Afford Anything - Happiness Habits, with Harvard Professor Arthur Brooks

Episode Date: November 15, 2023

#472: Imagine this: You’re a teenage musical prodigy, a world-class classical French horn player. You drop out of college at age 19 and spend your twenties touring the globe as a musician (including, once, tripping and falling off the stage at Carnegie Hall). At age 31, you retire from your musical career, get a Ph.D., and become a professor – first at Syracuse and then at Harvard, where you teach both at Harvard Business School and at the Harvard Kennedy School. You publish 13 books and write a column for The Atlantic, which gets noticed by Oprah Winfrey. Oprah then invites you to dinner, where she asks you to co-author a book together. This is the life of today's guest, Harvard Professor Arthur Brooks, whose collaboration with Oprah, a book called Build the Life You Want, focuses on the science and research behind happiness. Brooks teaches a class on leadership and happiness to second-year Harvard MBA candidates. In our conversation, we discuss a range of topics, including metacognition (thinking about how to think), the neurobiological basis of ruminating, and how to balance the concept of contentment with the innately human urge for ambition and progress. He also offers a formula for happiness: enjoyment + satisfaction + meaning and purpose. So – I hope you enjoy this episode; I hope you find it satisfying, and I hope it fills you with meaning and purpose! – Paula For more information, visit the show notes at https://affordanything.com/episode472 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Imagine this. Imagine that you are a teenage musical prodigy, and you drop out of college at the age of 19 so that you can go tour the world as a musician, as a classical French horn player. You even play at Carnegie Hall, where, embarrassingly, you trip and fall off the stage. At the age of 31, you retire from your musical career and get a PhD. You then become a professor first at Syracuse University and then later at Harvard, where you teach both at Harvard Business School and at the Harvard Kennedy School. You publish 13 books and write a column for the Atlantic, which gets noticed by Oprah Winfrey. Oprah then invites you to dinner where she asks you to co-author a book together. This is the life of today's guest, Harvard professor Arthur Brooks, and he's going to be discussing how to do you. to become happier.

Welcome to the Afford Anything podcast, the show that understands that you can afford anything but not everything. Every choice that you make is a trade-off against something else, and that doesn't just apply to your money. That applies to your time, your focus, your energy, your attention. It applies to any limited resource that you need to manage. And that opens up two questions. First, what matters most?

And second, how do you make decisions accordingly? Answering these two questions is a lifetime practice. That's what this podcast is here to explore. My name is Paula Pant. I am the host of the show. Today, Arthur Brooks, a professor at both the Harvard Business School and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and Public Policy, joins us to talk about becoming happier. Arthur Brooks is the author of 13 books. Most recently, he co-authored with Oprah, a book called Build the Life You Want.

And this book focuses on the science and research behind happiness. In our upcoming interview, we're going to talk about a range of topics, including metacognition, thinking about how to think, the neurobiological basis of ruminating. We're going to go there. We're going to talk about how to balance the concept of contentment with the innately human urge for ambition and progress. And he's even going to introduce a formula for happiness, which, spoiler alert, The formula is enjoyment plus satisfaction plus meaning and purpose.

I hope you enjoy this episode. I hope you find it satisfying. And I hope it imbues you with a sense of meaning and purpose. Here is Harvard professor Arthur Brooks. Hi, Arthur. Hi, Paula. How are you? I'm great.

How are you doing? Today is a beautiful day. I'm in San Clemente, California, spending most of November, and I strongly recommend it. Oh, that sounds fantastic. The last time that we talked, we had a great conversation. You told me about falling off the stage at Carnegie Hall. Did you break a rib when that happened? Yeah, I hurt my elbow and I damaged my instrument pretty badly.

It was not the best day of my life, but it's pretty vivid. I was 22 years old. I'm 59, and I can still tell you every second of that experience. Wow. In terms of vivid experiences, there are so many new vivid experiences and juicy questions, like what's it like getting a phone call from Oprah, which I will ask in a moment, but I'll start with maybe a more relevant question. Are you happy? And were you happy then at 22, playing that French horn at Carnegie Hall? And are you happy now at 59 in California, sunny California?

No, I'm not happy. And neither is anybody else. So happiness is not a destination. Happiness is a direction. People will say I'm happy, but what they mean is I'm happier than something else. The goal isn't happiness. The goal is happierness. The goal is to actually get happier. And part of the reason for that is just, it's just sort of basic reasoning. We have negative emotions to keep us alive. They keep us safe. They keep us thriving. You need to be afraid when something is threatening you. You need to run away or be angry or be sad when you're separated from your kin. These are evolved emotions and they're incredibly important for your survival. But of course, they give you an affect balance that can be negative at certain times. So being purely happy is not even desirable.

Plus, you'd never learn from anything. You'd never grow as a person. One of the things that I teach my students at Harvard is that they should recognize that their suffering is incredibly sacred, that they won't grow or learn as people. And every time they try to numb themselves with drugs or alcohol or behaviors, you know, everything from, you know, eating compulsively to looking at pornography, these things are horrible for your brain because they numb your emotions. Or if you have the bad luck of having some authority telling you that there's something defective about you because you're unhappy, that's wrong. And that person is actually not helping you. So, no, I'm not happy, but I sure am a lot happier than I was when I was 22. I'm sure a lot

happier than I was five years ago because I've learned about the science and I'm teaching the science. Right, right. And to what you said about, you know, if you have the misfortune of having some authority figure tell you that there's something wrong with you, that seems so common. You know, people say, hey, you have anxiety, you have loneliness, something is wrong with you. Why is that not a problem? Well, there can be a problem. We can have maladapted emotions. We can have negative emotions that are outsized and incredibly intrusive. But the thing to keep in mind is that anxiety, which is just unfocused fear, And depression, which is sort of the overwhelming sadness that we feel, among other things, that they're part of life. And everybody has them. They're dials, not switches. And so if you go to a doctor, the doctor says, you have anxiety, as if you could not have anxiety, is absurd. It's actually not true.

The switch is on for everybody. It's just the dial might be turned up so much that you need to learn better ways to manage it. And there are medical ways to manage it. There are medocognitive ways that, you know, I talk about in my own research, to deal with it. But when somebody says you're, you have anxiety and depression like switches, and that's something that makes you defective or broken in some way, that's, that's mismanaging your own particular issues. I tell my students, look, I teach graduate students at Harvard. I say, if you're not anxious and depressed, then you need therapy. I mean, come on. I mean,

this is, this is tough. You're putting yourself in a very stressful position and it's going to have, it's going to take its toll. That's not necessarily bad. You need to understand and, And if it gets too intrusive or is maladapted, then you actually need to get some help under the circumstances. But the emotions themselves are completely normal and natural. Then what is the opposite of happiness if it's not unhappiness? Well, they're not opposites because they come from different emotions that are largely processed in different parts of the limbic system of the brain. Unhappy emotions or negative emotions, which are not bad emotions because there is no such thing as a bad emotion or a good emotion for that matter. It's just information that your brain is processing so that you can interpret outside signals around you.

