Office Hours with Arthur Brooks - 5 Ways to Get Happier Starting Today

Starting point is 00:00:00 Do you want to be happier? I assume you do. That's why you're here. And other people do as well. The happiest, healthiest people in their 80s and 90s, they have some things that you can't control, like, you know, pick the right parents. But there's a bunch of stuff that you actually can control. Side note, the self-esteem literature that everybody thought they knew, which is that if your self-esteem is higher, you'll be happier. It doesn't stand up. But happiness and unhappiness are not opposites. They're largely mediated by different parts of the brain, as a matter of fact.

Starting point is 00:00:30 nature designed me to be happy and when I'm not happy it means something's wrong with me. That's completely wrong. Hi friends, I'm Martha Brooks, and this is Office Hours. I'm a behavioral scientist dedicated to lifting people up and bringing them together in bonds of happiness and love using science and ideas. I'm a university professor. I teach at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Harvard Business School, a class called Leadership and Happiness to bring along the next generation of leaders who understand the happiness

Starting point is 00:01:01 science so they can live better lives and bring more happiness to others. I also write a column in the Atlantic called How to Build a Life. That's a column about the happiness science based in the academic literature and how you can use it. And that's what this show is about as well. This is an opportunity to talk about the biggest issues, something you can watch regularly and pass on to your friends. Do you want to be happier? I assume you do. That's why you're here. And other people do as well. What I want to do with this show is to inform you so that you can join me in becoming a happiness teacher in your ordinary life. Now to begin with, because we're just starting this out right now, I'd like to know what questions that you have about happiness. I have a lot of ideas. I've written hundreds of

Starting point is 00:01:41 columns on the science of happiness and a lot of books, but I really care about what's on your mind and that's what I want to know. So if you've got a question about happiness, please write to me and I would love to hear it and I'll probably take it up in some way, shape, or form. The email for that is, okay, ready? It'll be on the screen right up here or down here. Office Hours at Arthur Brooks.com. Write to me and I'd like to hear what's on your mind. I'd also like to hear your feedback on this show. This is brand new. What do you think about the format? What do you think about the pacing? What do you think about the lighting? What do you think about my hair? Whatever you want. Office hours at Arthur Brooks.com. I'd love to hear whatever you like to talk to me about.

Starting point is 00:02:23 Let's get into today's topic. I've just finished a new book that's coming out in early August called The Happiness Files, Insights on Work and Life. It's actually a set of essays from my column of the Atlantic, but it's the most popular 35 essays that are written in the last five years about work in life. Work is part of life, to be sure. It's kind of work focused because it's published by the Harvard Business Review, but it also talks about how work impacts your life and vice versa. These are 35 columns that you can really use. and I want to start off today by talking about one of my very favorite of those columns, because it's affected me in my life so very much.

Starting point is 00:03:00 This is an essay called 10 Practical Ways to Improve Your Happiness, and it's just what it sounds like. These are very practical techniques that you can use based in the most cutting-edge science. I'm going to tell you a little bit about where these ideas came from, and then I'm going to get into some of the content and give you some ideas that you can use. I don't think I'm going to get through all 10. I think I'm going to get through about the top five, but these are the best five, and I'm going to tell you why here in a sense.

Starting point is 00:03:23 second. Now, to begin with, this research is based on a very important research article that's published in a journal called the Journal of Happiness Studies. Side note, in this show, whenever I refer to an academic article, I'm going to do it a lot. It's going to be in the show note. So don't worry about it. You don't have to take notes that quickly or remember exactly what I say when it gets really technical. You can look at the show notes and you can go look up the abstracts and the articles themselves. So that's one thing that we'll be doing in this show and in every episode going forward. So this is an article that came out a few years ago in the year 2020 in the Journal of Happiness

Starting point is 00:03:59 Studies, which is a very important academic journal dedicated entirely to happiness topics from the most scientific perspective. It's the lead author. There's three authors on the study. And the lead author is a friend of mine, somebody I really have a lot of respect for and a like. It's a guy named Dan Butner. If that name sounds familiar, it's because he wrote a very important book called the Blue

Starting point is 00:04:18 zones, which was then turned into a multi-part Netflix special where he looked at the places around the world where people who lived to 100. So it wasn't just about happiness. It was about longevity. But what he found was that people who live to 100, they're happier than people who don't, which is kind of, sort of makes sense, doesn't it? I mean, you're unlikely to live to be old if you don't want to live to be old. And so he started off by talking about health, but he wound up really talking an awful lot

Starting point is 00:04:46 about happiness. and this is the fruit of that. What are the things that people who do really well in life all have in common? What are the most important happiness techniques that people talk about? So here's how the scholars actually engaged in this piece of research, which is a really good technique. They went out to some of the most distinguished happiness researchers in the world. And there's a lot of people out there that do the work that I do at universities.

