How to Talk to People - How to Build a Happy Life: Know You're Lonely

Episode Date: October 12, 2021

The irony in loneliness is that we all share in the experience of it. In this episode of How to Build a Happy Life, we sit down to discuss isolated living and Americans’ collective struggle to create a relationship-centric life. As we continue along our journey to happiness we ask: How can I build my life around people?  This episode features Dr. Vivek H. Murthy, the U.S. Surgeon General.  This episode was produced by Rebecca Rashid and hosted by Arthur Brooks. Editing by A.C. Valdez. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Sound design by Michael Raphael. Be part of How to Build a Happy Life. Write to us at [e-mail] or leave us a voicemail at 925.967.2091. Music by Trevor Kowalski (“Lion’s Drift,” “This Valley of Ours,” “Una Noche De Luces”), Stationary Sign (“Loose in the Park”), and Spectacles Wallet and Watch (“Last Pieces”). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is How to Build a Happy Life, the Atlantics podcast on all things happiness. I'm Arthur Brooks, Harvard professor, and happiness correspondent at the Atlantic. In this series, I want to figure out how we can live more joyful lives. Through scientific discussions and an exploration of what happiness is, I'll uncover the how-toes of happy living and assign you exercises to make happiness a daily practice. Almost everybody listening to us has had. the experience of striking out of their own. Well, metaphorically, perhaps, but maybe physically as well, where you leave home and you start your own career, you start your own individual life,

it's intensely isolating. It's really not what you're expecting. I remember this in my own life. I got started a little bit earlier than others because of my exit from college at age 19, and I went out on my own to work. And what did I expect when I most, moved across the country and got my own little house. And I thought it was going to be kind of like growing up in a way. I was going to have a ton of friends and a lot of relationships and a lot of laughs, maybe just not under the thumb of my parents, quite frankly. But it wasn't like that at all.

Sure, I wasn't under the thumb of my parents, but I was super lonely. I didn't have any friends. I didn't really know how to make friends. I don't think. It turned out that I thought the only skills I needed to learn were skills involving work and making money. The real skills I needed as an adult were the skills of establishing new friendships with total strangers, and that's not something I was very good at. I've written a lot in my column about the four simple rules that pretty much guarantee

a happier life to almost everybody, faith and family and friendships and work. Let's start off with the first, which is your faith. You know, whether you're pursuing a life philosophy that's traditionally religious or not, let's just call it faith for short. And that's really important because it turns out that if you're only focusing on yourself, you don't get a bird's eye view of your existence. Why do I exist? You know, the grand transcendental, the things that are so exciting that make life a kind of metaphysical adventure. And quite frankly, life is just a lot more dissatisfying and boring. The second is your family. These are the ties that bind and aren't supposed to break. These are the kinship links that you don't choose. And God knows in a lot of cases

you wouldn't. But these are the relationships that are incredibly deep and meaningful with people that are wired into your life. The third, those are your friendships. Those are the relationships you really do choose. And those are the most intimate for most people. These are the people that you would tell things you would never even tell your mother. These are the people who know the most about you. But these friendships, they take a lot of work, and a lot of them go back years and years and years, and they don't just appear overnight, at least not for most people. And finally, there's work. Now, when you're first setting out on your own, you think that the work is going to be kind of a be all and end all, at least a lot of people do. I did. The thing I didn't understand was that the

components of work that brought the most happiness, it's about the relationships. It's about serving other people. It's about the sense that you're doing something that creates value with your life and in the lives of other people, that you're earning your success in those terms. Work is actually more than the worldly rewards, and the worldly rewards are not the most ironically rewarding part of work. So what do all of these components of a happy life have in common? And the answer is people. Well, what does the world push you into when you're going out into it? well, toward things and toward money and toward prestige and, quite frankly, it's not pushing you toward people very much. It's not pushing you toward relationships very much. And the result is

they feel dissatisfaction and they feel a lot of loneliness. And they don't know why. Well, that's our topic today. We're going to talk about loneliness, what it really feels like for most people, you're going to see that if you feel lonely, you're not alone. We're going to talk about where it comes from. And as importantly, as anything else, we're going to talk about how to build a happier life by how we can solve the loneliness problem for ourselves and for other people as well. This time on how to build a happy life, loneliness, lending a hand, and living a life around people with Vivek Murthy. As an adult, Arthur, I don't think I really fully understood that at times the moments where I felt withdrawn or my mood felt off.

