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You want to change your brain for the better in lasting ways.
Here's how. Hi, everyone.
It's Rosie here. Welcome back to Radiohead space.
So, as you know, I'm in school at the moment.
Getting my master's in clinical psychology.
and I have to say, it's not easy.
There was so much information coming at me all the time that I don't actually know how I'm supposed to absorb it all.
The real question is, how do we learn?
How do we change? How do we absorb information in a way that we can actually remember and use it?
And that's why I brought on Dr. Rick and his son Forrest Hanson.
Rick is a psychologist, best -selling author, an also an author and the host of the Being Well podcast. Whether you're in school or learning a new skill, I think you'll find this conversation really interesting.
For the last couple of years, I've been on this learning journey.
I obviously have been teaching meditation and mindfulness for many years.
I've been studying it for over 20 years.
And so now many many many years later, many decades later, I decided last year to go back to get my Master's in clinical psychology and so I've been in this really grueling master's program.
I feel like I'm consuming so much information which is what brought me to you guys.
You know, with what you both talk about and I'm so overwhelmed and over consumed with information.
I'm like, how do we reconcile it to utilize the things that we're learning and actually put them into practice?
Want to take a crack at that, Forrest?
Well, I think it's an incredible question and you've really described kind of the crux of a lot of people's problems these days.
I would almost... do you of actually ask you about it Rosie?
Oh please go ahead.
So like what have you found in your experience like learning about all of this cool stuff that actually helps you learn something?
Like what helps you sit with something and feel like you take it from a piece of information that you're hearing or that you're reading on a page and then turn it into something that actually kind of sticks with you?
Yeah that's a really really great question.
What helps me learn has more to do about having a heart connection to it or a more empathetic connection to the experience rather than a term that I can memorize for an exam and God please don't test me on it in a week because I probably won't remember the difference between is this causation or correlation or what you know like this sort of combining of the two.
Does that make sense?
Totally, oh yeah. You may have heard already this this line from a psychoanalyst, a woman in the mid -century.
She said, the client does not need a new idea.
The client needs a new experience, and that's it.
How do we help these ideas, or the facts in our life?
You have a nice conversation with someone, you get something done, maybe you realize something by yourself?
How do you turn those ideas or facts into experiences?
And then what has started fascinating me as a lonely, sad, freaked out 17 year old you know freshman in college, was how do you actually turn those experiences into lasting shifts inside.
Good change that lasts inside.
How do you actually do that?
And I kind of learned from the inside out that it's a very somatic process.
It's very felt. It's very emotional.
You receive it and then many in my case, many, many, many decades later, there's now a growing understanding neurologically through positive neuroplasticity of how that process happens, and related to your question and the way Forrest put it too, how can we help it happen?
I'm jumping out of my chair.
I know I'm not supposed to do that on camera, but I want to do it.
How we help it happen, right?
That's the deal. What's freaky and true is that even though we're in the change profession, we're in the change business, for a hundred years there's been very little study on the process of change.
How does it actually happen particularly what's happening inside the client's heart and mind and body or the person in general that promotes good change.
There's been a certain amount of study on what are the external factors and forces like what the therapist says or the setting in which things occur.
Yeah that treats people like passive vessels, you know they're just in suitcases, moved along and we try to pack stuff into them.
There's been almost no research on what people can do on the inside out.
Like you said, finding a heart connection to the material or making a narrative out of it other kinds of things that Forrest and I have explored in our books and stuff like that, what can we do on the inside out that turns momentary experiences into lasting gold inside?
And so that is really what I just think where the great opportunity is.
It's a fact that in 50 years the average results from psychotherapy for all kinds of things have not improved at all.
They've not improved, they're kind of decent average results, but they have not gotten better in 50 years.
For all of our efforts, they're not any better.
And that's because I think there's been so much of a focus on outside in and where the great opportunity is is on respecting people as active agents in their own healing, growing and awakening for in terms of what they can do on the inside out to take in the good, to grow the good, the last insight.
Yeah, I love that for us.
what what's your feeling on this?
I love that it that it's an inside job.
Yeah, I think it totally is an inside job.
So for me, I think that a lot of this gets to the management of attention as we're doing things that are difficult.