Starting point is 00:05:10 They look at the happiness science. They measure well-being in future episodes of office. I'm going to tell you how you measure well-being. But suffice it to say that they do that and they do it really well. So these scholars then they listed the 68 techniques that show up most in the literature for becoming a happier person. And together they rank them for their efficacy, for their effectiveness. So 1 through 68.

Starting point is 00:05:36 And what I want to talk about is the top five. So these are really the best techniques that have the best literature behind them. Now, let's back up a little bit. You get all kinds of advice day and in day out of how to become a happier person. But usually it's not very helpful. How can I become a happier person? Have a good marriage. Well, thanks.

Starting point is 00:05:55 You know, thanks very much. That's sort of put in the cart before the horse, right? I'm just going to snap my fingers and have a good marriage. I need something more concrete than that about how to do that, how to get to the place where I meet that person. How do I, once I am married, how do I make sure that it's a good marriage? And so forth and so on. Another one that I hear a lot is to be Danish, right, or Finnish or something because of those crazy happiness comparisons that we have, you know, the happiest country in the world, et cetera, et cetera. They always are the Nordic countries.

Starting point is 00:06:26 And so people say, you know, live like a Finn. What does that mean? It's not very helpful either, is it? Well, this study that I'm talking about here really is helpful because it looks at the top of the charts and all these pieces of happiness advice. And I'm going to give you the top five that they talk about. And all of these ideas are incredibly well validated. Here's what it means. You can do the things I'm going to talk about starting today and you will see results.

Starting point is 00:06:53 Now, these might not be a major philosophical change in your life, but these are things that can make it such that you go to bed happier tonight than you woke up this morning. And that's a virtual guarantee because that's what the science is actually saying. This is like health advice in that sort of vein and really practical kind of news that you can use. So let me start with number one. This is the top of the list. It's the top of the list. This is number one.

Starting point is 00:07:17 People. You need more contact with an investment in the people who are close to you. Maybe it sounds obvious, but it isn't obvious. I talk to people all day long who are neglecting their family members, neglecting their friends because of things that they care about less. I mean, I know you know this, but it's really important to keep in mind that the research couldn't be clearer that the more you invest in your relationships, the better off you're going to be. And today, if you make a substantial investment in your relationships, you're going to see a payoff

Starting point is 00:07:49 from that. There's a lot of research that goes in behind that. My favorite of this, by the way, and this is not just the research that they cited in this article. This is research that I've been looking at for years and years. The best piece of research from this that I've ever seen that shows this is a study called the Harvard Study of Adult Development. I wasn't behind this. It was a bunch of my colleagues or the Harvard medical school. And they started to look and follow the lives of people in the late 30s to see what they did in their 20s and 30s and 40s and 50s. They interviewed them every single year until they died, as a matter of fact. This has been going on for 90 years. Started actually with sophomores at Harvard College. That's the undergraduate part of Harvard University,

Starting point is 00:08:30 which isn't very representative of the population in the late 30s. But then they branched out. They actually got another survey of people who didn't go to college and then it had spouses and then it had kids. And today it's a very demographically representative sample across the population. And it looks at how they've lived from year to year to year and how those things predict them winding up as healthy, happy people when they're old. It's kind of a crystal ball, as a matter of fact. Now, there's a bunch of things that they did. And maybe in a future show, I'll actually dig more into the big patterns that they find. The happiest, healthiest people in their 80s and 90s, they have some things that you can't control, like, you know, pick the right parents,

Starting point is 00:09:10 you know, make sure that your parents, you know, don't suffer from mental illness. Well, you can't do that. I mean, the diet is cast by the time that you come along on that. But there's a bunch of stuff that you actually can control. For example, there's seven things that they always talk about that you can do in your 20s and 30s that are really going to predict a lot whether or not you're a happier person in your 60s and 70s and 80s. Some of them are health-related, diet, exercise, smoking, drinking, and use of euphoric substances. It's pretty obvious.

Starting point is 00:09:37 I mean, diet and exercise, you have to live like an adult and take care of yourself is what it comes down to. And that means, by the way, not being nutty about your diet, not having yo-yo diets that make you insane or give you an eating disorder. It means exercise that doesn't become an addiction, et cetera. I'll talk about that stuff in future episodes of the show because, yeah, healthy behaviors can be almost as unhealthy as unhealthy behaviors if you treat them in the wrong way and lead to unhappiness.

