Modern Wisdom - #1043 - Arthur Brooks - 14 Habits for an Optimised Morning & Evening Routine

Episode Date: January 8, 2026

Arthur Brooks is a social scientist, professor at Harvard University, and an author. What does it really take to live a fulfilling life? With endless advice on how to boost or sabotage happiness, what does science actually say about feeling better and living well? Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: ⁠https://chriswillx.com/deals⁠ Get a free bottle of D3K2, an AG1 Welcome Kit, and more when you first subscribe at https://ag1.info/modernwisdom New pricing since recording: Function is now just $365, plus get $25 off at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom Get a Free Sample Pack of LMNT’s most popular flavours with your first purchase at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom Get 35% off your first subscription on the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: ⁠https://chriswillx.com/books⁠ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: ⁠https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom⁠ Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: ⁠https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59⁠ #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: ⁠https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf⁠ #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: ⁠https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp⁠ - Get In Touch: Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx⁠ Twitter: ⁠https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx⁠ YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast⁠ Email: ⁠https://chriswillx.com/contact⁠ - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When it comes to well-being, what do you think contributes more psychological elements or physical elements? Because we experience our well-being psychologically, but we experience everything psychologically, including our physical well-being. When it comes to well-being, what contributes more, psychological or physical elements? The answer is yes, because psychology is biology. Fundamentally, psychology is biology. What's that mean? That means that you cannot disconnect. from your brain. Now, perhaps there's some external consciousness that people are experiencing, but the truth of the matter is that the functioning of the limbic system of your brain where you're having positive and negative emotions all day long. That's, that's, that's, that's,

that's biology. That's a part of the brain that was evolved between two and 40 million years ago as an alert system to what's going on outside of you. You perceive things, threats and opportunities. You react, your brain reacts with negative and positive emotions, which then give you a sense of being happier or unhappy at any particular time. And so that being the case, we should be very grateful for our negative emotions, but we also need to learn how to manage them. That's the great goal of life. That's the great goal of becoming a self-managing, self-leading person when you're in a state of suffering to understand why that is, how it can be productive, what you can learn, and how you can manage it such that it doesn't disregulate you or ruin your

complete quality of life. So if psychology is biology, should we just attack the biology? Well, the way that we attack the biology is by understanding of psychology and actually acting in a different way. It really does sound like the human centipede. Yeah, it really is. It really is. No, it's a, no, my whole philosophy is sort of a self-licking ice cream cone because no matter, if you say biology, I say psychology. But the truth of the matter is that once, if you want to become a happier person, the first thing you need to understand is the science, which is the reason that I teach the science of happiness to my students. I don't go in and teach woo-woo and say, you know, here's, you know, why don't we all try to manifest some sort of happiness? It's like, no, this is what's going on in your brain. When you're feeling sad, what's happening is that you've, the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex of your limbic system is highly alerted to the fact that you're perceiving a loss.

and that loss in your life of a person or something that you love is a very normal reaction in the ancestral environment where we lived in bands of 30 to 50 individuals to be rejected, to have a breakup, to have a schism with somebody else in your band meant that you were at a real risk of walking the frozen tundra and dying alone. You need to be really averse to that.

That's why you feel grief when you're disconnected from somebody that you love, and you have a part of your brain that's evolved to make you feel that grief. And that's completely normal. That's the most normal thing it could possibly happen. And people find a lot of comfort

and saying, oh, there's nothing wrong with me. There's not something I need to cure. That's actually evidence. So my brain is working the way that it should and I'm going to be okay. Do most people need more happiness or less unhappiness? Oh, it's such a good question. And the answer is it really depends on who you are.

Okay, so let's back up a little bit. You made a very important distinction right now, which is that happiness and unhappiness are not opposites. They're not. People, for the longest time, thought that unhappiness was an absence of happiness. A single spectrum with happiness on one end

and happiness is the other. And it's not true. I mean, it's like darkness is the absence of light, but unhappiness is not the absence of happiness. On the contrary, the emotions that are behind happiness and unhappiness, and again, happiness isn't emotions. Emotions are evidence of happiness. But they exist in different,

they're produced in different parts of the brain for different reasons. And so the result of it is that you can be a very happy person and also a very unhappy person. Oh, wow, that's interesting. And that just means you're a high affect person. I have a test that I give. It's a test of affect.

And that is to see the intensity of your positive and negative emotions. A quarter of the population is above average positive and above average negative. What's the rest of the split? The split is of the other four quadrants. So if 25% are that where, what's the, the rest of the 75% constructed by?

Oh, it's the other three profiles, which is above average positive and below average negative, below average positive and below average negative, and above average negative and below average positive. And that's evenly split, 25, 25. Yeah, because it's the median, it's not the means. Right. And so it's by construction, it's those quarters.

Now, that doesn't mean that it's not overrepresented among podcasters and entrepreneurs, you know, that's going to be 75% high high. You're a very high affect guy. And you're the mad scientist. That's what that quadrant is called. And so am I, by the way. I'm 95th percentile in positive emotion.

I'm 90th percentile in negative emotion. And so what does that mean? Which goes to show that it's not a single spectrum. Exactly, right. And so, and I know a lot of people who are low, low. Those are called judges. Those are people who make really good surgeons. They make really good, you know, nuclear reactor managers.

There are some people who are above average positive and bowl average negative. Those are the happiest people. Those are the cheerleaders. they have very intense positive emotion, a very weak negative emotion. They're great to be around. They make terrible bosses because they can't stand negativity

and they can't give criticism. No bad vibes, man. And then there's low, low, right? I mean, sorry, there's high negative, low positive. Those are the poets. And we know actually a lot of the neurobiology of the poetic temperament, as a matter of fact. We actually understand kind of what's going on in their brains.

And they're the unhappiest, but they're unbelievably creative and romantic. And it's what we find. And the reason for that is there's this funny little part of the limbic system called a ventralateral prefrontal cortex that makes you ruminate. That's your rumination organ, effectively. And so if you're a sad ruminator, like which most people who have a little bit of depression, they ruminate a lot, that's the same part of your brain that you use when you're

ruminating on a business plan or a poem or a symphony or on another person when you're falling in love is really, really active. And so that's why poets, they tend to be depressive. romantic, and creative. It's the same part of the brain. Psychology is biology. But the whole point is, you ask, what's more important to manage happiness or unhappiness?

The answer is, what's the bigger challenge for you? So for you, you need to work more on your unhappiness because you're a mad scientist. Me too. You know, happiness is really much more important to work on if you're a poet or you're a judge. You need to lift that happiness as opposed to moderating, managing the unhappiness.

Okay. what are the big movers for the judge or the poet compared with the mad scientist or the, what was the fourth one? The cheerleader. The cheerleader. Yeah. Well, I guess the cheerleader's just, the cheerleader's just... The cheerleader's doing great, except the cheerleader has weaknesses that the cheerleader doesn't recognize. Now, I'm just resentful, you know?

I'm just jealous. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I'm married to somebody who's more of a cheerleader that I am. And it's really interesting when you match these profiles, because it turns out that certain marriages work better than others. with respect to these temperaments. So people go to my website and they take this a lot with their partner. They take these tests a lot with their partner. So they can find it with their temperament is what their,

what their partners is. The best marriages for people who are really metacognitive, really in tune with their relationship are ones where they balance each other. Someone that's maybe a little bit less relative. Yeah. So if you're, for example, if you're a judge, you do really well with a mad scientist. So a really high affect person can do really well with a low affect person. If it's two really high affect people, it's going to be daggers drawn.

It's going to be trouble because you're going to spin each other up or bum each other out a lot. So you have to be really aware is kind of how this works. So the challenges are really different. Now, people who have high negative affect, they tend to manage their negative, unless they have science, so they know what they're doing. They tend to manage their negative affect in a destructive way. The most common way that high negative affect people manage their negative effect is drugs and alcohol. Because it's unbelievably effective.

Alcohol in particular cuts the connection between the amygdala, which is the fear and anger part of the limbic system and the prefrontal cortex. So you're all stressed out, but you don't know it. That's what alcohol does. So two martinis, and you're like, life's okay. And so if you're an anxious person, that's why you've got to be super careful with alcohol. And that's why CEOs have more alcohol problems than people were unemployed. No way.

Yeah. OECD data shows that highly successful, highly educated, high earners, they have more trouble with alcohol than people on the other end of the spectrum. There was an interesting, maybe one of yours. I don't think it was. I remember reading this really great article

that explained some of the justifications for why drug use among children from wealthy families is higher than those from low-income families. You might think, well, maybe it's because they've got the money to access it, but that's not right. Maybe it's because they go to these sort of, like,

posh parties when they're in their teenagers and everybody else has got access and they think that the rules don't apply to them and maybe a little bit but the explanation that i thought was really really great is that if you grow up as the child of somebody who has already set the bar incredibly high the pressure that's on you to be able to beat your intergenerational competition theory is unreal it also explains one of the reasons i thought this was such a fucking great psychological explanation that I never heard of, the higher rates of admission for children from wealthy families into prestigious higher education institutions, maybe it's because of the prep, maybe it's because of the access, maybe it's because of legacy admissions, maybe it's

because, maybe it's because, or maybe it's because they are so fucking terrified of falling behind the standard that their parents set, that they are prepared to drive themselves in a manner that somebody who doesn't have that degree of pressure over the top of them, wouldn't Yeah, fear of failure. I thought those two explanations were just so great. Yeah, that's right. And there's almost certain. So there's kind of two reasons.

Most of the literature is on alcohol, right? I mean, and in 20 years from now, we'll have more literature on cannabis, for example. Do you think the rules of alcohol are ported across on the cannabis relatively well? Yeah, yeah. Same thing. Yeah, they're every mechanism. They're self-medicating euphorics for the most part. There's kind of two kinds of people that get in trouble with alcohol.

People who have trouble with boredom and people have trouble with. with anxiety. So either you're a bored drunk or you're an anxious drunk. Those are the two problems that people have. And so the answer to these addiction problems are different in these two cases. If you're an alcoholic or you're drinking too much because you're bored, you need to crowd out the drinking by doing something interesting. That's why you take a kid who's drinking a lot and partying a lot in high school and make them do something unbelievably hard and interesting. And they'll be like, I don't want to drink that much because drinking is. it's not as good a party as whatever this thing is that I'm doing.

Anxious drunks are a different problem, right? Because anxiety is so unbelievably effectively dealt with by alcohol. It is so incredibly efficacious. And that means you need to deal with anxiety in a proper way. And drugs and alcohol are not the way to do it. Workaholism is a terrible way to deal with your anxiety. If you have a high, if you have high negative affect, this high really... What's workaholism's point of intervention?

if the link between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex is being severed from alcohol. What is it that workaholism is doing at a biological level? Distraction. So the amygdala is funny. So with little kids, you're going to see this when you have your children, that your two-year-old is going to be having to freak out because they're freaking out all the time.

That's what two-year-olds do all the time, because they have a completely dysregulated amygdala. And so they're fearful and angry, and they cut the crust off their little PB&J sandwich the wrong way. They totally freak out. That's because their amygdala lights up like a Christmas tree, right? The way that you get them to not freak out, and young parents never figure this out, right?

