If you could bring to mind someone that you know cares
about you.
It could be a pet, could be a group of people,
could be a person in your life, in your past, doesn't really matter.
What you're trying to do is have a good experience.
A simple good experience of feeling cared about.
You're trying to help the idea of this person or the image
or a memory become a feeling.
And then once you get it going, you're moving out of concept to experience,
stay with it.
It's kind of a critical mass of time, a threshold.
Things have to last long enough in our experience
to transfer from short term memory buffers to long term storage,
including emotional learning.
And meanwhile, you can sense that this experience is going into you,
you're absorbing it.
It's sinking into you, feeling loved
as you sink into it.
A simple moment 10-20s,
usually won't change our life, but bit by bit,
it can really make an enormous difference.
We all have normal needs to feel cared for.
To feel cared about.
We are the most profoundly social species on the planet.
As we evolved in the Serengeti, exile's a death sentence.
Causes have effects.
And if we don't get the supplies that we need, bit by bit,
it's kind of like we're living on a thin soup.
You can survive, you can make it, but there's a hollowness and emptiness inside.
In my own case, I ended up with lots of bad thoughts and feelings inside
of me as a result.
Then I went off to college and I began to notice something really powerful
and interesting.
Some small good thing would happen.
A girl would smile at me in the elevator.
Some guy would throw me the football and say, "good catch Hanson!"
That was really good.
Or guys would invite me to go out for pizza.
Basic stuff of everyday life.
And then I would have an experience.
I would feel a little included or a little wanted or a little appreciated.
Then the question is, "what would I do with that experience?"
If I dealt with it like I usually did, which was to kind of ignore it, let it pass
along, I kept feeling lonely and inadequate.
But I began to notice that if I did something different,
if I stayed with it a dozen or so seconds in a row,
it felt like something was gradually coming into me
that was actually good.
And I began feeling, better and better and better
and more confident.
Any single time I did this wasn't a mindblowing moment,
but the good things really did add up over time for me definitely.
And now years later, many years later,
as a neuropsychologist, I began to understand what I was actually
doing.
I wasn't just changing my mind.
I was actually changing my brain.
That's because as the neuroscientists say, "neurons that fire together, wire together."
Passing mental states become lasting neural traits.
Bit by bit I was actually weaving these resources into the fabric of my brain,
and therefore my life.
The inner-strengths that we all want, happiness, positive emotion, determination,
feeling loved, confidence, the virtues, the executive functions,
those are all built out of the brain.
The question is, how to actually get them into the brain?
The interesting thing is that most of the wholesome qualities,
mind and heart, that help us cope with life, including coping with hard things,
and have a lot inside ourselves to give to other people,
most of those inner-strengths are built from positive experiences of those
strengths.
If you wanna feel more confident, for example, have more experiences of accomplishment or
coping.
If you wanna have a more loving heart, practise more moments of compassion or kindness
for others.
The problem is that to get these experiences into our brain,
we have to overcome the brain's hardwired negativity bias.
This negativity bias means that the brain is very good
at learning from bad experiences, but bad at learning from good ones.
I'd like to tell you the little steps of taking in the good.
They're very simple.
I even have a clever acronym that you can use to remember them.
In the first step, have a good experience.
We've gotta activate, we've gotta get it going.
The brain is like an old school cassette recorder, it records the music by playing it.
We have to have an experience.
In the second step, enrich the experience.
Help install this activated mental state into your brain as a neural trait.
Let it last, help it grow in your body, help it become increasingly intense,
give yourself over to it.
And in the third step of taking in the good, absorb it.
Sense an intent that it's sinking into you.
This will prime memory systems.
This will sensitise them, so they'll be more efficient at encoding the
experience into neural structure.
And then, if you want to, the optional step
is to link the positive experience with something negative.
You gotta be a little careful about this cause you don't wanna be hijacked by the negative.
But if you can stay strong with the positive, it will gradually associate with the negative,
neurons that fire together, wire together and it'll go into the negative to soothe it,
ease it, even gradually replace it.
And you can use this step of taking in the good
where you're linking positive and negative for yourselves
or for children or for clients,
students or others you care about.
You can use this method to heal old pain or neglect,
whether in adulthood or childhood, even reaching down into young parts of yourself.
Now, this may seem a little complicated.
We all know how to take in the good.
We all know how to help some good life lesson land,
some good experience with other people, we know how to let these things land.
In a nutshell, this whole thing boils down to, all my verbiage
here, to four words,
have it and enjoy it.
Especially enjoy it.
So it becomes a part of you.