Hey everyone, it's Eric from the one you feed. Happy Holidays to you. Whether you enjoy them or you hate them, I hope you're making the best of them. As a holiday gift and as preparation for the new year, we are rereleasing seven of the older episodes. If you're new to the show, all these episodes are over a year old, so you may not have heard these yet if you've
only been listening for a year. I picked the episodes because either a I think it's a really great episode or B I think it talks about behavior change, which we're heading into the new year, and that's on a lot of people's mind. Speaking of which, we are going to try something this new year. We're going to try the first one You Feed Group Transformation program. It will be a hundred dollars for a month. We're going to
limit it to ten people. We will meet online four times that month, will discuss tips and tricks and different ways to ensure that you stay on track behavior wise. You'll be able to ask questions of me, and we'll do some things where you're paired up as a group so that you can get some support outside of the calls as well to make sure you get the new year off to a great start. So if you're interested, just send an email to me Eric at one you
feed dot net. I hope you enjoy these episodes. I listened back to a couple of them, and um, let's just leave it at we are getting better at what we do. In the very first one, I sound very nervous and I was so Anyway, it's still a great interview. Enjoy these, have a happy new year. Thank you for listening, and we will talk to you soon. Bye. You know, as I put it, we've got a brain that's like velcrow for the bad, the teflon for the good. Welcome
to the one you feed throughout time. Great tinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have, quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking.
Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guests this week is Rick Hanson, PhD, neuropsychologist and author of Hardwiring Happiness, The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm and Confidence. His other books include Buddha's Brain and
Just One Thing. Rick is the founder of the well Spring Institute of Neuroscience and Contemplative Wisdom and an affiliate of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley. He has been an invited speaker at Oxford, Stanford, and Harvard and teaches meditation worldwide. And before we start the interview, a lot of you might have noticed that Eric has been doing some one on one coaching, which we've mentioned
on various episodes. And up next, real quick, I just wanted you to hear one of Eric's coaching clients, Anthony, described what was going on in his life that prompted him to sign up for the one You Feed coaching program. Some of you might be able to identify with him as you listen to this story. Here's Anthony, followed by
the interview. Basically, I've been listening to the podcast for a while, and I had a bunch of goals set for myself that I wanted to accomplish, but it was just sort of falling short, I guess, in in general. So I wanted to get a little bit of encouragement and accountability from an outside source. You know, maybe wouldn't be so easy on me. If you're interested in learning more about this program, send an email to Eric at one you feed dot net. Here's the interview. Hi, Rick,
Welcome to the show. Eric. It's a pleasure to be here, truly. I'm I'm happy to have you on your combination of a couple of things I'm really interested in. One, you're an actual neuroscientist and be You've also got a lot of experience in and teachings in Buddhism. So I find the two of those to be very um compelling together. So I'm excited to get to talk through some of that. Right. I think of the intersection of that is neuro dharma.
I don't think it'll ever be a household word, but it does kind of sum up what we might be talking about here exactly. So our show is called The One You Feed and it's based on the parable of two wolves, where there's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like
greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second, and he looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Yeah. Um, well, if I've I've heard that story in different formulations, including the one that you offered there, and and it touches me deeply
every time. Um I literally sometimes in talks, I'll tell that story and I get the shivers every time I tell it, because to me it it speaks to two really important things. One the presence of the wolf of hate or the wolf of bad or the bad wolf as you put it. You know that capacity or inclination, and almost everyone, certainly me for as you say hate, violence, aggression, jealousy, envy,
ill well, etcetera. And um. The second thing, though, really more to our point, is that everything depends on who you feed, what you feed, and especially what you feed each day. And that gets to something that I think is extremely hopeful, that we truly can cultivate wholesome qualities of mind and heart based on our daily efforts. And no matter what's happened in the past, and no matter how tough our circumstances are, no one can stop us
from feeding the good wolf inside our own mind. And in addition to that being very hopeful, it also takes responsibility. It's on us because no one but us really can actively feed that good wolf every day, and then that's our job to do. UM. And as a neuroscience guy, I'm a very practical neuroscience guy. I produced a little research, I consume a lot of research, and I especially apply it. And in that context, it's amazing to appreciate how much
your brain is continually changing. Right, We're always feeding one wolf or another inside our brain because our brain is
designed to be changed by our experiences. But what we pay attention to and how we relate to what we're paying attention to so to me, the kind of bottom line takeaway using the fancy phrase these days experience dependent neuroplasticity, it's the idea that your brain is continually taking its shape in a very real, concrete, material sense, from whatever you rest your mind upon routinely, particularly given the bias of the brain towards taking its shape from negative experiences,
the negativity bias of the brain. That's why I think it's so important to do what you can to rest your mind and therefore change your brain by resting your mind upon the authentically real, beneficial experiences of everyday life that are usually enjoyable, little moments of feeling connected or grateful or peaceful or mindful or happy, or accomplished, or loving and caring towards other people, and through repeatedly resting your mind on those things, you will gradually wire those
strengths into your brain, thus fundamentally feeding a good wolf. I've got a bunch of questions for you based on what you just said there, and I'm going to start with one that I've been pondering out loud a couple of times lately. And you talk a little bit about the negativity bias, you talk about how we talked about on the show a lot. We're kind of wired that way, right. It's it's better to be safe than sorry, so to speak.
