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

by Rick Hanson

Mental resources like determination, self-worth, and kindness are what make us resilient: able to cope with adversity and push through challenges in the pursuit of opportunities.

You learn to be calmer or more compassionate the same way you learn anything else: through repeated practice.

We develop mental resources in two stages. First, we need to experience what we want to grow, such as feeling grateful, loved, or confident. Second—critically important—we must convert that passing experience into a lasting change in the nervous system.

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

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.

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.

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.

Acceptance doesn’t mean

complacency or giving up. We can accept something while at the same time trying to make it better.

Your brain is shaped by your experiences, which are shaped by what you attend to. With mindfulness, you can rest your attention on experiences of psychological resources such as compassion and gratitude, and hardwire them into your nervous system.

There are three major ways to relate to and engage the mind usefully: be with it, decrease what is painful and harmful, and increase what is enjoyable and beneficial.

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.

To stay in the green zone, take in experiences of your needs being met, which will grow inner resources. Then you can handle larger and larger challenges with resilient well-being.

Any lasting change of mood, outlook, or behavior requires learning.

You become more grateful, confident, or determined by repeatedly installing experiences of gratitude, confidence, or determination. Similarly, you center yourself increasingly in the Responsive, green zone—with an underlying sense of peace, contentment, and love—by having and internalizing many experiences of safety, satisfaction, and connection.

ACTIVATION 1. Have a beneficial experience: Notice it or create it. INSTALLATION 2. Enrich it: Stay with it, feeling it fully. 3. Absorb it: Receive it into yourself. 4. Link it (optional): Use it to soothe and replace painful, harmful psychological material.

This process starts with experiencing the good you want to grow inside yourself. There are two ways to have a beneficial experience. First, you can simply notice and focus on one that you are already having. Second, you can deliberately create an experience, such as calling up a feeling of self-compassion or sitting down to meditate. Let’s explore each of these.

For example, you can strengthen your moral compass through appropriate guilt and remorse.

Noticing enjoyable or useful thoughts, perceptions, emotions, desires, or actions that are already occurring is the primary way to have a beneficial experience. The experience is here, and it’s authentic and real. Why not gain something from it?

Once you’ve found a good fact, turn the recognition of it into an embodied experience. Know that the fact is really true; give yourself a sense of conviction about it and trust in it. Be aware of your sensations as you recognize the fact, with a sense of softening and opening in your body. Tune into your feelings and allow the experience to be emotionally rich.

Whether you’re noticing an experience or creating one, each day is full of opportunities to have beneficial thoughts and emotions, perceptions and desires. Just knowing that this is true is itself a good experience!

enrich the experience and absorb it. In your mind, enriching an experience means keeping it going and feeling it fully, while absorbing it feels like receiving it into yourself. In your brain, enriching is a matter of heightening a particular pattern of mental/neural activity, while absorbing involves priming, sensitizing, and increasing the efficiency of the brain’s memory-making machinery.

Lengthen it. Stay with it for five, ten, or more seconds. The longer that neurons fire together, the more they tend to wire together. Protect the experience from distractions, focus on it, and come back to it if your mind wanders. 2. Intensify it. Open to it and let it be big in your mind. Turn up the “volume” as it were by breathing more fully or getting a little excited. 3. Expand it. Notice other elements of the experience. For example, if you’re having a useful thought, look for related sensations or emotions. 4. Freshen it. The brain is a novelty detector, designed to learn from what’s new or unexpected. So look for what’s interesting or different about an experience. Imagine that you are having it for the very first time. 5. Value it. We learn from what is personally relevant. Be aware of why the experience is important to you, why it matters, and how it could help you.

You can grow inner strengths in four steps, summarized as HEAL: have a positive (enjoyable, beneficial) experience, enrich it, absorb it, and (optionally) link it to negative material.

The Link step is a powerful way to use positive psychological material to soothe, reduce, and even replace negative material.

Determination has four aspects to it: resolve, patience, persistence, and fierceness. As you go through your day, you can use the HEAL steps to turn experiences of these aspects into an even stronger sense of determination inside yourself.

