The Science Of Rewiring Your Brain To Be Less Miserable - Dr Rick Hanson

Dr Rick Hansen welcome to the show hey Chris it's great to talk with you again we were chatting briefly beforehand and was literally over six years ago and your whole work is skyrocketed I'm really glad for you and I'm really happy to be here I appreciate that yeah episode 47 was you and this is going to be episode 900 two something like that so yeah uh uh you were I know you were like a a protoplasm you were just a amoeba at the beginning of this journey and look look now as we're dinosaur sized dioicus

plotting around I'm a fan of mammals I I feel like I have a lot of empathy for our rats our kind of like rat likee ancestors running around in Jurassic Park that live through the cataclysm yeah D you know the asteroid came that was it on the 90% of the species but our ancestors were crafty and Sly and you know warm-blooded and had babies they took care of and we are here today the progeny continues on so I want to go through the neurobiology of Happiness today this is maybe taking you back to sort the

beginning of your work which I've become hugely obsessed by neurobiology especially as it relates to well-being interpersonal stuff it really does feel like we sort of go around the houses finding explanations and personifying and coming up with interesting uh descriptions and titles for things to to just come back to the nervous system and to just come back to sort of neurobiology and I kind of really want to get this year into the nuts and bolts of this so I guess um maybe a good place to start would be what are positive and negative mental States

from a neurobiological perspective big picture is that there are neural correlates of the stream of Consciousness so we're having experiences and those patterns of mental activity correlate with underlying patterns of neural activity maybe there's some X Factor that's Supernatural or even Divine ultimately that's getting in the mix there science accepts Mysteries but meanwhile it's really clear that there's a very high level of correlation moment to moment to moment so we have states of being moment to moment and we have underlying traits underlying tendencies that Foster States and the states the experiences we're having can then

leave lasting traces behind For Better or Worse that Foster the traits the underlying Tendencies of who we are boom my work has been extremely focused on how to uh grab hold of and take charge of who we are becoming and that fundamental process of helping beneficial states of being emotions Sensations attitudes motivation and thoughts become embedded as underlying beneficial traits inner strengths of various kinds including a positive mood since we're focused on happiness here that then Foster beneficial States in a positive upward spiral and being in charge of that process rather than just kind of

willy-nilly being swept along including with a brain that has a big negativity bias like velcro for bad experiences Teflon for good ones okay pause for breath any question so far keep going you're on a roll okay so you're exactly right how do we Foster in ourselves or those we care about more beneficial I prefer beneficial to positive because sometimes a beneficial state of being is healthy remorse or open-hearted sorrow or being real about um something that's painful to look at and hard but you really need to look at it inside yourself okay so how do

we Foster beneficial States and beneficial traits what's the actual how of that and what's going on in the Machinery under the hood that's you're getting at right so operationally we're talking about reduce I'm GNA use the word bad not morally but pragmatically here reduce the bad grow the good less less s less sadness less unnecessary sadness fear anxiety and shame the four major negative emotions so-called negative okay less of that uh less crippling anxiety lesss less negative rumination um less of that and more sense of underlying uh well-being that's resilient even as you deal with

the challenges of life so what's going on in your brain so on the negative side we have a brain that is already biased toward negative learning because that helped our ancestors survive so um and that very much involves I'll jump into it now actually I got to do it sorry bear with me brain evolved like a house three floors okay there's the brain stem the subcortex and then the cortex sitting on top right the so what we're trying to do is tune that brain more positively problem is the um lower regions of the brain are

hard to train they're very reptilian very automatic right and so it takes a certain amount of effort to to change them for the better so essentially someone who is unhappy let's say a lot of the time is often having an overreactive subcortical region of the amydala the hippocampus and the basil ganglia that's tilted and tuned in a negative Direction toward negative emotion and trapped in certain Loops sometimes motivationally as well in terms of what people want and the rewards they're seeking that are negative um and for that person there's not enough cortical prefrontal top- down

regulation of that negative stuff right and also there's a lack of the positive there's not enough production or um activity related to healthy opioids natural opioids that are the well-being chemicals in the brain uh or other little slippery small molecules called peptides such as oxytocin there's an under underproduction of that um and uh what we're trying to do basically with people is to increase topdown regulation of negative factors a b we're also trying to really promote um more emotional learning of that which is positive so that there's more of a tilting in effect in the

brain toward um healthy opioids you know in in general oxytocin in particular and um you know related then finishing on that uh more broader capabilities uh in um terms of integration of cortical systems of different kinds with these underlying more ancient parts of the brain that began to emerge 200 million years ago fantastic I can say more about that I'll say one more thing if I could what's super cool is like if we want to get good at something study people who are good at it so more and more we're able with um different forms

of brain scanning MRIs eegs and even invasive experiments that are ethically challenged on non-human Animals still we're starting to reverse engineer what's going on in the brains of people who are resilient in the face of challenge who are in combat situation side by side with somebody else but they don't develop post-traumatic stress disorder what's happening there what's happening in the brains of super meditators to bed and monks with 60,000 years lifetime practice let's say of meditation what's going on there and we can study more and more what changes in the brain over time with long-term

meditation you've been a meditator for a number of years I can tell you probably if you're like other people who meditated for a while significant changes that have occurred in your own brain that then map to changes in your mind so we maybe we could talk about that too so it seems like we have a couple of systems going on here we have the state changes that are how can we interject during an experience while something is happening how can we top down try to dictate a little bit more with the newer bit of the

house toward the back of the house how can you learn from that experience the goal is to change as best we can to uh enhance and latch onto good things to mitigate or beneficial things to mitigate the impact of bad things to also begin to retrain the house to move away from this predisposition it has of being negative in that direction and that I mean everybody is aware in one form or another about the negativity bias you know if you get nine compliments and one criticism you forget the compliments and you remember the criticism and

that sticks with you maybe for the rest of your life uh I was having a conversation with Canada's lead chair of the anti-bullying uh psychologists Association she's like evidence space bullying intervention she tell me this story about an 82-year-old woman who uh was diagnosed with something and she maybe didn't have too long to live and she was opening up to Tracy about the fact that she still remembered when she was 12 years old and the girls who picked on her in school and Tracy's response was that those are dead like you you you don't need

to be but it kind of shows just how uh competent we are you know we don't need there is no training course out there for people to become more anxious or more concerned or more sad or more worried are more shameful Mother Nature has taken good care of that already we are black belts in that from the womb uh but we need to work in correct we're all white belts in the rest of it so I think um maybe to just sort of dig a little bit deeper into the negativity side can you take us

