1KHO 899: You’re Entitled to be a Happy, Healthy Mom | Dr. Rick Hanson, A Happy Healthy Mom

**Ginny Yurich** (0:00)
You know how every friend group has that one person who somehow ends up planning the trips? They're finding the hotel, figuring out what's actually worth doing, sending everybody links, and maybe you're thinking, wait, that's me, I do this all the time. Why am I not getting paid for it? That is basically the idea behind Fora. Fora is a modern travel agency that gives you the tools and training to actually build your own travel business. You can earn commission booking hotels, cruises and experiences, whether you start with your own travel or just helping friends and family with theirs. And what I think is really cool is that you're not just booking things. Fora has relationships with more than 7,000 preferred travel partners, so you can often give your clients things like upgrades, resort credits and a late checkout. So if travel planning is already something you love doing, this might be worth checking out. Become a Fora advisor today at foratravel.com/1000hours.
That's F-O-R-A, travel.com/1000hours. And make sure you tell them that we send to you, foratravel.com/1000hours.
I'm the founder of 1000Hours Outside. We're going to be talking about a topic today that is critically important. It's about the care of the mother. And Dr. Rick Hanson has written a book along with his wife called A Happy Healthy Mom. If you're listening to this, it just came out. You can go grab a copy. It is a guide to less stress, better teamwork and more joy on the journey. Dr. Rick Hanson has written so many books. He has an incredible newsletter where you can get free teaching every week. He has an incredibly robust website, rickhanson.com, where there's all sorts of free help talking about anxiety and fear, depression, sadness, grief and loss, meditation, navigating political turmoil, negativity and anger. I mean, the topic just go on and on. There are courses and Rick has three podcasts as well.
This is a robust man with so much information. Rick, thank you so much for being here.

**Rick Hanson** (1:53)
That's really kind Ginny and I'm so happy to be here. I feel, you know, I'm a guy and wow, I'm just blown away by women in general, what they go through and what they offer to all of us, and mothers in particular. You know, my heart goes out to children and it's utterly clear that the best way to take good care of our precious, vulnerable, innocent children is to take really good care of their mothers, which very often means supporting their relationships with others too.
And so we wrote a book about that, but it really comes out of that deep kind of moral commitment to honoring and respecting and helping the people who are so deeply involved in bearing and rearing the next generation.

**Ginny Yurich** (2:36)
It's an incredibly well-written book, A Happy Healthy Mom, and it truly is a guide. I have got, I told you before we kicked it off, I've got 10 pages of notes.
But before we hop into that, I would love if you told us a little bit about you. Your dad was a zoology professor. I thought that was really cool and interesting. But you talked about how you were a shy and bookish kid who loved the outdoors, and you still love the outdoors. So could you give us a little background on just you as a person?

**Rick Hanson** (3:04)
Oh, thanks.
One reason I'm really happy to be here is the whole tagline on 1000 Hours Outside, absolutely.
My mom, my mom and dad are no longer with us, bless their memory, and my mom was raised essentially by a single mother, under tough conditions. She was the oldest of two kids. And my dad grew up on a ranch in North Dakota. He was originally a cowboy, born in 1918
He eventually got interested in animals and birds and became a professor of zoology. So I grew up in a loving and decent home with two pretty stressed out, traditional, somewhat critical, controlling authoritarian parents in the suburbs of Los Angeles. And I'm the oldest of three kids. So that's where I grew up. And I skipped a grade of a very late birthday. I was very young going through school. And my parents were very busy and kind of traditional. So I felt really quite unseen deep down inside, unseen by my peers. I was kind of on the outside and unseen by my parents. And I had these two great refuges for me growing up. One of them was reading. And I, particularly science fiction, imagining a world where people were practical and you could solve problems together. And the wilderness, the outdoors, outside our suburban home in Los Angeles. And that sense of being outside and being able to move outside and not be such a dork and to feel lived by the whole natural world in a harmonious and supportive kind of way was completely central to me. And it's been really marked my journey. I've gotten into rock climbing. I got pretty good at it. I'm too old now to be any good at it anymore, although I still go out occasionally. And one of my favorite things is being off trail in wilderness by myself, typically, moving safely over the land. And I think that's such a fundamental and transformational experience for kids, too, to get into a little bit of nature, at least.