like almost like I was depressed, or when I was just feeling unsettled and this unhappy, that what I was craving was human connection. Dr. Vivek Murthy is the Surgeon General of the United States. He's the 21st Surgeon General. Well, actually, he's also the 19th Surgeon General because he was the Surgeon General that served under President Barack Obama

and now President Joe Biden. He's a renowned physician and the author of the best-selling book, Together, The Healing Power of Human Connection in a sometimes lonely world. Dr. Murthy is not your typical public health expert. His uniquely compassionate and insightful approach to well-being addresses many of the human challenges that are hiding in plain sight.

From chronic loneliness to strain family ties in a success-driven society, Dr. Murthy's public health outreach is centered around his passion to connect people. Dr. Murthy's vulnerability with his own loneliness struggles serves as an inspiration to those of us who may struggle to do the same. Loneliness is a subjective feeling that the human connections we need in our life are greater than the human connections we have. And that subjective element is really important because what loneliness is not is something that's determined by the number of people around you. You could be surrounded by just one or two people and feel perfectly content if you have strong relationships with them. But you could also be like many college students are on a campus that has thousands of people or you could

be in a workplace. It's surrounded by hundreds of people, but feel profoundly alone, which is sadly the experience that many people have today. And so it's subjective depending on both your needs and your particular circumstances. So I can't just look at somebody's life, look at it and say, boy, that person must be really lonely. You know, a farmer who's in a combine 16 hours a day and barely sees anybody over the course of the day. That seems really, really lonely. Meanwhile, number one in lonely professions is physicians. And they're with people all day long. And that makes your point, right?

That's exactly right. We have this stereotype, Arthur, of the lonely person as being the guy or the gal who's in a corner at a party all by themselves, not talking to anyone. And sometimes loneliness looks like that. But loneliness can masquerade, like, lots of different things. There are particular times in their life where they're more prone to be lonely.

One is when they are sick themselves. The second is when they lose a spouse. The third is when they lose a job or retire. And sometimes all three of those things can happen around the same time. It can be a profoundly lonely experience. But in men, anger and short-tempernness is a common way the loneliness manifests. For other people, it might look like them being quiet or reticent or withdrawn. But you'd be surprised at how often, because of this stigma around loneliness, people will

seek to compensate by seeming like they're having a great time or they're super connected or talking about all the people that they're going to hang out with. But again, it's the quality of the connections that matter. They may be profoundly alone. I've been often quite surprised that the people I thought were perfectly content and seemed to be out at parties all the time and have a vibrant social life. We're actually often quite alone.

But they didn't feel comfortable saying that because in the United States of America and Western society in the modern age, to say you're lonely feels like saying you're a loser. So we don't talk about this, even though millions and millions of people, are struggling with loneliness. So loneliness can be a hidden phenomenon like many other areas of psychological difficulty or even mental illness.

You can't tell. Sometimes you can't tell who is struggling with alcohol abuse, for example. You can't tell somebody who's depressed and you can't tell somebody who's lonely. And so it's hard to help them, right? That's exactly right. If you look at the numbers around loneliness and you realize that you've got more people who are struggling with loneliness and have diabetes in this country, does it make me realize I should probably change my default a little bit in terms of how I approach other people.

Rather than assuming that people are connected and great and fine, I should probably recognize there's a very real chance that the person in front of me might be struggling with loneliness. And what that means is that try to remind myself to go the extra mile a little bit, ask how they're doing. If they pause, actually listen to what they're saying, make sure I'm trying to understand them a little bit and what their circumstances are. recognizing that that minute or two of conversation can often do a lot. And just think about this in our own lives, Arthur, like you and I can probably remember experiences where we were having a bad day or feeling lonely or isolated in our lives.

