Rick Hanson Quotes

Every human being has three basic needs — safety, satisfaction, and connection — that are grounded in our ancient evolutionary history.

Deliberately call upon your inner strengths related to meeting these specific needs,

Cortisol — released by the adrenal glands during the stress response; stimulates the amygdala and inhibits the hippocampus.

Things go much better if you slow them down. Give yourself — and the other person — the gift of time: time to take a breath or two, figure out what the other person is really saying, allow the first waves of fight-or-flight reactions to pass through your body, and recognize and restrain impulsive words and actions that you’ll regret later. Those extra seconds before you speak help others feel less like they’re on the receiving end of a rat-a-tat-tat barrage of words and emotional intensity. And the extra seconds give them time to reflect and be less hijacked themselves.

Neurons that fire together, wire together.

in your brain, loving-kindness mobilizes prefrontal language and intention networks as well as limbic emotion and reward networks.

[I]f you can be with the pleasant without chasing after it, with the unpleasant without resisting it, and with the neutral without ignoring it - [...] that is an incredible [...] freedom.

Try to see the big picture. Whatever has happened is probably a short chapter in the long book of your life.

If you’re having a stressful or upsetting experience, simple pleasures such as listening to music can move the needle of your internal stress-o-meter out of the red zone and back toward green.

In your body, the gradually accumulating burden of reactive experiences is called allostatic load, which increases inflammation, weakens your immune system, and wears on your cardiovascular system. In your brain, allostatic load causes neurons to atrophy in the prefrontal cortex, the center of top-down executive control; in the hippocampus, the center of learning and memory; and in other regions. It impairs myelination, the insulating of neural fibers to speed along their signals, which can weaken the connectivity between different regions of your brain, so they don’t work together as well as they should.

positive experiences fill us up, while negative ones wear us down.

Refuse to worry more than three times about something you can’t change; three strikes and the worry is out.

in relationships, it typically takes about five positive interactions to overcome the effects of a single negative one (Gottman 1995).

Resentment is when I take poison and wait for you to die.

Just before bed, your mind is very receptive, so no matter what went wrong that day, find something that went right, open to it, and let good feelings come and ease you into sleep.