They're going to be like, what? Use your words or something like this. No, no, no, no. Distract them. Because the amygdala is in charge of distraction actually affects the amygdala. Attention is something that highly implicates the amygdala. So if you change their attention, so you're a little two-year-old, you're like, oh, oh, do you see what I brought home from work today? I brought home something you really got to see. And you've pulled something out of your briefcase. That's bullshit.

Totally. Because they never figured out. Because they're an idiot. But what happens is that you stop the activity, the amygdala, that's leading to the freak out, and you put it into attention. So that's basically what's going on. You're distracting yourself through workaholism, through a reliable way to distract yourself. That's what comes about.

That's so great. I remember my therapist last year said to me, pay attention to fleeting thoughts. There's this line that she had, the whispers that sort of come, Rick Rubin would call them whispers. these little transient little things, little bits of smoke. And if you're living in chaos, I'm about to go back on tour this week. I mean, you've got three shows in three states in four days. Awesome. You know you love it.

It's great. It's great. I love the chaos. But if I've got something that I've been trying to hide in the fog for a while, oh, this piece of piss. I've got a call. I've got lobby call at 9 a.m. We're going to get on the flight.

I'm going to go skiing in Salt Lake City. Then I got the sound check. I got a sound check. I got a sound check. And then by the time we get there, someone brought a cake. Look at this cake. Isn't this nice?

And then you just, maniana, maniana, maniana. And I think that this is why, like, chronic touring musicians have problems with alcohol. I had Aaron Gillespie from Under oath here. And he said, I don't know how many times, like hundreds, hundreds of times. He checked himself into the ER on tour because he was sure who was having a heart attack. He got to the point where he knew the exact tests that they needed to run on him. to disprove his own fear

because he had just been drinking and medicated. He just kept going. Funny that you said that thing about the two-year-old as well, so Connor Beaton from Mantorke's who you need to meet. He's fucking fantastic. We did a pod recently and we're in the car. He was going to give me a left home. We're in the car and he said, I got to ring the kids first.

You got a four-year-old, four-and-a-bit-year-old and a one-and-a-half-year-old. And his wife gets on the phone and the one-and-a-half-year-old sees him, smiles for about three seconds and then just screams and just starts screaming and I spoke about it over breakfast this morning and he was like

yeah the one and a half year old she's just at the stage now where she screams she just screams all the time he said the one thing that we can do if we need either of them to shut up and stop if I come into the kitchen and I just have a moment with Vienna my wife if I pick her up and hug her my son four years old just runs over

and wants to get in between us, like in with us, and the one-and-a-half-year-old just stopped. Just change the rhythm. Just change the rhythm. It's re-programmed the amygdala. So cool. So that's, unfortunately, distracting yourself with work. And, man, I've been on to her since I was 19.

I've got the bug. I got it. I mean, I quit drinking when I was 38, a year older than you are now. I had to quit drinking. I mean, it was just not doing anything good for me. And it goes to dark places in my family and the whole thing. But the workaholic tendency. I mean, that's the go-to, man.

That's the go-to. Well, because it's publicly praised. Yeah, I mean, nobody ever said, you know, dude, you drank an entire bottle of vodka last night. That was awesome. Nobody ever said that, right? But you worked nine, 16-hour days in a row and made a bunch of money, and people praise you for that, for that highly addictive, dangerous behavior. It's also a secondary addiction.

The primary addiction is an addiction to success. And one of the things that I sort of specialize in successful people, and talking to and doing a lot. I mean, I teach at the Harvard Business School. These people are going to be the masters of the universe when it comes to business. And what I find is that the pathology actually of people who wind up workaholic,

it starts when they're kids in this funny pattern. And you're going to be able to respond to this because my guess is that you've seen this maybe up close. I mean, friends, right? Maybe closer than you might think. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They get the attention and affection of adults.

when they do stuff, when they do, when they bring home a good report card, when they make the baseball team, when they make first chair in the orchestra, that's when they get, that's when they really get praise. And so they make the connection as children that love is something that's earned. Now, love is a free gift freely given. It's a grace. It's not a gift. Graces and gifts are different. But they learn that it's a gift that you get, that's earned, sorry, it's an earned thing. And so the result of that is that they wire their little brains, their little prefrontal cortex is highly plastic. And they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, grow up thinking that they have to be special. This is what leads to the cult of specialness,

which is a real pathology because that leads to a success addiction. And literally, I mean, their brains don't actually get sufficient dopamine unless they're winning, unless they're having an outlandish experience, unless they're getting praised and they're admired by strangers. It's pathological. It's not normal at all. And most people don't actually suffer from this, but by the way, they become billionaires. Before we continue, I've been drinking AG1 every morning for as long as I can remember now, because it is the simplest way I've found to cover my bases and not overthink nutrition, and that is why I partnered with them. Just one scoop gives you 75 vitamins, minerals, probiotics and whole food ingredients in a single drink. Now

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plus bonus AG1 travel packs, and for a limited time, US customers also get a sample of AGZ and a bottle of omega-3s. Just go to the link in the description below, or head to drinkag1.com slash modern wisdom. That's drinkag1.com slash modern wisdom. Do most people not suffer from this as habituation to success, not something that's kind of in for everybody? Is that not the whole game of happiness, the habituation thing? Habituation is success.

It depends on what success means. If success means it's really in these worldly terms of money, power, the admiration of strangers, it's very different than the success that people actually have in having a family life where, you know, kids and your wife love you. And most people, actually, they sense success along these ordinary lines. What that success addicts? Most people? Yeah. They really do. And it's possible and it's funny when you look at surveys of public opinion, people really admire the most worldly successful

people to be sure. And they think, well, wouldn't that be great? And they look on social media and they think wouldn't that be great. But that's not my life. And so I guess I'm just going to go to the park and play with my kid. And they're pretty happy as a result of that. I mean, there's an old axiom in my business, which is woe be to the man whose dreams come true, he will find he had the wrong dreams. Why? Because the dreams that come true, the dreams that come true that are, that people praise you for, the people envy you for are the worldly idols. The worldly idols, that's what Aquinas talked about the idols game of money, power, pleasure, and fame. Those are the four idols. And if you make them your instrument those goals more than instrumentally if you make these the ultimate goals

of your life you will find unhappiness that's good modern social science but it's as old as aquinas who was lifting it from aristotle those are the as matter of fact i have a game i play with my students called what's my idol you want to play sure let's find out what chris's idol is okay now the way that this game works and as psychologically you don't just say pick one of the four you eliminate the ones that is not that's so you get much better fidelity and anything like this. So Aquinas suggested and modern behavioral science validates the idea that we're attracted to four-worldly things and they won't make us happy, but our animal impulses is that we need more, more, more, more. This is the hedonic treadmill of more and more,

money or resources, right? Power, which is influence over other people. It's not malevolent. It means that people do what you want them to do. You're the top dog. You're the king of the mombo. Number three is pleasure and pleasure manifests in different ways for some people it's like feeling good for some people it's comfort for some people it's security like people who check their stock portfolio every day they have a security idol which is in that pleasure like that it's the alleviation of discomfort and last is is honor not in serving with honor it means honor as the honor of the world that means fame prestige admiration of other people those are the four idols and everybody has one in particular, and when you know what it is,

you'll say, oh, yeah, that's why I always do the things that I regret later. This will be the source of your future regret, if you know this, gives you power. Okay, so money, power, pleasure, and honor. You have to get rid of one, which means that, not that you don't have it, what it means is that you have the population average in it,

which for a super striver is torture being normal. It must be normal, right? So one of the four, you've got to get rid of you've got to go to normal population average, which in the United States, you know, is pretty freaking great. So which one do you get rid of, Chris? Money, power, power, pleasure, pleasure, honor, or fame. Fame.

Or fame or the admiration of others, the adoration of the crowd. Power. Tell me why. I tend to not use it much. I tend to not try, I tend to not influence other people. Certainly not directly. I'm an only child. So solitude, a pretty small circle.

Right. You don't dream of being a big CEO? No, no, no, no. So I will make a prediction. You hate it when people have power over you. Yes, massively. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's always the thing. So here's the interesting thing.

When you look at would-be dictators, you know who they admire? Dictators. You always admire the people who have the idol that you have, that you have who are successful in accumulating the idol that you have of course because you see the currency more cleanly right so if you see a politician in the UK or the United States and they admire dictators look out yeah look out don't vote for that person you know what I heard put a pin in it for the second uh isabel unraveled uh on substacked fucking great so wonderful she just got engaged um she wrote this article which I think is so true she said uh uh extreme

crushes are just misplaced ambition. Basically, we see in our deepest romantic crushes, the ones that we do and don't date, traits that we wish that we had ourselves and that in the acceptance of us by this person, that is us finally validating the lack that we feel we have had all along. We see in them, they're so charismatic, they're so confident, they're so popular they're so talented they're so resilience they're so whatever peaceful whatever it might be and that's what i feel i don't have so it's an interesting inversion of this idea here but i i from what i can see i think that that holds true too yeah um because something

that you think would complete you they have something that you think would complete you and if you can't get it yourself then you're going to rent it in somebody else ah what a wonderful way to put it Okay, so I've gotten rid of power. I'm not longer powerful. Which means you have the normal amount of power. Yeah, which is basically none. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, I mean, everybody's got influence. Yep. You know, and you're going to have children and you're going to have power. As long as I can boss them around. Stop screaming. I pick your mother up. Which won't work. So, okay, so you've got money, pleasure, and honor left.

Which one do you get rid of next? Money. How do you know? Or I should say why? Uh, I don't tend. I don't have a particularly lavish life. I don't have expensive tastes.

I've developed slightly expensive taste for flying in business class if that counts, which I'm sure. It's like the first thing that everybody that gets money goes to. It's also a little bit of like... It's better. It's, yeah, well, it's the most immediate

way to like spend your money in a better. But also, it helps you it's like a very publicly acceptable way to spend. No, no. Yeah. Fuck. PJ is 10x.

Correct. No, no, no. I've not fucking Scott Galloway. He's fucking cornered me at South by Southwest. He got me by, we went out for dinner and he got me by the collar. He'd had a couple of beers. He's like, Chris, do you know what the only reason to get rich is? Private Jet.

It's like it's the only reason to get rich. It's like it's the only reason that you need money. It's like after Private Jet, there's nothing. It's like the only difference between you and any future is you and a private jet. Like I'm in such a gig. Okay, man. I thought he was so, he's really cute. But he's kind of left-leaning capital, I like his, I like the Venn diagram before he comes into that.

But no, I've gotten rid of money. Yeah, okay. And you probably, I mean, you've made plenty of money because you're successful. You've figured out that there's not that much fun you can have with it. It's not that great. No. I mean, I, there's two paths, I think, that people who don't come from money, I did not come from any money. I grew up in the most working-class town in the UK.

that was the only title it had was the widest high street in the UK and the highest teen pregnancy rating and then it lost that. What town? Stockton, Stockton, Anties. It's northeast, it's just below Newcastle. And you're the same town as...

