Office Hours with Arthur Brooks - How to Enjoy Your Life

Episode Date: May 4, 2026

Want to miss (or forget) life’s sweetest moments? Easy: don’t savor anything. My late mother, an artist, knew this was a terrible strategy for happiness. Through her art, she was an expert at savoring—and the first to teach me its benefits.In this episode of Office Hours, I connect her lesson to what we now know from behavioral science: because of our built-in negativity bias, we tend to overlook positive experiences unless we make an effort to notice them. I’ll share three simple ways to do that—so you can experience your life more deeply, remember it more clearly, and find meaning even in the hard moments.Want to go deeper on this—and other ideas from the podcast—and actually put them into practice? If you’re ready to do that work in person, I’ve partnered with MEA, a transformational science-backed retreat center, to bring these principles to life through a series of retreats in Santa Fe. You can find the details at retreats.arthurbrooks.com.—Brought to you by:• David Protein—The most effective portable protein on the planet ⁠https://davidprotein.com/arthur⁠—Where to find Arthur Brooks: • Website: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://arthurbrooks.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠• Newsletter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.arthurbrooks.com/newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ • X: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://x.com/arthurbrooks⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠• Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/arthurcbrooks/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠• Facebook: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.facebook.com/ArthurBrooks/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠• YouTube: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGuyFRjJQFGCKzfHTBvWM6A⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠• LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/arthur-c-brooks/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠• Email: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[e-mail]⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠—Timestamps:(00:00) Intro(09:52) What savoring really is(10:39) How savoring affects your brain and body(14:54) How savoring shapes your memory(17:16) Negativity bias and why it’s hard to savor(20:18) #1: Savor in all three time zones(24:34) #2: Expand your savoring techniques(27:21) #3: How I do it–what are you looking forward to(29:12) How to savor difficult experiences to support growth(31:19) Q&A: Making space for relationships in a demanding season of work(32:39) Q&A: Finding a religion that resonates(34:08) Q&A: Finding a calling—Referenced: • The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness: themeaningofyourlife.com• Meaning Membership: https://hub.arthurbrooks.com/the-meaning-membership • Arthur’s newsletter: https://www.arthurbrooks.com/newsletter • The Happiness Scale: https://learn.arthurbrooks.com/the-happiness-scale • The Pursuit of Happiness with Arthur Brooks: https://www.thefp.com/s/the-pursuit-of-happiness-with-arthur• Savoring the past: Positive memories evoke value representations in the striatum: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4254527• The Miracle of Mindfulness: An Introduction to the Practice of Meditation: https://www.amazon.com/Miracle-Mindfulness-Introduction-Practice-Meditation/dp/0807012394• ...References continued at: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.arthurbrooks.com/office-hours⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠—Production and marketing by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://penname.co/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.

Spotify, it's Jay Shetty. Are you one of those media strategy people? Scrolling through spreadsheets, searching for an audience that pays twice as much attention to your ads than they do on social? Let me introduce you to fans. And they're here with me on Spotify. Trust me, I know fans. They don't skip. They stay for hours.

They don't move on. They manifest. They're not a demographic group. They're fans. Spotify advertising. You're among fans. As a kid, I would come home from school and I would practice my French horn and then I would paint with my mother and it was just bliss. But my mom was better than me, not just because she was older, but because she had more ability.

I remember asking her, I was probably 13 or 14 years old, how I could improve as an artist. She said, look deeply at the thing you're trying to draw that you want to draw. Think about it and look at it again. Stare at it. Look at the nuances. Then try. Savoring experiences in life, neutral experiences. good experiences, even bad experiences, can be fundamentally game-changing in your well-being.

One of the biggest ways that we miss our happiness is that we're not here, we're not fully alive. And I promise you that if you learn to savor your life, your life's going to change. Hi, friends, welcome to office hours. I'm Arthur Brooks. This is a show about how you can lift people up and bring them together in bonds of happiness and love using actual science and ideas. This is a show that actually shows you how research can be in the public interest and indeed your interest. If you want to lift people up, if you want to help people to become their best selves, this shows for you. Why do it? I want to be happier.

