Office Hours with Arthur Brooks - The 3 Macronutrients of Happiness, and How to Measure Yours

Starting point is 00:00:00 What is happiness? What are the biggest mistakes that people actually make? What are the personality types? What are the genetic components of happiness? For example, I ask people all the time. What do you want? What do you want? I want to be happy. And I want my kids to be happy. And I say, sorry, you can't get that. What are you talking about? Isn't that what you do for a living? Yeah. But you can't be happy because to be happy in some perfect state of happiness suggests something that's entirely misguided about happiness. If they want to be happy, why can't they find it? I mean, the one thing that everybody really wants, you'd think with all the human ingenuity out there

Starting point is 00:00:35 that we would have figured it out. It would be sold on the internet or provided by the government or something like that. And the reason why that's not true, why the one thing that we want is so horribly elusive has to do with the nature of what happiness is and the mistakes that we tend to make in trying to find it. Hi, friends. Welcome to Office Hours.

Starting point is 00:01:01 I'm your host, Arthur Brooks. If you've been watching this show for a long time, you know that we have a singular purpose of lifting people up and bringing them together in bonds of happiness and love. We need happiness professors in this world, and my job is to help you, well, help yourself so you have more love and happiness

Starting point is 00:01:17 and also bring it to other people. That's why this is a show not just about, well, self-improvement, but also about the science and how you can use it in the public interest. As always, if you have questions about the happiness science or anything else I talk about on this program where you just want to feed back, please do look at the, use the email address.

Starting point is 00:01:35 It's right printed below or above me right now, office hours at arthurbrooks.com. Or you can actually leave comments wherever you're watching or listening to this show on Spotify or Apple. While you're there, please just subscribe so that you get an automatic notification. And also it does us the favor of being able to see exactly how many people are following the show. And the algorithms behind all this, they favor us a little bit more. Do subscribe to my newsletter. Every Monday morning, it's information that's complimentary. to the kind of information that you get in this podcast.

Starting point is 00:02:05 It's also delivered right to your inbox in a very succinct form, about 500 words. You can get that at my website, orthorbooks.com slash newsletter. Okay, what are we going to talk about today? Today is a refresher on the basic science of happiness because I've been getting a lot of comments and a lot of questions about why don't I actually go over the basic science that I talk about on the very first day of my classes at the university, for example, or when I'm talking to a large group of people that are uninitiated in any of this material. What is happiness? What are the biggest mistakes that people actually make? What are the personality types? What are

Starting point is 00:02:40 the genetic components of happiness? For example, the real basics. And this is important, because when you're going to hear this, you're going to see that this is not just gee whiz stuff. This is news that you can use. This is news that you actually need because the science actually leads into the habits. And we'll be talking a lot about those things today. Another thing I'll be talking about today is how you can measure your own happiness. Why? Because you manage what you measure. That's an old Peter Drucker management idea from business schools. If you can measure it, you're going to manage to it. So I want you to have more tools on how to measure happiness in various sorts of ways. And I'm going to give you a special tool for that if you listen until the end of the show. Okay. So what are we going to

Starting point is 00:03:20 start by talking about? Let's go with a real basic question I get all the time. People make an assumption when they come to my talks or they attend my classes or they see the show, for example, or read my books. You must be a really happy guy because you study happiness. But that actually is a misassumption. Why would I study happiness if I naturally had a lot of it? I know almost everybody in the business of teaching and writing about happiness. And a lot of them struggle, as a matter of fact. And that includes me. I don't have a natural gift for happiness. And for the longest time, I thought I was just a grump and I had a personality flaw. And perhaps I do. I I probably have plenty of those, but struggling with happiness is not one of them.

Starting point is 00:03:59 On the contrary, one of the things that the science has clearly shown over the years is that happiness has a very large genetic component to it. I don't want it to be true. I want to be able to control everything about my life through my habits, but the truth of the matter is that the genes really do play a role. Now, how do we know about this? Because there are a number of studies that look at identical twins that were separated at birth.

Starting point is 00:04:22 Identical twins are DNA carbon copies separated at birth and adopt. opted into separate families. That's not a diabolical Harvard experiment that just happened over the course of time, usually between the mid-1930s and mid-1960s. Now, of course, when they were reunited, when they found out systematically, because of the opening of records that they had an identical twin, this was a joyful thing. And you can go on YouTube and you can see really fun and delightful videos

Starting point is 00:04:47 of people finding their identical twin for the first time. But it's also a really good opportunity for social scientists like me to follow them around with clipboards and take data. Why? Because we want to know what part of the personalities and their experiences are genetically related or more related to the separate environments. And this is a great statistical milieu to do exactly that. So what do we know? The answer is that personality and things related to personality like happiness have a very large genetic component. Generally speaking, the components of your personality, your openness to experience, your conscientiousness, extroversion. agreeableness, neuroticism, they're between 40 and 80% genetic and your happiness too. A bunch of these identical twin studies as well as sibling studies and parent-kidies that are designed in a really good way show that something like 50% of your happiness and genetic. Now, what do I mean by that?

Starting point is 00:05:43 I don't mean how happy you are with respect to the things that are happening to in your life right now. I mean, your baseline mood level, affect level. That's kind of how you wake up in the morning most days. I mean, some days, some of you who are watching this, you wake up, or most days, you wake up and you're like, it's a great day. I want you to know that you're annoying. Most of the rest of us, we wake up and say, uh, ratitude, ratitude. I mean, it's an effort for a lot of people, and that includes me. So your baseline mood level on most days, that's about half genetic.

Starting point is 00:06:18 Your mother literally made you unhappy. Now, that might seem really depressing, but it isn't because the same data show all kinds of things are you just. and if you know your genetics, you can change your habits. And that's what I'm going to be getting to today. That's what this show is all about, is how to live with better habits such that when you know your genetic tendencies, you know your baseline, then you can actually work with it to be more effective in your journey for happiness. I'll give you an example, by the way, of how habits can manage your genetics. The same studies of identical twins show that about 50% of your tendency toward alcoholism is genetic. But if one of you writes to me and say, hey, Arthur, you know, both my parents are drunk,

Starting point is 00:06:55 and all four of my grandparents drank too much. So I'm doomed. I'm going to be an alcoholic. I've got a special new technology that can turn your genetic proclivity toward alcoholism to zero. It's the super, super high-tech thing way to do it. Here's the high-tech technique. Don't drink.