As far as what you pay attention to from a survival basis, is there any sense of does anybody know or is there any way to think about when do our brains start to actually catch up evolutionarily? Now? I know it's been an enormously large amount of time. Um, but we've seen in things like, uh, you know, studies with people breeding foxes and trying to turn them closer to dogs that in a relatively short time period they were able to make pretty substantial changes. There our brains
ever gonna catch up? Well, let's see. First, you're talking about biological evolution, you know, in terms of breeding foxes into um, let's say wolves or something like that. And you know, biological evolutions pretty slow, uh, you know, resets on the clock of the generations, maybe you get four or five generations per century. Uh. So I think that, uh, it's gonna be a long time before we no longer
have this hardwired negativity bias in the brain. You know, as I put it, we've got a brain that's like velcrow for the bad, bit teflon for the good, because that's what kept our ancestors alive to live to see the sunrise, you know, and pass on genes that passed on genes. So I think in terms of pure biological evolution, it'll be quite a while before, if ever, we somehow, as it were, breed that bias out of the brain got the three bees. There, you know, a little alliteration.
But meanwhile, we have cultural evolution and we have opportunities for psychological evolution. Um, The real question is not, um, you know, what kind of wolves do you have in your inner kennel? The real question is is you put it from the very beginning here? What do you cultivate
and what do you restraint? And even if we do have a hardwired tendency to over learn from our bad experiences and under learned from our good experiences, which is unfortunate because learning from our good experiences are beneficial experiences which are usually enjoyable, is the primary way to hardwire those psychological mental resources into ourselves for coping with difficulties and feeling happier and also having more to offer other people.
Even though all of that is true, we still have opportunities many times a day, using mindful attention to tilt towards beneficial experiences and make sure that we in particular install them, that we don't just have them, because merely having beneficial experiences is momentarily pleasant, but it but it produces no lasting value because those beneficial experiences are not installed, They're not encoded in some way as a lasting change
of neural structure or function. But if we do the dozen seconds or so of really savoring, really kind of marinating in our ordinary, authentic beneficial experiences a handful of times every day, in effect, given that we have a brain that's tilted towards survival but against quality of life, when we tilt towards beneficial experiences and in particular really take a dozen or so seconds to internalize them but take them in. If we do that tilt, then we
just level the playing field. But if we do that, and we can all do that, even though we've got a stone age brain, if we do that over the course of a day, we learn a lot more. From that day. We grow, We develop through this installation of beneficial experience as we hardwire happiness and as well as
other inner strengths, into ourselves. And then if you add that up over time, a handful of times a day, day after day after day, the years of our lives, it makes an extraordinary difference for people over the lifespan.
