Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRY-foz-ZAw
I take the same test year by year and I am 60% happier than I was 5 years ago because I finally cracked the code okay so Arthur BR the world-renowned social scientist har Professor best-selling author who teaches people how to live a better happier life I've studied the science of happiness and I found that most of what Society tells us is wrong and we will go into all of this for example they found that happiness is about 50% genetic introverts tend to have more long-term Happiness and happiness is a mind virus it will transmit from one person to another person to another person really yeah they were looking at the trajectory of people's lives measuring everything for many years and they found obesity is contagious when your friends get divorced you're more likely to get divorced but also when your friends get happy you're more likely to get happy the problem is with happiness has been in Decline since about 1990 one of the reasons is that we need struggle and suffering for us to actually get the joy that we seek but we know that for example 95% of D fail is the most unsuccessful industry in the world because the arrival fallacy that when I actually get rid of the belly fat then I'm actually going to have a more wonderful life that's actually not true you actually get more satisfaction from the progress okay so if not a weight number or a financial number what's a better more realistic goal to set that has more chance of success to being happier there are goals that actually do lead to the happiest life and the more you have the better off you are the four goals that really matter are quick one this is really really fascinating to me on the back end of our YouTube channel it says that 69.9% of you that watch this channel frequently over the lifetime of this channel haven't yet hit the Subscribe button I just wanted to ask you a favor it helps this channel so much if you choose to just subscribe helps us scale the guest helps us scale the production and it makes this show bigger so if I could ask you for one favor if you've watched the show before and you've enjoyed it and you like this episode that you're currently watching could you please hit the Subscribe button thank you so much and I will repay that
gesture by making sure that everything we do here here gets better and better and better and better that is a promise I'm willing to make you do we have a [Music] deal Arthur Steve what do you do I am dedicated to lifting people up and bringing them together using the science and ideas around human happiness where did you teach I teach at Harvard University are you a professor of Happiness yeah I'm a professor of leadership technically at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Harvard Business School but my area is leadership and happiness so I've studied the the science of Happiness which is a huge growing field multi-dimensional field across Social Psychology and Neuroscience behavioral economics Philosophy for a long time and what I try to do is I bring it to Future Leaders in politics and policy and especially business and help them understand themselves as happiness teachers so they can be happier and they can be more successful and bring more happiness to the people they lead what is the state of Happiness can you qu can we quantify that where we are in terms of are we getting happier as a people or more unhappy as a people we can we can't so the United Nations and a lot of other places try to see the happiest country you've seen those data a lot the happiest countri it's always Denmark it's always the Nordic countries um you can't do that and that's like the way that that happens is they go to 100 countries and they they survey a thousand people in each of countries and say how do you evaluate your life that's like asking people in every country how much you like the music in your country and on the basis of the highest rankings internally you say who has the best music that doesn't really make sense it's you know it's bad methodology you can look at the average well-being across a population where people are having more or less the same experience so I on inside countries inside communities over time I'm I'm willing to look at that and that shows that in most of the oecd countries including the United States and UK our countries um happiness has been in Decline since about 1990 since about 1990 yeah is that when you were born yeah
92 it's not you it's us what is um I always think when people commit their lives largely to a topic that that must have very personal roots with that individual sure what are your personal roots with the subject of Happiness it's hard for me it's hard for me I'm not a naturally happy person I'm way below average in happiness and at least 50% of that is genetic by the way so there's a lot of research looking at identical twins there's a whole database of identical twins born between the mid 1930s and 1960s that were adopted into separate families at Birth then reunited as adults this was not an experiment that was cooked up by some you know diabolical Harvard you know social scientists like me it was it happened naturally just over the of events and when they were reunited they were given personality tests you can see some of these meetings where they were reunited on on YouTube and they're they're wonderful they're joyful and funny you find that you have an identical twin you didn't know about and say finding all these commonalities but of course there's always a bunch of social scientists you know with with clipboards you know Annoying them like me you know taking data and so the personality tests all show that between 40 and 80% of your personality genetic and the rest is environmental and experiential and circumstantial but 80% up to 80% that's a lot and that means your openness to experience your conscientiousness as a person your extroversion agreeableness neuroticism and and happiness is about 50% genetic your mother literally made you unhappy Steve I'm or happy your results May Vary was your household a happy place it was a complicated place but it wasn't terrible because my parents were good parents and they loved each other and they loved us but my relationship by the time I was a young adult was cordial because they were busy with their issues and you know this is one of the things that I talk about with a lot of people nobody has a perfect childhood and a lot of people are troubled by their childhood and they feel doomed to repeat the circumstances of their childhoods but they're not you can rewrite your own past history by looking back at what happened and deciding to