Starting point is 00:07:16 In other words, if you have a tendency toward alcoholism, but you don't drink, your habit has saved you from the genetic tendency. It's the same thing with happiness. happiness. When you know you and you're going to know yourself a little bit better when we get into this episode, you're going to know the kinds of habits that work best for you, the things that you actually need to do. That's why your tendency is not depressing. It's empowering, as a matter of fact, but that's only if you know the science. Okay. Now,

Starting point is 00:07:42 back to this question. Am I naturally a happy person? No, I'm not a naturally happy person. I'm on all the best personality tests and happiness protocols. I'm on lower than average, is what we find. I'm significantly below my students average, as a matter of fact. But here's the really big point. That's why I study happiness. And I eat my own cooking, man. I follow the things that I talk about in the show. And since I've been doing this full time for the past seven years, really looking at this, I've been writing about happiness for 30 years, but dedicating myself entirely to the study of the science of happiness and taking my own advice, my happiness has risen by 60%. Now you might say to yourself, Brooks, how do you measure happiness in 60%? It seems awfully precise.

Starting point is 00:08:27 You're going to find out at the end of the episode on how you can chart your progress too. So, stay tuned. Now, one objection that people often give at this point talking about, you know, my happiness, my happiness, like, man, it's so selfish. Why would I be so selfish just to worry about my own happiness? It's not selfish. The greatest gift that you can give to the people around you is to work on your own happiness. You know, people, parents will often say, I'm never happier than my unhappiest child. That's bad parenting. Why? Because nobody wants an unhappy mom. Nobody deserves an unhappy dad. Nobody wants an unhappy husband or wife. Nobody wants an unhappy boss. It's a gift to other people for you to work on your happiness. It's a selfish thing to not work

Starting point is 00:09:11 on your happiness. It's a question of basic ethics and getting along in the world. Your happiness is a gift to the rest of the world. Bottom line, nothing selfish about it. Now, back to some basics. Why do we want it? Well, that's a really actually deep philosophical question. And people have been talking about this, you know, basically forever. You can go back and talk about, you know, listen to Plato or Aristotle, suggesting that there's a basic tendency to try to find happiness somehow, but it's so deeply. elusive. There is no one who does not wish to be happy, declared St. Augustine in the year 426 of the Common Era. And most philosophers have simply assumed that that in point of fact is the

Starting point is 00:09:58 case. But here's the mystery. If you agree with that, which by the way, I do. People want to be happy. They don't always act like they want to be happy. People often act like they want to be horribly miserable. If they want to be happy, why can't they find it? I mean, the one thing that everybody really wants, you'd think with all the human ingenuity out there that we would have figured it out. It would be sold on the internet or provided by the government or something like that. And the reason why that's not true, why the one thing that we want is so horribly elusive has to do with the nature of what happiness is and the mistakes that we tend to make and trying to find it. That's really what I'm talking about here is that the weird nature. What is happiness? And why do we make so many mistakes in trying to find it? That's what I want to talk about. And I want to help you, because, you Because when you don't make the common mistakes and when you do know what it is, we're going to be clearing a bunch of barriers for you to actually become a much happier person. Here's the first big mistake, the first big conceptual mistake that people make. And I'm going to give you three big mistakes in this episode. So we'll come back to this a little bit later.

Starting point is 00:11:03 We'll review this at the end. But here's the first big mistake that people make that puts them on the wrong track. I ask people all the time. What do you want? What do you want? I want to be happy. and I want my kids to be happy. Got it.

Starting point is 00:11:14 And I say, sorry, you can't get that. Like, what are you talking about? Isn't that what you do for a living? Yeah. But you can't be happy, because to be happy in some perfect state of happiness suggests something that's entirely misguided about happiness, the belief that it's a destination,

Starting point is 00:11:32 that you can arrive at perfect happiness. Now, there is a possibility that you can arrive at perfect happiness, but that's a religious idea. That's the idea that something after life will give it to you. Here's the assertion that I think is beyond any sort of contradiction. Life on earth is not going to be perfectly happy. And the reason for that is because you have negative emotions. You have them for a reason. They exist in the limbic system of your brain as a threat warning system to you. The reason you feel anger and fear and disgust and sadness is

Starting point is 00:12:03 because you don't want to get eaten by a leopard. You need to feel fear. You need to feel sadness. So you will not be making decisions that will get you separated from the people that you love. We've talked about these emotions in a past episode, as a matter of fact, and we'll make sure that that's linked right here. If you want to go watch the episode on the use of emotions and the evolution of emotions, go back and watch that. But the bottom line is, if you didn't have negative emotions, you'd be dead in a week. They protect you like crazy. But they make perfect happiness impossible because you've got to have them and you're going to have them. The second thing is that life on earth has negative experiences, not just negative emotions,

Starting point is 00:12:41 had interactions with other people, things that don't go your way. That's life on earth. If you didn't have negative experiences, that's evidence that, well, you're already dead. And that's not actually probably the first choice for most of you right now. Negative experiences mean you're alive, which is one of the reasons that so many philosophers would like us to get into a state where we say, bring it on, including the pain. Because that's what it means to be alive and healthy, as a matter of fact. But it also means that happiness is not a destination.

Starting point is 00:13:13 I mean, it might be a metaphysical destination as in heaven, but it's not a destination during this life. Happiness is a direction. Here's the point. Your job is not to become happy. Your job is to become happier. The last book that I wrote, oh, the book that I wrote in 2023, I published it. I co-authored it with Oprah Winfrey. And Oprah was sort of new when we started working on this to the science of happiness.

Starting point is 00:13:37 Much of her work has been helping people and lifting them up, to be sure. But the science of happiness per se was kind of new to her when we first started working together. Not new to her now because she's become very sophisticated in it. But she asked me a question early on in our collaboration. She said, if happiness isn't the goal, what is it? And I said, well, it's getting happier. She said, well, you need a word for that. I don't know.

Starting point is 00:13:57 She said, happierness. Good. She's good with words. So that's really the direction of happiness is happierness. What we want is to get better at the skill, pass it on, change our habits, and thus, from week to week and month to month, and especially year to year, to be happier than we were before. That's what we really want. Now, that's actually possible.