The negative emotions are fear and anger and disgust and sadness. Those are the four negative emotions. They're processed largely in different parts of the brain than the positive emotions like joy and interest. And so given the fact that there are different emotional signals that have different goals and different roles in your life, you can't say that they're opposites. That's like saying that, you know, you could something, two things that you have in your body are opposite. from one another. It doesn't make really logical sense to it. And that's the reason we need to understand that our happiness and unhappiness or happy and unhappy cognitions and feelings are simply different parts of the same life and we need them both.

What then is the opposite of happiness? Yeah, happiness doesn't have an opposite, really. I mean, happiness, as far as we understand, is simply a combination of three things. It's an enjoyment of your life, satisfaction with your life and accomplishments and a sense of purpose and meaning in your life. Those are the three component parts of happiness. So they make up kind of a meal, sort of like your food is your protein, carbohydrates, and fat. And you wouldn't say, what's the opposite of food, except not food, I guess, you know? And so that's the way to think about happiness as well. The opposite of happiness is, I guess, an absence of enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose. But it certainly

is an unhappiness, which you also need in your life. Now, to that formula, the formula of enjoyment plus satisfaction plus purpose. One other way of expressing the concept of satisfaction is wanting less, right? How do we square wanting less with wanting more, with ambition, right? To the person who's listening to this who at the moment is living in kind of a cramped apartment and driving a 14-year-old car, and they're not in a bad position. They're debt-free. they've got a few months of savings in the bank.

They're financially stable, but they want something more. How do you swear wanting less with wanting more? Yeah, no, I understand that. And the reason that they're listening to this, this is a hot podcast for people that want to do more with their lives. They want to get ahead. And that's phenomenal. Everybody wants to get ahead. Humans are designed to make progress.

Happiness largely comes from making progress in your life. It's not getting there. One of the first things for people listening to this podcast to remember is that if you have a financial goal, getting to that financial goal is not going to bring you happiness. What's going to bring you a sense of satisfaction in your life is making a little bit of progress toward that happiness every day. And by the way, that's the only way you're going to get to your goal in the first place is by making daily progress, which you talk about all the time. That's how good financial hygiene actually works. But here's the thing. We need that satisfaction that comes from daily progress toward particular goals so that we can

have a happy life. But it's important for us to recognize that we can get stuck in the whole kind of cult of more, more, more, more, more along the way. We need more, and part of the reason is that Mother Nature, I mean, she's such a tyrant. Mother Nature doesn't care if we're happy. She only wants us to survive and pass on our genes. And the formula that she puts into us is that more is always better. And so therefore, there is some goal out there that we're going to get when it's actually enough. There is no such thing as enough. That's the problem. That's the real problem that we're dealing with. You got to make progress while realizing that there's never enough. And so therefore, you need to make progress while managing your tendency to think that there's enough.

So you don't make that particular mistake. It's a sense of intention, which is a direction, without attachment to the idea that once I have a million dollars, once I have $10 million, once I have a billion dollars, whatever it happens to be, then it'll be like, oh, it's all great. Everything is so wonderful. It's not true. You won't find that. You won't actually get that.

What you need to make is progress along different dimensions of your life, continuously making progress in your virtue, in your love, in the way that you share, and also in the security that you have against the financial vicissitude such that you can bring all these beautiful faith and family relationships to bear in your life. So the way that I think about that is that I look at, you know, the great teachings of the Buddhist masters, but in every, every great religious and philosophical tradition, which is to think that you'll be satisfied not when you have everything, when you have all of it. But rather, it's a question of thinking. It's a question of thinking about all the things that you have, which most people listening to us have an awful lot.

I mean, they're in a free country that's upwardly mobile and incredibly charitable and relatively safe. It's pretty good if you're listening to this podcast. It means they've got a lot going on in their lives. That's right. All the things you have divided by the things that you want. Now, that doesn't mean you need to want nothing. What that means is you need to always be paying attention to your wants to make sure that you're not growing them into something that's unhealthy. These wants are usually money, power, pleasure, admiration of other people. You can just are migrating your ambitions more and more and more to what these things can give you more of, which is your faith and your family and your friendship and serving other people with your work.

Those are really the right ambition. So make a reverse bucket list every year. So yeah, I'm going to get these things. I'm working toward these things. That's really, really good. But I'm not going to fool myself into thinking that it'll be Shangri-a-Law. when I get there. On the contrary, what it will do for me is free me for the love that I really, I really desire in my life to make that come true. And if I'm substituting the 14th hour at the

office for the first hour with my kids, I'm doing it wrong. We've been discussing happiness. And happiness is a subset of this broader issue of managing your emotions. Right. And so what would you say to somebody who's listening to this podcast who says, you know what, I can manage my money. Right. I can't manage my emotions. And actually taking a step back, what would you say to somebody who says, I don't even understand why I should manage my emotions? Aren't emotions fluffy? Aren't they feely? Aren't they subjective? Do they really even matter? Let's start there. You won't be happy unless you can manage your emotions. You just won't be. You can't get

happier if your emotions are running out of control. It's like the kids, you know, telling you where to go on vacation. I mean, it's going to be a huge mess. You'll be out of money on the first day. You'll be driving in circles. I mean, the parents in the front seat are supposed to be making the executive decisions. And this is the whole point. Your emotions are being created by the limbic system of your brain. All they are is information that's interpreting what's going on outside of you so that the prefrontal cortex of your brain, the bumper of, you know, highly evolved tissue right behind your forehead can then make C-suite decisions. What happens if you don't manage your emotions, then the C-suite is offline. And that's a huge problem because then you will

have maladapted emotions all over the place. You'll have excess anxiety. You'll have sadness that's misunderstood. That's misunderstood. You won't be able to harness your emotions so that you can choose your own reactions in a way that's appropriate. You'll probably have a, you'll have temperate control problems and all these things will get in your way so you're actually not able to design the life that you want. The good news is you can absolutely manage your emotions. You don't have to understand how they work, which is different than your money and is different than your business. I was talking to a guy a month ago. It's just about my new book about emotional self-management. And he's like, it's so amazing, you know. He said, I did a $13 billion deal last week. And I said, congratulations.

