powerful opportunity for you to find out just how resilient you are. Some years ago, my team and I created the resilience assessment that more than 5,000 business leaders across the globe have taken.

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And what we're really about, including what you're doing, In your show is helping people grow strengths inside. And so, I'd say that's the orientation I bring to this, a kind of tough-minded, clear-eyed view of the difficulties of life and the importance for self-reliance that informs how I look at this. And what I've done in the last, I'd say, 20 years or so has been to really engage the leading edge of neuroscience, the fantastic breakthroughs and developments just in the last couple of decades. and think about how to use that very geeky stuff, very cool stuff, but actually how to use it practically to turbocharge a person's growth process as they go through their day and their life to really super steepen their growth curve, their healing curve, their learning curve, their development curve in a way that makes people in charge of that process themselves from the inside out, informed by modern neuroscience. Basically, how do you help the brain change for the better? As much as realistically possible every day. And that's, I'd say, my specialty. And I'm really interested in it. I also have a longtime background in meditation. I got interested in meditating in 1974, which takes me back, and it's been a while. And so for me, a lot of what I do is right at the center of 3 circles. If you think about it, the intersection of brain science, clinical psychology, and contemplative practice, contemplative wisdom. mindfulness practice. So you think of the center of those 3 circles where they intersect with each other. It's a sweet spot for a lot of skillful means that we can use to help ourselves and to help other people.

You know what? If you could, Rick, just repeat what those 3 circles are. I know people are going to be taking notes. Our community is pretty avid on the side of learning, continued learning. And there's that little Venn area.

Yeah, that's right. The intersection of the 3 circles. So circle number 1, your body. What's going on in the body, the physical biological body, especially the 3 pounds of tofu-like tissue inside the coconut between your ears, which has been described as the enchanted loom continually weaving the tapestry of experience. Really an awesome metaphor.

Yeah. Do you recall who said that? I'm interested.

Yeah. A guy named Charles Sherrington. Beautiful. Check him out on Wikipedia. neuroscientist, The Enchanted Bloom.

Very cool.

Second, I have a longstanding background in psychology, clinical psychology, human potential. So psychology, mainly Western study of the mind, deeply rooted in Freud, modern researchers in psychology, clinical psychology, that territory. So that's the second circle. But then the third circle is what could be called contemplative practice around the world in all the great traditions— Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, the shamanic indigenous cultures have a contemplative wing. It's really important to acknowledge increasingly now a very secular approach to contemplative practice with the mindfulness movement. That territory, these people, especially those who are most developed, are sometimes described as the Olympic athletes of mental training. These are people with tens of thousands of hours of lifetime practice of sitting quietly and directly observing their mind with, over time, tremendous concentration and a laser-like granularity of focus, really, really penetrating into what's happening in the mind on a timescale of multiple events per second. And those folks have worked hard and they have a lot of wisdom. So that's the contemplative tradition. The one I know best is Buddhism, especially the original teachings of the Buddha. It's the most stripped down. It's not religious, basically. It's very psychological. It's very direct as an inquiry into your own immediate experience. So that's the third circle. So if you imagine the intersection, then brain science, psychology, and contemplative practice, right at the center of those 3 circles is a lot of wonderful stuff. I call it applied neurodharma.

That's what I was just about to ask you is what's the shaded area? So, Applied Neurodharma.

Yeah, that's never going to be a book title or a podcast or anything. It's never going to get me on Oprah, but—

Good. I'm glad you didn't want to bring anything esoteric into the space. I appreciate that.

And it's applied. That's the part about it.

Well, that's the key, right? The concept that knowledge is power is BS because it's— you can acquire all the knowledge you want in the world and if it's just nothing but head knowledge, What good does it actually do for you, right?

Yeah, right.

Applied, that's the key. And so, hmm, and the neurodharma, I'm fascinated about that, but we'll put that aside for just a second. I want to dig in. So there's a few things I want— I'm tracking as loops I want to open, and perhaps we get to close them a little bit on the show too. So one is psychedelics, and another is, uh, nootropics, and another has to do with The ability to change. So, when you talk about neuroplasticity, we're not talking about neuro-rigidity. We're talking— so, neuro-rigidity to me would be the old expression that an old dog can't learn new tricks. And there's a lot of people out there who truly do believe that, and there's probably a fair amount of evidence to suggest that for most folks, when those grooves in the record or our programming from whether it started with our first trauma of 5 years old or what we learned from our parents and our teachers growing up, That those grooves are deep enough that for a lot of people, making a change, truly changing something in their life like their habits, is actually quite challenging. But I would challenge the notion only through my own experience and having worked with a lot of people that people can change. But again, you're much more the expert in this area than I am, so I do want to dive into that. I want to say that I just did a podcast the other day about my experience in Costa Rica recently where I partook in, I was there to facilitate, so I was brought down there to share some information with some folks, which was great. It had a beautiful retreat experience fully paid for. It's one of the great things about being a public speaker is, you know, there's some really wonderful things you get to, the places you get to see and all that kind of thing. And I was invited to participate in some ceremonies with shaman that facilitated ayahuasca journeys, plant medicine, and I did that for 3 consecutive evenings. So in any event, and I've been also interested in the nootropics topic as well, taking some supplements in the past about that too. So where would you like to dive in in those categories? Can the brain— is the brain actually capable of changing? And then is there some relationship to some of these ancient contemplative practices, including the ceremonies that are often guided by plant medicine? Mm-hmm. And the kind of modern-day psychedelic Or maybe it's not even a psychedelic, but this thing called nootropics where people are actively putting supplements into their body to increase, I guess, plasticity of their brain and maybe other functions of the brain.

