Simple practices for resilient happiness from Rick Hanson, PhD
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What is Well-Being? And how do you create it for yourself? Join me on February 8th for a free, online talk on "The Brain Science of Well-Being" and learn how to build up mental resources and inner strengths using the power of positive neuroplasticity. Click here to RSVP.
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Who Has Cared about You?
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The Practice:
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Feel Cared About.
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Why?
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Everyone knows what it’s like to care about someone. Remember being with a friend, a mate, a pet: you feel warmly connected and want him or her not to suffer and to be happy.
On the other hand, you’ve probably had the sense, at one time or another, of not being cared about. That you didn’t matter to another person or a group of people. Maybe they weren’t actively against you, but they sure weren’t for you.
As soon as you recall a time like that, it’s immediately clear why it’s important to feel cared about – which is to the heart what water is to your body.
Sometimes we feel embarrassed about our yearnings to be cared about. But they are completely normal – and deeply rooted in evolution. Love, broadly defined, has been the primary driver of the development of the brain over the last 80 million years.
Our ancestors – mammals, primates, hominids, and humans – survived and flourished and passed on their genes by learning to find good mates, bond with their young, draw males in to provide for children, create “the village it takes to raise a child” whose brain is quadrupling in size after birth and thus needs a long and vulnerable childhood, and team up with each other to compete with other bands for scarce resources.
In this context, being cared about was crucial to survival. Mammals, etc., that did not care about being cared about did not pass on their genes. No wonder you care about being cared about!
Studies show that feeling cared about buffers against stress, increases positive emotions, promotes resilience, and increases caring for others. Plus it feels darn good. And over time, feeling cared about today can gradually fill any holes in your heart left over from childhood (or last job, or last marriage) in which the caring felt like a thin soup.
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How?
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Let’s start with the hard part: opening to feeling cared about often brings up not feeling cared about. Those feelings are real, and they’re based on real things, like having a disengaged or critical parent or being left out in school social situations. It’s important to accept those feelings, and hold them as best you can in a large space of awareness so they are not so overwhelming.
Then, take a breath, and turn to the other side of the truth: the ways and times you have been cared about. Those really exist! They do in everyone’s life. The caring may not have been perfect or sustained, so it could be tempting to discount it or push it away as not good enough. (And we have to watch out for tendencies in the mind to hold on to grievances and reproaches that harm us more than anyone else – including the people we may want to punish.) But the caring that was present amidst everything else was indeed the real deal. And you, like everyone else, need to take that in as the living food every heart must have.
For starters, recall being with someone who is (or was) caring toward you. Perhaps a grandparent making cookies, or a parent, friend, teacher, sibling, mate, child, or pet. Or a spiritual being or presence.
Then open to feeling cared about. What does your body do when someone cares about you? What kind of thoughts or attitudes go through your mind? What’s your emotional response to being cared about? Know what it feels like to be cared about so you can find your way back here again.
Then, this week, look for opportunities to feel cared about. Most of these will be small, passing moments when someone is sincerely thoughtful, friendly, or concerned. Look behind the eyes of people, and see the human caring for you when it’s there – even if it’s masked behind formalities, a prickly personality, too many words, or no words at all.
When it’s there, take it in. Let the feelings, body sensations, and thoughts of being cared about soak into you, like swallowing water on a hot and thirsty day.
And then each night, before you fall asleep, take a moment to call to mind again the sense of being cared about – resting in that feeling as it weaves its way into your breathing, body, and dreams.
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Know Someone Who Would Like to Feel More Cared About?
Share this Just One Thing practice with them!
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NEW ON THE BEING WELL PODCAST
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Deeper Mindfulness
with Dr. Danny Penman
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Dr. Rick and Forrest focus on one of the most important skills we can learn: how we can become more aware of all the parts of our experience, avoid being captured by any one of them, and work with those parts more skillfully. Author and meditation teacher Dr. Danny Penman joins the show to explore how we can help our brain interpret the world more accurately and practical tools for relaxing suffering and enjoying life.
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| Watch/Listen to the Episode |
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More Good Stuff
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WEDNESDAY MEDITATION
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Watch last week's meditation and talk on Greenlighting, the Green Zone, and Maximizing Your Joy, and if you haven't yet, join me every week for this free, live offering.
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How we see the world around us is not necessarily how other species see it. Thanks to open-source cameras, we can now see it how they do with over 90% accuracy.
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FOR PARENTS
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Skill with another gender’s style lets you shift gears effectively, depending on what’s needed. It’s completely alright – and often necessary! – to ask your partner to communicate with you in a way that’s closer to what you need.
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HAVING TROUBLE ACHIEVING YOUR GOALS?
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In his latest article, Forrest Hanson talks about how to master the Law of Effect by having more fun — and achieving your long-term goals.
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ARE YOU AN ICF COACH?
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I'm happy to announce that you can now earn 34 CCE credits for the International Coaching Federation when you take my Positive Neuroplastcity Training! Click here to learn more.
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Making Great Relationships
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Get 50 simple practices for solving conflicts, building connection, and fostering love — now available wherever books are sold.
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"When you have a chance to feel seen, listened to, appreciated, liked, valued, or loved: take a dozen seconds or more to savor this experience, letting it fill your mind and body, sinking into it as it sinks into you."
Rick Hanson, Ph.D.
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JUST ONE THING (JOT) is the free newsletter that suggests a simple practice each week for more joy, more fulfilling relationships, and more peace of mind. A small thing repeated routinely adds up over time to produce big results.
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Just one thing that could change your life.
(© Rick Hanson, 2023)
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