The Resilient Mind - How To Take Control Of Your Life - Happiness Expert (Arthur C. Brooks)

Episode Date: August 24, 2026

Arthur C. Brooks, the world's No. 1 happiness expert, exposes three common self-sabotaging behaviours that undermine your happiness, offering practical solutions to overcome them.This episode is brought to you in partnership with Steven Bartlett for more inspiring videos: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheDiaryOfACEOTake action and strengthen your mind with The Resilient Mind Journal. Get your free digital copy today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bit.ly/Download_JournalExplore tools from past guests of the podcast. Some links below are affiliate links, meaning we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you:💓 HeartMath: https://www.heartmath.com/resilient🧠 Muse: https://choosemuse.com/resilientmind🌿 Brain Ritual: https://www.brainritual.com/THERESILIENTMIND🌍 The Resilient Mind Podcast is a proud member of 1% for the Planet — building resilient minds and a resilient planet. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Carl Jung said that the basis of happiness is figuring out what you believe in acting according to it, living according to it, that the basis of unhappiness is living not in accord with your own morals. In other words, I believe these things are right and wrong and I'm systematically violating. It's so incredibly empowering when I talk to a young woman or man. And I say, for example, what do you think is a decent way to treat a member of the opposite sex when you're on a date? and they'll tell me and I say, are you acting according to that? And they're like, no. I said, that's why you're unhappy. According to Carl Jung, but also according to common sense.

Once you know what that is and say, I'm going to start acting and living according to my own principles, your life starts to change. Why is that? So say someone right now is, for example, cheating on their partner, but they know. And they're against cheating. They're against cheating. They know it's bad. Because everybody's against cheating, by the way. Yeah, yeah.

Betraying somebody you love. Everybody's against betraying somebody's your love. Yeah. Right. That's actually natural law. if you believe there's any natural law. Why is that making them unhappy? That's making them unhappy

because that's doing violence to their own sense of propriety. You're hurting yourself. You know, the most ancient wisdom traditions and religious traditions, when they talk about sin, you know, in Islam and Christianity and Judaism and Hinduism and name the religion.

There's a concept of sin, right? Sin in almost every religious tradition is not offending God. It's hurting yourself. It's self-destructive behavior. You're doing something not in accord with the way that you want to live. And in so doing, you're weakening yourself. You're making it harder for you to understand yourself as a good person,

as a person of integrity, as an upright person, which we actually need. And again, there's a lot of go back to the social psychology research on this. We need to see ourselves as good people. It goes back to your point as well about helplessness and agency. Because if I know that that is bad, but I can't seem to stop myself doing it, Yeah. I'm telling myself that I'm low agency and I'm helpless. I'm a victim of my own sin. Yeah. I'm a victim of my own weakness. I'm a victim of my own impulses. And so this is one of the reasons that people will be like, I hate how I eat.

What are they actually saying? They're not saying that I hate, you know, I mean, like, I'm a sugar fiend. I love, I just can't get enough of it. I don't drink alcohol, but I eat tons of sugar. I eat lots of sugar. I shouldn't do it. Now, it doesn't offend my sense of propriety, to be sure, right? but I could get to the point where I'm so unhealthy that I hate that about myself because I'm actually hurting myself, but I'm being controlled by my impulses. This getting in line with your own views and making a plan, and this is where the New Year's resolutions about taking off the weight actually makes sense because it's not about the ab veins. It's about being morally consistent with your own view of the person that you want to be is when this comes down. But you can't do it

until you lay it out until you actually put it in black and white. Write down, your moral philosophy. I don't care how dumb it is. Write down your moral philosophy and say, make a plan to start living according to it. That's the base of the pyramid. There's two other parts. The second part is a contemplative tradition. Is contemplation. You need more contemplation so that you can experience transcendence. Now there's a bunch of different ways to do this, right? This is why everybody wants to do mindfulness meditation. That's all that is. It is basically is sitting still without your phone and focusing on being alive. So there are a lot of ways to do it. There's informal ways to do it. My colleague Ellen Langer, if you had her on the show,

super interesting person. She actually was the one who brought the concept of mindfulness to the West about 30 years ago. She wrote a book called Mindfulness. She was the first woman tenured in the psychology department at Harvard. She's phenomenal. And she's just absolutely first right. And she says that mindfulness is best practiced if you're sitting on the the train by putting away your phone, putting your hands in your lap and looking out the window. Can they listen to this podcast while they do that? No. You should listen to the podcast, but not during those periods.

