A few weeks ago, I wrote about the importance of thinking positively as a writer. This book is a FANTASTIC resource for learning how to do that. If you’re like me, and you have a natural bend toward negativity (which I suspect many writers have), I would recommend that the next book you read be this one. Nothing is more important for getting our brains into a healthy place.
Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm and Confidence, by Rick Hanson, is a book about training your mind to see good. But not just see it—absorb it. Make it a part of us. Rewire the brain to have a positivity bias.
Hanson is a neuropsychologist, which is a fascinating term, isn’t it? It just means that he’s a psychologist who uses brain science and not just psychology to help heal his patients. In Hardwiring Happiness, Hanson highlights the most recent brain science and then builds practices around how to use that brain science to rewire the brain so that we can eliminate things like helplessness, alarm, anxiety, fear, immobilization, disappointment, frustration, failure, boredom, apathy, drivenness, shame and worthlessness, resentment, and feeling neglected, misunderstood and left out, among many other negative biases. Hanson walks readers through how to change their brain using the everyday moments and his “taking in the good” practice, which is his term for sort of meditating on every moment, noticing it, taking it in, sinking into it, and then linking negative experiences with a positive one.
What I liked most about the book was the practices Hanson provided at the end of it. He lays out all the exercises you can use to eliminate your brain’s natural capacity for holding onto negative material. He said the negative material our brains hold onto falls into three different categories: avoiding harms, approaching rewards and attaching to others. I found those categories to be incredibly accurate and helpful for understanding my own biases. Hanson then created effective practices around each of those categories—with a challenge to eventually being practicing them every day.
I liked these practices so much that I actually recorded them on my phone’s voice recorder so that, when I’m feeling overwhelmed or I’m dealing with disappointment or I’m feeling ignored or left out or worthless, I can take a few minutes—which is really all these practices demand—and take in the good.
Where Hanson goes farther than other books I’ve seen like this is in his HEAL process. HEAL is an acronym for:
Have a positive experience.
Enrich it.
Absorb it.
Link positive and negative material.
I’ve read other books that detail the first three steps, but if you’re not linking positive and negative material and essentially rewriting the negative, then positivity will not last. The next time you encounter a trigger from your past, you’ll be right back in that place of shame or abandonment or failure. Hardwiring Happiness is a great resource for restructuring our brains to become and remain more positive—which is important for every aspect of our lives.
*The above is an affiliate link. I only recommend books I find valuable myself. I don’t even actually talk about the books I don’t find valuable, because I try to forget I wasted time on them.
