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

by Rick Hanson

Scan the major parts of your body from feet to head. See if you can appreciate each one of them, perhaps saying to yourself things like: “Feet, thank you for carrying me along … Thighs, you’ve done your job countless times and I’m very grateful … Heart and lungs, all those beats and breaths, oh my goodness I so appreciate you … Hands and hips, I accept you as you are … Chest and arms, neck and shoulders, head and hair, thank you for everything you’ve done for me.”

Just a few experiences of being trapped, powerless, and defeated can lead to “learned helplessness,” which undermines coping and ambition, and is a risk factor for depression. So it’s important to look for what you can do, if only inside your mind, especially in challenging situations or relationships.

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.

Gratitude and other positive emotions have many important benefits. They support physical health by strengthening the immune system and protecting the cardiovascular system. They help us recover from loss and trauma. They widen the perceptual field and help us see the big picture and the opportunities in it; they encourage ambition. And they connect people together.

Thankfulness feels good in its own right. Additionally, Robert Emmons and other researchers have found that it brings a remarkable collection of benefits: More optimism, happiness, and self-worth; less envy, anxiety, and depression More compassion, generosity, and forgiveness; stronger relationships; less loneliness Better sleep Greater resilience

One powerful method is to reflect on three blessings in your life before falling asleep. Help the recognition of what you’ve received become feelings of appreciation, reassurance, and even awe and joy. Use the HEAL steps to take these feelings into yourself, sinking into them as they sink into you.

And if you use the HEAL steps to repeatedly internalize experiences of pleasure, over time you will feel increasingly pleased from the inside out. This will help to reduce desires for pleasure from the outside in.

Happiness for others is a natural antidote to these feelings. It can pull you out of self-critical or bitter preoccupations and shift your mood in a positive direction. But thinking about the good fortune of other people may lead to painful comparisons that block gladness for them. To get through this block, begin by recognizing the blessings that you have received, the joys you have found, the things you have achieved, and the contributions you have made to others. Whatever is good in your life remains good even if another person has something great.

when children experience their caregivers as frequently unavailable, insensitive, cold, rejecting, punishing, or abusive, then they are likely to become insecurely attached.

If a Sunday picnic is ruined by a sudden thunderstorm, it’s unfortunate and unpleasant, but there’s no sense in yelling at the rain. If you accept the first dart for what it is, that’s like a circuit breaker interrupting the flow of second darts.

As you go through your day, try to register it when others see decency, capability, effort, and caring in you—typically in small passing moments that are nonetheless real. Also recognize your own good qualities much as you would see them in others. Label them in your mind as a fair-minded observer would, such as: “trying hard,” “being friendly,” “admitting a mistake,” “being skillful,” “contributing,” “enduring when things are hard,” “giving love.”

But it’s common to be triggered into flight, fight, or freeze reactions, with some combination of: Fear: uneasiness, nervousness, worry, anxiety, alarm, panic Anger: exasperation, annoyance, irritation, indignation, rage Helplessness: overwhelm, impotence, defeat, futility, paralysis

It’s normal to experience fear, anger, or helplessness from time to time. Problems arise when these reactions are invasive or chronic, or otherwise impact your well-being, relationships, or work. Because the need for safety is so vital, it’s equally vital that we regulate ourselves to meet pain and threats with calm strength. To help you do this, we’ll explore relaxing and centering, seeing threats accurately, feeling safer, and cooling anger.

Extreme parasympathetic activation can produce an intense freeze response, such as feeling like you can’t speak, the human equivalent of an animal “playing dead.” But normal parasympathetic activity feels good, with a sense of relaxed, centered well-being.

On the other hand, the sympathetic nervous system puts the pedal to the metal, mobilizing the body for action by speeding up the heart while hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol course through the blood. As the body revs up, so does the mind, with more intense thoughts and feelings.

when the sympathetic nervous system is combined with negative emotions such as anger or fear, these fight-or-flight reactions are stressful and upsetting.

Many of us experience chronic mild to moderate stress, living much of the time in a kind of “pink zone.” A person could slow down and do less. But the realities of work and family usually make this hard to achieve. If you are going to stay busy while juggling many balls and plates, it helps to keep engaging the parasympathetic wing of the nervous system along the way. One of the best ways to do this is through frequent practices of relaxation.

The parasympathetic and sympathetic branches of the nervous system are connected like a seesaw: if one goes up, the other is pushed down. As you relax, parasympathetic activation increases, which decreases sympathetic activity and related stress hormones.

The parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) manages exhaling and slows your heart rate, while the sympathetic nervous system handles inhaling and speeds up the heart.

For several breaths or more, try counting softly in your mind to make your exhalation longer than your inhalation. For example, inhale for 1-2-3 and then exhale for 1-2-3-4-5-6.

RELEASE TENSION Pick a key region such as your jaw muscles or the diaphragm under your rib cage, bring awareness to the area, and deliberately relax it. You could imagine breathing into this area, or that light or energy is flowing through it and carrying tension away. If you like, try progressive relaxation, in which you start at your feet and move up to your head, systematically r...

heart rate variability, the change in the interval between heartbeats, which reflects the degree to which your heart rate slows as you exhale and engage the PNS. Increased variability is a marker of greater parasympathetic activation in general, and is associated with improved mood, a stronger immune system, and greater resilience to stress.

MOVE Yoga, t’ai chi, qigong, walking meditation, dancing, singing, and other structured forms of movement are relaxing and often energizing as well.