Okay. And start with five minutes of just simple contemplation of life. Now, there are other ways to do it. Prayer is a really good way to do it too. Religious traditions are excellent at doing it, but people in a distracted world don't do that at all. You need to be in your head. You need to stop distracting yourself and systematically stop distracting yourself.

because in your default mode network, you'll actually start to think about things that actually matter, including the things that are in the fundamental moral basis that you've started to formulate. You need contemplation. I was thinking about this last night. I don't know why I was thinking about this, but this is how weird I am. I was thinking about why I don't pray anymore because I grew up in a Christian faith until the age of about 18. Are you still a Christian? No.

And every time we had dinner for my whole childhood, the family sat around the table. one of us would pray. And we'd just basically give thanks for things we're grateful for. And I stopped praying because I no longer have the Christian faith, but I was thinking last night, it doesn't mean I need to give up the prayer, which is just an exercise and gratitude to be thankful

for the nature of my life. And that would serve, and I don't have to pray to something. I can just pray for gratitude. Well, you can contemplate. You can contemplate the source of your gratitude. So gratitude listing is a really important way for you to focus on the, we're resentful creatures because we have a negativity bias. We have a tendency to pay attention to the

negative things in our lives disproportionately because that tendency serves us for survival. You know, you know, you pay attention to the worst thing that happened at the dinner, not the best thing that happened to the dinner for a reason. I mean, we've evolved to the snap of the twig behind you does not make you think, oh, bet that's my friend. So that's just how we're evolved. And the way to not let that become maladapted is for you to contemplate the sources of your gratitude, which are incredibly abundant. Now, the reason you stop praying is because you don't believe

there's anybody on the other end of the line. Listening, yeah. Yeah, you think that it's like the ghost phone in Japan. After the tsunami, the earthquake and tsunami, a guy set up a telephone booth that's not connected where the phone is not connected. And 30,000 people have gone and picked up the phone and talked to their dead relatives.

That's the ghost phone. And that's not satisfying for you with respect to prayer because your kid version of religion was the reason you're doing that is because you're talking to God. You've got a direct transmission mechanism to God. And now you don't think that's actually the case. So you stop doing the contemplation right now. It's probably worth rethinking an adult version of your faith as opposed to being put off by the, a lot of people are really put off by the kid version of their faith. It's like, really? Yeah, like the weird stuff. It doesn't make sense. But most likely, according to

the data, you're going to start becoming interested in your Christian faith again as you get older. It doesn't mean you're going to have the same faith that you had. On the contrary, you probably won't. But you'll start being like, you know, there's certain things I miss about that. And life actually is messy. And there is suffering that's hard to explain, but there's lots of things in life that are hard to explain. And maybe there's something in there that I didn't understand before. So openness to that. I'm not saying for sure, but I'm saying just be open to it. And then the very top is wisdom and that requires reading or or you know the accumulation of knowledge not everybody's a big reader and there's so many different ways to get good information in this point podcast for example

but the whole point is is reading or acquiring information in the wisdom tradition so you know read the stoic philosophers read the niccomachean ethics of aristotle read the bible read read read read read and start with 15 minutes a day of that kind of reading, which you can go years saying, I wish I read it, you don't. Right. I mean, it's, it's crazy. We'll spend all this time scrolling Instagram when we can spend just 15 minutes a day reading the meditations of Marcus Aurelius and the letters of Seneca. And it's incredibly enriching, right? It's like, wow, boom, starting at 15 minutes a day. So do the work. What do I believe? Spend some time in contemplation and do the reading, your life's about to change.

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