Dr. Rick Hanson on Changing Your Own Brain
Practices like meditation, relaxation training, the more body-based or experiential kinds of psychotherapy, and all sorts of private rituals already carry the HEAL process inside them, even if no one labels it that way. That's a big part of why they hold up over time. Consider how an ordinary day actually unfolds. Several times between waking and sleeping, you drop into the flow of something: a meal, the first minutes after you open your eyes, the moment before sleep. It can land at the close of a formal practice too, whether that's journaling, a short pause for gratitude, prayer, meditation, yoga, or Pilates.
The list keeps going. Walking the dog counts. So does a workout, a session with your own therapist, a massage, your daughter running a brush through your hair. Whatever form it takes, roughly half a dozen times a day you get a chance to light up some good experience. And then, if you slow down for it, a second chance arrives: the chance to take that experience in, to let it actually settle.
What moves me is the moment a person grasps that they can reshape their own brain from the inside, with support from science and plain common sense. The process is private. The experiences involved are usually pleasant, even fun. It isn't some grim march up the slopes of Mt. Doom to rescue the world. Once that clicks, it feels wildly hopeful. You start to see that, brick by brick, you can fill the gap left by whatever was missing in childhood, in a marriage, in a job, in a relationship that didn't give you what you needed.
The same goes the other way. Moment by moment, you can quiet and soften the places where allostatic load piled up, where you slid into depression or anxiety, or where something traumatic took hold. Realizing this, you can put to work what Jeffrey Schwartz at UCLA named self-directed neuroplasticity. The hope in that is hard to overstate, particularly now, when so many people feel shoved around by forces far bigger than themselves: the economy, politics, the neighbors, or just the pressure of a past life echoing inside their own head.
Most of the time we don't feel much power to push back against any of that. So there's real relief in knowing that at least here, in this one territory, in the small handful of everyday experiences you work with each day, you can be more hammer than nail when it comes to your own well-being. That by itself is a cheerful thing to carry around.