Office Hours with Arthur Brooks - The Science Behind Being Good at Leisure

Episode Date: February 23, 2026

Not all leisure is created equal—some of it feels good in the moment (pleasure) but leaves you depleted afterward. Other forms of leisure actually restore you (enjoyment). They lift you up, deepen your sense of meaning, and make you more fully alive. The difference matters, and leisure well used is a skill—and it’s one you can cultivate.In this episode of Office Hours, I explore what leisure truly is and why it’s essential to happiness. Drawing on both philosophy and modern behavioral science, I explain why contemplation, art, time in nature, learning, and deep connection with others feed you in ways that passive diversion can’t. The goal is not to squeeze more activity into your life. It’s to live more deliberately, in ways that genuinely support your happiness. And if you’re not sure where you stand, take The Happiness Scale to see whether enjoyment is an area that needs strengthening.—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(06:15) What enjoyment is, and why pleasure falls short(12:37) Pieper’s case for leisure as the basis of culture(15:22) The kind of leisure to avoid(19:22) What true leisure is(23:58) How connecting with beauty affects your brain(30:50) The benefits of time in nature(35:56) Structure your leisure (39:50) Don’t waste your leisure (42:11) Set leisure goals (44:48) Why our culture focuses too much on work(46:48) Q&A: The benefits of volunteering(48:01) Q&A: Helping others with cynicism and skepticism (49:53) Q&A: Teaching happiness to kids —Referenced: • The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness: https://www.amazon.com/Meaning-Your-Life-Finding-Emptiness/dp/0593545427• The Happiness Scale: https://learn.arthurbrooks.com/the-happiness-scale • The Four Cardinal Virtues: https://www.amazon.com/Four-Cardinal-Virtues-Josef-Pieper/dp/0268001030 • Leisure the Basis of Culture: https://www.amazon.com/Leisure-Basis-Culture-Josef-Pieper/dp/0865972109• The Three Macronutrients of Happiness, and How to Measure Yours: https://www.arthurbrooks.com/podcast/the-three-macronutrients-of-happiness-and-how-to-measure-yours• Brahmamuhurta: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahmamuhurta• Routine and Project-Based Leisure, Happiness, and Meaning in Life: https://www.nrpa.org/globalassets/journals/jlr/2012/volume-44/jlr-volume-44-number-2-pp-139-154.pdf• ...References continued at: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.arthurbrooks.com/office-hours⁠—Production and marketing by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://penname.co/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.

Joseph Peeper asserted that leisure is the basis of culture. Is it? I think that work is the basis of our culture. And that's a big problem. Because what we elect to do when we're not getting paid, that's really who we are as people. And if really we're doing two things, working and then trying to gasp for air so that we can come back and work some more, that's a big problem. We need to have time that's not working that's equally satisfying, that's equally deep, that's equally deep. that's equally meaningful. That's the kind of balance that we're actually looking at.

And to do that, that means that we need to be as excellent as our leisure as we are actually at our work. Leisure is not just not work. Leisure is a different skill. Hey, friends, welcome to office hours. I'm Arthur Brooks. I'm a behavioral scientist dedicated to lifting people up and bringing them together in bonds of happiness and love using science and ideas. And that's what this show is all about. Office hours, like my real office hours,

at my university are all about how we can all become happiness teachers, teachers of well-being, such that we can live better and we can bring that love and happiness to other people. Thank you for joining me. Thank you for joining me every week and recommending the show to your friends. As always, please do like and subscribe any place where you're watching this, where you're listening to this, and make sure that you feed back. Let me know what's on your mind. The email address is office hours at arthurbrooks.com or just write anything you want in the comments.

We look at the comments too, wherever you're watching. this episode. I want to talk this week about something that might seem like you don't need to get better at it. And that's leisure. But in point of fact, you probably do need to get better at it. If you're watching this show, it probably means that you're a striver. You're an ambitious person. You push a lot. So do I. I saw this really interesting story not that long ago of a hedge fund manager, a guy who, you know, master of the universe financially, who, you know, runs all of these billions of dollars. And he had been working for 10, 15 years to start his hedge fund, had been working 100 hours a week during this entire time, filled with absolute ambition,

never stopping, grinding, grinding, grinding, here in New York, where I'm actually recording the show here today at Spotify headquarters. He had at all, it seemed. He was wealthy. He was pretty famous, as a matter of fact. But then he had a couple of setbacks in his fund, then he decided it was time to cut his losses and close his fund. Now, he was already rich, to be sure, but there was something about the setbacks that ruined his sense of accomplishment. And I've talked about this in past episodes. Progress is everything, regress is torture, especially for strivers. Anyway, he closed his fund, but that's not the point that I'm trying to make here. He was asked by a journalist, so what are you going to do? What are you going to do? And the

answer that the journalist was kind of expecting was, well, I'm going to open another hedge fund, get a fresh start. That's not what he said. He said, I'm just so tired. I'm going to go to a beach someplace and do nothing. And that was kind of his plan. His near-term and maybe even medium-term, who knows, long-term plan was to do nothing because the idea of doing nothing was the only thing that seemed like it might refresh his soul

after so much time of grinding and striving and never resting, neglecting his family, neglecting his relationships. But it turns out, of course, that it didn't last very long. There's something about that leisure as chilling that didn't actually help him out very much, didn't give him what he was actually looking for. Now, it's funny because I can, in a weird way, not in the billionaire hedge fund way, I can kind of relate to this. I've always actually had kind of a hard time getting much.

refreshment from my own leisure, as a matter of fact. Early on in my career, I actually wasn't doing what I'm doing now. I was a professional classical musician. I was a French horn player all the way through my 20s. I didn't actually go to college until my late 20s and that by correspondence. I was traveling around doing my thing. And during a bunch of it, I was playing in the Barcelona City Orchestra in the French horn section. And I was super, super serious then. As serious then about playing the French horn as I am about love and happiness right now. And I was a grinder, man. I mean, I didn't take a day off. I didn't take a day off as a French horn player for 22 years, not one day off.