change certain variables in the way that you're going to live your adult life so Steve you're going to get married and you're going to have children and then you need to look at your own childhood and say what are the things that I want to be the same and what are the things that I want to be different I'm designing my life right now on not just on the basis of the things that went right but on the basis of the things that went wrong you know I wasn't close to my parents they never lived close to me my children who are now growing up never had a an intense experience of a relationship with any of their grandparents they're one side lived in Barcelona the other side lived in Seattle we were you know in New York and Washington DC and and and and so now no you know I'm I'm going to live near my kids and I'm a grandfather now um all three of my adult kids are hearing from me every day on FaceTime whether they want to or not I see my grandson as much as I can next week I turn down a whole bunch of work because I I get to babysit my my grandson is there any research that proves people who have hope in their lives have greater chances of survival whether it's with when they're suffering with you know illnesses or I often think about this sort of stereotype that when someone retires yeah or when they stop working or when their partner dies in old age so they might be both of them might be 90 years old when one of the partners dies it seems that the the remaining the surviving partner has months left sometimes that's mostly true the when is not true here's this is depressing how you know that statistic which is that if the husband dies the wife is going to be fine really yeah widows are way happier than widowers I told that to my wife and she's like huh um widowers do really poorly generally men do very poorly part of the reason is because these data are disputed but more or less they're they're directionally correct 60% of 60-year old men say their best friend is their wife 30% of their wives say their best friend is their husband women have more relationships they have close or deeper love relationships with non-related kin and with the adult children typically than than the than the husband does the
husband's most intense companion relationship typically is with the wife and that's why that's an asymmetric stat and that's what the data say but yeah for sure I mean back to the main point hope is super critical on illness on everything I mean hope actually affects all sorts of physiological processes and we know that when people lose hope they give up and when they give up they don't take care of themselves they don't do what they need to do they don't exercise like they should they don't they're not as active they're not talking to other people their minds are not stimulated they don't eat right they might use substances and ways that they shouldn't and all of those things compound and so just at the physiological level you'd see that you'd be You' have degradation when there is no hope and when you're 90 you can't afford it actually I'm 59 I can't afford it either and neither can you at 31 we all need hope this is he huge to the extent that you can actually bring hope to People by showing them they can do something as an agent in their own future that's just giving them a longer better more successful life that that's that's what I want to do with my work you know because I've seen so much I mean since I've actually dedicated myself to this I have very good protocols for measuring my own well-being and I don't game the numbers I mean I have there there's macronutrients to your happiness you have to take the different elements it's not a single measur thing and there are micronutrients that you can aggregate up to it and I follow this um very carefully month by month by month semester by semester year by year and I take the same tests as my students do every year and I am 60% happier than I was five years ago because of my work because of the work that you've done on yourself or because of your work as a both because here's the deal if you want to be happier you need to understand the science you need to apply it to your life you need to share it with others because you won't remember it and hold yourself accountable unless you're teaching it that's why I teach people to be happiness teachers interesting yeah yeah so so my guess is how long you been doing the podcast two years we launched on YouTube three years ago yeah it's uh it's probably having a big effect on
your life huge because you're talking about these ideas and my guess is that you're in your private life you're talking about the ideas that you learned with other people and every time you share these ideas you imprint them not just sort of they're not just limic fantasms they become you use them with the executive centers of your brain the more that you learn the more you talk about what you learn the better off you get you're only talking about things that Empower people and lift them up and make their lives better these are the topics of what you do right because you want people to be happier and more successful that's the point of the show right and that's how you're getting happier and more successful is there research that shows this point of agency correlates to happiness and survival yes like longevity and so agency essentially means that the belief that you have control over your life and your future in essence yeah and that you're there are things that you can do so that you're not helpless helplessness is the problem this this gets back to the work of Marty Seligman in the in the late 60s and 19 early 1970s he's the father of positive psychology he created the whole field of positive psychology he's a great mentor and hero to me he's done so much for me and and intellectually and in my career and as as a friend just as a person and when he was doing his early work he was doing animal stuff studies and work on human beings to take away their agency so he would do things like people would be you know putting nickels into a slot machine and they would figure out along the way that it didn't matter if they pulled the handle or not that they were getting the same outcomes that he took away just little tiny bits of agency he had dogs in boxes where the they would shock the floors of the boxes this is hard to get through internal review boards now but they would because it seems cruel it wasn't big shocks but the whole point was that the dogs would you know step off the parts of the floor that were shocking them but when they couldn't do that anymore they would just like lie down and whimper on the shocking floor they would give up this is called learned helplessness people will learn their helplessness when they realize that when they when or they
figure out or they conclude or they're told by politicians and media and activists and everybody else that there's nothing that they can do and they're a victim when you take on the identity a victim you learn your helplessness and that will degrade your quality of life make you less successful less happy and a lot of studies say that you'll you won't even live as long this point of agency is so interesting I um I had someone on the show at the very beginning of the show and he said that he basically crowdsources his book guy called Mo gat you might know the guy says he crowdsources his book and he gets 500 people to reread to read his book before it comes out and he goes when we got down to the part in my book about personal responsibility he goes 8% of people drop off the Google Document because they don't want to read it uhuh yeah no that's a spinach this this and and it's interesting because I have this column that comes out every Thursday morning in the Atlantic 12 or 1300 words on the signs of happiness and about once every two or three months I have a spinach column which says you want to be happy be humble you want to be happy change your mind you want to be happy don't tell somebody if they disagree with you that they're stupid and evil listen listen more than you talk you know just what your grandmother told you right about how to be a successful person but it's all about Humanity about humility but these are hard things in a society where all of our biases are I'm right you're wrong I don't want to listen la la la la la if it goes against my my whatever ideological biases that I happen to have and I'll write a spinach column and those are the ones that get way less way fewer readers do you know what's interesting I was as you were speaking I was thinking that nobody thinks they're a victim they can spot victimhood in other people very successfully but there's no one listening to this right now that would say I am a victim so how does one know if they are a victim well I mean a lot of people will say I am a victim of these institutional biases a lot of people will a lot of people really will say that I mean they will say that I'm a victim of capitalism or I'm a victim of
