Modern Wisdom
#903 - Rick Hanson - The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable
15 Feb 2025
Dr. Rick Hanson is a psychologist, author, and speaker. Our brains are more adaptable than we realise. With a bit of understanding, patience, and the right techniques, you can rewire your brain for greater happiness and well-being. So what are the best ways to make this happen? Expect to learn what positive and negative mental states are from a neurological perspective, if human brains are predisposed to being happy or peaceful, how to convince someone that they actually can change their mind, what the process for making our brain more likely to be happy, how to stop ruminating on bad experiences, how to not focus on negative self-talk, and much more… Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at https://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom Get a 20% discount on Nomatic’s amazing luggage at https://nomatic.com/modernwisdom Get a 20% discount on the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Full Episode
Dr. Rick Hansen, welcome to the show.
Hey Chris, it's great to talk with you again. We were chatting briefly beforehand and it was literally over six years ago and your whole work has skyrocketed.
I'm really glad for you and I'm really happy to be here.
I appreciate that. Yeah, episode 47 was you, and this is going to be episode 902, something like that. So yeah, you were like a protoplasm. You were just a mere amoeba at the beginning of this journey. And look now as we're dinosaur-sized Diplodocus plodding around.
I'm a fan of mammals. I feel like I have a lot of empathy for our rats, our kind of like rat-like ancestors running around in Jurassic Park that lived through the cataclysm. Yeah. You know, the asteroid came. That was it on the 90% of the species, but our ancestors were crafty and sly and warm-blooded and had babies they took care of. And we are here today.
The progeny continues on. So I want to go through the neurobiology of happiness today. This is maybe taking you back to sort of the beginning of your work, which I've become hugely obsessed by neurobiology, especially as it relates to well-being, interpersonal stuff. It really does feel like we sort of go around the houses of
finding explanations and personifying and coming up with interesting descriptions and titles for things to just come back to the nervous system and to just come back to sort of neurobiology. And I kind of really want to get this year into the nuts and bolts of this. So I guess maybe a good place to start would be what are positive and negative mental states from a neurobiological perspective?
Big picture is that there are neural correlates of the stream of consciousness. So we're having experiences, and those patterns of mental activity correlate with underlying patterns of neural activity. Maybe there's some X factor that's supernatural or even divine, ultimately, that's getting in the mix there. Science accepts mysteries.
But meanwhile, it's really clear that there's a very high level of correlation, moment to moment to moment. So we have states of being, moment to moment, and we have underlying traits, underlying tendencies that foster states. And the states, the experiences we're having, can then leave lasting traces behind for better or worse that foster the traits, the underlying tendencies of who we are.
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