The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - Build the Life You Want... Advice from Arthur Brooks and Oprah

Episode Date: September 12, 2023

Oprah Winfrey and Arthur Brooks want you to be happier - so the TV megastar and the Harvard academic teamed up to write a book setting out the steps you can take to be a little happier each day.  Over the summer, Dr Laurie Santos read Build the Life You Want, the Art and Science of Getting Happier and loved it. So she recorded a conversation with Arthur touching on how his son found meaning in the marine corps; why you should remove the all mirrors from your home; and whether happiness experts can ever be happy themselves.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Ugh, we're so done with New Year, New You. This year, it's more you on Bumble. More of you shamelessly sending playlists, especially that one filled with show tunes. More of you finding Gemini's because you know you always like them. More of you dating with intention because you know what you want. And you know what? We love that for you. Someone else will too. Be more you this year and find them on Bumble.

Pushkin. It's going to be a busy fall on Happiness Lab. I'll soon be embarking on a new season of shows with some of the sweetest, most joyful co-hosts imaginable. That's us! I'm back there! With the help of Sesame Street's Big Bird, Grover, and Abby Kadapi, I'll be bringing you happiness hacks that work whether you're age 3 or 103.

Oh, I am so excited! Me too, Grover. And after all that, we'll launch into an important new series about the ways we can share happiness with those around us if we can bring ourselves to be a bit more sociable. We'll look at how to connect with strangers, how to deepen our existing relationships with friends, and even how to negotiate the tricky move of revving up friendships that have fizzled. But before all that, I couldn't help but share a conversation I recently recorded with bestselling author Arthur Brooks. In the last few years, Arthur has set up a new center at Harvard dedicated to the same ideas that we discuss on this podcast, called the Leadership and Happiness Laboratory, or just Happiness Lab for short.

Arthur's work has gained legions of fans, with people lining up all over to collaborate with him. A lot of these folks are important and respected scientists and researchers, but some are just, well, absolute megastars. I've just finished a book called Build the Life You Want, The Art and Science of Getting Happier, co-authored with the queen, Oprah Winfrey. I read Arthur and Oprah's book over the summer, and I was totally hooked. It's not only full of smart insights and great advice, it also touches on a question that's close to my heart. How happy can happiness experts really be? As someone who runs a lab on happiness at Harvard and teaches about it to companies and leaders all over the place, someone who doesn't know you might assume that you are by nature a very happy person, that happiness comes easy to you. Is that the case? It is not. And happiness is funny. You've been in the happiness business

for a long time. And you and I both know most of the practitioners of happiness science, as it were. They're not desperate. They're not dark necessarily. But happiness is a bit of a struggle for them. And what they figured out is as social scientists, they can turn their toolkit on themselves. And that's certainly the case for me. We know based on the research that about half of your baseline mood from day to day, good and bad, positive and negative, it's genetic. And I have gloomy genetics. I have on both sides of my family, got a lot of gloomy people. And I figured out along the way after I really got interested in this topic that I was interested in it because I wanted more of it. The problem was I was treating it as if it were something I could observe but not affect through my habits. And I said, well, that doesn't make sense. This is supposed to be a

hands-on science. You were supposed to be able to help people with psychology and behavioral economics and change their behavior. Professor, teach thyself, I said to myself in the mirror one day and Lori, it worked. And you had some help on this insight from your wife, I think, that she was one of the people who pointed out this importance of applying this to yourself, right? I mean, she pointed out the irony that I was a gloomy happiness expert. I mean, come on. I was talking about happiness because it was so incredibly interesting. And I was hearing back from people that would read whatever I'd written saying it was very helpful. But I wasn't actually trying not only to use it for myself, I wasn't actually talking about the applications of it. And part of

the reason is because you and I are trained as academics. And academic papers don't have a section called how to use this in your life. On the contrary, that would get an automatic rejection from an academic journal. It would be stripped out by the editors. But that's really what people need, isn't it? And my wife was the one who pointed out that I was doing work that could be useful, but wasn't. I think her words were, don't you have a PhD for a reason? And she was right. And it changed my life. And one of those changes was really like writing down what you wanted to do. I love this idea that you wrote yourself a mission statement when you came to this work. What was in the mission statement? The mission statement was, I had a lot of different iterations, but they all came down

to the following. I was in my mid-50s at the time. I had, I don't know, 20 good years left in my career. Academics tend to work until they're pretty old. And I was going to spend the rest of my life lifting people up and bringing them together in bonds of happiness and love using science and ideas. Full stop. And I started doing it.

And I'm telling you, I'm telling you, Lori, it's amazing. Because when I basically did three things, I had learned that you need to understand, you need to change your habits, and you need to teach it to others. And so that's really what I did. I'd been really good at learning the science, but I had not been so good at changing habits for myself or others, and I'd not taught it. And so I did those three things in sequence, and the gears started to turn in my life, and I started to really have a big impact on the lives of other people, which was what I wanted. And you've had lots of amazing partners in that impact on other people. I know

you've done work with the Dalai Lama and all kinds of academics in the field of happiness science, but most recently you've been able to connect with, as you put it, the queen herself, Oprah Winfrey. I'm so curious, how did that first meeting go? Like, did you just get a call and the caller ID said, Oprah Winfrey? Like, how did that work? Yeah. Hi, this is Oprah Winfrey. And I said, yeah, and I'm Batman. You know, who's spoofing me today? It wasn't exactly like that because, you know, there's lots of layers of communication. And so it turns out that she reads my column in The Atlantic. And my column in The Atlantic was an effort to bring the best ideas in academia, including yours, to these massive audiences of people that ordinarily wouldn't read academic journal

articles. It's the same kind of mission as the Happiness Lab, which is to not popularize, but to make accessible these ideas to people because they're so critically important. This is something you've dedicated yourself to as well. And I don't know who reads the Atlantic column. It could be anybody. It turns out one of them was Oprah during the lockdowns for the coronavirus epidemic. She was at her house in Montecito, California, and she wasn't really leaving the property. So she was reading a lot, learning a lot, and using the opportunity to get interested in new things. And one of those things happened to be the call. And so when my last book came out, which was called From Strength

to Strength, about how to build a life that made you happier as years went by, it was a strategic plan for people in the second half of their lives because we need a happiness plan for the rest of us. She read that and called up and said, I want you to come on my book club podcast. She has this thing called Super Soul, which is a very good podcast where she reads a book. And boy, does she ever read the book. I mean, she was quoting to me from my book by memory. She's that good. And we had a long conversation. It was like a house on fire.

