Office Hours with Arthur Brooks - 9 Rules for a Happier Vacation

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Starting point is 00:00:27 Vacation is hard for me. I work a lot. If I were left to my devices, I would work all the time. And so maybe you, like me, find taking a vacation, a hard thing to do, and relaxing, pulling away from your generative work a hard thing to do. I'd like to tell you that the perfect vacation will make you permanently happy, or at least happy for the rest of the year. But it doesn't because that's not the way that your limbic system works. Today's episode is about how you can have a happier vacation. Really what it's about is how you can be happier as a person by taking the right.

Starting point is 00:00:59 kind of vacation, not the wrong kind of vacation, which many people do, and also how you can be happier while you're on vacation. I'm going to try to give you the criteria for building vacation that actually suits you the best as well as the people that you love. Hey friends, welcome to office hours. I'm Arthur Brooks. This is a show about lifting people up and bringing them together in bonds of happiness and love using science and ideas. That's my mission as a social scientist is to do that, but I need you with me. If you're trying to make the world a better place with more love and happiness, I hope this has been helpful to you, this show. And if it is, please do share the show with other people.

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Starting point is 00:02:09 Tell your friends that this is something you like to listen to and let us continue to grow as a movement of people dedicated to happiness and love. It's summertime. It's June. And that means that a lot of you are thinking about your vacations. And that's what I want to talk about today. Today's episode is about how you can have a happier vacation. Really what it's about is how you can be happier as a person by taking the right kind of vacation and not the wrong kind of vacation, which many people do, and also how you could be happier while you're on vacation. Maybe you've already planned your vacation, maybe not. One way or the other, maybe I can shift a little bit the science of your vacation taking, understanding what's actually important to you. So this is

Starting point is 00:02:52 going to be quite specific. I'm not going to talk about what everybody should do. I don't know what you should do. I'm going to try to give you the criteria for building vacation that actually suits you the best as well as the people that you love. Now, as always, please give them. me your comments or criticisms. You can write them to me at office hours at arthurbrooks.com or put them wherever you're watching or listening to this in the comment section. We do look at the comments. And also if you want more content like this, please just subscribe to my newsletter. 210,000 people are getting it every every Friday. It's full of new ideas, things that you're not that might be related to the episode. It might not be one way or the other. It's the same style,

Starting point is 00:03:32 just in written form. Three to 500 words. You can read. it really quickly Friday morning. Also has usually some stupid jokes that I think are funny and I hope you do as well. You can get that at arthurbrooks.com slash newsletter. If you're interested in going a little deeper and maybe working in person with other people who like this show or interested in this material, do think about checking out some of the retreats that we're doing. This is a nice way to actually work in person with me and others who are dedicated to the

Starting point is 00:04:02 science of happiness. You can actually look at that on our website as well. go to retreats. Arthurbrooks.com. And when you're on the website, you'll find all kinds of other cool stuff. You can take the happiness scale to measure your happiness. You can take a little internet workshop that will help you with what you've got going on. There's lots and lots of cool things.

Starting point is 00:04:18 And there's even a community of people that are meeting once a month for an hour on Zoom with me. They have access to an AI tool that actually helps you with all the things that we do in the science of happiness and lots of other cool bells and whistles to help you become a happier person and bring happiness to other people as well. So thanks for all of that. Now let's talk about the main point today, which is this theme of vacations. It seems like we wouldn't need a show about how to be happier on vacation, right? I mean, what could come more naturally than that? Well, I don't know. It doesn't come naturally to me at all. Confession. Vacation is hard for me. I work a lot. If I were left to my devices, I would work all the time. I mean, part of it is because I really love my work.

Starting point is 00:05:05 this is, I mean, this beats having a real job talking to you about love and happiness is the best thing ever. But the truth is, I've always been like that. You know, when I was 19 years old and I, you know, left college to become a professional French horn player, all I did was practice and think about the future and my career. And then I went to graduate school and got my PhD and I just worked and worked and worked 12 hours a day, seven days a week. It's a miracle that, that Esther, you know, put up with that Well, I was in graduate school. And then I was an assistant professor and you'd think, well, that's a pretty nice lifestyle. Are you kidding me? I was working 80 hours a week writing my papers. I'm just, I'm a little bit workaholic. And that's because I'm a striver. And so are a lot of you,

Starting point is 00:05:47 whether you have a traditional education or not. You're really serious about your life and you want to put points on the board. And so maybe you, like me, find taking a vacation, a hard thing to do and relaxing, pulling away from your generative work, a hard thing to do. I did it. I did a show some months back on the essence of leisure, how to get good at leisure. And if you need to, go rewatch that show. What does excellent leisure mean? This is going to be an even more practical look at how to build a vacation. What do they all have in common for good vacations? And most especially, how can you build one that's suited to your personality and your particular priorities? And even if it's hard, how do you get better at vacation? That's what we really want to get.

