(Editor’s Note: we are pleased to bring you this arti­cle thanks to our col­lab­o­ra­tion with Greater Good Mag­a­zine).

We’ve all been there: obsess­ing over a faux pas we com­mit­ted at a party, infu­ri­ated by an unkind word from a col­league, rumi­nat­ing over a tough break-up with a spouse or friend. We suf­fer some misfortune—big or small, real or imagined—and the pain or humil­i­a­tion sticks with us for hours, days, or even years afterward.

“The mind is like Vel­cro for neg­a­tive expe­ri­ences,” psy­chol­o­gist Rick Han­son is fond of say­ing, “and Teflon for pos­i­tive ones.”

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Draw­ing on some of the lat­est find­ings from neu­ro­science, Han­son has spent years explor­ing how we can over­come our brain’s nat­ural “neg­a­tiv­ity bias” and learn to inter­nal­ize pos­i­tive expe­ri­ences more deeply—while min­i­miz­ing the harm­ful phys­i­cal and psy­cho­log­i­cal effects of dwelling on the negative.

For years, research has shown that, over time, our expe­ri­ences lit­er­ally reshape our brains and can change our ner­vous sys­tems, for bet­ter or worse. Now, neu­ro­sci­en­tists and psy­chol­o­gists like Han­son are zero­ing in on how we can take advan­tage of this “plas­tic­ity” of the brain to cul­ti­vate and sus­tain pos­i­tive emotions.

In his recent book, the best-selling Buddha’s Brain: The Prac­ti­cal Neu­ro­science of Hap­pi­ness, Love, and Wis­dom, Han­son describes spe­cific prac­tices that can pro­mote last­ing joy, equa­nim­ity, and compassion—and backs it all up with sound science.

Han­son recently spoke with host Michael Bergeisen about some of these very prac­ti­cal, research-based steps we can all take to rewire our brains for last­ing hap­pi­ness. Below we present a con­densed ver­sion of the dis­cus­sion.

Michael Bergeisen: Most of us think of the human brain as either unchang­ing or los­ing power and strength as we get older, but the cen­tral theme of your new book is that we each have the capac­ity to change our brain for the bet­ter to make our­selves hap­pier, more peace­ful, and more kind. How can we do this exactly?

Rick Han­son: We’ve all known as we’ve gone through life that our minds have changed. In other words, we’ve learned things as we go through life, we picked up new skills, we’ve had expe­ri­ences, we remem­ber them. All that men­tal activ­ity means that we’ve changed our brain. That’s not break­ing news. In other words, it’s long been known that as the mind changes, the brain must be chang­ing as well.

What is break­ing news is that in the last 20 years, the sci­en­tific under­stand­ing of the brain has lit­er­ally dou­bled. And that has given us much more clar­ity about the link­ages between the mind and the brain, which then gives us this amaz­ing pos­si­bil­ity to change our brain to change our mind—so that we feel bet­ter, we’re hap­pier, we’re less prone to suf­fer­ing, we’re kinder, we’re bet­ter to peo­ple around us, we’re more effec­tive at home and work, and we have more sense of a kind of inner peace and con­nect­ed­ness with all things.

MB: Can you give us an exam­ple of a prac­tice that has this effect on the mind and hence the brain?

RH: When­ever you are aware of your own body sen­sa­tions. For exam­ple, when you pay atten­tion to your breath­ing, or if you golf, or if you’re a dancer, or if you do some­thing like yoga, or Tai Chi, or if you meditate—in all those cases, you’re pay­ing atten­tion to the inter­nal sen­sa­tions of your body. Well, as it turns out, a part of the brain called the insula—there are two of them actually—track the inter­nal state of the body, which means also that they’re inti­mately involved in sens­ing your feelings.

Research has shown that as peo­ple acti­vate their insula more, such as through med­i­ta­tion, the insula actu­ally gets thicker. In other words, neu­rons make more and more con­nec­tions with each other, which actu­ally mea­sur­ably thick­ens your insula.

MB: And what is the ben­e­fit of that?

RH: It’s a demon­stra­tion that they are mak­ing more con­nec­tions with each other. So as a result, peo­ple then become more in touch with them­selves, which is good. But even beyond that, research has shown that the insula is also cru­cial for empa­thy. Because when we get a sense of the emo­tions of other peo­ple, we actu­ally light up the same neural cir­cuits in our own brain—they light up as if we’re access­ing those feel­ings ourselves.

So the point is, that if you can strengthen the insula, that will both make you more able to be aware of your­self and also help you be more empathic toward others.