It turns out that she and I have a very similar mission about trying to lift people up and bring them together. That's what she wants. But she's been in a different world than me. And so after that, we said, wow, this is a synchronicity. We did a couple of other things together on the internet. And finally she said, you know, if I had my show still, she said, I would have had you on the show 20 or 30 times. And that would have introduced you to the American public. Why don't we do something like that in the form of a book? I said, let me think. Yes, because it's great. And I got

an opportunity to work with her. And so I went out and I spent some time in her place in California and we cooked it up in person. Just really, this chapter should do this and here's the big challenge. And it's interesting because her input to it was so critical for focusing what I was trying to get at. There were some critical moments when she made the book real by saying, this is the wrong question or this is the wrong title. It was really, really, really valuable. And then we went away and we independently worked on it, sent chapters back and forth, and now it's come true. I absolutely love the book. And this is, you know, I think a lot about how we can translate, you know, so many different findings and so many different insights. And you both have just done it in such an elegant way and such a digestible way. By the way, I just have to tell you, Laurie Santos loves my book.

Do you realize how much that means to me? I mean, you're such a big figure in this field. I mean, you're so inflecting in the way that this field has gone. I just, it makes me so happy to hear that. I'm showing Arthur the book and he can see that it's got like all these post-it notes stuck in of like different notes about, oh, that was such a cool point about humor and St. Augustine and all this stuff.

So everyone listening should get it. Ear made. Thank you, Laura. I really, really appreciate that a lot because your work has meant so much to me. Ditto, ditto. But I mean, so one of the big premises of the book that I absolutely adored is this idea that happiness is not a destination. It's a direction. It's not a state of being.

It's a state of doing. What do you mean with that? You know, everybody, when you ask them, what do you want to say? I want to be happy. And Socrates says, and St. Augustine says the same thing, you know, he says without proof because it's so obvious that everybody wants to be happy. But actually, that's craziness because happiness as a destination is completely unattainable. And you've said this in your show and you've said this in your research for so long that we need unhappiness in our lives to stay alive,

by the way. I mean, the work on emotions that you've contributed to and that so many of my colleagues here at Harvard have as well on the science of emotion, that negative emotions keep you alive. Sadness, disgust, anger, grief, these emotions, these basic emotions, we need them or we'll die. And if we have these things, we can't have pure and unremitting happiness. So it's the wrong goal. It's a goal that we can't attain.

It's El Dorado, the city of gold in South America that the Spaniards died trying to find because it didn't actually exist. And so understanding that is important. Look, you want to direct yourself toward happiness. Understand what it might mean. Understanding also that you can't attain it in this life. But in pursuing this goal, you're going to get what you really wanted all along,

which is to get happier. Oprah really nailed this point down. We were talking about it. So you're saying, she calls me professor, professor, that the point is not happiness. The point is happierness. That's the directionality of the best life is happierness. This is really what we want. And I'm telling you because I know that, but it pointed out this critical truism to me that helped me understand my own research. It helped me understand what I was

trying to do with my own life. And it started to make me personally over the course of writing this book more comfortable with my own misery. Because in that happiness, I can use that unhappiness. I can grow and learn from that unhappiness and have it be part of my happierness. So in this journey towards happierness, you also make the point that we need to get the coordinates right, which is tricky because we need to know what happiness or happierness. So in this journey towards happierness, you also make the point that we need to get the coordinates right, which is tricky because we need to know what happiness or happierness really is. And so give me your definition of happiness. What are the different parts? There are a lot of definitions of happiness that have come up in the social science literature. And that's disconcerting to a lot of people as if we somehow disagreed across the field. And that's

not true. I was trained as an economist. We'll forgive you. Yeah, I know. But I tried to make my way over to the psychology world along the way. For example, economists, you say, what's money? I mean, it's the currency of everything that we're doing, sort of like happiness is the currency of how we're trying to build our lives. And economists will say it's a medium of exchange. No, no, no, no. It's a store of value. Those are both true. And it depends on what you're actually trying to get at. And so if you look at the science of happiness just to descriptively understand what the experience of happiness is, it's one thing. But if you're trying to build a definition of happiness that helps people put together a game plan for how to get happier, that's a different thing. And that's

usually how I come at it because I'm trying to do something that people can use to build their lives, aka the title of the book, How to Build the Life You Want. So I think about happiness in terms of the three macronutrients of it. And again, this is completely compatible with all the more traditional psychological definitions of happiness. So the three macronutrients are sort of the protein, carbohydrates, and fat of happiness, which you need in balance and abundance to score high on the happiness indices. And again, there's a ton of psychometrically valid ways to measure well-being that you and I have worked on over the course of our careers. There are a lot of bad ways to do it too, but there are a lot of good ways. And you find that

people who score high, they're balanced and abundant in three dimensions, enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. You need to enjoy your life, which by the way, is not straightforward, not the same thing as pleasure. You need to have satisfaction, which is really paradoxical because it's Mick Jagger saying, I can't get it. The truth is you can get it. You can't keep it, which is a real problem. And last but not least, there's meaning and meaning is just completely full of sadness and difficulty and sacrifice. And so the result is ironically that it requires a lot of unhappiness in that. So each one of those macronutrients takes a game plan as it turns out. And that's a lot of what we write about in the book, how to get it and then how to embrace the inevitable unhappiness that

comes along with it so that you can have happierness along the way. And so there's this interesting irony with these three parts of happiness, which is that I think we often assume that we'd get to happier happiness by things going our way, everything going smoothly, by avoiding any potential suffering or problems. But in each of those three ingredients, the research seems to show that those parts of happiness come because of this suffering, not in spite of it. And this fits with this general idea that happiness takes work. It takes kind of effort, but it also takes problems and challenges.