powerful people I'm a victim of of conspiracies that are happen the the Deep State whatever happens to be a lot of people really will talk about it in that particular way and that's sort of the problem now of course all victims of something but we all have tons of power and the really interesting thing in life is to show people the levels of power that they have the levers of power that they have that don't start with trying to change the outside world that start with the inside of their heads that's what I'm dedicated to doing is showing people that the hope that they should have comes from the The Leverage they have over their circumstances which starts with what they thought they had the least control over their emotions their happiness their well-being the love that they experience because the commitments that they make if you really want to have power start with managing yourself not trying to manage the outside world is happiness a choice happiness is unattainable because it's a direction not a destination is being happier a choice yes being happier is a choice on the basis of the commitment that you are going to make in your life and in your relationships in the way that you manage yourself absolutely do you think there is a starting point to being happier yeah it actually starts with a starts with U recognizing that most of what Society tells us about happiness is wrong what's wrong it's not a feeling happiness is not a feeling on my first day of class I have you know two sections of 90 MBA students at the Harvard Business School and they they're taking this happiness science of Happiness seminar I've got 400 in the waiting list there's an illegal Zoom link they think I don't know about right it's the happiness class it's super fun I love it I love my students they're terrific and the I cold call them on the first day by saying you know what's happiness I pick one two 3 10 what's happiness and they will say it's the feeling I get when I'm with the people that I love or it's how I feel when I'm doing what I enjoy feelings feelings feelings feelings I say wrong the biggest barrier to actually getting happier is believing that happiness is a feeling it's not it's happiness is evidence or feelings are evidence of
Happiness like the smell of dinner is evidence of dinner that's how to understand feelings now feelings are really really important your affect your mood is critically important but happiness is something a lot more tangible you start getting happier the beginning of Happiness of be of getting happier because true happiness is not the goal because you have to have negative emotions negative emotions keep you alive negative experiences make you learn and grow so you don't want pure happiness the Side of Heaven H dangerous you'd be dead quickly without a lot of unhappiness but getting happier starts with this understanding that really what it is is the pursuit of three things enjoyment satisfaction and meaning those are the three macronutrients so you and I are nutrition nerds right and what we all know and I've heard people say on your show is that most people get insufficient protein and when you come to America Everybody Eats way too many highly glycemic carbohydrates right happiness is the same thing we get the macronutrient profile wrong we need more enjoyment satisfaction and meaning we know we have to know how to get them in in efficient and healthy ways and we need them in Balance can you define enjoyment satisfaction and meaning for me what yeah see this is the problem because a lot of people think they know what these things are but they aren't but this is the adventure because once you kind of get into the details of this then you've got real strategies for getting happier the definition provides strategy so let's start with enjoyment okay most people think it's the same as pleasure but that's wrong pleasure is a limic phenomenon now of course you know this because you've had you've had plenty of guests who talked about the lmic system of the brain that's the console of tissue deep inside the brain that's been evolving over the past 40 million years it takes signals from the brain stem and other parts rudimentary structures in the brain it takes those signals about what's going on in the outside in the lyic system it translates them into information all your emotions are is information there's no such thing as good and bad feelings bad feelings good feel no they're all good they might be maladapted but but the point is positive and negative emotions keep you
alive you need especially the negative emotions I talk about negative emotions all the time because they survival is critical and so anger and sadness and fear and disgust which are the big four negative emotions these have kept you alive thousands and thousands and thousands of times really important that information there then is relayed onto the neocortex of the brain specifically the prefrontal cortex the bumper of tissue right behind your forehead where you can figure out what are these emotions what do they mean and how am I going to react according to them now a lot of times these signals are all goofed up and and we're very reactive which means that we're not letting our prefrontal cortex catch up with our lyic system and that's a lot of the work that I do but back to enjoyment enjoyment is not the same as pleasure because pleasure is limic it's nothing more than a signal where the ventral straight and the reward center of your brain is getting tapped in the lyic system saying that thing is going to be good for survival and passing on your genes that's why feels good go do it sex and sugar sex and sugar sex and sugar and a lot and gambling Which social media has a lot in common with slot machines and all these little things that get back to your primordial evolutionary past I know you love The evolutionary biology and psychology because this gives us so much information about who we are today look at the place to see and see yourself kind of and and all of these things that give us pleasure it's because they they went back to survival and propagation of the species so importantly all those pleasure-filled things if you pursue them you're just sitting in your lyic system and modern technology and Society will engorge these things into incredibly unhealthy practices so you get you know we have natural endorphins that make us feel good and and help us when we actually get hurt so that we can get back to our cave and of course we've chemically altered them into fentel which feels great until you die fenel is not a big thing in the UK but it's a huge thing here it's huge I mean we have a 100,000 drug overdose deaths every year in the United States mostly because of fentanyl it's unbelievable but that that we have other versions of that you know we can have stochastic experiences
