Taking in the Good: A 25-Minute Positive Neuroplasticity Practice

The useful move: don’t just notice the good — let it land

Rick Hanson’s “taking in the good” practice is deceptively simple: when something beneficial is present, stay with it long enough for the nervous system to register it.

Not perform gratitude. Not force positivity. Not deny pain, anxiety, or the many things in the world that are genuinely difficult.

Just pause long enough for a wholesome state — peacefulness, strength, love, contentment, enoughness — to become more than a passing idea.

This matters because the brain is not a neutral recorder. Negative events often grab more attention, create stronger learning, and stick around more vividly than equivalent positive ones.¹ Hanson’s practice is one way of gently rebalancing the learning environment: giving the body-mind repeated experiences of what is already okay, safe, steady, or loved. ✻1Think of this as nervous system literacy: noticing not only activation, bracing, collapse, and threat — but also the micro-signals of resource that are easy to skip over.

Positive neuroplasticity, in plain English

Neuroplasticity means the nervous system changes through experience. Positive neuroplasticity is the deliberate cultivation of beneficial traits by repeatedly experiencing beneficial states.

A state might be temporary: one breath of calm, a flicker of warmth, the felt memory of being strong.

A trait is what becomes more available over time: steadiness, compassion, contentment, resilience.

The bridge between the two is not intellectual agreement. It is absorption. In this clip, Hanson repeatedly invites participants to rest in the experience, strengthen it, enjoy it, and let it spread through the body.²

That is the practical mechanism: if the good is present for half a second and then the mind darts away, very little gets encoded. If you stay for ten, twenty, thirty seconds — with sensation, emotion, imagery, and breath — there is more for the system to learn from.

Step 1: Settle before you strengthen

The meditation begins with consent and adaptability. Hanson explicitly invites you to adapt the practice, go your own way, or even turn the sound off if silence is what works.³

That is not a throwaway line. It changes the tone of the practice. The body learns differently when it is not being forced into someone else’s protocol.

He then starts with full breaths, posture, and three long-exhale breaths — “maybe even twice as long as the inhalation.”⁴

Longer, slower breathing is not magic, but it is a useful doorway. A large systematic review and meta-analysis found that voluntary slow breathing tends to increase vagally-mediated heart-rate variability, a marker often used in research as a window into parasympathetic regulation.⁵

The cue is simple:

1. Find a posture that is comfortable and alert.
2. Let the eyes be open or closed.
3. Take three breaths with a longer exhale.
4. Let awareness move through the body.
5. Release tension where the body is ready to release.

No strain. No performance. Just enough settling to make learning possible.

Step 2: Find strength without aggression

After the settling breath, Hanson invites a felt sense of strength: “not aggressive, a stability of strength.”⁶

This is an important distinction.

Many people only know strength as bracing — jaw tight, chest armoured, attention narrowed, ready to defend. That can be useful in the right context, but it is not the same as regulated strength.

The flavour here is closer to relaxed dignity:

• uprightness without rigidity
• backbone without hardness
• determination without contraction
• groundedness without needing to prove anything

You might remember a moment when you were steady under pressure. Or simply feel the body’s ongoingness: breathing, sitting, sensing, continuing.

The practice is not to manufacture a heroic identity. It is to find whatever fraction of real strength is already available and let the body recognise it.

Step 3: Let peacefulness coexist with reality

A common mistake in regulation practice is treating calm as evidence that life is fine.

Hanson does something subtler. He names that pain, anxiety, tasks, and worldly difficulty may still be present — and underneath or amidst all of that, there may also be a fundamental peacefulness.⁷

That coexistence is the point.

You do not need to wait until the inbox is empty, the body is pain-free, the nervous system is perfectly settled, or the world is less intense before you can locate one thread of peacefulness.

This is often a relief for high-capacity people. Contentment does not mean abandoning goals. Peace does not mean becoming passive. Enoughness does not mean nothing needs to change. ✻2A regulated system can still act. In fact, it usually acts with more precision because it is not only acting from threat compression.

Step 4: Open the heart without making it complicated

Around eight minutes in, the practice shifts toward the heart: breathing around the heart, inviting open-heartedness, and noticing what it feels like to be liked or loved.⁸

The language is deliberately uncomplicated.

What does it feel like to feel liked?

What does it feel like to feel loved?

Can lovingness flow out and in?

For some people, this will be immediately accessible. For others, it may bring numbness, grief, scepticism, or protective contraction. That does not mean you are doing it wrong. It means the nervous system is giving honest information.

If direct love feels too much, start smaller:

• the ease of being near a tree
• a pet resting beside you
• the memory of someone’s uncomplicated kindness
• warmth in the hands
• a sense of goodwill that asks nothing from you

The practice is not to force an emotional state. It is to find the cleanest available doorway into connection.

Practice

Taking in the good in 90 seconds

Use this when something beneficial is already present — after a good conversation, a breath of relief, a moment of strength, or the small animal pleasure of sunlight on your face.