Yeah, it's a great topic territory right off the top, Adam. I'm excited about these loops that you're opening up here. Well, let me just start with the brain. Let's ground it here and then we can launch. Right. So brain. Basically, right now, people can kind of imagine what's inside their head, literally. It's about 200 billion cells, ballpark, and about half are neurons, half are support cells. Typical neuron is connected to several thousand other neurons. Well, if you do the math, that means inside our head right now, we have a network with several hundred trillion little microprocessors. Each one of the connections, the synapses between neurons, is like a little microprocessor, and it's handling information. There are other mechanisms that represent and process information as well, so you can immediately get what an extraordinary information processing device, in effect, we have inside our head, which is then networked into the nervous system that runs throughout the body, which is then networked into other information processing systems like the immune system and other kinds of things that are working together. Yeah. Now, just talking only about the brain, a typical neuron is firing 5 to 50 times a second. Millions, even billions of neurons are firing synchronously with each other many times a second, which produces the brainwaves that EEGs detect. This organ is only about 2 to 3% of body weight, but it uses 20 to 25% of the metabolic supplies in the blood. The oxygen, the sugars, and so forth. It's an incredibly metabolically expensive organ and a vulnerable one. So why would we evolve it? It's to enable the mind. The nervous system, especially its headquarters, the brain, is the basis for our experience moment after moment after moment after moment. And when I use the word mind, I don't mean it in some kind of esoteric sense. I mean literally hearing, seeing, tasting, thinking, remembering. Right. Planning, wanting, loving, hating, enjoying suffering. All of that moment to moment to moment to moment is being made by physical processes. Now, there may also be supernatural and transcendental factors at work. I'm personally a transcendentalist. I think there's more going on than we know about, but minimally most, if not entirely everything, That's the basis for our experiences moment by moment by moment is happening basically between our ears. That's the final pathway of the causes that make each moment of experience. So that's a way to really get what's going on right now as you listen to this conversation, right now as you and I, Adam, see each other on the screen here. The brain is making our experience moment by moment. So then the question becomes, in terms of, Applied, right, what we really care about, how to nudge that brain-based process in a good direction, how to nudge it away from addiction and nudge it away from traumatic memories and limitations, nudge it away from habit patterns of getting into wrangles with other people or ruminating about resentments or self-criticism, how to move it in a positive direction, including the upper reaches of human potential, which interests me enormously. Both the kind of more conventional range of self-actualization and then even going all the way, as a number of people clearly have in this life, all the way to full awakening. So how do we actually do that? How do we change the brain for the better? That's your question here. And there are literally dozens of little tiny mechanisms inside the brain that produce the physical changes That are the basis for experiential changes, mental changes. For example, there's a classic saying, neurons that fire together wire together. So literally new connections form. That's one mechanism. Another mechanism is existing connections get sort of energized or de-energized. That's another mechanism of change. Ebbs and flows of neurotransmitters like dopamine, serotonin, that's another mechanism of change. There are many, many mechanisms of what's called experience-dependent neuroplasticity. But the takeaway, and I'll finish on this point, give you a chance to jump in here in my rant, is that the process of self-directed neuroplasticity, that's a mouthful, the process of self-directed brain change, helping yourself change for the better, growing the good inside yourself, including very heartfelt things like love or compassion or self-compassion. Growing that inside yourself is a very simple 2-step process, but you must do both steps. First step, you must experience what you want to grow. So either through— you're just already feeling it because you're maybe with a cool guy like Adam Markel, and he's a cool guy and you feel good around him, or you look out a window and you just naturally see some trees or flowers as I'm doing right now. Or maybe you deliberately create an experience through remembering something that makes you feel happy or bringing to mind someone you're grateful for, or taking LSD or drinking a cup of coffee or having a bagel with cream cheese, right? Whatever that might be, you're having an experience. You must experience what you want to grow. Second step, critically important. It's the one people forget all the time. And that's the dirty little secret in psychotherapy, human potential. Mindfulness training, human resources training, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You must turn that experience into a lasting physical change in your brain. That's the basis of learning broadly, healing, developing, transforming. If there's no physical change in your brain, by definition, there's no lasting value. It might have been a momentarily cool trip. I've done psychedelics. Could be a momentarily powerful therapy appointment or Walking the dog, you realize, you know, from now on, I just can't be such a dickhead or something like that. And it's nice, but then boom, an hour later, a minute later, a day later, you're same old, same old. Nothing has changed. How do we do that second step? How do we make the experiences we're having in the moment leave lasting physical changes behind in neural structure and function? That's the practical, really, really practical question. And it's one I've been extremely engaged with. How do we actually do that second step? How do we promote it in other people? And especially, how can we do it ourselves in the way we relate to and engage our experiences? I could talk about some of the key hows to that, but maybe I'll just pause here emphasizing the second step.

One thing I would say is at this point, let's use an analogy. I heard this once. I think it's a good one for folks that— I mean, I'm guessing everybody's tracking this, but I like visual examples because I learn and I also end up sharing information through either story. When we work with speakers, more often than not, we say, you got a great message. Terrific. Just don't teach the way most people teach because then you put us to sleep. If you put us to sleep, you've missed the opportunity to really get in there, like to get inside so that any of that change can occur because we're distracted or we're just— Yeah. We— you're predictable, so we turn off, tune out, we get bored, in other words. So, to me, this analogy is really a good one. Imagine that you're at your computer and you hit print on a particular document. So, it comes out the printer, you pick it up, you realize there's a typo on it. Mm-hmm. And so, you take a pen, a Sharpie, or whatever it is, you cross out the thing that's wrong and you write in the correction. And then, go back to your computer and say, great! I've corrected it now. Go ahead and hit the print key again, and lo and behold, what comes out of the printer is the same error. The thing that you corrected is still an error, even though you went ahead and erased it or scratched it out or whatever it was, because you didn't go to the program. So you've made— you made a sort of a change to it, as in, like you said, maybe you microdosed mushrooms, or you had a great experience at a seminar, you read a great book or something. It's the equivalent on some level of Seeing that printout and then saying, oh, I'm going to make this change. I've just decided I'm finally going to forgive somebody, my father, my mother, or someone who really hurt me a long time ago. I'm going to forgive them. And it's like scratching out the part that says, I can't forgive them, and you write in instead, I do forgive them. But then you go back to the machine and hit the print key a week later and it still prints out, I can't forgive them.