Oh, you went to university with Mike Thurston, right? I did, yeah, Newcastle. So he's from Leeds. He's from a little bit lower down than me, but yeah. Two directions. One is, I never had money. Wow, like, look at all of this, like, spare money that I've got, I really don't know

kind of how to use it, and maybe someone will coach me like how to make more of it or whatever, but I still have a bit of a puritanical work kind of ethic thing and like, oh, like the Bill Perkins archetype, right? The die with, you need to read die with zero like fucking 20 times and learn how to spend some money. And then the other side, which is, I never

had money, woo! And it's just like a roller coaster all the way down. That gets all. Yeah, like that's the NBA player. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's right. And when you get married and have children, then that's, you know, then it's a different kettle of fish because then you start thinking about intergenerational wealth and how you're building your family and your philanthropy and all that kind of stuff. But I completely believe you that the next thing to go is

money. Now it's, of course, more difficult because the two that are left are left for a reason. And that's pleasure and fame. And fame can mean different things. You can mean fame in the eyes of the right people. So academics is like, I don't care about it. Yes, you do. You want to walk into the room. You're a rich index. You're obsessed with your age index. That's Professor William. And he wrote the paper on, you know, the new string theory paper or something like that. Like, on what? Who cares? The point is that prestige is prestige.

Or the really kind of dysregulated one is adoration in the eyes of millions and millions of people on social media, which is a really disregulated. A deranged version of it. Well, it's, there's a real problem with it because fame is the only one of those that you can ever only be happy in spite of. You can be happy very easily with money. I can teach you how to be happy with a lot of money, but I can't teach you how to be happy with a lot of fame unless you do a lot of work. I mean, I know, like, my co-author is Oprah Winfrey,

and she's very, very, very famous, and she's an extremely happy person. But the only reason is because she realizes soulfully that her acclaim is a gift such that she can help other people. That's the only reason. And it will be withdrawn immediately if she were to stop doing that in her view,

which is an incredibly healthy way to see it, which is why she's actually done well. Okay. comfort or I should say pleasure your version of pleasure or fame which one do you get rid of so we've done this before but the last time I didn't hear you talk about security right or comfort uh-huh that's a big deal to me uh-huh that's a huge deal partly because you grew up without money uh the money thing was it wasn't like we had um uh like poverty anxiety uh it was more so i'm a pretty big feeler and chaos doesn't agree with me like intensive

agrees with me, but complexity doesn't agree with me. Ambiguity and uncertainty really do not agree with me at all. Oh, yeah. That's a good thing for us to work on, actually. Let's put a pin in that, because we need to come back, because that means you're an anxious person. Anxiety is unfocused fear, and there's a way to fix that. Okay. There's a way to fix that without benzodiazepine drugs. Okay, well, I imagine that lots of other people are feeling the same here. What would I say? given where I'm at right now I would actually say that the next one that could go would be fame and that I would keep myself with safety, comfort, security

I think that that would be top of the tree for me right now yeah so that would mean that the acclaim that you actually get from what you do for a living right now would go to the population mean which would mean that you'd have to do something else for a living that would suck a lot that would kind of suck right yeah But I would have 100 out of 100 security comfort. I don't know. I mean, maybe this is me speaking from my ivory tower.

Maybe what's changed. The guy with the top, you know, three podcasts or something in the world. Yeah, yeah, yeah. By the time that this comes out, Spotify will have released 2025 RAPT, which is Modern Wisdom's eighth on the planet. Dude, that's unbelievable. I got the press release today. Yeah, it's fucking crazy.

I'm on top of Jay Chetty, a position I've always wanted to be in. And actually, I'm the power bottom just below Andrew Huberman. So I'm in a J. Shetty, Andrew Huberman three-way, which I imagine the internet has just been waiting for. This is what the world's been hoping for all along. That's great. Congratulations. Thank you. That's a really wonderful thing.

And the problem is that you're in a business that requires a claim, that requires fans, that requires followers, that requires people who recognize you and trust you. And so that kind of, in a way to say, I don't really care about it is, not meaningful, because you actually, to do what you're able to do, it has to be something that's important. Do you know what I think it is, if I was being completely honest? And I think maybe other people, as they've played along at home, may have felt the same thing. There's two worlds. There is, what is it that I, functionally, what am I driven by right now? And what do I want to be driven by? Right. Like, what do I feel like my highest self? Like, if I was being incongruence, if I was coherent. Yeah. It's what do you want and what do you want to want?

And so what do you want to want is a really important exercise. I adore that. You know the first ever essay that completely broke my brain? A guy called Kyle Eshen Roda. It's no longer available. His website got hacked and taken over by some like one of those fishing porn websites. So you can't even see, but I've got the PDF saved and it's what you want to want. And it was the 20,000 word essay and it snapped me in half in like 2018.

Yeah. It was so phenomenal. So it's really, you know, I'll ask people to answer a bunch of questions. for their effective mission statement for life and then I'll have them write their ideal mission statement and the difference between the two is what you want, what you want to want.

And that's the essence, the Buddhist essence of right desire. Because what we want is right desire. The problem is not what you want. The problem is that your desires aren't right. You don't want the right things. For all of misery, pretty much, can be summed up in not wanting the right things.

You don't need to do something differently. You need to want something differently. Correct. So this is the problem. Well, your wants, Kyle's argument was that your wants define your paths of least resistance. Yes. And if you can choose, if you can get yourself to want what you want to want, then you get to row with the tide, as opposed to rowing against it. Yeah, that's right. And, you know, when you work with, you know, couples that are having trouble with infidelity, for example, the problem isn't the infidelity. It's the desire for infidelity.

That's really what it comes down to. And what you need to do is to actually engineer a different kind of desire. That's how you fix problems. That's how you fix problems in yourself and in your relationship. That's how you is really getting into the whole concept of what you want, is making sure that what you want and what you want to want or congruent. That's a lifetime goal.

So what we've established is that comfort is important to you or security is important to you and that you've built a life, you've built a career that requires a lot of acclaim. And so these are the things to keep an eye on. These are always the things to keep an eye on, that you'll make decisions and cut corners because you're trying to feel more secure

and that you'll hang on doggedly to a claim and never hold it lightly. You won't ever hold it lightly because this is an asset. The claim that you have is a really, really important asset professionally for you. But it's also kind of who you understand who you are. I mean, I know the story of this podcast.

I mean, you didn't start with millions of listeners. No, it took 450 episodes to hit 250,000 subscribers. and I moved to America with like 250 and yeah so the first half of the show was like 5% of the subscribers yeah the first half of the show to the fledgling podcasters out there if you're expecting quick success it is not it's a really important lesson it took four years it took four years and full I remember hearing you early on as a matter of fact this is really good this is going to be really good and it turns out it was true yeah well game recognizes game as they say

so anyway this is all this is really super important self-knowledge because once you understand what beguiles you you can manage yourself in a more effective way always a more effective way we'll get back to talking in just one second but first if you have been feeling a bit sluggish your testosterone levels might be the problem they play a huge role in your energy your focus and your performance but most people have no idea where there's are or what to do if something's off

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you can get $100 off, bringing it down to $399.99. Get the exact same blood panels that I get and save that $100 by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom. That's functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom. Talk to me about the anxiety and certainty things. It feels like that based on a lot of the people that I speak to, the hypervigilance that people have from maybe an uncertain atmosphere growing up.

Maybe communication wasn't super transparent and they needed to be able to detect the micro movements of exactly what was going on and read into sentences. Maybe love was contingent on performance. Maybe their nervous system just didn't feel soothes. Maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe. I think that that, based on the conversations I have at the live shows as well,

the people that come up and do the meet and greed or the questions that I get that are done at the Q&As afterward, so many of them are basically around, And I really fucking struggle with the uncertainty of the future. Yeah. Like tolerating ambiguity, uncertainty, unpredictability, feels like some weird personal curse. Yeah. So uncertainty is a problem.

Risk isn't, by the way. Risk and uncertainty are different. And people use them interchangeably. Uncertainty means you don't know what might happen, so you can't assign probabilities, so you can't manage contingencies. Risk is that you know what might happen, so you can assign probabilities, so you can manage contingencies. That's the reason that people feel better

when they buy insurance. Insurance is a happiness business. What it does is it converts uncertainty into risk and it no longer becomes a source of misery. That's why anybody who buys a life insurance policy feels better after they do it because they've just turned their uncertainty into risk. Uncertainty is a source of fear

and that stimulates the amygdala because the amygdala says it makes you hypervigilant and when there's a lot of uncertainty, you're more vigilant than you would have been otherwise and that's a source of negative emotion. So you're feeling this, constant sort of negative emotion. Why is vigilance a source of negative emotion?

Because you're vigilant against threat. And it's the possibility of threat. When you're uncertain, it's funny because, you know, there's all kinds of uncertainty that we don't worry about at all, right? Uncertainty, like, things might be great. You're not worried about that, right? It's funny because, you know, I do a lot of stuff on waiting. Waiting is a funny thing.

There's waiting that's wonderful. That's like I'm waiting for Christmas. And the reason that the Christmas lights go up in America after, after Halloween, is because we want to savor the season longer, because we want to wait longer, and that's positive. There are certain things that might happen, it might not. And so we're anxious about it, but anxious in kind of a happy way, in an optimistic way.

There's certain things that might go wrong and might be okay, but might be terrible. It's like tests from the doctor, and that's real anxiety. And then there's the one that you know it's gonna be bad, that's dread. And so there's a whole, there's a whole range. Sweets of different uncertainties. When it comes to waiting in uncertainty, for sure. So when people say, you know, I'm really worried about uncertainty,

they're worried about threats. And threat vigilance is really part of human evolution. We've, you know, the species has survived because of threat vigilance in the way that we're vigilant in the face of uncertainty. The problem is it's really dysregulated. It doesn't work the way it's supposed to. We're supposed to be occasionally really fearful and then have a sudden burst. The HPA axis goes bonkers and we're going to start running in climb a tree.

But that's supposed to be occasional and intense and not very frequent. How, just on that, how likely do you think it is that the ancestral evolutionary, zebras don't get ulcers explanation for it comes and it goes and you shake it off? Do you think that that was ancestrally accurate? You think that that was like? Yeah, I think it was. I don't think they didn't have Twitter. And so they weren't sitting around going, I wonder if.

What are how that tweet did? I understand on that, but what about the chronic that guy in the next cave keeps eyeing up my misses and that this has been going on for a long time? Male parental uncertainty, the fear of abandonment from a male partner from a new mother. Like, those things are. Those things have always existed for sure. And would that not cause this sort of chronic stress? Not chronic stress in the same way. It was a much sort of simpler, understimulated kind of environment.

where you could, I mean, when you live in bands of 30 to 50 individuals, it's a lot easier for you to have situational awareness. Now we live in an environment where you have no situational awareness because it's just too multidimensional, what's going on all the time. Something can be happening and you won't know about it all the time is really what it comes down to. So there's the big threats in, you know, 250,000 years ago. A neighboring band of Homo sapiens comes in, takes all your animal skins and flints and kills you.

