Wednesday 9 June 2021

Neuroscience Meets Mindfulness: Hardwiring Happiness


Hardwiring Happiness by Rick Hanson
Rider
Pp. 223

Being good to yourself has benefits for everyone, and for the entire planet. That’s quite a grand claim, but Rick Hanson, “a father, husband, psychologist, meditation teacher and business consultant” makes a concerted effort to help everyone do just that. He sets out to show us how to retrain the brain to focus on positivity rather than negativity, which is actually not our brain’s natural and default setting. The balance between science and practicality is fair, and Hanson correctly states, “You won’t need a background in neuroscience or psychology to understand these ideas.”

He has handily distilled his practice down to four simple steps “with the acronym HEAL: Have a positive experience. Enrich it. Absorb it. Link positive and negative material so that positive soothes and even replaces negative. (The fourth step is optional.)” Every new technique seemingly has to have an acronym, and this is a good one. He introduces concepts with analogies and anecdotes, including side tables to condense the information, and a section at the end of each chapter called ‘Taking It In’ that summarises the key points. He includes a table that the reader can print and then fill in with their own experiences that they want to affirm, and there are reference notes and a bibliography later in the book for further study. He even includes a section explaining how to use these steps with children, “while naturally adapting them to the child’s age and situation.”

The basic premise is simple: the brain has a built-in negativity bias to pay more attention to the bad than the good. This is a survival technique because the bad can kill you; the formation of implicit memory is negatively biased, to make us avoid harmful things or, as Hanson puts it, “Your brain is like Velcro for negative experiences but Teflon for positive ones.”

With advice that borrows a lot from Buddhist teachings, Hanson recommends that we focus on the positive and open our mind and body to happiness and good feelings. He describes how to sit and be with positivity, cultivate inner strengths, and absorb good feelings so that they can be recalled in other situations and used to calm and focus. He is keen to encourage feeling good in the moment and taking in the good through simple experiences like looking out of the window or eating an orange. It may all sound a bit Little Book of Calm, but if increased positivity is good for you, why not give it a try?

He focuses on ‘feeling all right, right now’, which he considers to be one of the greatest strengths, and supports experiencing something as it is rather than grasping after it or wanting more – “let sensations come to you rather than reaching for them”. An experience is made more powerful by being particular to a person and linked to their good memories. Hanson encourages holding onto this pleasant feeling to be able to more easily recall it later, through multimodality; sensing good experiences throughout the whole body and being aware of as many aspects of it as possible.

Although much of this sounds rather pleasant, we still have the capability to resist it, so Hanson isolates these negative blockers to our potential happiness. Some may argue that employing this positivity method is simply denial, but Hanson counters, “You’re not looking at the world through rose-tinted glasses, but rather correcting your brain’s tendency to look at it through smog-tinted ones.” Another specific blocker is the belief that there’s no point in feeling good since some things are still bad. Even a little bit of good will increase happiness: you can take a slice of the pie without waiting or wanting to have the whole thing. It is up to us to learn to enjoy experience, and Hanson is aware that this may be difficult, so he brings it home by appealing to our morals and contemporary ethics. “The fearful, greedy and self-centred reactive setting of the brain promotes a kind of gorging of the earth’s limited resources that is causing deforestation, mass extinctions, and global warming.”

He has crafted such a framework that it is morally questionable not to look after ourselves by accepting more happiness into our life and brain. He has supplied a very straightforward and practical manual outlining how to achieve this goal in which neuroscience meets mindfulness. And if he has made some money along the way, well good for him; I have no feelings of envy or resentment. See, it’s working already.

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