I mean, no joke. And when I first got married to Mrs. B., my wife Esther, she's from Barcelona. They're pretty good at leisure. And she was shocked because we would go on vacation together when we were newly married, up to the Pyrenees. And we would go camping up to the Pyrenees, for example. We didn't have enough money to stay in a hotel. So we'd say at this camp place called El Templa. soul, which in Catalan means the temple of the sun.

And it was beautiful and all that. But I'd have to start each day by taking out my French horn. And on the mountain side, I would practice for about two hours, just to, you know, keep my chops and shape and play my scales and arpeggios and a few etudes and a couple of things that I was working on at the time. And my wife was just, she was just completely confused by why I would want to ruin my vacation by taking out my French horn and remembering my work. And the truth of the matter was, I was just bad at leisure.

is the bottom line. And maybe a lot of you are too, kind of like that hedge fund manager. It's an improper understanding of it. And so leisure is just not fun. It feels like it's a break from work. It feels like not work. But then the work is grinding you down. But then the not work doesn't feel like it's fun either. And maybe you've been accused by somebody that you love a lot of not being able to relax, not being able to chill out. What do you do about that? Well, I'm going to tell you today because today's episode is about how to be better at leisure, how you can be as excellent at leisure as you are at your work. Now, if you're like my wife, you'd be like, why do I need to watch this? But if you're like me, you need free protocols for perfect leisure, and you're going to get

them today. That's today's episode. Now, let me start at the very beginning when we're talking about leisure. It really starts with this one macronutrient of happiness. If you've been watching my show, you know that happiness really has three macronutrients to it. Kind of like food has the macronutrients or protein, carbohydrates, and fat. Happiness is made up of enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. I write a lot in talking awful lot about these macronutrients. And if you're looking behind me, you see that, you know,

my new book, the meaning of your life, that's about that third macronutrient meaning, which is the hardest of all. But some people struggle with the first one, enjoyment. And if you want to get better at leisure, you need to get better at enjoyment. And it means to begin with you need to understand what enjoyment actually is. So let's talk about that a little bit. And by the way, those of you who've taken the happiness scale on my website, you go to arthurbricks.com and you take the happiness scale. A lot of you have, thousands of you have, you'll know where you stand in these macronutrients, where you need work on enjoyment or satisfaction and meaning. And if you're scoring below average on enjoyment, that probably means

that you need to get better at leisure. And this episode is for you. Okay. And for me. So let's talk about enjoyment a little bit and how to get better at it. And then we're going to get back to leisure here in a second. Enjoyment isn't pleasure. That's the first thing to understand. A lot of people get that wrong. So the hedge fund dude, he thought that enjoyment was going to be pleasure. It's like sipping a mitai on a sunny beach someplace doing absolutely nothing, that that was going to give him the refreshment that he actually sought. And the reason it wasn't actually nutritious for his soul was because he was making the classic error of thinking that pleasure is the same thing as enjoyment. And it isn't. On the contrary. If your life strategy is getting as much pleasure as possible, you're not going to wind up in

happiness. You're going to wind up in rehab. There's a reason for that. And again, go back to the episode. I'll make sure that we link it right below here to go back to the episode on what is happiness. It dropped a couple of months ago, and it's going to be really useful for you on this. But suffice it to say that it requires an understanding of how the brain works to distinguish between enjoyment and pleasure. Pleasure is a limbic phenomenon. It engages the console of tissue in your brain that was of all between two and 40 million years ago. And what it does is it basically gives you an emotional sense that there is something around you that's an opportunity and you should approach it. Positive emotions, including joy and interest and surprise, they come because you've sent

something, is actually going to give you a whole lot of reward like mates or calories or something. And that's really where pleasure comes in. Pleasure is a largely animal phenomenon in its way. I'm not casting aspersions. I'm not against pleasure, but we have to understand it biologically because psychology is biology in so many ways, including this. What we need to do to make it part of happiness is not to get rid of pleasure is to complete it by moving the experience of the pleasure from your limbic system into your prefrontal cortex.

And that means adding two things. Pleasure needs to be accompanied by people and memory. Now, what does that mean? That means it needs to be social and it needs to be, you need to be conscious of actually what you're doing to get the pleasure.

So it's never automatic. And there's all kinds of things that we do automatically for pleasure. For example, there are all sorts of habits. You know, you pull out a cigarette, for example. You have another drink without really thinking about it. You mindlessly scroll social media. These are all automatic behaviors

that you do in search of limbic pleasure. But what you need to do is actually make these things social and make these things conscious, thus actually moving the experience into your prefrontal cortex, the executive center of your brain, the console of tissue, the 30% of your brain by way right behind your forehead. That's what you need to engage for it to actually become part of your happiness. And that's what enjoyment actually means. You need enjoyment, which is conscious, which is memorable, which is social. And also, by the way, it has pleasure involved in it. And in this way, you can manage your pleasures and your pleasures don't manage you. And you get the distinction,

right? If you're being managed by your pleasures, look out. If you're managing your pleasures, fantastic. Good for you. And the way that you do that is by turning them into enjoyment. Okay, that's a reminder. I mean, that's just a reference back to what we've done in the past episode. If you'll want more on that basic science, then go back to that episode and watch that episode. Okay, now back to how enjoyment actually works. Enjoyment is really interesting because you're managing your pleasures in such a way that you're getting something really lovely, something delightful, something that is that really, really feels good, but you're not getting so much of it that it's addicting you, this subjugating you. Basically what it means is that you're refusing to be managed by your pleasures, that's great, but you're also not being subjugated by a complete lack of these pleasures. It's this balance.

