Rick Hanson on the Six Factors That Make Good Experiences Stick

The fifth factor Hanson points to is salience, or how personally relevant an experience feels. Ask yourself why it would matter to really take in the sense that you are strong and capable while you're wrestling with something hard. Or why it might help to feel that you have a right to have your own needs counted inside your family. For someone who grew up being brushed aside, whose needs were treated as an afterthought by the people around them, that kind of felt entitlement can be reparative. The clearer it becomes that something touches your own life directly, the deeper the groove it carves, and the more you learn from it.

The sixth factor he calls priming, or sensitization. When you set a deliberate intention to register what's happening, you tend to wake up the systems that build structure and lay down memory. Hanson uses memory in a wide sense here: any form of learning at all. In that state you can almost feel the experience soaking in, going down into you rather than skating across the surface.

Those are the six factors, and he's quick to say you don't have to run through every one. Any single factor on its own gives you something. If you wanted to compress the whole method into four words, it would be: have it, activate it, enjoy it, install it.

One pass through this, lasting five or ten or twenty seconds, will almost never rearrange somebody's life. The payoff lives in the slow pile-up. A handful of times a day, maybe half a dozen, each lasting under thirty seconds, you lean into the beneficial weight of an ordinary good moment. Add it up and that's under five minutes a day. But those small episodes of growth stack, day on day, week on week, year on year, and over time they bend the whole arc of a life. What was a flat, gentle rise across the decades starts to tilt into something far steeper.

Erik: That's fascinating, Rick. I think what people will like here is that it comes down to six fairly simple steps for folding positive experiences into yourself.

Dr. Hanson: Right. I usually package it with the acronym HEAL, which you may have run into. H-E-A-L. The H stands for have: have the experience as the opening move, activate it, let yourself occupy that state. Sometimes you catch yourself already in the middle of something good. As you breathe out and the parasympathetic side of the nervous system kicks in, a small wave of relaxation comes on its own.