You know, talk about some of these different aspects of happiness and how the suffering comes in. Yeah, sure. And I know that this is something you talk a lot about in your famous class at Yale. You don't just help people not suffer. You help them to put their inevitable human suffering in context, which is one of the reasons that people love the class so much because it finally rings true. It's not just some internet hack. You know, it's really about how to be fully alive. fully alive. When I look at your syllabus and I've listened to the way that you lecture, it's like, this is a fully alive class with Laurie Santos at Yale. People are like, finally, somebody who understands that I'm a human breathing being and there's nothing defective about me because I'm sad today. And this really is part of how happierness works.

The first is enjoyment. The biggest problem that people have with enjoying their lives is that they mistake enjoyment with pleasure. People who pursue pleasure but not enjoyment, they never get happier. Pleasure is actually in and of itself not a component of happiness. And pursuing pleasure per se leads to addiction and usually misery. There's never been anybody I've ever talked to or heard of who says my happiness secret is methamphetamine. And almost anything that you pursue for the pleasure of it will lead you in the wrong direction. Here's sort of the way of thinking about it, which is that enjoyment starts with pleasure, but it adds sociability and memory. It adds people and memory or communion with others and consciousness. And there's a bunch of neuroscience behind this. You need to have a pleasurable experience, but you need to be able to remember it and you need to be able to share it

with other people. And then it becomes this enjoyment that involves higher parts of your brain is the way that it works. And so here's kind of the rule of thumb that I talk about. If there's something that gives you a lot of pleasure and you're doing it over and over again alone, you're on the wrong track. Now, I realize there's certain things that you do alone, but aloneness actually is a problem with a lot of these pleasure-based activities. And there's a reason that Anheuser-Busch doesn't do beer ads showing some guy pounding a 12-pack alone in his apartment. Why?

Because they know that that's pleasure that doesn't lead to happiness. They show a bunch of people with their family and friends cracking open a cold Budweiser and having a big drink and having a nice time together and making a memory because that leads to enjoyment and enjoyment leads to happiness. And they want to be a happiness company and that's great. The same thing is true with almost anything that we do. If you're alone in Vegas at 3am in front of a slot machine and nobody knows where you are, you're probably not pursuing a happiness strategy. And it's the same set of principles as the way that works out. And things get worse in terms of the kind of stresses you need to build in when we're

talking about satisfaction, right? We tend not to really be satisfied with stuff that's super easy. Yeah, I know. I mean, you talk so compellingly about the hedonic treadmill. I've heard you talk about it. The way that I really understood it was like looking at your stuff and listening to you, actually, because it's so clear the way you talk about it. So first, what is satisfaction? Satisfaction is really the joy you get after you work for something. So if you don't have to work for something,

there's really no satisfaction. If one of my graduate students cheats to get an A in my class, there's no satisfaction with the A. But if they stay up all night, even though the A is trivial, nobody cares. But if they work hard for it, they get a lot of satisfaction from it. The problem is that that satisfaction doesn't stay around because we have a natural human tendency toward what

neuroscientists call homeostasis. Homeostasis, as anybody who listens to the Happiness Lab knows, is that nothing lasts. None of your emotions last and all of your biological processes always return to equilibrium. So for example, you can't stay angry that long. You can't stay sad. You can't stay happy. You can't stay joyful. Your moods, they change because your moods are signals to you that something is happening that you should react to. So you don't want somebody to stay in a particular mood because they won't be ready for the next set of circumstances. People misunderstand emotions. People think of them as nice to have or wish you could avoid all these other ones. No, no, no, no, no. This is the machine language of life that translates what's

going on around you into how you should react. And it's the universal language. It doesn't matter where you're from or what language you speak. We all have these same emotions. So we should be really, really grateful for them. We're always chasing the good ones. They don't last so we can be ready for the next set of circumstances. Mother Nature tricks us into thinking that if we get that nice emotion, we will keep it forever. I mean, Mother Nature lies to us a lot. Mother Nature says you can keep that satisfaction. You'll love that watch forever, that car forever, that house forever, that relationship forever. And then when you don't have it, you conclude that you needed more.

And so you run and run and run. And that's your hedonic treadmill, which of course is a metaphor, running to get the feeling, running to get the feeling again and again and again. That's the problem. And that's a really painful thing that we have to come to terms with, that we can't just have more and suddenly be permanently satisfied. And it makes life feel like a real tyranny, but it gives you a whole lot of learning and growth if you have a real life strategy for how to deal with it in a balanced and abundant way. And the same kind of struggle that we need is true for purpose for sure too, right? For sure. The question that's almost a cliche, what's the meaning of life?

You go to the cave and the Himalayas and the gurus and there, and you sit at his feet and say, your holiness, what's the meaning of life? There's a million jokes around that. But the truth of the matter is that's a wrong question because it's too general. Philosophers and even some psychologists that you and I are familiar with have broken the meaning question into three parts. We call them coherence, purpose, and significance. So coherence is the question, why do things happen the way they do? The purpose question is, what am I trying to do with my life? What's the arc of my life? What's the goal of my life? And significance is, why does it matter that I'm alive? And you need answers to those questions. I've actually found that there's a kind of a two-question diagnostic I can ask my students or anybody that they need

answers to. If they don't have answers, then they have a meaning crisis. Question number one, why are you alive? Question number two, for what would you be willing to die today? And it's extraordinary how many people can't honestly answer that question to their own satisfaction. Some people will give you answers that are plausible, but they don't actually believe them. And you see this with a lot of young adults, that one of the biggest problems that they have is they can't answer those questions, which is signaling, blinking lights on the 747 dashboard of happiness, of coherence, purpose, and significance, is they can't answer those two questions. Why am I alive? And for what am I willing to die? I remember with my own kids, I mean,

I have adult kids, and it's super fun for them to be the children of a social scientist, as you can imagine, because dad's working on a book. He's asking a lot of questions. You're asking the two questions again, dad. Yeah, I know for sure. But my middle son, it was really hard for him. I mean, he was a cut up and the most popular kid in high school, but he wasn't actually happy. And it was really a meaning crisis for him. And I remember asking those questions like, I don't know, dad. And when it was time for him to go to college, this is where the rubber hits the road. This is where you can use this to help people you love. I said, you shouldn't go to... And this is hard for me. I'm a college professor. You shouldn't go to college until you have some answers to these questions. How are you going to

find the answers to these questions? And he thought about it and he said, he's a big kinetic boy. You know, he's a big, hardworking, strong, handsome. He's six foot four. And he said, I want to go work with my hands by myself. And he became a dry land wheat farmer for two seasons. It's amazing. He was digging rocks out of the soil and building fences and cutting down trees and

spending long days by himself. And then he joined the Marine Corps, which was a hard thing to do. And boy, they ever test you. And he became not just a Marine. He became a special forces Marine. He's a scout sniper in the Marine Corps, which is scary for me and his mom, I can tell you. But he's got answers now. He found the answers six years later after graduating from high school.