Enjoyment involves this balance between too little and too much. And that's because you're adult, your executive center, the C suite of your brain. is involved in saying, yeah, give me more, but not too much. Getting that balance right is the essence of what it means to be a person who's fully alive to actually be in balance. This is a lot of how we understand leisure with respect to work. Now, everybody watching me, not everybody, a lot of you watching me, you love your work. You love actually what it does.

You love what you accomplish. You love how you feel when you're achieving these things and even the activities. Not all the time because not all of your activities are going to be pleasant all the time, but a lot of the time are really, really pleasant. They make you feel, your work makes you feel alive. But you know what happens when you do too much of it. You get tired. You get ground down.

You become ornery and something actually becomes missing from your life. So this is the enjoyment factor that comes in from balancing. Now, you know where I'm going with this. Work life balance or work leisure tradeoff is kind of how we're talking about that. That's fair. But I don't want to talk about it that way. The reason is because I don't actually think there is a balance. between work and life because work is part of your life. But leisure has to be part of your life, too.

Here's what we need to do to get as much enjoyment as possible, as well as satisfaction and meaning, from our work and all the things that we do that are productive. We need to have time that's not working that's equally satisfying, that's equally deep, that's equally meaningful. That's the kind of balance that we're actually looking at. And to do that, that means that we need to be as excellent as our leisure as we are actually at our work. Leisure is not just not work. Leisure is a different skill. Now, now that's an important thing to understand here because that's not how people typically talk about it. Even the great the great the philosopher, St. Thomas Aquinas referred to Aristotle as the philosopher. I mean, that's how important Aristotle is. Aristotle said we toil that we may rest and

war that we may be at peace. That's this understanding that leisure is not working, but I don't want you to think about it that way. I want you to think about your life as a portfolio of wonderful things that include your generative financial activities and the things that are equally rewarding for making you an interesting, complex, satisfied person that are not the work part. And that's the leisure part. That's why I'm going to give you protocols on how to be as excellent at your leisure as you actually are at your work. And the way to do this is with a pretty contemporary philosopher, or is to start with the ideas of a contemporary philosopher who really, really loved Aristotle, but tried to turn those ideas into something that were a little bit more,

I don't know, maybe acutely aware of the experience that we're trying to have. And that was the German philosopher, the German 20th century philosopher, Yosef Piper. Now, Piper, who lived between 1904 and 1997 was most famous for a book that he wrote called The Four Cardinal Virtues. And there will be future episodes on these Four Cardinal virtues. Because believe it or not, it sounds so boring, right? I mean, the Four Cardinal Virtues, Prudence, Justice, Temperance, Fortitude, you know, Wake Me Up When We're Done. No, no, no. It's super interesting. It's unbelievably exciting when we talk about how he defines each one of these things and how they can change your life and how they can change your work

and they can make you into a more excellent person. That's his most famous book. I want to talk about a long essay, sort of a book, essay that he wrote that's really in line with what we're talking about here, which is called Leisure the Basis of Culture. His belief was that, and he's German, okay? So like Americans, work, work, work, right?

But he didn't write a book called Work, the basis of culture. That would be the most obvious book ever. He said, not work is the basis of culture if you do it right. If your culture does it right, then your culture is going to get healthier and happier and stronger because of what we do when we're not at work. But that's not chilling on the beach. That's not scrolling away your time on social media.

That's not wasting your time at all. That's being great at this stuff. Fortunately, his essay, Leisure of the Basisanship of Culture, gives you the secrets on how to do it. And that's what we're talking about here. Okay, now, the first big idea in Peeper's leisure of the basis of culture, something called Assyria. And this is an ancient, you know, Greek word, acedia, that basically means spiritual and mental sloth.

Okay, now when I talk about sloth, or also pronounced by philosophers sloth, this is one of the seven deadly sins. You know, and the seven deadly sins, of course, is really important and popular in our thinking because of the work of Dante and the divine comedy. And Dante is, you know, in this great book in this great poem. He's going through hell, purgatory in heaven with Virgil, the philosopher.

And they're looking at people who have committed these horrible sins. And Sloth, sloth is kind of in the middle. The worst is pride and there's envy and then there's anger. It's sort of in the middle is sloth. It's the sort of laziness is the way. And we think of laziness as not wanting to work. Hanging out is the couch is what it comes down to. It's like, I should work. Yeah. But, you know, I'm going to binge some show on Netflix. And I have that pint of hogginas in the freezer and that new fuzzy blanket. So let's go. Now, that's not how Peeper thinks about Sloat.

He thinks about it fundamentally is a weakness that spiritual and mental, not just physical. It's not just sitting around on the couch. It's not just, you know, hey, it's leg day at the gym. So I think I'm actually going to, you know, hang out and not go to the gym instead. That's the least of it. Why? because all the physical kind of laziness that we have, clearly and obviously it actually comes from a more of a mental or a psychological state. And you might even join me in saying it's kind of a spiritual state.

And so that's what a cedia really is, is the spiritual and mental sloth. And he says that the worst kind of spiritual and mental sloth starts with the wrong understanding of leisure. And these are acediac activities. Here are the ones that he would really talk about today that are characterized by mental and spiritual sloth. This is the kind of leisure to avoid, according to people. And according to, well, us, too, if you want to live the best life. Number one, scrolling social media. Now, you should scroll.