I want you to be happier. I want you to help other people to be happier. And furthermore, this is not just a self-improvement idea. This is one that's actually based in data, and that's what we'll be talking about. This is an evidence-based program about how to lead your best life. Hope you've enjoyed it so far. If you do, please recommend this show to other people. hit like and subscribe wherever you're listening or watching the show that actually helps the algorithms

find other people as a matter of fact and and I appreciate you doing that an awful lot if you have questions or criticism or comments we want to hear it leave it in the notes leave it in the comments sections wherever you're consuming this content or send me a note at office hours at arthurbricks dot com don't forget to leave a review we want to know what you think and once again that's really helpful to the show so that we can continue to spread as we are bigger audiences almost every week So thanks to you for that. Hey friends, a lot of you know that I keep a very high protein diet. That's important for me in my 60s because I want to maintain a good level of muscle protein

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I started buying David Protein bars, and now I'm pleased that they're sponsoring this show as well. So whether you're on the go or hitting the gym, if you're trying to meet your protein targets, David Protein is a good way for you to do it. That's why I'm doing it and is what I'm carrying when I'm on the road. So head over to Davidprotein.com slash Arthur. They've got a special offer for you. If you buy four cartons, they'll give you the fifth carton for free. You're going to love that. And you can also find David Protein in stores by looking for the store locator. So enjoy. 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. They have families. They've checked the boxes. And yet, something feels off. Why 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. 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. 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 a question. questions that actually matter. If what I'm describing sounds familiar, I hope you'll come take a look. I'm recording this a little bit before Mother's Day, 2026. It's going to play pretty close to Mother's Day,

as a matter of fact. And so you're probably thinking about mom, whether mom is still alive or not. And I hope you had a good experience growing up with your mom. I hope you love your mom. Everybody deserves to, for sure. Not everybody does. I want to tell you a little story about mine, not because this is a show about Mother's Day, but because this is going to help me explain a very important phenomenon for your happiness. My mother was my late mother. She died relatively young, 73. She suffered a lot because she was very ill for most of her life, as a matter of fact. She was, however, a terrific artist. She was an artist of some renown in the Pacific Northwest. I grew up in Seattle, Washington. And she was a terrific mixed media artist. Many people in the Pacific Northwest

own her paintings. She did this to the exclusion of most other things over the course of her life. She was also an amateur violinist and pianist. So she was really into the arts and a creative soul, to be sure. One of the reasons that she was so dedicated to her art, if you've been a listener of this program over the last few weeks, you'll recognize this argument. It is that when you participate in the production of beauty, you illuminate the right hemisphere of your brain and you find the meaning of her life. When my mother would wake up in the morning, she was she was really in a lot of agony. She suffered from tremendous mental health problems.

And I mean, every day was a chore. It just was. And then she would come down and have a cup of decath. Because of her medication, she couldn't take caffeine. And she would have a little breakfast. And then she would head up to her studio. And life started at that moment. She was a different person.

It was extraordinary, as a matter of fact, how I saw that. And she was a great artist. She was fantastic. She had excellent technique. If she decided to paint a naked guy holding a guitar, much to my mortification as a teenager, it actually looked like that. And it was beautiful to boot, I guess,

although once again as a teenager, I wouldn't have been able to discern that. Now, growing up, I was very interested in the arts myself. I was more of a musician. As a matter of fact, I made my living as a classical musician for many years until I was 31 years old. But I was interested in all different kinds of creativity. I wrote stories and poetry.