If you ask him, I'll say, his name is Carlos. I say, Carlos, why are you alive? And he says, because God made me. I say, Carlos, for what would you be willing to die today? Immediate. He says, my faith, my family, my friends in the United States of America. Mic drop, very solid. They might not be the answers of every single listener to the Happiness Lab, but they're his answers. And that's the point. That's how we actually find the answers. And he found those answers through pain. I'm telling you, becoming a scout sniper in the Marine Corps entails lots of broken bones, lots of pain, and a lot of fear too. And that's how we find it. That's one of the examples about unhappiness is key to our happierness. And the other way that our mind gets happierness wrong isn't just that we kind of neglect the

importance of some of these painful moments, you know, in terms of seeking purpose and things like that. We also are really evolutionarily drawn to some of the bad stuff. We kind of have this bias to finding suffering and bad things all around us. Talk about why we're wired to have this not so good outlook on life. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of work that's been done in our fields about, for example, negativity bias. And negativity bias is basically pay more attention to the bad than the good because the good is nice to have, but the bad can kill you. So there's a very strong evolutionary argument about why we would be sort of, you know, negatrons, as my kids like to say. You know, somebody who's always being super negative all the time. But 500,000 years ago on the Pleistocene, you know, you're looking around.

A face that's smiling sweetly at you is nice to have, but a face that's frowning at you, if you ignore it, might be the death of you. It makes a lot of sense for you to be more attuned. Some people even believe to have more brain space dedicated to negative emotion than positive emotions. And neuroscientists disagree on all this because neuroscientists disagree on absolutely everything. And a lot of them actually believe that we're built to feel the pain because the pain actually keeps us alive believe that we're built to feel the pain because the pain actually keeps us alive so that we can survive and pass on our genes and fight another day. Now, interestingly, we tend to look in the rearview mirror more positively than negatively, which is called fading affect bias. And so what happens is when something bad is happening to you,

and this is one of the exercises that I ask my students to do, they have this negativity journal that they keep. And when something bad happens, which is inevitable, I mean, you're 28 years old, somebody's going to break your heart today, and then somebody's going to disappoint you tomorrow, and you're going to get a B on an exam, and it's going to bum you out or something. And every time that happens, you'd open your journal, and you write it down, and then you leave two lines under it. The first line, you have an alarm on your phone that comes up after one month, and you go back and you have to alarm on your phone that comes up after one month, and you go back and you have to write down what you learned from that one month later.

And then six months later, you have to come back and say, actually, a good thing that happened because of that. Why? Because you need to be more alert to fading affect bias, and you need to put your negativity bias in context. It doesn't mean you need to get rid of your negativity bias. It means you need to understand your negativity bias. And it's amazing when people do this, they start to feel that they start to grow as people enormously. They start to look forward to putting entries in their negativity journal because they get to look back at the last one and look back at the last one and say, yeah, yeah. It's like my boss gave me a really, really bad evaluation and I thought I was doing a good job, but I got a bad evaluation. It was horrible.

And then what did I learn a month later? I learned that I only felt bad about it for three days, even though I thought I was going to feel bad about it for five months. And then six months later, what happened? It suggested to me that maybe I was working in the wrong place and I went on the market and I found another job and I'm happier there.

And if you don't write that down, you're not going to remember. The fading affect bias will teach you something potentially, but it won't enhance your happierness, which is really important. We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be back with Arthur Brooks and more of his tips to build the life you want in just a moment. We're so done with New Year, New You. This year, it's more you on Bumble. More of you shamelessly sending playlists, especially that one filled with show tunes.

More of you finding Gemini's because you know you always like them. More of you dating with intention because you know what you want. And you know what? We love that for you. Someone else will too. Be more you this year and find them on Bumble. Before the break, happiness expert Arthur Brooks was explaining how keeping a journal can help us put our feelings into perspective. A bad grade or breakup might bring heartbreak in January.

But when we look back from June, it's just not so bad. That's advice we can all learn from. But in the new book he wrote with Oprah, Build the Life You Want, The Art and Science of Getting Happier, Arthur makes it clear that we shouldn't fear being scared, disappointed, or sad. It's very important, once again, for us always to remember that emotions are not just nice to have and bad to have. These are not luxuries and just a pain. These are the things that are literally keeping us alive. I mean, back in the 1980s, people my age, I'm 10 years older than you, and so you're not going to remember this. But back in the 1980s, there was a show called Cosmos that we all knew about where Carl Sagan, he would talk about astronomy and the

mysteries of outer space. But sometimes he would talk about the mysteries right here, and sometimes he'd talk about the brain. He used the old triune brain theory of Paul McLean, a neuroscientist from the 1950s and 1960s who tried to explain the human brain. It's funny because our colleague here at Harvard, Josh Green, says it's actually okay. It's still okay to describe the human brain and the triune brain. It's not as simple as this. But but basically the brain does three things. It has these ancient functions, which sometimes they call the lizard brain, which is the brainstem and the parts of the brain that are ascertaining things going on outside us. You're not conscious of it, but it's sending signals that you can breathe without thinking, you can walk upright without having to think about it, ride a bicycle if you've learned how to do so, etc. Then the

second part of your brain that that first part sends signals to about the outside world is the limbic system. This is inside, it's sort of deep buried inside your brain. It includes things like the amygdala and the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and the nucleus accumbens and all these parts of the brain. And what do they do? They create your desires and your feelings and your emotions. Why are they doing that? So that they can send that signal to your brand new part of your brain, the crinkly part on the outside called the neocortex, especially the prefrontal cortex,