you know things that that that happen occasionally and give us a reward when we when something happens um not in predictably but unpredictably um and so we make slot machines and they give us all this that you know tap into that that brain chemistry or we want to propagate the species and so we turn it into pornography which is unbelievably powerful and dangerous for the brain because it captures the brain and destroys relationships along the way it's just feny in its way but all of these things are just pleasure pleasure anything that can be addictive which pleasure-filled things typically can if you if you do them compulsively over and over and over again it will make you less happy but here's know when people ask me so does that mean I should never drink alcohol I should never gamble no no no no you need to add two things to turn them into enjoyment you need to add people in memory because if you add people in memory to something then you're moving the experience into your prefrontal cortex that's when it's fully human that's when it's not an animal experience it's a human experience and that is a very important part of your happiness and so the big question is if something's addictive if you're doing it alone you're probably doing it wrong what about sex that's pornography and masturbation is alone and that's not good for you is the whole point that's I mean again reasonable people disagree and some people be like what's this guy talking about but the whole point is that that the data on pornography or that it captures the brain and ultimately it doesn't on average lead to happier lives because it truncates the reproductive experience at the level of pleasure and doesn't take it all the way to enjoyment interesting yeah have you have you studied porn much as a subject sort of everybody in my field whes up there it's not something that I focus that much on cuz you know it's focusing on the research on pornography makes you look a little creepy at P 59 it's not a good look it's like so so so what do you study it's like yeah interesting so people in memory turn pleasure into enjoyment to enjoyment that's right so alcohol add
people in memory you know the anheiser bush Corporation doesn't put out advertisements of you know a dude alone in his apartment pounding a 12-pack that's how a lot of people use the product but that's everybody knows that's an irresponsible dangerous thing to do that can lead to alcoholism what they show is the same guy with his brothers and friends you know clink and bottles together having a great time that is pleasure alcohol plus people plus memory equals enjoyment and that leads to happiness because they want to join their brand to happiness not just to Pure Pleasure and certainly not to addiction same with like Coca-Cola all the Coca-Cola ads are like the world cup with your friends and In Summer with your friends and and that's actually less addictive I mean there are certain you know the sugar and and caffeine are certainly adictive but they don't have the same properties of of brain capture in the same way for sure because they don't they don't stimulate as much dopamine as as you know something like alcohol does and and so they're less likely to make you really addicted but the whole point is that they're it it does give you a little bit of pleasure but it makes you way happier if you get to enjoyment and you only get that when you're doing it with people satisfaction satisfaction is the joy you get after struggle you're an entrepreneur you understand this one really well you're at deferring your gratification all entrepreneurs are good successful entrepreneurs are good at deferring gratification which means I'm going to do this hard thing and it's going to get big payoff and that payoff is going to be sweet that's satisfaction there a really funny thing about humans is that we need struggle and suffering for us to actually get the joy that we seek and that's a really important part of our happiness so you find the people who are better at deferring their gratification get more satisfaction and they're happier there's a lot of that remember you've heard about the marshmallow experiment yeah and you know people have debunked it but they actually haven't so the marshmallow experiment was taken place it took place in the late' 60s where Walter Michelle was a psychologist at Stanford out in paloalto he had a you
know a little laboratory set up where he would come in and sit down on one side of a table and there was a kid on the other side of the table between four and eight years old and in front of the kid was a marshmallow and so he says to the kid you want the marshmallow the kid's like yeah yeah he says I tell you what I have to go take a phone call in the back here but when I come back if the marshmallow is still there I'll give you another one can you wait every kid's like yeah totally totally totally worth it he comes back five minutes later or so 80% of the kids had eaten the marshmallow 20% of the kids hadn't now that's a lot 80% of the kids could not to further gratification so the real question is who's the 20% it's Steve Bartlett that these are the people that went on to do distinguished things they did better in school they got better grades they went on to have more job success they had better relationships that's what they found that the most successful kids now the that what people fight about now is why whether it's nature or nurture it's probably 50/50 like everything else in life it's both nature and nurture but the bigger point is good things come to those who wait and when you wait you suffer and you need that suffering as part of the basic satisfying experience now the bigger problem with satisfaction is that Mother Nature has a big lie at the end of it Mother Nature says if you get it you're going to love it forever and that's not true see the the the brain the brain works emotionally and physically in um an environment of homeostasis homeostasis means that you always return to your Baseline physiologically and emotionally because you can't stay in a in a in in an unusual physiological State unusual states are are reaction you need to be ready to react and so you know you step off the tread Mill your heart is elevated your heart goes back to where it was so you're not dead in a week the same thing is true for you emotionally something really good or bad happens to you you think it's going to last forever so that you have an incentive to avoid or approach the thing but it doesn't last forever does it that's the problem we actually think that if I get that billion dollars it's going to be really great and the first thing that somebody who has a billion