He said, I'm so good at my job. I'm at the top of my field. And I went home to pop a champagne cork with my wife for the best day of my career and she started yelling at me because I forgot to unload the dishwasher this morning before I left for work and I realized I can manage 13 billion dollars but I can't manage my own marriage I can't manage my relationship with my kids and the reason is because emotional self-management is different than these other things that we do and to be a highly competent individual at money and at work is different than being highly competent in your emotional self-management which is why we need a whole as we say in Seattle, where I grew up a whole other set of skills. And that's the reason that I do the work that I do on the neuroscience and social science of emotional self-management.

So let's talk a bit about what those skills are. You very much emphasize metacognition. Can you describe what that is? Yeah, metacognition is awareness of your own thinking. So the whole point is that we talk about reactive people. And when we mean reactive people, these are actually limbic people who live in the limbic system. When they feel sad, they cry, when they feel happy they laugh, when they feel angry, they yell. These are people who are really controlled by their emotions. And sometimes we can say, oh, how wonderful and how spontaneous. But the truth is, if you're around a reactive person, it is no fun because you never know who you're going to find. It's the limbic system that's running the individual. And we have leaders like this and we,

ah, it's awful, actually. And when we are highly limbic, we're not happy because we're not actually in control. And we don't understand our own emotions. We're not learning from them. We're not growing from them. Metacognition is a series of processes in which your emotions, which are completely natural, they don't control you. On the contrary, you put more space between the information coming out of your limbic system, negative and positive, not good and bad. Remember, there's no bad emotions. Just the information, negative and positive. You put space in between and your interpretation of why you're having these emotions and what they mean. That's what it comes down to. And the way that you do that is through techniques like

prayer, techniques like meditation, techniques like journaling, techniques like counting to 100, before you actually say the thing that was on your mind. And all of this is unbelievably well documented in the social science and neuroscience literature. The point is take a break, take a pause, take a minute, and actually say, what is this feeling? What's it coming from? What does it mean? and saying, I am not that emotion. I am a person with that emotion for a particular reason, and then use the information appropriately. That's what we talk about actually how to get good at that in this new book.

Right. Would it then be accurate to say that metacognition is a skill, it's the skill of thinking about how to think, whereas prayer, journaling, counting to 100, those are techniques as a subset of that skill? That's correct. That's absolutely correct. And so once you understand that metacognition,

is what you want, you build up that skill by actually applying particular techniques that work really well for you. Some people are, you know, they use cognitive behavioral therapy, which is a very, a very good form of therapy in which you learn about your own emotions and how they trick you, how they trick you into thinking that something is a bigger deal than it actually is, like catastrophic thinking and, you know, that sort of thing. That's just another way of becoming more metacognitive. It's another technique for being more metacognitive. In general, people say, is therapy good or bad? answer is yes. It depends. If you're learning more about you, it's good. If somebody's just trying to rescue you with a series of hacks and glitches in the matrix, it's not going to be good for you.

It's not going to be helpful to you. And especially if somebody is simply firing up your emotions by saying get in touch with your inner grievance and victim, they're hurting you. Right. By having you wallow in that sense of victimhood. Totally. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Totally. Exactly. No, no, no. You got to get a PhD in you. It's like you're, it's got to have a PhD in Paula studies. That's really what it's all about. What are some other techniques that people can use to develop the skill of metacognition? Yeah, there's little practices that people can actually get. Your mother probably taught you, all of our mothers taught us, that when you're angry, before you talk, count to 10, right? Everybody learned that. It turns out, you know who invented that?

That was actually Thomas Jefferson, who invented that. He said, when angry count to 10, when really angry count to 100. And the reason was you're giving you your time for your prefrontal cortex to catch up to your limbic system. What happens is that there's a part of your limbic system called the amygdala. We all have heard of that. It's a bilateral organ about this. It's like two almonds inside your head. And what they do is they light up when you're angry or afraid, sending a signal to the hypothalamus of your brain to your pituitary glands, then down to your adrenal glands, which spits out stress hormones. And this happens in 74 milliseconds way before you're conscious of what's going on. And people who have a really bad temper,

they have what's called in my field the amygdala hijack phenomenon where your amygdala like gets into your cockpit and takes the plane wherever it wants to go that's thus getting you reported to HR. Yeah. And so that's why the idea of counting is a really basic and easy way. It's a, in a way it's kind of a hack, although, you know, there's no hacks in life as only habits. And to say, wait, every time I'm feeling upset, I'm going to wait. So a series of protocols that are similar, anytime you get a really bad email from somebody that just grinds your gears or freaks you out. In other words, fear or anger, don't answer it the same day. Your rule is don't

answer it the same day. If you have to, you know, mark it and then come back to it the next day, have a folder of bad emails. If you're a CEO, you're going to have a whole folder every day, right? It's going to be, but never do that because half of the problems will have resolved by the next day, and the other half will actually be managed by your pre-influental cortex and not your limbic system, which is really important. Then the other thing is, I mean, the same thing with texting, et cetera. But when you're in real time, take mom's advice. Actually, that, you're The data on this, the research on this is pretty interesting about counting. The answer to get your prefrontal cortex in charge is count to 30 while imagining the consequences of what you were about to say.

So that's the way to do it. And just make that into a habit. I do this all the time. I'm not a very super reactive person, but this is still saved my bacon a bunch of times. The reason I do this research is to save my own bacon. I'm a very selfish person. I've been married 32 years. And I'm still able to ruin 48 hours of my marriage by being an idiot.

So, you know, my wife says something, and it's not her fault, but it just really bugs me. And so I'm like, I'm going to, hold on, one, two, three. So here's what I was going to say. Five, six. I see the look on her face. Seven, eight, nine. Big fight is starting. Ten, eleven.

We're not talking. You know, and it goes through the thing. And by 30, I'm like, it's all good. What should a person do? And I'm sure, well, I've certainly had this experience. I'm sure a lot of people listening have had this experience where something upsets you. so much that even days, weeks, months later, you're still just ruminating on it. And it's still, when you're alone in the car with your own thoughts, it still makes your blood boil.

Yeah. Some people do that a lot more than others. And there's very interesting new neuroscience research that actually explains what's going on neurophysiologically. So let me tell you about the biology because it's super interesting about this. There's a part of your brain. It's your on-board component for rumination. Now, rumination is iterative thinking about something. It's almost always something concerning or something creative. That's almost always what you can't stop thinking about it when you're obsessed with something. That's a part of the limbic system. Once again, this thing was evolved over a 40 million year period, that interior part of your brain that regulates emotions. It's a part of that system called a ventralateral prefrontal cortex. We call it the VLPFC. VLPFC, if you look it up on,

you can Google it. You'll get a bunch of academic papers on it. It's your rumination center. It makes you ruminate on stuff. And for people who tend to be poets, romantics, melancholics, which are all the same people, by the way, they have an inordinately large VLPFC that makes them better ruminators.