Mm-hmm.

Because you haven't actually made a change to the programming, to the software. To the code that's on the inside. Is that a fair example of what you described as the second piece of turning experience into a lasting physical change in the brain?

Yeah, that's a great analogy. You have to— and maybe I can make it concrete here. We all learn. The notion that old dogs can't learn new tricks, we're all learning and we're all learning. We're all changing continually over a lifetime. My dad, who passed away just before he was 97, was still learning new interesting things, including how to just be kind of calmer and happier, as well as other things, you know, toward the end of his life. We do learn. So if you want to help yourself change, first of all, imagine that you begin with the experience, whatever you want to develop inside. Maybe you want to have more sense of worth. Maybe you want to feel that forgiveness, that letting go. Maybe you want to have a kind of cosmic consciousness experience, you know, a sense of Vast openness. That's territory I'm very interested in. So let's say that's true. You start with that experience. A lot of research shows that if you want to help it sink in, if you want to help yourself change for the better, there are multiple things you can do, but 3 really stand out for me. Number one, stay with the experience for a breath or longer. It's haunting, Adam, how often we work hard to have experiences, And then we race on to the next thing before the current thing can sink in. We're always channel changing. Stay with it a breath or longer. And if you just try to do that, a breath's less than 10 seconds. You just do that. You watch your mind jumping on to the next thing, particularly the ways in which our minds these days are trained to be stimulation hungry and always kind of seek the next little thrill, the next stim. So stay with it. That itself will increase the wiring of that experience into your body. Any single time you do this will be small and incremental, but drop by drop, you'll be filling up the cup.

So stay with the experience, number one.

Yep. Second, feel it in your body. Take it out of the head, as you said earlier, bring it out of the idea, feel it in your body. The more you feel it in your body, the more it's going to sink in. What's it feel like in your body to be forgiving? What's it feel like to feel determined and gritty in the face of people pushing you around? What's it feel like to be patient with your kids who are aggravating? Let's say, feel it in your body. And the third, interestingly, focus on what feels good about it. What's rewarding about it? People trivialize positive emotions or positive experiences like some la-dee-da California yoga camp. Yes. Actually, the positivity of an experience is usually an indicator that it's valuable. There are some experiences that are enjoyable, like getting too drunk or too angry in the moment that, you know, we pay a price for later, if not at the time. The most enjoyable experiences are good for us. We've evolved biologically reward indicators that say, hey, it's valuable to feel forgiving. It's valuable to let go. It's valuable to let go of stress, shed stress. That's good for you. It's valuable to feel strong. It's valuable to feel like you're worthy. These are indicators. So if you focus in the third thing here on what feels rewarding about the experience, what feels good about it, technically that increases activity of 2 neurotransmitters, dopamine and norepinephrine in your brain. And when their activity increases, That increases the wiring of the experience into your own nervous system. You don't need to do all 3 of these. Any one of them is good. The more you do, the better. Half a dozen times a day, slow down to take in the good.

Summarizing, stay with the experience. I think the channel-changing tendency or habit that many of us have developed over time and this constant need for stimulation is really important. So the idea of just take a few breaths and stay with the experience. Whatever that is, feel it in your, in your body. So the embodiment of it. And what I think about, my wife often says, I feel X, I feel something, and I sense it in my— and she includes a place in her body where she senses it. So I'm feeling happy, or I'm feeling sad, or I'm feeling tense or nervous or whatever it might be. And I sense it by, you know, in my lower back. Mm-hmm. Or in my neck or in my heart space or something like that. And lastly, so the embodiment piece being number 2, and third, focusing on what feels good about it.

Yeah.

You actually produce a chemical reaction of good feeling inside that produces more of the same. It becomes a bit of a snowball effect and it creates— I'm going to say this, I don't know if this is accurate, but you're creating a new neuropathway or at least another—

Yeah.

Another groove to something that's more positive-oriented. And we're kind of wired, I'm going to say this again, but you be the one to push back if this is inaccurate, that our, whatever it's been called, the reptilian brain, the ancient brain, the old brain, that part of us that is about keeping us safe from the time when safety, physical safety was a major concern of the day, and that's no longer the major concern of the day, that That there's still this battle going on inside of us between that fear response and seeing the glass as half empty and the negative— the way you can look at things in a negative way, or at least in a way that's saying, here's what could go wrong and this is what could happen if type of thing. That there is that contrast and maybe even a kind of a tug of war between that and the part of us that wants to just be content and happy and peaceful. Is that accurate or?

This is a really interesting topic. And so it's true that the brain evolved like building a house from the bottom up in 3 floors. Got the reptilian brainstem, mammalian subcortex, primate-human neocortex over the 600 million year evolution of the nervous system. Right. It is true. Now, I'm going to say something a little complicated. I've done a lot of rock climbing. I've been in situations where I'm 1,000 feet off the ground. I'm holding on to things the width of a pencil. The wind is whistling. My safety needs are being really challenged while I'm having the time of my life. I know what I'm doing. I've got a rope on. I trust my partner. I'm resourced enough to meet my need for safety so that I'm not freaking out. So just because there's a challenge to safety Doesn't necessarily mean that we need to get all stressed and angry and frightened and freaky about it. Same thing. We can pursue satisfaction. We can have goals. We can be ambitious, but we don't need to be driven or addicted about it. We can still be very purposeful, but we don't need to be a jerk to ourselves or others as we pursue our ambitions. That's our second great need for satisfaction, broadly defined. So, we have safety and satisfaction. And then we have connection. And

we're talking about Maslow's hierarchy of needs?