the bumper of tissue behind your forehead. And then you can decide what to do consciously, but you need the signals. You gotta have that language and that's really what emotions are all about. The negative emotions in particular, they're alarms. Go do something. And they're all

evolved for an incredible purpose. Anger and fear, it's because there's a real threat to you. It might be a threat to your well-being. Now, that's maladaptive. When somebody points a gun at you, it makes you feel a particular way. And you might feel the same way when you get up, you know, somebody writes something mean about you on Twitter or X or whatever we call it right now. And that's a maladaptive, you know, modern version of that that you need to manage, but you can't manage it until you understand it. Disgust is a basic negative emotion. That's actually a part of the brain called the insula or the insular cortex that governs disgust. The idea is that you should feel disgust for something that's a pathogen might kill you. You need that. The problem is when that's maladaptive

in modern life, when people use it to make you feel disgusted about people who disagree with you politically. And that's what populist polarizing politicians do all the time. But that's really important because once we're aware that polarizing politicians are trying to stimulate our insular cortex to feel disgust toward fellow human beings, they can't do it anymore. They don't have power over us anymore, which is really important. And last but not least, there's sadness. And sadness is really important because you feel it, incredibly painful. It actually stimulates the anterior cingulate cortex of your brain, almost like physical pain, especially when you're separated from a loved one. And the reason is because you're evolved to not be separated from your kin. Half a million years

ago, that would mean walking the frozen tundra and dying alone is the way that that works. All of this stuff has evolved. All of it is useful. But when you understand it, this is when it gets exciting because it won't be maladapted. Then you can actually manage the versions of these negative emotions that are not appropriate. You can say, ah, Arthur is feeling disgust toward a person because he read something on social media. No, no, no, no, no, no. I'm not falling for that anymore. And you've also argued that once we understand how negative emotions work, we can kind of swap them out for something healthier. You use this caffeine metaphor, which I love, being a coffee drinker, having brought my coffee in at four o'clock today. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. No, no, it's true. And all emotional self-management starts with a

broad suite of techniques that a lot of psychologists and neuroscientists refer to as metacognition. And metacognition is just awareness of your own thinking. If you are reactive to your limbic system, your sadness, your anger, your disgust, your fear, or your joy, even your interest in other things, then you're just going to react. You know, when you have little kids and they scream when anything bad happens, you always say the same thing to them. You say, use your words. And what you're saying is be metacognitive.

Use your prefrontal cortex, not just your limbic system. And so people like us that have suffered through a PhD in the social sciences, we don't talk about reactive people. We talk about limbic people. And that's really what it means. They're using their limbic systems, but not their prefrontal cortex. It takes time. It takes awareness to use your prefrontal cortex and choose your reaction and choose more appropriate emotions. Now, that requires a repertoire of techniques on ourselves. That's the beginning of emotional self-management. If you recognize that if you wait when you feel

something, you can move the experience into your prefrontal cortex and make conscious decisions about your own emotions. A good way to do this is meditation. Meditation practices where you're observing yourself with a certain remove. Lori is feeling sad right now. That's funny. Why is Lori feeling sad right now, which is a typical meditation technique. I use prayer in a traditional religious context to do this, where I'm basically observing myself. Other people use journaling. Journaling is incredible because when you're writing something down, you're using your prefrontal cortex, but you're journaling about something that was in your limbic system, which is unbelievable.

But one way or the other, once you do this, once your prefrontal cortex is involved, you've got choices. And that's so much power. So you can choose to accept the emotion and choose the reaction. You can look at the emotion and decide to substitute it with another emotion. You can literally do this. And this is the metaphor that I give in the book, which you just referred to, is that of caffeine. So caffeine is a substitute molecule for one you like less. Most people think if I drink caffeine, it peps me up. It doesn't.

It blocks a molecule that makes you feel too relaxed. They get up in the morning and there's this molecule in your brain called adenosine that's floating around and it has receptors that the molecules go into and the molecule goes into the receptor for adenosine. It makes you lethargic. So what does caffeine do? Caffeine looks just like adenosine. It fits into the receptors. It goes into the parking spots of the adenosine receptors. Adenosine can't get in. You actually feel like you have more energy. And if you drink too much coffee, there's not any adenosine.

You feel jittery. That's the way that that works. And the same thing is true with your emotions. But you got to know how it works. You have to have a substitute emotion. I was talking about this with a friend of mine, a guy who is an actor. He was in a show called The Office that most people have seen. And he played Dwight. He's a friend of mine. We grew up together at the same time in Seattle, about five miles apart. I didn't know him when we were kids, but we've become good friends these

days. And he said, yeah, I've got a good example of substituting emotions on purpose. I said, what is it? He said, most comedians, they tend to suffer from depression. And when they feel sadness, they decide to make a joke. They use humor when they feel sadness and they do it on purpose. That's incredibly effective and incredibly metacognitive, but you got to practice metacognition so that you can manage your emotions and they don't manage you. But in addition to swapping our emotions out, you've also talked about a different way to get out of our emotions altogether. And that's just to stop focusing on the self. It's not our brain anymore. We're just not there. What do you mean here? What does getting out of our own self-focus look like? So there's really three choices when you're feeling something and

you're metacognitive enough to recognize the emotion. And the emotion is uncomfortable. Now, to begin with, don't numb your emotions. Don't take the equivalent of emotional fentanyl. What we don't want is to not feel anything. And by the way, when people engage in many addictive behaviors, drugs and alcohol, what they're really numbing is not their physical pain. They're numbing their emotions. They're trying to get rid of them. That's a bad idea because, once again, we talked about this before.

