'Our lives are strewn with ordinary jewels' - Rick Hanson

Conflict Matters: Exposing kids to conflict No matter how fortunate we are, life is not an easy ride; we all have to deal with things going wrong. There are plenty of common expressions that make it clear we admire those who don’t let life’s inevitable setbacks turn their world upside down and at the moment “resilience” is a popular concept for discussing this ability. Especially when talking about children: we all want our kids to be “resilient.” One of my favourite teachers, Rick Hanson[1], defines it as: “the capacity to keep on going when things are hard.” I come across some who believe it is a bit like fuel and the amount we have is due to genetics, or something else outside our control, but Rick has the neuroscience to prove it is better understood as a learned behaviour.  Indisputably resilience is something we all need, both to recover from adversity and to manage the inevitable ups and downs of everyday life.

Rick was here a few years ago, lecturing at Auckland University on the “plasticity” of the human brain, in particular how we are constantly rewiring our own.  He reminds us that all learning – whether it is a baby learning to walk, an adult learning to navigate a difficult conversation, or learning how to press pause between hearing something hurtful and responding – involves changes to our brains. He has just written a book about learning how to be more resilient which is filled with practical suggestions on how to rewire your brain for the better.

While Rick’s suggestions are old school, involving actual work, the up side is that this work is actually very pleasant. He is probably most well known for a phrase he made famous some time ago: “neurons that fire together, wire together.” All this means is that repetition is neutral, free from the concepts of good or bad. Both positive and negative thought repetitions have essentially the same effect on your brain in that both create and strengthen neural networks. I think we all know this instinctively; bad habits are so easy to form because our attention is like a vacuum cleaner, whatever we rest it upon will be sucked up into us.

One of the things that prevents or restricts us developing resilience is being hijacked by our emotions, we get flooded, sometimes it literally feels like we are drowning. To be resilient we need to develop and maintain a core of awareness, even when we are 99% falling apart. The aim is not necessarily to suppress the emotion, but rather to fully feel it, without being entirely swept away.

Rick gets us to develop this awareness by really noticing the good stuff when it happens (and it always does, every day, however tiny); stopping for a breath or two and giving ourselves permission to really enjoy that moment, to actually fully experience it with as many senses as possible. Doing this a few times each day sews and strengthens the neural fabric of resilience.

[1] https://www.rickhanson.net/

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