And you call this process taking in the good, And UM, I'd like to get a little bit further into how to do that, but let's start off by UM, you know, the people who listen to the show know that I am a notoriously skeptical of positive thinking, which I know this isn't so, but help me understand the difference between taking in the good, which you're saying is resting your brain on the good things that do happen, versus sort of delusional positive thinking. Yeah. Absolutely, UM, I don't believe
in positive thinking like you. I believe in realistic thinking. So I want to see the whole musaic of reality. And you know, given our common interest, let's say in Buddhism, it's I think no accident that it's said in Buddhism that the fundamental deep route of suffering and evil is
ignorance or delusion, not really recognizing what's actually true. So the fundamental framework for me here is to really recognize what's actually true, and as part of that recognition, it's true that we have a brain that is negatively biased, especially in terms of how we learn from our experiences. And second, it's also true that in terms of the mosaic a reality, there's a lot of crap out there. You know, every life has difficult, hard, painful things, and
many lives are saturated in difficult, hard, painful things. So it's precisely out of that very clear eyed, noble take on both the negativity bias of the brain and the reality of the challenges that we will all face in this life. Based on that, uh, to me, it's really important to recognize in that mosaic of reality in your life the good facts as well as the bad facts.
And we have a brain is biased, as a kind of well intended universal learning learning disability to overlook the good facts generally speaking, while we continuely scan for the bad wounds. And then if you do recognize a so called good fact, you know, you finished the dishes, you finally got the kids in bed, the thing you worried about did not happen. Someone has smiled at you, You
see a flower blooming, You're still alive today. You recognize something inside yourself like grit or resilience or toughness, or some kind of character virtue like patience or generosity, whatever it might be. You see the good fact, and you let yourself feel something as a result, because most people number one, don't see all the good facts or even a fraction of the many good facts in daily life,
including in a tough, hard life. And then second, whatever they tend to see, they usually don't really feel it very much. And then if they even see it and feel it, they usually don't help their brain internalize it encoded by resting attention on the beneficial experience that they're having for more than a few seconds in a row. But if they don't stay with it for more than a few seconds in a row, that experience minimally, if at all, encodes from short term memory buffers to long
term storage. The fundamental process of conceptual learning, but more to our purposes here, the process of feeding the wolf inside wolf the wolf back inside that we care about, feeding um resilience and determination inside, feeding gratitude and happiness, contentment, feeding a sense of um uh, you know, relaxation inside, a sense of closeness with other people, a commitment to sobriety, commitment to exercise, what have you. If that's what we
care to feed inside. That's a two stage process of learning that moves from short term memory buffer is to long term storage, from state to trade, from activation to installation. And what I'm talking about is recognizing the ordinary good facts of daily life that are real that you tend
to overlook. And then on the basis of that recognition or on the basis of any beneficial experience you're already having, like a sense of completion when you get a tough email out the door, or a sense of fun or fellowship with friends, or a sense of spiritual development of any kind. When you're having those beneficial experiences at least a few times a day, don't waste them. Don't let
them pass to your brain like water through a sieve. Meanwhile, with negative experiences getting caught every time routinely, and instead of that, actually take charge of the structure building processes of your own brain from the inside out. The essence really of a tough minded self reliance at least a handful of times every day, you know, staying with those beneficial experiences to really register them so you gradually internalize them.
Um increasingly as resources you could draw upon when the going gets tough, and also draw upon just for ordinary happiness. You call this process taking in the good, and you have an acronym for it for the steps which is heal UM. Have a good experience UM, enrich it and then absorb it. And then the last is to link the positive and negative material. I want to talk a little bit about steps two and three. So have a
good experience. I think you're talked in the book a lot about A big part of that is actually be aware of and paying attention to things that are positive and and I agree with your point there are there are good things in nearly every life. UM. I am not good at those next two steps about enriching and absorbing. An example I would give is like I will do gratitude UM, but it it tends to be more of a mental exercise sometimes, which is not I still think
it's better than not having the mental exercise. But how do I take a UM, you know, somebody says something nice to me during the day, How do I enrich and absorb that? What are Because I've played with that since I've been reading your book, and and uh, I'm seeing benefits from the whole process, but I feel like I'm not getting those steps two and three. Very well, well thanks for saying all that, er can you've made me think about using your metaphor of the wolf you feed,