You need your emotions. What you want to do is blunt it in a lot of cases. And there's really three ways to do this with metacognition. Number one, choose the reaction you want, notwithstanding your emotions. Number two is substitute a different emotion, which we talked about before. And number three is decide to disregard the emotion by not focusing on yourself. And again, I mean, maybe it sounds obvious, but it really isn't. It's kind of incredible that

even if you go to therapy a lot of times, what they do is they make you focus on yourself exhaustively. And a lot of people have said, you know, the problem with therapy is I'm just, I feel like I'm getting worse. I'm obsessed with my own emotions. And I say, well, that's, you're learning metacognition,

but you're not using it in the right way. A lot of times the right solution is to decide to disregard your own emotions and focus on what's going on outside. And by the way, it's an incredible relief to have this in your emotional arsenal. There's this famous Zen Buddhist koan. Zen Buddhism is taught to junior monks largely on the basis of riddles. It's questions that the senior monks will ask them questions like, what on the basis of riddles. And it's questions that the senior monks will say, will ask them questions like,

what is the sound of one hand clapping? And you say, well, it doesn't have an answer, but it really does. One hand clapping is an illusion. It only becomes a real sound when you add a second hand. What that koan is about is the illusion of your own individuality. You don't actually, lori doesn't exist in this conversation,

except in an interaction with Arthur. That's how that koan is ultimately deciphered. And it shows the illusion of individuality, which is called emptiness in Buddhism. Here's another koan. A junior monk is walking along the road and he sees a senior monk coming toward him. He stops the senior monk and he said, where are you going? The senior monk says, I'm on a pilgrimage. The junior monk is immediately interested and says, where is your pilgrimage taking you?

The senior monk says, I don't know. He says, why don't you know? And the senior monk says, because not knowing is the most intimate. That's a koan that talks about the incredible knowledge that you get simply by observing and not thinking about your own intention. This is incredibly important that we can live this way. You can look at the Eiffel Tower and be amazed, or you can take a selfie of yourself in the Eiffel Tower, which really becomes a picture of you. And we're going through life, which is pictures of us and contemplating our

emotions and who am I and how am I in relation to all these things that I'm doing? And it's just, Lori, it's just terrible. It's just terrible. It's tedious. It's the kind of thing we get wrong so often. I see so many articles about self-care and treat yourself and these things. And it's like the real way to feel better is to actually become no self, right? To start paying attention to others. Other care. Other care. Other care. And you talk about this so much with your students. I mean, there's a reason you're telling your students to go out and do something kind for somebody else. It's not just because the other person needs it. It's because the person who does it needs it. They need to be the I self, which is the observer of life and not the me self, which is the observed. Serving other people is a way to do this.

There are other ways to do this that a lot of young people need to understand as well, which is, for example, getting rid of all the mirrors in our life. Now, that might be literal. I have a guy that I work with, and he was the dreaded fitness influencer. And he was a fitness model on magazine covers, but also in social media. And he never ate anything he liked for 10 years. And he had single-digit body fat, really highly visible abs. And he said he felt horrible and unhappy. And so he tried to figure out how to get out of it. This guy is an adept. He's a spiritual adept. He figured this out on his own. I mean, I'm not that smart. I couldn't do this. And here's how he did it. He moved into a new apartment. He took every mirror out of the apartment and he showered in

the dark for a year and he was cured. He was cured because he realized it didn't matter how he looked to himself or even how he looked to other people. Now there's another way to do that, which is to get rid of all your notifications on social media. Those are nothing more than mirrors. Never take another selfie or at least don't take any more selfies for a month. See how that feels. Get rid of all the mirrors in our lives because then we're looking outward and we can enjoy life for the first time maybe in a long time. It's time for another short break, but the Happiness Lab with Arthur Brooks will be back again in just a moment. We're so done with new year, new you.

This year, it's more you on Bumble. More of you shamelessly sending playlists, especially that one filled with show tunes. More of you finding Gemini's because you know you always like them. More of you dating with intention because you know what you want. And you know what? We love that for you. Someone else will too. Be more you this year and find them on Bumble. If we follow Arthur's advice, take down all the mirrors in our homes and stop looking at

ourselves, what should we focus our attention on instead? One option is something we haven't touched on all that much on this podcast, and it falls roughly under the title of the spiritual or transcendental. That can mean being spellbound by a beautiful view, an amazing piece of music, or the kind of life-changing religious experience Arthur underwent on a school trip decades ago. And I'm not a super mystical guy. I mean, I worked at the Rand Corporation on military operations research. I mean, this is not my ordinary terrain. But when I was a teenager, I was on a trip to Mexico, a school trip to Mexico.

And they were trudging us through these boring old churches. And I was 15 years old. How much appreciation can I have for these incredible monumental things? And we were at the Shrine of Guadalupe in Mexico City, which is a site of an incredible thing in the history of the Catholic Church. So during the early years of the Spanish occupation of Mexico, the Spanish Catholic Church was trying to convert vast numbers of indigenous peoples and having horrible luck. I mean, nothing was happening.

It was, and you can imagine why. This is not exactly a good sales pitch, convert or else. And it didn't look very welcoming. But then there's the story of an incredible miracle, actually, where a peasant man by the name of Juan Diego was outside what is now downtown Mexico City. And he saw an apparition of the Virgin Mary. And the Virgin Mary appeared to him, and this sounds kind of normal to us now, but it's incredibly transgressive at the time. She appeared to him as a woman of mixed race. I mean, just like no way that would occur to some Spaniard. I mean, forget about it, right? She was appearing to Juan Diego as if she could be related to Juan Diego. And furthermore,

that she was the mixture of all of the peoples of the world. That's how it is interpreted. And as the story goes, and again, I mean, some people believe it, and some people don't believe it. She appeared to him and imprinted herself on the tilma, sort of the poncho of Juan Diego. And he showed it to the bishop, and the bishop didn't believe him. And anyway, it goes back and forth in these typical stories, the way that they work. And these miracles, these apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which have happened in Catholic history all around the world. The tilma still exists of Juan Diego. And some people say it's authentic, and some people say it's not authentic, etc. It's just exactly what you'd expect. But it's sitting in the Shrine of Guadalupe in Mexico City.