Starting point is 00:14:19 That's a really, really important thing. We can actually do that, and so we want to talk about how to do that. First big question in trying to get happier. Believe it or not, this is the question that people often forget, and it's the most obvious question of all. What is happiness? What's the definition of happiness? And the answer to that is the most common second mistake that people make. The second big mistake that people make about happiness is misdefining it and so therefore looking for the wrong thing. If I said, you need to go to squim and you didn't know what squim was. It might be like a yoga class.

Starting point is 00:15:00 It might be a church around the corner, right? It's actually a city in the Olympic Peninsula in the state of Washington. And if you knew that, then you could actually set your goals toward doing something tangible to make progress. But if you don't know what squim is, you're going to be going in circles or you're going to be doing something completely counterproductive. Now, there's a long example, but you get the point that I'm making. If you actually don't know what happiness is and you think it's something that is not, you're not going to get happier. It's just basic common sense. And my guess is, a lot of you who are watching this, you don't know what happiness is.

Starting point is 00:15:35 I ask my students on the first day of class, what is it? What's happiness? And the first definition I typically get in, these are master students in business that are fancy university. They'll say, well, professor, I can't put it into words, but I know it when I feel it. Right. Or it's how I feel when I'm with the people that I love. Or it's the feeling I have when I'm doing the things that I really enjoy. And I say, beautiful, poetic.

Starting point is 00:15:58 wrong. That's the wrong definition because happiness isn't a feeling. People looking for a feeling you're going to be chasing their tails for the rest of their lives. They're going to be looking for a vapor. Remember, if you watch the show on emotions, you know that positive emotions, the feeling of happiness don't exist to give you a permanent nice day. No, no, they exist to show you that there's an opportunity and that you should approach that opportunity, like calories or potential mates or something like that is all biology is what it comes down to don't chase emotions and happiness isn't an emotion that's incredibly good news people who think their happiness is a feeling and just want that feeling and really feel like that feeling should persist they get so

Starting point is 00:16:45 frustrated with their lives they go to bed saying sure hope i hope i feel happier tomorrow and that's no way to live i don't want to live that way and you shouldn't live that way and good news you don't have to live that way because happiness isn't a feeling now happiness and feelings are related Positive emotions are related to happiness, but here's how they're related. Positive emotions are evidence of happiness. Just like your holiday dinner, the smell is evidence of the dinner. You walk into mom's house and that warm smell of cinnamon rolls and turkey or, you know, whatever's going on in mom's house, curry, whatever your mom makes.

Starting point is 00:17:23 And you say, oh, I'm home and love it so much, that's not the dinner itself. That's evidence of the dinner. That's evidence of good things to come and good things that have happened in the past. That's how feelings work. They're evidence of something more tangible. Don't content yourself with the smell of the turkey. You want the turkey itself. Now, let me continue with this metaphor.

Starting point is 00:17:42 What is your holiday dinner? Your holiday dinner, if it's not the smell, then you have to define it in a different way. If you could, if you're a really good cook, you could define it in terms of ingredients. Or if you're somebody who just like to eat, you could define it in terms of dishes. Or if you're a science nerd like me, you'd say, oh, dinner is, I don't care what kind of dinner it is. All food is simply a combination of protein, carbohydrates, and fat. Those are macronutrients. Everybody watching this show knows that because you know that I talk an awful lot about morning and evening protocols

Starting point is 00:18:13 and how fitness and wellness and happiness they all fit together and how the brain actually processes all that stuff. And so you know about macronutrients, most notably about getting enough protein, for example. Okay, back to happiness. That's just a metaphor. Happiness has macro nutrients as well. There are three macronutrients, and I'm going to make sure this is printed on the screen. And by the way, all this is in the show notes. I'm going to document all this stuff with the best science, many of the things that I've actually written in the Atlantic about this and other places,

Starting point is 00:18:42 so that you can read and go deeper into each one of these silos. The three macronutrients of happiness, which is to say the three things that you need and balance and abundance in your life, The three goals to actually be going for to become a happier person are as follows. Happiness equals enjoyment plus satisfaction plus meaning. Those are the three parts of happiness. And, you know, of good old Thomas Jefferson when he was writing the Declaration of Independence, he had taken my class, which, you know, he didn't because he apparently went to some crummy university. He would have said that we're endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights,

Starting point is 00:19:18 among them, life, liberty, and the pursuit of enjoyment, satisfaction, and means. meaning because those are tangibly the things that you need to go for. Furthermore, these are the things that you need to know where you have a deficit. Excellent news, folks. None of you is good at this. All of you can make progress in this. And what I want to do with what I talk about right now and the survey, the test, I'm going to give you the end of this is how you can discern where you need the most work. Now, maybe you kind of already know. Maybe you already know that you lack one of these macronutrients, but I bet you don't. And I'm going to give you the tools to figure out where you actually need more work. And right now I'm going to talk to you about how you can get better

Starting point is 00:19:58 at these things, as well as a bunch of other resources so that you can become an expert and enjoyment satisfaction and meaning and improve these, your macro nutrient happiness profile. Okay, let's start with enjoyment. Enjoyment sounds super easy, right? I enjoy, you might say you enjoy a glass of wine, you enjoy taking a sauna, you enjoy a walk in the park. Maybe so and maybe not. That usually is a mistake that people make between enjoyment and pleasure. Okay, now, now that's an important distinction because pleasure is actually not one of the ingredients in happiness. There's nothing wrong with pleasure inherently, but pleasure can be good or bad. Pleasure in the pursuit of pleasure can wind up subjugating you.

Starting point is 00:20:44 I mean, the end of the road for pleasure isn't necessarily happiness. It might be rehab. And you all know when you're thinking about, you know, your friends from high school whose search for unmitigated pleasure actually wound up, screwing up their lives, like hitting the pleasure lever over and over and over again. I've talked so much about the limbic system of the brain in this show again and again where the psychology is actually biology. The limbic system has a really interesting little piece in it called a ventral tegmental area as well as something called a ventral striatum.