And somebody just called to check on us. Maybe it was a five-minute conversation or maybe somebody at work, stop by, you know, our desk just to see how we were doing because maybe they sensed we were having a bad day. And that to me is very encouraging because the one thing that people feel is scarce, Arthur, in the modern world is time. So if we say that the solution to loneliness means that you just got to invest many, many, many, hours more per day, you know, engaging with other people. People may find that prohibitive. And the good news is you don't have to.

It turns out that just a few high-quality interactions can be profoundly healing even if they're brief. What's the problem with loneliness? I've talked to a number of experts about this over the years, and they say things like being lonely is as bad as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. So how dangerous is it when somebody's lonely? How should we be thinking about it? I would think about loneliness like hunger or thirst. The challenge to our health comes when loneliness persists for a long period of time. And what loneliness is ultimately is a stress date.

You see, thousands of years ago when we were hunter-gatherers, we really relied on safety and numbers. Safety not just to protect us from predators, but also to ensure that we could share our food and had a stable food supply. And when we were separated from our tribe, we felt that our safety had dramatically taken a hit because it had. Our chances of survival dropped. And our body reacted to that increased threat by entering into a stress state where we were

more likely to be able to retaliate if a predator came our way or to react to any other dangerous situation. So loneliness being a stress state, you can imagine how in the short term stress states can be helpful. But chronic stress states we know are harmful to our body. They lead to greater levels of inflammation. the damage tissue and blood vessels over time. And that's one of the reasons with loneliness, interestingly.

We see a connection with increased risk of premature death, heart disease, dementia, depression, anxiety, sleep disturbances. And the list goes on. And now, a quick timeout for science. Let's talk now a little bit about some of the research as undergirding the conversation that I'm having with Dr. Vivek Murthy. Much of it has been conducted by Dr. Julianne Holt-Lunstad, a professor, psychology and neuroscience at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. I recently caught up with Dr.

Holt-Lunstad. Her research is extraordinary in the way that it uncovers some of the most deleterious impacts of loneliness. Let's hear from Dr. Holt-Lonstadt about some of her findings. Loneliness is more than just a distressing feeling. It affects more than just our well-being and our happiness. It actually affects our physical health and ultimately our risk for premature mortality. We do have evidence that it has significant impacts on mental health, physical health, and cognitive health. For humans to survive to be social, right? Our brains have evolved that when we lack proximity to trusted others, it signals a threat response. Our brains become more activated, use more metabolic resources.

Let me give you one example. This can trigger increased inflammation. Acute inflammation may be adaptive, but, when it becomes chronic, inflammation has been linked to heart disease, cancer, diabetes. It's also linked to depression. It's also linked to cognitive decline and Alzheimer's disease. We did a meta-analysis of all of the epidemiological evidence. So any available study worldwide that measured some aspect of social relationships and then followed people over time. What we found was that people who were more social.

socially connected had a 50% increased odds of survival. In order to put the magnitude of the effect into context, we benchmarked it relative to data available on well-known risk factors for mortality. Things like smoking, smoking cessation, excessive alcohol consumption, cardiac rehabilitation, obesity, physical inactivity, and air pollution. This was just on par and comparable with all of these and in fact exceeded many of them. The point of these comparisons was really just to emphasize just how critical it is that we take our relationship seriously for our health.

And now, back to Surgeon General Vivek Murthy. In society, I feel like modern-day society, We've somehow taught our children and learned ourselves over the years that our worth as human beings is dependent on whether or not we're successful. And our success is driven by one of three things, our ability to acquire wealth. Think about the stories we tell in our movies, in our documentaries and books about people who are successful. They're usually individuals of acquired one or all three of those.

But Arthur, you and I know so many. people who are rich, powerful, and famous, and profoundly unhappy. And one of the things that tells us is that those aren't necessarily the recipes for success. There's something wrong with pursuing wealth, power of fame. And people can use that to do good things in the world, no question about that. But in terms of what really drives our self-worth, that is fundamentally different. And this is so important, because I think about this as a parent who has two small kids. And Like every parent, I'm just trying to figure out how do I equip them with the right foundation so they can live a healthy, fulfilling life? But one thing I know is that I have to find a way to do everything I can to make sure my kids know that their worth fundamentally.

