Rick Hanson Quotes

Notice when others could be building up your fears, perhaps for their own advantage. Also, deliberately consider your beliefs about dangers in the world and weaknesses in yourself, and look for the evidence that these are not true.

If you have three to ten minutes, try progressive relaxation, in which you focus systematically on different parts of your body, working either from the feet to the head or vice versa. Depending on how much time you have, you might focus on large sections of your body — e.g., left leg, right leg — or on much smaller units, such as left foot, right foot, left ankle, right ankle, and so on.

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.

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

As you go through your day, deliberately flag opportunities for pleasure.

Imagine the positive making contact with the negative, sifting down into frustrated places inside, perhaps reaching down into experiences of failure when you were younger. Let the sense of success calm, soothe, and bring perspective to the negative material. As you finish, let go of anything negative and simply focus on the sense of success.

If you don’t add fuel to second darts, they tend to run out of gas on their own.

we evolved to pay great attention to unpleasant experiences. This negativity bias overlooks good news, highlights bad news, and creates anxiety and pessimism.

Suffering has clear causes in your brain and body, so if you change its causes, you’ll suffer a lot less. And you can change those causes.

The most powerful way to use the mind-body connection to improve your physical and mental health is through guiding your autonomic nervous system (ANS). Every time you calm the ANS through stimulating the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS), you tilt your body, brain, and mind increasingly toward inner peace and well-being.

it’s the needs we push away that are often the most important to embrace. So try to be aware of needs, or aspects of needs, that have been unmet. Listen to the longings of your heart. As you go through your day, be mindful of your needs for: • Safety.

The Responsive mode is our home base, but we’re easily driven from home and prone to getting stuck in the red zone due to the brain’s negativity bias, which makes it like Velcro for bad experiences but Teflon for good ones. •

Unfortunately, while we’re no longer running from saber-toothed tigers, our modern multitasking, racing about, and frequent stresses keep pushing us into the red zone. Then it’s hard to leave due to what researchers call the brain’s negativity bias.

Think about some of what you’ve been given, such as friendship and love, an education, life itself, and a universe that bubbled into being more than 13 billion years ago.

Impatience combines all three ingredients of toxic stress: unpleasant experiences, pressure or urgency, and lack of control.