1. Notice the good. Name what is beneficial: calm, support, enoughness, warmth, gratitude, dignity, love.
2. Feel it in the body. Where does it register? Chest, belly, throat, hands, face, breath?
3. Stay for a few breaths. Give the nervous system time to encode the experience. Ten seconds is useful. Thirty is better.
4. Gently intensify. Let the colour brighten, the sensation spread, or the phrase become simple: “this is here too.”
5. Let it become yours. Imagine the experience settling into the body rather than floating past as a nice thought.

If the practice becomes effortful, soften it. The aim is receptivity, not achievement.

Step 5: Appreciate enoughness without losing your edge

The third movement in the clip is gratitude and enoughness: appreciating what is beneficial, strengthening thankfulness, and letting contentment be present even while goals and problems remain.⁹

This is where the practice can be misunderstood.

Contentment is not complacency. Gratitude is not denial. Enoughness is not pretending that injustice, grief, illness, money stress, or relational pain are irrelevant.

It is the nervous system learning that striving does not need to be fuelled only by lack.

There is decent research support for gratitude practices, though it is worth being precise. A 2023 systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized trials found benefits for gratitude, mental health, anxiety, depression, and positive mood. Other reviews suggest effects can be modest and may vary depending on the control group and intervention design.¹⁰

So the honest claim is not “gratitude fixes everything.”

The better claim: deliberately appreciating what is beneficial can become one ingredient in a broader regulation practice — especially when it is embodied, specific, and not used to bypass what hurts.

Step 6: Bring the state back into activity

Near the end, Hanson invites the beneficial qualities to spread through the body and become established — peacefulness, love, contentment, open awareness.¹¹

Then comes the integration cue: open the eyes, move a little, and see what it is like to preserve what has been cultivated while becoming more active.¹²

That final step is easy to skip. It may also be the most practical part.

A meditation that only works with eyes closed is still useful. But the deeper training is carrying a trace of the state into ordinary life:

• opening the laptop
• replying to the message
• walking into the kitchen
• having the conversation
• returning to the child, client, partner, inbox, or task

The question is not, “Can I stay perfectly peaceful?”

The question is, “Can one percent of this come with me?”

Key takeaways

• The negativity bias is not a personal flaw; it is a learning tendency that can make threat more salient than resource.
• “Taking in the good” means staying with beneficial experience long enough for the nervous system to register it.
• The practice starts with consent, posture, breath, and body awareness.
• Positive states become more trainable when they are embodied: strength in the spine, warmth around the heart, contentment in the breath.
• Gratitude and contentment work best when they are honest — not pasted over pain or used to avoid necessary action.
• The integration moment matters: preserve one thread of the beneficial state as you return to movement and ordinary life.

Free assessment

Map how your nervous system responds under stress.

If this practice helps, the next step is understanding your own baseline patterns: where you brace, collapse, over-function, or lose access to resource. The free nervous system assessment gives you a practical starting point.

Take the assessment →

Continue exploring

• Read The Art and Science of Interoception for a deeper foundation in sensing internal state.
• Try Reset Your Nervous System for a simple regulation sequence.
• Explore How to Work With Chronic Anxiety for a complementary masterclass guide on anxiety, worry, and avoidance.

References

1. Baumeister et al., “Bad is Stronger than Good,” Review of General Psychology (2001), https://doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.5.4.323. See also Rozin and Royzman, “Negativity Bias, Negativity Dominance, and Contagion,” Personality and Social Psychology Review (2001), https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327957PSPR0504_2. These papers support the broad idea that negative information often has stronger psychological impact, though the exact expression varies by context and person. ↩
2. Rick Hanson, Taking in the Good Meditation, around 11:29–12:25, where he describes resting in, becoming absorbed in, and strengthening wholesome qualities of body-mind. ↩
3. Rick Hanson, Taking in the Good Meditation, around 00:00–00:18. ↩
4. Rick Hanson, Taking in the Good Meditation, around 00:33–02:23. ↩
5. For a broad review, see Laborde et al., “Effects of voluntary slow breathing on heart rate and heart rate variability: A systematic review and a meta-analysis,” Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews (2022), https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35623448/. For nuance on longer exhalations specifically, see Van Diest et al., “Inhalation/Exhalation ratio modulates the effect of slow breathing on heart rate variability and relaxation,” Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback (2014), https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25156003/. ↩
6. Rick Hanson, Taking in the Good Meditation, around 03:26–04:56. ↩
7. Rick Hanson, Taking in the Good Meditation, around 05:02–07:23. ↩
8. Rick Hanson, Taking in the Good Meditation, around 08:21–10:50. ↩
9. Rick Hanson, Taking in the Good Meditation, around 14:39–17:31. ↩
10. Cini et al., “The effects of gratitude interventions: a systematic review and meta-analysis,” Einstein (São Paulo) (2023), https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37585888/. For a more cautious reading of clinical self-help effects, see Cregg and Cheavens, “Gratitude Interventions: Effective Self-help? A Meta-analysis of the Impact on Symptoms of Depression and Anxiety,” Journal of Happiness Studies (2021), https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-020-00236-6. ↩
11. Rick Hanson, Taking in the Good Meditation, around 18:08–21:35. ↩
12. Rick Hanson, Taking in the Good Meditation, around 24:10–25:25. ↩