It's not extrinsic, but it's intrinsic. It is determined by their ability to give and receive love, love in all its forms, compassion, generosity, kindness. And it is because of our ability to do that that we have worth as human beings. And there's a very famous study that students at the University of Rochester were asked about what their goals in life were. And then it followed up a year later to see whether or not they'd hit their goals after graduation and then to see how happy they were. And those who had extrinsic goals, which was money power and fame, they wanted to get ahead, they wanted to do really well, they wanted to make more money. They got those things. They were doing better than average.

But they were a lot less happy than people who had intrinsic goals. And those intrinsic goals were all about love and relationships. So it sounds to me like what you're saying, the problem with loneliness for a lot of people, and some people are just really isolated, but for those who shouldn't be isolated, but are, a lot of it might have to do with having the wrong goals in life. If you use people and love things, you'll become unhappy, but if you just transpose the verbs and the nouns, you use things and love people, then you've got the secret to it.

So that's consistent with what you're saying, right? That's absolutely right. And I love that, love people and use things, because love is our superpower, Arthur, and it's a renewing force within us. When we give love, when we receive love, we feel replenished, we feel empowered, and we're able to do more and to be more for those around us. That is a consistent theme, I believe, in the history of humanity and borne out often by our own life experiences. And Arthur, I actually think we know that when we're born in the earliest stages of life. Like if you watch small children in Iraq, they don't really care how famous they are. They don't care how much money they have or possessions.

They can be happy in a small house or a big house. But they derive so much in those moments of love they have with their parents, their siblings, with other family members and friends. They hone in, you know, to what really matters. But over time, society and people around us teach us different things. We think about love is something that's squishy, that's something that maybe makes you weak. And we gravitate toward these other measures of success. but they don't really drive happiness.

And so ultimately, the question we have to ask ourselves is, what do we really want out of life? What will determine whether a life is truly a life well spent. What I can tell you, Arthur, is about the conversations I've had with many patients at the end of their life. And what is remarkably consistent about those conversations, and I'm talking about those last moments in someone's life, those last hours, last days,

when I've been privileged to sit by their bedside and hold their hands and look into their eyes, and just hear their final reflections or their wonderful life. What people talk about in those final moments, Arthur, it's not how big their office was or the promotion they got or the prestigious job or how big their bank account was. What people talk about are relationships.

They talk about the people they loved, the people who broke their hearts, the people who they wished they had spent more time with. And my belief, Arthur, is we don't have to wait until the end of our, our lives to recognize what truly is important to us, what drives our fulfillment and well-being right now, as well as in the future. That is our relationships. And one thing that this pandemic has really made me think so much more deeply about Arthur, even more than all the conversations

I've had in recent years on loneliness, is it's forced me to just experience what life is like with extended family. Like we came down to Miami in March of 2020 at the beginning of the pandemic and decided actually on a whim, we came down to see my grandmother would fractured her hip and everything was starting to close down and we just thought, let's just stay here because why be in a small condo in Washington, D.C. with two small children and no family around us, why not be all together under one roof and we'll take care of each other? And that's what we did for more than a year. And it was the first experience I had since the age of 16 of living with extended family, of having four generations under one roof, of being proximate in such a way that you could actually just see what's happening because

you're there, not because you plan, you know, to have a high intensity, high quality, 24 hours together over a weekend, but because you're there because you show up. With all the pain of the pandemic, it's been the silver lining. But it's just made me realize that for all of my intentions, I was still building a life around work instead of people. And I want to think about that, switch that up and build my life now around people instead. At Medcan, we know that life's greatest moments are built on a foundation of good health, from the big milestones to the quiet winds. That's why our annual health assessment offers a physician-led, full-body checkup that provides a clear picture of your health today and may uncover early signs of conditions like heart disease

and cancer. The healthier you means more moments to cherish. Take control of your well-being and book an assessment today. Medcan. Live well for life. Visit medcan.com slash moments to get started. You're a super successful guy, knows tons of people. You have a job where you're around people pretty much 24 hours a day. You have a huge staff. How could the Surgeon General of the United States be experiencing loneliness? Because there are a lot of people listening to us who feel like, no, of course I'm not lonely. Maybe they are.