Starting point is 00:06:32 that. Okay, now, Americans are actually pretty bad at vacation, I have to say. So I'm not alone in the way that I struggle with the, you know, getting away. A lot of people are like, I don't want to go sit on a beach. It's just so boring. Maybe you think, oh, that's the best thing ever, but just chilling on a beach. That isn't so great for a lot of people. And how do I know that? Because I've got data, the U.S. Travel Association says that in the 1990s, the last decade of the 20th century, Americans took on average 20.3 vacation days per year. Okay. 20.3 in the whole year, not including federal holidays and not including weekends. By 2018, that had fallen by 14% to 17.4 days. In other words, we're getting richer, but taking fewer vacations. A lot of the what you hear, well, that's because Americans

Starting point is 00:07:19 are getting so much poorer. That's wrong. That's simply factually incorrect. We are actually getting richer. And one of the reasons maybe we're getting richer is because we are taking fewer vacation days. Furthermore, we have access to more vacation days that we're taking. Americans left 768 million vacation days voluntarily unused in the year 2018. And I'm sure it's higher today. I mean, that's a lot. Now, that's mind-boggling to Europeans. When I first moved to Europe when I was 25 years old, it's a, and not just Europe, Spain, it's a vacation culture. I mean, Spain, the number one industry in Spain is vacation, not the Spaniards vacation. Not the Spaniards vacation. about other people taking vacation in Spain because the weather's so nice.

Starting point is 00:08:02 That's that tourism is the number one industry in Spain. It's a huge part of the economy is the way that that works. But Spaniards themselves are very serious about their vacations. When you go to a party in America, you know, and you're breaking the eyes with somebody, it's like, what do you do? Which means what do you do for work? As my wife pointed out, who is my wife? She's a Spaniard for, as those of you who don't know, she said that's incredibly discreet. You're asking people what they do for money.

Starting point is 00:08:26 The most normal question in Spain at a party is. is, were you going on vacation? I kid you not. It's like, oh, yeah, you're going to Fort Mender. You're going to the La Costa Dorada. You're going to some, you know, one of these like Tony vacation spots or someplace to the, you know, to the beach or you're going to the mountains. And that's what you're talking about.

Starting point is 00:08:44 You don't care if the guy's a lawyer or college professor or politician. You don't care. You care where they're going on vacation, whether you know somebody who's there. That's what people really have in common because that's priorities. In Spain, you get double pay traditionally for the month that you're on vacation. You get double pay in December so you can buy your Christmas presents. You get double pay in August when you're on vacation so you can pay for your vacation, which suggests to me that people in Spain need to save more money.

Starting point is 00:09:10 And you know, you get a whole month too. I mean, stuff just stops in Italy and Spain and other parts of Europe in August. You actually want to get something done around in your house and get a contractor? Good luck. It's not going to actually happen. I mean, whole businesses literally shut down. In my neighborhood in Barcelona, there would be almost no stores open the entire month of August, which seems like an unbelievably good opportunity for somebody who wants to work,

Starting point is 00:09:39 except that most people weren't in the neighborhood either, so maybe that was pretty smart. One way or the other, there's a different attitude toward it. And when it comes to well-being, I'm not going to say for economic growth, what's better? I'm not going to say what's better for productivity, but for well-being the Spaniards, got it right. This is clear. What do I mean? That they're going on vacation and that they like vacation. Why? Because vacations understood properly are a huge source of well-being. There's the journal called the Annals of Tourism Research. There's a journal of everything, my friends, that ran a pretty well-sighted article from 2012 that show that vacations increase quality of life for most people. Here's the catch.

Starting point is 00:10:25 than health, money, family, and work. It only came in second place to religion. So being religious is really good for your mental health and your well-being. And especially if you take vacations. It's what it comes down to. The other stuff is important, but that's a big deal when you think about it. And if you don't know how to take vacations, that means that you don't know, that you don't actually know how to use this really important part of life, which is getting away from

Starting point is 00:10:54 your ordinary life in doing something that's fun and leisurely and enhances your relationships. And, well, let's be more specific. What should it do? That's the main question I want to get to today. Because I have actually, in combing through the research on this, which is not research, my friends, this is me search. This is me trying to figure out how I can actually get over this barrier and have the best possible vacations. In the literature, outcome nine rules. for having a great vacation this summer or any time in your life. So that's what I want to build. Now, I want you to think about this in terms of your own priorities. I'm not going to tell you where you should go. I want you to understand yourself better. Starting with rule number one, discern your

Starting point is 00:11:38 motive for going on vacation in the first place. Different people had different motives for going on vacation depending on their tastes, their memories, their history, their pocketbook, their psychological wiring. and there's all sorts of interesting patterns. I give you an example, introverts like the mountains and extroverts like the beach. Like, ha, that's weird. Why is that?