I'm going to talk about that a little bit later and on many other episodes. I'm not against scrolling on social media, believe it or not. I'm not one of these. I'm not an activist about this at all. On the contrary, social media can be really good for you if you use it in particular way. So stay tuned on how social media can make your life better. But mindlessly scrolling social media, especially right before you go to bed. And again, you want to know,

know how this affects your sleep, go back to the night time protocols, the nine nighttime protocols episode. That one will talk to you about actually what happens to your brain by stimulating your stress hormones and inhibiting your pineal gland and all kinds of bad stuff that happens to you. But just in general, it's this kind of sloth. What it does is it puts your brain on hold. Now, interesting neuroscience suggests that actually what it does is it distracts you while stressing you out. Bad combination. But the whole point is that peeper, even before the advent of modern Neuroscience would say that it's kind of, it's just slothful, it's just kind of lazy, you know, chuckling at memes while you do that. It's just not a productive use of your leisure.

Getting drunk is another way of doing this, where you're sort of inebriating yourself, you're anesthetizing your brain, you're distracting yourself, you're binge streaming some show. All of these things that are basically distraction from your ordinary life, that's sort of the just chilling phenomenon. And again, I got nothing against actually taking some time off and sitting on the beach either. I'm not, you know, trying to turn your leisure actually into another job. Stay tuned. I'm going to talk about that in this episode here. But it's really important to think. If you're trying to put your brain on your hold, no, if you're trying to put your soul on hold,

if you're trying to do absolutely nothing generative, nothing deep, nothing spiritual, it's acedia as far as he's concerned. And that's beneath you. That's sort of morally and spiritually beneath you. it's also going to lead to your unhappiness, which I'm going to show you in a second. True leisure is something that has kind of two parts to it. It's spiritually and mentally productive, and it tends to be contemplative. It's something where you're learning and you're growing.

It's productive in this particular way. But it really uses your soul, heart and mind, soul heart and mind, soul heart and mind. Why is it leisure? Because it's not, you know, nobody's paying you for it, for example, and you're not behind the gun. with it. You really are in charge of doing this for your, for your own generativity, for your own growth, for your own change. Here's some examples. Reading something really deep and reflecting on it. And again, the reflecting on it is really important. Maybe that's what you're doing while you're sitting on the beach. That is a really generative activity. You've maybe heard me talk about this,

that this is a form of contemplative meditation, as a matter of fact. This is how the Dalai Lama starts every day is for two hours first thing in the morning before it's light outside in the Brahma Mahorta and the creator's time the Dalai Lama spends two hours thinking about a passage in Tibetan Buddhist scripture something really deep what does this mean how am I supposed to interpret that how does this affect my life how am I going to teach this to other people that's an incredibly deep kind of leisure that's an exciting kind of leisure and it requires that you learn something in a particular way maybe you're reading maybe you're watching the show for all I know, but you're using it in a contemplative way.

Another way is having of to have true leisure, according to Yosef Piper, is deep artistic experiences, where you're consuming art, where you're producing art, where you're deeply engaging the right hemisphere of your brain, which is the hemisphere that largely is in charge of governing meaning and mystery. Hmm. That's really important. Spending time in nature is very similar to that, matter of fact, because beauty is beauty. Beauty stimulates the right part of your brain and leads to generative growth in either artistic experiences or nature-based experiences. Learning new ideas or learning new skills is really important, especially when you're not

learning it so you can make more money. It's not stimulated by an extrinsic goal. Remember, extrinsic goals are money, power, admiration of other people. Intrinsic goals are faith, love, experience. that are intrinsically satisfying. So if you're learning something, because it makes you a deeper, more spiritual, more interesting person,

notwithstanding what it will do to give you these worldly rewards, these are the kinds of leisure activities that tend to be contemplative and very productive, according to Yosef Piper, deepening personal relationships, a deep, deep, deep conversation with somebody.

And again, you can think about all the conversations that you have. This idea of deep, generative activity through conversation has really changed the way that I interact with friends, the way that my wife and I actually, that we socialize. So Esther and I, you know, I remember several years ago, some years ago now, maybe 15 years ago now, we realized that we didn't like most social activities. We didn't like them. We didn't like dinners with friends that much. And we thought about and we kind of deconstructed why this was the case. Why do they drive us crazy? And the answer is because

they're so shallow. So where do your kids go to camp? Oh, yeah, little juniors, sailing lessons. Waste my time. No. I would prefer to be in silence. Are you kidding me? And so we made a rule. Go deeper, go home.

And so it's crazy, man. I mean, it's like you come over to my house for dinner. And, you know, I mean, you're going to eat some good food. That's not the point. You're going to get nailed with. What are you most afraid of? That's my wife. It's going to be heavy.

And the reason for that is because we don't want to see you. We don't want to see you in our, in our conversations. And the contrary, we want leisure properly understood. We want to learn and grow with you. And if that's too much, okay, I get it. I mean, different strokes for different folks. But these kind of deep relationships that you can have, I mean, that's the life and life. And the reason is so unbelievably generative where you go home after a conversation like that and you say,

I'm better, I'm better. My heart is fuller. The reason is because you just experience the kind of leisure that you need to be experiencing all the time. And if you wonder why you're not getting that all the time, it's because you're probably not good enough at leisure. And the punchline of this is going to be because you need to follow the three leisure protocols. So this is where we're going.

Now, before I get to the specific protocols on this, I do want to explain a little bit more of the science behind a lot of how this works, the behavioral science research, behind deep leisure, behind deep activities and how they affect people and how they affect people in generative and very productive ways. there's a lot of social science literature that talks about different kinds of leisure activities and how they affect you.

And the bottom line for most of the literature is do nothing leisure, which actually a lot of it includes most vacation travel. It provides boosts and well-being that are very, very temporary. They're not lasting at all. Whereas pursuits that involve deep social engagement, personal reflection, a lot of nature activity, a lot of artistic activity, they tend to be way more sustaining and well-being. It's a really interesting article in the Journal of Leisure Research. Yes, there is a journal of leisure research. This is called Routine and Project-based Leisure.