Were you lonely without knowing it? And how did you find out? And how did it feel? I think I was lonely at many points in my life without really knowing it. As a child, certainly I didn't quite know how to think about it, but I remember feeling a sense of anxiety when my parents dropped me off to school, not because I was worried about tests, but because I was worried about being left out, being lonely.

And the serious part of the day, I should say, for me in school, was lunchtime, walking into that cafeteria and not knowing if there would be anyone to sit next to. But as an adult, Arthur, I don't think I really fully understood that at times, like the moments where I felt withdrawn or my mood felt off, like almost like I was depressed, or when I was just feeling unsettled and this unhappy, that what I was craving was human connection. But I'll tell you, when I was Surgeon General, I made a critical strategic mistake. I convinced myself, Arthur, that I have this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,

and I needed to just put my all into that, which meant that I, like, just didn't spend nearly as much time with friends as I used to before. It also meant that even though I was sort of seeing folks, that I was distracted a lot, that would be at the dinner table and I would be checking my phone, telling myself that, oh, I can multitask. And so the quality of my and quantity of my interactions with family and friends diminished. And I told myself again that it's all good because, you know, it's in the service of this job, you know, again, once in a lifetime opportunity.

I remember going to Boston to visit, and I had dinner with an old friend from my residency training. Her name is Namita. And Namita listened to me, and I was telling her about some of the things I was struggling with. She said to me, Vivek, she said, you know what your problem is? said, your problem is not that you don't have friends. Your problem is you aren't experiencing friendship. She said, your friends and so many of the people in your life are actually still there, even though those friendships may have become dormant.

If you reached out to them, if they knew that you were in need, they would be there for you, and you would experience friendship once again. And it was a really important realization for me. Whether we're doing well in our jobs or not, whether we're just starting out or most of the way through our careers, whether we're retired or in the heart of it, we need to ask ourselves, if today were the last day, what would you be saying?

What would you be treasuring the most? What would your major regrets be if you had any regrets? And would they be centered around your relationships? And if the case is that you can see holes, hollowness in these relationships, if today were your last day, then that's what we need to start paying attention to right now. And that, to me, Arthur, coming out of this pandemic,

is the great challenge and choice that we have. Are we going to continue to live a life that's centered around work that defines success, you know, through the acquisition of these extrinsic factors like fame power and money? Or are we going to choose a different path? Are we going to build a life that's truly centered around people? Are we going to design institutions like workplaces and schools and neighborhoods that truly center around relationships and strengthen our relationships with one another. One of the most important things that happened to me that helped me dig out from that well of loneliness was something that I formed with two friends called a Moai. Maui is an ancient Okinawan tradition where young children are bought together in small groups

and are told, these are your people. You should be with them. You should have their backs in the years that follow. It's an explicit commitment that you make to other people. And I was getting together with these friends in 2018, these two guys, Sunny and Dave, who are deep. We are dear friends of mine like brothers, but we rarely saw each other because we lived in different cities and life was always busy. And we, like most people, were building our lives around work. So we decided to build a MoI where we made an explicit commitment once a month. We would video conferences with each other for two hours. We also made a commitment to text one another when important things came up in our life, decisions we had to make, challenges or struggles we were having.

And the third is we made a commitment to be real with each other about the subjects that friends don't often talk enough about, our health. our finances, our failures. And so that's what we did. And I'll tell you, Arthur, that over the last few years, that Mo I at Sonny and Dave has been transformative for me. I have reached out to them during moments of joy, during moments of deep sadness. They've helped me make critical decisions in my life,

including about whether to return to government and to serve as Surgeon General. It's been extraordinary, but it was a lesson hard learned. When you're thinking, and people are asking you this a lot, about the post-pandemic environment. What's your view on the decision that a lot of people are considering about keeping remote work forever?

Do you believe that people should go back to work maybe more than they even want to, given the inertia involved? Well, it's a really important question, Arthur. And here's actually what I think. I do think that having in-person time at work, you know, with some cadence to be determined, is actually very helpful

because people do build strong relationships there and there's nothing like in-person time. I think what's really important, though, for many people in the workplace is some flexibility now. Because for many people who have realized that during this pandemic, that they enjoy that flexible time at home, working from home, what they've done with that time is spend some of it with their family.