So what you find is that the same people, they tend to be pretty melancholic. They tend to be kind of consumed by depressive or envious or regretful thoughts are the same people that tend to be quite creative, because creativity is rumination on an idea, like a business plan or an opera that you're writing or a poem. And they're the same people who tend to be extremely romantic because infatuation is rumination on another person. And you're incredibly good at doing that. So you'll find that depressives fall in love easily and write love poetry to their beloved.

That's why, because they've got this like big honkin VLPFC throbbing inside their brains. And the people that they're writing love poetry to are like, who is that guy? I don't remember that guy. Who is that guy? I don't even remember them. Right? Because they're not the ruminators. And so that's the key thing to keep in mind. Now, rumination that's negative, it makes you solve problems, but it comes at a huge cost if you're really regretful about something. And that's when metacognition comes to the rescue. Because once you say, I'm ruminating again, I'm doing that thing again, then it starts to actually be funny. And the moment that you start to find humor in your own obsessive rumination, you can find a way out. You can find the escape hatch.

from that and get out of it, but it takes a bunch of practice. Wow. And so the archetype of the poet that you described, now there are four emotional profiles, right? There's the poet, there's the cheerleader, there's the mad scientist, and there's, oh, there's one more. The judge. The judge. That's right.

The judge, which could also be described as a little bit of a surgeon. You've described the poet archetype. Can you describe the others? The opposite of the poet is the cheerleader. So what we're talking about is the intensity of positive and negative affect. Affect means mood. That is not the same thing as happiness. Remember, feelings are evidence of actual happiness.

Happiness is a real thing, enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose, etc. But you have moods that are affected by them. When people think that happiness is a feeling, they're making a big mistake. But we have feelings, and that's what we're talking about here. We all have the same feelings, but we have them in different intensities. There are four kinds of people, people who have high positive intensity of emotion and low negative intensity of emotion. Those are cheerleaders. Everybody wants to be that person. Those like congenitally cheerful, annoying people, right? There are people who are the opposite who have intense negative affect and low intensity positive effect. Those are the ruminators. Those are the melancholics. Those are the poets who tend to be very creative because of that VLPFC that's going on. Then you have people who are very high in both. Some people think, you know, the big mistake about thinking that positive and negative mood are opposites. Now, you can have both. You're not. You're not. You're not. You're not. You're not. You're not. You're not. You

You're going to be way above average in both. That's high affect people. Those are people who are like, everything is great or terrible, but nothing in between. I'm a super mad scientist. That's what we call that quadrant, people who are above average intensity positive

and above average intensity negative. The mad scientist profile. It's quarter of the population. And then there are people who low, low, these are low affect people. These are people who have plenty of happiness and unhappiness, but the intensity of their emotion on both sides of the ledger

tends to be lower than average. These are the judges. They tend to be unflappable. Cool as a cucumber. They don't freak out. That's why they're good surgeons. They're good spies. They're good judges.

They're good parents to teenagers. And there's an important place for all four of these, but you have to know who you are so that you can manage yourself. And you can surround yourself with people who compliment you as opposed to firing you up even more. You talked about the VFPLC as the brain basis for the poet. is there a brain basis for the others? Yeah, it's all in the limbic system. It's all in the limbic system. So you find, for example, that sadness tends to reside largely around this ventralateral prefrontal cortex and etc. There's also a lot of emotional pain from another part called the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. That's when you feel grief. That's when you feel

emotional pain, rejection, etc. So these things are working in concert where the dorsal anterior a single cortex is making you feel pain, mental pain, and then you're ruminating on it in the ventralateral prefrontal cortex. You're running all these cycles on this. There's other sets of systems that work the same thing, but they're all within the limbic system of the brain that people are just better at certain things than they are others. And neuroscientists are increasingly, you know, using technologies like the functional MRI scans to figure out what part of the brains are bigger in these different affect profiles. And it's not that all psychology's biology, but there's a lot of biology in here that's really interesting. So I'm trained as a

social scientist and behavioral economics and social psychology, and I'm having to learn more and more and more neuroscience as the years go by. I mean, I've retrained myself and to a very large extent in a lot of the neuroscience literature over the past five years, just because this is the vanguard of what we're understanding about ourselves. Wow. We're bringing in a different book here, but is that an example of crystallized intelligence because you're now gaining multidisciplinary insights. Yeah, there's a lot of that. But also I'm just learning how to explain it. The most important thing is that, you know, if I were learning, you know, if I'd gotten my PhD in neuroscience, I wouldn't have been able to talk to any humans. You know, I would only have been able to talk

to neuroscientists. And that's what was happening. When I first got my doctorate, and I was doing this really sophisticated mathematical modeling, I was doing early artificial intelligence modeling called genetic algorithms. And I was applying them to different kind of policy mechanisms. And, you know, like there's nobody understood. It's like 14. people in the world could read my papers. And now I write for half a million people a week in the Atlantic on the science of happiness. And I have to explain a lot of this neuroscience. And, you know, people are listening to us right now. They're not like going, what's the bleep, bleep, bloop, coming from, you know, Professor, what's his name's mouth? I'm talking in ways. I'm using terms

people have probably not heard, but I'm trying to do so in a way that people can actually understand. And that comes later. That comes after 50 is the ability to teach in that particular way. That's crystallized intelligence. We'll come back to this episode after this word from our sponsors. The holidays are right around the corner and if you're hosting, you're going to need to get prepared. Maybe you need bedding, sheets, linens. Maybe you need serveware and cookware. And of course, holiday decor, all the stuff to make your home a great place to host during the holidays.