I mean, when you have it. So let's kind of make it real. Let's opposed that. Um, maybe in your family you have a nice sense of connection or closeness with a child, or let's say that just in an ordinary day, it's been a stressful, rushing about day. Finally you get a chance to sort of relax. Maybe you take a shower, or maybe a work out a little bit, maybe just sit and watch some TV with your family or by yourself, whatever's it relaxing. Okay, you're having some
kind of a beneficial experience. So to use the metaphor of the wolf, you're holding a food, you know, against the wolf's mouth, and maybe even the wolf is tasting it. The wolf is now chewing on this experience of closeness with family members or relaxation or accomplishment. But then the question becomes, if you really want to feed that wolf, the wolf has to swallow the food. The wolf, yeah, has to actually take it in and then metabolize it
from the inside out and to a larger point. You know, um, we continually learn things, and we continually often go about teaching people things, but how often do we learn how to learn? Or how often do we teach how to learn? And in the words, we say, it all depends on the wolf you feed. How do you get that wolf to swallow and metabolize whatever it is we're feeding him or one site. So that's what we're getting in here
in the second and third steps exactly right. So the neuropsychology of learning UM has been widely studied in terms of more conceptual material. Unfortunately, it's not been very studied in terms of emotional, motivational, attitudinal, social, somatic, even spiritual
kinds of learnings that we really care about. Right, So what I've done is applied to those sorts of learnings very standard findings that come mainly from the realm of cognitive psychology, but are really well established and they make
common sense. Basically. It says that look, if you want to see in the learning curve, including from an experience let's say, of gratitude, there are five well known factors that will steep in your learning curve from that experience over the course of five, ten, or twenty seconds one duration. You know, as you know, there's a saying in neuroscience um neurons that fired together wired together. So the longer those neurons are firing, the more they're going to be
wiring five ten, twenty seconds in a row. Second intensity, the more intensely you experience, let's say, gratitude, Um, you know, you really feel it, or you really think about it, like, oh my god, I am so grateful, you know, for that particular thing. The more intensely those neurons are firing, the more intensely they're going to be wiring. A third factor I sum it up with the word multimodality. All I mean by that is the richer the experience, the better.
There's a place for internalizing thoughts represented by language were more sort of dual or imagery based, like a sense of perspective or a framework for how we look at things, all right, So there's a place for internalizing the thought of gratitude like Wow, I'm very fortunate that my parents, you know, made efforts to bring me up in this world. Are Oh, I'm grateful for living in a time in which you and I can communicate with each other through
a technology like Skype. That's great, but it's just a thought. It doesn't have that much impact. The more that we allow the experience to be um sensed in the body, and the more that we have it has an emotional component, and even the more that we link a sense of desire to the experience, the more modalities in other words, of experience that we're engaging, the richer than neural traces. As you know, any fourth grade school teacher knows. And then really fast the fifth and the fourth and fifth
factors of enriching our novelty. The more that we can relate to our experiences kind of through the eyes of a child. As you know, there's probably as you probably know, there's a saying, zen mind beginner's mind. Um yeah, the more we're gonna you know, encode the experience. And then last, the more we have a sense of salience, personal relevance. Why should I care? You know, why would it matter to me? Let's say, to deepen the experience of gratitude.
That's those and you don't need to do all of those. Where it mostly shows up for people is around duration, intensity and feeling it in the body. The more the better. Okay, then what also can steep in the learning curve from different from episodes of learning opportunities? And when I say learning, I don't mean memorizing the multiplication table. I mean internalizing a growing sense of grit or resilience, or loving kindness
or compassion for others. That kind of learning. You know, if you sense and intend that this experience is really sinking into you, in other words, you're absorbing it. That's the A step in the h E A L he'll acronym. You're absorbing it. As said, the more you sense and intended the experience is going into you like water coming into a sponge or um kind of giving yourself over to the experience or warrant spreading out into your body. The more that you do that, the more that you
will be um priming and sensitizing memory making systems. So that's the essence really, if you think of it, the fundamental neuropsychology of learning. I didn't invent it. I've only tried to kind of uh summarize and apply this really well established understanding about learning, and to do so in a context in which I think people in psychology, human resources training, character, development of children, self help, you know,
practical wisdom coaching, mindfulence training, etcetera, etcetera. Me include have overvalued the activation phase of learning, the initial step around having some kind of beneficial experience. That's important. You know, the brain is not like an iPod. It's like an old school cassette recorder. You record the song by playing it. We need to have the experience in the first place.
