The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable - Rick Hanson - #903

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Dr. Rick Hanson, welcome to the show.

**Rick Hanson** (0:02)
Hey, Chris, it's great to talk with you again. We were chatting briefly beforehand, and it was literally over six years ago. And your whole work has skyrocketed. I'm really glad for you, and I'm really happy to be here.

**Chris Williamson** (0:14)
I appreciate that. Yeah, episode 47 was you, and this is going to be episode 902, something like that. So yeah, you were like a protoplasm. You were just a mere amoeba at the beginning of this journey. And look now as we're dinosaur-sized diplodocus plotting around.

**Rick Hanson** (0:39)
I'm a fan of mammals. I feel like I have a lot of empathy for our rats, our kind of like rat-like ancestors running around in Jurassic Park that lived through the cataclysm. Yeah, you know, the asteroid came. That was it on the 90% of the species, but our ancestors were crafty and sly and warm-blooded and had babies they took care of. And we are here today.

**Chris Williamson** (1:04)
The progeny continues on. So I want to go through the neurobiology of happiness today. This is maybe taking you back to sort of the beginning of your work, which I've become hugely obsessed by neurobiology, especially as it relates to wellbeing, interpersonal stuff. It really does feel like we sort of go around the houses, finding explanations and personifying and coming up with interesting descriptions and titles for things, to just come back to the nervous system and to just come back to sort of neurobiology. And I kind of really want to get this year into the nuts and bolts of this. So I guess maybe a good place to start would be, what are positive and negative mental states from a neurobiological perspective?

**Rick Hanson** (1:50)
Big picture is that there are neural correlates of the stream of consciousness. So we're having experiences, and those patterns of mental activity correlate with underlying patterns of neural activity. Maybe there's some X factor that's supernatural or even divine ultimately, that's getting in the mix there. Science accepts mysteries. But meanwhile, it's really clear that there's a very high level of correlation moment to moment to moment. So we have states of being moment to moment, and we have underlying traits, underlying tendencies that foster states. And the states, the experiences we're having, can then leave lasting traces behind for better or worse that foster the traits, the underlying tendencies of who we are.
Boom, my work has been extremely focused on how to grab hold of and take charge of who we are becoming. And that fundamental process of helping beneficial states of being, emotions, sensations, attitudes, motivations and thoughts become embedded as underlying beneficial traits, inner strengths of various kinds, including a positive mood, since we're focused on happiness here, that then foster beneficial states in a positive upward spiral. And being in charge of that process, rather than just kind of willy-nilly being swept along, including with a brain that has a big negativity bias, like Velcro for bad experiences, Teflon for good ones. Okay, pause for breath. Any questions so far?

**Chris Williamson** (3:31)
Keep going, go on a roll.

**Rick Hanson** (3:32)
Okay, so you're exactly right. How do we foster in ourselves or those we care about, more beneficial, I prefer beneficial to positive, because sometimes a beneficial state of being is healthy remorse or open-hearted sorrow, or being real about something that's painful to look at and hard, but you really need to look at it inside yourself. Okay, so how do we foster beneficial states and beneficial traits? What's the actual how of that? And what's going on in the machinery under the hood? That's where you're getting it. So operationally, we're talking about reduce, I'm going to use the word bad, not morally, but pragmatically here. Reduce the bad, grow the good.
Less sadness, less unnecessary sadness, fear, anxiety and shame. The four major negative emotions, so-called negative. Okay, less of that, less crippling anxiety, less negative rumination, less of that. And more sense of underlying wellbeing that's resilient, even as you deal with the challenges of life. So what's going on in your brain? So on the negative side, we have a brain that is already biased toward negative learning because that helped our ancestors survive. So, and that very much involves, I'll jump into it now. Actually, I gotta do it. Sorry, bear with me. Brain evolved like a house, three floors, okay? There's the brain stem, the subcortex, and then the cortex sitting on top, right? So what we're trying to do is tune that brain more positively. Problem is the lower regions of the brain are hard to train. They're very reptilian, very automatic, right? And so it takes a certain amount of effort to change them for the better. So essentially, someone who is unhappy, let's say, a lot of the time, is often having an overreactive subcortical region of the amygdala, the hippocampus, and the basal ganglia that's tilted and tuned in a negative direction toward negative emotion and trapped in certain loops, sometimes motivationally as well in terms of what people want and the rewards they're seeking that are negative. And for that person, there's not enough cortical prefrontal top-down regulation of that negative stuff, right? And also, there's a lack of the positive. There's not enough production or activity related to healthy opioids, natural opioids that are the well-being chemicals in the brain or other little slippery small molecules called peptides such as oxytocin. There's an under-production of that. And what we're trying to do basically with people is to increase top-down regulation of negative factors, A, B. We're also trying to really promote more emotional learning of that which is positive so that there's more of a tilting in effect in the brain toward healthy opioids in general, oxytocin in particular. And related then finishing on that, more broader capabilities in terms of integration of cortical systems of different kinds with these underlying more ancient parts of the brain that began to emerge 200 million years ago.