dollars says to her himself is I guess I needed another billion because of homeostasis and that puts you on something called the hedonic treadmill more more more more more more more more so that's the great conundrum of the striver is that there's never enough Never Enough never enough I deal with people all day long I really specialize in people who are incredibly successful but not happy and a lot of what I do is explain one simple equation that both explains that but also gives you the solution which is that your satisfaction doesn't come from all the things that you have so have more is not the right strategy satisfaction is all the things you have divided by the things that you want halves divided by wants successful people need to manage their wants even more than they need to manage their halves they need to want less and that's a whole kettle of fish that's spirituality that's discipline that's Fitness that's diet that's a whole lot of things that go into that and that will help you actually get enduring satisfaction sounds like a contradiction though doesn't it sounds like a contradiction to that the striving and the struggle is going to make me happy but I should want less yeah what people actually who crack this code and and a lot of you know Eastern Traditions actually get into this is not that striving is bad but that striving in itself has an has a a reward to it that you that the process and what you find out along the way is that what you wanted was not a right rival what you wanted was progress and then you start to get the reward from the progress itself there's a funny thing in the the in the research on dieting we all know that is the most expensive unsuccessful industry in the world right 95% of diets fail which means within a year people have gained back all the weight that they've lost but they're successful in so far as that almost everybody loses weight when they go on a diet here's the thing about diets every day you're willing to foro the food you like in exchange for the reward which is the scale going down when you hit your goal it's going to be so great it's going to be so great you know what the reward is Dave you never again get to eat the things that you
like for the rest of your life congratulations once you've got there that's why you fail and the arrival fallacy which is an identifiable phenomenon in my field is that it's going to be sweet when I get to the goal it isn't what you're going to have is homeostasis when you get to your goal frustration and disappointment therefore you need to want less you need to think about the about less about wanting these arrival experience experiences and get more satisfaction from the progress from the journey that's really what it comes down to and people who crack that code over the course of self-discipline self- understanding self-management they can actually experience remarkably higher satisfaction the dolly Lama I've been working with the dolly llama closely for the past 11 years and I asked him this question how can I get lasting satisfaction and he said you need to want what you have not to have what you want and that's what it comes down to it's the management of my wants not my Hales on that point we're at the time of year now where so many people are thinking about diets you mentioned that there so for those people that are approaching that moment and that you know they're going to be setting their goals and stuff and all those kinds of things what is a better goal to set if not a weight number or a financial number or whatever what's a better more realistic um goal to set that has more chance of success yeah has it it's it's interesting because there are certain things that we can accumulate that won't homeostatically return us to the Baseline that won't throw us onto this honic treadmill over and over and over again those goals are the goals that actually do lead to the happiest life and the more you have the better off you are or more actually is better but they don't fall into the categories of money power pleasure and fame which are the typical kind of goals that we get or related goals like weight loss or you know whatever it happens to be the four goals that really matter are Faith Family friendship and work that serves others those are the four really great and Transcendent goals that we can have now there's nothing wrong with money or power or pleasure or fame there's nothing wrong with those things but only as intermediate goals to make it easier
for us to pursue and accumulate deeper Faith or philosophical life I'm not talking about traditional religious Faith necessarily better family relationships which are very mystical um poorly understood even in Neuroscience in a lot of ways friendship deep friendship it's hard for a lot of people especially successful people and work that where you earn your success and serve other people that's what it comes down to so those are the right New Year's goals that we need you know this year what am I going to do what how am I how am I going to grow closer to the Divine how am I going to do that this year what am I going to do to draw closer to my family and to have a a more intimate relationship with my family how am I going to have deeper friendships this year and how am I going to take my work and find it more meaningful and satisfying on the basis of serving other people how am I going to do that what is we haven't got to meaning yet yeah we haven't got to meaning yet you said the word there but but I want to make sure I close off on this point about a better goal because there's still going to be a huge group of people that go listen I get it love it I believe it but I hate this belly fat yeah I get it and this belly fat yo-yos every year so so those are intermediate goals and there's nothing wrong with those things the problem is where they become satisfying and self-destructive is when that's the final goal Because by the time you get there you think why why that wasn't as meaningful as I thought that wasn't as good as I thought that's the arrival fallacy that when I actually get rid of the belly fat then I'm actually going to have somehow a more wonderful life that's actually not true the reason that you're doing that is because you want to live longer with your spouse and see your and and you dandel your 11 grandchildren on your knee that's the reason you want to do this because you need to do it for some intrinsic reason as opposed to an extrinsic reason having to do with people will love me more I mean it's amazing to me cuz I you know I'm I do a lot of you know wellness and fitness and stuff as it interacts with happiness I I work with a lot of people who are very big in the longevity Community because I have sort of the