That's really, really scary. And then there's the smaller threats that you'd find where you're falling in the hierarchy in your band for some particular reason. Now it's everything all the time. Everything all the time is stimulating the amygdala. And we're getting this little drip of cortisol and people get these panic attacks.

You know, it's like, it's not that long ago, by the way. I mean, I'll tell you what the, you know, Grandpa Williamson never said to Grandma Williamson. I had a panic attack behind the mule today. no it wasn't a thing what drives panic attack it's uh and over it's it's a flooding the hb a axis is that you know the adrenal system goes berserk it becomes incredibly dysregulated and you know when you have a lot of time without devices and you're doing a job that's relatively repetitive and your brain is working the way it's supposed to so the default mode network is on when the right hemisphere

of your brain is properly activated which is the part that questions missing and meaning, the why questions in your life, you're not gonna be freaking out all the time. And that's what people are doing, is they're freaking out all the time, because they're constantly distracted and they're overstimulated. That's what it comes down to.

Is this an argument to chop wood and carry water more? Yeah, well, it's an argument to live more like Grandpa Williamson, actually. But which is not ordinary anymore, that's the problem. He didn't have to think about it, but we do. Grandpa Williamson did also, I think he went to the Falklands War He went to caught some tropical disease in the Falklands War. He fought the Falklands War? I think it was the Falklands, yeah.

That's really. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, that's a real source of meaning for these guys. They did these things. They did these hard things, and he wasn't looking at his phone the whole time. No, that's true. And he wasn't posting his Falklands War pictures to Instagram. I mean, his life was, in a way, more simpler.

I mean, the pulsatile nature of life is, like, real interesting to me. And the sort of flattening and the spreading of the curve. We've seen this really great demographer, dude, Stephen Jay Shaw. He's the best on it. As far as I can see, he's the best on the planet for birth rate decline. The best on the planet. He's the demographer. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, he's self-trained, but he's done it. He's been obsessed. He created the birth gap documentary. Brad Wilcox is also fantastic on this one. Lyman Stone, also fantastic. Nick Eberstadt, yeah. Yeah, Nicholas Eberstadt and his wife as well, although she's a different beast. Mary.

Yeah, fucking animal. Yeah. Isn't it so fortunate we get to live in this time with all of these cool people going up with great? It's unbelievable because, you know, you live in the ideal world. And the ideal world is like an unbelievable sporgasbord. Infinite. Anyway, he's got this idea about the flattening of the vitality curve. So in the past, if you were 21 and you met a 21-year-old, the likelihood that they're ready to have kids right now, it's pretty high.

Yeah. As you flattened this curve, you can imagine that there is a left to right, there is a time, and then height is what proportion of the entire population. is ready to go at that time. You have both moved it rightward and you have flattened it down. And when you flatten it down, it means that if you, the likelihood of you finding someone that is ready at the same time that you are ready is actually low. And as you know in some of the research, if you stick about in a relationship with somebody

for more than five, more than seven years and no kids have come along, it is really, really tough to hold that together because your ancestral programming, your brain says to you there is no world in which reliable contraception existed in paleo times no kids have arrived maybe it's her maybe it's me but it's definitely one of us and if we break up if i just find the way that she used to sip her tea and i thought was cute now fucking horrendous and drive me up the wall i just feel like we just fell out of love we're not really too sure and the people hate to hear this because the we're enjoying ourselves we're bonding we're doing all the rest Like, I get it, I get it, but like there are, was this psychology as biology.

There are some physics of the system that are risky to roll the dice against. I'm not saying it can't be done. Many of my friends have, but more of my friends have. I mean, you and I've talked about this a lot, about the evolutionary of desire and about David Buss's stuff and about the fact. The king. He's the king of this. He's really great. You know, I don't even know him personally, and I cite him constantly.

I got to meet him. We're in a city. We should have gone out. I know, we should, we should, anyway, but, but the whole point is, is that there's this, it's a funny thing in relationships. There's this, they talk about the seven-year-inch. It's actually a five-year itch in relationships where you're most likely to break up after five years.

And actually, that's a divorce rate. So that's after you get married. So, and part of the reason for that is that the tension, the honeymoon is over, and people get angry with each other, and people start to have higher negative affect in the relationship. But that's when you start to, for example, fertility cues and resource cues go from positive to negative. And so, for example, women, they tend to admire their husbands less if their husbands are not doing well, and it's at the five-year mark.

They're starting to think, cut my losses, even if they don't know they're thinking that. And men, if there's fertility issues, as you suggest, around five years, they start thinking, try someone else. That's the big problem. It's horrible when ultimate motives clash up against the much more. more publicly acceptable sort of proximate motives of things like oh well you know like we just didn't really feel the same way about each other we didn't really it's like I wasn't sure that he could provide for me in my family or I wasn't sure that her AMH level was actually where I needed to be in order to be able to keep this thing going yeah and part of that is just because propaganda

tells us that we're not biological creatures that we don't have an evolutionary impulse behind us and that's nonsense the more that we actually understand how we're biologically wired the more that we're actually able to stand up to our biology and live in our space of moral aspiration. The prefrontal cortex of the human brain is an incredible marvel. And it actually allows us, the fact that it's 30% of our brain by weight

allows us to make decisions consciously that the dog can't. Your dog's prefrontal cortex is waferior thin. That's why all it has is animal impulses. We, on the other hand, have moral aspirations. But you're not going to get beyond your animal impulses into the space of your moral aspirations

unless you understand those animal impulses. That's why I teach about the animal impulses so that you know enough that you can reject them. Start from the bottom of the brain's stem up. Absolutely. I mean, the whole, you know, the fact that if you don't actually understand how you're wired and what your impulses make you want to do,

you're unable to stand up to it and say, I choose to behave differently. Yeah, it's a weird blessing, but also a burden or an obligation, perhaps. like you're obliged if you want to capture all that is available up here there's an entry price

that you have to pay for this weird inheritance that you've got this like cosmic cognitive inheritance that you've been given if you want to if you want to make it work

you're going to have to you can just live like your dog you can have the same moral goals as a squirrel and a lot of people do that you know Peterson had a great line about this I was at a live event of his in like 2018

and show had been going for six years. Someone stands up at the end like they do in my Q&A's and he says, The depth of my consciousness causes me to suffer. Is it a blessing or a curse to feel everything so deeply? I was like, what a wonderful question. Give that guy podcast. What did Jordan say?

Thought for a moment. He said, the only way out is through. You take more of the thing that poisons you until you turn it into a tonic that girdles the world around you. You can try and regress back into a more animalistic state. It's too bloody late for that.

It's too bloody late for that. And I thought it was such a very apocalyptic on brand, but I thought it was such a wonderful answer. Yeah, that's an ancient answer, actually. That's an ancient answer. St. Ernaus in the 4th century said, the glory of God is a man fully alive. That means a man who's suffering.

You need to be fully alive because that is your teacher. It's interesting because, you know, the Buddhists have this math with suffering is pain multiplied by resistance. And you can go to the therapy industrial complex in the Western world today to try to lower your pain,

or you can try to be fully alive and lower your resistance. In so doing, what happens that the suffering ultimately declines because you've turned it into learning. You've turned it into generativity. You've turned it into growth. And that's what Jordan means by you've got to.

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water is a sweet, salty, orangey nectar, and you will genuinely feel a difference when you take it versus when you don't, which is why I keep going on about it. Best of all, there's no questions-ask refund policy with an unlimited duration. Buy it, use it all, and if you don't like it for any reason, give you your money back and you don't even have to return the box. That's how confident they are that you'll love it. Plus, they offer free shipping in the US. Right now, you can get a free sample pack of elements most popular flavors with your first purchase by going to the link in the description below. I heading to drinklmn t.com slash modern wisdom. That's drinklmn'tt.com slash modern wisdom. The only way out is through. I remember this Daniel Kahneman idea.

I think it's so great. I wonder if you've ever used this analogy in your work. Imagine that you have a spring and on both ends you're pulling this spring. Your goal is to get the midpoint of the spring to go in one direction. Now, you can either apply more pull to one end or you can reduce more pull from the other. And the difference, the thing that I thought was so clever about it was that if your solution is to hit the gas rather than to take your foot off the break, yes, you move the center of the spring, but you have way more tension in the system. I thought that was, it stuck with me, I think that's such a fucking, it's a nice analogy. Great analogy because if you pull more, yes, you're overriding it and you are pulling it through,

but there's so much more tension in the system. That's right. And you're having to work harder. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's why, you know, the Zen Buddhists, it's an attitude of non-resistance, an attitude of non-resistance. Look, when it comes to suffering in general, and this is a lot of what I write about now. And part of the reason is because the most important teacher of the meaning of your life is your

suffering, the most important. And one of the greatest ways for you to miss the meaning of your life is for you to try to avoid your suffering. Give me an example. So nobody ever said, I really figured out what I was made of that we could beech in Ibiza. Now, they talked about when my mom died, when I almost lost my business, when I flunked out of college, when I got really sick when I was truly scared, and I made my way through it. When I understood, when I went through, that suffering was my teacher about who I am as a person in the meaning of my life. What you find is that in large groups of people, you find that when you ask them to talk about the meaning of their life, they always talk about their terrible times. They always talk about their suffering. Always.

That's the way it is. And if we have a culture that tries to get rid of pain, you have a culture that gets rid of meaning. It's not only get rid of pain, it's resist it. Right. Yeah, well, it's more resistance is bad, just as getting, it's trying to lower pain is bad. Yes. So you have a culture of that. That's what the therapy culture really is. The therapeutic culture is about getting rid of pain and not resisting anything, et cetera, et cetera. That's a really big problem because ultimately at the end of the day, what that is is that's antithetical to finding the meaning of your life, to finding the significance of purpose and coherence of your life. so what we need is we need a culture of the spartan fife as as ralphaldo emerson put it there's the best essay on this by the way you've read it but everybody who watches modern wisdom needs to read self-reliance by ralph waldo emerson 1841 it's like read it tonight it's an essay it's like ein rand but not creepy

I liked what else I read recently Is there a Rilke poem on the Shortness of Life? Oh, yeah, fucking fuck. Yeah, yeah. Talking about walking through some madness. But the whole point is, we need a culture that embraces the inevitable suffering that is part of the human existence that says, you know, so I ask my students to repeat after me, my suffering is sacred.

and it's like a really fun teacher right and and just have a little mantra at the beginning of the day say i'm truly grateful for the happy things and the fun things are going to happen this day but i'm also grateful for the trouble i'm going to have because therein lies my growth bring it on and have that to face it to face up to it it's a really wonderful thing it's actually one of the reasons that people get happier when they're older that people start to get happier in their 50s and And almost every, it's like I tell my students, because almost everybody's happy to happiness declines in their 20s and 30s and 40s, yeah, yeah. But almost everybody from early 20s until about 50, their happiness declines.

