Resilient: How to Grow an Unshakable Core of Calm, Strength, and Happiness

by Rick Hanson

True resilience fosters well-being, an underlying sense of happiness, love, and peace.

As you become more resilient, you’re more able to meet your needs in the face of life’s challenges, and greater well-being is the result.

We meet our needs in four major ways: by recognizing what’s true, resourcing ourselves, regulating thoughts, feelings, and actions, and relating skillfully to others and the wider world.

growing the good inside yourself gives you more and more to offer to others.

compassion—the recognition of pain with the desire to relieve it—which can be given to oneself much as it can be given to others.

The essence is simple: first, experience what you want to develop in yourself—such as compassion or gratitude—and second, focus on it and keep it going to increase its consolidation in your nervous system.

Bring to mind times when you were really on your own side. Perhaps you were encouraging yourself during a tough period at work or speaking up to someone who hurt you.

Compassion for yourself is where you start when things are tough, not where you stop.

“There is a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in.”

Imagine compassion like a gentle warm rain coming down into you, touching and soothing the weary, hurting, longing places inside.

If we don’t accept what’s true about ourselves, we won’t see it clearly, and if we don’t see it clearly, we’ll be less able to deal with it.

“If you take care of the minutes, the years will take care of themselves.”

Mindfulness can feel most out of reach just when you need it the most.

With mindfulness, you are recollected rather than forgetful, collected and gathered together rather than scattered apart.

With mindfulness, you can step back from your reactions and observe them from a more peaceful and centered place.

the best meditation is the one that a person will actually, consistently, do.

Recognize that you’ve come through something hard, and appreciate yourself for doing so.

at the bottom of every want is a healthy need.

The neocortex has enabled humans to be the most social species on the planet. It is the neural basis of empathy, language, cooperative planning, and compassion—sophisticated ways to meet our needs for connection.

A healthy body and mind do not come from denying, “overcoming,” or transcending needs.

the needs we push away that are often the most important to embrace.

There is a fundamental difference between facing challenges while experiencing that your needs are being sufficiently met, and facing challenges while experiencing that your needs are not being met.

Sometimes all you can do is preserve a tiny little green refuge in yourself that stays calm and strong while the rest of you is upset.

our modern multitasking, racing about, and frequent stresses keep pushing us into the red zone.

Connect with someone you like, either directly or in your imagination.

When someone smiles at you or you remember a person you love, keep feeling connected. Be mindful of green zone experiences, value them, and stay with them.

Internalizing green zone experiences builds up a core of inner strengths.

you can handle larger and larger challenges, staying green inside even when the world is flashing red, with a bone-deep resilient well-being that nothing can penetrate and overwhelm.

you won’t unlearn the inner strengths you grow over time.

if you sit by your campfire and add some sticks to it, happiness will come to you, and stay.

If you tend to push aside a particular need—such as connection, for instance, by blaming yourself when people mistreat you—that’s the one to be extra sure you’re not overlooking.

Love is deeply satisfying. And love draws us immediately into a sense of connection. If it’s hard to identify a key resource for a challenge, no worries. In one form or another, try love.

even without having a romantic partner, a person could find other ways to experience some kinds of love, self-worth, and joy.

in terms of internalizing resources into the brain, experiences are independent of the conditions that evoke them

You may not be able to heal a wound entirely or fill up every bit of the hole in your heart. Still, something is better than nothing.

implicit memory: the residues of lived experience that shape your expectations, ways of relating to others, and background sense of what it feels like to be you.

such as the knowledge that you lost a parent when you were a child. Keep the idea “over there,” off to the side in your mind, while a rich, enjoyable positive experience is “right here” under the spotlight on the stage of awareness.

More adult parts of you could hold, comfort, reassure, and cherish younger parts. Compassion could touch suffering.

When you do Linking, be resourceful and creative. Stay on your own side, helping whatever is beneficial to prevail in your mind. Use your imagination and go with your intuition.

This is not about positive thinking. It is about realistic thinking, seeing the whole mosaic of reality with its problems and pains as well as its many, many reassuring, pleasurable, and useful parts.

We can learn how to learn. Learning is the inner strength that grows all the other ones.

With agency, you are active rather than passive, taking initiative and directing your life rather than being swept along.

It could be hard, it could be painful, but we choose the change. This also is agency.

The more powerful the forces bearing down on a person, the more important it is to find ways to experience some sense, any sense, of agency.

life is full of delays and discomfort, and sometimes we just have to wait.

Even if your efforts don’t pay off, you’ll know in your heart that you tried, and that in itself feels honorable and comforting.

Sometimes the most important things to persist with are your thoughts and feelings.

the cognitive development of children is shaped by sensorimotor activity, and that the perspectives and moods of adults are highly influenced by pleasure and pain, energy and fatigue, and health and illness.

Being able to tap into a fierce, feral intensity makes a person more resilient.

the simple fact that people are alive is reason enough to be happy