and I painted with my mother. As a kid, I would come home from school and I would practice my French horn and then I would paint with my mother and it was just bliss. I loved it too. Not knowing, of course, that my little right hemisphere was fully illuminated

and I was experiencing the meaning of my life. But my mom was better than me, not just because she was older, but because she had more ability. I remember asking her, I was probably 13 or 14 years old, how I could improve as an artist that I expected her to say,

do it a lot, did the reps, which certainly is true. That's not what she told me. She said, here's the reason that people can't draw. Here's the reason. Because they actually never look at the thing they're trying to draw. She said, look deeply at the thing you're trying to draw, that you want to draw. Think about it and look at it again. Stare at it. Look at the nuances. Then try. So I was actually trying to draw a tree. Simple thing, right? And I would look at it and try to draw the tree. It didn't look like a tree. Didn't look very good at all. Then I really stared at it. I really took in the details of what I was looking at. I was, I wasn't relying on my brain to fill in the details. I was actually observing the details, the contours, the colors, the shadows. And I drew a pretty good tree. Now, here's the point of that. I was also happy. I remember being really happy, not because the tree looked good, because the whole experience was rich. What was that? It turns out that that was an experience. of what we call savoring. Savoring experiences in life,

neutral experiences, good experiences, even bad experiences, can be fundamentally game-changing in your well-being. And that's what I want to talk about today. In our hustle and grind culture where everything is fast, where we're distracted constantly,

one of the biggest sources, one of the biggest ways that we miss our happiness, as we're not here, we're not fully alive. Now, this is not, just a call for some sort of mindfulness meditation technique. This means simply savoring life as it's happening right now. I want to tell you why it's so important and I want to tell you how you can do it in your ordinary life. And I promise you that if you learn to savor your life, your life's going to

change. Let's start off with some basics of what savering actually means. Savoring is to pay attention and to say, I want to be doing this right now. I want to be fully absorbed in this thing right now. That's what savoring really is. So you savor the experience of eating a piece of chocolate. You don't just gobble it up. You actually put it in your mouth and you taste it on your tongue and you feel the texture of the chocolate and you're conscious of it. That's smooth, that's sweet or whatever it happens to be. That's what savoring really is all about. Or if you savoring, moments with your beloved before you say goodbye, you're experiencing the look in her eyes and the the smell of her skin, and you're conscious of that. That's what savoring really is. Now, there's been a

lot of research on how that affects you psychologically, how that affects you neurophysiologically. And it's pretty interesting what researchers have come up with when you're savoring, when you're paying attention, when you're immersive, when you're here now on something, neutral, or perhaps even negative, I'll get to that later. Actually, it stimulates the reward processing centers in your brain. Your brain's ventral striatum. There's two parts of your limbic system that principally are responsible for you feeling pleasure.

What is the ventral striatum? The other is called the ventral tegmental area. You tap those things. Now, they're very thrifty, which means there are lots of ways to tap it. If you say, if my wife says to me, I just love you so much, it will tap these pleasure centers.

and I'll say, joy, right? That's positive emotion. If I had a huge bump of cocaine, it would do the same thing because of my thrifty brain. By the way, I don't do that. But you get the point that I'm actually trying to make. So when you savor, you will actually stimulate that ventral striatum, that part of your brain, and there's interesting research on that, that, of course, as always I'm going to put into the show notes. This is a paper called Savoring the Past.

Positive memories evoke values representation in the striatum from neuron, which is a terrific journal, neuroscience journal. So all you have to do to do that is to pay attention and say, I want to be paying attention to this. I like paying attention to this. And then really look like I was looking at that tree that day. You can even savor completely ordinary things. Like, right now, I am walking to the post office.

That's the essence of what the great Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Ticknhat Han. Of course, one of the most famous Buddhists in the world, a Theravada Buddhist among Vietnamese. When he wrote his famous classic, The Miracle of Mindfulness, which starts off with this just an explanation, this description of washing the dishes. When I'm washing the dishes,

I should be fully present in the act of washing the dishes. What he's saying is savor washing the dishes. Don't rush through it. Be fully present. Be saying, this is what I'm doing now. I like the fact that I'm savoring this. I like the fact that I'm fully present. And that will stimulate.