And they think it's going to go up because their success and money, et cetera. Their dreams are going to come true. They are. The problem is that, you know, you're going to get less enjoyment and it's going to be trouble. Almost everybody gets happy. So I tell my students, it's a good news, bad news story. So the bad news is that your happiness is declining. the good news is that I'm getting happier.

See ya. 50s and 60s, almost everybody is happier. And part of that is because you start to understand suffering for the first time. And you're like, oh, oh, I'm not going to be suffering about this tomorrow. So I'm going to get a head start feeling better today. You understand yourself.

You understand the nature of the experience. It's the sort of transient nature of these things. This is a big sort of lesson for me. that I really struggled earlier on, and I still struggle with now, which was, this is going to be the way it is forever. And it causes you to not savor things that are good

that are happening and overly fear things that are bad that are happening. When the world's on top of you, it doesn't last for as long as you're worried about, and when you're on top of the world, it doesn't last for as long as you hope. Right. That's the hedonic treadmill.

I mean, the fact that emotions are transient, because emotions are not there to give you a good day. emotions are there as a signal that there are threats and opportunities in the environment and that you need to avoid them or approach them. That's all your emotions are. They're just neurobiological signals to you. Negative emotions, fear, anger, disgust, and sadness, there's only four. And they're in response to four different threats.

Thank God for those threats. They keep you alive. But when you understand them as particular signals, then you can metacognitively manage them by understanding them better. And that's one of the great, that's one of the reasons that people get remarkable less neurotic. It's one of the ways that personality reliably changes as people get older. They become more agreeable, they become more conscientious, they don't become more open to

experience, but they almost always get less neurotic because they have a better understanding of the fact that life is suffering. When it comes to negative experiences, what are the most reliable levers to lower negative feelings.

So the most reliable is anything that's metacognitive. It's understanding of negative emotion. That's really what it comes down to. So, okay, so there's two different questions here. Number one is what will actually help you with negative emotions? Number two is what is the technique in your life? And so the least productive ways are drugs and alcohol and workaholism, like we talked about, and now it'll be mindless internet use or something like that,

sedation through distraction, et cetera, so it just kind of goes into those categories. The techniques that work really well and are extremely productive because they make you better through your suffering and they actually alleviate a lot and they're non-resistant in their way. Number one is religious activity and number two is picking up heavy things running around. So people ask me, do I get happier when I go to the gym? No, you get less unhappy. If you have naturally low negative affect,

if you're naturally a very low intensity unhappiness person, which is to say that you're a cheerleader or you're a judge, you're not going to be able to stay in the gym because you're not going to feel better. You're going to be like, it just hurts. So you're saying that as we look around the gym, the more jacked people are, the harder they find life generally? Yeah, that means they have high intensity and negative affect.

That's the reason you love the gym. They're being alleviated. Yeah, and you get lots and lots of, you get a lot of relief when you go to the gym from your intense negative affect jacked guys are sad guys jacked guys are guys with issues

jacked guys are guys with issues if you're a 61 year old and you look like you go to the gym a lot it means that you're you're but the other thing is religious activity and religious activity is really really important and that's part of the way

it's one of the reasons that I my own morning protocol starts with number one I get up 430 445 to 545 in the gym every day i'm in my house then i go to mass every day i'm catholic you go to mass every day because it goes body and soul because i have a negative effect problem you're saying that you're using church and religion as a performance enhancer for your happiness that's right and it's completely legal

yeah wow okay so take me through your if you were to create an evidence-based morning routine yeah maximizing well-being what would it look like so i maximize both well-being and productivity so This is really, really important because I have, I'm in a creative profession. I got to write, think, speak, teach. I got to work every day on having creative output because I have a weekly column and I write books and I have to give talks, et cetera, et cetera. Your output's terrified, good. And I have a podcast. I mean, it's like, and it takes a lot of work in this whole thing.

So I need to be super productive and that means my brain has to be optimized for that. And I want to alleviate high levels of negative effect. So number one is the Brahmajorta, which is in Sanskrit means the creator's time, that has been around for 6,000 years. And the whole idea is if you get up before dawn, you've already won the day, because that actually gives you better concentration, better focus, and better creativity. If you get up when the sun is warm, you've already lost the first battle. And now, a lot of people are like, yeah, my chronotype. I'm a night owl. No, I used to think I was a night owl tool, too.

I was actually just a musician who drank too much. Morning larks, the chronotype is probably 60% environmental. They're only about 40% genetic, so everybody can be a morning lark. It's harder for some. I never get up with an alarm clock ever, ever, ever, ever. And year after year after year, I still have to. I would sleep in if I could. But that's the first battle.

And that's really a big swinger in improving your negative value. Yeah, you've really started off with a difficult one that, especially if you're in summer somewhere and you think, oh, that's 430. No, no, of course. If you're in Helsinki in July, you're not going to be able to do it because it's no sleep. I don't sleep. That's right. You got to get up.

You got to get up before you went to bed. So, I mean, your results may vary. You got to figure out how to, I mean, you never make the perfect, the enemy, the good on this. The second part of that is what you do, first thing, and that's substantial physical activity. Exercise is really important. So a lot of guys will write to me, 22-year-old guys graduate from college, feel aimless, don't know what to do, feel really depressed, living with mom, whatever. I say, okay, you don't have to go to the gym and pick up heavy things and do something insane,

like your routine. I recommend getting up a half hour before dawn and walking for an hour without devices outside. Walk, not under treadmill, outside. You hear the crunch of the gravel under your feet. No devices. This will give you a sense of transcendence. It will wake up the right hemisphere of your brain,

which is what you need for a sense of meaning and mysticism. It's important, I mean, it's great to listen to modern wisdom, but not during the walk. right and doing that while the sun comes up has special benefits huberman talks about that an awful lot but this is very well studied that this is really important okay so combine these two for me if you're saying that it's great to pick up heavy things and some people like to pick up heavy things but you're also saying it's great to be out on a walk outside like those are incompatible unless you're working out outside i know right and and that's great if you can actually do that

if you've got an outdoor gym because you know you're lift at x shout out lift atx in austin tex Venice Beach, whatever, yeah. So, but, and so you got to make choices along those lines. I have a gym in my house. So I go downstairs to the basement from 445 to 545 every day. I get about, I take about one, one day off per month because of travel, so I'm on the road a lot. Then I clean up and I go to Mass every day. And that's important to me.

These are my religious beliefs. And by the way, I go with my wife. We go to 6.30 Mass every day when I'm home. And I'm home about half the time. And here I'm in Austin, Texas. I'll go to Mass tomorrow morning at 630. dirty. There's a church near my, my, there's, it's like being Catholic is great. It's like Starbucks. It's a complete franchise system. It's the same every place. There's one in every corner. It's unbelievable.

Exactly what you're going to get. Yeah, exactly right. So, but that's important to me. But that, the whole point is not Catholicism. The whole, my path is not the only path. The point is transcendence and transcendence by getting smaller and making the universe larger. For some people, the apostina meditation works really, really well. But the, that's getting soul in line with body, first thing in the morning. And there's a lot of neuroscience research that talks about why that's so important, because I'm driving toward high well-being and high productivity. Those are the twin goals.

And doing this alignment really works, really helps a lot. Because by seven, then you're ready to, and I haven't taken any nutrition yet, except for, you know, 15 grams of creatine monohydrate and, you know, electrolyte, something salty, and yeah. So I'm not getting any calories. That's when I apply

the second stimulant. That's when I apply the caffeine. Because you don't want to use caffeine to wake up. You want to use caffeine to focus. We all know about how the A2A

adenosine cycle works in the brain. No doubt everybody in your show knows about this. I piped on about it. Look, I got a ton of shit because for a long time, element that's been a great partner

on the show and I fucking love them. They're terrific. My big pitch was for the first 90 minutes of the day your adenosine system isn't what's in charge your adrenal system is and salt acts on your adrenals more than it does if you want to fuck about with cortisol

and you want to like increase that using caffeine but so many people have a mid afternoon, early afternoon slump and then need to crank the caffeine lever again but this is only. They drank their caffeine too early. Correct. Yeah just push it I'm telling you. New Year's resolution push it back

by two hours, by three hours and just see what happens. Especially if you're using something like Nutonic as well, because the Elthenein is going to smooth out. Or just take Elthene, you don't need to use Newtonic. Take altheneing capsules with your morning coffee. And if you are really, really tired, you can go harder on the coffee,

but the Elthene will smooth out the letters. And then if you add 10 plus grams of creatine in, you're in good shape. Because the creatine monohydrate, the newest research says it's neuroprotective. It's not just good for muscle protein synthesis. So it's a real, I mean, creatine is one of the most studied supplements.

Super product. Super product. And I take up multivitamin and I do all the stuff that you're, that sensible people do. Okay. So you're up before the sun? Yep. Up before the sun, hard workout,

which is 75% resistance, 25% zone 2. And then I'm going to be active for the rest of the day. So I get another five miles of walking over the course of the day, the rest of the day, which is important. Go to mass, go to church, which is, or my meditation time. How many? How many stuff? I just don't like saying 10,000.

and steps because it's so hackney, you know. Oh, okay, you've got to do it differently, don't you? I gotta be different. I gotta be me. Anyway, so I come back from, once we come back from church, that's when caffeine. That's when caffeine is entered as a picture. And I use about 350 milligrams of caffeine a day. It's usually...

That's not a small amount. It's not a small amount. It's in one bolus. I grew up in Seattle, dude. I grew up near the only Starbucks in the world. Okay. Yeah, so I'm used to burnt coffee. For me, the best coffee is like hot water through charcoal briquettes.

You know, it's like if you made something called Indonesian Ashes, I would buy it. Anyway, so then, and then I take first protein. I try to get between 60 and 70 grams of protein, first thing in the morning. And that means weight protein with Greek yogurt and berries to get the micronutrients with the berries and the nuts and there.

And that's the only nutrition I take until the middle of the day when I get another bowl of the protein. But that Greek yogurt has a ton of triptophan in it. And Triptophan is real good for mood management. What's your favorite brand of Greek yogurt for this? I like, well, Fayet is great, Chabani's good. Ribani's lovely. Oedcois is nice.

Okay, so it's not like there's something that you've found that doesn't have the... Unflavored, fat-free Greek yogurt. It sounds joyless, but you know, when you put some delicious berries and nuts and it's the best thing ever. They should make some good protein powder in it too. Yeah, for sure. And you spike it with protein powder. You get up to 70 grams of protein, and that's a big bolus of protein. So you're getting the amino acid that you need.

And all of that is really good for focus. And so I get four hours of an appropriate amount of dopamine in my prefrontal cortex, equivalent to what I would, if I were taking metafinol. I mean, if I'm equivalent to taking an ADHD medication. And you can't get four hours of, I mean, if you're doing creative work, generally speaking, you can expect two hours a day.

You can extend that by about 100%. if you design your protocol to make your brain chemistry work the right way. I'm happier and productive. A quick aside, you've probably heard experts like Dr. Ronda Patrick talk about the benefits of omega-3s. They reduce, hello, omega-3s, there they are. They reduce brain function. No, they don't.

