Imagine lounging in a hammock on a sunny beach, palm trees swaying in the breeze, the bright turquoise of the sea barely dimmed by your sunglasses. You glance up the beach, then down the beach: not a soul in sight. It’s only the first day of your holiday and your whole body feels so relaxed, you could dissolve into the sand and be swept out to sea. You take a lazy sip of your pina colada and take it all in. Out of nowhere, a voice whispers into your ear: “No, really, take it in.”
You nearly jump out of your skin until you remember the book in your lap: Hardwiring Happiness by Rick Hanson, a psychologist, New York Times bestselling author, and senior fellow at UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center. You’ve just been reading about “positive neuroplasticity,” a way of rewiring your own brain by deeply internalizing good experiences. Positive neuroplasticity, you’ve learned, isn’t just about slowing down; it’s about paying close attention. The idea is that cultivating a deeper relationship with the good can buffer us against our brain’s own tendency to focus on the negative, a bias that may have served a useful evolutionary purpose when survival was more frequently at stake, but can, in a relatively stable 21st-century daily environment, trap us in cycles of rumination.
Based on research showing that “deliberately taking in the good” can boost resilience and improve well-being, Hanson came up with a new intervention called the HEAL method. In the first step, people are encouraged to activate their brains by having a good experience (“H”); in the second step, they’re invited to help their brains internalize the good experience by enriching it (“E”), absorbing it (“A”), and linking it to other positive or negative experiences (“L”). In a small exploratory study using pre-post self-report measures, Hanson and colleagues assessed the effects of this intervention on twenty-one healthy subjects and found significant improvements in savoring, self-compassion, emotional reappraisal, gratitude, positive rumination (emotion focus), joy, contentment, love, as well as significant decreases in depressed mood. Participants also reported statistically borderline improvements in self-esteem, positive rumination (self focus), pride, happiness, and satisfaction with life. Many of these effects persisted after two months.
But can you really rewire your brain this way, by changing your mind? Neuroplasticity, which is defined as the brain’s ability to change and adapt, can be measured through a combination of brain imaging techniques and behavioral assessments. For example, if someone is able to learn a new skill more quickly following an intervention, scientists can correlate this with changes in brain activity, using what’s called “task-based fMRI.” But the details of cause-and-effect are far from simple, and the research methods far from perfect. Although there is considerable evidence for neuroplasticity as a phenomenon related to health and well being, skeptics warn of “neuroplasticity hype,” and positive neuroplasticity itself has not been corroborated neuroscientifically in humans.
Still, Hanson says, we’ve come a long way toward understanding the relationship between mind and brain. “As science has progressed in the last hundred to a hundred and fifty years with the study of the nervous system,” he told Big Think, “the correlations have become increasingly well understood and tight between ongoing mental activity–hearing, seeing, loving, hating, wanting, remembering–and the underlying neural activity that is their physical basis.” Brain imaging studies of certain mental practices, such as mindfulness meditation, have shown robustly that changes in mental patterns correspond to structural and functional changes in the brain.
In the 1960s, researchers began using electroencephalogram (EEG) to study neural activity during meditation. In the 1970s came magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and in the 1990s (the “decade of the brain”), both human and animal studies began showing clearer linkages between different kinds of mental experiences, or patterns of experience, neural activity. For instance, one seminal study of nuns praying inside fMRI machines showed that their “reward centers” lit up as if they were taking cocaine. “It doesn’t mean connecting with Christ consciousness is the same as taking cocaine,” Hanson notes, “but they were starting to find underlying neural correlates.” It is now well-established that meditation and other contemplative practices enhance neuroplasticity.
In the mid-2000s, as Hanson and his colleagues began combing through the research literature, they wondered whether they could flip things around and harness what scientists had gathered about the brain to use in contemplative and clinical practice–an investigation which ultimately became the basis for HEAL. Could they deliberately activate the brain to induce certain mental activities that would lead to lasting changes in the brain and, ultimately, support the development of optimal traits like a more positive outlook on life? As Hanson put it: “Could we use our mind to stimulate and change our brain to benefit our mind?”
If so, harnessing brain science could, in theory, motivate people who wouldn’t otherwise think to take up a “mental hygiene” regime such as meditation.
“When people realize this airy-fairy, woo woo stuff is actually helping their own brain, they get much more motivated,” he says. Ruminating over the state of the world may not be helpful, but “when you slow down, take a moment to feel close to your friend or partner, and let that really land inside, that’s changing your brain for the better.”
It’s still unclear exactly how good experiences may change the brain for the better, but Hanson points to the autonomic nervous system as a likely candidate: “If I want to calm myself down, it’s important to touch my partner, or my dog, because that social engagement is going to ripple down and calm my heart.” Often, deeply good experiences–whether through social bonding or swaying gently between two palm trees or meditating–can light up the reward center of the brain in the same way. But according to Hanson, it’s when we become aware of the good, and hold onto it, that the real benefits kick in. This might already be an insight gleaned through contemplative practice, or simply common sense, but neuroscience can help us prioritize it further. In his many decades as a clinician and meditator, Hanson says combining brain science and contemplative practice–such as taking in the good–has helped him feel more empowered in improving daily life for himself and others. Neural correlates aside, the real proof is how you feel on a daily basis.
“When you go to bed, are you a little happier, wiser, and more loving than when you woke up? That’s under your power.”=
This article Taking In the Good: Rick Hanson on the HEAL Method is featured on Big Think.
The post “Taking In the Good: Rick Hanson on the HEAL Method” by Stephen Johnson was published on 03/27/2025 by bigthink.com