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From November 25th to December 2nd, your donation will be doubled. That means every dollar goes twice as far to help build a future where no one's seeking help is left behind. Donate today at camh.ca.ca.g.towsh.org Going back to the topic of happiness, you've often said it's not happiness, it's a happierness. Can you explain that? Yeah. So this goes back to what we were talking about a minute ago, which is happiness is not a destination. It's a direction. If you actually think you're going to be happy, well, good luck. You're going to be running for Shangri-La and never finding it. You know, this ancient city that people were looking for and people died looking for,

El Dorado, which was, you know, people, the Spanish explorers, they had heard there was a city of gold in South America. And they just like hundreds of thousands died looking for the city of gold because it didn't exist. That's happiness. Happiness is the city of gold. Happierness is the state in which you're making continuous progress. That's really the way that we want it. We want to make progress in life is the whole point. We want to not get rich. We want to get richer. We don't want to get happy. We want to get happier, right? We don't want to have perfect love in our life. We want to have more love in our life than we had before. We want to be more charitable. We don't want to be some sort of mythical level of

charitable that you can't go beyond because none of the stuff exists on this side of heaven. It doesn't and that's not how we're wired. Human beings are wired to make, have, you know, greater satisfaction coming only for progress. Let's actually dive into that. So what is the basis of our deeply, innately human drive for progress? It's a good question, except that humans are going to die when they're not actually trying to move forward. You know, if humans actually could ever be truly satisfied, look out. You know, if you're on the Pleistocene, you know, Paula and Arthur's ancestors are like,

hey, hey, Paula, ancient Paula, hey, caveman, Paula. I found berries on a bush that are just so delicious over here. And then we go and we eat the berries off the bush and we stand there for two or three days, feeling like really cosmically metaphysically happy. We'd be some Sabertrude Tiger's lunch for sure. The whole point is you've got to keep moving. you got to get new berries, new berries on a new bush. You have to, and avoid all these predators all the time.

So we're evolved to always be moving forward, moving forward, moving forward, actually better, you know, learning more, doing more, eating more. That's a tyranny because, you know, that progress principle means that you're always going to want to have more, you know, podcast downloads, more millions of podcast downloads, more famous, more, you know, advertisers paying more money for the show. It's natural that you're going to want that, but you have to recognize that you're never going to get there, which means that you have to temper your expectations and make sure that your ambitions really are more transcendent to these worldly things. Or you're never going to find

happiness. And again, because other nature doesn't care. Shouldn't care if they're happy. But in the animal kingdom, you know, every species wants to survive and reproduce, right? But I don't see other species, like I look at my household cats, and I don't see them driven for progress. Yeah, well, they don't have a prefrontal cortex. So they can't actually. So the progress principle that we have makes it possible for us to actually strategize about that. Now, your household cat, if you've got a tom cat and you don't neuter him, he's going to try to have as many mates as possible. And every time there's a cat in heat out in the neighborhood, he's going to try to escape.

Why? Progress. He wants to be the top cat. He wants to be the one at the top of the hierarchy. So even animals try to do that. One of the reasons that you regulate your cats from eating is because they'll eat and eat, eat, neat, neat, until they're morbidly obese and it's really bad for them. because they're going to try to get more cowries, which is their primordial sense of progress. So even in the animal kingdom, we kind of do that.

But we're just much better at strategizing so that we feel like we're more sophisticated than your cat. We're kind of not. So that then leads to the question of to what end do we strategize? And you've talked about, you know, the happiness 401K, the four accounts that you make deposits in, right? Yeah. Yeah, for sure. I mean, if we're not emotionally self-regulated, we're super distracted. And we're unbelievably uncomfortable all day long.

And we're just trying to avoid negative emotions. And we're trying to get positive emotions, which is so dumb. It's like the hippies used to say, if it feels good, do it. That is the worst strategy for living ever. That's as bad as, you know, 20-somethings today saying, just make my suffering stop. If it feels bad, make it go away. That's just a hippie dictum in reverse. And all it is is saying, I am willing to be completely managed by my amount.

emotions. It's like, fine. And my only technique for actually making myself feel better is trying to either avoid my emotions or numb my emotions or whatever it is. And what that does is it sets you into a cycle of distraction. The reason that people are on their phones all the time is they're distracting themselves from negative emotions, from boredom, from pain, from fear. And they're just distracting themselves by these means. It's the same thing with any dangerous activity or behavior. And what it does is it actually changes your brain chemistry, which keeps you in a cycle of actually not paying attention is really what it comes down to. But once you can become properly metacognitive through this everything we've talked about from therapy to meditation to prayer to journaling to counting to a million. Yeah.

That once you've got these techniques and you're actually able to emotionally self-manage, you can actually, you can stop wasting your time. and you can focus on the stuff that will authentically, realistically bring greater happiness on which you, the pillars on which you can build a happy life. And there's really four. I mean, there's thousands that can do good things for you. But the real practices for raising your happiness, not your mood, your happiness, or your faith, your family, your friendship, and your work. Those are the big four. Those are the things that really matter.

And I don't mean my faith. I'm Catholic. It's super important to me. But as a social scientist, I can tell you that anything is transcendent. to your individual psychodrama, you know, Paula's lunch and Paula's podcast and Paula's commute and Paul is like cat. I mean, it's just, you're going to be stuck in the psychodrama. It's like watching the same episode of the same show over and over and over again. And the result of that is that you can't zoom out and get some perspective in peace. Your family life, that's pretty

self-explanatory, but a lot of people are not talking to family members, either because of laziness or stupid things like, you know, political differences. So dumb. Friendship requires real work. because deal friends and real friends are different. They're not the same thing. And a lot of us who have big jobs and big careers and we think we're so important, then it becomes all deal and no real, and that's really lonely.

And then last but not least, it's your work. And the only thing doesn't matter about your work is earning your success and serving other people. That's it. And you need a certain base of financial security to moderate the avoidable sources of unhappiness. And that's all money does, is that it keeps you above,

avoidable unhappiness is really all money does, so that you can focus on these things, which really will bring you the happiness that you seek in life. I want to dive deeper into all four of those. Let's start with faith, because the people who are listening to this podcast come from a wide variety of faith viewpoints. And those who are very certain of, you know, I am Catholic, I am Jewish, I am Hindu, I am Muslim, you know. Right.

Yeah. But so to the people. who are listening who don't identify with a particular organized religion, what advice would you have for them in terms of incorporating these lessons? Get small. Get small. Make yourself small. When you're too big in your own psychodrama, there's a big problem. You know, when it's the Arthur show, I'm a mess. It's misery. The Arthur show is boring. The Arthur show just crowds out everything. So the whole point is get small. Now, there's lots of ways to do that. You know Ryan Holiday. You know Ryan Holiday. You know Ryan Holiday. He does all the stuff on the Stoics. Ryan's great. He, I mean, it's unbelievable how effective it is to study the Stoic philosophers, which is why so many young people today are reading the meditations of Marcus Aurelius. I'm like a 1900 or 1800-year-old text, a guy's personal diary, or the writings of Epictetus or Cicero or Seneca, these ancient ideas of self-management through Stoic philosophy that makes you small. Walking in nature is an incredibly good way to do this. I recommend that people who want to start on a transcendental journey, which is really what this is,

is to go out before dawn every day and walk for an hour without devices and watch the sun come up and be just present in that. There's another way to do that. Some people will study things that will bring them true awe through beauty. So, you know, studying the fugues of Johann Sebastian Bach. Great way to do that. Blow your mind and you'll never be done for the rest of your life. Some people actually will start a meditation practice, which is very important, especially a vipasana or insight. meditation in which you're consciously, metacognitively, considering your own emotions.