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That's L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S dot com slash Modern Wisdom and Modern Wisdom. A checkout. This is, the happier and productive thing is an interesting non-trade-off that you're making work. So it makes me think about varicoseal surgery. So I'm going to bring this back. Wait. So most interventions that increase testosterone and decrease fertility. Yeah.

If you go on TRT, if you start taking PEDs, your fertility reliably drops. Spirm count goes down, mortality, morphology, also usually not too great. LH and FSAH, like, just super suppressed. But one of the few interventions that I know, which is varicilis, acetyl surgery, which is to improve the, like, blood flow to testicles, makes both go up. They see a mean change, I think 120 points on test, which is, you know, for a lot of guys now are going to be between like 25 and maybe even like 50 percent or 40 percent, something like that. And you also see improvements in sperm count and motility, morphology. Basically makes your

boys younger. Correct. It makes everything work a little bit better. If you've got varicoseil, obviously. And this is one of those few interventions where having a bit more of a global perspective. So for instance, it's one of the reasons that we designed the Newtonic drink. It felt like when I was drinking energy drinks usually like I was borrowing health from tomorrow for today. And I didn't want that. I wanted something that felt like, oh, this is good. This is like compounding over time and this is contributing to better performance. And that's what you're talking about here too. Yes, that's exactly right. It's exactly right. You can turn back the clock in a lot of ways because you're doing exercise. I mean, Peter Attia talks about this a lot. Exercise is the single best medicine, the single best longevity drug you can get.

What are you piecing your energy, your exercise routine around what's that look like to you? So I've been, when I was in my late 30s, when I changed. You look fucking fantastic. It looks great. Well, thank you, Chris. I appreciate that a lot. It was going to come in here. It's like with a tank top or something. Nobody needs to see that. Um, so when I was in my late 30s, I changed my life up a lot. I quit drinking alcohol because I had to. It wasn't, it wasn't going no place good. And I recognized that if I did an exercise, that the future, I was going to be, I was going to be broken down.

I just looked at a lot of people that were in my professional. I was an academic professor in those days, looking at a lot of people who were in their 60s. And it was, it was grim. So I started doing what I do with everything else. I started studying it, studying the science. of, you know, the exercise science, which went on my 30s was way less advanced than what it is now.

But we still knew a lot. You didn't have to get your science through muscle and fitness. There were papers on PubMed that you could actually understand what the proper exercise protocols look like. But I did actually something that was more important than that. I started, every place I was going, I'm starting to tour a lot as a lecturer. And every time I was in a city,

I would find the oldest iron gym I could find. Because that's where the old guys hang out. That's where the guys in the 70s hang out that are still kind of, they're still pretty shredded. And they're like, you know, and now, now I'm one of those old guys, right? My wife says, sleeping with me is like holding a leather bag of ropes. Yeah, thanks. That's nice.

Anyway, it's a sack of ropes. That's exactly what my ambition was. But anyway, I'd go to these old guys and say, give me advice. How do you not get hurt? How do you stay shredded? What do you eat? And I started just copying these old guys. I was just collecting data.

But they're not necessarily the healthiest. They're not necessarily the healthiest, but that's why I wanted the oldest guys. That's why I didn't go for the youngest shredded guys. Because, you know, when you're 29 years old, you can look at the portrait of health and have, you know, you can have a right ventricular hyperplasia. Who knows?

You can get something like hypertrophy of your ventricles because you're taking performance enhancing drugs. You can be on death's door. When you look right, when you look, you look like, and you're unable to have children. And, and, but when, if you're 75 years old and you're still picking up heavy things in the gym, a lot of things are going right. That means your back doesn't hurt too much and your joints are pretty healthy and you're keeping proper muscle mass and you're keeping proper body fat. And what it did was it started me on a set of protocols that I've been adjusting and adjusting and adjusting. I'm still adjusting it, by the way.

I mean, I'm down, I'm 15 pounds lighter than I was five years ago. because I adjusted way up my protein content and my exercise protocols. And what it comes down to is basically this. You need a proper balance of Zone 2 cardio and resistance training. And the older you get, the less heroic you need to be

under the weights. And so I hate it. I don't want that, right? I still want to do heavy squats. And I can't do that anymore because I'm going to hurt myself, is what it comes down to. But you can maintain a lot of muscle mass.

And so you can actually get rid of it. I can maintain sub 10 body fat. and keep muscle mass. That's absolutely wild. And part of it is because it's genetics, because I'm thin, right? But part of it is, I mean, you can do a lot just by having good protocols by being a really, really disciplined person. It also helps that and drink alcohol. Well, it's not, okay, so the alcohol thing's a big part.

And what you're doing with a structure and a framework is you're trying to not rely on discipline, trying to just follow the program. I mean, if I could give, one of the things that I did that was great, I did lots of things in my 20s that were fucking ridiculous, especially to me. You're a club promoter in your 20s. I was. I spent a decade and a half sniffing random bags of unpronounceable white powder from dudes called Greg that were in the bathroom of some fucking like unpronounceable nightclub in the northeast of the UK.

This should be fine. Well, I mean, I'm made of rubber and magic. What's it going to do? That was my point with COVID. When COVID came along, my main takeaway was that COVID should be scared of me. Not be me scared of COVID. Like if you get into it, it's like, what the fuck is inside of this? It's like, get us.

No way. No, thank you. I'm leaving. But the thing that I'm super happy with is that I started training in the gym. Me, Mike Thurston, he was one year younger than me. We trained at the Center for Sporting Excellence in Newcastle University. And I have been four days a week, three days a week on average compliance, like, since I was 18 years old. It's so good.

And the point is if you are in your 20s, even if you're in your 30s, what you're doing is it's kind of like an investment into a future bank account. It's about health. Forget that bit. Forget the tier. You're not going to fall over. You can pick your kids up when you're 70. That doesn't matter.

What it means is that when you get to 37 or probably even 47, you can maintain a beach ready physique on two training sessions a week. Yeah. You can do less than everybody else and look better than everybody else and not have to work as hard. So it's all, and you look great now, right? And it's good for your health, and it's good for your mental. Like, all of those things.

But the main one that I can see is I am like an inheritor of shit that I did. Yeah. And it means that now I just, I don't have to work as hard. And it's like what every, it's this weird side effect that every gym bro didn't ever intend to be doing. Right. But realizes as they get a bit older, I just, I don't really need to train all that much. And look, I'm never going to be shredded as I was when I was 25, but I hold on pretty fucking. Yeah, yeah, and your wife doesn't go,

you know, when you take your shirt. But it's also, as you get older, you find that you want to do more days in the gym. And part of the reason for that is because of mood management. It's so incredibly effective as a means of mood management to pick up heavy things and run around. So I do seven days a week. How are you splitting the resistance training in the cardio?

Yeah, so it depends on the day and actually where I am or what I'm doing. So if I'm someplace where I'm going to be relatively sedentary, then I'll do a lot more zone two, first thing in the morning. So I just plan it out according to that. If I'm in more pain for whatever reason because I'm stiff, I'll actually do more stretching, more yoga is what I'll do. So I apply it in particular ways.

If I'm under an ordinary routine, then on the weekends, when I'm actually walking a lot with my family, with my wife, then I'll actually do 100% will be resistance. I'll have a big pull day and a big push day, for example, for an hour of push and an hour of pull. And it's a lot. I mean, it's a, but I'm not using the kind of weights and I'm not putting the, I'm not having the impact on my joints

and I'm spreading things out enough that I'm actually not getting hurt. Covering. Which is the great thing about being older. What's your favorite zone too? My favorite zone, I have an elliptical. I'm a weak man. It's just, you know.

Dude, honestly, I did this at the start of the year in Mexico as we were on a trip in Mexico. And just put the treadmill at 15 degrees, yeah, three miles an hour. And you will just hold, I mean, people that are way better than me probably would be fine would need to push it between three and three point four something like that and you will just hold like 140 150 bpm and you can text you can think you can yeah yeah no it's good like dude and i'm like oh my god 45 minutes at that a

couple of times a week no that's great my my daughter who we have a treadmill too because you know my my kids are two of my three kids are complete gym rats i mean absolutely gym rats they're military good and my daughter's a second lieutenant in marine corps right now she's four foot 11 See, the 100 pounds. She does show that the treadmill is not going to make it. Well, she'll put it up at 30 degrees or some crazy thing like this. Like, practically, it looks like it's straight up. And then she'll put on a pack that's 70 pounds on her 100 pound frame and go for an hour.

She's the animal. So that's, I mean, that's hardcore. But then again, you know, she's 22 years old. Wow. Okay. Evening routine. So the evening routine is a little bit different because what you want is mood management of sleep. it's not mood management or productivity you want mood management and sleep and so that's a that's a

slightly different routine and that routine starts at dinner and one of the mistakes that a lot of people make is that they eat dinner too late and you know i lived in spain for a long time i've lived off and on in spain for 35 years and dude no 10 p.m i'm sorry i mean it's like oh it's so great and lifestyles that's unhealthy i'm sorry you know it's like lo siento much but no say, boy, out there so. It's like, in Spain, it's not good to do that. So when we moved to the United States, that was a hard transition for my wife, who is from Barcelona. Oh, that's interesting. I've always thought that one of the, uh, worst incompatibilities that you could have with somebody that you loved was bedtimes. Yeah. You want to go to bed at nine and they want to go to bed at two. Yeah. That would be difficult to navigate. I hadn't accounted for the fact that somebody could want to eat dinner at six and somebody else could want to eat dinner at 10. Exactly right. And that was, that was, that was, that was, that was, you know, we got through it, man, and we've been married 34 years, but now we both eat at six. And part of the reason is because, you know,

we're in our 60s, and so we actually need an evening protocol that actually works. And we have to get up early in the morning. She doesn't get about 445, but she gets up at 6 o'clock. She sleeps more than I do. I need about six and a half hours of sleep. She needs closer to eight. So to actually be, have her, you know,

biology working the way it's supposed to be working. So it starts at 6 o'clock. And what that means is, you know, your last protein-rich meal, really your last meal should be a couple, three hours before you go to sleep. For all sorts of reasons that Rhonda Patrick talks about a lot.

Three to one. Yeah, exactly right. Exactly right. And it shouldn't be your heaviest meal and there's a lot of things that go into that. Now, having never any caffeine with dinner, never drink any caffeine with dinner. I mean, you can actually get away with it better

when you're younger, but let me tell you, Chris, when you're 61 like me, it's like I just looked at this. This is so delicious what you gave me. has 120 milligrams of caffeine in it. I'll be up, like, cleaning the garage tonight. The fact that you opened it in the same room as yourself is... I know, it's like, I smelled that thing,

and I'm not sleeping tonight, but it's you become way more. The metabolism of caffeine changes a lot with age and almost everybody. So that's why benzodiazepine drugs is the same kind of thing, that you have to titrate what you use for going to sleep or waking up

very differently as you get older. And a lot of people will have insomnia when they're older, because they're drinking an afternoon coffee and they don't realize that that's what's happening. That's a really common thing. So no caffeine. I recommend no alcohol in the evenings.

