There are two different modes of the human brain according to Rick Hanson’s Hardwiring Happiness: the reactive mode and the responsive mode.
When you feel safe, satisfied, and connected, with all your core needs fulfilled, your brain is in its responsive or “green” setting. But when any of your core needs have been unmet, thus making you feel unsafe, dissatisfied, or disconnected, your brain shifts to the reactive or “red” mode.
The reactive setting of the brain, Hanson says, served the human race pretty well in the past. For more than 99 percent of the past 60 million years, our human and primate ancestors lived in the world of danger, scarcity, and confrontation, with the help of the red brain’s “fight or flight” reactions.
The prolonged dependency on the red mode, however, made our brains “Velcro for the bad and Teflon for the good.” In other words, we tend to overestimate threats and underestimate opportunities, a sort of mindset unsuitable for the 21st-century world where resources and know-how for safety, rewards, and attachment come in ample supply.
Hence Hanson’s four steps of taking in the good, the so-called HEAL steps:
H: Have a positive experience.
E: Enrich it.
A: Absorb it.
L: Link positive and negative material.
These steps have been designed to deliberately internalize positive experiences and keep the brain as “green” as possible. As I read through the details of each step, it hit me that my child, S, actually takes those steps on a daily basis for almost all experiences that she goes through.
Let me take an example of this one time when she rode her scooter home from school. She was all smiles and playful as she sped through our neighborhood on her scooter (having a positive experience). She talked about how the breeze cooled her off as she accelerated, and she also commented on the trees and the oxygen they produced that she must be breathing in at that very moment (enriching and absorbing the positive experience). She then saw me running after her and remembered that she’d run to school the previous day because she was late. She told me how embarrassed she’d felt about it, but then she proudly added that she’d hurried up the next morning and made it to school in time (linking positive and negative material).
During the first couple of days of reading Hardwiring Happiness, I marveled at S’s positivity and the seemingly evergreen state of her brain. But on the flip side, I wondered, At what point do we lose our childhood resilience?
It was toward the end of the book that I found some clues. Hanson suggests a series of negative beliefs that block people from taking in the good. Some of those beliefs are:
- Concern that you’ll lose your edge in business or life if you no longer feel “hungry”
- Fear that you’ll lower your guard if you feel better and that’s when people get whacked
- Belief that seeking to feel good is selfish, vain, or sinful, or that it’s disloyal or unfair to those who suffer, or that you don’t deserve it
- Fear that if you let yourself feel good, you’ll want more only to get disappointed later
- Past experience of being punished for being energized or happy
- Belief that there is nothing good inside you
- Belief that there is no point in feeling good since some things are still bad
I know of so many grownups who have expressed such beliefs, and I myself have had some of those beliefs at one stage or another of my life.
I may not be able to keep my child from losing some of her resilience down the road. Some of the loss might even be attributable to my parenting since, as the poet Philip Larkin suggested, parents mess you up. In that case, I wish I could have enough strength to own up all my blunders and turn them into opportunities. To that end, I doodled on my iPad to enrich and absorb one of my positive experiences, to follow the HEAL steps, to nurture my emotional strength.

The joy on her face as she zoomed. The forever source my gratitude, the evergreen provider of everyday laughter.