That's activation, all right, But most people be included, certainly in the past in the general territory of psychology or self help or human development, um have not paid enough attention to the installation phase of learning, the two second and third steps that you've properly highlighted here. And because we haven't paid enough attention to the installation phase of learning, we've lost many, many opportunities to turn passing beneficial states
into lasting beneficial traits. And that's why if a person wants to really steep in their learning curve as they go through daily life, don't just notice the beneficial experiences you're already having, or look for natural opportunities to deliberately create them. Don't just do that. That's good, that's just the beginning. Take the time a dozen or so seconds at a time to enjoy the experience, stay with it
so you don't waste it on your own brain. Yeah, I mean, I think that is so true, that idea that, particularly in our culture, I think we learn so much, we consume so much information, and so little of it translates into anything that sticks with it or is actually becomes part of our life. Uh, something that we do. I often say, it's not what you know, it's what you do, um or I think I'm I doubt I'm the first person that said that, but and I agree
with what you're saying. So let's think about this installing process. So I have a good experience and I'm looking for duration and intensity, and what I find happens is that similar to like what I'm trying to be mindful, like meditating, I feel the good experience. I think, okay, I should should feel more of this good experience, or I should dive deeper into it than my mind wanders or my mind goes into action. You know, it's it stays and is it? Is it just a matter of continuing to
try it and getting better at it, like anything else. Yeah, I think that the short version is that we all know how to take in the good. If I was to really summarize all the neuropsychological complexity here, it would
be in four words, have it enjoy it. In other words, have the beneficial experience, usually because you're already having it in the words, you're already are you know, feeling close with your partner, or you're already relaxing, or you're already um feeling determined and capable you know, to face the challenge, or you're already having a sense of accomplishment or completion
around some tax task. It's already happening, right. And another key point here is that these experiences, and also opportunities for experience are typically mild. These are not million dollar moments, most of them, you know, in the zero ten intensity scale. They're the ones and twos of everyday life. But when you're having them, draw upon the natural um inclination of the mind to lean toward what's enjoyable. I will say,
you're just what you're saying, um for. One of the interesting things is that when people start getting interested in this practice of actually internalizing uh, you know, half a dozen times a day or so, if not more, the ordinary beneficial experiences of their day, they start discovering amazing things. One they're not having experiences, they're completely in their head. That was me, you know, throughout most of my childhood into young adulthood. I was numb from the neck down.
And or they are having fleeting beneficial experiences that have more of an emotional and embodied quality and therefore have more of the raw material for truly producing, you know, for truly feeding those those the good wolves, you know that that we want to develop. I noticed that the good wolf is not about memorizing the multiplication table or you know, locating the I don't know what the capital of the wolf of wolfs. Yeah, yeah, no, no, no,
These are about character. Terrible joke, right, these are experiential character qualities. Anyway. My point is that, um, you know what people often bump into as well, is they feel a kind of I don't know what, shame or fear or inhibition about just staying with a beneficial experience for ten seconds in a row, you know. And what happens, though, is you start this pride. You initially start, like a lot of things, with deliberate top down attention and intention.
