Being Well with Forrest Hanson and Dr. Rick Hanson

By Rick Hanson, Ph.D., Forrest Hanson

Education Alternative Health

What's Being Well with Forrest Hanson and Dr. Rick Hanson about?

Forrest Hanson is joined by his father, clinical psychologist Dr. Rick Hanson, and a world-class group of experts to explore the practical science of lasting well-being. Conversations focus on the key insights from psychology, science, and contemplative practice that you need to build reliable inner strengths, overcome your challenges, and get the most out of life. New episodes every Monday.

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LAST EPISODE

How to Navigate Common Argu...

01.30.2023

All of our relationships include some conflict, the big question is how skillfully we handle that conflict when it appears. Dr. Rick Hanson joins Forrest to walk us through some effective ways to deal with common forms of interpersonal conflict. ...

Being Well with Forrest Hanson and Dr. Rick Hanson episodes:

01.30.2023 How to Navigate Common Arguments All of our relationships include some conflict, the big question is how skillfully we handle that conflict when it appears. Dr. Rick Hanson joins Forrest to walk us through some effective ways to deal with common forms of interpersonal conflict. ...
01.23.2023 Letting Go of Our Conditioning with Caverly Morgan The main topic we explore on the podcast, in many different ways, is change. How can we come to understand ourselves better, let go of who we were, and become who we wish to be? In this episode Dr. Rick ...
01.16.2023 The Keys to a Great Relationship Before becoming the “brain guy” Dr. Rick spent over 30 years working in private practice as a couples counselor and family therapist. Today we’re leaning on that experience, and learning what we can do to build healthier, happier, and more ...
01.09.2023 Becoming Our Best Selves with Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman and Dr. Jordyn Feingold We often know what we “should” do, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to do it. Today Dr. Rick and Forrest are joined by Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman and Dr. Jordyn Feingold to explore how we can learn to consistently ...
01.02.2023 Why Don't We Get Better? Forrest is joined by Dr. Rick Hanson to explore why we often struggle to change in the ways that matter the most to us, how much change is realistically possible, what makes change hard, the hidden barriers to real change, ...
12.26.2022 How to Reinvent Yourself (in 2023) We’ve come to the end of another year, and it’s a good time to take stock and consider how we’d like to grow and change during our next trip around the sun. In this episode, Forrest and Dr. Rick focus ...
12.19.2022 The Science of Stress with Dr. Elissa Epel We think of stress as “bad” for you, but what if some forms of stress could actually help us grow and change for the better? On today’s episode Forrest and Dr. Rick are joined by Dr. Elissa Epel, a psychologist ...
12.12.2022 Responding to Criticism, and Accepting The Way Things Are Criticism is an unavoidable part of life. But even though we’re all going to be criticized from time to time, many of us spend much of our lives living in fear of criticism. Then, on the flip side, we’re all ...
12.05.2022 Untangling Ourselves with Sensei Koshin Paley Ellison “All the time I work with dying people, and only a few of them know they are dying.” On this episode of Being Well, Soto Zen teacher Sensei Koshin Paley Ellison joins Forrest and Rick to explore living, dying, and ...
11.28.2022 How to Understand Anxiety and See Threats Clearly We’re living in an anxious time, and part of the reason we’re anxious is because there are very real challenges we face both individually and collectively. But we’re also affected by the natural tendencies of the brain, which is easily ...
11.21.2022 Moving Beyond “Fair” to Build a Great Relationship with Nate and Kaley Klemp These days couples often shoot for 50/50 in their relationships: an even split of responsibilities in the home or at work. But 50/50 often leads to fights over fairness, and this fixation on fairness can be the death of many ...
11.14.2022 Choosing the Roles We Play in Life If you’re the kind of person who listens to mental health podcasts, you’re more likely than average to get pulled into an impromptu “helping role” with your family and friends. Sometimes we seek out these roles, but they can also ...
11.07.2022 Authentically Developing Self-Worth It’s one thing to feel good about what we do, and another to feel truly worthy from the inside out. When we increase our self-worth it allows us to take our needs more seriously, get on our own side, and ...
10.31.2022 Saying No to Your Past, Embracing Growth, and Becoming Lighter with Yung Pueblo Diego Perez, widely known by his pen name Yung Pueblo, joins Forrest to explore how we can deepen our personal practice, refine the mind, break old patterns, relax the self, and feel lighter than we were before. This was one ...
10.24.2022 How to Forgive Yourself We all make mistakes in life. When we do it's important to take appropriate responsibility, feel the "wince," and make amends as we can. But after we've done that...then what? Many people find it easier to forgive others than they ...
10.17.2022 Evolving Our Approach to Treating Trauma with Dr. Bessel van der Kolk On today’s episode of Being Well, Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, the author of The Body Keeps the Score, joins Rick and Forrest to explore how trauma keeps us stuck, and how we can use imagination, self-expression, and creativity to ...
10.10.2022 Changing Old Patterns, Using Psychedelics Thoughtfully, and Exploring Human Nature: October Mailbag On this episode of Being Well, Rick and Forrest answer questions from listeners. They explore what they’re still working on in their relationship, how we can disengage from obsessive thoughts and old patterns, Rick’s thoughts on psychedelics and how they ...
10.03.2022 PTSD, Post-Traumatic Growth, and Prioritizing Mental Health with Jason Kander In 2016 Jason Kander was a rising star in the Democratic Party. After narrowly losing the race to become one of Missouri’s Senators, he began laying the groundwork for a Presidential run. Jason unexpectedly pivoted to declaring his candidacy for ...
09.26.2022 How to Effectively Communicate What You Want On the previous episode of Being Well, we talked about how to identify our wants and needs...but identifying our needs is just the first step. After that comes the tricky business of coming to terms with those needs, and communicating ...
09.19.2022 Discovering Your Wants and Needs Everyone has needs, but many people find it difficult to identify what authentically matters to them. Even when we can identify them, shame or fear often stops us from expressing those needs to others or taking the practical steps that ...
09.12.2022 Healing Trauma in a Toxic Culture with Dr. Gabor Maté Renowned physician Dr. Gabor Maté joins Rick and Forrest to explore the many problems for our bodies and minds that arise out of our modern culture, and what we can do to meet our needs, heal ourselves, and become more ...
09.05.2022 Understanding, Recognizing, and Dealing with Narcissists with Dr. Craig Malkin We all have narcissistic traits. Having some sense of our own specialness isn’t just normal, it’s actually psychologically healthy. The problems start when people go beyond normal levels, and become addicted to feeling special. Today Forrest is joined by Dr. ...
08.29.2022 Dealing with Difficult Emotions with Mollie West Duffy We all experience big, difficult feelings, from common emotions like uncertainty, anger, despair, and regret, to difficult experiences like the pains of comparison, burnout, and perfectionism. On today’s episode of Being Well Podcast, Forrest is joined by the wonderful author, ...
08.22.2022 How to Use Your Diagnosis (Without It Using You) Receiving a diagnosis can be emotionally challenging, and leave a person with a lot of understandable questions: What does this mean? What do I do now? How do I relate to this? On this episode Dr. Rick and Forrest Hanson ...
08.15.2022 Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy with Dr. Albert Garcia Romeu There’s been an explosion of interest in psychedelics over the last 10 years, and phrases like “psychedelic-assisted therapy” have gone from the relative fringes of the mental health conversation to bursting into the mainstream. Alongside a great deal of hype ...
08.08.2022 Relating to Death, and Living a Better Life The median life expectancy for a man living in the United States is roughly 80 years. That works out to 960 months, 4,160 weeks, or about 29,000 days. Rick is sneaking up on 70 years old, which means, on average, ...
08.01.2022 Changing Your Relationship to Shame Shame is one of the most complex and difficult emotions we experience on a regular basis, and one that can have seriously negative impacts on our sense of self-worth and ability to experience healthy connection with others. On this episode ...
07.25.2022 The Grieving Brain with Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor On today’s episode of Being Well, Forrest is joined by one of the world’s leading researchers on grief, Dr. Mary-Frances O’Connor, to help us better understand grief and grieving. They explore why grief is such a unique and intense emotion, ...
07.18.2022 Borderline Personality Disorder: Regulation, Nurturance, and Compassion One of the most important and challenging skills we can develop is learning to regulate our strong emotions. While it’s very natural to have fluctuations in how we feel about others and ourselves, for some people these ups and downs ...
07.11.2022 How to Make Learning STICK One of the most important skills we can develop is learning how to learn–how to update old beliefs about ourselves, take in new information, and build psychological resources like courage, gratitude, and confidence. We have experiences from which we could ...
07.04.2022 Rediscovering Your True Self: Parentification and the "Gifted Child" When a child is particularly emotionally intelligent, and a parent is particularly emotionally vulnerable, an inversion of the typical relationship can occur where the child devotes themselves to meeting the parent’s needs rather than the other way around. This can ...
06.27.2022 Connecting with Your Best Parts A little while ago, we had an episode on self-awareness where Rick emphasized how the majority of what people have to become self-aware of is the good inside themselves. The point felt significant enough to expand into a full episode ...
06.20.2022 Recovering from Complex PTSD with Elizabeth Ferreira Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD) is the result of the slow accumulation of many small traumatic experiences over time. On today’s episode, Forrest is joined by his partner Elizabeth Ferreira to explore CPTSD through a personal lens. Elizabeth shares her ...
06.13.2022 Attachment, and Cultivating Nonattachment You might have heard the line “attachment is the root of suffering.” It comes from the Buddha, but you don’t have to be a Buddhist to recognize that becoming overly attached to a particular outcome, person, or view of yourself ...
06.06.2022 Intimacy, Individuality, and Breaking the Trauma Cycle with Terry Real On one of our favorite episodes of Being Well, Dr. Rick and Forrest Hanson are joined by author and therapist Terry Real to talk about how to overcome the myth of toxic individualism, break trauma cycles, and experience real intimacy ...
05.30.2022 Overcoming Comparison and Accepting Ordinary with Dr. Ron Siegel When was the last time you went through a day without comparing yourself to anyone? For instance, by comparing your life to someone else’s highlight reel on social media, or being critical of your own willpower and abilities? Avoiding these ...
05.23.2022 Working with Anger: Costs and Benefits, Repression, and the "Empty Boat" Anger is one of the most complex, demanding, and difficult emotions we deal with on a regular basis, in part because it has both many costs and many uses. It burdens our bodies, relationships, and the world around us. And ...
05.16.2022 Increasing Self-Awareness: The Key to Personal Growth Self-awareness is both one of the most important skills for a person to have, and one of the most challenging to develop. In this episode of Being Well, Dr. Rick and Forrest Hanson explore what it takes to increase self-awareness ...
05.09.2022 Changing Old Patterns, Self-Awareness, and Repairing Family Relationships: Mailbag Dr. Rick and Forrest Hanson open up the mailbag to explore a variety of listener questions. They talk about what causes our brains to become attached to unwanted habits, how to know which of your thoughts are worth listening to, ...
05.02.2022 Maximize Your Motivation: Dopamine, Discipline, and Accepting Our Nature We all have things we want to accomplish in life, but having goals or knowing we should be doing something is often not nearly enough to get us to actually sustain our efforts in getting where we want to go. ...
04.25.2022 Preventing Secondary Trauma and Compassion Fatigue with Laura van Dernoot Lipsky With so much suffering going on in the world that’s worthy of our compassion and engagement, it’s easy to become overwhelmed by it even as we have the desire to remain engaged. On today's episode, Forrest talks with trauma expert ...
04.18.2022 Rumination: How to Disrupt Obsessive Thoughts It’s normal and healthy for us to try to process our experiences emotionally, but sometimes during that process we find ourselves getting stuck on the same painful memory, anxiety, or disturbing thought. This frustrating experience, known as rumination, is a ...
04.11.2022 Navigating Modern Dating with Logan Ury We’ve spent a lot of time on the podcast exploring how we can improve our skills in romantic relationships, but for many people one of the most difficult parts of a relationship is getting into one in the first place. ...
04.04.2022 Understand and Manage Stress: Causes, Biological Basis, and Increasing Resilience On this episode, Dr. Rick and Forrest Hanson take a deep dive into defining stress, how it functions, how it impacts our lives and bodies, and what we can do to repair from its effects. We discuss how to distinguish ...
03.28.2022 Use the Enneagram to Rewrite Your Story with Ian Cron One of the most effective ways to change how we show up in the world is to identify and change our underlying personal narrative. On this episode, Forrest Hanson talks with Enneagram expert Ian Cron about how we can use ...
03.21.2022 Hedonic Adaptation: Causes, Critiques, and How to Stay Happy We’ve talked on this show about lots of ways we can be happier over time, but one of the hardest things to do is to STAY happy as the events of life wash over us. On today’s episode of Being ...
03.14.2022 The Science of "Self" with Dr. Jud Brewer Dr. Rick and Forrest Hanson talk with neuroscientist, mindfulness researcher, and bestselling author Dr. Jud Brewer about where we can find the “self” in the brain, the benefits and pitfalls of "self-ing," and how we can slowly release our attachment ...
03.07.2022 Supporting Yourself During Difficult Times It feels like we've had more than our fair share of difficult times over the last few years. Today Dr. Rick and Forrest focus on what we can do, in our mind and in our lives, to relate to the ...
02.28.2022 Coping with Failure, and Dealing with Disappointment One of the most important skills we can develop is the ability to deal with disappointment and cope with failures big and small. On this episode of Being Well, Dr. Rick and Forrest Hanson discuss what it looks like to ...
02.21.2022 Standing Up for What You Believe In with Todd Kashdan There’s a tension we’ve all felt at some point between the benefits of conformity and the desire to be true to ourselves and stand up for what we think is right. On today’s episode of Being Well, Dr. Rick and ...

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