Starting point is 00:12:00 I'll tell you why. Because introverts don't like to get naked in front of other people. I mean, practically naked in America, like literally naked in Spain. It's unbelievably awkward. That's why. It makes sense, right?

Starting point is 00:12:11 Because in the mountains, you're all covered up, which introverts like to do. Okay, got it. By the way, some of you are very modest extroverts that don't take offense. But that's one of the funny things

Starting point is 00:12:20 that you find in the literature is that different strokes with different personalities and different motives for what they actually do. Okay, so what's your motive? Let's find out. There's a 2015 study of Danish tourists, and this is from advances in economics and business, the relationships between socio-demographic variables, travel motivations, and subsequent choice of vacation that shows, based on these Danish tourists, that there's six basic motives. And this goes through a large sample of people and ask them why they go.

Starting point is 00:12:51 one vacation in a structured set of interviews, and out pop basically six motives. It's a pretty exhaustive list. And knowing what your motive is is going to be really helpful for building the vacation that best suits your motives. Because one of the reasons people don't like their vacations, they got one motive and they wind up going on a kind of vacation that's incongruent with that. So, for example, you have a motivation of getting away from it all, but you're doing something that's actually unbelievably stressful and intensive. And you're wondering why you don't like your vacation because there's incongerance. So let's start with your motives.

Starting point is 00:13:26 Number one is exploration. A lot of people really want to explore, which is a learning motive. Number two is escape. Just not ordinary life. Some people want to get away from ordinary life. That's a primary motive. Number three, family and friends, aka relationship deepening. Very big motive for a lot of people on vacation.

Starting point is 00:13:44 Number four is prestige. Their motive for going on vacation is kind of looking cool or looking rich. Now, that's a bad motive, as you can imagine. If you watched any of my stuff, you know that that's all based on social comparison. I'm going to come back to that one later. Still, that's something that shows up a lot that people will say that that's their motive. Usually not in those words, they'll say, my motive for vacation is prestige. But what it comes down to through the structured interviews is that's what they want.

Starting point is 00:14:10 They want social comparison. They want to do something that other people envy. Number five, nature, just the beauty of nature. Now, I've done episodes on the importance of nature. and how nature actually changes your brain. And some people actually know that, and they know that the more nature that they can actually get into, long, hikes, sleeping outside, whatever it happens to be, these are sort of national parks people typically, that they really, really get a lot out of it.

Starting point is 00:14:34 And if you know that's the case, then that's an important motive for you to be gearing your vacation plans around. And number six is history and heritage. That's different than exploration. It's not just seeing new things, but it's a learning motive as well. And people really, really love that, as it turns out. So how does that map on to your motives? And by the way, you don't have to choose just one.

Starting point is 00:14:54 You might have like three and have them in order. But the more that you know what they are, the more likely you are to choose a vacation that's going to be satisfying to you and regenerative for you. I'll talk in a minute about prestige. So I'm going to leave that aside for now. One thing that I will note is that in almost all of the cases, no matter what your motive is, you'll get more from your vacation if you share it with people that you're love. One of the things that you find is that very, there are very few people that have the most

Starting point is 00:15:24 fun vacations by going away by themselves. Now, maybe you're one of those people. Okay, but that's not typically the case. It's not what we see. When you're enjoying something and you're enjoying with others, the enjoyment tends to rise because we are social animals. That doesn't mean you're out there with 300 people. It might mean one other person, whoever it happens to be. But consider the social aspect, the social magnifying aspect of the motive that you have. Okay, that's rule number one. What's your motive? Now, rule number two, when you do choose a vacation that's congruent with your motive, savoring the anticipation of the vacation is a critical component of getting the most out of it.

Starting point is 00:16:02 One of the happiest parts of vacation is looking forward to it. There's some good studies on Dutch and Chinese vacationers, and they see that they have way greater happiness over non-vacationers in the weeks leading up to their holiday. It's not just that people are go on vacation and they're happier than people who stay home, is people who are going to go on vacation are happier than people who are going to stay home.