And some people will, another way, of course, is the faith of your youth, which, you know, a lot of people listening to us are young adults. And they're like, ah, I was a kid. It was such a drag. It's like, yeah, you need a grown-up version. And believe me, there's a grown-up version of your religion out there, just waiting for you to check it out. And it's not what you thought, because you got the third-grade version in your head,

and that's kind of a drag. I got it. But the grown-up version can be, it's unbelievably profound because people much wiser and smarter than us are the ones who thought it up. So look at it from new eyes and new perspective. All of these things actually work in that particular category, but you've got to do something every day. Let's talk about family, because they're going to be, again, a wide variety of people listening to this, some of whom have a great happy family life, but some of whom they have no spouse or partner, they have no kids, and maybe they're estranged from their family of origin. Yeah, and sometimes that's unavoidable. I mean, it's not like you can snap your fingers and, you know, be married.

I mean, that's not the way it works. This is not, you know, my dad traded 100 goats for me and now I'm married. I mean, it's not, this is not the old days. This is not, obviously, it's a complicated. Yeah, there's no arranged marriage system. Yeah. Not so much. Although, you know, it's unbelievable how, you know, we look at the data on that.

It's not perfect, but it's a lot better than Tinder. It turns out for the effect. of partnerships, as it turns out. The real shame that I see today is that people are voluntarily estranged from family members because of things as trivial as political differences. One in six Americans is not talking to family members because of political differences. And that's really, that's, I mean, that's a, that's a kind of a propaganda brainwashing approach where a lot of baby boomers have tried to conscript millennials into their pointless culture war. And the way that they do that is by saying, walk away from your

love relationships because anybody who disagrees with you on important social or political issues is somehow erasing your existence. That is patent nonsense. There's one reason for schism with family, and that's abuse. And differences of opinion are not abuse, even if there's substantial differences of opinion. And we have to get back to the point. We need young adults, Gen Z and millennials, to fight back. We need a rebellion against these bad baby boomer and Gen X ideas that are creating this incredibly polarizing culture war. Because who's who's, paying. You know, the people who are not speaking to their parents are the ones who are paying. Now, I write a lot about actually how to turn the gears on this.

You know, one of the biggest reasons that there's schism inside families is that there's values rejection. Behavioral differences almost never create schism. So if you're living in a way that your parents don't approve of, they will almost always forgive you. But if you say, I reject your values because they're stupid, they probably won't. Live your life. Let them live theirs. them all the same and don't reject their values. That's the important thing. And then you won't have the schism, but your parents will get over it. Almost always.

I've had the data. In virtually 100% of the cases, your parents will learn to live with however you're living your life. What they can't deal with is if you come home and say your religion is stupid, your politics are stupid, your opinions are stupid. So when your teachers in college are telling you to go home and, you know, stand up to mom and dad and tell them they're morons, that's your teachers trying to conscript you into their war. Don't play ball.

You just talked about the culture war being the baby boomer and Gen X. But do you see that also originating in millennials and Gen Z who maybe their parents are willing to talk to them, but they don't want to talk to their parents because of political differences or viewpoint differences? It takes two to go to war for sure. It takes two to go to war for sure. But the problem is that largely we're in a fear-based culture in our politics and social environment in the United States. And a lot of people are making a huge profit by generations not speaking to each other. And people are different political affiliations not speaking to each other, which is so absurd. The way that this works is 93% of Americans recognize how destructive our polarizing culture really is around politics and social issues and hate it.

And the other 7% don't hate it because they're getting rich and getting followers and getting viewers and getting votes. And that's a big problem. And so you can actually find people of all different generations that are dining out on our miseries. and when it comes to family, don't play ball. I mean, you got to, and I'm not talking about not playing ball with people with whom you disagree. That's easy. Don't play ball with the people with whom you agree because they want you to sacrifice your own relationships for a particular agenda. And you agree with the agenda, that's fine, but your relationships and your love are more important because it's your life.

It's your life. And, you know, these are the people in your, these are the most mystical relationships. These are your love relationships you didn't choose. God knows you wouldn't have chosen them. but you didn't choose them. And so you can't let somebody make you walk away for some amorphous. Your political opinions are not going to keep you warm. It's very important that we not be manipulated in that way.

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All right, let's talk about the third category, which is friends. You talked about the distinction between real friends and deal friends. So my follow up to that is a deal friend that sounds like a relationship that's purely transactional. Am I understanding that correctly? Kind of, although, you know, lots of deal friends are really warm. I mean, there are a lot of people that I do, that I work with that I really, I love them. You know, they're really wonderful people.

But the real friendship is usually characterized by a cosmic uselessness. It's, you know, real, deal friends are useful. Real friends are useless. And that's the important thing for us to keep in mind. And I don't mean worthless. I mean, I've got friends like that, too. It's useless insofar as that there's this love for each other. And usually it's kind of based on a love for a third thing.

You know, I have really close friends who share my faith. I have really close friends who they care a lot about my relationship with my wife and my family. And they don't ask me very much about, hey, I heard you're on the bestseller list. It doesn't really mean that much to them. And they may or may not be people who read my books. They care about me. But you can't be distracted from the fact that you need people in your life who are going to be interested in more than your financial position, more than your success. position. We all want to be admired

for our success at work. We all want that. That's the reason that people buy fancy cars is they want to be, they're signifiers. I mean, the Ferrari is a signifier of the fact that you can afford a Ferrari so people infer a lot about your level of financial success and they will admire you

and you will rise in a cognitive hierarchy. It's all biological evolution. That's what it all, it's like, it's evolutionary psychology. And I get it. I mean, we all fall prey to that. But you can't let that evolutionary psychology get in the way by dominating all your relationships and all your ambitions and your whole life of the love that you need or you'll just be desiccated.

