Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence
Rick Hanson
Top 10 Best 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,”
“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.”
“If you take care of the minutes, the years will take care of themselves.”
“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.”
“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.”
“• 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.”
“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.”
“you can manage your mind in three primary ways: let be, let go, let in.”
“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”
“The brain is good at learning from bad experiences, but bad at learning from good ones.”
Except where otherwise noted, all rights reserved to the author(s) of this book (mentioned above). The content of this page serves solely as promotional material for the aforementioned book. If you enjoyed these quotes, you can support the author(s) by acquiring the full book from Amazon.
Book Keywords:
