It's hard to count on a world that's constantly changing. That's why it's vital to grow internal strengths like grit, gratitude, and compassion — at least, according to Dr. Rick Hanson, a Senior Fellow of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley and author of "Resilient: How to Grow an Unshakable Core of Calm, Strength, and Happiness." In this episode, he discusses the key to resilience, and to lasting well-being in a changing world. Additional resources from Dr. Rick Hanson: "Resilient: How to Grow an Unshakable Core of Calm, Strength, and Happiness" Dr. Rick Hanson's website The Foundations of Well-Being Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley "Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence" Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to get smarter withCody Gough andAshley Hamer — for free! Still curious? Get exclusive science shows, nature documentaries, and more real-life entertainment on discovery+! Go to https://discoveryplus.com/curiosity to start your 7-day free trial. discovery+ is currently only available for US subscribers.
It's hard to count on a world that's constantly changing. That's why it's vital to grow internal strengths like grit, gratitude, and compassion — at least, according to Dr. Rick Hanson, a Senior Fellow of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley and author of "Resilient: How to Grow an Unshakable Core of Calm, Strength, and Happiness." In this episode, he discusses the key to resilience, and to lasting well-being in a changing world.
Additional resources from Dr. Rick Hanson:
Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to get smarter with Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer — for free! Still curious? Get exclusive science shows, nature documentaries, and more real-life entertainment on discovery+! Go to https://discoveryplus.com/curiosity to start your 7-day free trial. discovery+ is currently only available for US subscribers.
Full episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/resilience-is-the-key-to-your-well-being-in-a-constantly-changing-world
CODY GOUGH: I'm curious. Why is it important for people to be resilient?
DR RICK HANSON: If you want well-being, which is what I think we generally want-- we want to feel happy, we want to be at peace inside ourselves, we want to feel that we're in balance with life. To have that kind of well-being in any kind of lasting way in a changing world, you need to be resilient. Resilience means that you can bounce back from really horrible things. But more generally, and probably frankly more usefully, you can keep on going towards your goals even when you're challenged. So resilience is not just for surviving the worst day of your life. We need it for thriving every day of the life.
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CODY GOUGH: Hi. I'm Cody Gough with the resilient curiosity.com.
ASHLEY HAMER: And I'm Ashley Hamer. Today we're going to learn how to become more resilient and why it matters.
CODY GOUGH: Every week we explore what we don't know because curiosity makes you smarter.
ASHLEY HAMER: This is the Curiosity podcast.
CODY GOUGH: The world is constantly changing and you can't really control that. But you can control how you respond to it.
ASHLEY HAMER: Today's guest argues that the key to well-being and conquering challenges is to develop resilience, and he can back it up with science.
CODY GOUGH: Dr. Rick Hanson is a Senior Fellow of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley, and author of the new book Resilient-- How to Grow an Unshakable Core of Calm, Strength, and Happiness.
ASHLEY HAMER: He says that being resilient isn't just important for getting through bad situations. It comes in handy no matter what life throws at you. And you're about to learn how it can help you feel less stressed, face challenges with confidence, and improve your overall state of well-being.
CODY GOUGH: Do you really think it's that fundamental to our well-being-- the resilience, because there's so many different components of the mind or of personal traits that people can say, oh, this is really what drives it. You're saying resilience is kind of the way to go.
DR RICK HANSON: Resilience is a necessary condition. It's not sufficient. People who are depressed, for example, can be resilient, but they need other things to really promote well-being. But if you think about it, it takes us into some very fundamental ideas about self-reliance and adapting and coping, which is what we really need to do. If you're lying there in the hammock and you have your iced tea and someone's brushing your hair and massaging your feet and you have IV chocolate, you're good to go. You don't need any resilience to have well-being there.
But in the course of an ordinary day, you're stuck in traffic, you're dealing with emails, you're struggling to get the audio gear up to do an interview for the Curiosity podcast, you're arguing with your teenager, you're seeing someone on TV whose politics you don't like, your back hurts, your shoes are too tight, fill in the blank-- you're bothered by something that happened in your childhood. All of that is totally normal.