Once again, I'm here to tell you, that's going to stimulate your pleasure centers. You're going to get pleasure from washing the dishes, but only if you savor washing the dishes. The second thing that it does, this is an interesting study from 2022, is it lowers symptoms of depression and increases higher levels of reported happiness.

Probably that's related to the first effect that I talked about, because when you stimulate the parts of the limbic system that elicit the feelings of joy, that's not consistent with the affective pain that we actually get, which is the activation of that. the anterior cingulate cortex, the different part of the limbic system. And third, it leads to these higher levels of reported happiness not in looking at people's brains, but just asking for people's experiences.

There's one study where researchers ask human subjects to record the frequency and intensity of their daily positive experiences. Half of the subjects in these experiments were asked to savor their events in their lives, to be fully present, to be paying attention. And they found that these subjects were significantly happier after the experiment than those who are not given any specific instructions. In other words, if I just remind you to be fully present, you're going to be happier. You're going to enjoy your life more. This is especially clear for people who experience, here's the irony, for people who experience fewer positive events. In other words, if you're living a life that is

tough and you're going through a really tough time right now and you savor the moments that you like you know this all of us go through these things you're really stressed out or really really too busy or but there's going to be a moment like you know the sun coming through the clouds a little bit you stop me and say yeah sunshine on my face and you savor it that will have a disproportionately joyful impact on you the less good there is the more good you get that's one of the benefits of savoring it also leads to happier memories later on, which is interesting that the more that you savor the present, the more you're going to remember the present when it becomes the past. Because you lay down more intense memories than the hippocampus of your brain. The episodic memories are actually

more distinct when you savor them. It makes perfect sense, doesn't it? You remember the things where it feels like time slowed down because you were fully present. By the way, this is one of the reasons that when you're in the middle of a car accident, it feels like time slows down, because you're laying down hugely complex memory tracks in those moments, you're savoring the experience of getting T-boned by a semi or something, which, you know, not so great, I suppose. Actually, more on that later, because I want to tell you how negative events can be savored much to your advantage as well,

but we're not there yet. So savor more, have happier memories later. Now, this is important. This one's really important to me personally. I'll tell you why. I don't have very many happy memories. It's not like I had some trauma, some terrible childhood, but I don't have happy memories. I just don't.

I don't like remembering the past. I don't like looking at childhood photo albums. I don't like it. I don't like looking in old videos. It just bugs me. It bothers me. It makes me uncomfortable to do that. I mean, I practically don't drive looking in the rearview mirror.

I'm a dangerous driver. But, I mean, I go through life, not looking in the rearview mirrors through the windshield of the car. It's just for some reason that's how I'm wired. I don't like talking about the good old days. So it's hard for me to keep up with my old friends, as a matter of fact, because just past, I don't know. I mean, I have this one set of really, really happy memories. When somebody says, what are your happiest memories from childhood? They're all the same thing.

I used to go down to the Oregon coast with my Aunt Marie and Lincoln City, Lincoln City, Oregon. And it's funny because those of you who have been a longtime viewer of the show, you know that I'm great friends with Rayne Wilson, the actor. And his wife grew up going to the Oregon coast in the exact same places as me. me and we reminisce about that actually, which is sweet and really good. But generally, I don't like it. I don't like that. And what I've learned from the literature, this is how I try to engineer my own life is by using the research to live better, is right now what I'm trying to do with my life is savor more now because I want better memories. I don't want to be the kind of guy that can't remember the past in a positive way. So why is it hard? Why don't we naturally do it?