For anybody, even for people who can drink appropriately, not doing that, because that just messes up your sleep architecture. And the hardest one for me is sweets. I have a huge sweet tooth. Me too. All former drinkers all love sweets. Okay. Because you metabolize in the same way.

And the result of it is that I want... It's sedative. The big chunk of sugar is the same like, Oh, so good. It's so good. But it's just not good for your sleep architecture is the way that that works. Of the three, sweets are a little less bad than the other two is what it comes down to. Then actually walking right after you eat is really important.

And so we walk 30 to 40 minutes after dinner every night when I'm home. And I'm home about half the time. So I get to do that. And that's really good for you because it actually, the way that you, your insulin response, your glucose, et cetera, et cetera. So it's just much better for your sleep and mood management later on. And then getting to sleep, actually going to bed. Going to bed is really important.

And if you're sleeping with your partner, this is the best thing ever. Because you can actually work on both your mood management and your relationship by going to bed early, but don't go to sleep early. The thing to do is to actually have about five minutes of hardcore oxytocin release by staring into each other's eyes in bed. This really, really, really works. Now, this is more important for women. women have about three times as much oxytocin as men that's why women need more eye contact than men men need more touch than women

women need more eye contact than men hold hands while you stare into each other's eyes deeply for five, ten minutes and you're having a real conversation you can save most marriages by the way by holding hands more and always looking at each other in the eyes when you talk this will save most marriages and I can add a couple more things than like having more fun and praying together or something but eye contact and touch

is super important. A, B, T, always be touching. Always be touching. It's what it comes down to and never be not looking at each other in the eyes when you're talking. That's in bed or out bed. But in bed, that's a really good way to do it. Reading to your partner is an incredibly good way to work. Reading to your partner. Reading to your partner. Or being read to. Yeah. Or being read to read to. And there's a whole bunch of really interesting studies on this. But it's like, for me, it's like narcotics. If you read to me in a feminine Spanish accent in bed. unbelievable and so you know we've been reading psalms and love poetry and things we read to each other a lot at night is really what it comes down to it's a really really good thing that's a

nice funding experience yeah and then actually getting to bed on time getting to bed at a at a reasonable time and so you're managing your you know your blood sugars and your blood chemistry your blood glucose etc through your activities etc and then you're doing what actually your brain needs, which is connection and relaxation in a really, really healthy way. And these are the protocols that, when I'm home, at least, we use pretty regularly. It's helped a lot because I'm an insomniac. And so I need to be really rigorous about my sleep hygiene. Is there a risk of people over-optimizing well-being to the point of neurosis?

Oh, for sure. And that's the reason that, you know, wearables can be a real curse for a lot of people. What do you use for wearables? Woop. Use whoop. That's great. Those guys will, Will Ahmed, has. It's a great company.

He's a, he's a, he's a terrific. It's a terrific, it's a fantastic. It's fantastic of what they do, but I understand the health anxiety thing. Yeah, and are the same thing, yeah. And so you have to be real cognizant of that. And some people, like my wife doesn't use her wearable when she's in bed, because she doesn't want to know how many minutes she slept and how many minutes she was awake and what her sleep score is.

She doesn't want those data. Her life is better when she doesn't have those data. So you've got to figure out how much data you need and not to gorge on it in such a that you become really neurotic some people are and so i have to be you know pretty careful about that but what i find is that when i take i take the the the cognition the the conscience the consciousness out of everything and i just turn it into what i do when i wake up at the morning what i do before i go to bed at night that my life is better because i'm able to use the cycles well you've got a system two system one this right yeah you've got to go okay and this is

why you know when i first started the show and it's one of the great things about having a uh uh ledger of proof of work of where you were at at what time the first two or three years of the show was me being a productivity bro it was me talking about morning routines and Peter C Brown make it stick learning how to learn

and Ebbinghaus forgetting curves and space repetition and Anki note cards and like fucking Evernote external brains it was all that because you have to go through this sort of big over complicated is the solution over here or over there or is it this thing?

And you go really hard and deep on this, and then you move on to the health and fitness thing, and then you move on to the, for me, the sort of relational thing, and then you move into the culture thing, and then my current era is like the emotions thing. It's like the emotional thing. I'm like trying to get below the neck.

That's right. But below the neck is still above the neck because psychology is biology. All right. Fucking. All right, professor. The realization is, you're going to have to do a much more obsessive version of this first.

You're going to have to do a very deliberate. It's going to look super nerdy. It's going to be really clunky. You're probably going to hate it. Half the shit that you do is going to fall away. Right. Because for you, the persona just doesn't work, but mass may. Or mass just doesn't work, but breathwork does.

Yeah. Whatever. Like, you're going to find your particular flavor of what it is. And that's going to take time. Yeah. So I think that everybody needs to go through a productivity bro phase. And I was fortunate. that I did basically five years of this obscene morning routine.

Maybe compared with yours, it's comparable. But like this big, you know, opulent two-and-a-half-hour monstrosity, this cathedral of stuff that I would do. I get up and I'd walk, I'd come back, and I'd sit down. Journal. And then I would do breathwork, and then I would meditate, and then I would read, and then I would do yin yoga, and then I would prep my food,

and then I would go to the gym, and then I would come back, and it would be midday. and I'd have got up at 7 a.m. And I'm like, well, I've done so, like, all of the things I wanted to do have done. And that was me trying to reach escape velocity from the adult infant that sniffed around in bags of drugs for 15 years. Yeah, I got it. I got it completely. And, you know, that ultimately is not the solution.

What that is is gaining information. That's not the solution. So, as a matter of fact, when it comes to the person that you want to be, that's not a problem you can solve. That's a problem you can understand. There's two kinds of problems. There's the solvable problems and the understandable problems. There's the complicated problems of life and the complex problems of life. Complicated problems you can solve with enough brain power and enough discipline

and enough computational horsepower and enough information. That's like a jet engine or making a toaster or, you know, that's actually figuring out how to put together a podcast. It's a complicated problem. Complex problems are super easy to understand, but they're impossible to solve. You can only live them. That's like a football game. It's very simple.

One team has more goals than the other. But the reason that you care about it is because you can't solve it in advance, you can only live it in real time. My marriage is the ultimate complex problem. I can't solve it. Chris, I'll never solve it. My wife, before I came over, she said,

I love you. She texted me. We text all the time. And when I finish this, she might be super pissed off at me. I don't know. Well, I don't know. So I don't, she's Spanish, and that's part of the complexity, but, but I mean, that's why I love my marriage.

That's why I love my cat and not my toaster, because my toaster's complicated, my cat is complex. That's why all the things you really care about are complex. Your life, you, the Christmas is a complex problem. You start off as a, as a bro, trying to treat Christmas as a complicated problem. And what you do find at the end of the day is the complex. the complexity therein, to understand it and actually live your life. Talking earlier on about the, do people need more happiness, less unhappiness,

what are the experiences in life that give people the most pain? What makes us miserable the fastest, reliably? Is sadness is what is the hardest thing that people can actually bear. And what's sadness? Sadness is losing something or someone that you love. that's what that's what reliably brings you the most pain is loss is that grief yeah well grief is an extreme form of sadness right and you know that's the when when somebody's removed from

your life that's the most pain that people actually go through that's the negative emotion that's most intense and part of the reason is because that is on its face the most catastrophic of the occurrences that's why you're the most averse to it that's why you have the most pain from it you know there's a this this little place in your brain this dorsal anterior singular cortex in your brain that little thing in your limbic system, that gives you what's called affective pain. Pain has two parts, sensory and effective. Sensory pain is really the stimulus from the nerve endings when you burn yourself on the stove or something. That has to do with inflammation. Affective pain is where it hits your brain and you say, I hate this. Right. So there's out, and I hate it. So when you

physically hurt yourself, that's what happens. That's a good distinction. Yeah. And there's two parts. And it's, you know, it's working in different parts of your brain. So the pain has two parts. When you have mental pain, like rejection or loss, that's only the affective component. And that's worse. That's worse. Now, interestingly, acetaminophen, which you, Brits called paracetamol, I think, that's Tylenol, that works on the affective component of pain, whereas as Advil, you know, ibuprofen, that works on the sensory component of pain. So that lowers inflammation, non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, they work on inflammation, whereas Tylenol works on the affective component. It Tylenol actually doesn't make you feel less pain. It just makes you care less. Is that right? Yeah.

That's why when you take Tylenol and ibuprofen, when you take acetaminophen and ibuprofen together, it's a potent thing. It works on the two parts of pain, really effectively. How interesting. And it's actually, that mix is better than opiates. That actually is more effective than opiate drugs in managing pain. But here's the point.

When you're really, really, really sad, and there's a study of college students who are in bad breakups, And some of them get Tylenol, and some of them don't. Those who take Tylenol, of course, have Tylenol, are about a third less heartbroken. No way. Yeah. Wow.

Yeah. But did you not say earlier on that we want to embrace our suffering? Yeah. We want to feel our suffering. Of course. What you want to do is manage it. And so what you don't want to do is eradicate it, but there are times when it's good to manage it.

How do you know when it's time to manage it and when it's time to feel it? When you want to know when it's there, but you don't want it to actually interfere with your ability to live your life. That's usually at the therapeutic line where they talk. And that's one of the reasons that over-the-counter analgesics are fine,

but opiates are bad for most people. And one of the reasons that people will take opiates is they're trying to use them as an analgesic against the pain of life, just the pain of life, the pain of life. And that's a really dangerous business. Why do breakups hurt so much? Because there is signal to you

that you're going to be cast out of your tribe and walk the Savannah and die alone. That's a, it's a, it's that you're going to die alone. That's when, that's why breakups hurt so much. Because they say, there'll never be anybody for me. I'm incapable of falling in love. You catastrophize because your brain wants you to avoid that. Your brain wants you to not break up.

And so it's going to make you feel like this is the end of the world so that you won't break up. It's not the end of the world. But if you knew it wasn't the end of the world, you'd be like, whatever. What-Eves? That's why you won't leave a crummy relationship because you're afraid...

You're not afraid of the breakup. You're afraid of the pain for the breakup. You're not afraid of failing. You're afraid of how you'll feel about yourself if you fail. People are afraid of their emotions. They're not afraid of the catastrophes, is what it comes down to, because the emotions are so aversive

and that's what they're evolved to do. So once you understand that, and you're saying, look, this is a crummy relationship. This is an unhealthy relationship. This is not going anywhere. 10 years from an ounce is not going to be better than it is today. I've got to do that. And then with the knowledge, this is going to hurt, but it's going to be temporary pain, and that's a normal biological process. You can handle it.