No, I'm talking about a model that's deep in psychology of 3 major needs. They overlap a little with Maslow, but the basic model is safety, satisfaction, connection, managed by avoiding, approaching, and attaching. So I'm pulling together pretty commonly accepted material in psychology and biology about the needs of any animal in these 3 major groups. Now, the way a lizard meets its needs for connection, which is to say sex— I watched a couple fish in my pond yesterday trying to have sex with each other. It was pretty primitive. That's not as sophisticated as a bunch of high school kids getting prepped for a dance or something. Point there too, just because— and people often say, well, the lizard brain is bad. The modern human brain is good. No. The modern neocortex, which is very dialed in for meeting our needs for relationship can be crazy. Think about prejudice, discrimination, ethnic cleansing.

Hmm.

Think about bitter rivalries in families that blow them apart after a parent dies. Just because it has to do with our more recent primate and human desires for connection doesn't necessarily mean it's wholesome. So, my point is we have 3 needs: safety, satisfaction, connection, loosely related to the 3 levels of the brain. And then we have 2 settings for meeting those needs. I call it the red zone and the green zone. Red zone, we're in fight, flight, freeze, freak out, addiction, asshole.

Mm-hmm.

That's one way to meet your needs. And we see that in the White House today, if I can say that directly. We see one way to meet needs, but it's not a healthy way. And it's suitable for a short-term burst of stress. You got to run away from the saber-toothed tiger. You got to fight that aggressive alpha male off of you back in the day.

Can we call the root of that fear? Is that without overlapping with—

I would say fear to me goes to safety, but it could be frustration. Maybe you have a really important goal and you're not afraid, but you're really frustrated and you're being opposed in accomplishing that thing. You have someone getting in your way. Maybe you're a woman in a corporation who's never going to get hired to the next level and it's really frustrating.

Wow, the pace of change over the last couple of years has been rapid. And if you're a leader, a business owner, an entrepreneur, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Every day it's something different, something new. But the one thing that I've learned in performing at the height of all of those roles has been that we must be resilient. In fact, it's the unsung hero in every success story that you will ever hear about, and it's It's the reason why my team and I created the resilience assessment that more than 5,000 business leaders across the globe have taken. And all you have to do to get your own free resilient leader assessment is go to resiliencerank.com. It takes less than 3 minutes, and it's our gift to you for being the leader that you already are. Other free resources and tools will accompany your score instantly. So go to resiliencerank.com and find out just how resilient you are.

Or maybe you're in a relationship and you feel really hurt by somebody, or you're lonely, or you grew up with a lot of insecure attachment and you just cling to other people, maybe in ways that are kind of not very healthy for you or for them. Fear is not really in the mix there, but you're still in the red zone.

Mm-hmm.

You're still messed up about it. And so for me, it's actually really liberating, Adam, to think of these 3 needs as distinct from each other. And just because needs are running doesn't mean we need to move into what in Buddhism would be the 2nd noble truth of craving. We don't need to move into craving and drivenness, which has 3 major forms. In terms of safety, craving shows up as fighting what's unpleasant. In terms of satisfaction, craving shows up as addiction to what's pleasant. Or drivenness for it or possessiveness about it. And in terms of connection, craving shows up there as resentment or grievance or shame.

Hmm.

That's the red zone. And that's part of life. Once in a while, it's useful, but most of the time, it's just full of suffering and harm. And the question then becomes, how do we meet our needs? How do we stay safe? How do we keep those people from harming us and those we love? How do we— also in terms of satisfaction, how do we succeed in our careers? How do we keep going? How do we stay motivated when the going gets tough without stressing about it? Similarly, how do we deal with our relationships? How do we go on Match.com or OkCupid without freaking out about it? How do we work through issues with other people without becoming hateful? How do we track the distinction between being strong and firm and even inquiry without having ill will toward other people, right? How do we stay in the green zone, in other words, in terms of our meeting needs? And the key distinction between red zone and green zone, which makes all the difference in the world, there's no escaping our needs. There's no escaping the reptilian brainstem and the rest of the brain structures. The only question is, how do we meet our needs?

Well, describe the green zone. I don't know that I tracked it sufficiently. Got a sense of what the red zone looks like. What does the green zone look like?

Green zone means you're pursuing your needs, you're staying safe, you're satisfied, you're connected while maintaining a sense of resilient well-being inside yourself. That's the green zone. And you do it a lot. Here you and I are, we're dealing with things as we flow here. We're accomplishing tasks, we're managing challenges. We're not just sitting on a hammock with IV chocolate and someone Brushing your hair, like, that's easy. How do you stay in the green zone when you're challenged? That's the crux. And the answer to that question to me is you grow strengths inside. You grow strengths inside that give you resources. Like my analogy of rock climbing, or my example, I was resourced sufficiently. Same thing in business. You know, you can pursue goals and you can deal with obstructions, but you feel resourced so you don't tip into— Fear. Becoming a jerk about it. Same thing with relationships. You have a— you can stay centered in a place that's compassionate and also assertive, not letting people push you around, but not going to war with them.

Yes. What's your definition of resilience? There's so many places I'd love to go, but I want to make sure we open and sort of

touch on

it.