And to deal with it in any kind of lasting way so that we don't feel flooded, stressed out, and overwhelmed, we need to be resilient inside. And resilience over time enables us to meet challenges to our basic needs in a way that doesn't get flooded by those challenges. So that in an ongoing way, we're able to cope while being happy and loving and at peace in the process.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah. When I think of resilience, I think about performing artists, let's say, actors and musicians who are auditioning and getting rejected all the time, or someone who's on the job market and they're not getting hired after interview after interview. Do you find that certain lifestyles demand more strength and resilience, or have you found that certain types of people have a natural predisposition for it?
DR RICK HANSON: Yeah. There are a lot of-- there are several questions in there. So-- first there's a frame-- there's this idea in psychology in health care that everything boils down to three kinds of factors-- the challenges that come at you, the vulnerabilities they wear upon, and the resources you have to deal with those challenges and protect your vulnerabilities. That's kind of it. It's like the equation of your life with three variables-- challenges, vulnerabilities, and resources. So as challenges rise and as vulnerabilities grow or are large in a person, you need more resources.
And I'm a longtime therapist among other roles, and one of the things I routinely see is people walk in the door and they're under-resourced compared to the challenges they've got to face. So it's true that if someone who is getting rejected routinely, let's say as a sales person or as an actor, that's a person who has high challenges so they need high resources to be able to deal with that. But it's easy to think about resilience only in terms of high intensity challenges, such as people going through a combat tour or people who've been traumatized say, in childhood. But when I think about resilience, I really mostly think about people trudging home from work or people grappling with a long day at the hospital.
I spent a lot of time with my father a few years ago during the last several months of his life, and I was very struck by the orderlies, the custodians, the janitors, the vocational nurses, the people who are just sort of the backbone of the system, and you knew they had to dig down deep a lot just to get through their day. And that's a major reason for having resilience as well. For that kind of modest, relentless daily grind that living in this world exposes us to.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah. It's really a daily need even just getting up out of bed in the morning for certain people. As a clinical psychologist, I'm sure you've run into people that maybe if they're lacking in resilience, have difficulty even doing that maybe?
DR RICK HANSON: Yeah. Well, so now you're getting to me the really exciting question, which is if well-being requires resilience, what does resilience require or what gives us resilience? What gives us resilience primarily are psychological resources of various kinds. And these are things that-- some of them are fancy like secure attachment or executive function, but most of our psychological resources are character virtues or strengths of different kinds like patience, fortitude, gratitude, compassion, self-compassion, mindfulness, motivation.
These are various internal factors that make people more or less resilient. About 1/3 of these factors are basically rooted in our DNA. They are grounded in what's innate to us or more technically what is heritable. That really means, though, that the other 2/3 roughly of our psychological resources are in principle learnable. They are acquirable-- they can be gained or grown over time. And so what I focus on and what my book focuses on, is the process of growing inner resources and then using them.
And this is especially important if a person temperamentally doesn't have so many resources. Maybe internally they tend toward anxiety or they tend to be sensitive, or they've been affected by life in such a way that they've become more vulnerable over time. Or if people are particularly challenged-- they've got a stressful job, they're raising children alone, they're dealing with health issues, they're grappling with aging parents. Whatever it might be, the more we're challenged, the more resources we need.
ASHLEY HAMER: The idea of growing resources can be kind of hard to picture. So I thought I'd pop in with an example from Rick Hanson's book. Throughout the book, he includes little exercises you can do on your own to strengthen the resources covered in the chapter. This one he writes, quote, "focuses on gladness, but you can apply the methods in it to any experience you'd like to create for yourself. Think of something-- a fact-- that you're glad about. It could be small or large, in the present or the past. It could be a thing, an event, an ongoing condition, or a relationship. It could be a spiritual being or the entire universe.
Be aware of your body and open to gladness, gratitude, comfort, happiness. There could be an easing of tension, a letting go of stress or disappointment. Explore different elements of the experience. Be aware of thoughts such as, I'm fortunate, perceptions especially bodily sensations, emotions like delight or quiet joy, desires perhaps to give thanks, and actions such as a soft smile. Think of other things that you're glad about. Help the knowledge of them to become a rich experience by using the suggestions just above."