Starting point is 00:10:03 But then smoking, of course. I mean, who doesn't know this? I smoked when I was in my 20s. That was a long time ago. And even then I knew I shouldn't be smoking, that it wasn't going to lead anywhere good. I mean, I had to have an emergency to stop. Specifically, I lit my bed on fire. And I was engaged at the time.

Starting point is 00:10:22 And I thought, well, I guess it's one thing to have this have it kill me, but it's something else if I'm going to endanger somebody else's life. And I stopped because of that. But, you know, I knew that it wasn't a good thing to do. And the truth of the matter is that if you're a lifelong, smoker, it's going to wind up with health problems that are going to not just hurt your health, but also your happiness. And then there's substances. What you find is that anybody who uses substances irresponsibly and, you know, look, if you're watching any podcasts on this, whether

Starting point is 00:10:49 there's Peter Attia or Andrew Huberman or a lot of other real experts in longevity, they're very critical of anything more than the most minimal use of euphoric substances. You've got to be really careful about these things because they're fun in the short term and real bad in the long term. If you have any questions about your use, you should stop. That's kind of what it comes down to. Okay, that's four, but then the last three are a little bit less intuitive. Number one is lifelong learning. Learners are happier when they're older. Number two is dealing with your problems. You've got to get really good at a technique for dealing with your bad moods and your problems in life. More on that later. But last but not least is number seven, and this is the big one, which is love. Love and the relationships in your life. This is just random

Starting point is 00:11:34 loving people. These are your people. These are your friends and these are your family. Specifically, the happiest people have one or both of two things, a loving marriage and or really close friends. Now, this is not to say that you, to be happy when you're old, you have to have a great marriage. No, lots of people don't. Doesn't work out that way for everybody. But if they don't, they have really close friendships. Super important. And ideally, you get both because it's a bonus. It's multiplicative, as a matter of fact. This shows over a long period of time, and it reinforces a big academic literature that happiness is love. Investing in your friends and your families is the number one thing that you can do today and an ongoing basis. So that's number one. Number two,

Starting point is 00:12:18 this is interesting because in the study they say number two is join a club. Like, huh, I looked at it. I'm like, join a club. I don't belong to any clubs. But then I thought about it, and actually I do. I mean, I'm a traditional religious believer. I belong. I belong. I'm a to probably the biggest club in the history of the world. I'm a Catholic. It's a club, as it turns out. The point isn't the club. The point is actually sharing ideas and loves that we have in common with other people, which is intrinsically a very satisfying thing to do. And this gets back to the work, to the great thinking on this subject from, you know, the world's greatest philosopher on the subject of friendship, which is Aristotle.

Starting point is 00:12:57 2,500 years ago, he was writing in a way that really, I mean, it's never been, it's never been, it's never been, it's never been improved upon over the past three millennia on how he writes about friendship. He talks about, you know, the transactional friendships that we have with people at work. I call these deal friends. They're fine, but they don't bring you real happiness. He talks about friendships of beauty where we admire somebody else really a lot, and that's the basis of our friendship. And that's better. But again, if the beauty goes away, then so does the friendship. The friendships that bring real, real happiness are what he calls virtuous friendships. And what they have in common typically is a shared love for a third thing with somebody that you really know. And it's a beautiful thing because you kind of walk toward that shared love shoulder to shoulder.

Starting point is 00:13:44 Those, by the way, can also be very useful. They're real friendships. They can also have deal friendship in them. But fundamentally, they're about love for each other and love for this third thing. And that's a beautiful thing when you think about it. That's the reason that the best marriages are based on deep friendship. They're not based on the passion that you had in the first six months. Thank God you wouldn't get anything done.

Starting point is 00:14:05 But deep friendship, which is called in the literature, companionate love, that's the basis of a really great marriage. And what that is in this Aristotelian framework is this shared love for something else. Usually the kids, sometimes a religion, sometimes a set of values. is then you and your spouse, you walk forward into the future, eyes firmly fixed on this third love, and it's one of the most satisfying things that you can do. Okay, that's kind of what they mean by a club, is finding your people who have the shared interest, and that shared interest is the basis of a deep friendship that's not useful to you.

Starting point is 00:14:43 It's just beautiful to you. Now, there's a lot of social science on this. Probably the most famous of this comes from my Harvard Kennedy School colleague, Robert Putnam. That name sounds familiar because in the year 2000, he wrote a very famous book called Bowling Alone. And that was a book not about bowling. It was a book about how people used to join bowling leagues and have a great time with their friends. And now most people go to the bowling alley by themselves or just one of the person. And that's a real loss for their happiness. That was his point. It was sort of the death of American civic culture. In the show notes, I'll put the

Starting point is 00:15:18 original article, which came out in the Journal of Democracy, America's declining social capital. Very, very interesting article is sort of the 5,000 retreatment of this argument. And what it shows is that your life is impoverished when you're not doing this Aristotelian stuff. That's what it means to join a club. So practically speaking, what does this mean? This means that, you know, find something you're really interested in and do it with other people. That's really what it comes down to. You'll forge friendships that have a little bit of magic in them that you're probably not going to get with your work friends.

