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MindFull of GOOD

Dr. Rick Hanson's Occasional Collection of Good, Free Stuff

NEW ON THE BEING WELL PODCAST:

The Freeze Response, Gifted Kid Syndrome, and BPD: July Mailbag

"Sometimes we cannot succeed in terms of the obvious goals, but we can redefine the game into something we can win at."
— DR. RICK HANSON

Dr. Rick and Forrest answer listener questions about perfectionism, performance anxiety, trauma, and relationships. They explore how early praise for being “gifted” can create a fear of failure and contribute to “failure to launch,” and share ways to shift from focusing on an idealized future to appreciating your actual self right now. They discuss learned helplessness, the freeze response, and practical ways to build agency and vitality to counter feelings of powerlessness. Other topics include the differences between borderline personality disorder and bipolar disorder, overcoming performance anxiety, and how to decide which friendships are worth investing in.

NEW FROM THE WEDNESDAY TALK/MEDITATION:

How to Find Peace in Impermanence

Life can feel like it’s coming at us from all sides—relationships change, plans fall through, our bodies age, and the world keeps shifting under our feet. It’s totally normal to feel uneasy or anxious in the face of all this unpredictability.

But what if we could relate to change in a different way—not as something to fear, but as something we can move with, and even find peace within?

So this week, I explored one of the Buddha’s most fundamental insights: that everything is changing. And not in a dry or philosophical way, but in a deeply practical sense—how seeing this clearly can actually help us suffer less.

HAVE YOU READ IT YET?

Buddha's Brain: 15th Anniversary Edition

With more than 500,000 copies in print since it was first published, I'm proud to announce the 15th Anniversary edition of my book Buddha's Brain, which features this new preface.

ALSO NEW ON THE BEING WELL PODCAST:

How Real Change Happens with Elizabeth Ferreira

Forrest is joined by associate therapist Elizabeth Ferreira to discuss parts work, psychological defenses, and how real change happens. They talk about the inner child work Forrest recently did during an episode with renowned therapist Terry Real, and how that led to meaningful changes in their relationship. Elizabeth and Forrest unpack the therapeutic process Terry led Forrest through, and discuss clinical technique, why small shifts can lead to big changes, the challenges of working with developmentally young material, and why insight alone is rarely enough.

FREE SUMMIT:

Intergenerational Healing Summit

I'm proud to be a part of the Global Compassion Coalition's FREE Intergenerational Healing Summit, happening July 28th - August 1st. You’ll learn from world-renowned psychologists, mindfulness teachers, and trauma experts as they guide you through the essential pillars of intergenerational healing.

FREE SUMMIT:

Reset Your Nervous System

If you’re feeling overwhelmed, anxious, or stuck in old patterns, the Reset Your Nervous System Super Conference offers powerful, science-based tools to help you calm your body, heal past pain, and feel more at home in yourself. With insights from leading experts in trauma, somatics, and neurobiology, you’ll explore practical ways to restore balance, build resilience, and nurture lasting inner peace.

ASK RICK:

Why is it important to know about the Responsive and Reactive settings of the brain?

Taking in the good is a foundational practice that compensates for the brain’s preferential encoding of negative experiences and builds inner resources. More fundamentally, I am interested in naturalizing Buddhist psychology in a frame of evolutionary neuropsychology and operationalizing states and factors of non-craving (broadly defined in the Buddhist sense) in neuropsychological terms.

I’m using a conceptual framework that draws on polyvagal theory, Higgins work on promotion/prevention, and other work to posit three core motivational systems in the brain – Avoiding harms, Approaching rewards, and Attaching to others – which have two primary “settings.” 

When a person experiences that his or her core needs are met for safety, satisfaction, and connection (tracking the three motivational systems), the related system tends to default to its Responsive setting, in which there is little or no basis for craving in that system; in this state, the body refuels and repairs itself and the mind rests in a basic sense of peace, contentment, and love (again, tracking the systems). 

"On the other hand, when the person experiences that one or more core needs are not being met, the related system shifts into its Reactive setting, there’s a fight-flight-freeze stress response cascade, the body burns resources, and the mind shifts into a basic sense of “hatred,” “greed,” and heartache (using two of the traditional Buddhist mental “poisons” in broad terms and tracking the three motivational systems)."

While Reactive bursts can be adaptive, especially under the conditions in which our ancestors evolved, chronic Reactive states create significant allostatic load as well as a lot of unnecessary anxiety, irritation, frustration, drivenness, envy, interpersonal disturbances, and shame. Consequently, repeatedly taking in the good both down-regulates Reactivity and increases Responsivity in the moment plus gradually internalizes a felt sense of needs met as well as inner resources that together help stabilize a person in the Responsive mode even during challenging conditions, thus over time undoing many of the underlying neuropsychological causes of craving and thus suffering (broadly defined).

RICK'S PICK:

The CHI Podcast

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