Well, resilience is staying in the green zone while you're challenged. In other words, Mm-hmm. If people are tipped into panic or rage, that's not resilient. That's one way to meet safety needs, but it's not a resilient way to meet safety needs. So resilience basically is being able to manage challenges while maintaining a core of well-being and functioning. That's the essence of resilience. You can cope and maintain your well-being in the face of challenges. If you're coping, but you feel horrible inside, you feel upset, you feel angry, you feel deeply aggrieved, that's not very resilient deep in your core. So essentially, it's the capacity, like I said, to manage a changing world with a relatively even keel while you aim toward your goals.

And this is something that— not to say that there aren't That there isn't a genetic tie to resilience because it's probably quite a bit—

About a third of the causes, about a third ballpark of the factors that make a person resilient are baked into our DNA. The other ballpark, two-thirds, has to do with, in terms of internal factors, there are other things externally that can protect people or wear them down.

Sure.

In terms of what's inside us, about two-thirds of it is fundamentally developed

Right. So is that— can we say that's the epigenetic side of this?

It's more than epigenetics. That's a good distinction. Epigenetics, as you know, for others I'll say it, the expression of genes. So for example, some kids— I've worked with a lot of kids. I'm a child therapist, my background. I did my dissertation on 15-month-olds. I'm a dad of a 30-year-old and a 28-year-old, so I've been down that road. And kids just come out differently, you know? I'm myself. I have my dad's temperament. I'm very—

It's remarkable how you have a bunch of kids and they're all so ridiculously different. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The joke is they

came from the same place, the same gene pool, right? Yeah,

that's right. I know. Like, what? How'd that happen? No,

it's

very real. But the other— the point is, the 2/3 ballpark science shows of the factors that make a person resilient can be developed or not developed. So for me, the takeaway is no one can stop you from growing, but no one can do it for you.

Exactly. And I'm looking to create a little recipe with you. So I want to cook. Me too. And I'd love to create a recipe for resilience. And I have one that I've been working on.

I got one too.

You do? Well, you go first.

Oh,

yeah. Should you show me yours? I'll show you mine.

Yeah. Well, because I'm kind of thorough, I want to just call it out first. If you want to help yourself be resilient, one way is to intervene in the world around you to build up resources there, like a healthcare system that works or a stop sign outside your kids' Mm-hmm. And get away from stuff that wears you down, like environmental toxins. I've got people in my family who are just— they're affected by artificial molecules that are irritants to their lungs and body. So get away from the stuff that wears you down, including other people. Certain kinds of people just wear on you. That's going to wear your resilience down. So it's okay to intervene in the world. It's also okay to intervene in your physical body by, as you said, Take good supplements of various kinds, eat protein.

So environment here, that this is the idea that you're creating an environment or curating an environment for yourself intentionally.

Yep.

Yogananda said, environment is stronger than will. I think that's one of the— that's a statement I'll take with me for the rest of my days. And this is a nature versus nurture argument on some level as well, right? Because regardless of what your gene pool would suggest and/or how it's expressed, you can change your life by changing your environment. You can change your— in this case, you can create more resilience, is your point, by changing the environment, which might include who you spend time with, who you don't spend time with.

That's right. Basically, I'm identifying 3 places you can intervene to make things better, and then you see what the possibilities are. The 3 places are the world, the body, the mind. So I'm just kind of acknowledging the upside potential of intervening out there in the world or in your body. And then I want to talk about the mind because that's where I'm really a specialist. Yeah. So I want to just call out, yeah, you can make things better by doing what you can out in the world and in your body. Now the mind, the fundamental recipe for growing resilience Inside your mind is to develop psychological resources that are matched to the challenges in your life, or more exactly, that are matched to the needs that are being challenged in your life. And I have a lot of material about this. People can see it on my website where for each of these major needs— safety, satisfaction, connection— I list key psychological resources that are matched to those needs. For example, if you're anxious about something, Fear, like you said earlier, maybe you're worried about a health issue or you're worried about your daughter. If you're grateful or experience pleasure, that will not meet your need. Your need is a safety need and experiencing something that's rewarding for satisfaction. Or maybe you walk out the door and someone says, oh my, your hairdo looks nice today. Come on, it's your eyebrows. Your eyebrows.

I always— every day is a good hair day for me.

That's it. That's your eyebrows are amazing.

You should see them braided.

Yeah. That's not going to do the trick. You need resources that are matched to the need, this challenge. But the bottom line is to look for ways to grow strengths inside that enable you to become calmer and stronger and happier in the face of life's challenges. And then, that to me is a lifelong process. How do you grow strengths inside? And it's really positive. It's future-focused, and it's in your power to do it every day. Every day you can grow strengths inside. I had like a huge breakthrough when I was about 15. I was really miserable and didn't know what to do, very unhappy, totally awkward, total dork, and just dead in the water. And I had kind of a breakthrough where I realized that no matter how bad the past had been or no matter how much the present sucked, every day I could learn something. I could grow in some way. I could get a little more skillful talking with girls. I could be a little wiser about dealing with my parents. I could let go a little bit of these old feelings of inadequacy. I could grow every day. That was incredibly hopeful because it's opportunity-focused. I could—

Future-focused.

Future-focused. And then And the follow-on to that was, well, if learning— and I'm using that term really broadly, way beyond the multiplication table, growing, healing, that's what I mean by learning. Well, if learning was the most important thing in life, the most important thing to learn was how to learn. The most important thing to get good at was the superpower that grows all the other superpowers, which is learning. And that kind of set me on my career.

Yeah. I once read, and I love this— well, I'm a prayer. I love to pray. And one of the things I read once was, you've got to pray. Sometimes you pray for the best way to pray.

Oh, yeah.