Starting point is 00:15:48 Because you're, I don't know about you. I mean, the company you work for is probably not your hobby. actually in my case it kind of is, but that's not the case for everybody. And so you need something on the outside that you'll actually do. Maybe, you know, like running, join a running club. Whatever happens to be, do something like that. If you practice a religion, get more involved in your house of worship. Look, even if your beliefs aren't clear, the fact that you're going to be practicing them

Starting point is 00:16:16 in whatever way with other people, that's going to be central to your happiness. Okay, that's number two. And they're both based kind of on people in love, right? Number three is a little bit different, and that's to become more active mentally. This sort of relates to that thing in the Harvard study of adult development of continuous lifelong learning. That's really important because one of the things that we find is that the happiest people over the course of their life, they have one habit in common, and that's that they read a lot. Now, this isn't necessarily the way that you learn. What this is really is about is learning and staying mentally.

Starting point is 00:16:50 active and knowledge acquisition. And the key thing is learning about things that you don't have to learn about. This is really the sort of the secret of happiness is this, not just the uselessness of real friends, but the uselessness of real information that's just simply interesting to you. Now, the reason that this is the case is that there's, we talk an awful lot about positive and negative basic emotions. There's a lot of research on this. The negative basic emotions, there's only four.

Starting point is 00:17:17 We all feel very unique emotionally. We're not. The basic negative emotions are anger, fear, disgust, and sadness. The basic positive emotions are joy, interest, and surprise. Some people put another couple on that list. But what's really fascinating is that interest is a basic positive emotion. Human beings, homo sapiens are made to learn stuff. We love learning stuff.

Starting point is 00:17:41 And there's a reason for that. In the ancestral environment, your predecessors would be a lot more successful if they were learners. If they got better at stuff, it would give them a fitness advantage. It would give them a survival and a mating advantage. If they were the ones who found the berries on the bush, they found the watering hole that had the gazelles around it. And so the result of it is that we get tons of satisfaction and enjoyment when we're learning things just naturally. It's a basic positive emotion is interest. How do you feed that basic positive emotion such that you have a more constant flow of positive emotion, which gives you more enjoyment in your life, which is

Starting point is 00:18:17 one of the sources of happiness. The answer is learning, learning, learning. Some of the unhappiest people have stopped learning. They've gotten bad at learning. Or they never learned how to learn effectively. There's a lot to indict about our education system in America today, but probably the biggest area of indictment is that we don't take seriously the fact that learning is inherently pleasurable. And so we need to be really, really good at helping people learn in different ways that suits their style. You know, some, for example, they're not necessarily great readers, and so they need to learn in different ways. They need to be, they're auditory learners, for example, and there's literature on this that people learn in different ways. I would love it of the public education system,

Starting point is 00:19:00 took interest as a basic positive emotion into account because they wanted a happier population. They wanted a happier America. They wanted a happier world. And they can do so much to do that, as a matter of fact. I have three kids, adult kids, two of them, huge readers, one of them not, but he's a huge learner. He knows kind of everything. And it's funny. I'll say, I'll say, something's wrong with my washing machine. He'll say, huh, okay, what's making the sound? I'm like, yeah. He says, what does it sound like? And I'll say, oh, no, ff, foo, foo, fo, f. It's all, I know what's going wrong. He says, how do you know that? He says, I saw a YouTube video on it. And I say, why did you watch a YouTube video about washing machines? And he said, because it's interesting.

Starting point is 00:19:43 And so there's new ways to actually learn, and that's a great thing if you can avail yourself of it. Learn, learn, learn. Find more ways to learn so you can become and remain more mentally active, and you will become a happier person. That's number three. Okay, let's go on to number four. And for number four, we're going to change directions a little bit. Number four is for you to get out of your daily psychodrama by transcending yourself with faith or philosophy. Okay, now I'm not saying that you need to practice my religion. As I mentioned before, I'm a Catholic. And I like it.

Starting point is 00:20:21 It's great. But as a scientist, I have to tell you that for happiness, my way is not the only way. Here's how it works. Mother Nature, she focuses you on your day-to-day life. You, you, you, you, you. For me, me, me, me, me. Left on my devices, I'm going to think all day long about, you know, my stuff. all the things that I'm actually doing.