So, you know you can, can you read a paragraph?
Yeah so you can read a paragraph of something, like, you're reading your psychology text, right?
It's it's kind of a thick text, you know, it's not really, this is not a romanticcy novel, right?
It's not built for easy consumption.
We're really kind of digging into here, right?
How long can you stick with that sentence before you notice your brain start to drift?
Can you do a paragraph?
Can you do a page? Can you do a chapter, right?
Most people, their brain, particularly these days when we're just exposed to constant stimulation, again it's that fire hose, everybody knows all of the time that the phone is in their pocket and so you have to make the deliberate choice to keep on sticking with this thing that's kind of difficult as opposed to this thing that's a lot easier and a lot more directly rewarding for your brain.
So some of the question is can we expand our ability, our kind of window of comfort, to use a phrase, to stick with that kind of an experiment, to stick with the text, rather than being captured by something else that's going on inside of our life?
That sort of deliberate training of focus, I think, is again a huge piece of how people learn.
Rick's talked a lot about how other people as well have talked about the attention as a kind of vacuum cleaner, you know, it sucks things up and stores them in our mind, so how deliberate we're being with where we're placing our attention is a huge aspect of this for sure.
And through mindfulness training and other things like that, Rick's really explored that a lot in his work.
Yeah I love that and I totally can see how creating a system like that works.
You know this is actually apropos one of the that I wanted to talk to you both about.
This sort of pulling of attention, right?
It's like we're getting pulled in every different direction.
Does our brain even process what we're putting in?
It's like, Rick what happens to my brain once I'm reading this chapter and then I do my tests and then I just keep it moving, like is that stuff still gonna be in there in a year?
He's nodding his is what matters.
In other words if something matters to us it tends to sink in and also do we matter.
The actual process, I mean it's fairly easy to learn a new word or idea really quickly as cortical regions are very quick at that.
Emotional learning like what it feels like to be you, your mood, growing happiness, growing confidence, healing old wounds, that kind of learning involves much more ancient parts of the brain that started developing maybe 200 plus million years ago.
They need more time, we need to slow it down, but for people to slow it down just for a few more seconds inside themselves to kind of feel something that matters to them, they have to matter to themselves.
They have to take a stand that their life matters, their inner matters, that soft little vulnerable parts inside matter, and they want to help those parts.
They want to soothe them.
They want to feed them.
They want to make up for what was missing or scary when they were young.
So the process actually of helping learning land, learning broadly, not just book learning, but life learning that we really care about, the process of that feels actually quite intimate.
You have to be willing to receive.
You have to be willing to budge inside and let yourself shift in some ways so that you can establish more what you want to grow inside so that it sticks with you and you know I have found that that process, people do it informally and like a lot of things we can get better at some things that we're doing kind of haphazardly and maybe incidentally.
And so much of what Forrest and I focus on is the actual how of that.
You know, how do you actually do that kind of from the inside out.
But at bottom for me, I'm kind of a pissed -off hippie.
I just feel like stick it to the man and people are way too pushed around and it's time to grab hold of what you're experiencing and decide for yourself what you want to help sink in and say bye -bye, you know, to the rest. So, that's kind of the piece of the motivation here, alongside all my psychological training.
I love this. Forrest, what do you think?
I think that people have a lot of misconceptions about how the brain works, and there's been a huge rise in psychology -related content, obviously for a piece of that, you know, the last decade or so, and it's incredible.
It's incredible that this stuff is out here, and at the same time, what's happened is that all of this language has entered the public space, like words like neuroplasticity.
Yes. Are just kind of out there in the field, you know?
Well let's define neuroplasticity for people that are listening.
Do you want to do this, Dad?
You're gonna give a better technical definition.
Just very briefly, plasticity is the capacity of anything to change, you know, and so we have physical neurons in a nervous system and neuroplasticity is simply its capacity to change, in particular by the information passing through it, particularly our experiences.
Passing patterns of neural activation leave lasting traces behind.
That's neuroplasticity for better or worse, and positive neuroplasticity is about trying to help good changes occur in who you are becoming, particularly grounded in lasting changes in your own nervous system.
Thank you. Well, here's the cool thing.