through the phases of the neurobiology of that negativity bias sort of how it occurs step by step so five things we're Hardware to do that were really good for survival back in Jurassic Park the Stone Age one continually scan for bad news outside and also inside look for the bad two when you identify it over focus upon it so that's one reason why Barbara frederickson's work in positive emotions is called broaden and build the broaden part is that while we're having emotionally positive experiences our perceptual field is wider that's which also promotes greater creativity and

productivity at work one that one light on the inner dashboard Mosaic 10 by1 100 little lights start flashing red we ignore all the other green lights and the gray ones the neutral ones to focus on that one thing third we overreact to it people react more to loss than to gain that's condiment work on prospect theory and and all the rest of that um just think about the emotion somebody gives you a $100 oh that's nice on the other hand what happens when you realize someone has stolen $100 from you you know the intensity is

great so overreact and then fourth really important overlearning we're much more impacted typically by negative interactions with a friend or lover or family member than we are by positive interactions that's why positive interactions uh need to outnumber significantly by people debate the number the factor but by 3:1 5:1 or more you know in a long-term relationship and when I stumbled on that fact in grad school I Revisited the last three days with my wife and realized I needed to raise my game in terms of the ratio of positive and negative so that's four things right

there that's really natural and then fifth uh as a result of that the brain gets sensitized it's designed to become sensitized to negative experiences so when we're identified with anxiety when we're hijacked by it or anger or frustration um or feeling inadequate um that gets reinforced very quickly in the brain and we become even more vulnerable to that kind of experience in the future now that's different from mindfully experiencing negative emotions which actually then tends to neutralize them because we're starting to associate a kind of undisturbed observing of the negative experience with the negative experience

which tends to calm it down so those are five things that we're just naturally hardwired to do which then sixth outside of the neurobiology in the world tends to create Rous Cycles with other people and um that's the negativity bias in the nutshell there's certain situations where it's really useful you know you grow up in a war zone or you live in a war zone it's really handy U but for most people Modern Life most of the time it creates all kinds of needless suffering and needless aggravation with other people it's and so practically if

we tilt toward valuing beneficial experiences in a kind of hard-nosed clear eyed way not out of Airy fairy positive thinking but in a hard-nosed clear eyed way we're trying to grow strengths inside and part to deal with the bad is we lean into beneficial experiences and we help ourselves disengage from negative experiences to the extent that it's useful for us to do that and not get ruminating about them so forth if we tilt in those ways we're just leveling the playing field yeah so the best argument for the neurobiology of positivity and of trying to

hardwire the stuff that you uh advocate for is that well this just brings you back to Baseline this this just sort of levels the playing fields because you've been fighting an uphill battle your entire life that's part that's part one of it and in me I don't like bullies and in effect we're being bullied by our brain you know so there's a part of me it's like you that's one part of it you're exactly right yeah but there's the other part which is in addition to just leveling it and no longer swimming Upstream how do

you grow the strengths inside how do you influence who you are becoming from the inside out and to mean that's very interesting you know I I grew up really a shy dorkey kid decent parenting and so forth I was very young going through school and so I really felt nobody cared about me or saw me and I was I was I was a loser and I was never going to be any good and so it became really important for me to um develop strengths inside of various kinds that compensated for that that healed that such

as feeling in just included or I still remember a million-dollar moment you know because I was super young in school I was picked last for sports in college though I kind of discovered I was a pretty good athlete I was playing intramural football American football not soccer but you got it and this stud of a quarterback on our team uh who just a little too small to play in division one um football but was still a manly man uh and uh he walked past me one day as we were coming back to our dorms after

practice and uh he just grunted at me you know like dudes do hey Hanson you're good I'm gonna throw to you more oh man that was a million dooll moment that was so good to take in to sink you know let it sink into me to specifically heal wounds and lack inside and also grow normal range you know self-worth and self-confidence so for me these are the two reasons to tilt toward what's beneficial and to take in the good to grow the good that lasts inside one definitely compensate for Mother Nature's bias but also to

develop whatever you want to grow inside you yeah I think people feel like they stuck with their mind yeah like it just is the way it is this that's right is my programming does that piss you off to feel stuck well look I the most important thing in mine and a lot of my friends lives is agency it's our ability to change the outcomes to win the computer game no matter what the boss is that's put in front of us to be uh to not need permission to do it completely permissionless um and yet there

is a couple of pound wet thing between my ears that I'm prepared to much of the time move the world out of the way in order to get the things that I want but because you can't see it happening internally because there's no uh this is to be done this is is being done this is H this has been done sort of widget criteria that you can that you can track uh it's all ephemeral and difficult to work out am I better is this better now than it was back then have have I is am

I actually doing anything it's it's tough so yeah I think um convincing people that they can change their minds at a fundamental level is um something that's probably pretty important I've been really struck so I have a business background and and a practical background um I've been really struck by how people are really pretty clear about making things better over time in the outer world but they kind of feel helpless or even uninterested in the process of making things better over time in the inner world that's what you're talking about and your whole work I

think a lot of it is helping people realize they do have that power inside themselves and they can use that power in skillful ways that's that's exactly right and um it's a plain fact that the essence of it is a twep process that's incredibly simple it's under our control most of the time and people usually forget the Second Step first you have to experience whatever you want to grow you want to feel feel uh better about yourself you want to feel more committed to exercise you want to you want to be um less self-critical you

want to be more confident public speaking whatever it might be you first have to experience what you want to grow or factors of it okay that's a state but the second step is there must be an internalization of that momentary patterning of neurological activation that leaves a lasting Trace in the body especially in the brain that's the second step but if people actually engage that second step a handful of times every day for typically a breath or two maybe longer then they are steepening their growth curve and influencing in lasting ways who they're becoming the

dirty Secret in the clinical world is that we routinely leave out that second step we kind of hope that something will stick to the walls there you know even in Barbara frederickson's for example wonderful work on on broadening and build the build aspect of emotionally positive experiences is described as incidental me I don't like that I want deliberate you know what I mean I want deliberate I'm Gonna Leave This up to chance yeah that's exactly right and this is no knock on Barbara this is I'm really speaking actually about my own my own errors as

a therapist over time to be good at promoting certain experiences in people but ignoring the question of whether they're sinking in in any kind of a lasting way and so anyway people can appreciate that it's a two-step process state to trait and you actually have the power to slow down and take in the good as it were of that experience keep the neurons firing together so they wire together feel it in your body track a reward value of the experience right there are three neurologically based evidence-based methods for heightening internalization of whatever you want to

develop in yourself stay with it feel it in your body track what's benef track what feels good about it highlight what feels good about it uh and there are other methods as well like be aware of what's novel about it or Salient personally relevant um you know give over to it allow yourself to receive it feel like it's sinking in these are all evidence-based factors that increase learning um but in the moment um you're really helping yourself Harvest what you've earned in in the experience you're having at the time and so and you're being kind

to yourself you're getting bonus benefits for doing this you're treating yourself like you matter uh along the way yeah and it's it's as simple as that it's not a quick fix you know takes time but less than a few minutes a day people can profoundly change who they are becoming based on durable changes in their own brain let's go through in painstaking detail the process for making our brains more likely to be happy than somebody is going through their normal day they think this Dr Hansen guy sounds pretty good he was on episode 47 of

modern wisdom I can trust him uh CHR led him back oh my I reckon he knows yeah six years later I re he knows what he's talking about um take us through it take us through the the evidence-based processes three things first if you're um going through your day and think of them as ordinary Jewels you know ordinary experiences that are that are that feel good you know like right here I have an opportunity to feel respected by you appreciated by you okay it's not more than what it is but it's not less than what

it is or you're going through your day you get something done you complete a workout you feel good about yourself for doing that you accomplish something at work someone is someone smiles to you anything in the course of your day slow down handful of times every day to take in the good on the fly right there you've probably spent about a minute total maybe two minutes total doing what I'm suggesting here probably closer to a minute a a breath at a time which is about 10 seconds plus or minus that itself will change a person

if they said okay I'm going to follow this guy's prescription I think he's a maniac but I'm going to try it there's no no harm it's secret is private no one is knowing that I'm slowing down to taking the good even though I'm a really tough person you know and super stoic and all the rest of that right righty just the fact that you're looking for what for the good facts and then you're letting yourself have a good experience from the good facts just on the let yourself have the good experience and allowing it to

sort of sink in sink in yeah what just can you just a little bit with a little bit more description what what is what is the process of doing that or what have you found to be the best way to uh to do that yeah and we could do it together you know if you want but so uh notice that something good is happening or could be happening like that's revelatory for lot of people you know because again negativity bias and the pelm pace of Modern Life were just blowing right past all kinds of jewels

so if you were to become someone who said hey that I want to deliberately let it land you know and I don't want to be manipulated by all these people who are blasting me with threat messages they level orange all over the place or dragging me into the next thing or trying to compel my attention no I'm in control of my own attention I want to rest my attention on ordinary small usually but real good stuff in my life and I want to Second help myself feel something so I finish a challenging email I hit

send before racing on to the next thing I take half a breath while I'm inhaling to register hey I finished that and good on me and a sense of relief I got it done I'm feeling something useful okay Additionally the longer you stay with that experience half a breath now a few seconds have ticked by you know neurons typically are firing five 100 times a second you know giant coalitions of neurons in the brain are synchronized in their firing you know 5 to 80 times a second or you know there a lot of stuff's happen

happening in your brain over the course of an inhalation add the exhalation now you're up to about six or eight or 10 seconds you're staying with it just that is increasing the consolidation of that experience in your brain stay with it the second technique I mentioned try to feel it in your body sometimes there's a place for just absorbing a new idea it's purely conceptual okay um in my early 20s I realized that growing up I had been a nerd but not a whim that idea had a lot of implications for me you know but

that's just that was an idea but much of the time what we really want to internalize is more felt in the body it's more sematic so we want to just feel what's it like to feel a sense of accomplishment and relief that I handle that tricky email or what do I feel in my body when I have a sense of like Fellowship Friendship Community with with another person I I like and respect like I'm experiencing here what's that feel like so the more you feel it in your body the deeper the learning we're going after

emotional learning emotional learning somatic learning motivational learning even spiritual learning if we get to that um third thing you can do is be aware of what is Meaningful or enjoyable about it for you because as soon as you track the reward as soon as you highlight the reward value of an experience technically it increases activity of dopamine and norepinephrine to neurochemical systems in your hippocampus which is the front end of the process of emotional learning in your brain so and as dopamine and norepinephrine activity increase in the hippocampus that Flags the experience that the time

is a keeper in long-term storage as it sinks into you gradually we will not remember the event but the emotional residues will sink into us so those would be three things that people can do do in the flow of life that are evidence-based that increase emotional learning from experiences increase impact lasting value I I could name others people I published a paper called learning to learn from positive experiences that summarizes all the evidence for this and and how to do it um and I've written about it and talked about it in other kinds of ways

people can check that out but just those three stay with it for a breath or longer feel it in your body try you know highlight for you what's enjoyable about it what's meaningful about it Bingo you are increasing the trace you're heightening the trace in physical structures and functions that's that's left behind by The Experience how does that process or where does this map onto heal your okay acronym for a framework thanks for being a really good student my stuff I've only had six years to prepare so that's right super briefly the heel acronym so

I did not invent any of these methods now really good teachers and people often on their own who have a fairly steep learning curve I would imagine that you've yourself been just doing this naturally along the way do these processes of internalization what I have done is to pull them together in a comprehensive framework and embed it in evolution and then apply it which we'll get to in a second about the second big thing that people can do with this which is to identify particular strengths they want to grow inside not just kind of move

through life harvesting you know here and there useful experiences which is great in its own right but going after things in particular so I'll get to that so heels stands for have that's the have the beneficial experience in the first place either you notice it's happening or you create it and then the second necessary step right the one that I and others routinely for get uh of installation I call it activation installation because I read too much science fiction uh installation and still do probably um the E stands for enriching you're helping the experience be

big powerful lasting in your brain and a for absorbing you're sensitizing the neurobiological Machinery of memory so the enriched experience is landing on a more sensitive system that can really internalize it that's the basic process then the fourth step is optional but very powerful is to link in the moment a beneficial experience with some negative material you're trying to to soothe and ease and eventually even replace right that's that's the overall structure I think of it as like the brain and mind are like a garden you can be with it which is fundamental but you

can also work with it uh and working with it means pulling weeds and planting flowers and my focus a lot is how do you plant the flowers but you can use in the linking step you can use flowers not just to gradually Crow out the weeds over time but to actually uproot the weeds is there anything else is there anything else to say on here before we get to l h i well yeah let's get to the L that would be cool but the the the second people you said okay brick great thanks how does

this translate into daily life I think of this is like the five minute challenge right three parts the first part I've said already as you go through the flow of your life look for a handful of useful experiences beneficial good moments and slow down and let them sink in most of them are not million-dollar moments they the bread and butter of daily life but if you start looking for them and taking them in that will change your day alone and you've only spent a minute doing that spread distributed over the course of your day second

what do you want to grow more inside what would make a big difference if it were more present in your mind you know there are these four questions Chris said routinely clinicians should think about and people can think about in daily life what's your challenge what's a challenge especially what's the experience of it inside you right then second the money question what would help if it were more present in your mind right so now you know like for example my story feeling respected for not being a total loser athlete I'm not great but I'm kind

of good all right I wanna I want to feel that I want to look for that or I want to feel more included more comfortable uh fairly manly men like you were scary to me when I was like a skinny dorky guy in school to feel fine and comfortable that's that's something I want to grow inside let's say whatever it might be and there are many other things uh working on patients and being less exasperated by some people whatever you're look working on know what that is I think of it as like I call it

the vitamin C you know if you have scurvy iron won't help you need Vitamin C what are the specific inner resources inner strengths that are matched to the challenges you have and as you know from hard Maring happiness I think of challenges in a certain framework relating to the evolution of the brain or three basic needs for safety satisfaction and connection and what are the strengths that are specifically matched to those particular challenges if you a lot of it is just what does your heart long for or when you were growing up what would have

made all the difference in the world you that that identifies okay now that you know what you're trying to grow one or two key things look for ways to Step One experience it or factors of it and second slow down and really take it in that might take another minute a day that's the second aspect of my five minute Challenge and then last if people are you know real about it at some point in your day maybe part of your meditation maybe when you first wake up or go to sleep marinade and when I called

Deep green the natural setting of our species and mammals in general it's why zebras don't get ulcers you know sapolsky's Wonderful book on stress the natural setting when we feel that need are met enough in the moment is the body settles down to in its equilibrium state in which it's undisturbed and the mind is saturated in terms of our Three Needs with a broad sense of peacefulness contentment and love related to safety satisfaction connection whatever for you feels like a kind of homecoming to your natural state of sense of your own inner goodness deliberately take

one to three minutes to just marinate in it every day just help yourself come home to it help it land sink in stabilize and establish itself in you and give it a minute to three every day that will gradually build up a resilient core of well-being inside you that you can return to increasingly and that core will gradually build out even with stresses and frazzled and irritation and worry and so forth around the edges okay right there that five minutes most people you know uh will easily spend five minutes a day on their workout or

you know Doom scrolling on Twitter uh spend five minutes a day influencing who you are becoming right so that that's a quick summary and just the first three steps have enrich and absorb hea I like that relate to what I've said so far and if you want then you can move into linking to clear out the negative crud yeah I suppose you know in the word heel uh maybe most people would think about there being an issue which is being made better and so far uh three quarters of it we've been engendering more of what

we want to see in our lives we have been finding the particular areas that we may feel deficient in or that we would just like to to bring more of into our experience and we're moving towards that uh but everything kind of changes or we move more into the remediation uh part when we look at the linking so talk to me about the neurobiology of that oh definitely um kind of inevitably talking about it can sound kind of like professorial or dactic because I'm I'm like a coacher I'm saying well you want to ski this

is what these are some things to do you know lean into it rather than back you know things like like that beware of your edges and when you're doing this it it feels really quite intimate with yourself and kind you're I mean we're hungry we're we're BIG scared monkeys life is hard uh we're rattled happens most of us have you know been treated unfairly in different ways you know less so if you're you know kind of more privileged and so forth but still happens so uh you're you're really standing up for yourself you're helping yourself

you're being good to yourself you're treating yourself like other people should have treated you and that's very it's real you know you we we want to take in okay um and in the process of that nobody there's been very little research on the deliberate internalization of beneficial experiences there's been a lot of research on the impact of sustained experiences that are beneficial and how they change the brains of humans and especially non-human animals there's a lot of evidence for this and one of the things I'm really interested in is retuning the amydala and the parts

of the brain that are biased negatively and then get very sensitized negatively how can we retrain them over time so that they become you know reactive to red lights and but they are on the other hand much more opportunity focused and have more of what's called an approach orientation which you know is more associated with mental health uh and and wellbeing okay linking uh two ways to do it one is in the moment you you know that there's a place inside you that has either a wound or a lack and the lack part is really

important because people are aware of how they were mistreated like the woman at 80 who was bullied or harassed as a kid that creates wounds alongside those wounds it could well have been there could also well have been a lack of inclusion in groups where she was with kids she liked she may not have had a good friend maybe her parents were busy and old school and decent but not very touchy feely and so there may have been a lack of positive social supplies we can be just is affected by the lack of the good

as the presence of the bad that's really important when people kind of reflect on themselves what are they working with either way there's quote unquote negative material inside all right so if you know about your own negative material I I really enjoyed listening to use the metaphor in going through therapy uh of learning about all kinds of new rooms in the Mansion of of your being um when you start to know what's in those rooms then you can start to identify what are the resources inside the strengths inside that would um be a good match

for that wound or that lack that would help to fill that lack inside that hole in your heart maybe or would soothe and ease and gradually mend that um that wound inside so you identify a particular strength so I'll give an example let's suppose that someone um either based on their history or just their temperament uh is anxious about stuff let's say anxious in work environments about sticking their neck out speaking up and even making presentations very common okay uh or or being let's say vulnerable speaking from the heart with someone they care about letting

someone know hey you know it's really scary when you're a kid to go to some house knock on the door will Johnny come play or Susie play you know do you like me it's really scary okay so let's say there's anxiety there what's the Psychological Resource that would be matched to it well one is being able to calm yourself especially calm your body when you're nervous about something that's good uh another is a sense that you're strong that yeah you're anxious about something or it's threatening or challenging but you're strong you're determined you're capable you've

got Moxy you're going to get through it you can deal with it you know either one of those so far right right so in my extended example sorry about this let's say you're going through life and um you know that you have anxiety and you know that you value a sense of calming in your body or a sense Andor a sense of personal strength so then when you have that positive matched resource like calming or sense of strength and you're feeling it in the present you could deliver L bring it into contact with that anxiety

maybe anxiety going back to your childhood maybe more like your your temperament and be aware of both of them at the same time neurons sit fire together wire together so if you keep the positive experience bigger in your mind while you're aware of that negative off to the side and a sense of the positive connecting with the negative going in into it both of them are present in your awareness at the same time where you're toggling back and forth pretty quickly linking is Central to therapy trauma work passive healing in general I'm talking about how

to do it on your own very specifically if the negative material is so powerful like in trauma that it's going to hijack you you're not ready to do linking with it but if you can do it on your own and regulate yourself while you're doing it this is top five top three mental health method I know terms of its far-reaching impact so that's one in which you start with the Matched strength and you deliberately connect it with the negative material or a few breaths maybe longer you can explore it you can do longer versions of

this if you want to and it's done in longer ways in structured therapies but you can do it on your own and it's incredibly powerful the other way is if you're sucked into the negative uh after you be with it for a while the three main ways to work with your mind are to let be let go and let in so you let be you be with it you feel it mindfully then you move into some kind of release then what do you want to replace it with right you've released let's say the anxiety but

you want to replace it with for example calm or a sense of being strong or other matched resources so then what you would do in linking is you would deliberately bring up some resource that's matched to the negative material and be aware of both of them at the same time keeping the positive bigger it's interesting to think about uh that cognitive superposition of holding both the positive and then to sort of add this in without collapsing it down into one but allowing them both to sort of sit together and then that's very good yeah you

got yeah totally it's really it's cool and you got to keep you got to be on you got to be on your own side to do this you got to want the positive to win you start to discover sometimes that there's an inner traitor inside you that is allied with the negative and wants to keep it around maybe because it serves some function for you so a lot of stuff gets stirred up when you try to do this it's really useful to be aware of in yourself but if you stay with it you know you

want the the strong to prevail not because you're trying to bypass the negative or suppress it no you're being kind to yourself you're you're easing it you're soothing it you're um you're you're helping yourself not feel unnecessarily anxious it's useful to be anxious in proportion to threats you know and then it's useful to move past anxiety and deal with the threat without feeling nervous I've done a ton of Hardcore rock climbing in very dangerous situations and most of the time I'm really because I feel resourced you know I have a rope I know what I'm

doing I have my buddy you know I'm scruffy and determined and I'm going to get up to the top of the darn thing um you know so just because there's a threat we don't have to feel anxious as we cope with it that's a detail but an important one it seems like one of the most no matter what your outcome goal is here being able to slow down around experiences seems Central so so quickly moving beyond experiences to the Litany of new novel things or the next achievement that you're trying to do is fundamentally like

amputating our capacity for embedding happiness in this way you know Chris um I appreciate you immensely you know I just because I knew I doing this I would start watching you and um you're you're so clear and the clarity comes from the inside out it's just a really a pleasure really thank you you're you're exactly right and and I I reflect on that a little bit as you know like a kid you're not the boss of me you know who what who and what do we let Boss us around including our own habit Tendencies to

chase the next thing and as you know my own background is increasingly kind of Buddhist in which there's a real respect for the intelligence and the the Buddhist original Drive theory of suffering we let craving chasing the next shiny object you know drag us away from the present and getting control of that in part by repeatedly internalizing the felt sense of needs met enough in the present to undo the biological Machinery of craving which is based on deficit and needs met enough right that there's a lot in that but to me it becomes very profound

to to do exactly what you're saying to be able to marinate in the Bounty of the present right uh with a sense even of contentment in the present even as we pursue you know worthy goals yeah I've been spending a lot of time thinking about conspicuous productivity recently being uh obviously busy and the social rewards that you get for that whether it's internally within a company whether it's externally with the people around you look at how much I'm doing see how frenetic and how quickly I move but if you look at uh what happens in

systems that are very very tuned up you remember the ever given that uh big tanker that got stuck in the Suez Canal a couple of years ago they're still paying off the supply chain issues that that it was tens of billions of dollars I think it was maybe stuck sideways in the Suez Canal for 4 days 5 days something like that but the system is tuned up so tight that there is no tolerance left and the smallest error uh causes massive massive repercussions and everything falls apart and um I think about the way that a

lot of people myself too uh overtune our Our Lives we we try to overclock our speedrun through what how many how many thoughts can I think at once how much work can I do at once I'm going to wash the dishes whilst listening to a podcast at two times speed and I'll have my emails Open Over The Far Side so while the water's getting hot I'll quickly go and do this thing and um in some ways it's exhilarating to do that you know it's it's exciting it's rushy uh it's very obvious the ways in which

you are moving to toward something but when you actually ask yourself okay what what did I get done today when you look back the dishes weren't what washing dishes is maybe a bad example because it's pretty difficult to do it badly uh but maybe the dishes weren't washed thoroughly you don't remember anything from the podcast and you didn't send any emails but you kind of looked at them a little bit so my point being that we can we can prioritize we can optimize for trying to do very obvious things that in no way meaningfully move

us toward the goals that we have in life the actual outcome that we're trying to achieve and much of the time the thing that we're looking for is right under our nose like why is it that you're trying to do the very next thing why is it that you're rushing toward this next set of novelty or this next task that you can take off or to achieve the next whatever Target it is that you've set yourself well presumably it's because you want to try and Achieve an enjoyable emotional state like that's really all there is

just enjoyable emotional states yeah you just I just want to be in the present moment and feel good about it okay what if by chasing the next shiny new thing you are denying yourself the very thing that you're trying to achieve by doing that thing so you're sacrificing the thing that you want for the thing which is supposed to get the thing that you say that you want and uh every time I TR put out a fire with gasoline or satisfy your thirst with salt water right exactly yeah yeah yeah it's like um I can't

stop to look at the sunset whilst I'm driving in the car I must drive quickly toward the sunset so I can see it um like I must have my my eyes down at the steering wheel so I can get toward the sunset it's like dude it's right there and you know the more that I hear about the importance of slowing down the fact that you do need to something good has happened allow it notice it allow it to sink into you build it up build it up allow it to be felt in your body okay

you cannot do that if your next thought is the next thought if you're moving toward the next action the next thing that's going to go on that's correct and uh yeah I think I'm at the stage and a lot of my friends are now where we're just like ah dude I'm kind of sick of myself I'm kind of sick of my patterns I'm like really kind of bored of this of using that chasing of the Dragon the dopamine thing uh because tried it become very successful at it but source code fundamentally it doesn't change that

much it is uh you know an Ora Bor s it's like a one of those ancient gods that had an unlimited sized stomach and it's like it can just continue to eat and continue to eat and continue to eat and there'll never be an amount of stimulation that's enough so I think that getting in and actually tinkering with the knobs and the dials at the very bottom is uh seems like a much better strategy drop the mic I can't touch to an arm yeah I mean it really is so true how to H it it's

funny for myself I thought I would have issues with in terms of the three main needs safety satisfaction connection I thought I would have issues with safety like I'm kind of anxious by temperament or as a lonely kind of introverted person I thought I'd have issues with connection and my issues I mean having stable experiences of feeling safe enough or connected enough in the present but no my issues really have been around contentment have been around feeling satisfied enough in the present because I'm very goal directed I want to accomplish things and I'm hedonistic you

know on the anyag I'm a seven if that's relevant to you in terms of that system of modeling so that's been it's been really startling to appreciate how much automaticity there is in my fairly well-trained brain at this point to to to look for the next thing to want it's like endlessly foraging even though my belly is already full looking for the next new thing to want and it's really quite profound for people to explore can you actually feel like there's enough right now even as you pursue wholesome goals to feel already content even as

you pursue important Ambitions um it's pretty challenging and probably because it's challenging it's been really interesting I've really want wanted to do that and to me that's that's the name of the game to feel content already enoughness already you know I I have a meditation thing online and I did a talk just on the word already like the profound wisdom in the word already you're already safe you're already enough you are already enough and on the basis of that yeah accumulate more knowledge become more skillful become more able to help more people good stuff but

to feel already enough is just hard for people and yet it's really important you're good enough already whoa let that sink in I had this idea a long time ago I was interested in why personal development seemed to assuage my feelings of insufficiency uh even though the insufficiency was still there and the fear of not being enough and I think that it is the it's the denial of something like the word already or enough which is if I know that I'm on a trajectory where every day I'm getting a little bit better and today I

might not be good enough but because tomorrow I know I'm going to be a little bit better maybe tomorrow will be the day when I feel enough and you continually push off the promise of when you will be happy or satisfied with yourself or with the the place that you've got to you continually push that off until the next day well might not be now but you know it'll be tomorrow and I imagine that uh maybe people with eating disorders you know maybe uh girls suffering from anorexia maybe well you know my body's not right

now but I I if I if I don't eat today maybe tomorrow will be the day that I do this this sort of anticipatory prediction that we have that something that's going to come up will be the moment at which I'm a piece that was when it was enough it's not right now but I I the trajectory is moving me in the right direction interesting even if it's the Direction so what's the difference what's it feel like to be motivated by a sense of something missing or on the other hand to be motivated toward something

good with already a sense of fullness it's a big difference I mean it's the it's a difference between running away from something that you fear and running towards something that you want um and even the thing you're running toward that you want is done in the knowledge that you can have it and it'll be great if you get it but you don't need it and you're enough without it uh I think you know that whatever cognitive superposition thing these are two very difficult ideas to hold in our mind at the same time because so much

of what we do is driven by fear of insufficiency yeah fear of insufficiency and uncertainty and wishing that we were it's it's a a really powerful fuel in the beginning but it's toxic when you use it for too long that's right in long-term pay a big price I mean maslo got to that with this as you know hierarchy and so forth and selfa the lower needs are called D needs deficiency needs something's missing there's a lack but um self-actualization a b need being need um you know there's a fullness already and I I think a

lot of people and in the culture D I say as a generalization maybe a lot of men um have a have a fear that they'll lose their Edge um you know the great ads I don't know if you saw the beer ads for dois this like really manly man stay thirsty my friends you know that if if we don't stay thirsty if we don't stay hungry then we're going to lose our Edge and not pursue and it's interesting that in early Buddhism the root of the word for craving is thirst in the language of early

Buddhism thirst something's missing it's a dve State biologically hypothalamus based and um it's it's quite something for people to realize that they can shift out of a flawed vehicle that they're familiar with you know deficit-based motivation into a fullness a different vehicle that you can still be motivated you can still be a top performer you can still have a work ethic you can still have standards you still achieve um based on a sense of fullness already good enough already accomplished enough already content already and and it helps people to realize I can step out of

this rowo it's it's working for me but it's costly it's toxic over time got a it's got a hole in the bottom no matter this other vehicle that I can increasingly trust over time you know as the basis for my motivations going forward looking back at the heel framework uh I know the most recent paper that you put out was only 2023 or something so this thing's like hot off the press in Academia terms how much evidence is there of the impact of these strategies on things like uh personality like neuroticism or extroversion well-being Health

outcomes what what's happened in the evidencebased literature for for this yeah there's tremendous evidence for um the ways in which um beneficial experiences can gradually shift people over time and there's tremendous evidence for for that there's large evidence for the underlying neurological implementation of that process increasingly what's happening in the hardware that's really great there's been almost no study at all about internal factors in individuals whether in formal clinical settings or informal life in general what are the internal factors that lead to Greater response to treatment or rate of change it's kind of crazy and

that in schools there's what's called there's the learning to learn movement they got interested in classroom settings for fifth graders how do we teach kids to be self-directed Learners from the inside out so there's a growing sense of that in in educational settings but it's crazy that we've had a hundred years of people in the growth business formally you know therap Psychotherapy and counseling and now coaching who are interested in producing change that have generally operated in a growth 1.0 model in which the person is regarded as a passive recipient of experiences or and information

and the hopes that something will stick and for some it does um but we have ignored in any systematic way the agency of the individual in how they are engaging their experiences at the time I've been talking about how do we engage the experiences we're having at the time in neuro in ways that promote positive neuroplastic change right what do we do on the inside out with the experience we're already having because we have tremendous influence at the front end of the learning process the formation of memory in the broadest sense emotional somatic memory included

the most important factors in terms what actually lands is what we do at the front end of the experience we're having at the time when you say front end what do you mean oh I mean while you're experiencing something beneficial while you're experiencing it whatever you do in your mind or whatever's being made to happen in your mind by a skillful teacher or therapist or coach that's going to most affect U the impact of that experience whether it sinks in or not the dirty secret is that the the Delta the rate of change from session

to session in therapy or counseling or other or rate of change listen to a podcast I do a podcast too it's really humbling you know I I write books I teach meditation what change is actually happening it's humbling to stare hard at that and point being the most powerful factors in change are what people are doing inside their minds at the time with how the engaged experiences are having and yet my hope profession Clinical Psychology broaden out to counseling and coaching has basically ignored the agency of the person and and not systematically certainly taught people

how to steepen their own growth curve based on how they're engaging the experiences they're having at the time that to me is the growth 2.0 model and to as you can tell I'm kind of revved up about it I feel about it but here's a here's a weird fact um 40 years ago really good research on Psychotherapy for say anxiety and depression showed that on average there was a moderate effect size on average some people got more some people got less but the average in numerical terms the way this is done about 0 6 that's

moderate that's legitimate it's credible it's not doesn't work for everybody average benefit pretty good 40 years later new theories new understanding new personalities new Charisma what's the average response to psychotherapy for anxiety or depression it's the same there's no Trend whatsoever of average Improvement so I we've gotten a lot better at helping people have various experiences we've gotten no better at helping them learn from them and so to me there's a call for Action here so when I tell you candidly yeah there's been very little Reon research one paper and a couple other related papers

so far um that have to do with teaching people how to deliberately internalized useful experiences you know to grow the good that lasts inside and there's been no research on the underlying neurobiology of that so to me it's not a critique of what I'm trying to say it's a plea you know for more investigation and this really important area yeah not uh not exactly a glowing review for the field of Psychotherapy there that you haven't really been able to make any progress you know it it would be like it be like finding some sort of

a drug and never developing a better one saying well kind it's kind of all right is for some yeah survival rates for breast cancer yeah they're a lot better today than they were 40 years ago you know there's there improvements we want to see improvements in certain areas um and I'm the it's really strange if you think about it that and you see this in the spiritual Traditions as well certainly the ones I'm familiar with mindfulness training Buddhist kinds of situations uh very sincere teachers very good at helping people have experiences and sometimes in the

growth 1. 1.0 model um uh those set different settings are different kinds of trainings and gender certain experiences in people that tend to have more impact like being in groups of others or having intense experiences like Tony Robbins is a master at himself and gendering states and factors that promote emotional learning in people phenomenal and still and this is no critique of him I did the firewalk with him like 30 years ago I made it through it it was cool stuff but he not teaching people on the inside out how to deliberately internalize the experiences

they're having at the time so that they really land in some that would be if if Tony was doing the E and the a you might see even greater responses even bigger reactions and that of course would be how to do more research on it where you take two standard interventions and you add you know these approaches of deliberate internalization to one and hopefully you see greater impact and so on but the broad point I would make about the fields is that I don't think there's much more upside to be had in um getting better

at at have um fostering shiny experiences for people where the real upside is investigating how does learning actually happen in the broadest sense and how can we help it happen well just getting back into the more negative side of experiences what is happening in the brain when we can't stop ruminating about some upsetting scenario or memory or fear that we have there's tremendous activation in the default mode Network so briefly and you're familiar with this um there are different networks in your in the in the brain um there probably three major networks that are relevant

kind of sort of right here uh one is uh when we're um you know the salience network is tracking what matters very amydala based and then when we identify what matters like in survival situations back in the jungle we see the we see the snake you know we've detected the snake then the second Network task Network gets engaged better do something about the snake jump back or prevent snakes or in the future go different Trail fine and then when things settle down the brain defaults to a third network which it's is where we go when

we're kind of just spacing out or daydreaming or ruminating and that network is kind of in the midline toward the rear right so when people are ruminating there's activity there uh I think of it as the simulator the ruminator you know um very involved with what's called mental time travel Imagining the future reflecting on the past so when people are stuck there's a lot of activity there and a lot of that activity we haven't talked about this yet it's super cool is self referential very me myself and I and since neurons that fire together wire

together when people are in the default Network and the ruminator they're reinforcing what they're ruminating about and sensitizing their brain to what's negative along the way so one of the for me takeaways from what I've really learned over the last 30 years about the brain is to get out of the ruminator as fast as I can feel the feelings this not about avoiding feelings but feel them mindfully in a framework of spacious awareness so you're not so glued to that angry case about other people or that resentment you know take poison and wait for others

to to die as they say right resentment um you know when you do that you're reinforcing it but if you're witnessing it more and naming it to yourself mindfully you actually um reduce reinforcement what are some of the ways to break that circuit you know sometimes people get stuck in a vicious cycle uh now they don't even have the culpable deniability they don't know it's further increasing their sensitization to negative experiences in future which may actually make them more fearful of the experience fre out sorry yeah well look you you you've you've given the the

the poison now it's time to give the tonic so that's right that's right I I I can tell you there several things that are really cool yeah let's get aggressive with the intervention someone's been ruminating for a long time there's something they're worried about what are some of the ways they can break that circuit yeah okay so one is to take take action take action and very often people ruminate to avoid certain experiences particularly experiences related to taking action so if you're ruminating about a a meeting with your boss or you're ruminating about a workplace

presentation or you're ruminating about a mistake you made whatever what's appropriate action related to what you're ruminating about now that's kind of tough-minded been a therapist a million years I'm I think more compassionate but I'm kind of tougher you know there's there's no replacement for action action binds anxiety and action breaks people out of the rumination cycle and it satisfies you hey you took the action you could I mean right there know that you did what you could and then you have to work on becoming at peace with what you can't control but you did

what you could control H that's really important one two uh there are a couple of fantastic hacks um one is to do what's called interoception tune into the internal sensations of your body like the sensation of the air coming in as you inhale and flowing out as you exhale chest rising and falling um then that um engages a part of the brain called the insula and it acts like a circuit breaker when people are tuning into interception they're in the present and that reduces activity in the default mode Network which tends to be very often

like I said focused on the future or the past that's that's really a very very powerful hack right there um third thing people can do is tilt towards some kind of intensely positive experience you know whatever it is that's energizing for you jump up and down um eat something good look out the window watch a cad video on YouTube you know there is a place for literally snapping out of it you want to reduce the reinforcement of the rumination cycle um and then I'll say one more one more pack that's really great is one of

my favorites it's so cool get a sense of anything as a whole you can get a sense of the sensations of breathing in your chest as a whole rather than in one little part or your body as a whole or get sense of the volume of your room as a whole or raise your gaze to the Horizon visually and um or kind of deliberate yeah I would just say that when you do that when you get a sense of things as a whole two good things happen one is that you start to engage for most

people the right hemisphere of the brain which does holistic aalt process that's why it does a lot of visual spatial reasoning distinct from the sequential stepbystep specialization of the left hemisphere which is why it's specialized for language because language is sequential much ration is saturated with inner speech inner language talking to yourself or ideating but when you get a sense of things as a whole you're immediately drawing on that right hemisphere of your brain which reduces rumination activity the other thing that that happens including when you especially lift your visual gaze to the horizon or

above you shift out of what is called an egocentric frame of perceptual processing into an allocentric frame there's a lot of science about this and a large fraction of the brain is dedicated to visual processing not just the occipital cortex but other areas as well so when you fiddle with visual processing you're affecting your brain a lot of real estate is getting affected so you can just notice it in in evolution it makes sense when things are close to you when your gaze looks down to what's within a meter or two that's where friend and

foe live typically going to eat me or can I eat it self referential processing increases what saturates rumination is self me right the me that it's happening to or could happen to or did happen to or it should have done a better job me me me me me okay on the other hand and you can just observe this when you start getting a sense of things as a whole and especially when you lift your gaze out to the bigger picture you shift into a more impersonal frame of reference you're not privileging your perspective you're taking

a sense of things as a whole in which you're certainly a part of that hole but there's a lot more going on in that hole the sense of self immediately starts reducing and as the sense of self starts reducing just like as the sense of inner language is reduced rumination starts to reduce as well so good so let's say that someone's acquired negative learning across life they they've just found this Insight now fantastic but they think that's that's quite a few Decades of accumulating thought patterns in this way of sensitizing myself how possible is it

to get rid of those negative learnings is it is it possible that once those pathways are laid down that we can actually prune them or is it simply a case of us having to create other patterns are these I I Bro Science of milein sheets never getting being gotten rid of I I I don't know give me give me the give me the truth oh that's really great never bet against the human heart that's kind of my bottom line and um you know there's a lot to this so um first off in terms of rumination

I want to say one more thing one of the reasons people ruminate is a defense against feeling certain things and the the feelings keep coming up because they're incompletely experienced so one thing a person could do to help themselves if they keep ruminating around let's say a loss or a regret or there's something they have remorse about it's to really open up to that feeling and to Resource themselves so they can tolerate it and are not overwhelmed by it but once you're able to feel it if only for a few minutes in a row really

let yourself feel it and as you feel it help it to flow blow it in effect that that's really a crucial thing um the the hacks I've mentioned are more situational um you know taking action on the things that you've ruminated about including reaching out to someone you've harmed and really apologize to them or write a letter that they'll never read because they're dead or or they'll never open your mail but you at least wrote the letter and shared it with people you know take the actions that you can um as well as feel the

feelings fully and and help them out the door in the last few years uh I've been just stunned by the amount of mistakes that I've made in my life that have resurfaced for me to consider it's not like people brought them to me it's just my mind has gotten quiet enough that that stuff in some of those rooms you know in the Mansion of the mind has started to open their doors on their own and push their way into the living room hello Rick you really up there how do you feel about it now and

I've had to really come to terms with it but and the key to that is to let it to flow so that's that's a deep aspect to it and then your your other question um there's tremendous evidence that people can really change over time they really can um as you talk about go into those different rooms and gradually clear them out you know they really can and so what are the factors that help people do that um one is to just like anything is to bring effort to it how much time are you spending really

productively on you know releasing old pain you know and replacing it with something beneficial in including things like kindness toward yourself and compassion for yourself and and respect that like I've been with people in um men a lot of whom are men in business settings and and also in Wilderness settings who are really Fierce really tough really prepared to deal with a lot of challenge who are completely undone at the prospect of being at all emotionally vulnerable with another person like that is staggeringly hard for them you know they're I think of interpersonal cowardice as

a certain particular kind of cowardice that's I'm not trying to ashame it I'm just sort of naming it we're scared right admire yourself respect yourself for doing that kind of noble work so that's one factor how much effort do you bring to it second how skillful are you are you listening to you know your podcast which is an incredibly dense repository of wisdom about how to change for the better over time you know being skillful and are do you reach out to experts about it it's so interesting people understand they have to fix their faucet

um you need an expert let's say someone who knows how to do it maybe you already know how to do it but if you don't know how to do it you want to get someone who knows how to do it well if you want to uh fix a leaking faucets you know then are spewing that are dripping crud in your mind talk to an expert uh as best you can given the expenses involved do the best you can there I think that's that's also important and then there's another thing which is uh in wisdom Traditions

it's it's considered that they're that the path and the cart of healing growing and Awakening I think of those three healing growing Awakening is like a cart with two wheels they're two tracks and one is the track that we've been entirely focused on which is developmental change over time which means youve got to be changing your brain over time but the second track is true nature already what's always already that word again already true Underneath It All of who you really are and can you get in touch with that can you believe in it uh

can you use it as a refuge that you can return to so that the two tracks support each other you know um the phrase gradual cultivation sudden Awakening gradual cultivation you know it's a progressive process and um so for people to really really change over time I think what's really helpful is like I said effort as in any domain and skillfulness as in any domain and along the way as that change is happening see if you can get increasingly in touch with your own fundamental good-heartedness you know your own innate goodness the innate wakefulness biologically

even without getting new age or you know transcendental about it just for some reason biologically we evolve a level of being inside us under kind of underneath personality and gender socialization and history and that is unstainable unbreakable we didn't make it we can't break it it's there and we can gradually get in touch with it especially as your mind gets quieter you can you can recognize it increasingly in yourself and get in rest in it you know have one of your one of your wheels in Your Wagon of healing growing and Awakening you know stay

in in touch with that track a long while doing the the work developmentally Rick you're so great I can't believe I had to wait six years to speak to you again you're really kind thank you dude I I Adore this intersection the way that you're able to weave between the hard neuroscience neurobiology stuff the sort of peaceful dhic side I it's it's so great let's we need to run this back Let's do let's do another episode at some point this summer I I've got so much more to talk to you about I'd love to uh

where should people go do want to keep up to date with all of the things that you do and put out and have created where do you want to send them oh very briefly just Google my name uh or go to Rick Hansen s.net and uh most of what I do is freely offered we have stuff for sale for people can afford it it's reasonably priced blah blah but it's kind of the Robin Hood principle frankly uh where a lot of our aim is to make things available for free you know for people around the

world so I would say that also I got a shout out you asked about our son Forest um who's a superstar and the podcast being well he's really driven that and more and more he's creating his own content so people could check out that podcast too heck yeah shout out Forest Rick I I I really do appreciate you I think you're great and I can't wait to run this back again I promise it won't be six years maybe it won't even be 6 months oh anytime really well you take good care of yourself chrisis and

I I hope my wish for you in part is you you too can be in touch with really what a good guy you are thank you I appreciate that until next time do you think that your algorithm on YouTube is a bit of a God is able to know things about you that you don't know about yourself well the YouTube gods have selected this episode specifically for you bespoke so go on go check it out