Rick Hanson Quotes

The Reactive mode tears us down, while the Responsive mode builds us up. Adversity is certainly an opportunity to develop resilience, stress-hardiness, and even post-traumatic growth. But for a person to grow through adversity, there must also be Responsive resources present such as determination and sense of purpose. Plus most opportunities in daily life to experience and develop mental resources do not involve adversity: there is simply a moment of relaxation, gratitude, enthusiasm, self-worth, or kindness.

Living in the Green Zone Developing inner resources is like deepening the keel of a sailboat so that you’re more able to deal with the worldly winds — gain and loss, pleasure and pain, praise and blame, fame and slander — without getting tipped over into the reactive mode — or at least you can recover more quickly. With growing confidence in these capabilities, you become more comfortable raising your sights in life and sailing even farther into the deep, dark blue.

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.

Being for yourself simply means that you care about yourself. You wish to feel happy instead of worried, sad, guilty, or angry. You want people to treat you well instead of badly. You want to help your future self — the person you’ll be next week, next year, next decade — to have as good a life as possible.

Your brain is like Velcro for negative experiences but Teflon for positive ones.

If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each [person’s] life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm any hostility. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Simply having useful, enjoyable experiences is not enough.

Equanimity is neither apathy nor indifference: you are warmly engaged with the world but not troubled by it. Through its nonreactivity, it creates a great space for compassion, loving-kindness, and joy at the good fortune of others.

Think about the many ways that others will benefit from you being more good-humored, warm-hearted, and savvy. Nurturing your own development isn’t selfish. It’s actually a great gift to other people.

The key to growing any psychological resource, including compassion, is to have repeated experiences of it that get turned into lasting changes in neural structure or function.

I think the sweet spot in life is to pursue your dreams and take care of others with your whole heart while not getting fixated on or stressed out about the results. In this place, you live with purpose and passion but without losing your balance and falling into a sense of pressure, strain, or depletion. This sweet spot is very valuable, so take it in whenever you experience it.