Rick Hanson: The Neuroscience of Happiness and How Mindfulness Improves Brain Health | Mental Health | YAPClassic

Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha: Entrepreneurship and Self-Improvement Podcast - Hala Taha | Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing | YAP Media Network

In this YAP Classic episode, host Hala Taha sits down with psychologist and neuroplasticity expert Rick Hanson to explore the neuroscience o

Key takeaways

• The future is always open—growth and change are possible every day through consistent learning and self-improvement.
• Neuroplasticity allows us to reshape our brains by cultivating positive mental habits like gratitude, compassion, and mindfulness.

Main topics

• Neuroplasticity and brain rewiring
• Mindfulness and its impact on mental health

Notable quotes

"Learning itself—knowing how to help yourself develop—is the strength of strengths. Learning is the superpower of superpowers."

Conclusion

Rick Hanson's journey from a shy, unhappy teenager to a leading expert in neuroplasticity and mindfulness demonstrates that

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Hey, young improfiters. Ever notice how one small criticism can ruin your entire day while 10 compliments barely leave a mark? In this YAP Classic, I'm joined by psychologist, bestselling author, and neuroplasticity expert, Rick Hansen, whose work has helped millions understand how their brain shapes our happiness, resilience, and well-being. What makes this conversation so relevant today is Rick's insight that many of the struggles we accept as part of life, from stress and self-doubt to overthinking, are not fixed traits. They're patterns that we can train our brain to change. So if you've ever felt trapped in your own mental loops, Rick is about to show you how small, intentional moments can help you rewind your mind for the better. Speaker 2 (0:41) Hi, Rick. Welcome to Young and Profiting Podcast. Speaker 3 (0:44) Hello. I'm really happy to be here. We spoke briefly before we started, and I'm thoroughly psyched about what we're going to be talking about. Speaker 2 (0:51) Thanks. I'm really excited too. I know that my listeners love this kind of content, so I'm sure they're going to enjoy this conversation. So welcome, Rick. For those who don't know you, you are a psychologist. You are the founder of the Wellspring Institute. You are the host of the Being Well podcast and a bestselling author. So we're going to get into your neurodharma book and seven ways of being in a bit. But first, I want to start off by hearing a little bit about your childhood. So I learned that you had a big turn. point when you were just 15 years old. You were a little bit awkward, you were unhappy, and just pretty dissatisfied with life until you realized this big aha moment in your life. So talk to us about this turning point when you were a teenager. Speaker 3 (1:35) Oh, thanks for queuing me up there. So I grew up in a decent, fairly stable, lower middle class. environment in Southern California, no abuse, no trauma, nothing horrible, and still for a lot of complicated reasons, including being really young while going through school, I was really unhappy. I was a lot of awkward, a lot of miserable, a lot of neurotic, and it just seemed pretty hopeless. And right there, right about age 15, and I know it was about age 15 because I was reading Dune at the time, and the main character, Paul Madib, is also 15 when the book starts. it's right about. And I suddenly basically realized that as bad as my past had been and as much the present might suck. The future was open to me in the sense that I could always learn a little, heal a little, and grow a little every day. I could learn how to be a little less completely tongue-tied around girls. I could learn how to be not so scared of these big aggro, you know, alpha male types in the locker room. I could learn how to manage my own mind bit by bit. And in effect, I learned that learning itself knowing how to help yourself develop, not just memorize the multiplication table, but develop as a person was the strength of strengths. Learning is the superpower of superpowers because it's the one we tap into to grow the rest of them. It took me many years, including becoming a neuropsychologist, et cetera, to really understand the how of that, how we can actually heighten neuroplastic change inside our own brains and gradually hardwire things like grit, gratitude, compassion, and happiness altogether into our own nervous system. And there are things we can do to do that, but the fundamental idea that I was in charge of who I was becoming has shaped the rest of my life. Speaker 2 (3:32) That's an incredible story. And I can't wait for us to dive deep on neuroplasticity and all the ways that we can improve our brain and actually change our brain. But first, you've got some interesting things that I want to talk about in terms of your journey. So it turns out you started college when you were just 16 years old. So that's pretty incredible. How did you end up going to school so early? And what was that like? Because at that age, two years difference in terms of college is a big deal. Speaker 3 (3:57) Oh, thanks for remarking that. So I skipped a grade. It was second grade. not a big deal. And I was a bright little kid and all the rest of that. And that had some