Starting point is 00:21:12 Those are the things that you tap to get pleasure. And they're very frifty. There's lots and lots of ways to get pleasure from those things. know, if your soulmate says, I just, I love you with all my heart, it's going to tap those pleasure centers. You'll cap those pleasure centers similarly if you get a big, big old bump of cocaine. I mean, the brain is the brain. And if you actually hit the pleasure lever over and over and over and over and over again, pretty soon your life's goal will be to hit that continuously, which gives you more or less the same life goals as a squirrel or a golden retriever. And that's not

Starting point is 00:21:44 the highest levels of humanity, I dare say. That's certainly not moral aspirations. Now, there's nothing wrong with pleasure, however. The whole point, however, is to turn pleasure into enjoyment, which is a source of happiness, a macronutrient of happiness. That means moving from a sheerly animal limbic phenomenon, pleasure, pleasure, pleasure, ventral tag, mental area, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, to experiencing that in the prefrontal cortex of your brain, the tissue right behind your forehead.

Starting point is 00:22:14 I've talked about that a lot in the show as well. How do you do that? you do that by taking pleasure and adding two things. People and memory. Pleasure plus people, making it social, plus memory, making it something that you can govern and remember. That turns it into what we would think of as enjoyment, which is a more human sensation, a more human experience. At this point, of course, what that means is that that's something that you can, that you can experience over and over again because it's in your memory. And furthermore, it has your executive control over it so that you're managing your pleasures and

Starting point is 00:22:47 your pleasures aren't managing you. Now, you knew this already, even though I'm putting some more scientific language around it. When you see a beer commercial, for example, you'll notice they never feature a dude alone in his apartment pounding a 12-pack, right? Why not? Lots of people use the product that way. The answer is because that looks like the pursuit of pleasure, and it looks a little dangerous, a little sad, a little pathetic, and a little lonely, maybe even a little alcoholic. What do they show? I guess. guy, same guy, opening a beer with his brother or with his friends. Why? Because they're implicitly doing a good little bit of neuroscience in a commercial, which says, our beer plus your friends

Starting point is 00:23:30 making a memory together equals enjoyment and that's part of happiness. That's how you turn our beer into happiness. Now, you can use this yourself. There's something that you're addicted to, or not addicted to, but something gives you disproportionate pleasure that scratches these areas of the limbic system. For different people, it's different things. For you, it might be highly glycemic carbohydrates, junk food, for example. Maybe it is drugs and alcohol. Maybe it's internet use, scrolling social media long hours of the night. Maybe it's something dangerous for your brain like pornography. People have these sort of pleasure sensations that they get from things that they know are probably not leading them to their best life. If you're doing that, and it can be

Starting point is 00:24:14 addictive, most things can be, and you're doing it alone, you're probably doing it wrong. That's kind of the test. So that, and that might be everything from how you eat to your, your behavior online, to the way that you drink, to the way that you gamble, whatever it happens to be. Make it more social. Make it more of an experience that you can remember, and you'll be more likely to be turning it into a source of enjoyment, which will lead you to greater happiness. that's less than one. That's macronutrient number one. Macroninitrient number two is satisfaction. And I'm going to talk in a future episode all about satisfaction. So I'm not going to spend a whole bunch of time on this, but let me define satisfaction. Satisfaction is the joy that you get

Starting point is 00:24:58 from an accomplishing a goal after struggle. Now, homo sapiens were super weird. Homosapians are the only species that wants to struggle, that wants to sacrifice, that even wants, can in discomfort because that's part of the sweetness. It's an important point. I'm going to come back to this point in a minute. If your goal is getting rid of struggle in your life, you're not going to get satisfaction. You're just not. And the result is you're going to be hurting your happiness.

Starting point is 00:25:25 If your goal in life is to suffer as little as possible, you're not going to be a very happy person. That's my assertion. That's an important point, folks, because a lot of the modern therapy industrial complex around the world today is that if it feels bad, make it something. stop. There's something in my life that's giving me discomfort. That's something I obviously need to eliminate. I'm not saying that all of the mental health profession does that. Most don't, as a matter of fact, but you've got to be real careful about that because that will actually lead you to not achieve satisfaction in your life. Now, think about it in your own life. Think about it in terms of when you're in school. If you cheated to get an A,

Starting point is 00:26:02 there's no satisfaction in the A. But if you worked really hard to get the A, you're really proud of it. That's the satisfaction principle. Every parent teaches this to you. your kids. You know, Junior coming home from baseball practice says, mommy, mommy, I want to stop for ice cream. And mommy says, no, it's 4.30 in the afternoon. And junior's like, so what? And then mommy says, you'll spoil your dinner. And junior says, so, because junior's kind of smart. And then mommy lies. I mean, not really lies, but mommy gives the wrong explanation for why you shouldn't spoil your dinner. Mommy says, it's bad for you. You need a nutritious dinner and ice cream isn't nutritious. That's not the real reason. It's true. It's true.

Starting point is 00:26:40 probably, depends on the dinner. But here's the real reason. Mommy wants Junior to learn that when you come to dinner hungry, you enjoy your dinner, and that's a good life lesson. See, all these things wire up the kids' brain. All these things when a synaptically plastic state that is childhood and adolescence, these experiences that you're having give you lessons for life that can leave you to a happier life. And in this particular case, that happier life is all about deferring your gratifications,

Starting point is 00:27:08 delaying your pleasures because the pleasure would become much greater when you're hungrier for them and that requires struggle, that requires sacrifice, that might even require pain. Every one of you watching me here, if I say, tell me the source of your greatest satisfactions in life, you're going to tell me about something hard that you did, not an easy thing that you did. You might even tell me about tragedy and trouble in your life, as a matter of fact. I learned, I'm incredibly satisfied with what I was able to do when my company went bankrupt. what I was able to do with my life to find who I was as a person after I got divorced and I didn't want to get divorced or whatever it happens to be. That's such an important principle. That's the satisfaction principle.

Starting point is 00:27:50 Now, what I'm going to talk about in a future episode is why not why that's so weird. I'm going to talk about why it's so hard to keep our satisfaction. Nick Jagger's saying, I can't get no satisfaction. He should have saying, I can't keep no satisfaction. Now, you already kind of know your emotions don't exist there to give you a permanent good day. Your emotions are signals about what's going on and they wear off really, really fast. But what I'm going to give you in a further episode, a future episode, is the formula for satisfaction that hangs around. You get the prize, you hit your goal, whatever it happens to be, and so it doesn't go away. So the satisfaction lasts and last and last.