Starting point is 00:16:26 I mean, a really significant thing is it turns out. I'll put a couple of links to the research in that, one from the applied research in quality of life. Great journal. And the analysts of tourism research empirical insights. The data say that one of the greatest sources of happiness from any pleasurable activity

Starting point is 00:16:42 actually is the anticipation of it. And there's a reason for that. There's a neurochemical reason for that. I've talked a lot about the neuromodulator dopamine, which is really, it's not. People think of it as a kind of a pleasure chemical. It's not. It leads to anticipation of reward. Dopamine is implicated in the wanting and learning and liking cycle where you learn about

Starting point is 00:17:02 something that actually is good for you. And so the result of it is that you want it more and that you crave it and you anticipate the reward from getting it the next time. All of those feelings that you get, that's all, it all has to do with dopamine. is being sprayed from a little thing in your brain called the locus serulius, largely onto the nucleus accumbens in your brain, I want that. I want that roast beef sandwich, you know.

Starting point is 00:17:27 I want that, you know, to see that person, you know, that I'm anticipating seeing somebody that I'm falling in love with. That's dopamine talking right there. And the same thing is true when you, when you anticipate a beautiful vacation that you've planned and when you savor it in advance, what you're doing is giving yourself little sprits of dopamine. onto your nucleus accumbens.

Starting point is 00:17:49 It's going to be so fun. I'm going to like it. It's going to be so great. And that adds to your happiness in the run-up to the vacation, which net net is good for you, good for your well-being. That's great.

Starting point is 00:17:59 Use this science to your advantage by setting up your vacation agenda in advance and studying it, studying your destination, learning more about actually what you're going to see. I used to do this a lot with one of my sons. When my kids were little, my three kids,

Starting point is 00:18:15 I don't have 16 kids if this was possible. You know, I had three kids. And each one of them, they each wanted to do different things. And once a year, I would go away alone with them. I was always a super hard worker. But once a year, I would take three or four days with each one of my kids and go someplace that they wanted to go, just the two of us. You know, my middle son, who's always been an avid hunter and fisherman, we would go hunting

Starting point is 00:18:37 and fishing. Hunting is not my thing, but he is my thing. With my daughter, we would go to amusement parks. He was super into, like, radical rides. And then she went on to, you know, she's in the Marine Corps. She likes strong experiences. And my oldest son, he was very, very into classical music from a young age. And so for his birthday in May every year, we would go to New York City.

Starting point is 00:18:59 We would go to the Met. We would see opera. And he was like a 12-year-old kid. He wanted to see opera, our chamber music. And we would go see the New York Philharmonic. And for me, that's my whole background. I'm seriously crazy about classical music, and I know a lot about it. But that was an opportunity for him to learn about it.

Starting point is 00:19:14 And so what we would do in the anticipation of these trips, two months before, we would actually get our tickets and know what we were going to do. And we would buy the scores of the pieces that we were going to see, either the orchestral pieces or the chamber music pieces. And we would study the scores with CDs, the old days of CDs, before he went to bed at night. So we'd go before, you know, before we'd say his prayers and say good night for half an hour, we would go through a movement or two of whatever it is that we were going to go see in New York City. and he would learn the music, which really helped him to read music better. If it was an opera, we would study the libretto, or we would actually watch videos of the opera, so he really had the tunes in his head. And the result was he got more and more and more excited, and me too.

Starting point is 00:19:56 It was so great. What we were doing was like our locus serulius was like a little fire hose of dopamine inside our brain, saying this is going to be so great. If you're not into classical music, you're like, what a drag, but do your thing, whatever it happens to be, you'll like it better. Now, one thing to keep in mind is that too much anticipation, can backfire, if you imagine your vacation will put you in a state of constant bliss. So you've got to have realistic expectations that nothing is perfect.

Starting point is 00:20:21 You don't want to be disappointed to be sure. But enjoying the learning about what you're going to do in advance, that's a really great thing. That will really increase the enhanced value of the vacation with respect to your well-being. Right now, you're like Neo in the Matrix. You can keep scrolling, experiencing a simulation of life, or, You can wake up to how your attention is being harvested for profit. It's happening to people all over the world right now. You don't want to be productized like this anymore, but it's hard.

Starting point is 00:20:54 Tech addiction is so potent because it's been designed to tap into your dopamine system. Just like heroin, porn, gambling. You've got the cravings. You're addicted. You don't like it, and I don't either. But I can't just tell you to stop doing it. That's hard. If you want to break free from the system, you need an incentive.

Starting point is 00:21:11 Well, here's one. Why don't you join a phone company that pays you not to use your phone? If you want to reduce brain rot, get Noble Mobile Mobile. It pays you to use less data. It gives you an incentive to unplug. Noble Mobile is the phone plan that finally aligns incentives with what's good for you. Use less data, earn money back. And when you do, you'll be living once again in real life.

Starting point is 00:21:34 And you're going to like how it feels. Okay, we're only on number two. Now we're going to go to number three. And I got nine. Okay, so I'm not going to be here all day. Let me pick up the pace a little bit. Number three, manage your expectations. That kind of picks up on the last point that I just made in the following way.

