Dr. Rick Hanson's Book: Just One Thing

Dr. Rick Hanson has reached a wide audience through his writing on the mind and how to steady it. Across his career he put out four titles: Mother Nurture, Buddha's Brain, Just One Thing, and Hardwiring Happiness. The third of those, Just One Thing: Developing a Buddha Brain One Simple Practice at a Time, works nicely as a companion for anyone trying to stick with a plan for growth. It is a collection of small practices, and the promise is that following them changes how your days feel.

So what sits at the center of the book? Hanson wrote it with three things on his desk: positive psychology, what we know about the brain, and the idea that attention can be trained. His worry is a familiar one. People stay so occupied with being occupied that they rarely slow down enough to notice the parts of life worth enjoying. Reading the book is meant to hand you his own go-to methods for feeling better, day to day.

The practices themselves number fifty-two, drawn from the ones he likes best. Hanson describes each as a simple move you make with your mind. Do them and you grow more able to weather the hard, painful stretches of a life. His claim is that every single repetition shapes your mind in a good direction, and that none of it is guesswork; it leans on his background in positive psychology, neuroscience, and raising children.

Here is one of them. He keeps the practices short on purpose, because he assumes your schedule is already full and you can only spare a little thought each week. Whether you tell people you are doing the work or keep it private makes no difference to the result. One example asks you to spend a couple of minutes each day noticing what you are grateful for: the people around you, the way you managed a feeling, the work you do. It sounds too thin to matter. Make it a habit, though, and the effect runs deeper than you would guess at the start.

The pull of the book is that it treats change as something you cause rather than wait for. Hanson's position is that good outcomes do not drift toward you; you build them, and you build them out of small, ordinary adjustments. If you want a firmer grip on your own life, those modest shifts are where he points. He thinks of them as the route to living more fully, and he laid the book out for busy readers specifically. He is not asking you to drop what you already do. That is a good part of why the book lands.

- Cara Havens

References: Just One Thing: Developing a Buddha Brain One Simple Practice at a Time (amazon.com); rickhanson.net/writings/just-one-thing/; arbor-seminare.de