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.”
No comments:
Post a Comment