The clas­sic line in neural psy­chol­ogy is, “As neu­rons fire together they wire together.” The seem­ingly imma­te­r­ial and ephemeral flow of the thoughts and feel­ings through your mind leaves behind traces in your brain. So the take­away point is to be very thought­ful about what you think about all day long. A lot of us think about crud all day long. We’re wor­ry­ing about this, we’re plan­ning that, we’re obsess­ing over some­thing bad that might hap­pen that hasn’t even hap­pened, what­ever. Or we’re think­ing about what a loser we are, how we just never get any­where in life, or peo­ple don’t love us, or we get mistreated—and there’s a place for that if it’s productive.

But much of the time, we’re just run­ning those movies in the men­tal sim­u­la­tor. The prob­lem is, as we run those movies, they’re leav­ing behind traces of neural struc­ture that are neg­a­tivis­tic, depres­sive, pes­simistic, and very self-critical.

MB: So we ini­tially talked about the more pos­i­tive aspects of the brain. Now you’ve started iden­ti­fy­ing parts of the brain that have a more neg­a­tive slant. And in your book, you do talk about this neg­a­tiv­ity bias in our brains. Can you describe that a bit more?

RH: Our ances­tors, the ones who lived to pass on their genes, got bet­ter and bet­ter and bet­ter at mak­ing a cru­cial deci­sion many times a day about whether to approach some­thing or avoid it. Approach the pleas­ant, avoid the unpleas­ant. Approach the car­rot, duck the stick.

Alright, now the prob­lem is that sticks are much more impor­tant to pay atten­tion to in the wild than car­rots because if you miss a car­rot today, you’ll get another chance at one tomor­row, but if you don’t avoid a stick today—Wham!—you’re not gonna get a crack at a car­rot tomorrow.

So we’ve devel­oped what’s called in sci­ence a “neg­a­tiv­ity bias,” which means that the brain, to help us sur­vive, pref­er­en­tially looks for, reacts to, stores, and then recalls neg­a­tive infor­ma­tion over pos­i­tive infor­ma­tion. For exam­ple, there’s a pretty famous find­ing in the realm of rela­tion­ship psy­chol­ogy from John Gottman, of the Uni­ver­sity of Wash­ing­ton, that it takes at least five pos­i­tive inter­ac­tions to make up for just one neg­a­tive one. In other words, in effect, a neg­a­tive inter­ac­tion in an impor­tant rela­tion­ship is five times more pow­er­ful than a pos­i­tive inter­ac­tion. That’s an exam­ple of the neg­a­tiv­ity bias at work.

So then the really inter­est­ing ques­tion becomes: How can you over­come it? That’s why, for me, tak­ing in the good is an absolutely cru­cial skill to develop, and a won­der­ful way to bal­ance this unfair tilt embed­ded in your own ner­vous system.

MB: What do you mean by “tak­ing in the good”?

RH: The brain is like Vel­cro for neg­a­tive expe­ri­ences but Teflon for pos­i­tive experiences.

For most of us, as we go through the day, most of the moments in life are either neu­tral or pos­i­tive. The prob­lem is that neu­tral or pos­i­tive moments get remem­bered with stan­dard mem­ory sys­tems, which is to say they’re mostly in-and-out. But neg­a­tive expe­ri­ences are instantly reg­is­tered and intensely focused on, based on the neg­a­tiv­ity bias of the brain. Then they get stored in what’s called “implicit memory”—not so much mem­ory for events, like what I did on my sum­mer vaca­tion, but rather the feel­ing of being alive. And that implicit mem­ory bank gets shaded in a darker and darker way by the slowly accu­mu­lat­ing residue of neg­a­tive experiences.

To coun­ter­act that, we need to actively build up pos­i­tive implicit mem­o­ries to bal­ance this unfair accu­mu­la­tion of neg­a­tive implicit mem­o­ries. And the way to do that is three steps for sure with an optional fourth step.

The first step is to turn pos­i­tive events into pos­i­tive expe­ri­ences. All kinds of good things hap­pen in our daily life that we hardly notice at all, and if we do, we don’t feel it. Some­one pays us a com­pli­ment, we hardly pay atten­tion to it, or we deflect it. So instead of thatm you turn pos­i­tive events into pos­i­tive experiences.

Sec­ond, really savor it. In other words, the way to remem­ber some­thing is to make it intense, felt in the body, and last­ing. That’s how we give those neu­rons lots and lots time to fire together so they start wiring together. So rather than notic­ing it and feel­ing good for a cou­ple of sec­onds, stay with it. Rel­ish it, enjoy it, for 10, 20, or 30 sec­onds, so it really starts devel­op­ing neural structure.

The third step is to sense and intend that this pos­i­tive expe­ri­ence is sink­ing into you and becom­ing a part of you. In other words, it’s becom­ing woven into the fab­ric of your brain and yourself.