If this were such a great thing, then we'd be savoring everything all the time and life would be sweet, right well it's hard because we're not evolved to savor anything we're evolved to rush through everything and pay attention to the negative that's what we're designed to do now why you as a viewer of the show you know that i rely a lot on evolutionary biological and psychological um arguments and because they're compelling and because they're more nearly right we have brains that were designed in more or less our current form something like 250 000 years ago in the late place the scene era. And that was a dangerous time to be homo sapiens. You know, you had to pay attention a lot. You're going to be a wild animals lunch. There was no law. Somebody could come in, you know,

take your buffalo jerking animal skins and, you know, kill you summarily if you're not paying attention. So we have more brain space dedicated to negative emotions and positive emotions. That's what gives us what we call the negativity bias in our lives. Negativity bias means that life isn't that great all the time. But it, we're more likely. to get to tomorrow, we're more likely to survive the night. That makes perfect evolutionary sense that your suspicious, nervous inner troglodyte is trying to survive and pass on your genes. So you're not a saber-tooth Tigers lunch. But that negativity bias is now maladapted. It's basically an error that we would do that, that we would not savor, but rather that we would be suspicious

and vigilant and trying to get into the future as quickly as possible. That's a survival tactic that and actually leads to happiness. One quick note, Mother Nature, who did that, doesn't care if we're happy. That is an important thing to keep in mind. Mother Nature wants us to survive and pass on our genes. But that's why we have a wonderful prefrontal cortex so that we have decisions. We can make conscious decisions, not just to live according to our animal impulses, but to live up to our moral aspirations. That's the beautiful thing about being human. That even though I have a negativity bias, I can override it with my consciousness. And that's what we're talking about here. savoring is rebelling against yourself.

And oh, how freeing that is, isn't it? Stand up to your worst impulses? It's an error because a negative disposition, it's maladaptive today because the negative disposition makes us error-prone neuro predictions. You're always going to over-predict the worst. You're going to be going to assume the worst all the time. And that's a heck of a way to live.

And it lowers our quality of life, to be sure, of course. Lots of interesting work on this, by the way. I'll put in a great argument. in the notes titled the brain is adaptive not triune how the brain responds to threat challenge and change and and that's in psychology therapy and psychobatics it's a nice article so savoring is the secret to great happiness but it doesn't come naturally how are you going to savor your life more and and that's what I want to tell you now what are the techniques for actually savoring more what are the techniques for overriding your negativity bias your tendency

to rush into the future to not pay attention and savor the ordinary moments of your life that you actually need. And I'm going to give you three ways to do it. Three ways that you can savor your life more. Number one, technique number one for savoring your life. Do it in all three time zones. Okay, now, what do I mean by that? I don't mean literal time zones. I'm talking about savoring the past, savoring the present and savoring the future. This comes to the work of the psychologist Fred Bryant who created something called the savoring beliefs inventory, which asks people to talk about their tendency to seek and enjoy positive experiences and memories.

And so how does he talk about it? Richness of reminiscence. In other words, what do I need to do as somebody who struggles with the past? Is think back to the past and think, what was good about that? And you know what? I just did that and the opening to the show, didn't I?

I mean, I could have talked about the fact that my mom was sad all the time. It seemed to be as a little kid sometimes. She wasn't sad all the time. She was painting beautiful paintings. and those were moments of bliss for her. And I remembered that on purpose. Why?

Because I was savoring the memory of me savoring the present. This recursive structure created by time travel, the prefoldal cortex. It's a miracle, isn't it? A able to edit my memory in this particular way, in a positive way. Richness of reminiscence is doing exactly that. It's to savor the past on purpose by paying attention to the positive parts. And by the way, the editing of memory is a very interesting area of research. you know, you can say, oh, yeah, you know, Thanksgiving of, you know, 1996.

