Hardwiring happiness
"SEE THROUGH THE LIES YOUR BRAIN TELLS YOU Why is it easier to ruminate over hurt feelings than it is to bask in the warmth of being appreciated? Your brain was wired this way when it evolved, primed to learn quickly from bad experiences, but not so much from the good ones. It's an ancient survival mechanism that turned the brain into Velcro for the negative, but Teflon for the positive. Life isn't easy, and having a brain wired to take in the bad and ignore the good makes us worried, irritated and stressed, instead of confident, secure and happy. Every day is filled with opportunities to build these strengths inside, but the brain is designed to ignore and waste them. This makes you come down harder on yourself than you do other people, feel inadequate even though you get a hundred things done, and lonely even when support is all around. Dr. Rick Hanson, an acclaimed neuropsychologist and internationally bestselling author, shows us what we can do to override the brain's default programming. Hardwiring Happiness lays out a simple method that uses the hidden power of everyday experiences to build new neural structures that stick to happiness, love, confidence, and peace. Dr. Hanson's four steps build a brain strong enough to withstand its ancient negativity bias, allowing contentment and a powerful sense of well-being to become the new normal. In mere minutes each day, we can transform our brains into oases of calm and happiness. We can hardwire in happiness"
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What Hacker News says
- I'm not the person you replied to but their list of strategies (gratitude practice, evoking joy, exercise) pretty much mirrors what I've been trying to employ.
> Saying it every day means little even if I write it down, and the writing itself feels more like a burden than a help.
Perhaps an obvious statement but our experience with any type of practice varies in infinite ways from moment to moment. At times things just click or maybe we've built up enough momentum that it could feel effortless, but on just as many occasions it can feel like wading through sludge. When it's the latter I have to ask myself just how am I showing up for the activity. How mindful am I? What's my intention? Perhaps most importantly, is the sense of gratitude actually being felt in my body?
If you don't mind self-help type books, 'Hardwiring Happiness' by Rick Hanson is a fairly accessible resource that stresses the importance of the somatic side of this type of work. The tl;dr is that if more parts of the mind pay _sustained_ attention to the embodied experience of gratitude, compassion, joy etc. then we're increasing the chances of training our minds. So if I find myself enumerating things in a journal that I believe I'm grateful for but the exercise feels contrived or flat then that's a sign I should either tune even more into large parts of the body (can be anywhere but for me it's usually my face, chest, and arms) or just attempt to evoke warm feelings in those areas. That last part can feel fake at times but there's probably value in learning how to encourage more mind processes to sign up for the practice. The OP alluded to this bit with "sometimes it can help to simply sit up straight and smile". If the body remembers what gratitude feels like then chances are that's going to influence the mind for the next few moments.
'Awakening Joy' by James Baraz is another book in this vein. In it the author makes the case that learning how to shift our baseline towards one coloured with joy and gratitude usually requires someone repeatedly and genuinely appreciating seemingly trivial things over the course of each day (food, shelter, mobility, pet, access to nature, etc.). Whereas shifts occurring solely due to significant positive life events are potentially less common.
- For more of the science behind approaches like this check out the first four chapters of 'Hardwiring Happiness' [0] and try the exercises listed in the book. It sounded like fluff when I first came across it but so far it's helped me relate to perhaps unsavoury mind states in more healthy ways.
- There's two really good approaches to this issue that I've learned. The one in the article is cognitive behavioral therapy (also, dialectical behavioral therapy, depending on the type of ruminations). Another approach that has been gaining more traction lately is mindfulness, which is basically using meditation to clear the mind of ruminating thoughts.
I've read bits of Feeling Good Handbook, which is an often recommended book for CBT, but I really felt like I connected more with the mindfulness approach. Mindfulness seems to work faster for me since I can use meditation to quickly clear out negative thoughts rather than trying to reason about them over time as with CBT. For mindfulness, I'd highly recommend Hardwiring Happiness, which goes into depth about using neuroplasticity (the ability to rewire the brain) to pave more positive neural paths using mindfulness techniques.
I'm sure both CBT and mindfulness are good approaches and can be used in conjunction, and there's likely other good alternatives to these as well. Ultimately the goal is to balance our evolved negativity bias with more positive thinking.
- I'm starting Hardwiring Happiness. If you've read it, what did you think, and did it impact your life? How so?