They've used a few minutes in between meetings to check and see how their kids are doing. They've taken the opportunity to walk their kids to school or back from school because they have. more flexibility and they don't have to commute. I think we can be much more deliberate and intentional about how we design that in-person interaction. And that is a choice that we have to make. If we, for example, decide to design a society that supports relationships, we may invest more in social emotional learning programs in schools. We may invest more in designing workplaces that strengthen

connection between colleagues and also give them opportunities to serve in communities. We may measure things differently. We may measure success in part by the strength of the relationships that we create. We would live and look at life very differently if we truly built our life around people. I'll tell you about a simple thing we're doing actually in our office. Every week at our all-hands meeting, we would give one person five minutes to show us pictures. Pictures of anything they wanted as long as it wasn't related to their current job. And that was literally all the instruction. There was no cost involved. We didn't hire expensive consultants to design this for us.

This was just a very simple exercise. And then we listened with our full attention for those five minutes. And incredible things happened, Arthur. We learned things about people that we had no idea about, even though we had worked with them for more than a year. We learned that one of the women who, you know, everyone described as the nerd in an office full of nerds, she would take, you know, prepare 30-page briefing memos on subjects where everyone else would prepare three-page. memos, everything was incredibly annotated and detail-oriented. But when she showed pictures, she showed photos of her actually running marathons. And it turns out, she was an incredibly

talented distance runner and had qualified for the U.S. Olympic team. None of us had any idea, but it shifted how we saw her. Another young man in our office who shared, it was my aide-de-camp, was Luis. And Luis was in the Marine Corps before he joined our office. If you met Luis, he would say, well, he looks like he was in the Marine Corps. He looks like a guy's guy. He still got the same crew cut. He's stoic. What he shared were pictures of his mom and dad, Arthur. But when he talked about his mother, that's when he brought tears to our eyes. In his time in the Marine Corps, during the most difficult and dangerous missions that he was sent on Arthur, when he wasn't even sure if he would come back alive, that the person he would think of when he felt that pit of fear

growing in his stomach was his mom. Because she was the one who had largely raised him and his brother on her own. She had put food on the table during difficult times. She'd gotten them through school. And when he thought about strength, he thought about his mom. And those five minutes, Arthur, really humanized him. And so as we think about how to bring people together in our workplaces, how our workplaces can be a force of connection, I think with a little bit of intention, a little bit of structure, we can go a long way.

And you facilitated the ability for Luis to share with everybody the true source of his strength, the true source of his sustenance, which is a relationship with his family, how incredible that is. And by the way, why does this touch my heart? The last call I got this afternoon was from my son Carlos, who is a forward-deployed combat Marine, and I'm not going to be hearing from him for some indeterminate amount of time because he's on deployment in the Pacific, and he called me just as his ship was leaving port. Incredible. And I can only hope that he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, He's thinking about us and the love that we have for him, which is his source of sustenance as well, because what else do we have, right?

What else do we have? You're doing a lot of good for a lot of people. I know that you're working really hard on the pandemic, but the pandemic behind the pandemic is that of loneliness and connection that we're having with people. It's something that we have to build together as brothers and sisters. I think this is really the legacy of what you're doing to help us all, so thank you for that. Well, thank you, Arthur. I have deep admiration for your son and to your family

and for the sacrifices that you've made to help serve the country and serve the world. And something you said in the beginning really resonated with me, which is like you, when I think about what would make for a meaningful life for me, if I can do something small to help people feel more empowered

and more fulfilled and to help others feel the same around them, that would feel like, the life well lived and like service that's worth rendering. As a happiness researcher, I'm curious to find out how people define happiness for themselves. A few weeks ago, we asked people to submit their thoughts on this question. When's the last time you remember being truly happy? Hi, my name's Alexandra and I live in Portland, Oregon.