You know, you say to yourself, okay, I'll listen to Rick. I'm gonna try this. No one needs to know I'm doing it half a dozen times a day. When I'm having this nice feeling, I'm going to give an extra dozen or two dozen seconds to really sense that it's sinking in, to sink into it and let it sink into me. All right. Uh. In the beginning, it takes a little deliberate attention, But what starts to happen is
your body knows. Your body naturally knows how to stabilize in and rest in a beneficial experience, and so you, you know, you start shifting from a kind of white knuckle, top down effort into more of a kind of intimacy with your own body, a kind of inside out receptivity where you just it's like sitting down next to a warm fire. I think we all know how to come in from the cold and sit down next to a warm fire and just kind of receive it and be humble enough to open to it and let it come
into ourselves. You have a part in the book where you you say, I'm just going to read it because I think it said so well. And we talked about this stuff on the show a lot. You say, when something difficult or uncomfortable happens, when a storm comes to your garden. The three ways to engage your mind give you a very useful step by step sequence. First, be with your experience, observe it, and accept it for what
it is, even if it's painful. Second, when it feels right, which could be a matter of seconds with a familiar worried mind, or months or years with the loss of a loved one, begin letting go of whatever is negative. Third, again, when it feels right after you, after you've released some or all of what was negative, place it with something positive. You got it. That was a tricky paragraph to write. It's in, as you know, chapter one because it creates
a framework and it speaks to I think. What I just think of is the three great ways to engage the mind to practice, the first being just be with what's there. The second, reduce what's negative. Third, grow what's positive. And if you use the metaphor of a garden, it means first witnessing the garden, second pulling weeds, and third
planning flowers. So I'm focusing here with you mainly on planting flowers, but it's in the larger context and I would point out that to be able to simply be with the mind, even in a radical meditative sense of choiceless awareness bear witnessing, to be able to sustain that choiceless awareness, you need to grow a lot of flowers in your mind through training so that you can stabilize
that kind of receptive, spacious awareness. And then also if you reduce the neg to if you, let's say, let go of some belief that you're worthless, or you'll never find love, if you cannot fit into your old pair of jeans, if you let that thought go, or maybe you release some negative desire like wanting to get hammered every night or what have you. Um, it's not enough to just pull the weed. You need to replace it with a flower. Otherwise, as any gardener knows, the weeds
come back, right. So yeah, that's why I think that one of the most powerful um personal growth practices I know, and I've been exposed to a lot of them, both in the spiritual traditions as well as in Western psychology, one of the most powerful practices I know is to use positive experiences that are the natural antidote to the old pain or old deficits you carry. Around inside yourself and um by having an experience today that's the natural
antidote to that old pain. Using myself as an example, if I were to feel truly cared about today and especially included in a group, because that's a lot of where my pain was as a very young, shy, um isolated kid growing through school, to feel today that I'm included and wanted in a group, UM is a very powerful antidote experience for me that addresses directly those early experiences I had, in the words, those old experiences of rejection, shame,
feelings of inadequacy, and so forth. And so if I then use the linking step um of holding both of those in awareness at once, in effect, I'm using wheat apartment, I'm using flowers to pull weeds. I'm using the here and now current experience that's authentic and legitimate in my example, feeling wanted and included in let's say, in a group. I'm using that here and now experience today to gradually ease, soothe, bring wisdom too, and potentially replace those old feelings of pain.
And you know, any single time you do this usually will not be a million dollar moment. You won't change your life. But the gradual accumulation again, just like you know, feeding of the wolves, the gradual accumulation of food and the gradual accumulation of which wolf we choose to feed makes an enormous difference, you know, Bye bye bye sent
apps by sent apps over the course of a person's life. Yeah, there was a part in the book where you were explaining you were talking about exactly that you're when you were younger, feeling not connected and um, and you said something that really struck me, And you said, you spend a lot of years thinking that if you piled up enough achievements that would fix it. And and and I think it's obvious on one level, like, no, that doesn't work, But the way you put it, it it became really clear
to me why it doesn't work. Right, that's not even the problem. The problem you're you're using the wrong tool for the job in that case, not that piling up achievements are doing positive things. Achieving can't help you feel better in other areas of your life, but it's not going to fix it that right. Um, You're exactly right, and thinking of a way into this. Um. One of the things that motivated me to write the book, which
is far mass a general audience hard borrowing happiness. But but also I was motivated as someone who has a deep interest in that enormously psychological theory of human suffering and happiness that was created by the Buddha years ago. Those summary being the four noble truths, the idea, as you know, there is suffering suffering as a cause, the cause being craving. That's the second truth, the third being there can be an end to that cause and thus
an end to that craving um. And then there's the fourth noble truth of what's the path leading to the end of craving in there for suffering? Well, I work backwards, you know, in terms of reverse engineer ring, and I try to operationalize what in the world is going on in the brain of a Buddha or you know, a sage or a saint, where any one of us when
we're in a really good place, what's going on? And that had led me to developing a framework that um, you know, is very rested in frameworks that other people have developed that are very solid connected to the three stage evolution of the brain from its reptilian brain stamp through its mammalian subcortex with stuff in it like via magdala and hippocampus, and then the primate and especially human cortex that sits on top of that, and that three
stage evolution of the brain gives us a framework, a kind of roadmap for identifying what are those experiences that will help us the most when internalized again and again and again, I say, ten thousand times, ten seconds at a time gradually reset our personal brain so that we move increasing from states of underlying, sometimes often subtle background senses of deficit or disturbance that are the underlying causes of the craving that causes suffering and harm in the
second noble truth, And we gradually, over time, through repeated internalization of UH certain kinds of experiences UH, move out of that underlying sense of deficit not enoughness to a sense of fullness. And we move out of that underlying
sounds of disturbance increasingly to a sense of balance. And those three stages of the brain's evolution give us the roadmap in terms of what I think of as our three basic needs for safety, satisfaction, and connection, which are very linked to that Reptilian and Melian and primate human
layering as it were, of the brain. So long story short, if you realize, as I did, that my real needs were having to do with connection, not with satisfaction or with safety, then it means that to address your real need you need to take medicine as it were, or
vitamins that address your need. And so in my own case, even though my issues were very much in terms of connection and feeling you know, rejected, excluded and whatnot, I tried to pile up experiences in which I felt tough and manly and defended to you know, take care of safety. Well maybe that's good to a point, but it did not address my need for connection. It was as if I had scurvy in terms of my needs for connection.