happiness console the science of the happiness console that I put into those things and and so I meet a lot of people that are really into the fitness part and and what what a lot of guys will tell me is that they'll have these fitness goals like I'm going to put on 15 pounds of muscle this year and I'm going to get rid of all my belly fat and the whole thing and and buy if they stick to it by September or October where they're finding is that you know they're not getting any more attention or compliments from women but a lot of dudes are going looking good dude and they're like that's not what I wanted and part of the reason is because the arrival fallacy is you build up this image of what will actually come from the the satis the satisfaction that will come from hitting these intermediate goals these aren't the right final goals you got to have the right final goals then set some intermediate goals along the way but not let's not kid ourselves and when you think carefully about that that losing your last five pounds of belly fat so you can see your lower abs which by the way is not necessarily that healthy is going to materially improve your life and your relationships it's not just isn't what's a better end goal then as it relates to Fitness would it be something more centered on health yeah it is something that's actually sustainable and having you do with health also with happiness is the way that this works so I work out 60 minutes a day it's not because I'm vain look I'm like I got a face for radio Steve I mean it's good I don't know what you're talking about I know but it's age adjusted I look good you know this I think you look good period and I'm not you know I've got a girlfriend but credit where credits to you the thank you Steve I appreciate that but you made my week see this was my goal yeah but the reason that I do this is because I find that for me that working out as much as I can is much harder than working out every day working out every day is much easier than working out as often as I can right amen yeah and practicing my religion every day is much easier than practicing my religion when it when it comes naturally to me or when I find it convenient eating healthily is
much easier when I do it every day and so the result of that is that I find that with those particular routines I program those things into my life and I'm a much happier guy look at lowers my cortisol levels which are naturally very high I'm a very anxious person um and and I understand anxiety I understand the cortisol production I understand how to manage it and and this is one of my management techniques thing about Fitness to understand is when I say it makes you happier it actually doesn't it lowers your unhappiness happiness and unhappiness largely the experiences of happiness and unhappiness which is to say posi positive and negative affect they're produced in different parts of the lyic system so you can both be very high happiness and very high unhappiness I have tests for that that I put my students through you're probably somebody who experiences both very high positive effect and very high negative effect we've only met but my guess is that you're a mad scientist that's the profile and so that means is you got two strategies you want to keep your positive effect high and you want to manage your negative effect effect and one of the best ways to manage your negative effect effect is physical exercise vigorous physical exercise today today for me was leg day I hate leg day but I feel pretty good right now okay that makes sense I've got an answer there that I that I'm super clear on um I should be aiming at the end goal of Happiness ultimately even if it the intermediary goals are things like belly fat and these short-term things that are measurements of my progress towards the bigger goal and the real key here is consistency yeah I this was the big unlock for my whole Fitness thing because I was that person which will be 90% of people listening now that made the goal every year that I was going to go to you know change my life every year never worked right because I was aiming at getting a pack for summer so when I arrived with the six pack and it worked or summer it was great I look great I got I actually got I think I got a couple of compliments which was nice however the minute summer finished or the six-pack arrived I could not find for the life of me the motivation no so I'd go into winter and I'd become there's no willpower that can that like
you cannot muscle these things out unless they become a part of your life consistency making my goal consistency andits was the big unlock for me for sure because then okay the goal becomes if I go to the gym every day if I make that part of my habits I'm going to be healthier happier better at my job [ __ ] is there anything more important is that less important than a six-pack and that mind set shift changed my life for sure meaning then meaning was the last of the three yeah meaning is the why of your life this is the hardest for most people especially young adults this is really really hard so meaning is is really a combination of three things it's coherent purpose and significance coherence is things happen for a reason and so meaning in your life means you got to have a theory about why things happen like it's one damn thing after another I mean you got to have some concept of why things happen purpose is my life has Direction and has goals that's what purpose really is I'm going in this direction toward these things without getting stuck on the arrival fallacy and the last but not least is significance which is it would matter if I weren't here I'm significant those are the three parts of me meaning in people's lives according to you know philosophers and social psychologist so there there's a test that I give my students that kind of encompasses these three ideas so you can remember them into two questions and you have a meaning crisis if you actually don't have answers to these questions that you believe and there's no right answers you just got to have your answers you want to play yeah here's the quiz question number one why are you alive you can answer that in terms of who created you or what you're on Earth to do both okay so why am I alive that's something that I get to answer every single day I get to Define that by what I chose to do this morning when I woke up what was it I went to the gym I was on the running machine because I know I've got a not going to be able to today and then I came here and had this conversation with you yeah but why are you why are you doing this conversation with me Steve the iag guy Theory comes to mind when you ask that which is it's incredibly selfish I learned a tremendous amount already just from this
conversation and I know that it pays um pays it forward to other people who are going to going to learn from it as well and that makes it feel worthwhile so you said two things fun and service yeah right which is more important to you transcendentally which is more important to you it's the service part yeah okay good we're that gives me all my that gives me all my Worth right but the more you focus on that the better it gets now we uncovered that so now thinking about that you put the order of operations into the podcast to say did it does it serve is that guest going to serve is this question going to serve is this show going to serve is this sponsor GNA serve the people who are watching this podcast then suddenly meaning starts to go starts to really spread out of the soil because you we got to that if it's like is it fun yeah good so look my my whole have a company and that that that rides alongside what I do academically and everybody that works with me we have an order of operations and the order of operations are these are the four goals but they have to be in this order you just told me that the order of operations is serve other people and have fun for your work that's what you basically said it's probably more like lift people up and have an adventure that's probably in intellectual Adventure right but the order of operations has to be right if you're having fun more than you're serving other people you're not going to find your sense of meaning based on that first question so you see you see where we're going with that right so the second question is harder for what are you willing to die today there's a couple of people in my life that I die for I die for my romantic partner i' die for my brothers and sisters any of them MH interestingly I don't know if I die for my parents which is interesting did you die for an idea did you die for your country I would die it when you say for my country do you mean to save the country I don't know I mean if you were called to even if it were ridiculous even if you thought it were ridiculous would you die because you love your country it depends what you mean by that what's the cost if I what's the cost if
