Hardwiring Happiness Quotes

“Neurons that fire together wire together. Mental states become neural traits. Day after day, your mind is building your brain. This is what scientists call experience-dependent neuroplasticity,”
― Rick Hanson, Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence

“If you take care of the minutes, the years will take care of themselves.”
― Rick Hanson, Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence

“By taking just a few extra seconds to stay with a positive experience—even the comfort in a single breath—you’ll help turn a passing mental state into lasting neural structure.”
― Rick Hanson, Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence

“Your brain is like Velcro for negative experiences but Teflon for positive ones.”
― Rick Hanson, Hardwiring Happiness: The Practical Science of Reshaping Your Brain—and Your Life

“Imagine a day in which you feel generally fine. After waking up, you spend a few minutes in bed lightly thinking ahead about some of the people you will see and the things you will do. You hit traffic on the way to work, but you don’t fight it; you just listen to the radio and don’t let the other drivers bother you. You may not be excited about your job, but today you’re focusing on the sense of accomplishment you feel as you complete each task. On the way home, your partner calls and asks you to stop at the store; it’s not your favorite thing to do after work, but you remind yourself it’s just fifteen extra minutes. In the evening, you look forward to a TV show and you enjoy watching it. Now let’s look at the same day, but imagine approaching it in a different way. After waking up, you spend a few minutes in bed pessimistically anticipating the day ahead and thinking about how boring work will be. Today, the traffic really gets under your skin, and when a car cuts you off, you get angry and honk your horn. You’re still rankled by the incident when you start work, and to make matters worse, you have an unbelievable number of rote tasks to get through. By the time you’re driving home, you feel fried and don’t want to do a single extra thing. Your partner calls to ask you to stop at the store. You feel put upon but don’t say anything and go to the store. Then you spend much of the evening quietly seething that you do all the work around the house. Your favorite show is on, but it’s hard to enjoy watching it, you feel so tired and irritated. Over these two imaginary days, the same exact things happened. All that was different was how your brain dealt with them—the setting that it used.”
― Rick Hanson, Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence

“staying with a negative experience past the point that’s useful is like running laps in Hell: You dig the track a little deeper in your brain each time you go around it.”
― Rick Hanson, Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence

“•  To survive and pass on their genes, our ancestors needed to be especially aware of dangers, losses, and conflicts. Consequently, the brain evolved a negativity bias that looks for bad news, reacts intensely to it, and quickly stores the experience in neural structure. We can still be happy, but this bias creates an ongoing vulnerability to stress, anxiety, disappointment, and hurt.”
― Rick Hanson, Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence

“Just before bed, your mind is very receptive, so no matter what went wrong that day, find something that went right, open to it, and let good feelings come and ease you into sleep. Doing”
― Rick Hanson, Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence

“The brain is good at learning from bad experiences, but bad at learning from good ones.”
― Rick Hanson, Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence

“Even if you, like me, have done things worthy of remorse, they do not wipe out your good qualities; you are still a fundamentally good person.”
― Rick Hanson, Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence

“you can manage your mind in three primary ways: let be, let go, let in.”
― Rick Hanson, Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence

“staying with a negative experience past the point that’s useful is like running laps in Hell: You dig the track a little deeper in your brain each time”
― Rick Hanson, Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence

“Every time you take in the sense of feeling safe, satisfied, or connected, you stimulate responsive circuits in your brain.”
― Rick Hanson, Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence

“with practice, you’ll learn to light up the neural circuits of positive states even when you’re rattled or upset, like reaching through clutter to get the tool you need.”
― Rick Hanson, Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence

“Stay with the positive experience for five to ten seconds or longer. Open to the feelings in it and try to sense it in your body; let it fill your mind. Enjoy it. Gently encourage the experience to be more intense. Find something fresh or novel about it. Recognize how it’s personally relevant, how it could nourish or help you, or make a difference in your life.”
― Rick Hanson, Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence

“Mammals, including us, become friendly, playful, curious, and creative when they feel safe, satisfied, and connected.”
― Rick Hanson, Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence

“I think the sweet spot in life is to pursue your dreams and take care of others with your whole heart while not getting fixated on or stressed out about the results. In this place, you live with purpose and passion but without losing your balance and falling into a sense of pressure, strain, or depletion. This sweet spot is very valuable, so take it in whenever you experience it.”
― Rick Hanson, Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence

“Inner strengths are the supplies you’ve got in your pack as you make your way down the twisting and often hard road of life.”
― Rick Hanson, Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence

“Enjoying the taste of toasted raisin bread or the humor in a cartoon may not seem like much, but simple pleasures like these ease emotional upsets, lift your mood, and enrich your life. They also provide health benefits, by releasing endorphins and natural opioids that shift you out of stressful, draining reactive states and into happier responsive ones. As a bonus, some pleasures—such as dancing, sex, your team winning a game of pick-up basketball, or laughing with friends—come with energizing feelings of vitality or passion that enhance long-term health. Opportunities for pleasure are all around you, especially if you include things like the rainbow glitter of the tiny grains of sand in a sidewalk, the sound of water falling into a tub, the sense of connection in talking with a friend, or the reassurance that comes from the stove working when you need to make dinner.”
― Rick Hanson, Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence

“In terms of building neural structure, what matters is not the event or circumstance or condition itself but your experience of it. Knowing without feeling is like a menu without a meal.”
― Rick Hanson, Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence

“In effect, the negativity bias is tilted toward immediate survival, but against quality of life,”
― Rick Hanson, Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence

“the brain evolved a built-in negativity bias. While this bias emerged in harsh settings very different from our own, it continues to operate inside us today as we drive in traffic, head into a meeting, settle a sibling squabble, try to diet, watch the news, juggle housework, pay bills, or go on a date. Your brain has a hair-trigger readiness to go negative to help you survive.”
― Rick Hanson, Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence

“This is taking in the good: activating a positive experience and installing it in your brain.”
― Rick Hanson, Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence

“Repeated mental/neural activity leaves lasting changes in neural structure: what’s called experience-dependent neuroplasticity.”
― Rick Hanson, Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence

“Mental states become neural traits. Day after day, your mind is building your brain.”
― Rick Hanson, Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence

“Meanwhile, less active connections wither away in a process sometimes called neural Darwinism: the survival of the busiest.”
― Rick Hanson, Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence

“Positive emotions encourage the pursuit of opportunities, create positive cycles, and promote success.”
― Rick Hanson, Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence

“Unlike fleeting mental states, inner strengths are stable traits, an enduring source of well-being, wise and effective action, and contributions to others.”
― Rick Hanson, Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence

“When you feel safe, your avoiding harms system enters its responsive mode, which brings feelings of relaxation, calm, and peace. When you feel satisfied, your approaching rewards system shifts into its responsive setting, with feelings such as gratitude, gladness, accomplishment, and contentment. And when you feel connected, your attaching to others system goes responsive, evoking feelings of belonging, intimacy, compassion, kindness, worth, and love.”
― Rick Hanson, Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence

“Create a positive experience by 3. finding good facts in your current setting 4. finding good facts in recent events 5. finding good facts in ongoing conditions 6. finding good facts in your personal qualities 7. finding good facts in the past 8. anticipating good facts in the future 9. sharing the good with others 10. finding the good in the bad 11. caring about others 12. seeing good in the lives of others 13. imagining good facts 14. producing good facts 15. directly evoking a positive experience 16. seeing life as opportunity”
― Rick Hanson, Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence