Your Wise Brain

Practical insights into happiness, love, and wisdom from psychology, neuroscience, and Buddhism.

by Rick Hanson, Ph.D.

See Beings Not Bodies

When we encounter someone, the mind summarizes & simplifies tons of details. Though fast and efficient this process has lots of problems Read More

Step Into The Cloud

In a way, everything is a cloud. Everything is made of parts, everything arises due to causes, and everything passes away eventually. Enjoy the clouds. Relax. Read More

When you love the world, you both appreciate and care for it. Each of these actions makes you feel good, plus they help you preserve and improve everything you depend on for air and food, livelihood, security, pleasure, and community. Read More

Hug the Monkey

Hug the monkey inside yourself. It helps satisfy an innate human need for connection, can remedy old pain and provides that fundamental human sustenance: love Read More

Feed the Mouse

When you help the early mammalian parts of your brain feel rewarded and fulfilled it's easier to let go of longing, disappointment and craving. Read More

Say Thanks

Say Thanks - it's a small moment with big ripples: a confirmation of a wonderful truth - that we are all joined in a web of innumerable acts of giving. Read More

Have Compassion

Compassion is natural; you don't have to force it - moments of compassion come in the flow of life. Try to open to compassion - including all beings, omitting none. Read More

Empty the Cup

Enjoy emptiness in the forms that speak to you: perhaps the quiet at night when everyone's asleep but you, a blank page in your journal, a friend's receptive listening, an open counter as you begin to cook (love this one myself), a hole in your schedule, the space between thoughts as your mind calms and becomes still, or a Saturday with no plans at all. Read More

Give Over to Good

As unique standing waves, you and I are constructed each moment by the currents - the forces and factors, both internal and external - flowing through us. We have no choice about being lived by these currents, continually given over to them. But we can choose to give ourselves over to the good ones. Read More

Pet the Lizard

The brain is highly integrated, so three key functions--avoiding, approaching, and attaching-- are accomplished by all parts of the brain working together. Nonetheless, each function is particularly served by the region of the brain that first evolved to handle it. This fact has significant implications. Read More

Rest, Unwind, Recharge

Tell the truth to yourself about how much time you actually - other than sleep - truly come to rest: not accomplishing anything, not planning anything, not going anywhere. The time when you don't do anything at all, with a sense of relaxation and ease. No stress, no pressure, nothing weighing on you in the back of your mind. No sense of things undone. Utterly at rest. Read More

Relax, You've Arrived

We spend so much of our time trying to get somewhere. Part of this comes from our biological nature. To survive, animals - including us - have to be goal-directed, leaning into the future. This focus on the future - on endless striving, on getting the next task done, on climbing the next mountain - can get confused and stressful. Read More

Feel Cared About

Sometimes we feel embarrassed about our yearnings to be cared about. But they are completely normal - and deeply rooted in evolution. Love, broadly defined, has been the primary driver of the development of the brain over the last 80 million years. Read More

Remember the Big Things

While it's good advice not to sweat the small stuff, we also need to nurture the large stuff. There are many good reasons to do so. You'll never know when you step over the invisible line and the countdown begins - 365 days left, then . . . - but you can know, before and after you cross it, that you've remembered the big things. Read More

Forgive Yourself

Everyone messes up. Me, you, the neighbors, Mother Teresa, Mahatma Ghandi, King David, the Buddha, everybody. It's important to acknowledge mistakes, feel appropriate remorse, and learn from them so they don't happen again. But most people keep beating themselves up way past the point of usefulness: they're unfairly self-critical. Read More

Drop The Case

Lately I've been thinking about a kind of "case" that's been running in my mind about someone in my extended family. The case is a combination of feeling hurt and mistreated, critique of the other person, irritation with others who haven't supported me, views about what should happen that hasn't, and implicit taking-things-personally. In other words, the usual mess. Read More

Tune Into Others

Imagine a world in which people interacted with each other like ants or fish. Imagine a day at work like this, or in your family, aware of the surface behavior of the people around you but oblivious to their inner life while they remain unmoved by your own. That's a world without empathy. To me, it sounds like a horror film. Read More

Notice You're Alright Right Now

The brain's default setting of apprehensiveness is a great way to keep a monkey looking over its shoulder for something about to pounce. But it's a crummy way to live. It wears down well-being, feeds anxiety and depression and makes people play small in life. Even worse, it's based on a lie. Read More

Speak From The Heart

Speaking from an open heart can seem so vulnerable yet be the strongest move of all. Naming the truth - in particular the facts of one's experience, which no one can disprove - with simplicity and sincerity, and without contentiousness or blame, has great moral force. Read More

Keep Hope Not Fear Alive

Reducing negative experiences entails taking action in three domains: in the world (including your relationships), in your body and in your mind. All are important. So don't take painful experiences lightly, neither the ones you get nor, honestly, the ones you give. Prevent them when you can, and help them pass through when you can't. Read More

Put No One Out of Your Heart

Closing off doesn't feel good. It makes your heart heavy and contracted. And it primes your brain to be more tense and reactive, which could get you into trouble, plus trigger others to act worse than ever. It may feel necessary to distance yourself utterly from another person for awhile or forever but in general, you never have to put anyone out of your heart. Read More

Why You Shouldn't Take Slights Personally

Recognize the humbling yet also wonderful truth: Most of the time, we are bit players in other people’s dramas. When you do this, you naturally get calmer, put the situation in context, and don’t get so caught up in me-myself-and-I. Then you feel better, plus more clear-headed about what to do. Read More

Who Is Behind the Mask?

Much of the time, we interact mask-to-mask with other people. There's a place for that. But remember times when someone saw through your mask to the real you, the person back behind your eyes. If you're like me, those times were both unnerving and wonderful. Read More

Confronting the Negativity Bias

My previous post used the example of Stephen Colbert's satirical "March to Keep Fear Alive" as a timely illustration of a larger point: humans evolved to be fearful -- since that helped keep our ancestors alive -- so we are very vulnerable to being frightened and even intimidated by threats, both real ones and "paper tigers." With this march, Colbert is obviously mocking those who play on fear Read More

Stephen Colbert: We Don't Need To 'Keep Fear Alive'

Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have dueling rallies in DC coming soon. Stewart's is "Rally to Restore Sanity" and Colbert's is "March to Keep Fear Alive!" Read More

Balancing Joining and Separating

There is a natural balance within us all between the desire for joining and the desire for separation, between the desire for closeness and the desire for distance. These two great themes - joining and separation - are central to human life. Almost everyone wants both of them, to varying degrees. Read More

You Can Feel Safer

Feeling safer is a tricky subject, with complications that can be both personal and political.

(This topic and others are explored in depth in my interview with New Dimensions) Read More

21 Ways To Turn Ill Will to Good Will

My recent posts have highlighted two very powerful, yet opposing forces in the human heart: in a traditional metaphor, we each have a wolf of love and a wolf of hate inside us, and it all depends on which one we feed every day. Read More

How Did Humans Become Empathic?

Empathy is unusual in the animal kingdom. So empathy must have had some major survival benefits for it to have evolved. What might those benefits have been?

Empathy seems to have evolved in three major steps. Read More

The Wolf of Hate

I heard a story once about a Native American elder who was asked how she had become so wise, so happy, and so respected. She answered: "In my heart, there are two wolves: a wolf of love and a wolf of hate. It all depends on which one I feed each day." Read More

Rick Hanson, Ph.D., is a neuropsychologist and author of Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom.

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About Your Wise Brain

We all want greater happiness, love, and wisdom.To support you on your path, I’ve gathered tools and information from psychology, brain science, and the contemplative traditions to help reduce stress, sorrow, fear, and anger; to promote well-being and personal growth.You’ll find a wide range of resources, such as step-by-step instructions for weaving good experiences into your brain and your self.May these benefit you, and in widening ripples, our world so full of promise and peril!