I stay alive no I know and I and it's it everything is context specific to a certain extent but really what I'm I'm trying to see is what's your what's your kind of reaction is to this you know to see what the there are good things in there you are willing to die for your girlfriend yeah Will to die for your brothers and sisters Mom and Dad it's like jur kind your mom listen to this podcast they do but I'm just being honest because I think I think I don't know why I said that but I just I no for sure this is good this is really important right this is worth thinking about right now the worst answer is I don't know or nothing those are the worst answers that doesn't mean it's a problem on the contrary it's a huge opportunity huge entrepreneurial opportunity to realize you don't have answers to these questions because you don't have to go to you know get your PhD in philosophy you don't have to sit at the mouth of the cave with the guru someplace in the himas you need to look for your answers to these questions that's it that's the quest that's the Vision Quest so and when you see somebody find these things like a lot of young adults have they're nowhere near you where you are on your journey you're solid Steve I mean this is good stuff but I meet a lot of people like why am I alive cuz a egg met a sperm really yeah and what are you willing to die for nothing really or I don't know right A lot of people and then they uncover that they don't have a why is what it comes down to repeat the questions again why are you alive and for what are you willing to die this very day there's no wrong answers I have so many young kids in particular messaging me on Instagram with the same question which is I think Society Instagram quotes all of that stuff has told them that they need to find find their purpose and it seems that they're in Hunt of their purpose like it's some Easter egg um and you think about that phrase itself find your purpose it comes loaded with two assumptions find which means you got to go search for it and purpose which is a singular word means there's one of them somewhere and the unhappiness that I sense because they were unable to find this Easter egg somewhere that they've been searching for causes them to feel
all kinds of inadequacy what do you say to that yeah well part of it is because that's the what we call in in business the go find a rock theory of leadership where the the CEO says to an employee go give me a rock like what go give me a rock okay so you go outside and you bring a rock back in the boss says wrong Rock that's not helpful right that's go find your purpose that's the go find a rock theory of leadership it's like what rock how where do I look the world is full of rocks that's so you need to be a lot more specific and figuring out deeply why you believe you're walking the Earth why you actually are alive besides just the mechanical you know explanation for what we understand in in 10th grade biology the real why the Deep why you're alive and and think really I mean if with push came to shove I would die for this I actually would die for this thing that's when you understand what your deepest values are that's when you can actually write your mission statement that's what it comes down to and that's how people actually find is opposed to just platitudes on the internet of go find your purpose as if I mean I I spent a lot of time in darmala in in the Himalayan Foothills this where the Dal Lama lives in in um in Northern India and uh when I'm me in darm Solo was a little village until the Daly Lama went there about 1960 when he was exiled from China when was kicked out of Tibet and now it's not a metropolis but there's tons of people there and there's I meet a lot of westerners there there's Seekers I'm a seek Seeker man gosh yeah yeah I'm a seeker and so I'm going to go to a place where I feel like there's a lot of positive spiritual energy and don't get me wrong I mean I've you know I've studied meditation with the Dal Lamas Tibetan Buddhist monks I mean it's I'm a much better Catholic on the basis of this I feel like I'm I'm I'm a deeper Christian on the basis of this but the idea of just going someplace and and and randomly looking hoping that your purpose just hunts you down is misguided you have to have a much better more specific sense of what you're looking for and these things coherence significance and purpose as part of meaning or the way to do it and those two questions are a good way at least to get started there's going to be a huge you know group of people that are listen
to this and thinking you know what I don't have anything that I would die for and I don't really know why I'm alive yeah and that's just made me hugely good news it's incredibly good news because that's the basis of your adventure is to find those things cuz in point of fact there are things out there you just don't know them yet and you haven't been looking for them you've been who knows what you've been looking for like maybe even looking for what I like right why is that wrong there's nothing wrong but it's just not going to find it's not going to be the secret of finding your meaning what I enjoy is a different pillar of Happiness a lot of people will say if I figure out what I enjoy then I'll find my meaning no those are different there different you're over on that branch of the tree you're trying to get over on this branch of the tree different questions so I'm that person say that person now and I don't have answers to either you tell me it's that's a great place to be because it means the start of my adventure yeah what do I do put my shoes on and leave the house what what Jo so there's a a lot of different protocols you can actually start depending on where where you on your life one of the things that I actually recommend is reading more not reading garbage and dumb stuff and not even reading the news I put people on a protocol of 15 minutes a day of of of real reading actually there's a three-part plan you want to hear the three-part plan to actually start figuring out the answers of these questions M you don't have to answer the questions directly but number one is start thinking to yourself what do I think is right and wrong what are my moral principles what are my moral non-negotiables that's the moral basis of living it's the foundation of actually figuring out the answers to your questions so for me that might be I think like free speech is important for example um treating people with dignity equality cool right and this is going to change over the course of your life too so you know you're 28 years younger than me when you're my age is going to be different and and saying to yourself that's good I want to change I want to change I want to change and that means that one of your non-negotiables is moral flexibility perhaps really