You'll die inside. You'll die inside your Ferrari. And, you know, that's not that great. Right. Right. All right. And then the fourth is, is profession or work. And that seems, again, going back to our earlier conversation about happiness equals enjoyment plus satisfaction plus meaning and purpose, you know, it seems as though to be satisfied with the work that you're doing almost feels like a contradiction against wanting to climb the corporate ladder. But yet there's there's that drive for progress and that drive for wanting to make that climb. Yeah. No, and it is very healthy and good to want to do that, but you have to understand yourself to the point that you're not, you don't become obsessed with that and sacrifice the things that really are enduring and that matter

a great deal more over the course of your life. And that's the kind of balance that you can only get through metacognition and say, I'm doing it again, I'm doing it again, you know, I'm doing this thing. You know, I admire ambitious people. I mean, my kids are super ambitious. I mean, that's like one of them wants to be an entrepreneur and the other one wants to start a school and the other one wants to do cognitive neuroscience and go into the family business with me. And it's just so awesome, right? But I have to tell them, remember, you know, it's love that matters. It's love that matters. And you can have both. You just have to be metacognitive about the way that you're doing that. When it comes to happiness at work, there really is two characteristics, neither of which is how far you are up on the corporate ladder.

You know, the prestige that you actually have at work in the admiration of others is nice in the moment. But what brings enduring joy from work is feeling like you're earning your success, which means that you're creating value and being recognized for it, which is why I'm a real enthusiast for the free enterprise system, by the way, because it's really good at letting people, you know, work in a labor market that's kind of efficient at least. and then people tend to get ahead when they work harder, which is a really good thing, you know? That's good, without ruining our own lives, of course. So earning your success, but the more important thing is feeling like you're serving others.

This is really, that people need you. Somebody needs me. That's what's so satisfying about work. You know, when you can be, you know, selling widgets that don't really have a good purpose that you know of and be extremely successful at it, and it's okay. But when people are writing you emails saying, you changed my life or you can look into the eyes of somebody who you really helped or you sell a product and it really

enhanced the quality of their life, then it's unbelievably satisfying and you'll get true and enduring joy from your work. This is you, right, Paula? Look what you're doing at this point. This is your, I mean, that's weird. I mean, if I told you 10 years ago, this is going to be your job, you'd be like, what do you smoke? Exactly. And what you're doing is that I bet you, like me, I bet you get 12 emails a day. from people who say thank you for doing that.

I was living in my mom's basement a year and a half ago, and now I feel like I got it going on, and I feel like I've got a leg up. And so the joy that comes from that is not the fact that you've got 25 million downloads, some ungodly amount of downloads, which you have. It's that people are writing to you, and you're actually changing their lives.

And that's what gives you the enduring sense of meaning and satisfaction from your work. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And particularly when I meet those people in person, you know, that's when it really feels real. For sure. For sure. Me too. Me too. Me too. It's just an amazing thing. And then, you know, the bucks are nice, right? But at the end of the day, that's, you know, you're not going to be lying

on your deathbed saying, you know, if I got to help fewer people but have another million dollars. Right. That's right. Nobody ever, yeah. If only I'd helped fewer people. Yeah, for more money. Yeah. What's it like when one of those phone calls or emails that comes in is from Oprah Winfrey. That's weird. That's a weird day. You know, and so yeah, it's like, hi, this is Oprah Winfrey. And I'm like, yeah, and this is Batman. Who's this really? You know, it's, but here's the funny thing that, you know, you have this podcast and hundreds

of thousands of people are listening to each episode of your podcast. You don't know who they are. They could be anybody. It could be, I mean, and it turns out, because I have about 500,000 people who read my column every week in the Atlantic, and one of them every single week was Oprah Winfrey. And then I had a book that came out about success and happiness in the second half of life. It came out in 2022 called Buildil. No, sorry, it was called From Strength to Strength. I'm getting confused. I wrote two books in two years, which is not my ordinary speed. And it turns out she read that book and called me up and said, let's do my podcast. I always wanted to meet you. And I'm like, you always wanted to meet me? That's crazy. And that's what it feels like. It just, it means that,

successful people, they want the same things as everybody. They want love and friendship, and they want to understand the meaning of their lives. And getting a little bit more money doesn't give you special metaphysical information about truth. And that's what I've actually learned over the course of writing books that sell a few copies is that there are people as important and inflecting and beautiful and well-equilibrated

like Oprah Winfrey herself, that they're interested in these secrets as well. And that's a really, boy, that's satisfaction on that day. Can you describe the process? You've written so many books, what, 13 books, I believe, by, you know, most of those books you've written by yourself. Can you describe the process of co-authoring a book with Oprah? It's a different process for sure.

And part of the reason is because, actually, the book was her idea, it wasn't my idea. And she said, what have we collaborated on something? And I said, yeah, you'd name it. And she says, if I had a show, she said, I would have had you on the show 30 times. And then everybody would have been following your stuff. But I don't have a show right now. So let's write a book together where I host the material where, you know, I open up an audience that you wouldn't ordinarily have and say, read this thing that we're doing together. And it's like I'm sitting on, we're sitting on the couch together talking about this thing and I'm bringing you on as the expert.

And so I, you know, we wrote, she she weaved her unique voice as, as a host in between these parts of the science and ideas that I'm talking about. And she talked about how this has helped me, how this can help you, here's what this really means, here's a new word that might be helpful. And it's just like every single is like pearls. I mean, for example, the word happierness comes from Oprah, not from me. I said, you've got a big progress. You have to the progress principle, blah, blah, bleep, bleep, bloop, bloop, technical, technical.

She says, you mean the goal is happierness? She said, that's it, one word from the queen. Right. Wow. Wow. Are you happier having done this? Yeah, for sure. It's great. It's great. And the reason is because about five years ago, I stepped down from a CEO job. I've been, you know, I've been a long time academic, and I taught for a long time. Then I stepped away, and for 11 years, I was the president of this research organization, a think tank in Washington, D.C. It was a hard job. I mean, and I was just burnt out and exhausted. I was 55 years old and I stepped back. I'm like, what am I going to do?

So I spent a whole bunch of time meditating and praying about what I wanted to do with the rest of my career, which, you know, when you're in the thinking business can go on a pretty long time. It's not like I'm doing something that's so physically taxing that I have to retire. And so it's going to be another 20 years. What's it going to be? And, you know, over a six-month period, it came that I was going to, I wanted to use my ideas to lift people up and bring them together. in bonds of happiness and love, employing the highest levels of science. And that, and I, you know, so I took an academic job. I came to Harvard.

I became a professor at Harvard, and I started writing for The Atlantic, which is this big public-facing idea magazine, and then sort of building an audience and building an audience and doing more media, and now teaming up with Oprah, I get to bring that to more and more and more people. I'm living my, I feel like I have a holy vocation to lift people up and bring them together. And so every day sort of feels like a prayer, Paula. it's amazing actually. And some days are bad, right?

I'm not going to kid. There's some days that are, you know, I sleep four hours. And it's like, I'm on the plane again. My flight is canceled. But, you know, I get to do 175 speeches a year outside the university. I get to write for 100,000 of people. I get to work with Oprah Winfrey and all to raise happiness for people. And so if I'm not happy, I should have a good stern talking to.