In so much of life, you can tend to the causes, but you can’t control the results. Knowing this fosters both responsibility and inner peace.

Mental health is sometimes framed as suppressing our primal, animal nature. But then parts of the self that are wild and wonderful get locked away. Being able to tap into a fierce, feral intensity makes a person more resilient.

How you feel about and treat your body affects your health and vitality, and these in turn affect your thoughts, feelings, and actions.

Since each day is full of goals, large and small, it is full of opportunities to take in experiences of successful goal attainment. Doing this builds up an internal sense of being successful, which helps us weather criticism and be less dependent upon the approval of others.

A durable sense of being successful comes from internalizing many experiences of small successes, not from seeing a big trophy outside such as a fancy car parked in the driveway.

The number of actual failures in any person’s life is tiny compared to the vast number of goals that have been successfully attained.

But the failures are highlighted by the brain, associated with painful feelings, and stored deeply in memory. This crowds out a legitimate and well-earned sense of being an accomplished and successful person.

The fear of failure is worsened if you grew up with a...

Recognize that you are continuing to fulfill ongoing process goals.

To paraphrase the Dalai Lama: If you can be happy when others are happy, you can always be happy, since there is always someone somewhere who is happy.

Pleasure is easy to dismiss, but it is a rapid way to lower stress or to disengage from an upset. Wholesome pleasures crowd out unwholesome ones. The more you feel already full of pleasure, the less you’ll strain for it outside yourself.

Because of the negativity bias, we notice when we fail to reach a goal while missing the fact that meanwhile we’re succeeding at hundreds of other goals. Look for opportunities to feel successful many times each day. Take in these experiences and use them to compensate

But if there’s been too much disapproval and rejection, and too little encouragement and support, then a person tends to lack confidence and be insecure, self-critical, brittle, and less resilient.

Consequently, they tend either to keep their distance and not expect much or to cling to other people. Having taken in relatively little caring from others, they’re less able to be compassionate toward themselves; meanwhile, they’ve internalized put-downs and rejections, and tend to be harshly self-critical. As a result, they’re less resilient, less able to cope with stress and setbacks.

Use the HEAL steps to turn the recognition of caring for you into an experience that you stay with for a few breaths or longer, taking it into yourself.

Research has shown that people who were insecurely attached as children can develop secure attachment as adults. A key step is to develop a realistic, integrated, “coherent” account of what happened when you were young and how that affected you. This is a gradual process that can take many months, even years.

There is something mysteriously reparative about treating others as you wish to be treated yourself. It feels like a mending inside of what’s been torn or tattered. It’s also an affirmation that no matter what happened to you, your innermost being is intact. You can still be good to others, and you can still love.

The first dart is unavoidable physical or emotional discomfort and pain: a headache, the cramping of stomach flu, the sadness at losing a friend, the shock at being unfairly attacked in a meeting at work. The second dart is the one we throw ourselves, adding unnecessary reactions to the conditions of life and its occasional first darts. For example, second darts include getting really worried about a minor misunderstanding with another person, brooding about being slighted, and holding on to resentments and grudges. Second darts are the source of so much human suffering, especially in our relationships. They make us more upset than we need to be and cause us to do things we regret later.

you can have a sense of perspective about first darts in general. They’re a natural and unavoidable

No matter what happened in your past, these days you can build up an inner nurturer by using the HEAL steps to internalize experiences in which others are caring toward you—growing a natural, lasting sense of caring for yourself from the inside out. Additionally, when you are caring toward yourself—such as telling yourself that a small mistake is not a big deal—then take in these experiences, which will strengthen your inner nurturer.

As soon as you recognize the characteristic tone or words of the inner critic, be skeptical about it.

“This criticism has a grain of truth in it, but everything else is exaggerated or untrue.”

Try regarding the inner critic as something that lacks credibility. You could imagine it as a ridiculous character, like a silly cartoon villain in a Disney movie.

The key people in your life still think you are a basically good person.