It's from 2012. So it's a little bit older now, but it certainly does still obtain these findings, as far as I'm concerned. And there's another article I'll put in there, Happiness Through Leisure from a pretty interesting volume on this. I'll put that in the notes as well. It's a volume called Positive Leisure Science. How does leisure scientist?

actually do their work. You'll learn about that if you want to. Okay, so to be more specific about it, the literature, it kind of breaks things up into beauty, nature, and a few other basic areas. Let me, I'm not going to, you know, go three hours into this, but I'm going to take you through a little bit of how this, of what this literature looks at. To begin with beauty creates a lot of emotional resonance. What beauty does, and, and to put it in a nutshell, this is going to be topics for a whole bunch of future episodes on the brain science of hemispheric lateralization, which is, of course, the two hemispheres of the brain, how they work differently. This is what a lot of my new research is looking at is how the left and the right hemispheres.

They tend to be mismatched and imbalanced in modern life. And they explain the explosion of depression and anxiety is we spend too much time in the left side of our heads and not enough time in the right side of our heads. One of the ways to open up the right hemisphere of your brain to find more meaning, to find more mystery, to find more love, to find more happiness is actually to get more beauty into your life. And most people, they get beauty into their lives through their leisure activities. This is one of the reasons that you've got to be good at leisure is because you need to find meaning and mystery and happiness and love and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Beauty creates a lot of emotional resonance. And there's lots of funny stuff on this, actually. So, for example, if you're in a pretty good mood, you'll find that happy, music will help you connect to that and help you understand that it's not just pleasure that you get from having this mood. But there's something behind it that you want to learn from. You can learn from your positive experiences, your positive moods, your positive emotions. And one of the ways to do that is by connecting to beauty that has kind of a happiness to it. There's one piece of research that shows that the happiest song ever written is the Beach Boys good vibrations. That's not for me.

But, you know, whatever. You know, I'm an old classical musician, so my taste run a little bit differently. But actually, more interesting than that, that same literature shows that you can connect to the deep experiences and learning from your negative emotions as opposed to trying to banish your negative emotions by listening to sad songs. You'll get more meaning if when you're not working, you're listening to actually sad music when you're feeling sad. And you might say, well, that's counterintuitive. Listening to sad music will make me feel sadder while it's not true. It'll help you to put into context your sad emotions, which is when you've been the. through a nasty breakup, which you probably have.

You want to listen to sad music because it helps you understand your emotions, but you're also actually benefiting from leisure in those moments. Doing this systematically is kind of a good thing to do, is listening to more music that kind of matches your emotions. Art creation is even better when it comes to generative leisure, as it turns out. And there's a lot of research, especially on the elderly, who have a lot more leisure time. The big difference between, are you going to get happier when you retire,

as opposed to you're going to get unhappier when you retire. Here's the difference. Do you know, are you good at leisure or not? That's what it comes down to. I mean, I talk to people a lot about the liminal space between full-time work and retirement. And that's a really hard thing because that change. I'll do a future episode on retirement, I promise you,

because there are retirement protocols, things that you should do when you retire that will avoid a lot of big natural problems, neurophysiological problems, as a matter of fact, but also help you to, you know, keep from making avoidable mistakes. But just in general, even if you've been retired for 10 years, you're not going to like it if you, and you're going to die sooner, if you're bad at leisure.

That's really what it comes down to. So one of the things that we find is that elderly people who struggle with their leisure and they're retired, but they're, you know, they're kind of too old to work. One of the ways that you can improve their lives a lot is by introducing the production of art into their lives. And so they, you know, they kind of tritely call that art therapy. You know, they start painting watercolors or, you know, throwing pots or, you know, whatever, you know, writing poetry, you know, writing haikus or something like that. It's much deeper than that.

It's not just some sort of art therapy so the old people won't feel so depressed. On the contrary, it's a super important understanding of they're actually able to experience and produce productive leisure for the first time. And they're using their brains the way that their brains should be used. It's also therapeutic in other ways, of course. There's a lot of work that shows that elderly people when they, you can alleviate a lot of neurological problems by introducing beauty. And that's almost certainly a right hemispheric phenomenon in their brains. There's a bunch of Parkinson's stuff when people, when they hear a rhythmic piece, people who have achinetic porn, where they're sort of rigid from Parkinson's when they hear a rhythmic piece, they can move better.

And I remember this when my mother was really suffering from rigidity from a lot of Parkinsonian syndrome that she had later in life. died at a relatively young age, and it was hard because she had a lot of health problems. And, you know, there were times when she just couldn't move. And one of the things that she would do is that she was, she had been a classical musician her whole life. She was a professional painter and she was also a good amateur violinist and pianist. She would actually put music on. She would put on Prokofiev's Love of Three Oranges, and which has this, you know, March in the middle of it. And she would put it on the march, this Prokofia of March, and she would start walking. You would help her start walking again.

And that's a generalizable phenomenon. Alzheimer's patients, when they are having trouble remembering common things, if you put on music that they actually remember from a particular time, they'll remember faces and names from that time as well. So there's all these therapeutic things. That's a little bit apart from what I'm talking about here, which is happiness and using your leisure appropriately. But there's so much good that actually comes from it.