Starting point is 00:20:46 And that's really boring. And it's tedious and it's terrifying and it's terrible. It's hard to break out of that as a matter of fact. It's one of the characteristics of clinical depression is ruminative thinking about yourself and it's almost like a prison. It's like you're locked up with you all the time. That's one of the characteristics of clinical depression. Somebody very, very close to me who had suffered a lifetime of really debilitating depression. I said, you know, what does it feel like?

Starting point is 00:21:14 And she said, it's just so boring. I said, what do you mean? It's so boring. And she said, because all I think about is myself. And I don't want to. Well, I don't want to. Well, none of us do, as a matter of fact. And so the question is, how do you stop?

Starting point is 00:21:28 The answer is by getting smaller, making the universe larger. There's a funny thing at most universities, that there's a general science requirement for undergraduates, and one of the classes that they can take, and a lot of them wind up having to take is astronomy, astronomy 101. And nobody goes into freshmen or sophomores at universities. They don't go into astronomy going, I always wanted to take an astronomy class. I mean, some do, but not everybody does.

Starting point is 00:21:54 But here's the weird thing. They go in reluctantly and they come out enthusiastically. And I've asked many undergraduates, why do you love your astronomy class so much? You're a psychology major, a communications major, or whatever. You're not a scientist. And they say, because I can't quite explain, it's just so. weird. But, you know, I go in on Thursday morning in my astronomy class and I'm like bummed out about something. You know, my girlfriend's not talking to me or whatever. And I come out 90 minutes

Starting point is 00:22:22 later and I'm like, I'm a speck on a speck on a speck. You get peace and perspective from zooming out into the universe and finding your smallness. It's paradoxical, isn't it? It feels like you should be less happy when you're small because your self-esteem would be lower. Side note, the self-esteem literature that everybody thought they knew, which is that if your self-esteem is higher, you'll be happier. It doesn't stand up. And a lot of really good scientists have questioned that. Why? Because of this autofocus.

Starting point is 00:22:53 It's maddening to be thinking about yourself all the time. Me, me, me, I'm so great, I'm so important, I'm so interesting. No, you're not. And thank God, that's important for us to remember. And something that you can do that makes you zoom out so you're little and the universe is large. you do it every day, it's great. It's unbelievably beautiful, as a matter of fact. There are a number of ways to do that, but some of the most efficacious and techniques that you can get really, really good at involve faith, spirituality, or life philosophy. Well, you're thinking about the bigger

Starting point is 00:23:28 things. You're thinking about the structure of the universe. You're thinking about your small place in it, but fundamentally about the macro instead of the micro-you. Now, again, lots of ways to do that. I've done work, I've done the podcast of Ryan Holliday. Many of you know his work. He's sort of the world's leading spokesperson on popularizing Stoic philosophy. His work is great. His books are phenomenal. I just love his work and I love doing his podcast. He's a very interesting guy. And what he figured out is that when people study philosophy, that philosophy in particular, which is don't forget, you're going to die. Don't forget the universe is large. So suck it up. Buttercup. It's amazing. It makes you feel better. He's figured that out. Why? Because of this

Starting point is 00:24:15 transcendence. This is really what we're talking about. Other people have other sorts of techniques that they do for this. They find that if they walk in in nature, usually before dawn without devices, that there's a funny thing that happens with the mind where you put yourself into perspective. You don't become so big. Other people will study great works of art or music. At different points in my life, I would really study intensively the works of Johann Sebastian Bach. I used to be a classical musician for a living. He was my favorite composer. Man, I would listen to that and be like, it's amazing. There's nothing like this. This is a miracle. A miracle is bigger than me. I've recommended to a lot of people that they study Vapassana meditation, insight meditation, where there's a perspective

Starting point is 00:25:01 on your thinking and who you are, a perspective that is much bigger than you, as a matter of fact. incredibly effective. I've seen it and I practice it myself. And of course there's a traditional religious faith. Maybe if you're a young adult, you are raised in a religious faith and you've left it. And the reason you left it is because you had this vision of what it was when you were a kid and when you grew up, you're like, that's ridiculous. Well, it turns out there's probably a grown-up version of that faith that you're pretty familiar with. And if you went back and looked again, it might be a different thing. And so I recommend that you just maybe try again. without judgment. And in so doing, you can transcend yourself. In transcending yourself,

Starting point is 00:25:43 you will get happier. And that's what it means to practice your religion or to practice your philosophy. And that's number four. Number five. And you don't want me to leave this off the list, but this is going to take a little bit of explanation. Number five on the list that the experts put together is get more physical exercise. And a lot of people say this to me. It's like, One of the things that really makes me happy is a hard workout, going for a good run, getting into the gym, picking up heavy things. And the truth is that that's really, really important for me personally in my well-being protocols. I'm extremely disciplined about my well-being. It's important for me because I actually know the science.

