Hello and welcome to the Being Well podcast. My name is Forrest Hansen. I'm here today with

Dr. Rick Hansen, who is the author of Buddha's Brain, Hardwiring

happiness and a number of other books. He also happens to be my father so dad how

are you doing today? I'm great. Today we're going to be beginning a new series focused on

the subject of resilience. Why is resilience important and just a normal person's

life? The basic idea of resilience is that you bend when you're challenged, but you don't break.

And I think about a willow tree and a storm compared to an oak tree.

Oak tree is stiff and crashes and gets broken. The willow tree

copes and adapts and responds and is still standing after the storm passes.

We need that core of inner strength to deal with things

when they're really horrible but we also need it every day. Resilience is not

just for surviving the worst day of your life, it's for coping and thriving every day of your life.

Ordinary stresses, hassles with others, disappointments, setbacks, or just frustration or delay in attaining your goals, fulfilling your dreams.

So resilience is really, really fundamental and what's great about it is that you can grow

it.

So besides the ways in which resilience helps you be happy,

because without resilience, you can't have any kind of long-term happiness.

You get overwhelmed by life.

In addition to that truth, what's also true, based on new science about how your brain works, you can actually become more resilient over time.

And I'm really looking forward to exploring how to do that with you.

So I think that the obvious question, once you say that, is how do you do that?

Like what's the process for becoming more anything, whether it's becoming more

...