That's my point. Nature, of course. And this is a big problem. one of the biggest problems that we have is that we, you know, we don't know how to have good leisure. And one of the reasons that we don't is we're not just naturally in nature. If you want to be inspired by appropriate leisure, go back and, you know, just read, you know, Walden by Henry David Thoreau or any of his, you know, his, Walden's okay. You know, his great essays were published in the Atlantic in the 1860s, usually right after his death. And one of his most famous essays in the Atlantic was called Walking. I'll put it in the show notes. You can go back. and just click on it from the archives of the Atlantic. Here is this vast, savage, hovering mother of ours, nature lying all around with such beauty and such affection for her children as the leopard. And yet we're so early weaned from her breast to society, that culture, which is exclusively

an interaction of man on man. I mean, that was published in a magazine back in those days. What that is is a celebration of the right hemisphere of Henry David Thoreau's brain when he was out in nature and he was not getting paid. I probably got paid for the essay, but he certainly wasn't getting paid for the walk that was underneath it. This is becoming a huge problem. It's a significant period of each day in nature. That was an experience of 90% of Americans at the beginning of the 19th century. It's less than 20% to close of the 20th century for Americans today. And, you know, walking around outside, it was an ordinary part of life and it just sort of is less, but it's also

less part of how people see their lives, less how people actually are experiencing nature. And the result of it is that they're getting less good peeper variety nature. It's less generative. It's less contemplative how people are living their lives. It's one of the best ways that you can be contemplative and enjoy your life. It's just, man, go outside. That's why, you know, a lot of, it's hilarious. You know, a lot of people have this young people today. My kids in their 20s, they have this expression when they're online too much and they want to, you know, get back in touch with reality, they say, they have this expression, touch grass. Like, what's that? That's literally go outside and, you know, touch this living, growing thing as opposed to looking at your

screen all day. What's that, what that basically is saying is get away from this generative activity that's putting you in the wrong part of your brain and, you know, go outside and, and experience this generative kind of, if not leisure, at least get a break from you. There's tons of research on this. You know, at some point I should do a show on, on, on on nature per se. But suffice it to say that it's really clear in the research that the more time that you're outside experiencing nature as part of your leisure, this is the shortcut to experiencing leisure the right way. Even better, by the way, is think of three or four big contemplative and philosophical ideas that you want to understand and then go for your

hour-long walk half an hour before the sun comes up and experiencing the sun coming up without your devices, thinking about these three philosophical things. You'll be killing like three birds with one stun. Your life will be better. Okay. We find in a lot of the literature that when leisure is properly experienced through these ways that I've talked about so far, these are just two, you know, artistic expression and nature that anxiety goes down, there's better mood, there's more working memory.

This is just better for you as it is. And again, you might be saying to yourself, well, maybe that's just sitting on the beach. But remember, it has to be something that has content to it. because that's what your brain actually needs. That's what your life actually needs. It also, side note, will improve your work. And again, that's just not what I'm trying to do. Remember that it's not right that leisure is simply the absence of work,

but leisure properly understood will improve your work. Iron sharpens iron, as they say in the proverbs. That means that when your work is better and you're good at leisure, your leisure will be better and when your leisure is more skillful, because what we're talking about here, that your work will get better as well. And it's really clear that when people are great at leisure, their work gets enormously better.

There's a really interesting 2012 study called Creativity in the Wild, improving creative responses through immersion and natural settings. And that's in Plus One. That's in an Apex Science Journal. Once again, goes into the show notes. It basically talks about how you're better. You're better at your concentration. You're better at memory.

You're better at focus. You work more joyfully. if you're great at your leisure. It's also true that you'll be better at a lot of your spiritual goals when you get better at it if you're using your leisure for specifically for these kinds of goals. When people are asked to experience awe and to pay real attention to the depth of what they're experiencing

outside, the great jeopardy study that shows that they have more self-transcendence, a greater sense of closeness to God, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Okay, now that's a warm up because we got to get to the, really the meat of this, which is how do you get better at your leisure? The three leisure protocols. You know, I love this stuff. And basically, there's three things you need to do. You need to structure your leisure.

You need to not waste your leisure and you need to set leisure goals. These are the three things that you need to do. And again, this might sound like I'm turning your leisure into work. I'm not. I'm just asking you to take your leisure with seriousness. And maybe some of you're watching this, like, I don't need this. Like, I don't need this. If you don't need this, great.

But you might and you didn't know it. And I need it. This is what I do because I want a better life and this has really changed my life. And I've been working on this with my students, you know, super strivers. And it's really, really helped them a lot. I want you to be an elite leisure athlete. And these are the three ways to get it done. Number one is structuring your leisure.

And that means taking your leisure the same way that you would your workout. You don't go to the gym and just go to the gym and like, I don't know. I mean, maybe I'll go to the elliptical for, you know, I'm not even going to turn on the timer. It's going to go, right, right, right, right. I go, you know, pick up this weight and go pick up that way. And that's the way to get frustrated and not get into better shape. There are a lot of people who actually do that.

They go to the gym thinking that being in the gym, they're going to get, you know, in better health. It's not being in the gym. It's actually what you do in the gym. It's the same thing is being at the beach isn't the point. It's what you're actually doing in your leisure at the beach is actually what matters. and that means it actually needs to be structured. Three things to do.

Take it seriously, schedule it and plan it, is what it comes down to. That means leaving your device behind, having an, you know, making sure that you've structured it so that you know what you're actually going to be doing. You have an agenda of activities that you're engaged in certain days at certain times. You engage in different kinds of leisure. It's really important. And it's actually kind of interesting that how people have structured this in the past. Many religions, for example, have a concept called the Holy Hour, you know, of your grandparents, if they were Catholic in America, they used to watch this show on CBS that was hosted.

It was actually the most popular primetime show on CBS, believe it or not, by a Catholic bishop by the name of Fulton Sheen. And he had this, like, cult following practically. He came out in this red cape. And he would talk about the Holy Hour and had a structural holy hour each day. And he recommended it everybody, particularly priests, but. but lay people as well do this holy hour. Now, the reason it was so popular, he was great. But the reason was because, you know, that's what Catholics all watched on CBS on one particular night during the week.