Starting point is 00:26:25 And one of the things that I do is I get up at 4.30 in the morning and at 4.45 to 5.45 every morning, I'm in the gym. I have a gym in my house. It's a combination of Zone 2 cardio and resistance training, and I've been doing it for decades. I'm super serious about that. People say that's a great source of happiness. I say, yeah, no, actually. But it is important to well-being, and this is a quibble that I have with this particular study. They talk about happiness techniques.

Starting point is 00:26:51 Physical exercise and physical exertion is actually an unhappiness technique. Now, I'm not going to go into all the details about this. I'll do this in a future episode. But happiness and unhappiness are not opposites. They're largely mediated by different parts of the brain. as a matter of fact. Unhappy cognitions and emotions are produced in different parts of the brain than happy cognitions and emotions because they exist for different reasons. You have negative emotions because they indicate there's a threat to you that you should avoid. That's why you feel sad or angry, disgusted, or fearful. And the same thing is true with positive emotions. They indicate there's an opportunity that you should approach. So they wouldn't be produced in the same part of the brain to begin with. And that's why they're not opposites. There's a matter of fact they're separable. Some people for their well-being, they need more happiness. Some people for their well-being need less unhappiness. You might be incredibly adroit and well-developed in the

Starting point is 00:27:48 production of unhappiness, which is good for your, probably is very good for your survival, but it's not good for your well-being. And that happens to be my problem, is that I'm plenty healthy in happiness, but I'm also plenty healthy and unhappiness, and I need to manage my unhappiness. So here's the point. This is number five. Your well-being, will increase if you take care of your physical body. If you do a lot of exercise, your well-being will rise because your unhappiness will fall, because you'll manage your negative mood. If you naturally have a very low negative mood, congratulations, your quarter of the population

Starting point is 00:28:26 has below average, actually half of the population has below average negative mood, we call it negative affect in my profession, then probably it's hard for you. you to stay in the gym as a matter of fact because you won't have a much greater sense of well-being. And I know a lot of people like this are just naturally not unhappy people. And they're like, ah, I don't know why. I can't stay on a fitness protocol. That's why. Because you don't come out of the gym going, yeah, I feel alive again. But I do. 545 by the time I'm actually going to take my shower, I'm like, yeah, I can face it. It's going to be, I can, why? Because I've just lowered my level of negative affect by getting more physical exercise.

Starting point is 00:29:06 tons of research on this. I'll throw a couple of the articles into the show notes on which you can actually read about this. But here's my promise. In a future episode, I'm going to talk more about my morning protocols to manage my affect so that the positive is higher and the negative is lower. That's one of them. I mean, maybe a whole bunch of things that you can actually use that are based on science so you can set up your day to have a great day to begin with. So those are the big five. Now, again, I mean, you're going to see all this stuff in the show notes, but let me go through it one more time. So we've got the list. Number one, family and friends. invest in family and friends. Number two, join a club, which is to say share your interests with people. Number three, stay active mentally by learning a lot. Number four, practice your philosophy, spirituality, or religion so that you can transcend yourself. And number five, get more exercise, actually move your body, pick up heavy things, run around. These are things that are really going to help you a lot. These are great pieces of advice. If we had, you know, 17 and a half hours for this episode, I would go through all 68 and I would especially pay attention to the, you know, the ones in the bottom, because the ones on the bottom are the things you always hear about that don't

Starting point is 00:30:17 work. Save that for a future episode. What I want to do now in a remaining time, I don't want to go just a little bit more macro, on just generally, how can you craft your own happiness? How do you put together a happiness plan? Anybody who's watching this, you probably watch a lot of self-improvement content on YouTube and on Spotify and on the other platforms. That's great. Good for you. What that means is that you're a life entrepreneur and your enterprise is you incorporated. I admire that about you. That's a great. That's the ultimate enterprise that matters, as a matter of fact. So you're probably watching stuff about your health and you want to have an overall strategy that you can fit things like I've talked about here into.

Starting point is 00:30:59 So let me talk you about a structure about that, just so that you've got it in your notes. I have studied a long time why it is that so much self-improvement, even that which is real and not woo-woo and nonsense, even the stuff that's really science-based, why it's not usually very sticky. And the answer is that it's just a bunch of ideas that give you an epiphany, but then it kind of, it just sort of burns off. Here's how you can take the ideas we're talking about here and make them sticky. So they really have an impact on your life. You've got to do three things. any great ideas that you get physical health, financial health, and the happiness stuff that we talk about on this show and in all my content. You got to do three things so that it will stick around and you can count on it, you can use it.