DR RICK HANSON: One reason why I think the book is timely is that I think for many, many people, they feel quite challenged by the pace of change, the rate of globalization, the rate of economic change as well as uncertainty, in a sense that the institutions that they used to rely upon as external resources, seem to be coming unglued, or at a minimum it seems like the cavalry is not coming. So increasingly people are on their own as it were. And if you're on your own, the best thing you can do is to grow resources inside yourself.
CODY GOUGH: You do talk in the book about how there are internal factors, and then there are environmental factors, and that the self is really the one that you have the most control over. So that's the most important one to cultivate, right?
DR RICK HANSON: Yeah. I mean, I'm a total goofball geek when it comes to a 3 by 3 matrix, so forgive me please, but I'll just say quickly. If you go back to that model of how do you make your life better? You can manage challenges, you can protect vulnerabilities, and you can grow and use resources. That's good. And then resources, challenges, and vulnerabilities are located in three places if you think about it. They're out there in the world, they're in your physical body, and they're also in your mind.
So that gives you in effect three ways to make your life better, and three places in which you can do it, you combine them, it gives you nine ways to improve your life or help other people and help the larger good-- the greater good. Of all those-- they're all important, I'm not against any of them. That said, growing resources has special opportunities because it's positive and usually we can do more there.
And then in terms of resources being located out in the world or in your body or in your mind, the resources in your mind have a special, special benefit because one, you have more control over them. No one can stop you from learning and growing and healing and developing every day. You can grow the good inside yourself every day. That's under your power. No one can stop you, and only you can be responsible for doing that.
Second benefit of mental resources is that you take them with you wherever you go. We move from environment to environment in terms of what's happening out there in the world, but the resources in your mind you've got with you everywhere and you can use them with just about everything. So that's why I especially focus on building up resources inside the mind, like grit and gratitude, compassion and confidence, and other things as well.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah. Some of those psychological resources like you just mentioned-- learning, calm, motivation, intimacy, these to me seem like such fundamental aspects of who a person is. I didn't realize you could even develop and grow these traits. How does one teach him or herself how to be more generous or have more aspiration or courage?
DR RICK HANSON: Cody you are on the key question. And it's a haunting one. It takes us I think in part to ask ourselves, wow, what's my learning curve in life? It's a pretty humbling question. What's my growth curve? What's my rate of healing over long periods like a decade, and then over a shorter periods. Because longer periods obviously are made up of shorter periods of years and months and days and even hours. What's my rate of gaining?
And it's very true as well as motivating to appreciate that we really can grow a lot. You can grow the trait of calm. And here too you're spotlighting a really important thing, which is the transition from just states to traits. In other words, the transition from having experiences of calm or gratitude or happiness or determination, and then turning those experiences into greater trait gratitude or trait compassion or trait calm or trait determination.
And that's the whole point, because then you've actually shifted your state of being in a general way, and you don't have to keep inventing or deliberately creating different useful states of being-- states of mind. And the key to that transition from state to trait-- the key to growing greater calm, happiness, resilience, self-worth, and so forth, whatever a person wants to grow, is a two-stage process. This is the fundamental neuropsychology of learning-- learning very broadly defined, not just memorizing the multiplication tables but social, emotional, et cetera, kinds of learning.
First, you have to experience whatever you want to grow. If you want to grow calm, if you want to grow self-worth, if you want to grow skillfulness with your partner or your kids. First you have to experience it. You can't just jack a cable into the back of the head and transfer over the file right into your inner iPod. You have to play the song-- you have to experience it. And then in the second necessary stage of transformation, of healing, growth, learning, and development, you must turn-- that experience must be turned into some kind of lasting change in the brain. Otherwise by definition, there's no lasting gain. There's no learning, there's no healing, there's no growth.
And what I observed myself, as someone who's been in this field a long time now, it's that we routinely forget the second stage, me included. We routinely forget to turn on the inner recorder to help the experience that we're having leave lasting beneficial residues behind. And that's a major opportunity for us, in general, to focus more on internalization of the experiences we're having. And how to do that? Largely by simply marinating in the experience for a breadth or two or longer. Stay with the experience, feel it in your body, focus on what's rewarding about it. All of those are like hacks in the hardware of the brain that turn the experience into a lasting change. So that's a really important thing to do.