Let's put it that way. Happier. Happier. Happier. Happier. Happier is the... Are you happier than you were? I mean, how long you've been doing this podcast?

How many years now? I've been running a Ford anything since 2011 as a brand, as a newsletter, and the podcast since January 2016. So it's a long time. You're kind of an early adopter. You know, in 2016, I thought I was a late adopter. I was like, I'm so late. But it turns out seven years in, seven going on eight years in, and you build this

huge... I mean, everybody listens to the show. And the reason is because they trust you. And that's a big responsibility. But would you say that you're happier now than you were in 2016? Absolutely. Yes. Absolutely.

It's a joy, isn't it? Yeah, it's that progress that every step of the way, I'm incrementally more satisfied in every facet of life than I was previously. Congratulations. You deserve it. Well, thank you. We're coming to the end of our time. Is there any final message that you would like the people who are listening to this to walk away with?

Yeah, there's no one weird trick, like not eating bananas, which is sort of the character, which characterizes the internet culture. Do this one weird trick and lose all your subcutaneous abdominal fat, you know, whatever. There's no one weird trick. You have to do the work of learning and then changing your habits and then passing it on. But there's one big thing to remember. You know, the happiness habits are faith, family, friends, and work. And what this hasn't called, common is that we're talking about love of the divine, love of your family, love of your real friends. The apex of family and friendship is your romantic life, deep, deep romantic love, which is not passion. It's companion at love where you're the closest of friends. And then love of everybody

is expressed through the way that you make your daily bread. And so the one concept that's common across all those things is love. And the truth is if you're going to remember one thing, is that happiness is love. And if you can't remember anything else to do because you're freaking out, go love and you'll be fine. Thank you so much, Arthur. What are three key takeaways that we got from this conversation? Key takeaway number one. Happiness is not a feeling. People often think of happiness as a singular emotion. But Professor Brooks tells us that it's a framework made up of three distinct pieces. And this is valuable because it gives us a path to navigate to greater happiness or

happierness by examining these three distinct parts. Yeah, happiness doesn't have an opposite, really. I mean, happiness, as far as we understand, is simply a combination of three things. It's an enjoyment of your life, satisfaction with your life and accomplishments, and a sense of purpose and meaning in your life. Those are the three component parts of happiness. So they make up kind of a meal, sort of like your food is your protein, carbohydrates, and fat. And you wouldn't say, what's the opposite of food, except not food, I guess? And so that's the way to think about happiness as well. The opposite of happiness is, I guess, an absence of enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose.

But it certainly isn't unhappiness. So enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning or purpose. Those are the three distinct pieces that make up happiness, or happiness. Happy er-ness. And that is key takeaway number one. Key takeaway number two. The topic of managing your emotions might sometimes feel irrelevant within the broader conversation of how to manage your money and design your life.

After all, isn't happiness fleeting? Isn't it subjective? Isn't it, I don't know, isn't it a little bit raw, ra, rainbows and unicorns? No, it isn't. Arthur Brooks points out that being able to manage your emotions is foundational and fundamental in good decision-making and as a result in building a satisfying life. You can't get happier if your emotions are running out of control. It's like the kids telling you where to go on vacation. I mean, it's going to be a huge mess.

You'll be out of money on the first day. You'll be driving in circles. I mean, the parents in the front seat are supposed to be making the executive decisions. And this is the whole point. Your emotions are being created by the limbic system of your brain. All they are is information that's interpreting what's going on outside of you so that the prefrontal cortex of your brain, the bumper of highly evolved tissue right behind your forehead,

can then make C-suite decisions. What happens if you don't manage your emotions, then the C-suite is offline. And that's a huge problem because then you will have maladapted emotions all over the place. You'll have excess anxiety. You'll have sadness that's misunderstood. You won't be able to harness your emotions so that you can choose your own reactions in a way that's appropriate. You'll probably have a, you'll have temperate control problems.

And all these things will get in your way. So you're actually not able to design the life that you want. Emotional management is the C-suite of your life. That is the second key takeaway. Finally, key takeaway number three. Metacognition is being aware of your thoughts. It is thinking about how to think. And this skill is fundamental when it comes to managing your emotions.

And managing your emotions is foundational to managing every component of your life, from your money to your business, to your family life, to your career. Managing your emotions is the foundation of that. And metacognition is a crucial element of emotional management. When a person is highly reactive, their emotions take over. they hijack the decision-making process, and that means the intentional, thoughtful choices become much harder to execute.

Arthur Brooks discusses the importance of metacognition, and he shares strategies with us to help improve metacognition. Metacognition is a series of processes in which your emotions, which are completely natural, they don't control you. On the contrary, you put more space between the information coming out of your life,

Olympic system, negative and positive, not good and bad. Remember, there's no bad emotions. Just the information, negative and positive, you put space in between and your interpretation of why you're having these emotions and what they mean. The way that you do that is through techniques like prayer, techniques like meditation, techniques like journaling, techniques like counting to a hundred before you actually say the thing that was on your mind. And all of this is unbelievably well documented in the social science and neuroscience literature. The point is take a break. Take a break. take a pause, take a minute, and actually say, what is this feeling? What's it coming from? What does it mean? And saying, I am not that emotion. I am a person with that emotion for a particular

reason and then use the information appropriately. That is the third and final key takeaway from this conversation with Harvard professor Arthur Brooks. Thank you so much for tuning into the podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please do a couple of things. First and foremost, share this with a friend or a family member. That's the single most important thing that you can do to spread the message of having strong financial health and reaching financial independence. Number two, subscribe to our show notes. Affordainthing.com slash show notes. And number three, please leave us a review in whatever app you're using to listen to this show. And while you're there, make sure that you are following this show so you get all of our updates, make sure that you

are signed up for any notifications. If you haven't seen us on YouTube, check us out there. YouTube.com slash afford anything. We're on YouTube. We just, actually announcement, we just surpassed 50,000 subscribers on YouTube. Thank you so much for everyone who watches this podcast on YouTube. If you haven't seen us there yet, check us out. And I can't wait for 50,000 more. So thank you so much for everyone who has been part of that, that journey. All right. Well, thank you for being part of the Afford Anything community.

Remember, you can discuss this episode with other members of the community. Just go to affordanything.com slash community. You guessed it. All right. Thanks for tuning in. Don't forget to subscribe to the show notes. Affordanything.com slash show notes. My name is Paula Pant.

I'm the host of the show. And I will catch you in the next episode. See you there.