And I went there when I was 15 years old, and like, whatever, whatever, what is this thing? What is this legend? I don't know. And I looked at it. And again, I wasn't Catholic. I didn't know any Catholics. And I'm staring at it. And she was staring at me. Now, to be sure, I could be looking at Elvis on velvet and the eyes would have followed me. I mean, that's a technique. I understand how that worked. But it had a big impact on me. It made me hungry for more transcendental, more mystical truths. And so I started to read as a kid. I was just a musician. That's all I was doing in those days. All I wanted to do is play music and goof off. But I couldn't stop reading. I was reading about

various mystical traditions, about different religious traditions. It just, for some reason, that sparked a hunger in me, that experience. I couldn't get it out of my mind. I couldn't get it out of my head. And I converted. I became a Catholic. And that experience, actually, still, it's as if it were still happening to me today. I can still see it. And some listeners are going to be like, ah, Brooks is fooling himself. But I'm not, because I know what I saw. And I'm not saying that it is exactly the magical thing that I might have interpreted as, or many Catholics do. All I know is it sparked something in my soul, a hunger for transcendental experiences that I got and I've only ever gotten through these religious experiences and in no other way for profound

insights in my life. That led me as a social scientist to study these transcendental experiences. And it turns out there's a vast literature that shows that religious and other philosophical and transcendental experiences, not just the tilma of Juan Diego of the Blessed Virgin Mary. I mean, there's in Buddhism, in Hinduism, in various religious traditions and non-religious traditions, reading the Stoics, the experiences of awe as in walking in nature. But these things can give you transcendental moments that will illuminate different kinds of experiences and use parts of the brain that are typically unavailable in any other way. And so we don't often think about these transcendent experiences

as being connected with happiness, but there's lots of social science research that suggests that they really are connected with feeling happier. So walk me through some of the evidence that these kinds of moments of faith are really connected with improving our well-being. So we find that when people have these transcendental experiences, they're much, much closer to the sources of meaning in their life. So we talked about this a minute ago.

Why am I alive? And for what am I willing to die? My Catholic faith answers those questions. It really does, right? And having the answers to those questions is critically important. They talk to you about the coherence of life, the purpose of life, and the significance of life. And so providing answers to that is no joke. From a neuroscientific perspective, they stimulate parts of the brain that are very hard to access in any other way. The whole idea of accessing the periaqueductal gray of the brain,

this is implicated in deep feelings of calm, of belongingness, of deep feelings of love that are very hard to find otherwise. And a lot of studies that have looked at both Buddhist monks and Catholic nuns, they find that it stimulates the theta waves in the brain, which are associated with dream sleep, giving profound insights even when they are awake. And so you can access things that are hard to get otherwise. And again, people differ in whether or not the things that are happening are actually real. I happen to think that they are. I think that there's a realm beyond what we understand that I'm fumbling with the shadows

and the dark to actually find what it is. And my Catholic faith is the best way that I know how to do so. But I have this deep love and appreciation. And I have these real friendships, which is, you know, for example, has led me to work with His Holiness the Dalai Lama on the commonality of the religious experiences that we both have had and how it can impact the way that we're trying to live our lives with greater compassion and greater insight. And this was also a big connection that you had with Oprah herself, right? I mean, this is something that you both talk about is this being one of these

four pillars of happiness has been so important for both of you. Yeah, we've discussed this an awful lot. And one of the things that really makes it relevant in our society today is that people will often assume, even if it's unstated, that the next big breakthrough in tech and consumer life and media is finally going to give us the feeling that we're looking for. It's going to finally fill that hollowness that we all feel. Facebook is going to connect us to other people and make us less lonely. AI is going to explain the answers to these questions. Things as silly as streaming Netflix or shopping therapy are going to just make us feel fulfilled in some way,

shape, or form. And the problem with that is that everything that these techniques and technologies bring us are answering complicated questions. They're fulfilling complicated problems. But all the things that we really want for that emptiness in our souls, that sense that we don't have deep fulfillment, these are complex and adaptive human problems. These are problems of love. It's almost as if I want a cat because cat is alive and warm and the world keeps giving me toasters. And every time I say, I want a cat, I'm lonely. Silicon Valley gives me this great whiz-bang toaster. I said, well, I got a toaster. It's like, there's a better toaster. It's like, okay, I'll take the toaster.

But then I keep wondering what's actually wrong. Only these transcendental approaches to life about understanding a love of the divine, or at least trying to understand some of the cosmic forces of the unseen of our lives by reading Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus or walking in nature or trying to absorb. This is what Schopenhauer talked about. Schopenhauer was an atheist, but he believed we couldn't get it. We couldn't get the reality. And the only way that you could was unusual moments of insight,

typically through music. Only then Schopenhauer believed we could have these transcendental moments of absolute clarity, which is the complex, not the complicated. So maybe it's studying and listening to the great works of Johann Sebastian Bach, which has been a good deal of my life. I've made my life, my living as a musician off and on through various parts of my life. And that's what we all need to get in touch with. And for me, religious faith is the best, most efficacious way to do so. And again, none of this discussion is who's right. Those are different questions. And of course, I have my opinions and other people have their opinions on that as well. I'm just talking about the fact that this is a great way to get happier.

And so even though you've self-described as somebody who's like genetically gloomy, you do seem to have your finger on the pulse of things that are transcendent in terms of their experiences, right? You were a musician and you have this rich religious faith. What about for somebody who wants to kind of dive into this pillar, but they kind of struggle with some of these experiences? Let's talk about how we can get started. In your book, you mentioned that one of the first practices is just like trying to find other ways to tame the monkey mind, either if you're religious, maybe through a practice like prayer, but even through something like meditation. Why is taming the mind such an important part of these transcendent experiences? The problem that we have in modern life is that we're not actually alive. There's a

famous book that many of the Happiness Lab readers will have read, and if they haven't, order it today, called The Miracle of Mindfulness by Thich Nhat Hanh, the great Vietnamese Buddhist monk. And it starts with this description of washing the dishes. And he says, when you're washing the dishes, you should be fully aware of washing the dishes and nothing else, because if you're not fully aware of washing the dishes, you aren't really washing the dishes and you're not really alive right now. You're either living in the future or you're living in the past. You're either retrospective or you're prospective, but you actually can't apprehend what's going on around you.