And then to finish though, the importance of that second stage of learning-- internalization. Helping yourself receive what's happened so that it shifts you gradually for the better over time-- it's really important to do that in part, to compensate for and offset the brain's negativity bias, because it has evolved to be very good at immediately internalizing experiences of stress or irritation or hurt or anxiety, but relatively slow and inefficient at internalizing experiences of happiness or self-worth or feeling close to other people. If you tilt toward beneficial experiences in the way I'm describing, fundamentally you just sort of level the playing field. And then from there, you can grow lots and lots of very useful resources inside yourself.
CODY GOUGH: Let's go back to experience. You start with an experience.
DR RICK HANSON: Yeah.
CODY GOUGH: Let's say I have a great life, and every week is just the business and I'm just having a great old time. And then a really bad week comes, and it's just one of those terrible things. This seems to be something that I experienced semi-regularly. I rarely have a bad week, but when I do, it's a really bad week. So then, there's an experience that's kind of rare. Like if you need an experience in order to turn it into a lasting change but you rarely have that experience, how do you develop a skill where the experience is not something you're commonly exposed to?
DR RICK HANSON: Yeah. It's a great question. So I'd say first in your good weeks you're having lots of experiences, and right there are many, many times, several times a day at least, to slow it down a bit and help something useful sink in. So that when it's a bad week, you've got more resources inside you can draw upon. Also the reason you're having a good week, I imagine, is because you've already created a fair number of resources inside yourself, plus probably your circumstances are relatively fortunate and you've earned good relationships, good conditions, a good kind of work and so forth.
So I think it's useful to appreciate that there are causes of good weeks and causes of bad weeks, and over time we can nudge those causes in a positive direction. So then if you're having a bad week, without doing therapy with you right here, no worries, it's helpful to think about what makes it bad and then the useful question is, what if it were more present inside my mind? Would really help, depending on what's bad about a bad week. And so for example, sometimes people are just sort of-- they're just randomly vulnerable to depressed mood or feeling anxious about something. It just kind of comes, sort of built into their body.
Well, let's suppose someone starts getting glum or blue, what are some resources that would help? Well, gratitude is a major resource for feeling glum or blue. Feeling loved, feeling cared about. And having that as a bone-deep sense inside yourself that you can reach down for and then pull up as needed, or even better, it's in you bone-deep that you feel cared about and loved and valued, and it just naturally rises as kind of an automatic activation of that particular mental resource when it's needed.
ASHLEY HAMER: Have you ever noticed that when you're feeling down in the dumps, it's hard to remember anything good in your life? UK researchers noticed that, and wondered if memory tricks could help people with depression. For a 2016 study published in the journal Clinical Psychological Science, people with chronic depression were taught a time-tested memorization strategy called the method of loci.
It's also known as the memory palace technique, because it works by taking unrelated pieces of information like the capitals of African countries or that time your best friend flew all the way across the country to surprise you on your birthday, and making them objects in an architectural space, like signposts on a route or decorations in a palace. This seems to work because the hippocampus-- the area of the brain responsible for memory-- is also responsible for navigational and spatial reasoning. And your ability to navigate is a much more ancient skill than your ability to memorize capital cities.
In the study, half of the participants learned how to use this method to access positive self-affirming memories when faced with a bad mood. And the other half were told to just practice recalling happy memories. Both groups were able to boost their moods using their respective techniques, but the method of loci group kept it up for the long-term. It goes to show that you can't just assume you'll remember to use the resources Rick talks about when you're faced with a bad situation. You have to practice at it, so you'll be ready when the time comes.
DR RICK HANSON: So depending on the details you might think to yourself, wow, what would really help if it was more present inside me when the week goes bad? And then you could look for opportunities to experience that particular mental resource, and then more generally once you're experiencing it, really value it. Really help it kind of land inside. So bit by bit, synapse by synapse, it's increasingly with you and available when the oatmeal hits the fan.