I feel like I've learned something today.
Now that we've had this conversation, how can I apply this to my journey as I navigate this cooling Masters program?
I'll leave it to you for us who has a partner who has only recently been navigating a grueling was just a gruelling master's program.
So there are kind of two different sides of this.
Rick's work and, to some extent, my work is pretty focused on the more internal learning psycho -emotional skills aspect of this, and is less focused just pragmatically in terms of what we talk about, about learning factual material that you're going to be tested on or some of that kind of thing, but to maybe make this real, master's programs are a slog.
It's a long slog. So that naturally makes you feel a certain kind of way about it, right?
Yeah, okay. We see the feeling of it to a certain extent, so it makes you feel a certain way about it, and that's real.
This is not about rose -colored glasses.
It's not about denying reality, but it's also true, and then you start bringing in what's also true, and what's also true is that you're reading something and you go, huh, this is really interesting.
What's also true is that you're working on a program that you feel kind of emotional connection to.
You have an interaction with your partner that goes a little bit differently because of some skill that you learned during your whatever class in psychology, you know, and I think that a big part of this for people is about holding the what's also true as we go through this stuff because it's so easy for us to be consumed by the kind of day -to -day grind of it all and to just get very lost in that.
It also takes us away from any kind of long -term planning.
You need to have a real long -time horizon here to be okay with the graduate program, right?
You are deferring gratification for a long time.
I think that again, that kind of moment -to -moment, whether it's through the heal practice or just a basic kind of mindfulness -driven recognition of like, wow nice cup of coffee, Wow, sun was shining." You know, whatever, not denying the stuff that's bad, but just kind of taking in the stuff that's authentically enjoyable in the course of our life.
It's so resourcing.
And really what we're talking about is how can you resource yourself so you can do more hard things?
A graduate program is a hard thing.
So I guess that's how I would kind of think about it.
How does that land for you?
Yeah, it lands. Thank you so much for acknowledging all of that truth.
Yeah, life's hard. Yeah, it is, and I think that it does, it's always nice to have that reflected back and I think even people that might be listening to this that are on their own journey or maybe have a desire to continue to learn.
Look I'm 41, like I just went back to school the beginning of last year, so I've been in it for a year already and it's gonna take me, like you said, I'm going to be here for while.
It's the new norm. And all I keep going back to is what Rick was saying, that breath, you know like just really just being in it enforces what you're saying to about in a way it is what it is right now and this is my norm, my new norm.
So enjoying those little moments are my respite.
And just settling into the fact that yeah, every day I have to do homework every day I'm reading every day I'm doing little bits of work in the midst of having a full -time job and a career inside projects and writing another book and you know doing all the things that I'm doing it's still very important to me ultimately and it doesn't matter how long it takes.
So for the people that are listening to this and they want to hear more they want to more work than they go.
Being Well podcast baby.
So the podcast is called Being Well.
You can find it wherever you get your podcasts.
We're also on YouTube under my name that's Forrest Hanson.
You can find Rick at RickHanson .com.
He has 37 books and 358 languages.
No, it's not like seven books or merely seven books or something.
Seven books, 33 languages.
Okay, great, great, great.
There it is and, yeah, we just really appreciate you doing this today.
Thanks for having us.
Yeah, you were awesome Rosie.
I just feel like a lot of people are sort of emotionally anorexic.
They don't feel entitled to take in the good and that's present.
They don't feel they deserve it or it's not okay or it'd be a sin or you would betray somebody else who's suffering more and whatever it might be.
It's really important to, without getting conceited or egotistical, to really appreciate actually we can be helpful to other people.
I can just tell you you're going to be really helpful to a lot of people even beyond what you're doing currently.
That's so nice. Thank you so much for saying that.
I appreciate you both so much and again, thank you so much for all the work that you're doing, for all the content that you're putting out there to make it easy for people to follow along and you're both helping so many people.
I can't wait for our community here at Radio Headspace to listen and to connect with you both.
Thank you. You're welcome.
And Headspace is awesome.
I've seen it develop over the years, actually, from the very start and the motivation behind the KeyFounder and everything.
And it's fantastic.
So I'm a super fan of Headspace and you can quote me.
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