There is a motif, in fiction and in life, of people having wonderful things happen to them,
but still ending up unhappy. We can adapt to anything, it seems--you can get your dream job,
marry a wonderful human, finally get 1 million dollars or Twitter followers--eventually we
acclimate and find new things to complain about.
If you want to look at it on a micro level, take an average day. You go to work; make some
money; eat some food; interact with friends, family or co-workers; go home; and watch some TV.
Nothing particularly bad happens, but you still can’t shake a feeling of stress, or worry,
or inadequacy, or loneliness.
According to Dr. Rick Hanson, a neuropsychologist, a member of U.C. Berkeley’s Greater Good
Science Center’s advisory board, our brains are naturally wired to focus on the negative,
which can make us feel stressed and unhappy even though there are a lot of positive things
in our lives. True, life can be hard, and legitimately terrible sometimes. Dr. Hanson doesn’t
suggest that we avoid dwelling on negative experiences altogether--that would be impossible.
Instead, he advocates training our brains to appreciate positive experiences when we do have
them, by taking the time to focus on them and install them in the brain.
I spoke with Hanson about this practice, which he calls “taking in the good”, and how evolution
optimized our brains for survival, but not necessarily happiness.
Q: “Taking in the good” is what you emphasize repeatedly. Can you explain what that is
as a practice and how it works in the brain?
H: The simple idea is that we all hope to have good things inside ourselves: happiness, resilience,
love, confidence, and so forth. The question is, how do we actually grow those, in terms of the
brain? It’s really important to have positive experiences of those things that we want to grow,
and then really help them sink in, because if we don’t help them sink in, they don’t become
neural structure very effectively.
Q: Do you want to explain how that actually works in terms of brain structure? What is the
connection between having this good experience and making tangible changes in the brains?
H: There’s a classic saying:”Neurons that fire together, wire together.” What that means is
that repeated patterns of mental activity build neural structure. This process occurs through
a lot of mechanisms, including sensitizing existing synapses and building new synapses, as well as
bringing more blood to busy regions. The problem is that the brain is very good at building
structure from negative experiences. We learn immediately from pain--you know, “Once burned,
twice shy.” Unfortunately, the brain is relatively poor at turning positive experiences into
emotional learning neural structure.
Q: You once said:” Positive thinking is usually wasted on the brain.” Can you explain how positive
thinking is different from taking in the good?
H: That’s a central, central question. First, positive thinking by definition is conceptual and
generally verbal. And most conceptual or verbal material doesn’t have a lot of impact on how we
actually feel or function over the course of the day. I know a lot of people who have this kind of
positive thinking, look-on-the-bright-side smart people, but deep down they’re very frightened,
angry, sad, disappointed, hurt, or lonely.
I think positive thinking’s helpful, but in my view, it’s not so much as clear thinking. I think
it’s important to be able to see the whole picture, the whole mosaic of reality. The tiles that
are negative, as well as the tiles that are neutral and positive. Unfortunately, we have brains
that are incentivized toward seeing the negative tiles, so if anything, deliberately looking for
the positive tiles just kind of levels the playing field. But deep down, I’m a little leery of
the term positive thinking because I think it could imply that we’re overlooking the negative, and
I think it’s important to face the negative.
The second reason why I think most positive thinking is wasted on the brain goes to this
fundamental distinction between activation and installation. When people are having positive
thinking or even most positive experiences, the person is not taking the extra 10,20 seconds
to heighten the installation into neural structure. So it’s not just positive thinking that's
wasted on the brain; it’s most positive experiences that are wasted on the brain.
Q: Taking in the good seemed like something you started to do on your own in college, and then
later you found that research supported the practice, is that right?
H: A lot of people stumble upon something that works for them, and then later on they find out
there’s a lot of research that’s related to it. For me, the research that’s relevant is
on learning, both cognitive learning and specially emotional learning. How do people grow
psychologically? The research on that shows that it’s a two-stage process of activation and
installation. Also as a long-term clinician, I began to think about how relatively good we are
as clinicians at activating positive mental states, but how bad we generally are at helping people
actually install those activated states into neural structures. That was a real wake-up call for me,
as a therapist.
Q: You include a lot of testimonials, examples from people in your books and articles. Is this
something you do in your work with your patients?
H: Yeah, definitely. It’s changed the way I do therapy and more generally it’s changed the way
I talk with people in life in general. Let me turn it around, to go back to your question about
modernity. On the one hand, due to modernity, many people report that moment to moment, they’re
having fairly positive experiences, they’re not being chased by lions, they’re not in a war zone,
they’re not in agonizing pain, they have decent medical care. And yet on the other hand, many
people today would report that they have a fundamental sense of feeling stressed and pressured
and disconnected from other people, longing for closeness that they don’t have, frustrated,
driven, etc. Why is that? I think one reason is that we’re simply wasting the positive
experiences that we are having, in part due to modernity, because we’re not taking into account
that design bug in the Stone Age brain that it doesn’t learn very well.
By repeatedly taking in the good to grow inner strength, you become much more able to deal with
the bad. For me, taking in the good is motivated by the recognition that there’s a lot about life
is hard.