And during that holy hour, he would recommend prayer, scripture, reading, and meditation is what they would do. But really, really super structured. Nobody was getting paid for that. It's not like a priest gets a bonus in his check. And you, if you do something like a holy hour, you don't either. But it's a super structured and scheduled thing that you would actually do. that according to Peeper is leisure and that's generative leisure because you come out of your holy hour and if you've done it man I do this I mean every day if my morning protocol you go back to that show you'll see this is something I do I come out of it so generative so much better I'm just my life is just better as a result of it and that's according to Piper not just because of what I'm doing spiritually not because of what I'm doing to practice my religion but because I'm understanding leisure the way it's supposed to be understood so that's what we're what we're really talking about, you know, a structure. It's like, I take a 30 to 40 minute walk

after dinner with Esther every day that I'm home. That's part of my structured leisure. It's scheduled. That's what we do. It's planned. It's time that we actually take. We actually have even, you know, because it's dark, because we eat dinner early and we finished dinner at 630, 645, with these lights on our jackets. It's like such an old couple thing to do. I'm green and she's red. We look like a Christmas tree between us. Anyway, that's new here and there. Okay, that's protocol number one. Take it seriously, like you take the gym.

Structure it, schedule it. Second, don't waste it. It's so funny because, you know, people will have an hour for an hour break. That's serious time, and they'll start by frittering it away. You know, I'm going to, maybe I'll, you know, I'm going to look at the news a little bit, kind of scroll the headlines, watch a few. Like, let's see what's going on on social media. Let me check my notifications. Don't do that.

That's such a waste. I mean, you wouldn't do that when you start your, maybe you do that when you start your work. That's a waste of time when you start your work as well. That's kind of like, you know, I used to have this dog. I love my dog, Chucho. He was such a good boy. He died after, you know, 12 happy years with my family. But before Chucho would get into his bed, he had this pillow, he had near the door.

And he would like walk around the pillow. You know, and why are you walking around the pillow? He'd walk around the pillow for, you know, a few minutes, sometimes for a weirdly long time before he'd get in the bed. Like, don't you want to get in the bed? Anyway, I'm not here to psychoanalyze poor dead chucho, but we kind of do that with our leisure, with our rest as well. We don't really get right into it for some particular reason. It's a serious thing, so don't waste your time.

If your plan is to read a book from 6 to 7 in the morning, which is not a book about work, you're reading the Summa Theologia of Thomas Aquinas or the Brothers Karamazov of Dostoevsky. And side note, you want a good book reading list? Go to my website, arthurworks. I won the Guinness World's record for the world's weirdest reading list. That's a lie. I just lied. That's not true.

But I could. Who knows if they've got that world's record. These are all great leisure reading books for you. They've been leisure reading books for me. I didn't make any money from reading these things. If that's your goal for your leisure from six to seven, then hit it, man. I mean, six to seven in the morning, boom, you're reading. You're not wasting your time.

You've got your book open and ready. I recommend that if you're going to get up first thing, do that, leave it by the couch or the chair where you're actually going to do your reading open to the page where you're going to start so you don't waste any time at all. Start walking right on time. I mean, it's like, ding, ding, there's the alarm. Out you go. If you go to a museum this Saturday for your leisure time, get there on time, like a business appointment. If you're not as serious about the time as a business appointment, you're not taking your leisure seriously and you're not an elite leisure athlete. That's number two. Don't waste your time.

Number three, set specific leisure goals, set goals for what you're actually trying to achieve in your heart and mind and soul with your leisure. We're very goal-oriented people and we get more learning and generativity. We also get more happiness when we make progress in our lives. You shouldn't just have progress with respect to the gym and the job. You should be making progress with respect to your leisure as well. So if during your leisure time, which again, this is not. just chilling. If you're, if you've decided, look, I'm going to read the whole Bible because, I mean, I don't care. And by the way, if you're, even if you're an atheist, I mean, you should

read the whole Bible because it's the most influential book that's ever been written in society. So you got to know it. You know, you got to know it to understand all these weird things that people say. You know, if you, you, you completely disagree with it. At least you got to understand it. So read the whole Bible. But that's a leisure activity, understanding leisure the way that we've defined it in this episode. So that means. set about a goal of doing it. There's a million apps that you can get. There's a million plans online that you can get for reading the Bible in a whole year in a particular

way where you're reading it during a particular period of time and you're thinking about what it actually means. And again, if you're not religious, you're not thinking about what it means for your soul. You're just thinking about literally what's going on historically or whatever, but make the goal of actually reading the whole Bible and pound through it in a particular year. It's unbelievably satisfying. You're like, wow, finished Leviticus. It's like, are you going to read Leviticus just like on your own?

No, you got to structure it and you got to set a goal to actually get it done. If you're a meditator, work up in your meditation to the point that you can do a week-long retreat and put it on your calendar. If you're listening to music and you're focusing on a particular composer, and I recommend Johann Sebastian Bach was the greatest composer who ever lived. Hey, man, I'm going to do an episode on Bach. If you want to understand how Bach can change your life, you need to start. listening to Bach, but listen to a little bit each day, figure out some way, talk to somebody or online. There are a million programs on this too to learn the appreciation of how Box music works. And then, you know, go to a concert in six months of, you know, the Box B minor

mass, his 1749 masterpiece that was the culmination of the high Baroque, but do the work that leads up to making these particular goals come alive in your life. Now, these are the the three protocols. Let me go back to one quick question. Yosef Piper asserted that leisure is the basis of culture. Is it? It's not 1964 anymore when he wrote this book. I don't think leisure is the basis of our culture. At least leisure properly understood. I think that one of the biggest problems that we have, and no, get me wrong, I love the free enterprise system. But I think that work is the basis of our culture. I really do in the United States. And that's a big problem. Because what we elect to do when we're not getting paid, that's really who we are as people. And if really we're doing two things,

working and then trying to gasp for air so that we can come back and work some more, that's a big problem. That's a society that's deeply, deeply ill. And I think for a lot of people, and you could argue for big parts of our culture, that is in point of fact the case. And let's, you know, get personal. Me too. The worst parts of my life were when I was, my species was not Homo sapiens. I was homo-economicus. And it is only in parts of my life when I've learned to understand and to practice work and leisure in an appropriate balance has the culture of my family, the culture that I'm trying to be part of, the way that I'm trying to actually add generatively to the culture to which I belong, then better. And that's mostly driven by what people are.