Starting point is 00:21:49 Time away might raise your perceived well-being, but it doesn't last super long. I'd like to tell you that the perfect vacation will make you permanently happy or at least happy for the rest of the year. But it doesn't because that's not the way that your limbic system works. Your limbic system is console of tissue inside your brain between two and 40 million years old. which is basically the factory of your emotions, it's there to give you signals about things around you, whether the threats or opportunities. It's not there to give you a permanently nice day.

Starting point is 00:22:22 If you did something like had a good vacation or ate a delicious Snickers bar and it gave you permanently better mood, that would distract you from things you need to be paying attention to, potential threats. That would be dangerous. The result is that, yeah, you can get a higher affective state. You can improve your mood.

Starting point is 00:22:40 you can get more positive emotionality by having a really great vacation, but it's not going to be a permanent state of affairs. And it's important that you manage your expectations about that, not thinking, oh, it's going to be great forever, because it isn't. It tends to wear off. And in some cases, kind of quickly, there's a 2010 Dutch study of vacationers. And it found that for sure, while they were on holiday, that's what they call it. People on vacation were healthier than when they weren't on vacation, less stressed, more energetic, more satisfied, in better spirits, for sure, in general they were. Those effects largely disappeared at the end of the first week back at work. We got a glow of a few days. That's what it came down to. Now, there's some studies

Starting point is 00:23:22 that find a slightly longer lasting effect, even up to weeks at a time, but none of them say that they're going to be permanent or even really, really long term. So manage your expectations that this is a good thing to do. What you're trying to do is to make some really nice memories with people that you love doing something you really enjoy. You're going to be really significantly happier and healthier while you're doing it and you get a lot of savoring beforehand, but don't think that six months from now that this is the game changer because it probably isn't. Okay, now one way to make it last a little bit longer, however, is lesson number four, the strategy number four. Break your trip or break your vacation into vacationettes,

Starting point is 00:24:02 into little vacations. Don't take one month in Borneo, take 15, long weekends to the Jersey Shore or wherever your thing is, what it comes down to. Now, this is a great way to get an afterglow that goes on longer because it's more frequent. It's more frequent dosage. I remember when I was a little kid. I remember thinking, I wanted to play. It was summertime. I want to play outside all day.

Starting point is 00:24:28 And what really annoyed me was that my mom would make you come back for meals. You know, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Come on, man, every day, every day. breakfast, lunch and dinner. Obviously, I wasn't really into eating, which is why right now I look like a skeleton and a shirt. But my point being that it was like that when I was a kid. And so I remember thinking and proposing to my mom, you know, how about if I eat all three of my meals at breakfast? And I can just stay playing until I go to bed at night. Not realizing, of course, that that doesn't work metabolically. That's not going to work. That's not a strategy that actually work with my biology.

Starting point is 00:25:01 But the same thing is true with the big vacation. One big vacation for most people actually doesn't give you a very big afterglow. And more frequent, smaller vacations will give you an effect that will, it's not super long term. But that's okay because your next vacation is right around the corner. Over the past few years since our kids have grown up, Esther and I like to take pretty frequent weekends away. You know, we'll go someplace. Where do you want to go? You want to go to the mountains?

Starting point is 00:25:28 You want to go to the shore? You want to go to Florida? Whatever. We'll just, you know, go, which is great. What a privilege it actually is to be able to pick up and do stuff like that. And what we find is that we're quite refreshed by doing that. Not as much as, you know, the two-week deal, but more often. So maybe that's the way to think about it.

Starting point is 00:25:47 That actually is an interesting paper from stress and health. Effects of short vacations is the name of the article. I'll put that in the notes. These are sort of punctuations to your equilibrium that you can spread out over time, even if they fade. And that leads to higher life satisfaction and better mood overall than the single long vacation.

Starting point is 00:26:07 Hmm, give that some thought. That might be the way you want to take your vacation days. Number five. Okay, here's a counterintuitive one. Take fewer pictures. I know, I know you want to take pictures so that you can remember this. But think about this.

Starting point is 00:26:20 It's such a funny thing. Human beings are just time travelers. This amazing prefrontal cortex behind our foreheads, the supercomputer of our brains. allows us to live in two or three time zone simultaneously, the past, the present, and the future. We're retrospective, we're mindful sometimes, and we're prospective, which is to say that we're thinking about things to come. The trouble is that we're better at retrospection and

Starting point is 00:26:46 prospection, the past and the future, than we are being here now. That's why, you know, the great Vietnamese Buddhist monk Tikna Han wrote the miracle of mindfulness. That starts off by saying when you're washing the dishes, you need to be fully present while you're washing the dishes, because if you don't, you're missing your life. You're literally thinking about a time that's not now, and in so doing, by the time that now is over, well, it's gone because you weren't fully present. You were probably thinking about the future. The future when, you know, at that particular time, when it comes, the things that you were thinking about will already be in the past. People live this way.

Starting point is 00:27:26 And I live this way. And that's a problem, isn't it? That's what taking pictures on vacation kind of is. It's like, I'm going to take a picture of something so that, and I'm thinking about the future while I'm taking the picture, imagining myself in the future, remembering what is currently the present, but at which point it will be the past. And it wasn't fully alive in that moment. Okay.

Starting point is 00:27:49 So you need some data to see whether or not that's a good argument, don't you? Hope so. I have got it. What you find is that when people are engaged in highly enjoyable activities, they have more fun when they don't take pictures. Some estimates say that between you, you decrement your enjoyment of something when you're taking pictures by 15 to 20 percent. And that's a lot if this vacation is important to you. That comes from psychology and marketing. You distract yourself from having experience.

Starting point is 00:28:17 It's impossible to savor something when you're thinking about yourself enjoying this in the past. So how do you do that? How do you deal with that? Now, one way to do that, if you're, if you're pretty Buddhist about this, to say, no pictures, this will be, this will be evanescent. This will be a thing that's a moment in time, never to be recreated. It's like making a snowman and waiting for it to melt. Okay, all right. Or, or you can simply say, yeah, we're going to want to have, we're going to want to memorialize this vacation with some pictures.

Starting point is 00:28:49 So I'll tell you what, we're out here with our family of four. one person each day is assigned to taking pictures and the other three of us are prohibited from doing so. Just make a rule. That turns out to be a really, really good rule on vacation. So everybody enjoys it and later you can all look back on it and say that was fun. And that seems like a pretty good, that seems like a pretty good compromise to me. Okay, now, number six is an adjunct to number five. Don't post about your vacation.

Starting point is 00:29:16 That one is really clear. That gets back to the prestige motive. You know, why am I taking my vacation? because I want to be fancy. Well, what's the best way these days to be fancy on your vacation and get the benefit of showing what a fancy person you are with your vacation of Fiji or something? You put it online. And so other people can say, oh, man, she's living, man. She's obviously making a lot of money and having a great time. And she's with, you know, some really, really handsome guy and the whole thing. But the truth is, you're ruining your own experience when you're doing that

Starting point is 00:29:50 because you're living your vacation for somebody else. You're trying to elicit envy, for example. Now, evolution is what's making you do this. This is not your fault. You're not a terrible person. You're not venal and weak. Evolution says that you live in a hierarchy, and you want to rise in the hierarchy. Evolution doesn't care about your happiness at all.

Starting point is 00:30:12 This is not something that's been, you know, that's natural selection or sexual selection is based on happiness. it's based on fitness, on biological fitness, and that's exhibited in all sorts of different ways, including the extent to which we can afford a fancy vacation. So the reason that you want to put this stuff online is to show how fit you are, to show that you're somebody who has high status

Starting point is 00:30:36 is the way that that works. That's the prestige motive. And that, my friends, will lead you to enjoy your vacation less and to be less happy. That is real clear. article from 2018 in the Journal of Consumer Research, how the intention to share can undermine enjoyment,

Starting point is 00:30:53 photo-taking goals and the evaluation of experiences that shows that pictures are bad enough, but taking pictures for the explicit motive of posting those pictures will basically suck the enjoyment at your vacation. Number seven, a lot of people talk about taking a working vacation or just doing a little work when they're on vacation. Bad idea. Generally speaking, that's a bad idea.

Starting point is 00:31:17 Vacation is super hard on workaholics because they're thinking about their work the whole time and they're stressed out because they're not doing their work and because their work is actually piling up. And so one way to cope for a lot of workaholics, trust me, I know, is to take along a little work. Like this way, look, my emails won't pile up and I'll have something to do after the kids go to sleep. Don't do it. This strategy won't just lower your satisfaction during the trip. It'll also give you a worse vacation hangover when you come back. Here's a really interesting finding from the journal of stress and health. Researchers find that engaging in work-related activities lowers the positive effects of vacation one, three, and ten days after returning from work. In other words, the glow that you get,

Starting point is 00:32:02 which is not permanent, not even super long-term, you won't get it if you work while you're on vacation. Plus, my friends, you'll have a spouse who's annoyed with you. And you'll have kids who are like, dad, dad, dad, dad, dad. Sounds an awful lot like I know that. Soundtrack. If you want to busy yourself with something, pick up a book and learn something that you're not getting paid to learn. People have been asking me for years and years and years about my reading list, for example. And I have a reading list on my website. If you want to look at it, Arthurbrooks.com slash reading list with a hyphen between reading a list.