Starting point is 00:28:28 So you can have a life of satisfaction that hangs around. got to watch that episode because I'm going to literally give you the formula for making sure that you can keep your satisfaction. Stay tuned. Okay. Now, last but not least, the third macronutrient of happiness is meaning, the meaning of life. This is so important that my next book is entirely about the meaning of life. It's called The Meaning of Your Life, Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness comes out. March 31st, 2026, mark your calendars.

Starting point is 00:28:59 You don't really need to mark your calendars because, If you're watching the show, I'm going to bug you about it about a thousand times between now and then. And I've been thinking about this one for the last five years. And here's my assertion. I'm willing to go on record. The biggest reason for the explosion of depression and anxiety, especially for young adults under 35, is a growing inability to perceive and understand the meaning of life. It's that big a thing. Now, what the new book is about is what is the meaning of life?

Starting point is 00:29:26 What's the meaning of meaning? Where do you go to find it? why has it become suddenly, weirdly, so hard to find the meaning of life? And I've got the answers. I'm going to talk to you about technologically what the answers are. Now, in the run-up to that, I'm going to do a whole bunch of episodes about that. I'm not going to bother you about it right now, but suffice it to say, keep watching office hours, because I'm going to arm you with the ability within six months to find the meaning of your life and to help others find the meaning of theirs. And it's going to rock your world. I promise. I've seen it again and again. And it's been unbelievably

Starting point is 00:29:58 beneficial for me. Now, suffice it to say that there's a lot coming, but I do want to define meaning because it's so critically important. The meaning of life really is a combination of three phenomena that we call coherence, purpose, and significance. This actually comes from a couple of scholars that I'll put this in the show notes, those who have done the most important work on this, or social psychologists, one in Colorado and one in Finland, as a matter of fact. And my Steger, who's actually put together a really, really important test on the meaning of life. I'll put the show notes in that into the show notes as well. Fantastic social psychologist and a real shout out to Mike who's done this important work.

Starting point is 00:30:40 What are coherence, purpose, and significance? Well, they're really the answer to three questions. So you want to find the meaning of your life. You need to ask three why questions. Meaning is about why, not what and how to. What and how to? That's internet stuff. That's Google stuff.

Starting point is 00:30:55 That's AI stuff. What and how to? That's the reason that you can actually find the meaning of your life by using AI. Can't be done because they're not why questions. Okay. So there's three why questions that you need to live with, contemplate. You might not come up with good answers, but you need to understand. Question number one, this is coherence.

Starting point is 00:31:15 Why do things happen the way they do in my life? Why do those things happen the way they do in my life? And maybe your answer is religious, maybe your answer is scientific, maybe your answer is a bunch of conspiracy theories. I don't recommend the last. You need to contemplate that why question, why things happen the way they do in my life. That's part one of meaning. Part two is purpose.

Starting point is 00:31:35 Why am I going the direction I'm going in my life? Why am I doing what I'm doing today, this year? That's purpose. Do I have goals? Do I have direction? That why question of why I'm doing what I'm doing is super important. You don't have that. You don't have purpose.

Starting point is 00:31:49 Purpose is part of meaning. You're sunk if you don't have the answer to that. Or at least you have an understanding of that. Last but not least is significance. Why does my life matter? And to whom? Why does my life matter? And that's like, I don't know. Or it doesn't. That's a problem, right? Now, how do you find the answers to that? By living with those questions, here's the thing. Here's the thing. Humanity and the meaning of life are actually not about answering questions. This is what all the AI people get wrong. They think that AI is sort of human because they can answer all these questions that has so much human-like genius. That's wrong. Answering questions is not the nature of humanity. You can train a gorilla to actually do sign language and answer questions. I mean, Coco the gorilla, I'll talk about Cocoa the gorilla in a future episode because I've got a whole thing I want to talk about questions in a future episode. Coco, the famous gorilla, Google it, right? Had a thousand words of sign language and answered tons and tons of questions. That's not humanity. Humanity is actually what Cocoa the gorilla never did and what no non-human primate or any non-human

Starting point is 00:32:54 animal is ever done in history. Coco never asked a single question. You want to know what it makes, what makes you human? You want to know what makes you a person with meaning? It's questions, not answers. If you can type something into a Google search bar, it's not part of meaning. If you need to contemplate it with a deep why to look for the mystery, to look for the numinosity.

Starting point is 00:33:19 One of the things I'll be talking about a future episode is where that exists in your brain. and by the way, why it's getting harder to access that part of your brain, but most importantly, what you need to do to open up that part of your brain. So stay tuned, folks, the meaning of your life. Coming soon. Okay, now, next topic. Unhappiness. You might think that unhappiness is something I'm talking about implicitly because it's the absence of happiness. Duh. What's darkness? The absence of light? Wrong. That's not right at all. Remember in all the work on emotions that the positive and negative emotions. They're largely stemming from activity in the limbic system of the brain, but we've isolated the parts of the limbic system that are responsible for specific, basic, negative,

Starting point is 00:34:02 and positive emotions. Joy, for example, that ventral tegmental area, the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, when you're feeling sadness, for example, the amygdala, where you're feeling fear, where you're feeling anger, disgust at this whole little place called the insular cortex, aka the insula. I mean, it's really important to keep this in mind because you're positive and negative emotions, are actually being physiologically produced, their origin, is in specific brain regions for specific reasons. And that's more evidence that unhappiness is not simply the opposite of happiness, simply not the absence of happiness. Furthermore, the plot thickens when I point out that unhappiness and happiness depend on each other. Most specifically, you want to be a happy person,

Starting point is 00:34:46 you need to experience unhappiness. It's really important for the richness in this. It's like, If you ever eat a cake that they forget to put the salt in, you're like, something's wrong here. This isn't really good. I hate this cake. Or one of those cheap cookies that you eat someplace that doesn't have a little salty in it. It's one of the funniest things that in recent years, I love sweets. So I'm going to give you sweets analogy. Sorry, you know.

Starting point is 00:35:07 People love salted caramel, like sea salted caramel. If you told me that when I was a kid, it was like, that sounds gross. Now, it's actually super good. Why? Because the saltiness of it actually helps you to understand the sweetness and to savor the sweetness in a different way. That's biological, folks. That's not just all psychology. That's biology that's actually making that the case.