aren't paying me to do, which is the beautiful thing. My guess is that if I'm doing anything good for you here right now, is because of what's actually going on in my heart and my brain and my soul and my mind, when I'm not actually doing my work, when I'm communing with the people that I love, when I'm in periods of contemplation and prayer, when I'm trying to understand who I am, when I am, as Yosea Piper would say, engaging in leisure properly understood. So what about you? do you need to tune up? You need to get better at it. If you do this, I promise you, you're not going to be sorry. Your life's going to get better. But if you do, don't forget to share.

Because if you do, that'll make it permanent, you'll be accountable to it. Well, that's where we are with leisure. Let me take a couple of quick questions before we close. As we always do, we like to take questions at the end of the episode. This is a nice question from Zoe Krizek on email. Thanks, Zoe. I believe when people volunteer with us and she, you know, she runs a non-profit organization, they become happier. Is that true? How do we prove it? Yes.

I wrote a whole book on that. The first book I ever wrote that anybody ever read, I'd written many, you know, terrible, boring academic books before that. But the first book I ever wrote was called Who Really Cares in 2006. And by the way, it was really academic and boring. But the reason people read it is because weirdly the president of the United States read it and talked about it. It completely changed my life when that happened. Trust me. But it's a book about who gives and who doesn't and what it does for people's lives.

And that book, Who Really Cares, really has a ton of research in it about all the beautiful things that actually happen to people when they give to others. That's a form of transcendence, to transcend yourself. One of the best ways you can make your life better is getting away from yourself. And the best way you can do that is by loving and serving other people. And the easiest way to do that is to go volunteer. Easiest way to do that is to go volunteer. here. I promise you you won't be sorry. Thanks for that, Zoe. Holly Johnson by email, how does one overcome skepticism and cynicism in others? How to show them that expressing gratitude

isn't a chumps exercise and futility. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Here's how you do it. You model it. Don't harangue anybody. Say, don't be such a cynic. Nobody wants to hear that. That will change nobody's heart. The way that they do that is by seeing your own genuineness. There's a funny thing about cynicism. Skepticism is can be problematic, but I'm a lot less worried about it. And by the way, cynicism and skepticism, they actually come from two different schools of ancient Greek philosophy, the cynics and the skeptics. And skeptics, the skeptics were a lot more awesome. So, you know, who knows? I'll talk about that maybe in a future episode. But the whole point is that there's a kind of a tendency to bond with each other around cynicism. This is a drag, man. And you

kind of bond over, you know, shared cynicism and negativity about current events. Don't let that be you, you know, like the boss is a jerk, you know, the weather's crummy. It's kind of how, you know, when you have teenage kids, the ones you don't want them to hang out with are the ones who are the most cynical. This is if you're anybody who's my age, that's the Eddie Haskell effect. That's a famous character from that, an old sitcom from the 60s. Actually predates me. I don't remember when it was the first run called Leave It to Beaver. And they have this friend who was super nice to the grown-ups. As soon as they left, he was like this smart Alex cynic. And everybody didn't want their kid to have an Eddie Haskell friend. But you know, you do have these friends.

And they're not good for you, is the whole point. The way that you actually get better friends and become a happier person and the way that you overcome skepticism and cynicism is to stop be so skeptical and stop being so cynical is what it comes down to. You won't actually be contagious toward other people and you'll be more immune to it. You'll be more boring on social media, I promise you. But that's the kind of boring you want. want. Last but not least, Sandeep Aurora sends a nice email. As a parent, I'm trying to figure out how to help my child build the same foundation that I'm trying to build, how to learn happiness, practice it, and carry it into adulthood. How do you do that? Same idea that I just talked about with

Holly, model it. You know, with kids, it's a funny thing, especially if they're your kids. You can harangue them all you want. It doesn't matter. They will do more or less what they see, especially in the long run. It's extraordinary to me with adult kids now to see, you know, they do all the stuff that I, for better and for worse that I used to do, you know, they're just, they're turning into me, ah, right? But a lot of things I like, the things that I saw, you know, people ask all the time, how do I make my kids grow up and practice my religious faith? And the answer, it doesn't matter what you tell them.

It matters what they see. Do they see you on your knees? Do they see you in reverence for the divine? Well, the same thing is true for any of the happiness principles that we talk, you know, talk about. Do they see you being grateful? do they see you being impeccably honest and kind even when you don't need to be

or when it's not warranted? That's actually how they learn it is by you modeling it. So I hope that helps. We've come to the end of another episode. If you liked it, please do share this with your friends. Leave a rating that helps the algorithmic gods of smile on us a little bit more.

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meaning of your life. It's a nice present for other people and maybe you can use it yourself. We can all use a little bit more meaning. Hope you enjoy it. And I hope you enjoy your week bringing these ideas to other people. Don't forget that leisure is part of your life and leisure will make you happier. if you do it like an elite athlete. See you next week.