Your brain grabs the bad and drops the good. Hanson's method teaches you to keep the good and grow happier.
Hanson's name for the negativity bias: to keep our ancestors alive, the brain grabs threats and insults instantly, while good experiences slide off unless you deliberately hold onto them.
Hanson estimates only about a third of a person's inner strengths are innate; the other two-thirds are developed over time. You grow them by growing them.
Learning has two stages: activating a positive state, then installing it as a lasting trait. Passing pleasures that are never absorbed leave the brain unchanged.
Have a positive experience, Enrich it, Absorb it, and optionally Link it to negative material. The first three steps are the core; each takes only 10 to 30 seconds, a few times a day.
Make the experience last longer, feel stronger, engage more senses, notice what is fresh or novel in it, and feel why it matters to you personally.
The rest of this summary — and the one thing to do this week — is in the PDF.
Download the free PDFNeuropsychologist Rick Hanson starts from an unfair fact about the brain: it evolved to keep us alive, not happy. Because missing a threat could be fatal while missing a pleasure could not, the brain developed a negativity bias - it is like Velcro for bad experiences and Teflon for good ones. One insult echoes for years, while a warm compliment fades by lunch.
But the brain is not fixed. Hanson points out that only about a third of our inner strengths are innate; the other two-thirds are developed, and the way to develop them is through experience-dependent neuroplasticity: neurons that fire together wire together. His method is called taking in the good - turning a passing good moment into a lasting inner resource by actually staying with it instead of letting it slide off.