Starting point is 00:31:44 Number one, understand. You got to understand. You got to understand the science. You got to know what's actually going on. Don't just do, you know, kind of plug and play. Don't just look for some sort of dumb formula. That's ridiculous. You got to understand the mechanism of action of what's actually going on, which is why I actually talk about the science.

Starting point is 00:32:01 as opposed to just telling you what I think you ought to do. You need to understand. That's actually the beginning of learning that sticks. That's the reason that in a math class in college, they talk about how the math actually is working as opposed to just giving you formulas for working out problems. But then doing the problems is part two. For happiness and anything else,

Starting point is 00:32:23 you need to actually practice. You need to practice the techniques that you're talking about. You need to change your habits. You need to have a plan of life on the things that you can actually do. This is, by the way, like you would learn golf. You need to learn about golf, and then you need to go golf. You need to do those two particular things. But then there's one more thing you need to do.

Starting point is 00:32:43 When you're learning about happiness or you're getting your health together or you're learning anything that you want to learn about and you want to keep that knowledge, you've got to teach it. This is the thing that people often forget. My dad was a math professor. I mean, we're all just old college professors in my family. And my dad was an incredibly brilliant guy. And by the time I was old enough to appreciate what a wonderful teacher and what a wonderful person he was, I was in my 20s.

Starting point is 00:33:08 I'd gotten through my bad years and I got finished being a jerk to my dad. And I thought, you know, I want to go watch him lecture. I want to go watch him teach math. And so I went to a math class, this advanced calculus class that he was teaching, and he taught the whole class for 90 minutes without a note in his hands. It was like watching a virtuoso violinist. was the most amazing thing I'd ever seen. It was my dad. I was just blown away. And afterward, I was like, dad, how did you do that? How did you, how is it possible that you could explain so clearly by memory something that's so complex? And he thought about it and he said,

Starting point is 00:33:48 because I've taught it a hundred times. He said, I own it. I know it. It's mine. And boy, that had a big impact on me because that's the same thing for me and for you. If you want to become a happier person and use your happiness knowledge, you've got to have the knowledge, you've got to change your life and you've got to become a happiness teacher. My appeal to you so that you can become a happier person is that you take the material that you've learned in the show and that you share it with somebody else. Print off the show notes if you need to, watch this one or two times, maybe watch it again with somebody that you love and discuss it, but when you do that, you'll become the teacher and that will make you the person who benefits the most from this particular

Starting point is 00:34:28 material and I want you to become happier. Okay, now before I close, I want to take a couple of questions because we're already getting questions from our social media audience and a way for you to contact me by that, by the way, is usually on Instagram where I have a, you know, sort of the happiness audience that follows my work most closely. I'm Arthur C. Brooks. That's my handle on Instagram. And I want to take a couple of questions from Instagram as a matter of fact that have just come in in the past 24 hours. A bunch of questions came in, but here too that I hear an awful lot. This one is for. from Devin Sloan on Instagram.

Starting point is 00:35:01 It's a classic. How do I get over a breakup? How do we get over a breakup? Yeah, I know. I know. I mean, I haven't broken up in a long time. I've been very married for 34 years. Thank God I haven't gone through a breakup.

Starting point is 00:35:12 But yeah, I mean, my students, my friends, and I remember decades ago, it's a lousy business. Well, to begin with, it's normal, even though it feels unique and extraordinary and terrible. the average person has her or his heart broken five times. Five, five bad breakups or your heart is broken. And in 50% of the cases of the breakups, people say it was messy. So it happens again and again and again. And most of the time, in six out of ten, about six out of ten cases, it's a mess. So there's nothing abnormal about this, Devon, or anybody else who's going through this, which is, I don't know, quarter you?

Starting point is 00:35:55 Here are two ways that science says that you can get over break up faster. Now, to begin with time heals all wounds, your emotional system, the limbic system of your brain fools you into thinking that you're never going to feel better because that's how it gets your attention. Anything negative gets your attention to say, this is horrible, it's going to be horrible forever, and there's a part of your, they're literally physical parts of your brain that are dedicated to making you feel awful. And I can explain in future episodes why you would have this part of your brain. You need it, but you don't like it. It's not permanent, your brain is lying.

Starting point is 00:36:28 It's going to get better. It's going to get better faster than you think. But there are a couple of ways to urge that along a little bit more. There's one very interesting and funny study that talks about how if you actually think about what a jerk your ex is, you feel a lot better about the breakup. In other words, don't just go over the things that you miss, go over the things that you don't miss. And there are things that you don't miss.