And that's a big problem. The monkey mind makes it incredibly difficult, even impossible. Our monkey minds, which is our great big meaty neocortex, makes it possible for us to run future scenarios, to simulate environments, to remember the past and learn from it. And that's wonderful. My dog Chucho can't do that. On the other hand, my dog Chucho, he's alive now and he's enjoying his life right now. And one of the things that metaphysical, transcendental, religious, spiritual, or philosophical experiences do for you is they can make you alive right now. And that extends your life in a very important way.

Our mutual friend and my colleague here at Harvard, Ellen Langer, she's arguably the first person who brought the concept of mindfulness to big groups of people in her famous book, Mindfulness, from decades ago. And she didn't talk about sitting in a lotus position. She talked about sitting on the train with your hands in your lap and looking out the window with no devices and noticing things. Well, it's hard to do because we're incredibly distracted. And one of the ways to become de-distracted is prayer, is worship, is devotion, is meditation, is focusing on something that's awe-inspiringly beautiful, like a fugue of Johann Sebastian Bach or a sunset. And the sunset really gets to another practice you suggest in the book, which is one that I think a lot of folks who are not as religious

kind of go towards, which is the appreciation of nature and kind of getting out in nature. What do we know about the evidence that nature can kind of bring us to these transcendent experiences? There's sort of two ways. One is pretty well understood psychologically and the other is still kind of mysterious. So the first way, you know, gets to the research of our mutual colleague,

Dacher Keltner out at UC Berkeley, who does the Greater Good program and just everything he writes, we ought to read. It's just so good. And Dacher has a new book out called Awe, which is a big bestseller. It's really worth reading. And Dacker has a new book out called Awe, which is a big bestseller. It's really worth reading. And what he talks about is the mysterious experience of awe-inspiring happenings in

our lives and putting ourselves purposively in front of things that bring awe to us. Because what that does is, once again, it just throws you into the I-self. It just extinguishes the me-self. And what that does is that makes you alive right now. And you're looking at it, you're alive right now. You'll feel when you do something that inspires awe, whether it's listening to the music that you love or watching the sunset or really one of the best ways to do it is to experience people in acts of kindness toward others, which, you know, this is a reason that people cry for joy. One of the biggest reasons people cry for joy is because they witness beauty in the behavior of other people, which is it brings awe as well. That will give you these moments of transcendence because it'll give you relief from the future and the past. The second with nature is not just awe. And this is something that's a, I don't know, this literature is hard to interpret because right now in social science, we're all wrapped around the axle about replicability

and data and the whole thing. I mean, it's just so complicated. But there have been a bunch of papers, and replicated a little, that suggest that contact with nature, it stimulates something for us neurophysiologically that we don't quite understand. As a matter of fact, walking barefoot outside, touching the soil, it tends to give you a set of experiences that you can't replicate in other ways. And some people have suggested it has something to do with the biology of what's happening, electrical signals. There are a lot of hypotheses about what it is. I don't know,

but all I know is it works for me. Walking in nature really works for me. I started off this day outside of Austin on the coast between Plymouth and Cape Cod, walking on the beach for an hour as the sun was coming up. And I'm telling you, it was just, I didn't sleep well last night. I felt really bad when I first woke up, but 15 minutes into it, I was alive. I was alive again. And I came back fully alive and I was a new person. And that really works. I love that story with the beach because it's not just about finding transcendence. It's really also about kind of finding your focus. When you're kind feeling all out of it, you can be in this sort of like, you know, me self and that really you need this kind of other focus to kind of get out of it.

And that's the spot where you really end your book. It's not just about kind of finding transcendence. It's that we all need the right focus for some of our happiness practices, right? We need to kind of take it in the right direction. And this is more that it's really not all about us. You know, explain what the right focus is and what we really need. The right focus is, basically, this is the secret to Laurie and Arthur's happiness, which is that we teach happiness. This is it. And you and I have discussed this, you know, off mic before and, you know, had lunch and you say, what's your secret to happiness? Teaching it. It really is. And it might sound like, okay, so here's the secret to happiness. Go, you know, suffer through a PhD and then do, you know, 20 years of research doing animal studies, or in my case, doing public

policy, running a think tank, whatever. No, no. Learn, practice, share. That's the algorithm, the I-self algorithm, but it's the happiness algorithm. Why? Because we know that you'll really remember what you learn if you teach it to other people. You'll practice it if you're recommending it to other people. I mean, it's just, I don't know, Lori. I mean, I've been teaching this for four years at Harvard now. And I put my students as you do through a battery of self-tests on their values and their mood and their personality, but also their happiness is measured in different ways, largely from the tests that come from our mutual friend, Sonia Lubomirsky out at Cal Riverside. And they're really good tests. And if you take them sincerely, you're going to know a lot about yourself.

And so I take them every semester because I'm teaching it to my students and kind of want to see my progress. And my happiness has gone up by 60% since I've been teaching this and since I've been doing more and writing more about this. And since I can talk about it with people like you, it's really the secret to happiness. And so everybody can do that. How?

Learn more, change your habits, pass it on. When you're doing that, you're in the process, the lifelong process of happierness. It works for Lori, it works for Arthur, and it's going to work for everybody listening to us. And it's one of the reasons that everyone out there should right now not just go out and buy Arthur and Oprah's new book, but they should share it with other people, read it, dog ear it, and then give it away to someone else. Thank you so much for taking time to be on Happiness Lab. Thank you, Lori. Thank you

for your work. You've enriched my life a lot with your research, with your show, and now with your friendship. Aw, ditto. If you want even more of Arthur and Oprah's ideas on how to pursue greater happierness, I can't recommend their book enough. It's called Build the Life You Want, The Art and Science of Getting Happier, and it's out for you to buy right now. I hope you enjoyed this special show.

And I really do hope you'll make a date to join me, Big Bird, Grover, and Abby Cadabby when The Happiness Lab returns on September 18th. This is gonna be so magical. Big Bird, Grover, and Abby Cadabby when the Happiness Lab returns on September 18th. This is gonna be so magical. Ugh, we're so done with New Year, New You. This year, it's more you on Bumble. More of you shamelessly sending playlists,

especially that one filled with show tunes. More of you finding Gemini's because you know you always like them. More of you dating with intention because you know what you want. And you know what? We love that for you. Someone else will too.

Be more you this year and find them on Bumble.