That's when, you know, Uncle Chet, he, you know, got so drunk and he barfed in the front yard and went and beat up the neighbor. There was something good that happened that day too, probably. I'm just going to guess. Second time zone is the present. And that's the degree of conscious enjoyment. That's really kind of the main focus of what we're talking about here, savoring the present, being here fully, thinking. about the good that is in this, the experience, the full experience. You know, that's, that's that, full experience has almost theological overtones, the great Catholic Saint Iranas of the second

century. His most famous quote is that the glory of God is a man fully alive. And to be fully alive is to be fully present. Why? Because only in the present can you love. You can't love in a different time. You can't love in the past or love in the future. Love is now. If you're not here now, you're not loving. By the way, important for your relationships. Why should you savor your marriage? Because she needs love, and so do you. And then here's the third time zone, the future. And that's something to look forward to. That's keenness of anticipation. Now, a little of this can go a long way. According to Marty Seligman at University of Pennsylvania, you, the average homo sapiens spends 30 to 50% of the time thinking about the future because

it's incredibly adaptive. You practice future scenarios, see the dangers, come back to the present and don't choose those roots into those paths into the future. That's how we, that's why human beings are so awesome is because we're able to make mistakes in our minds and not make them in real life. And so the average person is literally 30 to 50% of the time in the future. but the average striver, and I'm looking at you, and I'm kind of looking at the mirror,

spend something like 80% of their time in the future. These are estimates. Your results may vary, as they say in the commercials. But if you're 80% of your time of the future, and it's all castles in the sky, this can go a long way. But if you're the kind of person who lives with a little bit of dread, then thinking about things that you can look forward to

is all about the savoring of the future. So you've got to figure out, is that your challenge or not. If it's not your challenge, good. If it is, that's what to do. You don't have to really choose. I recommend that you choose all three, but I do recommend that you think, once again, as I'm emphasizing here, that one of these things is harder for you, and that's what you should actually work on.

If you have a hard time being here now, then present saving is important. If you have a hard time in the past, you need to edit your memories. That's me. If you have a hard time actually getting out of the future, right? Or if you have a hard time actually not being in the future because you have so much dread, then that's what you need to is to find something you look forward to. What do you need to do? What's your challenge?

What's the time? time zone in which you need to savor. Go do that. That's number one. Number two is to expand your repertoire of savoring techniques. This is great stuff from 2010 where psychologists found four savering techniques that were really, really effective. So here's your savering chops. Here's how we're going to put it together. Number one is what they call behavioral display, which means expressing positive emotion with nonverbal behaviors. Here's the deal. Smile, even if you don't feel it. I think I've mentioned it on the show before, the Duchenne smile, which is the only smile that's actually associated with true human happiness. It involves two sets of muscles in the face. The Zygomatic

is major and the orbicularis aculi muscles. You can actually simulate that by holding a pencil in your teeth like this. And kind of God, because happiness is seen in the eyes and not in the mouth. That's the Duchin smile. That was invented. That was no. That was named, discovered and named by a physiologist named Duchenne because he wanted the happy smile to be named after himself, of course. But you can do that, by the way. I mean, you can put the pencil in your molars and go grin in the mirror that way. You'll, you'll fool your brain. You'll be happier because of this behavioral display, because of what you're doing. This is actually a savering technique in its own way. Smile more. Pretend you're happier. Go act happier. Behavioral display is number one way to

to savor. When you're doing something, behave with joy. Second, it be present, which is mindfully focusing on the pleasant experience. And what that means is saying to yourself, I am doing this thing. I am sitting on the train looking out at a beautiful seascape, if that's what it is. Being present means actually saying the thing to yourself because you want to bring it from your subconscious into your prefrontal cortex, into your, you know, consciousness where you're really thinking about something. And the way to do that is by saying it. And it's really unbelievably effective. There's a famous piece of avant-garde music from the 1970s by a French composer named Alvin Lucierge called I am sitting in a room. And the whole thing is just, I am sitting in a room. And he talks about

sitting in the room. It's just like studying and savoring and over and over and over and over again. I thought, how silly. And now I'm thinking, I kind of like it. So say what you're doing to yourself. That's number two. Number three is capitalizing. which means talking about and celebrating positive experiences with others. So don't just say it to yourself. Say it to other people. Talk about the experience that you're actually having, notice things to other people,

which makes this even more conscious, even more concrete, even more permanent. And last but not least is what they call positive mental time travel, which is, once again, vivid reminiscence or anticipation of positive events, just what I talked about in the last one. So those are your four techniques, your repertoire for savoring.