Starting point is 00:36:49 Absolutely. When you think about that, you get over the breakup much faster. And the neuroscience is very clear on this, but it sort of makes sense. sense probably intuitively as well. Second is a really kind of even more counterintuitive notion, which is that when you listen to sad music, you get over a breakup faster. You'd be like, why? Why wouldn't I feel sadder when I listen to sad music? And the answer is no. Music actually activates structures in the right hemisphere of the brain that give you a sense of meaning. The meaning of your life is mediated in the right hemisphere of your brain, which is not

Starting point is 00:37:20 where you process language, not where you process sort of rational. task-based thoughts. It's where you understand what's going on in your life at an intuitive level. Sad music puts into perspective your feelings. It helps you understand what your feelings actually are. And when you understand you, you can move on. That's the reason that you listen to a sad song over and over and over and drive all your roommates crazy because you're actually trying to put your feelings into context. So sad music is actually really good for you. I hope that helps, Evan. And it's going to be okay. Here's another question. question. I'll just take this one more. This is from Papa John G. Papa John G. Pizza fan,

Starting point is 00:38:02 perhaps. What's the biggest most mind-blowing surprise you've learned in studying happiness? Man, there's a lot. There's a lot. I mean, every day. This is why I do this. This stuff just is so crazy all the time. And I'm learning new things and it's just opening my brain constantly. But I think that probably the one that changed my thinking the most early on when I was studying happiness is that I was of the view that I'm supposed to be happy, that Mother Nature designed me to be happy. And when I'm not happy, it means something's wrong with me. That's completely wrong. Mother Nature doesn't care if I'm happy. Mother Nature, in other words, the way I'm genetically designed, according to evolution, is for two things, to serve.

Starting point is 00:38:51 survive and pass on my genes. And so all of my base urges in life are about survival and gene propagation. Sometimes that's a really good thing, sometimes that's a really bad thing. Because a lot of the times when I'm doing things that are sort of gene propagation or survival oriented, it might have it to do with, I don't know, eating 5,000 calories more than I'm supposed to of a bunch of sugar that's not good for me because in the ancestral environment that meant, wow, you get all those calories. Who knows if you don't eat for three weeks, you're going to be okay because of this.

Starting point is 00:39:19 that's totally inappropriate in the modern environment. And we do lots and lots and lots of things because Mother Nature gives us an urge to do that and it doesn't make us happy. People often ask, you know, why are people unfaithful to their spouses? That's a complicated question. Boy, oh boy, do I talk about that a lot in my classes about why people are unfaithful to each other. But marital infidelity has everything to do with the impulses that people have from Mother Nature that go completely contrary to their own happiness. nobody ever says, you know, sure I'm glad I got caught having that affair. Well, it's mostly the caught part, I guess, but you get my point that nobody says, you know,

Starting point is 00:39:56 I'm sure it's great that I did something that actually doesn't even live up to my own values. Why did I do that? People question, why did I do that? Because Mother Nature doesn't care if you're happy is the bottom line. Mind-blowing stuff, as a matter of fact. You know, most religions say that we're, the human beings, homo sapiens are both animal and divine. The animal part is Mother Nature's impulses. The divine parts are our own moral aspirations to which we actually try to live up over the course of our lives.

Starting point is 00:40:24 Want to be happier? Think of the person you want to be and then work to become that person notwithstanding your feelings. Boy, then will you be free? That's just completely molded the way that I see the science of happiness and how we can use it in our everyday lives. Well, that's what we got for today. I hope you've enjoyed it. I hope you'll come back. Bring a friend.

Starting point is 00:40:47 No, no, no, no. Bring a million friends. In the meantime, leave a review, if you wouldn't mind, on Apple or Spotify or wherever you're listening to us or watching us for that matter. And hit like and subscribe because, you know, then the bots actually are kinder to us and that makes us happy when bots like us a lot more. In the meantime, any questions or thoughts that you've got, office hours at arthurbrooks.com, that's the email box that we'll be looking at.

Starting point is 00:41:11 Can't wait to see what you're thinking about. And if you want more like this and you want to read it real quick, go get the book. The Happiness Files by me, Arthur C. Brooks. And that's out from the Harvard Business Review Press. Anyplace where you get your fine books or online, which is probably where you get your books. So I'm looking forward to talking to you the next time. I hope this has lifted you up a little bit. Don't forget, I need happiness teachers in the movement with me.

Starting point is 00:41:34 So come back next time and together, let's become a school of happiness that lifts up the world. Thanks very much.

Office Hours with Arthur Brooks - 5 Ways to Get Happier Starting Today

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