[LAUGHS]
CODY GOUGH: I like that sort of phrase. So you're saying that the experience doesn't have to be a specific experience that you feel you need to have in order to develop one of these 12 psychological resources? It could be your general state of being and taking that as an experience. Is it kind of saying that maybe everything is an experience, even my normal day to day, even just waking up for work, going to work, doing my job, going home, whatever your day may be like, that in itself is an experience and--
DR RICK HANSON: Yeah. Let me slow it down and kind of unpack it. So let's pick something concrete. First chapter of the book is compassion. And especially compassion directed at oneself, or a more muscular sense of being strong and on your own side. It might seem really obvious but many, many people do not have much sense of that kind of internal muscular feeling of being for themselves. Not against others, but truly for themselves.
And many, many people do not have much quality of compassion for themselves-- that kind of sweet or kind, caring, sympathetic attitude toward themselves with regard to the ways in which their life is difficult. Much as they would have that attitude toward others, normally and reasonably, they don't have it for themselves. OK. So we've identified now, let's say, two key mental resources. A lot of research about both of these-- self-compassion and a kind of muscular sense of being for yourself.
So to grow those resources, it's very mechanical. Kind of brutally simple, but wonderfully simple. The way to grow those as resources-- especially if a person identified them as, yeah, that'd be really useful, is to look for opportunities to experience them. And when you have those experiences, focus on the experience, stay with it. There's a famous saying, you probably know it, neurons that fire together wire together.
So the longer those neurons are firing, the longer you're having that experience, the more neurons that are firing together, which is to say, the more embodied, emotional, and enacted the experiences of let's say, self compassion or being on your own side, the more it's going to go in, and the more you focus on what's rewarding about it, what's enjoyable or meaningful about it. That's going to increase activity of dopamine and norepinephrine in your brain, which is going to really help the experience become consolidated, has a lasting change in neural networks. So those are ways to help it really land. Bit by bit, you would then grow that resource inside yourself. So that's kind of the way I'm talking about it.
More generally, yet surely, if a person is having kind of as you describe in your good weeks, a global sense of well-being, it's really useful to just sort of help a global sense of well-being to sink in. Because then you're in effect growing trait well-being over time. That's a really useful thing to do. But one thing that is incredibly striking is that people routinely are having beneficial experiences, and they're nice, but they're not leaving any traces behind.
Because people are skittering on to-- in part due to our culture in which we're bombarded with one shiny object after another-- people tend to skitter on to the next shiny object before they've had an opportunity for the current shiny object, the current beneficial useful usually enjoyable experience to transfer out of short-term memory buffers to long-term storage. And I think a lot of people frankly who have relatively enjoyable happy lives are vulnerable to not having that much inside themselves if the music stops.
And in other words, if the external factors that give them a really good life-- the person who loves them or the job they have or where they live or a certain vitality in their own body-- if that changes, people are left with what they've grown inside. And for many people, they haven't grown that much inside, and the cupboard is kind of bare just when they need it the most.
CODY GOUGH: This is where relationships come into that saying, always make sure you love yourself before you get in a relationship with somebody else, that kind of thing?
DR RICK HANSON: I think that's one way to think about it. It's helpful to-- let's say, loving yourself is a kind of resource inside. And obviously it's not either or to have well-being, which is my primary focus here, and be able to contribute to the world based on a person's values. It's really good to have external conditions around you that are as good as they can be, obviously. Look for a good partner, look for a good job, try to live in a good place, and try to install stop signs near schools, OK, good.
That said, we tend to move as people from situation to situation, and also external conditions often kind of end. They fall apart. And what we have inside ourselves in terms of durable, trait-based inner resources is what we take with us wherever we go. So I think it's really useful to have good relations with friends and family and intimate partners and so forth. What's even more useful is to really internalize what it feels like to have a good friend or a good intimate partner or to be close with your family, so that you have that inside you even if something changes in that relationship outside you.
CODY GOUGH: I think internalizing is part of the trick behind all of this. It sounds to me like presence of mind is a really key component to all of this.