Starting point is 00:35:26 And that's true in every part of your life. Remember, the three macronutrients of happiness, they all contain some non-trivial amount of struggle in them, of displeasure in them, of sacrifice, even of pain in them. You know, easy pleasure is we sacrifice that for enjoyment. And enjoyment's harder. Deferring your gratifications as part of satisfaction. deferring your gratifications, that's hard. If you're putting off your gratifications for years

Starting point is 00:35:56 to meet your goals, that's a hard thing to do. And meaning, you find meaning in your life in the lowest parts of your life. My friend Bruce Filer, who wrote, Life is in the Transitions, I'll put it in the show notes. He shows that every 18 months, you're going to go through a major life transition, ordinarily, not of your choosing. And every five years, you're going to have what he calls a life quake, every five years. And it's always a huge surprise because you didn't, you didn't choose it. And so it's usually pretty unwelcome. And looking back on it, you know, that bad diagnosis from the doctor, that bad setback in your relationships. And the vast overwhelming majority of the cases, according to Bruce's work and all the best social psychology on this,

Starting point is 00:36:37 people look back on the same, man, I really grew from that. I really grew from that. I found meaning from suffering. Here's the bottom line. Unhappiness and happiness are not opposites. And one unhappiness is an ingredient. And the other. happiness. If I do my job, I want you to appreciate that a lot more. And that actually leads to the third big mistake that people actually make and their happiness journey. They try to eliminate their suffering and they're effectively eliminating their happiness by doing that. Their life feels like that cookie that doesn't have the salt in it. It doesn't have any taste to it. It doesn't have any fulfillment to it. It doesn't give any contentment. It doesn't give any source of a sense of

Starting point is 00:37:19 enjoyment, satisfaction, or meaning. I mean, maybe you don't get your meaning from cookies, but, you know, different strokes. The whole point is that if you're getting advice from somebody who says, ah, you're feeling some sadness and anxiety, that's evidence that something's wrong. No, it's evidence that you're alive. Now, it can be dysregulated, it can't be exaggerated, it can be a medical problem, to be sure. I mean, thank God for proper mental health care. That has saved the lives of people in my family. But let me tell you, your suffering is not. You're suffering is not your enemy, on the contrary, that your unhappiness, and we'll talk more in a future episode about unhappiness per se, because if you're interested in this, let me know, because I'll do a whole

Starting point is 00:37:59 episode on why we suffer and how we should understand that. If you want that, let me know in the comments. Okay, let's talk, therefore, since unhappiness and happiness co-exist necessarily, let's talk about your unique mix of happiness and unhappiness. This gets back to the show that we did on managing your emotions. This is your affect profile. So I'm going to go over that really quickly again. And again, we'll put in the show notes and a link to this, the episode, a popular episode in the show,

Starting point is 00:38:30 three steps to managing your emotions so they don't manage you. And in that episode, we talked about your affect profile, your unique mix of happiness and unhappiness, a.k.a. positive and negative emotions. Remember, emotions are not happiness and unhappiness, but we experience happiness and unhappiness with these emotions, to be sure, because they're evidence of the unhappiness and happiness that we feel. And I discussed this very famous test called PANIS, the positive affect, negative affect sequence. And you can find it on my website. You can find it all over the internet. You can take it yourself, and you can find your

Starting point is 00:39:05 affect profile. Okay. Now, you're unique in your own way, not because you have unique. emotions, everybody has the same basic emotions. The four basic emotion, negative emotions are fear, anger, disgust, and sadness. And the three positive emotions. And again, the positive emotions, as I mentioned before, are more contested. Emotion researchers, they kind of disagree about these. They don't disagree on the negatives, but on the positive. But joy, interest, surprise. There's not a million emotions. There's just like seven or ten, depending on your counting. I mean, it depends on if you really like that movie Inside Out. You might know. Notice that Inside Out 2 had more emotions than Inside Out 1.

Starting point is 00:39:43 The bottom line is there's a not an endless variety of them. And we all have the same emotions. Where we're unique is the intensity of those relative positive and negative emotions and what we do with them. So think about it this way. Emotionally, we're all given the same kitchen with the same appliances and the same ingredients. What we decide to do in that kitchen, what we're really good at doing, that's where we differ.

Starting point is 00:40:09 Okay. So that's really what I want to talk about. Your unique mix, your affect profile is the salience of your positive versus your negative emotions. You might be above average and positive intensity or above average and negative intensity or below and below. There's four combinations. And I want to talk about those real quickly because it's important for you to understand who you are, especially because I'm going to give you a test that you might want to take. that you understand how your personality works with your happiness and what your greater challenges are. Here's what I say when I mean your challenges. If you find that you're below average in positive emotionality, which is to say experiences of happiness, your goal will be to raise your happiness and all the stuff that we're talking about here. If you find that your intensity of negative emotion, which is to say your experience of unhappiness is above average, then your challenge is actually managing your unhappiness. And I've talked about in that past and past episodes about working on your spiritual life, about picking up heavy things and running around,

Starting point is 00:41:18 because exercise is one of the best ways to do that and things to avoid, like workaholism and drugs and alcohol to manage your negative affect. But you got to know who you are. This is absolutely crucial information that you need about yourself so that you can manage yourself in the best possible way and not make mistakes as well as getting really frustrated. Okay, so there's four basic emotional profiles. Number one is people who are above average in both positive emotion and negative emotion. These are high affect people. These are people who feel everything super deeply.

Starting point is 00:41:51 Everything is great or terrible. You know people like this. A lot of you are this. And I am too. I'm at the 95th percentile in positive affect. Really strong positive emotions. I'm at the 90th percentile and negative effect. Really strong negative emotions.

Starting point is 00:42:08 That's what drives my affect, my well-being numbers that were always below average. And for the longest time, I thought, oh, man, I just need to get happier. No, I needed to manage my unhappiness. That's what I needed to do. And learning the things that I talk about often in the show, and we'll talk about more, if you want, was revelatory for improving my quality of life. It was super important for me, and it can be important for you. if you are that high, high profile, which is called the mad scientist. The mad scientist profile is above average positive intensity of emotions and above average

Starting point is 00:42:43 negative intensity. Now, number two is the judge. The judge profile is somebody who's low, low, low intensity of negative, low intensity of positive. This is somebody who's cool as a cucumber. They're not freaking out all the time. And some of that's you. these people are super good at certain things. I mean, operating a nuclear actor, for example, running a hedge fund. But really more to the point, judges. You don't want a freaking out judge,

Starting point is 00:43:11 really, or a surgeon. I don't want to go to a surgeon. And, you know, when the surgeon has gotten me open on the operating table, they're like, oh, my God. I don't, that's not what I'm looking for in a surgeon. I want somebody who's like, yeah, okay, I can deal with this. You get my point. Third is the cheerleader profile. That's positive, intense, intense positive effect and weak negative in emotions, weak negative affect. Everybody wants to be that. And the truth is, these people tend to have the highest levels of well-being because they have

Starting point is 00:43:41 tons of positive, intense, positive emotion and weak levels of negative emotion. But that doesn't necessarily mean that we need a world full of cheerleaders. On the contrary, that would be not so great. Let me wait for a second to tell you about the relative strength and weaknesses of each one of these profiles and go to the fourth one, which is the poet. The poet is high, negative, and low positive. And these are the people who actually struggle the most. These are the people that have the absolute lowest levels of well-being, generally speaking. And once again, you might be thinking, well, I sure do want to avoid that.

Starting point is 00:44:14 Well, you probably can't because these affect profiles, they're not completely fixed. You'll move around in these quadrants a little bit. But you are who you are for all sorts of. of reasons and all sorts of beautiful reasons. And in point of fact, if you understand yourself and manage yourself appropriately, these can be a blessing no matter where you sit. Case in point. Mad scientists, they're great to have it a party. They tend to be very good entrepreneurs and CEOs because they dig in on everything. They're just like super into absolutely everything. On the flip side, they tend to be exhausting. They tend to exhaust their romantic partners and their kids or

Starting point is 00:44:48 their parents. And they can be exhausting to work for. So if you're a mad scientist, you need to manage yourself appropriately so you're not you're not exhausting everybody all the time the judges are they're cool i mean they're really really good under pressure they're naturally great under pressure which is wonderful on the other hand they tend to look kind of unmotivated they tend to look kind of unenthusiastic at times so if you're a judge there are times when you're going to need to dial up the emotionality to make sure that people don't think that you just don't care the poets are the ones who feel the most unfortunate but the truth of the matter is you know people don't want to be that. But the truth of the matter is, these tend to be very creative people. And there's

Starting point is 00:45:26 really provocative research about a part of the brain called a ventralateral prefrontal cortex. The VLPFC. I'll throw a good journal article into the show notes about the VLPFC if you're interested in this. And that's the part of the brain that you used to ruminate, sort of depressively ruminate. And if you have a very developed VLPFC, you're going to be a ruminator. You're going to be more of a poet. But that's the same part of the brain that you used to ruminate on a creative project, like a poem, symphony, a business plan. It's also what you ruminate on when you're in love. You're ruminating on the other person. And that's the reason, almost certainly the reason, this is the hypothesis, that a highly developed VLPFC in the poet profile is why you see depressed

Starting point is 00:46:11 people. They tend to be creative and romantic. Just like the old poet of, you know, the stereotypes, would suggest. Last but not least, and we need poets. The world needs poets. Last but not at least are the cheerleaders. Cheerleaders are great. They're super fun to have around. They'll always motivate you, but you need to self-manage because cheerleaders hate bad news and they can't give criticism very well. And you need to manage yourself so that you can, you're not bound by your, by your aversion to negative emotionality, such that you can do what actually needs to get done, especially if you're a leader. Okay. Now, scales on this. How do you measure it? I talked about the PANIS test. I have a new test that you can actually use. And I want to talk about this because this is going to tie all these things together.

Starting point is 00:46:53 We have a new psychometrically highly tested, validated test, and it's on the website, orthobergs.com, and you can take it. It's called the Happiness Scale. This is the first test of its kind that will give you three pieces of information. Number one is your overall well-being, which is the kind of the balance of happiness and unhappiness in your life with respect to the rest of the population. You'll understand kind of where you are, which is a good place to start your journey. Second, it will actually tell you in your happiness where you are with respect to the macronutrients because it breaks out enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. Super important, right? Because maybe there's somebody who's got great satisfaction because you're such a, you know,

Starting point is 00:47:34 you're so good at your projects and you've got tons of purpose and you're just values driven, but your meaning is just kind of okay and you don't enjoy yourself because you're a workaholic. Do you know? I mean, maybe you have a, maybe you have a clue. This test is going to tell you where you actually need to be spending your effort on which one of those macronutrients, enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. And last but not least, it's going to tell you whether happiness or unhappiness is your greater challenge by giving you your affect profile, which one of the four quadrants that you go into. And once you do, you're going to get a whole PDF back. You'll get a long report about you and your unique affect profile well-being levels and the strategies

Starting point is 00:48:14 you actually need to undertake, to appreciate what your strengths are. And, actually start to manage to your own natural affect weaknesses. Now, you can actually give it to your friends as well. In a future episode, I'll talk about how, for example, affect profiles fit together in couples. So I'm going to do a whole series of romantic love that's coming up. But the whole point is you got to know you and the happiness scale is a good way to do that. Okay. Now, I've talked enough in this particular episode about these basics. Many of these things I've hinted on about the past and I've given you a whole bunch of leads about things we'll be talking about in the future. But here's what I want you to remember. People misunderstand happiness. They really do. And they don't have as

Starting point is 00:48:53 much happiness as they want, even though that they want more of it because they make a bunch of mistakes. They think that it's a destination, not a direction. They think it's a feeling, as opposed to a combination of enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. These are important mistakes that we make. And probably the most important mistake that people make is they try to eliminate their unhappiness, not understanding that it's a key ingredient. It's the salt and the salted caramel. Okay. The second thing that I wanted to point out that I want you to remember is that happiness really has three macronutrients and you need to know where you are and your journey toward happiness by understanding your macronutrient profile. And those are enjoyment, satisfaction,