Number three, I'm going to talk about how all this works for me, right? Okay, so this is kind of how I'll put it together. I promised you three. It's actually two, but now I'm going to talk about how I'm trying to do this in my own life. Here's how I do it. I use the research that I'm talking about by starting my morning with a quick reflection on two or three things that I'm looking forward to, right, when I wake up in the morning. The first thing that I do is I say a prayer.

That's how I start my day. At some point in the show, I'll give you my daily prayer if you're interested. Put it in the notes if you are. If you're not, say, don't do that. Okay. But then I reflect on two or three things I'm really looking forward to. And for me, it'll be my morning workout routine. I just, I want to do it, man. I'm just super grateful to wake up and be able to go out of the gym, even when I'm tired. I'm getting to do this podcast, having dinner with my wife, whatever it's going to be, whatever that day is going to bring, just kind of looking ahead a little bit, savoring that. I imagine each of these events vividly for a few seconds, and I make an effort to smile when I'm doing it. Because what I'm doing, I'm neurocognitively, programming myself to savor that thing, to remember it more, to imprint it in a positive way, so that the episodic memory of that event when it actually becomes the past will be positively valenced. Boy, there was a lot of jargon in that last sentence. Forgive me for that. And then finally, before I go to bed, I think back vividly on each one of these experiences when it is now a memory

with a sense of gratitude. And I'll express that gratitude with whoever I'm with, and it's almost always with my wife. At luck, when I'm going to sleep, it's either with my wife or I'm alone. Now, I screw this up. I fail to carry this out because my caveman limbic system wants to hijack the process and wants me to worry about somebody looting my cave and stealing my jerky and animal skins. And so I start again. And that's how I try to live. So forth are good. One last note. I promised you I was going to talk about savoring bad things too. The research focuses entirely on savoring pleasant events and experiences. But there are difficult parts of your life. And if you see, savor them correctly, these can be unbelievably enriching as well. And here's why I recommend

you do that. Here's the say you savor the bad. I've mentioned this briefly, but I want to bring it up again in the show. I keep a failure journal. Look, everybody has a lot of failure in their life, disappointment in their life. Lots of things are happening. You don't like. When something bothers me, I write it down. Now, sometimes they keep it electronically, and sometimes I keep it in pencil and papers, but actually better in pencil and paper, you're more likely to remember it. But I leave two blank lines under each entry. And I come back to the first one after a month. I go back and I read the thing that bothered me. It might be something stupid, right? It might be something kind of important. But I come back and I say after a month, after that first blank line,

and I write down what I learned in the intervening period, thanks to that bad experience. There's always something. It might be, you know, I thought that the argument that I had with somebody I care about, which really bummed me out. I thought it was going to bum me out for a long time, but I actually stopped thinking about it almost immediately and didn't hurt the relationship. I learned that. How interesting. Then after another month, I'll go back to the second blank line that I left after the entry, read it again and read the thing I learned, and then write something positive, something good that happened as a result of the experience. I might say, we ended up making amends and our friendship was actually stronger as a result of that. A good thing happened as a

result of our ability to make amends, which deepened our relationship. Now, trust me, if you give it a bit of thought, you'll have something worthwhile to say about almost any negative event. You're not going to say, I'm glad it happened, but you might. And you're going to get benefit from learning and benefit in creating a more positively valenced memory from that, which is a form of savoring of something negative, which will add depth to your life, learning to your life, growth to your life. And that's something that makes every minute of your life worthwhile. Let's finish with a couple of questions. This comes from Eugene Zauau.

Thanks for the email. How should someone earlier in their career think about intentionally maintaining and investing in relationships when so much of the feedback and momentum is pulling them toward work? Okay, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I get it.