DR RICK HANSON: Yeah. Because if you're not present, you can't be aware of the opportunity for internalization. You're right. And then you need that presence of mind as well to internalize. Now that said, the brain is so fast. Neurons are firing 5 to 50 times a second. Large scale patterns of synchronized neural activity that are tracked through measuring brainwaves, they're happening 5, 10, 80, 100 times a second. The brain is really quick.
So over the course of a breath or two or three, that's roughly long enough to begin the process of consolidation. The more, the better. There is a kind of quote unquote, "dosing effect." But the process of internalization, it's really useful to appreciate. It's something that people can do on the fly, it's private, it's internal, nobody needs to know that you're doing it, and yet as people do it-- let's say a few times a day, maybe half a dozen times a day, it takes less than 5 minutes total probably over the course of a day-- as people do that, they really do start to feel like they're filling themselves up from the inside out, instead of as many people feel these days, kind of like they're running on empty.
Or instead of feeling that they have deep down kind of a hungry heart, through this process of internalization that we're talking about, it's the essence of self-reliance. People become stronger, they become more resilient, they also become happier. And interestingly as people resource themselves-- research shows-- and they fill up their own cup, they tend to be more generous, forgiving, loving, and reasonable to deal with other people.
CODY GOUGH: Your book is written in a way so that it's not necessarily meant to be read chronologically. You can kind of pick and choose the chapters. Maybe if I need to work on motivation or gratitude, how do I know where to start?
DR RICK HANSON: I use for this a road map that's based in some fundamental ideas in psychology as well as the evolution of the brain, which has to do with the fact that to have well-being we've got to cope, to cope we must address challenges to our needs. So the foundation of well-being, if you think about it in any lasting way, is you have to experience a sufficiency of needs being met-- fundamental idea-- including ultimately biologically grounded needs.
So what are our needs? There are different frameworks of needs. Many of them boil down to essentially that we have three basic needs, for safety, satisfaction, and connection-- broadly defined. And the way we meet these needs is through avoiding harms for safety, approaching rewards for satisfaction, and attaching to others for connection. This is an overarching kind of framework that contains many, many details inside it. But the fundamental map is clear-- safety, satisfaction, and connection.
And the ways in which we avoid harms or approach rewards or attach to others, is very shaped by the three stage evolution of the brain. With its reptilian brain stem, mammalian subcortex, and primate human neocortex sitting on top. It's a little bit like a house in three floors built from the bottom up. The bottom line takeaway is that all of us have a little zoo inside ourselves, and you can kind of get in touch with it.
In effect, I'll super simplify, and it's a useful fiction. We each have a little lizard, mouse, and monkey inside ourselves. And the lizard involved with safety needs, the mouse pursuing rewards, the monkey looking for its tribe. So that gives us a kind of roadmap. So if a person is thinking to themselves, now to get to your question concretely, where should I focus what would really help?
Or if a person is trying to answer that question I raised a couple of times, what, if it were more present in my mind, in my experience, would be really useful these days to help me feel better or cope better, or just not lose my temper so often let's say, or stop with two cookies and not eat the whole bag? What if it were more present in my mind, would really help. A useful roadmap is to ask yourself, OK, if you're being challenged, is it mainly a challenge to safety, indicated let's say by anxiety or anger or a sense of powerlessness or overwhelm or immobilization?
Or is it a challenge to satisfaction, indicated by frustration, disappointment, loss, depression, or a feeling that you're being thwarted in the attainment of important goals, or just that your life is really dull and beige and gray and blah? That would indicate challenges to satisfaction. Or do you feel inadequate, or is there an issue with shame? These are issues of connection, social emotions. Or do you feel rejected or left out or lonely or unloved? Or inside yourself is there a tendency toward resentment, grievance, vengeance? Are you getting caught up in us against them kind of rivalries or conflicts? That would indicate challenges to the connection needs.
So then when you know roughly where the challenge is, it's a really useful thing. And I go into a lot of detail of this in the book. How do you now focus on what would be the resources that would be specifically targeted to the need that's challenged? Because for example, if you're feeling anxious, if you're worried about something, or you're dealing with pain or the threat of pain, in other words, a challenge to safety, well, gratitude is nice, but it doesn't address your safety need. Gratitude is useful for satisfaction.