For bonus points, if you’re so inclined, it’s often very pow­er­ful to take a cur­rent pos­i­tive expe­ri­ence and have it kind of go down inside to an old place of pain. Do not do this if you have a trauma his­tory and you get flooded if you think about old pain. The method is to have the old painful mate­r­ial be in the back­ground of aware­ness while the cur­rent pos­i­tive expe­ri­ence that is its anti­dote is promi­nent and strong in a fore­ground of aware­ness, and hold both those things in mind for 10 or 20 or 30 sec­onds straight. If you can’t do that, don’t worry about this fourth step. But if you can do that, wow, this fourth step is really pow­er­ful. Hon­estly over many years, it’s how I filled my own hole in the heart.

MB: Your book is filled with prac­tices that peo­ple can try to boost their feel­ings of love and hap­pi­ness and equa­nim­ity. Do you use any of these prac­tices on a reg­u­lar basis?

RH: Oh yeah. My wife wishes I used more, but anyway.

MB: Can you iden­tify one and per­haps describe the effect that you’ve seen it have on your mind and brain?

RH: Yeah, I’ll men­tion two, actually.

One is the impor­tance of focus­ing on pos­i­tive expe­ri­ences, because of the neg­a­tiv­ity bias of the brain, and also because pos­i­tive expe­ri­ence has so many ben­e­fits. It’s so good for the immune sys­tem. It’s so good for con­cen­tra­tion. Pos­i­tive emo­tional states help steady the mind for a com­plex rea­son involv­ing dopamine. So in daily life, I look for pos­i­tive emo­tion and I really try to allow it to be there and to kind of sink into it, to wel­come it.

Sec­ond, I’ve really come to appre­ci­ate how extremely sen­si­tive we are to threat. If you think about it, in life there are two big mis­takes you can make: You can either think there is a tiger there when there is not. Or you can think there is no tiger, but there really is one. Of those two mis­takes, which one do most peo­ple make most the time? It’s the first one. We think there’s a tiger there when there really is no tiger. Or it’s a baby tiger, or it’s a paper tiger, or it’s a tiger in chains. And we go through life feel­ing threat­ened all the time.

So I’ve become very alert to need­less threat. I don’t want to make the sec­ond mistake—in other words, I want to see clearly and be dis­cern­ing about what is truly a threat over there. But I don’t want to be bam­boo­zled or mis­guided either by my own men­tal processes or by exter­nal mes­sages into think­ing that there’s a threat there when there really isn’t one.

And related to that, I’ve also become much more thought­ful about not being threat­en­ing to other peo­ple need­lessly. I don’t mean walk­ing on egg shells, avoid­ing telling the truth when it’s appro­pri­ate and use­ful and all the rest of that. But what I do mean is being thought­ful about how I give peo­ple an alarm sig­nal some­times when I don’t really mean to.

MB: Let me come back to another very con­crete aspect of your book, and that’s some­thing that you call “the two darts of suf­fer­ing.” Can you talk a lit­tle bit about what those two darts are and whether they’re tied to our ner­vous sys­tem in any way?

RH: Sure. Well, the metaphor is the Bud­dha. He said that things hap­pen in life that are painful and dif­fi­cult. At a phys­i­cal level, we’re all exposed to aging and dis­ease and death, and because we’re intensely social ani­mals who love, we’re also exposed to sor­row when peo­ple we love die or are threat­ened or are in pain. Those are the first darts of life; you can’t escape them.

Then the Bud­dha pointed out that we com­pound the pain through self-inflicted wounds, in other words, that we throw “sec­ond darts” at our­selves. For exam­ple, we get upset that we’re in pain or some­body says some­thing cruel to us, which is a first dart, and it pierces us and hurts, but then we brood over it for the rest of the day, inflict­ing all kinds of sec­ond darts upon ourselves.

When a first dart lands, it’s really impor­tant to try to auto­mat­i­cally start acti­vat­ing the parasym­pa­thetic wing of the ner­vous sys­tem, because first darts trig­ger the stress response—the “fight or flight” wing of the ner­vous sys­tem. So as much as you can, start try­ing to get auto­matic around tak­ing deep breaths, calm­ing your­self down, imag­in­ing that you’re safe, or as safe as pos­si­ble, bring­ing to mind other resources, remind­ing your­self you’ve got­ten through these sit­u­a­tions in the past, call­ing to mind pos­i­tive emo­tions that are the anti­dote to what­ever has hap­pened right then and there—whatever works for you.

It’s decep­tively sim­ple, but if one takes in the good a hand­ful of times every­day, related to really small things, that’s going to make a per­ma­nent change in your ner­vous sys­tem, prob­a­bly in a mat­ter of days.

–  Michael Bergeisen is the host of “The Greater Good Pod­cast.” The Greater Good Mag­a­zine, based at UC-Berkeley, is a quar­terly mag­a­zine that high­lights ground break­ing sci­en­tific research into the roots of com­pas­sion and altruism.

Related arti­cles:
– Enhance Hap­pi­ness and Health by Cul­ti­vat­ing Grat­i­tude: Inter­view with Robert Emmons
– The Ten Habits of Highly Effec­tive Brains

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