Starting point is 00:32:36 Let's go to the website. You'll find it. And you'll find something that, you know, many of these things I've actually read while I was on my vacations from work. It's not dumb beach reads. This stuff is serious stuff that will. be generative that will be like Yosef Peeper's good leisure. This stuff will help you learn and that'll be fine. But it won't be your job, which is what you actually need a break from so you don't burn out. And vacation is supposed to be burnout insurance, among other things. Okay, number eight, come home

Starting point is 00:33:05 early. Now, I don't mean cut your vacation in half, you know, get into a screaming argument with your spouse and leave. That's not what I'm talking about at all. I don't want that to happen. But what I am saying is, home a little bit earlier from your vacation than you have to so that you don't have to immediately jump right back into work. Researchers find that easing back into your work routine is better than traveling up to the very last second for enjoyment and for happiness. And it actually gives you something to look forward to, kind of like a second mini vacation. And so you finish your vacation and you get three days at home before you have to go back to work. You're actually going to really enjoy those days at home, it turns out. It's going to be

Starting point is 00:33:42 kind of relaxing for you. You'll be able to do some things that you want to do. that are not just your vacation, you should come home before the weekend rather than returning on Sunday night with a full work week ahead, for example. Come back on Friday and give yourself a vacation from the vacation, and you're going to actually like that better. Sort of related to this, there's a Leo Tolstoy quote that I've always liked where he said, happiness consists a living each day as if it were the first day of your honeymoon and the last day of your vacation. But the last day of your vacation should also, I think, be preceded by a nice little honeymoon after that. I like to do that. That's something that I've adopted and I've found really great results of that.

Starting point is 00:34:23 Okay, number nine, we got one more to go. Brace yourself when you return and manage your feelings. And the reason for that is that one of the great benefits of vacation is the contrast with work, with a contrast with the day-to-day grind, the things that you don't like that you're actually able to get away from. That's really good. But there's contrast when you come back as well, which you're going back to the things that you're actually getting a break from. Now, again, if you're a super workaholic and vacation is just, oh, the worst, then you'll be looking. If you're a thing, God, it's Monday kind of person, then who knows? Maybe you'll get the warm glow from actually having the thing that's over. You know, when you go back from work, how was vacation? You're like, I got through it. Like you're just coming

Starting point is 00:35:02 back from Vietnam or something. This is not for you. For most people who really do like their vacations, you've got to brace yourself and manage your feelings, because if all goes well, and you're successful at having a really good vacation, you'll have increased enjoyment and life satisfaction, which is good news. The bad news is that ordinary life might be, the contrast might be disappointing or frustrating to you. Like, you know, eating a carrot after a piece of candy. It's not that great. There's a way that that works. But the more that you know, the better off you're actually going to be. Don't be surprised by that. It's completely normal. I have a policy of paying attention to this and thinking about how I'm going to use my work when I come back in the most generative possible way. I also have a policy of not making significant life changes in the first week that I come back to work because I'm not really in the right frame of mind to do so. So think about it. And once again, once you know what's actually happening inside your brain and inside your heart, then you won't be surprised. And not being surprised is the essence of managing yourself so that your feelings don't manage you. Those are the big nine,

Starting point is 00:36:09 my friends, you know what I'm going to do is so that you can remember these things. I'm just going to go through the list one last time and we'll put them up on the screen the same time. Number one, discern your motive for vacation. Why are you going on vacation? Once you know, you'll design the right kind of vacation. Number two, savor the anticipation of your vacation. Start thinking and studying it a while before you do it. Number three, manage your expectations about how great it's going to be and how long it's going to be that great. Number four, break your trip into smaller vacations, especially if you find that the one big one is not giving you what you seek. Number five, take fewer pictures or assign one person in your party to take all the pictures each day. Number six, don't post. Or if you do post, certainly don't post

Starting point is 00:36:55 while you're on vacation. Yeah, don't post. Number seven, leave your work at home, actually get away from your work. And number eight, come home early. Get a little vacation after the vacation. Last but not least is brace yourself when you return, manage your feelings, so your feelings at work don't manage you. Hope this helps. You're not broken. You're meaning-starved. I talk to people all the time who are by any external measure successful. They've built careers.

Starting point is 00:37:26 They have families. They've checked the boxes. And yet, something feels off. Life feels thin. Like you're going through the motions. Like you're watching yourself from the outside. And here's what I want you to know. That feeling is not a personal failing.