The last time I was, I think, truly happy was actually in the beginning of the pandemic. And it was when the world first shut down and I had this freedom that I've never known before. And I have a daughter and I felt prior to the pandemic that I was pulled in about a million different directions with an intense career. And suddenly I was given this hall path to just be a mom and go to the park every day and cook long dinners that I hadn't cooked in two years and just lay in the grass and look at the class. clouds and life seemed to slow down in this way that I've never experienced before because the world was on a collective pause. And that's kind of since faded as, you know, I'm back at work and things have changed. But I just so fondly looked back to that time and recall the roads being empty and the world taking this breath. And I know it wasn't like that for everyone.

but in my world this feeling of given a period of time in life to just really slow down in a way that I'd never have before was such a nice time and it's something I'll always cherish. I hope this conversation with Dr. Vivek Murthy has touched your soul a little bit but what we need to do now is apply these concepts

through practice. Today's exercise is called extrinsic versus intrinsic goals. So to say, start, there are two kinds of goals. Extrinsic goals and intrinsic goals. What are extrinsic goals? Well, money, power, and fame, basically. These are the things that the world rewards you with. They're the rewards that you get from the outside, hence they're called extrinsic. Intrinsic goals, on the other hand, are goals that give you deep-rooted satisfaction or intrinsic satisfaction. It comes from inside you.

Intrinsic goals are most often involving good human relationships, relationships with families and friends and a romantic partner, or maybe even a relationship with the divine. Today's exercise is geared toward helping us migrate away from the extrinsic goals in our lives and toward the intrinsic goals. And it's an exercise that has three steps. Here's step one. Imagine yourself in five years. So let's say you're 27 years old. Imagine the 32-year-old version of yourself. Imagine what you're doing, what you're thinking.

If you're 57 years old like me, then think of the 62-year-old version of yourself, which I'm doing right now because I'm recommending it, and frankly, it's kind of freaking me out here a little bit, so I'm going to have to take a moment. Anyway, back to you. The five-year-older version of yourself is happy. I don't have to tell you what that means. You know what that means.

You're a happy person. Now come step two. I want you to list five things that are actually making you happy five years from now. Okay, now, this might sound like it's impossible, but it isn't. You know perfectly well the kinds of forces that would bring you authentic happiness, don't you? They're probably not the five things that you've always thought about the most, the things in your bucket list, you know, flying in a hot air balloon or having a fancy time share in Belize. that's not on your top five.

Think about the five things that are the reason that you're the happy version of you in five years. Now, I want you to put them in order. One, two, three, four, five, where one is the force on your life that's bringing you the most joy five years from now. And five is good, but it's not one. Okay, now what are they?

The extrinsic stuff practically guaranteed is going to be four and five or three, four, and five, or something like that, and one and two is going to be. to be relationships. It's going to be love. It's going to be intrinsic. It's going to be your ability to maintain the type of love that you actually crave. Isn't it? Yeah. Well, me too. Now, what do we have? We have a happy version of you, and we have the list of the five things in order that are going to make it so. And this leads us to step three. You need to manage number one and two. Are you right now? If you want to get to that,

You want to get to the top two things on your list five years from now so you can be the happy version of you in five years. You better be actively managing number one and two on your list. Are you? You might not be. I've taught this to a lot of people and I find that most people aren't. I find that most people are managing number four and five on their list. Why? Because they're easier to manage.

Because they're physical things. Because they're tangible things. Because they're extrinsic things. They're easier to imagine. And so they're easier to conceive of and get. and we manage what we can see. But those aren't the most important things. So this is really step three

and the most important part of all, which is taking action to start managing to number one and two on your list. The love that you want in your life, this spiritual journey that you're yearning for in your life, it's not going to make itself happen. It's not going to manage itself. You need to manage it.

Now, do this exercise once a week for a month and think how it's changing your priorities, and then do it for the rest of the year. I guarantee you your priorities are going to change because you're going to give more attention to the things that really matter. You're going to be thinking about them. You're going to be thinking about ways to develop them. You will start to reap the joy from the kinds of things that's number one and two. The journey toward those things turns out to be the real secret of happiness. And you're going to be doing the kinds of things that Dr. Murthy talked about in this episode. What you focus on more is what you will manage going forward. And you'll be

become a more intrinsically motivated person reaping the happiness rewards. That's all for this week's episode of how to build a happy life. This episode was produced by me, Rebecca Rashid, and hosted by Arthur Brooks, editing by A.C. Valdez. Fact check by Anna Alvarado. Our engineer is Michael Rayfield.