Much of our stress is driven by internal verbal processes. These worry about the future, rehash the past, and mutter about the present. In most people, the neural basis for language is on the left side of the brain while the right side handles imagery and other forms of holistic processing. (This is reversed for many left-handed people.) The two sides inhibit each other, so if one becomes more active, that quiets the other. Consequently, focusing on imagery will reduce verbal activity—and help you relax.

fear is at work when a person stays within a small comfort zone, procrastinates to avoid a challenge, feels emotionally inhibited, or avoids speaking up and standing out.

most people overestimate threats while underestimating their resources for managing them. These biases operate in the background and are often hard to see, which makes them very powerful.

It’s obviously important to recognize real threats and develop resources for handling them. But most people feel more anxious than is necessary or helpful. We tend to see ourselves, the world around us, and the future through fear-colored glasses. Even when you know rationally that there is absolutely nothing to fear, there is still often a background trickle of anxiety, a sense that something could go wrong at any minute.

To be safer, we need to decrease actual threats and increase actual resources. To feel safer, we need to stop inflating threats and start recognizing all our resources.

Bound the issue in space and time. What part of your life does it affect—and what is unaffected? When does it happen—and when is it not very relevant?

OK, suppose the feared event occurs. What would you actually feel if it happened? On a 0–10 scale, with 10 being the absolute worst imaginable, how bad would you feel? And for how long?

Then ask yourself this: given the actual magnitude of the thing you fear, the odds of it happening, and the intensity of its impact, how could you cope with it?

Think about times when you’ve drawn on inner strengths such as grit, confidence, and compassion to handle issues in the past. Then take some moments to consider how you could tap into those inner strengths again to deal with the current challenge. Also consider the talents and skills that you could bring to bear. How could you work on the problem? What plans could you make to prevent it, manage it, or recover from it? Think about other resources inside yourself—such as mindfulness and your own good heart—and how these could help

It’s important not to suppress fear or overlook what it’s trying to tell you. Reasonable concerns are your friend, keeping you out of potentially dangerous situations. But being consumed, invaded, and compromised by fear doesn’t make you safer.

One of my favorite sayings from the Buddha is “Painful feelings arose, but they did not invade my mind and remain.”

Take some breaths, and relax. Be mindful of any tension, uneasiness, or worry. Step back from any anxiety and observe it. Let it be, and let it come and go. Let fear in any form move to the background of awareness. In the foreground, bring to mind things that protect you.

Also resources inside you, such as endurance and determination. Open to feeling that there is a lot you can draw on. Challenges will come, but you’ve got many ways to deal with them. Keep opening to feeling safer. Let needless worry fall away. Let go of any tension. Let a sense of safety sink in and spread inside you.

Let thoughts and feelings come and go. Abide with ease at the front edge of now. You are still breathing just fine, the next moment is passing through, you’re still OK, you’re safe now, safe in this moment, moment after moment, basically all right, right … now.

Anger is often at work in the back of the mind, and recognizing its presence enables you to control it rather than it controlling you.

When you feel angry in any way, explore the experience, including its sensations, feelings, thoughts, and desires.

Beware the rewards that come with anger. There are four major types of “negative” emotions: sadness, anxiety, shame, and anger.

Anger is also an effective way to hide hurt and vulnerability, assert status or dominance, push away fear, and compensate for feeling small or weak.

Try to be mindful of the process of getting angry, which typically happens in two stages: the priming and the trigger. In the first stage, little things add up. Some are general, including stress, weariness, and hunger. Others are more specific, such as the small moments of feeling misunderstood, let down, or hassled that gradually sensitize you to a particular person.

Then, in the second stage, some kind of spark lands and starts a fire—often way out of proportion to the trigger itself.

There’s a proverb that says: Getting angry at others is like throwing hot coals with bare hands—both people get burned. Because anger can feel both rewarding and justified, it helps to realize that it is a toxic burden on you, in addition to its consequences for others.

Put the trigger in perspective. On your this-is-bad scale running from 0 to 10, how bad is the trigger, really? How long will its effects last? Will you even remember it in a couple of days? This is not about minimizing the trigger, but about seeing it clearly.

DISENGAGE FROM RIGHTEOUSNESS It’s useful to have values and standards. But if you add righteousness to them, with its dogmatism and superiority, this adds fuel to your anger, triggers reactions from others, and undermines your credibility.

Because righteousness can feel good, remember how you don’t like it when others get righteous with you, and use this to motivate yourself to set down that angry barb even if its tip might at first seem sweet.

There’s a Zen story that illustrates this. A senior monk and a junior monk with strict vows of celibacy were on a journey and came upon a beautiful woman at the edge of a muddy river. The older monk offered to carry her across, she gratefully accepted, and he did so. Then she went on her way. Afterward, the two monks continued on their path. For the next hour, the younger one kept obsessing to himself: How could he have held her warm soft body in his arms, feeling her sweet breath upon his neck? How terrible that he kept smelling her beautiful long hair! Finally he confronted the other man and burst out with what he’d been thinking. The senior monk listened, then smiled gently and said, “I set her down on the other side of the river, but you’ve been carrying her ever since.”

Located next to the thalamus, the amygdala gets a head start over the prefrontal cortex. Its “jump first, think later” nature drives our immediate reactions. The amygdala also biases the interpretations and analysis of the prefrontal cortex when it starts catching up a second or two or three later. This is the amygdala hijack in action: great for raw survival, but also the source of much needless upset, overheated reactions, and painful conflicts with others.