Wholeness Healing Center

Taking In the Good

Taking in the good enhances happiness. Use Thanksgiving to remind yourself that focusing on these things you are grateful for impacts your well-being and creates moments of lasting happiness.

Rick Hanson, a psychologist and author, has done significant work on the neuroscience of happiness, resilience, and mindfulness. He teaches ways to cultivate well-being and create more happiness in our lives. He suggests that we must work at taking in the good, as our brain naturally gravitates towards the negative. This tendency is rooted in our primitive past, where being vigilant for danger was essential for survival. Our DNA carries this ”negativity bias”, causing us to focus on potential threats and, in turn, often miss out on the good moments.

One of his key insights is the importance of “taking in the good”, which involves deliberately savoring positive experiences. He suggests that holding onto a positive experience for 10-20 seconds can help it become more deeply encoded in our brains. This practice leverages the concept of neuroplasticity—the brain’s ability to change and adapt—by giving positive experiences more time to “sink in”, counteracting our brain’s natural negativity bias. We can use the mind to change the brain – engaging in our own neuroplasticity. This creates a pathway to the happiness region of the brain, as neurons that fire together wire together.

You can use your mind alone to change your brain based on your thoughts. But you have to be intentional. Positive experiences, unless they are intense, tend to move through our brains without sticking. Since we rarely spend time catching these moments, these good moments move through the brain like water through a sieve. They slip away – like Teflon. Meanwhile, negative experiences are like Velcro; they stick and stay with us. The good news is that good moments that are held in short-term memory buffer for 10-20 seconds and can transfer to long-term storage. You can achieve this by savoring the positive moment. I often ask my clients to take those moments and put them on like a salve, sinking into them through using all their senses and being with the moment for 10-20 seconds. This requires an awareness of the thoughts and feelings as they arise and then intentionally being with the experience for these few seconds.
This idea ties beautifully into the themes of Thanksgiving and gratitude. Thanksgiving is a time when we intentionally reflect on what we are thankful for, focusing on the positive aspects of our lives. By using Hanson’s technique during Thanksgiving, you can enhance the experience of gratitude.

When you take a moment to truly savor what you are thankful for—whether it’s family, friends, health, or a delicious meal—and hold that feeling for 10-20 seconds, you are not just recognizing it but also deepening your emotional connection to it.
This practice can make gratitude feelings more lasting and impactful. Over time, regularly “taking in the good” can help shift your brain towards a more positive outlook, making it easier to find joy and contentment in everyday life. Thanksgiving, therefore, becomes more than just a holiday; it can be an opportunity to cultivate a habit of gratitude that enriches your mental and emotional well-being throughout the year.

Taking in the good is good for you. Use Thanksgiving to remind yourself that focusing on what you are grateful for impacts your well-being and creates moments of lasting happiness. Over time, this practice hardwires your brain to seek out and appreciate these positive experiences more frequently. Who doesn’t want to feel good?

Works Cited
Hanson, R. (2018, July 29). Retrieved from Rickhanson.com: https://rickhanson.com/take-in-the-good/

 

Tags: create pathways for happiness, savor your moments and create happiness habits