Or ultimately you're worried about your health and you go to work and someone says my, you look good today. That's nice. That is a resource experience for connection, but it doesn't address your underlying safety concern. Let's say about your health or the health of someone else you love, like a child. So it's important to find resources that are matched. That are actually relevant. So it's kind of like if you run out of gas you need gas not a spare tire, if your tire's flat you need a tire not gas. So you work backwards.
And for example, just for anxiety, classic resources for feeling anxious or irritable or kind of overwhelmed or immobilized, are to be able to relax your body, to calm the body-- that's a fundamental resource. To increase trait calm-- that's a fundamental resource. Appraising threats accurately rather than overestimating them in an alarmist way-- that's a major resource. Another major resource is to really have a sense of the protections around you. What is actually taking care of you that you can count upon?
Another resource for issues of anxiety or anger or helplessness, is the feeling that others are going to be there for you, because we're a profoundly social species, exile was a death sentence back in the Serengeti. And one thing that people can do that's immediately soothing and can also help them be less angry, is to feel that others are caring.
And the key point to finish, is not just to have in the moment experiences of this, but to increase the trait of calm, or the trait of appraising threats accurately rather than in an alarmed way, or the trait of feeling protected by many, many resources in your life, or the trait of feeling loved and cared about by other people. This is what's really important to grow.
ASHLEY HAMER: Another place to get started is on Rick's website. After the interview, he told us that his book is based on an online program called The Foundations of Well-Being. It's an experiential program that he says has been tried by more than 13,000 people. And he recommended it as a great companion to the book.
The Foundations of Well-Being includes everything from guided meditations to interviews with world class experts on subjects like positive emotions and mindfulness. It's online. You can do it at your own pace, and you can customize it to your needs. And Rick's before and after research has shown quote, "very powerful, statistically significant results." You can learn more about it on Rickhanson.net, and we've got a link to it in the show notes for this podcast.
DR RICK HANSON: Of course, always based on what's authentically true. It would be foolish to grow the trait of feeling protected when you're actually not protected. Or to grow the trait of feeling loved by others when you're actually not cared about or loved by others. I mean, any kind of resource we're trying to grow in ourselves must be grounded ultimately in what's actually true. I don't believe in positive thinking, I believe in realistic thinking. OK, what do you think about all that?
CODY GOUGH: I would love to keep talking to you but we should wrap up. And I just have a quick question for you on the curiosity challenge. I learned about something on curiosity.com that I think you might find interesting, so I'm going to give you a little trivia question. According to a study published in the Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, people subconsciously change their voice when they're chatting with someone who they think is attractive. Can you tell me, how does their voice change?
DR RICK HANSON: That's so interesting. So first of all, obviously we're talking about the average of groups. And language makes us generalize to everybody, so there are going to be some individual differences here. That said, my guess is that their voice would change to a lower register, slightly deeper, now we're speaking more from the chest cavity, and that has to do with polyvagal theory, the vagus nerve complex, and so forth. So my best guess is that people would-- the rate of speech would slow down a bit, and I think the timbre would become a little deeper. That would be my best guess.
CODY GOUGH: You are very, very close to the mark. You really were right about the pitch. So the full correct answer would be that both heterosexual men and women in the study tended to lower their voices in pitch if their opposite sex conversation partner was deemed attractive. So, yeah, perfect. And there may have been some slowing as well. Of course, again, as you mentioned there's some individual variation, but the researchers, they were surprised that women lowered it as well. But it refers to both genders, they're all going to lower their voice. And you had a little bit of trivia for me as well.
DR RICK HANSON: Well, one of the things that has really haunted me in a good way is to learn the fact that over the course of evolution, our species-- anatomically modern humans arose 200,000 to 300,000 years ago. But roughly, it's hard to tell exactly, but it looks like maybe around 80,000 years ago, there were several so-called choke points, in which the actual numbers of Homo sapiens on planet Earth dwindled significantly.
And there was one choke point in particular having to do with global climate change due to natural causes roughly the 80,000 or so years ago-- this is from memory-- in which the number of people that were alive on Earth dwindled to be less than several thousand. And the people who remained alive lived in little tiny ecological islands, including some islands off the coast of South Africa that had certain kinds of shrubs that were year-round sources of food. Also on the coast, they were able to gather shellfish and so forth.