Eugene, we're all strivers, aren't we? Workaholics, I get it. And the answer to that is actually the work of Yosef Piper. I've done a podcast before on the importance of leisure. Yosef Piper said that there's three kinds of leisure. They do not include chilling on the beach. Because I tell you, fellow strivers, you go to the beach,

and like the first couple of hours, you'd be like, this is awesome, it's so nice and more. And by the third hour, you're like, I want to go back to work. I want to go back to work. Why? Because your monkey mind is going to be back in the office or in front of your laptop or whatever it is. This is how you're wired.

I get it. Yosef Piper, the German philosopher, said that you should engage your leisure, which is defined as generative positive activity for which they don't pay you. That's leisure. Three kinds of things. Deepening yourself spiritually, deepening your relationships, and learning something deeply. That's the three things to do. And so that's actually how to think about that, how to not go back with your monkey mind in the office because you're dedicating yourself to something that's meaningful under these circumstances.

And you need that kind of leisure. William Page writes in to the office hour's email address, how would a person raised in a non-religious family choose a religion to be? begin your recommendation to start first practicing. Yeah, that's good. That's good. I mean, it's funny because it almost sounds like, oh, man, there's just so many choices out there. It's like going to the supermarket and deciding what kind of breakfast you're at. And William, I know that's not what you mean, but, you know, look, it's a, it's a huge world out there, right? The most important thing that you're telling me is that you want something, that you know there's something deeper and that you're looking for something. Here's the algorithm. Start by reading.

Then start by observing, like a front row seat. And then, start by practicing a little and only then start believing and last but not least maybe start feeling that's the way to think about it a lot of people when they're when they're looking for they know they need some sort of a faith or life philosophy at least or coherent spirituality they say i got to i'm going to feel something no no no no that's the wrong way to think about it feelings are just the activity of your limbic system that's not how you should pursue your marriage either is by saying i got to feel it all the time you're going to end up divorced no no it's really all about finding something that you're can practice every day, believe a lot and occasionally feel. That's your marriage and that's

the religion that you'll actually find if that's what you're in the market for. And the way to do that is by doing the work, is by learning, which is by reading and then observing because it's not enough just to read. You have to observe. And then actually experimenting with practice. From there, belief will come and occasionally feeling as well. Good luck on your journey. Last but not least, and I don't know how to pronounce this one. I'm sorry, Masiege-Buzuk. was enough. In your research and experience, what is the most important

for someone in a situation of high competence, genuine contribution, but a persistent inability to translate inner value and to add a reward. Now, this sounds an awful lot like you've got an adolescent kid who is unbelievably smart,

I'm just guessing here, unbelievably smart, really, really creative, but not posting, like in school and in life, not maybe launching as a young adult. And the answer to that is fundamentally to help that person, even if it's you, to find calling. And the way to find calling is the two questions of meaning. This is the meaning exam that I've talked about in the show before. Think deeply about this. Where do I need to go and what do I need to do

to find the answers to the two questions, why am I alive and for what would I die? Why am I alive? And for what would I die? Maybe that's who created you. Maybe it's what you're on earth to do. And most importantly, for what would you give your life? What are you going to do? Where are you going to go? What are you going to read? Who are you going to ask? What experiences are you going to have? So you can find the answers to those two questions.

When you do, what you will find is your calling. That's what you're supposed to be doing. And that will solve the problem of high competence and low performance, virtually always. We're done. Let me know your thoughts at office hours at arthurworks.com. Like and subscribe on Spotify and Apple and YouTube and leave a comment. We want to hear it. Negative positive.

We like it all. follow me on Instagram, LinkedIn, the other platforms. There's all kinds of content over there that's in shorter form. But it will reward your scrolling as opposed to frittering away your time, I promise. Order the meaning of your life, my new book, to learn more about all the topics I'm talking about here. And last but not least, happy Mother's Day. See you next week.