Starting point is 00:49:30 and meaning. And I defined all those things. And I want you to understand that in your life when you know that you have power. All right. Before we quit, let's do a couple of questions. We love to do this. I got a really good one from Jim, Jim D. And this is on email. Again, office hour. that Arthurworks.com. He turns out to be the first type one diabetic in his family, and he's 52 years old. And it's a problem for his happiness. For sure, I mean, it's a real barrier to your lifestyle, being able to do all the things that you want for sure. And it also can be scary and dangerous, as a matter of fact. But he really liked my morning routine and my evening protocol. And so how could he adapt it? Because I'm not diabetic, and that's a really smart question. If you have a particular health

Starting point is 00:50:14 impediment. How do you adapt the protocols to your particular life circumstances? Here's what I would recommend. Doctors, they do better when you're taking control of the management of your own health. And that means learn a lot and work with your doctor as opposed to simply being served by your doctor. You know, don't think of the doctor as the cook, rather get into the kitchen with the doctor on this. So get the guides. These are free PDFs on those two episodes. On the six-part morning protocol and the nine-part evening protocol, download those those guides and take them to your doctor. So if your diabetic, take it to your endocrinologist and say, I want to adapt these things. How should I do it with what I eat and the timing of my meals and with my

Starting point is 00:50:53 sleep, et cetera, et cetera. And I promise you, if you've got a good doctor, your doctor's going to say, cool, where'd you get that? And then you can talk to them about office hours and look really smart. Taylor it and tailor your medical care and you'll get better outcomes. That's just generally true for all of us. Second question, this is anonymous. Thing anonymous, very mysterious. And this is an email question. I have a question about how to improve my public speaking and communicating. This person says, I have great ideas, but I have a lot to say, but, you know, sometimes I don't say very much because I don't know how to communicate publicly very well.

Starting point is 00:51:25 And people think I lack curiosity. And that's not true. How do you become a better public speaker? Look, I hear you. And now I give 150 speeches a year outside the university. This is, I'm on tour constantly. But when I started, I wasn't very good at this. It was hard for me to speak in public.

Starting point is 00:51:42 I've had bad experiences, as a matter of fact. I was a professional French horn player and you'd think, you know, since you're a professional musician, it should have been super easy. But I'm telling you, when my mouth was occupied with a French horn, no problem. But when I had to have words coming out of it, I was like, and the reason is because it doesn't come naturally to a lot of people. There's this, the old belief that people think that public speaking is scarier than deaf. I don't know if that's true. But people are really scared of public speech. And there's really three things to do.

Starting point is 00:52:12 Number one is to actually get help. And wherever you are, there's a Toastmasters International, you know, this group where you practice public speaking and you critique each other. There's a group like that in almost every town and city. Sign up for that. You'll get coaching and you'll have a community. Second is reps. Get opportunities to actually speak in public because the more that you do it, the better off you get.

Starting point is 00:52:33 When I decided I was going to have a public speaking career, so I'd made that decision in 2005, 2006. It's 20 years ago. And one of the things that I did is I took a consulting job. I was an academic of teaching at Syracuse in those days. I knew how to teach, but I didn't know how to give a speech. And so I took a consulting thing for a company, and they had a lot of clients. And it was a very technical thing that I was doing, but I developed the speech and I accepted about 50 speeches for their clients.

Starting point is 00:53:01 And I traveled all over the place. I charged $1,000 of speech plus coach class Eric Fair and a courtyard marriott room. and I'd go to Albuquerque and I would go to Duluth and I mean I'm I'm I'm like Johnny Cash I went everywhere man and I got tons of reps and the reps of the key that's what actually makes you better at it and last but not least make sure you write a lot writing a lot is the secret to speaking better because you're working with words and you're thinking about words that's the three ways to do it I recommend it and if maybe in a future episode if you want anonymous or any of you write to me about actually how to give

Starting point is 00:53:37 a great talk. And I'll do an episode on how to give a great talk. Because it's got structure to it. It's got neuroscience behind it. You can make sure that people remember what you talk about. Maybe if some of you are clergy and you're getting up in front of congregations, I'll teach you how to give a... This is real hubris, by the way. I'll teach you how to give a better sermon or homily. Make it short. Anyway, all right. And last but not least, Bill S on email, I could benefit from stronger spiritual belief. My question is as a scientist, how you balance your religious beliefs with science. Yeah, faith and reason, man, faith and reason. The truth is that faith and reason are the iron that sharpens iron. For me, as, you know, somebody who's deeply committed to my faith,

Starting point is 00:54:18 but deeply committed to my, to the science that I study and I try to share with you on this channel and everything else that I do in my writing and everything else, is that the creation and the creator reinforce each other. If I were a Picasso scholar, I wouldn't say that, you know, the Picasso painting rules out the existence of Picasso, the artist. Furthermore, I wouldn't look into the Picasso painting for evidence of Picasso the man. I would need to look at these things in different ways, one using history about Picasso and one using the learning about how his paintings work. And that's for me, really how it works. And I got this from my father, who was a devout Christian in his entire life, but also had a PhD in biostatistics. He really loved God a lot, and he really loved science. And

Starting point is 00:55:04 And his science brought him closer to transcendence by standing in awe of the creator. And that's really what's worth thinking about. It's getting at the frontier of what's most amazing in your life and saying, I don't get it. Isn't that amazing? And so trying to understand the creator and the creation is really how I keep faith and reason, not separate, but integrated in ways where the creator makes the creation more amazing and the creation gives me more awe of the creator.

Starting point is 00:55:29 That's my answer. As Nixon said, that's my story, and I'm sticking to it. We're done. Please, once again, let me know your thoughts at office hours at Arthur Brooks.com. Like and subscribe on Spotify, YouTube, on Apple. Leave a comment. I'll read it, even if it's negative, especially if it's negative. Thank you for feeding back and taking time with the things you like and the things that you don't.

Starting point is 00:55:50 Follow me on socials. Instagram. There's a lot of stuff going up on there every day. LinkedIn as well and other platforms. Order the happiness files and the meaning of your life. That's coming out. Soon. Get an advanced copy.

Starting point is 00:56:03 get my books or whatever you want. Make sure that you share these ideas with other people because remember, they become permanent in your life when you share them with others. That's the beauty of being a happiness teacher. So go forth fellow happiness professors. And until next week, be as happy as you can be and make other people happy as well.

Office Hours with Arthur Brooks - The 3 Macronutrients of Happiness, and How to Measure Yours

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.