That's how knowledge is power. What happens in the brain when you put off the breakup, when you end up in a relationship with the relationship with the breakup? Yeah. And you're constantly ruminating and thinking and pushing off. You're not getting, you're actually, the inevitable is still inevitable. But you're just elongating the suffering that leads up to the inevitable. That's a problem. Now, if you don't know, you don't know is what it comes down to. But if you're trying to just avoid doing something that's difficult, firing that employee,

saying that difficult thing, facing up to the fact that the business is not going well, then you're just going to suffer and suffer and suffer and suffer and suffer about it, and then the inevitable is going to happen. That's why the Band-Aid right off is usually the right approach. You know. what's the gold standard for how people should deal with a breakup so the gold standard and there's a there's a bunch of interesting protocols that actually show up in the literature the breakup protocol um there's a bunch of stuff to not do too so there's two do's and there's two don'ts number one is take some Tylenol, perhaps. Why not? I mean, it's, I don't, obviously, check with your physician. This is not medical advice on modern wisdom. But there are a lot of other things to do. One of the things that you find is that when people actually, they want to curl up and cocoon when they're in the midst of a breakup. Actually, having more fun is really important. Distraction is extremely important. Distraction is something that you enjoy with people that you love is a critically important. Go ride your bike with your friends, even though you don't want to. doing that is a very effective way for you to actually start to heal.

The second is to consider not the things that you're missing, but the things that you're not missing. It's actually focus in a relationship. In every relationship, you broke up for a reason, right? If you have a breakup, you broke up for a reason. Focusing on what was good about it is actually going to prolong the grief. Focusing on the reason that you broke up is really, really important. Because that actually aligns, that's metacognitive.

It aligns your prefrontal cortex with your limbic system. I broke up for a reason. Why did I break up? I broke up because this wasn't going to go any place. And here's the reason it wasn't going to go any place. And focus on that. You know, so for women, for example, they get into these relationship with these terrible dark triad guys, narcissistic, Machiavellian psychopaths, which is, you know, by the way, 7% of the population.

And, you know, it's your first husband, right? And focus on the reasons that you had to get away from that guy, not the reasons that you miss that guy. And last but not least, there's a really interesting study that actually talks about the effects of sad music. It's like you wouldn't put on a marching band after you break up. Even the, you think, that should improve my mood.

The reason is that you don't, you're trying to, when you're sad, you're trying to understand your feelings. You're making a real effort to understand your emotions. And your emotions are very confusing to you in a period of high negative affect. And when you listen to sad music, sad music literally, because it expands, it stimulates the right hemisphere

of the brain, where you process aesthetics, where you process beauty, it helps you to understand your emotions better than you did before. And understanding your emotions is part of the healing process. So some Lewis Capaldi would be... Whatever your favorite sad song is, right? Okay, so one thing that you said that was really interesting, this sort of odd duality that people are in

people are in when they go through a breakup of prior to the breakup, thinking about all of the reasons that they should break up, and then as soon as the breakup is done, thinking about all of the reasons about why they shouldn't have broken up. Exactly. What's the switch that seems to be happening in lots of people's brains there? When, you know, when switch such that they actually pull the trigger? No, the switch that prior to the thing, prior to the breakup, here are all of the things that are bad. Because we focus on losses. Because we're always focusing on losses. You focus on losses when you're in it and focus on losses when you're out. That's the negativity bias inherent in homo sapiens.

So we're always focusing on the negative because the negative emotions and attention to threat is what keeps us alive. Thinking about what's good doesn't keep us alive, that's nice to have. That's why you have literally more brain space dedicated to negative emotions than to positive emotions. So you're always looking for the bad side

of whatever's going on. I mean, I found myself saying the other day, you know, first class in United Airlines has really gone downhill. It has. Was it transatlantic or domestic? It's all of it. But yeah, it was some domestic.

It was like east coast to west coast. Yeah, that sucks. It sucks. It sucks. Yeah. But I mean, I'm getting there in five and a half hours for Pete's sake. Yeah. So, but that's how we're wired.

And so when you're in the relationship, you're focusing on the negative part of the relationship. And when you're out of the relationship, you're focusing on the negative part of not being in the relationship because we have a negativity bias, which can be overridden metacognitively. And so if you're in a relationship and it's till, to your part, you're going to have a lot of negativity. You're really going to have a lot of negativity. And the thing to do is to focus consciously and systematically and therapeutically

on what's right about your marriage every single day and giving thanks for what's actually in your marriage. If you have to break up with your partner and you do, then the thing to focus on is not what you're missing, because that's the negative stimulus, but to be focusing on the reason that you did it and the fact that it was the right thing to do and the things that are actually giving you relief. Like, I'm not screaming at somebody today. I'm not jealous about something today.

I'm not wasting another year of my life in a relationship that's unproductive today. And so focusing consciously, as opposed to focusing unconsciously on the negative. That's the reason we do that. Do you think the modern freedom has made happiness harder, not easier? Yeah, I do.

I actually do. And I think that that's actually escalated a lot in the last 30 or 40 years, as a matter of fact. And the evidence of that is that in the UK and the United States that happiness has declined since about 1990s, been consistently declining. And part of the reason is we make just tons of errors. I don't think, you know, I'm not of the view

that we have too much freedom or we have too much abundance or we have too much affluence. I think that what we have is a tendency, well, we have kind of a climate and a weather problem with happiness. The climate is that in, modern society, we've gotten away from things that we took for granted, which are faith, family, friends, and work. Those are the four habits of the happiest people. They're serious about their faith or life philosophy, if they're not religious. They have serious family life. They have close

friends, and they pay attention to the meaning in their work. And all those things have been in decline for the past three years. The weather problems are screens, hatred, political polarization, and COVID. Those are the three big storms of unhappiness that have come our way. Surprising that anybody's managed to make it through the last half decade. But, you know, we do. I mean, we're tough, man. People are really, really tough. And the way that we do it, by the way, is by having personal

protocols that fight against those tendencies. It's to say, okay, yeah, I mean, that life is making it less likely for me to worship or practice philosophy of life. being distracted constantly by these do-dads and gougas and stupid nonsense on the internet no i'm putting that down i'm going to study the holy book or whatever it happens to be yeah i mean that life says that you're tied down that you're losing your freedom if you get married and have kids wrong get married and have kids for most people most of the money to the right person yeah kids with the right person for sure for sure but it's interesting because to do it the wrong your show is you know the reason

I've always, I was like a show, because modern wisdom actually is ancient wisdom. That's the, that's the twist. Well, the thing that's been fascinating about it is the mismatch. Yeah. Whereas you would say in evolutionary psychology, the mismatch principle, that a lot of the systems that were built to protect us or keep us effective, ancestrally, maladaptive in the modern environment. Or they're maladapted.

Yes. A lot of the time. Yeah. Yeah. So it's, you know, there's, there's nothing wrong with resource cues and fertility cues. The problem is the way that they're maladapted in modern culture and the extent to which we believe the propaganda that they don't exist. Do you ever look at Seth Stevens Dividowitz's work? Oh, no. So he is a, used to be a data scientist at Google. He wrote, first book was everybody lies.

And then his next one was don't trust your gut. Oh, yeah. I've seen that. Don't trust your gut. It's fucking money. It is so, I can't believe that he managed to like, he danced through a minefield of political incorrectness and just got away with it somehow. I don't know why. Maybe it's because of the way he presents. He presents at this sort of slightly nerdy, slightly Jewish guy. But he fucking crushed it with that book. And he highlighted what are the traits that people optimize for to click on?

And what are the traits that are actually reliable for who you'll click with? What predicts long-term relationship satisfaction and happiness versus what are the things that people tend to optimize front-end? And the two are totally different. I mean, he did some, in that book, He did some really spicy shit. He did some stuff around sex and race and which ones are most preferred by each sex and race.

He had one of those crossover charles. And he was like, hey, Asian guys and black women, like, you guys have got a tough end of the deal at the moment because it seems like certain groups from that. And he's, I'm like, how did you get away with that? The fuck, did you write this book and put this out there? And it just, people just say, it's very interesting, isn't it? I'm like, have I met, because it was in the middle, I think this came out in 2020, 2020, 2020, 2021.

Like, this could not have been more in the bullseye of like exactly how this is the walkpocalypse is upon us. Oh my gosh. Yeah. And, you know, like real, real harsh, brusk insights. Here's how you do it. So here's how you do it. So I've been, you know, I've been in the business of saying, you know, unspeakable thing. Yeah. You can, if you use the truth as a weapon versus if you use the truth as a gift. do you bring the truth in love or do you bring the truth in hostility do you say these things about race and sex because you're trying to score a point

you're trying to offend or you're trying to do it because you love people and you want people to live better happier lives it's the motive I mean you can still get cancelled with a pure motive but the truth of the matter is that motive matters a lot and people know your motive

someone I watched this video online about comedians and they were talking about how I can't remember the comparison was between a of comedians. And they said about how one of them, you just didn't believe that he was doing it to be nice. Yeah. It was saying that thing because you kind of maybe had a secret acts to grind. And this other one, you go, yeah, I mean, it's kind of the same group that you're punching at or whatever. But it doesn't feel as, it just doesn't feel the same. Yeah. It doesn't feel we have a hundred ways to discern that. A hundred ways to discern that. We have so many ways

below our level of consciousness when you know to know whether somebody's friend or foe and somebody can say the same thing you can criticize somebody I mean I if you criticize me right now I'm going to take it as an expression of love I'm going to take it as a way that you want me to be better because I know you will my good to love according to Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas

is to will the good of the other as other to will the good of the other as nothing about your feelings nonsense to if I will Chris as good as Chris and when you believe that I have love in my heart for you like that. I can say hard things. You're going to be like, thanks, man. It's amazing, actually.

And so that's what we need to work. This is the want to want. This is the right desire. If we want to be interesting people in the world, we have to have right desire, which is love for everybody else. Just be full of love. And then it's funny because St. Augustine,

it's very biblical in its way. It's very Buddhist in this way, but it's very biblical in its way. So, you know, you've got the Ten Commandments, and the young guy comes up to Jesus, and he says, I've got a lot to remember, Lord, can you boil it down? Something I can remember. He says, yeah, I mean, there's really just, you know, love the Lord your God, and love your neighbor as yourself. You know, and he said, okay, that's great.

So St. Augustine was asked, you know, can you boil it down? St. Augustine said, love and do what you will. So we're really good of the do-what-you-will part, but we're really not good at the love part. So this is the important thing for everybody watching us, and for us to live. We're going to do what we will, and that's great. I love living in a society in which we have all these opportunities

to have conversations like this and get paid. It's insane. But if it's not based in love, it's bad. If it's not based in love, it's a problem. It's making life worse, and you're going to get in trouble, is what it comes down to. But if it's based in love, love, you can be pretty confident because people are going to know that.

That can't. Arthur Brooks, ladies and gentlemen, dude, you're great. I love you to bits. What have you got? What have you got going on in the moment? I got a big book coming out in March called The Meaning of Your Life, Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness. We've got to talk about that again.

Can't wait. Me too. Thank you. Podcast. You've got a podcast. I got a podcast. Yeah, sorry. Office Hours with Arthur Brooks.

It's brand new. It's doing really well. It's crushing. It's super fun. I mean, it's like it's a lecture. It's not, it's, I'm talking about behavioral science and in front of a camera, it's cool. Unreal. Appreciate you, man. Until next time.

Thank you.