And I just feel it's quite haunting to imagine like literally in some of these islands there would be no more than a few adults, total. That was the entirety of the human species left on the planet. And we were that close to going extinct. And I just imagine, what was life like for them? Even imagine dwindling toward or on the risk of being the last humans living on Earth. And we are here today because they fought through. They were resilient.
There you go. I didn't know what was going to end up with resilient when I started with this. Yay, resilience. They were resilient. They fought through those tough conditions, and here we are talking with each other. You and I Cody now, thousands of years later inheriting the fruits of their efforts and the ways that they were resilient. And they are-- we are their great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren, and we're here today because they were resilient.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah. It's wild and it's really hard to imagine. There's a lot of people that can't even imagine what life is like without Facebook, let alone-- Well, thank you again for joining me on the Curiosity podcast. Dr. Hanson, I really appreciate it.
DR RICK HANSON: Cody, it was truly a pleasure.
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ASHLEY HAMER: It's time for the extra credit question. This week's question comes from Archana from India who writes, "I have always wondered if I could extend any day, say, my birthday, with the help of time zones. If it's 11:59 PM on the 14th of April in India, then this day is about to end. But comparatively, Cairo, Egypt, has a time lag of two hours. So in Cairo, I'd still have two hours before my birthday ends. Assuming I can teleport myself anywhere in a matter of negligible seconds, how long can I make my birthday last by going backwards in time zones?" What a question! The answer, after this.
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ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah, the whole idea with curiosity.com is that you can learn something new every day, and this way you won't miss a thing.
CODY GOUGH: And we know you've got a packed schedule, so we keep our emails short and sweet. And if you're on the go, you can even click a link in every email to listen to our daily podcast.
ASHLEY HAMER: You'll get our daily podcasts automatically if you're subscribed on your favorite podcast app, like Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Google Play, gReader, Pocket Casts, PlayerFM, anything.
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ASHLEY HAMER: One more time, that's curiosity.com/email.
CODY GOUGH: And if you love it, forward it to a friend. They'll thank you later.
ASHLEY HAMER: I just teleported in to get you the extra credit answer. Archana wanted to know how long you can extend your birthday by teleporting through time zones. The answer relies heavily on Earth's international date line. That's the line of longitude that says when today starts and yesterday ends. It's on the opposite side of the world from the Prime Meridian which runs through Greenwich, England. The Prime Meridian forms the basis for Greenwich Mean Time, GMT, a time standard now called Coordinated Universal Time or UTC.
Because it's on the opposite side of the world from Greenwich, the time zone on the international date line is UTC plus or minus 12 hours. The time in India is UTC plus 5 and 1/2 hours. Got it? OK. So now you have two options. If you want to spend the day celebrating with your friends in India, you can wait until 11:59 PM and then teleport to the next time zone over every hour on the hour. If you did that, you could celebrate for 12 plus 5 and 1/2 hours or 17 and 1/2 extra hours.
But if you wanted a destination birthday party, you could fly everyone to the international date line. Might I suggest a tiny pair of islands between Russia and Alaska called the Diomede Islands. You could party for 24 hours on Big Diomede, then transport east to Little Diomede Island roughly 2 and 1/2 miles or 4 kilometers away. Then you could party for another 24 hours and it would still be your birthday the whole time. It might be cold, but it'd still probably be worth it. Thanks for your question. If you have a nagging question about the world, send it in to podcast@curiosity.com and I might answer it on a future show.
CODY GOUGH: That's all for today. We'll be back next week with another feature-length interview. And in the meantime, please check out our daily podcast and learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY HAMER: We're really excited about it. And it would be a huge help if you could tell at least one friend about our show.
CODY GOUGH: Sharing is caring.
ASHLEY HAMER: That's true. I'm Ashley Hamer.
CODY GOUGH: And I'm Cody Gough. Have a great week.
ASHLEY HAMER: And stay curious.
SPEAKER: On the Westwood One Podcast Network.