Starting point is 00:37:42 It's not ingratitude. It's not something wrong with you. It's a meaning problem. And it's an epidemic. The modern world is extraordinary at giving us comfort, achievement, and distraction. It's terrible at giving us meaning. And no amount of successful fix that. I've seen it in my research and I've seen it in my own life.

Starting point is 00:38:03 That's exactly what we work on at MEA, the modern Elder Academy in a program I've developed called The Meaning of Your Life. It's not a lecture. It's not a quick fix. It's several days of real work in a small group on the questions that actually matter. If what I'm describing sounds familiar, I hope you'll come take a look. Let's finish up with a couple of questions. We've got some good ones this week. This one's from, we have a duo of people asking this question. Patrick Grutter and Mario Bachman wrote in to talk about music. And, you know, there's an upcoming episode

Starting point is 00:38:42 on why music makes you happier or planning that one out. And that one's really important to me because I love music. And I've studied actually on how it can make you happier or how it actually affects your emotions. And we're going to talk about that so that you can put together a playlist

Starting point is 00:38:55 that enhances your happiness. Okay? So wait for that one. Here's Patrick and Mario's question. A friend and I were wondering how music plays into boredom in the sense of distraction. We understand how,

Starting point is 00:39:07 how a content-rich podcast distracts the mind during a gym session. And I've talked about how it's important pretty regularly to work out without headphones so that the non-distraction will give you that shower sensation. When you're in the shower, you get your best ideas. You can actually get that in the gym as well. They're wondering if music is something they should avoid as well. Music feels less intrusive or distracting, making it harder for us to grasp if music distracts the mind from vital mental processes.

Starting point is 00:39:33 Or maybe it helps. What type of music? What role does it play? Now, this really depends. I can't listen to music when I'm working out. And the reason is because I was a professional musician for 12 years. Really, for 22 years, if you count all my growing up. That was all I did was music.

Starting point is 00:39:49 And so I think of myself as more of a musician, literally, than anything else. I know a lot more about behavioral science than I knew about classical music because I've done it longer. But still, it was my formative years. I think of myself as a French horn player. And so the result is, I listen to music and I'm listening analytically. If you don't, if you're using the right hemisphere of your brain, the complex, the intuitive side of your brain when you listen to music, more power to you. That's great. It really depends on you and you have to decide whether or not it's distracting or whether or not it's enhancing the other thing you're trying to do.

Starting point is 00:40:24 Holly McCann writes in to the website, my friends say they were raised as iPad kids having weird habits like needing to be watching some. something in order to enjoy meals or being able to fall asleep. So Holly's friends believe that they can't enjoy meals or fall asleep unless they're watching something. How does that even happen? And what is living like this doing to them? The answer is it's just simple habit. It's simple habit. And so, you know, there's all kinds of things that you can do as a habit that you can't feel like you can go to sleep properly unless you're doing this weird thing because we're habituated. Our brains habituate to something. Those habits like any other habits are actually pretty easy to break. You just have to make a commitment and do it. And usually it takes.

Starting point is 00:41:05 Well, a bad habit like that will you probably take about two weeks, maybe a little bit longer, before you don't miss it anymore. And you actually not just don't miss it. You like it. Sleeping, for example, is very costly to your sleep architecture. If you're looking in blue light as you go to sleep. It just, if you look at the sleep architecture on a tracker like whoop or even my fit bet, you'll see bad sleep.

Starting point is 00:41:29 Even if you slept for, you know, if you're in bed for eight hours, you're not going to like what it looks like. Plus, if you're actually while you're eating, if you're watching something, like eating in front of the television, even with you're another person, you're not going to get the oxytocin exchange, the bonding that actually neurochemically is supposed to occur while you put stuff in your mouth while looking each other in the eyes and having a conversation. That's the reason people eat together. That's a really important thing to do. And so you're missing out in a lot when you do that. But again, it's a simple habit. This is not something that's set in stone. This is not some behavior that has wired the brains permanently.

Starting point is 00:42:00 there's no evidence that that can't change even in a matter of weeks. It's a question of knowing the truth, following the science, and improving your life. Thanks, Holly. Well, we're done. Let me know your thoughts at arthurbrooks.com where you can find all of our resources. You can also write to us. Please like and subscribe on Spotify, Apple, YouTube, any place where you're watching or listening to this. Leave a comment. We love to read them. We're on continuous improvement to make this show what you wanted to be. Follow me on socials, LinkedIn and Instagram. most notably, but other platforms as well in order the meaning of your life

Starting point is 00:42:34 to learn more. Hope you've enjoyed this. Happy vacationing. Happy setting up your vacation. Looking forward to talking to you next week.

Office Hours with Arthur Brooks - 9 Rules for a Happier Vacation

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