So it's that learning piece, is that we have to learn how to learn. And it's vital that there's a great deal of hope in it, as you said, through that humility, through that understanding that maybe I don't have all the answers today, but there's a good chance I can have more answers Soon, in the future, you know, especially if I'm willing to open up that pathway to receiving that knowledge, whatever it might be. And I think that's where the— by creating a Venn diagram of my own between sort of the way the brain responds, and I want to track into this in just a second, this thing we might call consciousness, and where my spiritual— Mm-hmm. Thoughts and my spiritual beliefs lie, it would be in this understanding that openness is everything, that when we make ourselves open to things, that it's— you could call it a miracle, you could call it something else, that all of a sudden new information shows up, new understanding, new awareness appears out of sort of thin air, which is a pretty remarkable thing all by itself. So consciousness, let's talk for a second about consciousness because there is a debate for sure and a— A client of mine, a friend, somebody I really respect, has just come out with a book called An End to Upside-Down Thinking. His name is Mark Gober, where he talks about the origin of consciousness. And obviously materialism has sort of been the way of the world for a long time, that consciousness emanates from inside of us. His proposition, not his own proposition, but through research and other people's work that has for the most part, been marginalized, is that consciousness emanates from outside of the brain. So there's all kinds of spiritual implications and many others. I'm going to put you on the hot seat for this one just for a moment and ask you, you know, what's your theory there? What's your belief system based on science and based on common sense, really?

Yeah, for me, it's respectful as well as scientific to start with simple examples or cases, especially when we're grappling with something as profound and puzzling as consciousness. So I start with the squirrels in my backyard. Is a squirrel having experiences? You look, is a bird, is your cat or dog having experiences? I think we would say, yes, a squirrel is seeing, is hearing, is smelling, A squirrel is having simple emotions. I've watched squirrels play with each other. I've also watched them be deeply frustrated trying to get seeds out of a bird feeder and being unable to do that. So they're having experiences. So the word consciousness for me is a really tricky word because it sounds so abstract. I take it down to experiences. So what's the basis of the experiences of seeing or hearing or wanting that a squirrel is having? That are very similar to, seemingly, the experiences that we're having. Well, the basis for the experiences that we're having of seeing, hearing, remembering, wanting, even fairly subtle spiritual experiences in meditation, the basis for that, which seems like the necessary basis and perhaps even a sufficient basis— that's the key fork in the road here. With your friend's work, is it sufficient? Is the meat sufficient to make the mind, to make the experience of hearing or seeing or wanting that a squirrel has or we have? And that's the key question, isn't it? So it's really clear that in ordinary reality down here on planet Earth, without a brain, you don't have experiences. Without a nervous system, you don't have experiences. Human, squirrel, et cetera, and the neural hardware that seems necessary for the experiences of hearing, seeing, wanting, remembering, thinking, and so forth in a college sophomore, great guinea pigs of studies, as well as you and I, as well as in squirrels or mice or lizards or even simpler, simpler creatures. Is a butterfly having experiences? Is a spider having experiences? Is a shark, is a crab, right?

Well, it's sort of like if the tree falls in the forest and no one sees it, did the tree fall in the forest? If the turtle is having the experience but is not aware or conscious, let's say, of having an experience, is the turtle still having an experience or not?

Well, it's hearing, it's seeing, it's awake or asleep. You know, any— all animals, including fruit flies, have— go to sleep. They have a nerve— or the equivalent of sleep. So my point is that it seems clear to me that a nervous system is necessary for experiences, including the field of awareness through which experiences pass. Now, the question is, is it sufficient? That's the key spiritual question. Personally, I don't know. And My own view as a transcendentalist is that consciousness is necessarily woven into the fabric of reality for quantum potentiality to congeal into actuality continually at the front edge of now everywhere. That's a lot packed into that sentence. That's my personal view. As to whether that consciousness that's intrinsically inherent in the fabric of physical reality Is necessary for the consciousness of a lizard, a mouse, or a monkey, or a squirrel, or you or I? I don't know. In a deep sense, if consciousness is necessary for material reality to occur, in that sense, it is necessary for hearing, seeing, tasting, touching. But I'm not so sure it's necessary. On the other hand, I think it's also true that there could be consciousness woven in, transcendental consciousness woven into the fabric of reality, while simultaneously it's not necessary for the experiences of a squirrel, maybe making that distinction. And also, I think it's possible that someone, whether it's a squirrel or certainly a human being, can have— can use their natural mental processes that are not themselves caused by the transcendental, we can use our own natural processes of intuition and imagination and opening to begin to have intimations of, or a sense of, infinite transcendental consciousness. I think that's all quite possible. And I find for me, it's useful to track these distinctions because when people blur them together, I've been in the New Age spiritual world since the early 1970s. It's a long time. And I've just seen a lot of BS, a lot of confusion. I've seen a lot of dogmatic atheism. I've seen a lot of sloppy, muddy thinking from people who are just sort of wishful and hopeful. Also clouds the issues. And you don't see that in the great teachers, in the great traditions. There's a clarity there and they're tracking these differences. So for me, it's not just semantics or something academic to track these differences. It's respectful to track these distinctions.

It is respectful, for sure. I've been saying something a lot lately that I read or heard at some point in the past. I mean, Socrates, I think, said all learning is remembering. So I don't know that there's any original thought anyway, but I don't know who to attribute this. So there's no attribution. for this quote, but I'm open to everything and attached to nothing is something philosophically that's been important for me a lot lately. Open to everything but attached to nothing, because attachment is a form of this kind of suffering that we talked to, that red zone as you were describing. I think a lot of that is a part of attachment.

That's a beautiful way to put it, yeah.

And openness, I think that's where the consciousness conversation comes for me. is that if I'm to understand, or if I'm to believe, let's say, that consciousness emanates from outside the brain so that it's almost like I'm a receiver, and much the way radio waves and signals and all this other stuff's kind of floating through the ether, you know, everything's floating through the ether space at the moment.