I needed vitamin C. So I'd go out and I would take all kinds of iron as if I had anemia in terms of safety needs, but it didn't help me. And also, as you said, I tried to pile up a lot of accomplishments, gets lots and lots of satisfaction, had a lot of fun, you know, enjoy my life in a lot of ways. Okay, maybe there's a place for that too, but that was like taking B vitamins for my It didn't work. It was only when I started really really looking for what would help that things
changed for me. That makes a lot of sense. I wanted to ask you. You've you've written several books. You are a researcher, You're always reading other people's research. I'm curious what ideas are you being introduced to now or pursuing or reading about that have you really excited? Wow, that's a great interesting question, you know. I'll tell you
a couple. One is the idea that and these are linked ideas that um at a macro scale, the human species today, actually planet wide, has the know how and the resources for the very first time in human history. Maybe roughly this has been the case for twenty forty years so years, but basically for the very first time in our entire duration on this planet as a species hundred fifty thousand years or so, let alone our ancestors going back another two million plus years, two ancestors that
first began making stone tools. During the entire time, there were not the object of conditions that would enable us truly to take care of the safety, satisfaction and connection needs. You know, the inner lizard, mouse, and monkey inside us, all of every human being on the planet, and yet now we actually have the resources to be able to
do that. We as a species, like the will, we're not making sure, for example, that a billion people don't go to sleep hungry every night, which is the case worldwide. We have not made sure in the richest country on the planet, America, that we don't have one in five children nationwide living below the poverty line. So obviously we have to bring will to bear. And it's not just enough even to have the physical resources available for people. We have to help people really register the felt sense
of core needs, safety, satisfaction and connection being met. Otherwise we have lots and lots of people, uh who even though they have plenty of safety, they still feel afraid. Even though they have you know, plenty of resources, money in the bank, food and refridge, consumer goods hanging in their closet, they still feel an emptiness inside they're trying
to fill with various pleasures. And even though they're you know, really well connected to other people and they're not actually being threatened, they still are very attached to us versus them,
tribalisms of various kinds. But the net of it all is that new science is showing you really do have the wherewithal to make a fundamental change in the course of human history so that we have the actual material conditions that would enable every brain on the planet to actually rest in what I call the green zone, which is a kind of quick and dirty approximation to the noble truth in Buddhism mind in which there's not much basis, if at all, if any at all for craving. That's
one thing that gets me jazz. Well, I think that is a great place to end. This has been really enjoyable, Rick, I thank you for taking the time. I know you're getting ready to go on some extensive travels, so thanks for freeing up some time. Eric. It was truly a privilege to be here. I mean, what you're doing is a big service, and um, I look at the quality of your other guests and I'm very honored to be in their company. Well, thank you so much. I appreciate it.
Take care, take care of you too. You can learn more about Rick Hanson and this podcast that one you feed dot net slash Rick. Also, if you're interested in the one on one in program, don't forget to send an email to Eric at one new Feed dot net, thanks, bye,