Dr. Rick Hanson on Growing Inner Strengths

Every psychological resource, every inner strength a person can build up, gets there the same way: through having experiences of that resource and letting them settle into the brain. Say you're someone who runs anxious, or carries trauma, or tends to feel frozen and helpless, or finds yourself angry whenever you feel threatened. Each of those is a sign pointing at an unmet need for safety, maybe rooted in things that happened to you long ago, maybe something live in your life right now. Once you understand that, you can go looking on purpose for the kinds of experiences that speak to your own particular need.

I'm not going to walk through all of the remaining needs here. I've written about them at length on my site, RickHanson dot net (spelled R-I-C-K, Hanson, S-O-N), and in other places too, so the material is there if you want it. The short version is this. When you keep taking in the felt sense that these core needs are being met, doing small things over the day to feel reasonably safer, reasonably more satisfied, reasonably more connected, you're working with three broad categories: steering clear of harm, moving toward reward, and bonding with others.

Do that half a dozen times a day or more, deliberately internalizing the sense that a need has been met, and over time you start to heal in these areas. You get better at meeting life from a steadier place. I call it the green zone of your brain and nervous system. In the green zone you can still face a threat without tipping over into fear, holding onto a kind of inner calm while you handle whatever is hard.

The same thing happens with opportunities. Rather than sliding into frustration or disappointment, or getting driven and grasping and hooked, you can rest in a fullness that was already there before the opportunity showed up. It's been built in. Gratitude, a settled satisfaction, contentment generally, all of it hardwired ahead of time, so you meet opportunities and absorb losses from that base instead of from a sense of lack.

Connection works by the same repetition. Take in experiences of relatedness, of feeling cared about, several times a day, and you stop entering your relationships from the red zone. The red zone is where you show up feeling hurt, lonely, ashamed, resentful, maybe wanting to get back at someone. It's also where allostatic load piles up from one stressful experience after another, and that wear is not good for you.

Approach your relationships from the green zone instead. From a sense, already woven into your nervous system and your body, that you're cared about and loved, that you can be compassionate and kind, that you carry self-worth and actually love yourself. That prior underlying feeling is what changes how the relationship goes.