Yeah.

And if I go in my car and I tune, you know, the old tuning station or whatever, I can pick up one of those stations and listen to whatever song style of music or talk radio or any of those things, but otherwise without that device, I can't tune into it. With it I can, and the brain is a way for us to tune in. But yet it's still happening regardless of whether we tune in or don't. So that to me, just to be open— Yeah. To what's possible to learn and understand and experience, if we're willing to do a little tuning, a little finer tuning, maybe we can all find more of More what it is that we're here to learn, I suppose. You talked about these 3 steps. So I want to just make sure on the resilience side, intervening in the world. So the world, the mind, and the third, was it the body? Because I don't know that I tracked exactly what the third one was. So it was the body.

Yeah. I'm just super practical. I'm a methods guy. So I— and it's my nature as well. It's kind of a scruffy cockroachy— I say my wife's a butterfly. I'm a cockroach. Survive. And so I just think, well, what can we do? And sometimes your mind is just gridlocked, but at least you can go for a walk with your body, drink some water, have a cup of coffee, have a beer or something, just shift your body and then it shifts your mind. Take a nap. So I'm looking around in all those areas, world, body, mind. And that said, for the mind, I wanted to I mentioned 3 key strengths for resilience that track these 3 needs and the inner lizard, mouse, and monkey of the 3 levels of the brain. First strength is the strength of peacefulness. Calm strength, calm in the core of your being, even though around you, you're really threatened. I think of people who maintain that sense of inner peace in a refugee camp or a war zone or working as an inner city Police officer who are just like peaceful warriors in their core. They're peaceful even as they're struggling physically with somebody. They're in their core, they're at peace. That's something we can develop over time, that core of inner peace. Also contentment. That's the second strength that goes to our need for satisfaction, where you feel authentically there's an enoughness already in this life. You'd love to have more, but you feel this life already has been incredible. I've already had so much pleasure. It's amazing to be alive at all, you know, to live at this time, access to music, to food, to information, podcasts, contentment, you know, already realizing that just because you feel peaceful doesn't stop you from pushing against threats and speaking truth to power. Just because you feel contented doesn't mean you become lazy or complacent. Right. Last strength, strength of love, being able to develop inside yourself a fundamental core of compassion and kindness that omits none, as the Buddha put it 2,500 years ago, which also recognizes that some people are bad people or they're going to keep coming at you like the Terminator in the movie. And you got to do things about that. And maybe you need to take up arms against them eventually, maybe. But in the core of your being, you're not poisoned by hatred. We're very vulnerable as social mammals, primates too. We're incredibly vulnerable to grievance and vengeance. Right.

Justified grievance.

You see that manipulated historically endlessly by authoritarian demagogues. You see it today, so easily manipulated us against them. And, um, so it's so important to not let that poison you. So those are the 3 strengths I wanted to mention: peace, contentment, and love.

This is a great place for, you know, perhaps— and I'm just anticipating how a lot of our community may respond to this particular conversation as being a very small part of a much bigger trajectory that's possible. So perhaps we'll have a part 2 for this. I think that would be terrific. Yeah, we don't have to shortchange any of the places that we could go with this. I'd love to ask you about your rituals at this point. Yeah. And also just say, if this comes through in the recording, because some people watch it, consume on YouTube, and others are listening and all that, there's a sound that's been happening in the background, which I don't know if it's coming through on the microphone, but my office has a beautiful carpet, like a rug, and our black lab who's 13 years old, his name is Willie, and Willie just lost his best buddy. Duncan, our golden, who's 12 years old, and we— he, about a week ago, left this physical world to go off into eternity. And I know Willie has been missing his presence and showing signs of both confusion, depression, a lot of the same things that human beings experience as grief and grieving at the loss of this—

Having experiences.

He certainly is. And at the moment, one of the experiences he's having is snoring. Fast asleep practically at my feet and snoring. So if you're hearing that little grumble in the back, that is really— all right. Well, Rick, back to rituals. What's something that you do on a ritual basis that just helps you to be more resourced?

I think first, your question is fantastic. What are those regular things? And there are many. I'll just kind of headline a couple. One is when I'm first waking up in the morning, I sort of reset myself. And a key piece of that is to restate for myself my purpose in life, which has a feeling in it, not just the words. So I restate that for myself and I feel it and I kind of recenter there. Okay. And also, I'll often recenter in peace, contentment, and love, the essence of the green zone, where I just kind of go, okay, I'm not at war with anyone. Peace, contentment. I have a lot of things I got to do today, but deep down, I feel like there's enough already. And love, right? I might get irritated. I'm not enlightened yet, but in my core, I'm really committed to not giving people cause to fear me, and to approach them with what a teacher of mine described as a blessing disposition, a kind of leaning in toward others, peace, contentment, love. That morning ritual before I get out of bed takes a minute or 2 at most, usually less, actually. I just kind of reset in part because with practice, this goes back to where we talked about that 2-stage process of growth as we turn states to traits. We acquire traits like a trait of peacefulness, contentment, and lovingness that then becomes easier to activate as a state, which then gives us a chance to reinforce it as a trait in a nice positive cycle. So with practice, I've been working at this for a while, I can access those at will pretty readily. So that's a key ritual, I think.

