Hardwiring Happiness | Book Highlights
Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence by Rick Hanson, PhD
Inner strengths are the supplies you’ve got in your pack as you make your way down the twisting and often hard road of life. They include a positive mood, common sense, integrity, inner peace, determination, and a warm heart.
First, be with your experience. Observe it and accept it for what it is even if it’s painful. Second, when it feels right—which could be a matter of seconds with a familiar worry or a matter of months or years with the loss of a loved one—begin letting go of whatever is negative. For example, relax your body to reduce tension. Third, again when it feels right, after you’ve released some or all of what was negative, replace it with something positive.
If you keep resting your mind on self-criticism, worries, grumbling about others, hurts, and stress, then your brain will be shaped into greater reactivity, vulnerability to anxiety and depressed mood, a narrow focus on threats and losses, and inclinations toward anger, sadness, and guilt. On the other hand, if you keep resting your mind on good events and conditions (someone was nice to you, there’s a roof over your head), pleasant feelings, the things you do get done, physical pleasures, and your good intentions and qualities, then over time your brain will take a different shape, one with strength and resilience hardwired into it, as well as a realistically optimistic outlook, a positive mood, and a sense of worth.
The brain is good at learning from bad experiences, but bad at learning from good ones.
A person’s inner strengths include peacefulness, contentment, and love, as well as resilience, confidence, determination, and insight. These strengths help you cope with the hard things in life, recover from stress, heal old pain, maintain your well-being, get things done at home and work, and be patient and caring toward others.
Your brain has a hair-trigger readiness to go negative to help you survive.
Negative stimuli are perceived more rapidly and easily than positive stimuli.
Lasting intimate relationships usually need at least five positive interactions to balance every negative one. People really begin to thrive when positive moments outnumber negative ones by at least a three-to-one ratio, and ideally higher.
Your brain is like Velcro for negative experiences but Teflon for positive ones.
4 Steps to Hardwiring Happiness:
Step 1: Have a positive experience
Step 2: Enrich it
Step 3: Absorb it
Step 4: Link positive and negative materialThis fact is another source of good experiences: seeing life as opportunity.