advantages, but it also, Speaker 2 (4:09) plus Speaker 3 (4:10) my own kind of shy, anxious temperament, led me to feeling like the runt of the litter, as my dad put it, because he grew up in a ranch in North Dakota. So I felt really shy and awkward. Going off to college, though, on the other hand, breaking away from home and having a sense of being able to step into all kinds of new possibilities was wonderful for me. And to locate it in our culture, I started UCLA in 1969. So just imagine the height of the political changes of the time, the counterculture, all kinds of developments in psychology. the surge of Eastern wisdom coming into the West at the tail end of the 60s and early 70s. It was a wild time. It was a fertile time. It was a good time to be in school. Plus, there was a lot of great music as well. Speaker 2 (5:04) That's so cool. I mean, it's so great. See, I thought there was going to be something more to it, not that you just skipped second grade, but it's super interesting nonetheless. And the fact that probably some of those feelings that you had is what ultimately led you to becoming who you are and what you do and what you're passionate about today, which is just really interesting in itself. So a key part of your journey was wanting to understand why people feel unhappy and Speaker 1 (5:30) what Speaker 2 (5:31) sparks unhappiness. So how did this curiosity lead you to starting to study neuroscience and psychology? Speaker 3 (5:39) Maybe I'd like to kind of draw people to a level of I don't know, a kind of tender intimacy with themselves a little deeper and ask people, what are some of the things you knew when you were really young? Maybe you didn't have words for it, but you just had a knowing. You had a sense of what it was like for people around you, or you had a sense of who you were, your fundamental capabilities. Maybe there was a dream for your life that really was starting to take form even when you were in kindergarten. And for me, in my earliest memories, and I have a lot of memory of my childhood going all the way back probably to late two years old, just in all of them is this wistful, poignant sense. of the needless unhappiness, the needless strife, the needless bickering, nothing horrible, but the needless hassles, the needless stresses, the needless worries, the needless feeling less than other people or being uncertain about where we stand with other people, just ick, needless. And so, yeah, absolutely. I had this sense of it and this kind of movement, not just observing it. but a movement of compassion, a movement of compassionate action to do what one can. And I'm far from unique. I think so many people, I suspect for you as well, Hala, right, in your own background, moving you to do what you do. There also was that sense that there's so much unnecessary unhappiness and there's so much more well-being and harmony, even in a very real world, including in a competitive marketplace, that we can... forged together and there's a movement in you, a movement in me, and probably a movement in many other people as well to try to be helpful in that way. Speaker 2 (7:30) Yeah, totally. I think you bring a really solid point across the fact that so many of us, we live decently privileged lives, you know, and we all have food on the table. Most of us are able to go to school and just, you know, we have roofs over our heads and we take all this for granted. And like the little things become such a big deal, even though we have so much to be thankful for. Speaker 1 (7:53) And so I Speaker 2 (7:54) think that's a really great point. So I want to talk about Buddhism because. Like we just mentioned, you grew up decently privileged. You know, you're from L.A. You Speaker 1 (8:03) know, Speaker 2 (8:04) it's pretty unique that your religion is Buddhism. So talk to us about how you fell in love with that ancient Asian religion. Speaker 3 (8:13) Oh, sweet. So I grew up a casual Methodist. That was kind of the framework and tons of respect, certainly for Jesus, as a teacher and a realized being. That said, the forms of all that just didn't somehow connect with me. The way I was communicated just felt kind of small and dogmatic and kind of bossy. So then I land in college, the doors are kicked wide open, right? We're talking 1969, 70, and all the rest of that. And toward the end of college, I just had an interest in seeing, oh. what's out there in the Eastern traditions, which I didn't know really anything about. And I encountered Buddhist teachings, which in the roots of them are arguably not even religious. They're psychological, essentially. Basically, the fundamental observation of the Buddha is that everything is connected to everything else and is continually changing. And if we... flow with that river. If we ride that horse in the direction it's going, we suffer less and we harm less. On the other hand, if we fight the fact that things are changing and we try to cling to our experiences and try to make certain things happen inside our minds and we try to push away various things, we create suffering and harm for ourselves and other people, pure and simple. Speaker 2 (9:33) And Speaker 3 (9:33) so that's kind of where it really began for me. And I guess I should add as well that that's what's been the heart of the matter for me. these fundamental, very psychological teachings about the deep