Absolutely. I mean, in many ways, I think the quality of our lives equals the quality of our rituals, the things that we do on a ritual basis. And by that, not a, not a religious, uh, you know, word for me, more like a conscious habit. Like, because you could just say the habitual things, but to me, I brush my teeth the same way habitually. I don't— there's no consciousness involved in the way I brush my teeth unless I'm going, oh well, I'll just change my hand. I'll just do it with the other hand. Then it's different. And so this— Mm-hmm. Putting consciousness, an intention, let's say, behind something new that you're doing is how I define a ritual. And so when you're thinking in that way about why you're doing what you're doing and if there's a purpose to it, there's a deeper meaning to it, a why, it has perhaps at least anecdotally only, because I haven't done the research, is more of a chance that it turns, as you say, a state, something that's temporary, into a trait, something that— has some permanence and lasting value.

Yeah, I think you're totally right. Absolutely right. And, you know, there's a classic teaching: your mind takes its shape from what it rests upon, for better or worse.

Do

we rest our minds on resentments and regrets and self-criticism, or do we rest our mind on, let's say, peace, contentment, and love? That's what We take our shape from over time. And based on modern science, the brain literally physically in lots and lots of microscopic ways takes its shape from what our minds repeatedly rest upon.

I really hope you're enjoying this episode of the Change Proof podcast. If you've not yet gone out and gotten your copy of Change Proof, it's not too late. You can get your copy right now by going to changeproof.com and not only getting the book and all the bonuses there, but getting access to our proprietary resilience assessment tool.

It'll just take you 3 minutes to do, and it's something that will really help you to utilize the book even more effectively to create practices and rituals Yes, so beautiful as part of a personal code of conduct. So, I'm going to share my waking ritual in just a second as we wind down part 1, I'll say, part 1 of a future 2-part series, at least, conversation With Dr. Rick Hanson. 4 things for me: don't hurry, don't worry, don't condemn, don't resent. These have been part of my personal code. I don't say that I live that way every day or have for the last 10 years since that got developed, but don't hurry, don't worry, don't condemn, don't resent is definitely, uh, for me, it's part of what you say, staying in the green zone, a way to stay in the green zone. And then the most significant way for me to stay in the green zone was the topic of TED Talk I gave in last September. It was recently published and it's a 10-second practice because I think that the things we're talking about, the essence of them is that they're simple.

Mm-hmm.

Not simplistic, but simple, meaning that they're usable, that we can apply them, as you said earlier, because applied neurodharma, we're going to apply something It can't be complicated, otherwise most of us can't do it or won't be able to put it to use. So, here's the simple 10-second practice. And first, I would love it if you'll engage with me on this one.

Okay.

All right. So, my question to you, sir, is did you wake up today?

Yes.

Excellent. Beautiful. I sometimes will ask that question to audiences, varying groups of people, and there'll be a laughter because I raise my hand, how many of you woke up today? And hands will go up. And then I'll look and I'll ask the question, and how many of you still in the process, right? And the other hands will go up because not everybody is. And it's a kind of a question that confronts people as well because we're not always awake, or at least we don't feel awake. And so it's an interesting thing. And then my question to you will be, so was that guaranteed last night when you went to sleep?

No.

And the same answer, everybody has that same answer. Nobody had a guarantee they'd wake up. So tomorrow, and this is both my hope and my prayer for everybody that's watching this and for all of yours, your families, and for you, Rick, and for myself and the people I am involved with, that we all get to wake up again tomorrow. Right. And by that, physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually, however you look at it, but that we are a little bit more awake and aware and conscious tomorrow. And in that moment, That we all will get to have, that we take 10 seconds and it can be from the bed. Like, you don't have to even put your feet on the floor, but if you want to wait till your feet hit the floor, that's just fine. But that in that moment that you're taking the first aware breath, that first conscious breath of the new day, that you realize there are people all over this planet who will be taking their very last breath in that moment.

Hmm.

So regardless of the circumstances, of our lives, which are varying and sometimes difficult and sometimes other things, that we can feel gratitude and appreciation in that moment for our lives and whatever it feels like in the moment to just be awake. And then to say these words again, 10 seconds, if you feel like saying them, to declare them out loud, you can say these words. I love my life. I love my life. Do you love your life, Rick?

I love living.

In love with living, for sure. And so that's it. It's a simple practice. And like a lot of things that we do repetitively over time, a new way of being, a new way of feeling. So I wish everyone— and Rick, thank you so much. I feel so grateful that we got to spend this time together.

That's a fantastic practice, Adam. about remembrance, really, that you've woken. Many people are taking their last breath even as we take this one right now. That's fantastic. I really appreciate it. Thank you.

Yep. It's simple. I like things that are simple. And certainly it's difficult to be in any of those other states, those red zone states. I want to use your language. The red zone is tough to maintain at the same time that you're in green zone. Gratitude is a green zone feeling. And so those 2 things are sort of mutually exclusive. And so I just like simple to override what is— I can wake up in the morning and knowing that we're in an inflection point in our world in so many ways, there's all this division, there's all this fighting, there's all this issue about how to solve seemingly impossible or intractable problems. I mean, these are tough things. To wake with them, and we do, you know, pick up our phone and immediately start to consume a lot of these challenges and rhetoric around them. It's tough, but we can override— I think there's a way to override that, and we get to choose. That's our fundamental freedom, and it doesn't matter where you live, under what regime, we all maintain this one true freedom, and that is the choice to decide how we— Yeah. frame these things, how we think about them. So anyway, Rick, thank you so much again. Appreciate your time today. Everybody, if you've loved this, we love the feedback. Please let us know, adamarkel.com/podcast, and leave your comment. We'll respond to it, of course. And if you have other feedback, please, love that too. Feedback is like oxygen for us. Good, the bad, the ugly, doesn't matter. It's all valuable. And of course, you can leave a review on iTunes. You can Join us at Start My Pivot Community on Facebook as well, and stay tuned. We might have a part 2 of this, which would be pretty stellar. So, have a beautiful day, blessed and peaceful and loving day, everybody. We'll see you soon. Ciao for now.

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