nature of the mind and what are the causes of our happiness and well-being and welfare and harmony in the way we live with others, and then how can we embody those causes through personal practice, learning. Now we're coming back to that principle of learning, personal development, cultivation of what's skillful and useful and good and enjoyable inside ourselves. How can we actually develop ourselves in that way? So that's my orientation to all this. And later on, I learned a lot about both clinical psychology and then certainly neuroscience. So if you think about the combination of hardcore brain science. clinical psychology, and contemplative wisdom, that combination of those three things is just packed with power and full of skillful means for how we can help ourselves and other people. Speaker 2 (10:37) Yeah, 100%. And honestly, I've interviewed a lot of neuroscientists and neuropsychologists, and so far nobody has brought in this Speaker 1 (10:45) element of this wisdom that you're talking about, this Buddhism element. So it's really unique, and I'm excited for this conversation. So let's talk about neurodharma. Speaker 2 (10:55) Dharma is something that I didn't know what it meant. So just starting off, what does the name mean? Speaker 3 (11:01) Oh, great. It's a... word from India originally, it means essentially the way it is, the truth of things. And it also can mean accounts of the way it is. So like a body of wisdom, we could say, whether it's a body of wisdom in Western psychology or a body of wisdom in a particular tradition, such as the Buddhist tradition, which has many aspects to it, right? Tibetan Buddhism, Zen, pure land, other forms of it as well. And I put those two terms together. Because if you kind of think about it, I'm going to get a little geeky here, we can know ourselves in two ways. First, we can know ourselves subjectively from the inside out in terms of our experiences. And that was all that was available to the early teachers, such as the Buddha. And certainly until very recently, that's the only way we could know ourselves. But with modern biology and then neuroscience, And then especially in the last 10, 20 years or so, neuropsychology really coming together, we can know ourselves from the outside in, objectively. The combination of the two, these two ways of knowing ourselves, is what I call neurodharma. And we can go back and forth, right? Here we are. We're upset about something. Somebody, our boss, frowned at us. Somebody else took credit for one of our good ideas. Speaker 3 (12:28) You're like, let's say a woman, as our daughter has reported to us many times. You're sitting in meetings and you say something, everybody ignores you. Then some dude down at the other end of the table says the same thing five minutes later and everybody starts clapping. Like what? Okay, this is happening. It's happening inside your mind. That's what you're experiencing. Meanwhile, if you want, you can also know, oh, I've got this amygdala that is very sensitized. to negative experiences. And so it will routinely turbocharge something that's kind of a one or a two on the object of yuckiness scale, but make me feel like an eight or a nine in terms of being pissed off or wounded or hurt. oh, I can know that about myself. And I can also know maybe objectively that my amygdala got sensitized when I grew up in a pretty critical family or in a culture that was pretty critical or shaming, maybe body shaming or who knows what else it was doing, right? And by knowing that objectively about the hardware. You know, the three pounds of tofu-like tissue inside the coconut and how it's cooking away. Knowing that objectively, right, about ourselves can be matched together with the subjective internal experience, which then, let's say, might move you to just going, hmm. Knowing, let's say, that the amygdala has oxytocin receptors on it. In other words, it has receptors for a neurochemical that's released with... experiences of healthy connection. And the action at those receptor sites on the amygdala is calming and inhibitory, like pumping the brakes in a car that's running away now down a mountain. Knowing that, aha, there I am, upset about, let's say, this thing that happened at work. But I can now deliberately think about or draw in the feeling of being with people, real people, including maybe my dog or my cat, who actually care about me. And when I bring them to mind, I start feeling more connected, more warm-hearted, maybe my caring for them as well. And that is going to increase oxytocin activity in my brain and calm down my poor little amygdala that's flashing red right now. That's an example of neurodharma. Speaker 2 (14:41) It's super fascinating. I guess I want to ask you this question. Why is it important to be in this calm, steady state? Like, why is that the best state to be in? Speaker 3 (14:52) Huh. Well, that's a great question. I would say it like this. So, you know, I'm a real person. I've done a lot of rock climbing, for example, and, you know, I can kind of get excited and intense and so forth. Speaker 3 (15:05) I think what's really helpful is to be able to sustain a kind of steadiness of self-awareness. And I think that's what you're really talking about. Speaker 1 (15:14) Around Speaker 3 (15:14) that steadiness of self-awareness, sustained mindfulness of what's happening inside