important that you're able to evolve right the world doesn't want you to evolve the world wants you to be rigid because you're a better soldier in the culture War when you're not able to say huh what I thought actually probably isn't right huh weird right okay so so that's that's number one is the moral foundations and thinking about that you know I I asked my students to take out a piece of paper and write start writing things down that they think he the things that I actually think are right and wrong here the basis of the way that I want to live now this is a very yian idea Carl Jung said that the basis of happiness is figuring out what you believe and 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 them it's so incredibly empowering when 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 they're like no I said that's why you're unhappy according to Carl Yung 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 everybody's against cheating by the way betraying somebody you love everybody's against betraying somebody you love right that's actually natural law if you believe there's any natural law why is why 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 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 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 I hate you know I mean like I I'm a sugar Fiend I love I just can't get enough of it I don't drink alcohol but I drink tons of sugar 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 make sense because it's not about the ab veins it's about being morally consistent with your own view of the person person that you want to be is what this comes down but you can't do it till 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 okay the second part is a contemplative tradition is contemplation you need more contemplation such that you can experience Transcendence now there's a bunch of different ways to do this right um this is why everybody wants to do mindfulness meditation that's all that is is basically is sitting still without your phone and and and and focusing on being alive so there 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 no super interesting person she actually was the one who brought the concept of mindfulness to the West about
30 years ago wow she wrote a book called mindfulness she's a she was the first woman tenured in the psychology department at Harvard she's phenomenal and she's just absolutely frustra and and she says that mindfulness is best practiced if you're sitting on 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 because no you should listen to the podcast but not during those periods okay and start with five minutes of a of 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 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 Christian no and every time we had dinner for my whole childhood the family sit around the table one of us would have would pray and we'd just basically give thanks for things we're you know grateful for right and I stopped praying because I no longer have the Christian faith but but I was thinking last night it doesn't mean I need to give up the prayer which is just an exercise in gratitude to be thankful for the nature of my life and that would serve if 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 really important way for to focus uh on the 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 right so that that's just how we're Revol and the way to not that let that become all adapted 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 you're it's like the ghost phone in Japan after the after the 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 talk to their dead relatives that's the ghost phone and um that's not satisfying for you with 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 think 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 all weird stuff and doesn't make doesn't make sense but a a 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 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 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 at this point pod podcast for example but the whole point is is
reading or or acquiring information in the wisdom tradition so uh you know read the stoic philosophers read the nicomaki and ethics of Aristotle read the babad Gita read the Quran read the Bible 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 and you don't right I mean it's it's crazy we'll spend all this time scrolling Instagram when we could spend just 15 minutes a day reading the meditations of Marcus aelius and and the letters of Sena and they incredibly enriching right it's like whoa 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 that's the protocol that's the Tibetan Buddhist protocol for actually finding F starting to find meaning in your life but I've I've prescribed this to others and I've done it myself and this really works it helps you find on the path to the answers to those questions build the life you want it's a book it's a book sat in front of me here that that has your name on it and who's this Oprah Winfrey I'd like to give you young authors a leg up how did you so you co-wrote this book with Oprah yeah yeah how how did you meet Oprah she called me turns out she's a I know it's it's she this is Oprah Winfrey I'm like yeah I'm Batman I mean it was Oprah Winfrey The Voice she's iconic all over the world for sure and it turns out that she was a regular reader of my column in the Atlantic on Thursday mornings how to build a life which is a different area of the signs of happiness every week that I cover and read my last book which is called from strength to strength finding success happiness and deep purpose in the second half of life right so that was a book she read on the first day it came out and I went on her Super Soul podcast and we were thick as thieves just immediately because we have the same goals as lift people up and bring him together in the spirit of happiness and love she does it differently because she's not an academic she has incredible platform I've never seen a platform like she has where you know she says one thing and people are like H that's it's good thing to do but she's always looking for it's interesting because she
has the money and power and fame and she uses them she's cracked the code she uses them in service of other people and that's her whole goal from the very beginning she's never said anything to disabuse me of the idea that that's how she lives and uh we started doing some some things together and some podcast together and she called up and she said you know if I had my show still she for 25 years she had this iconic show on television in the United States called the Oprah win show and millions and millions of people watched it every day and went off the air in about 2014 or something she says if I had my show I'd have you on 30 times and then you'd have your show she said but I don't have the show anymore so let's do kind of a version of that and let me host a book and and so we wrote the book together all over the last winter in the winter of 2022 2023 I went away to she lives in mono California I live I went and got a house in San CL California and we we structured the thing and you know at her place and we went back and forth on the and it was just blast it was about you know how to manage yourself and once you're able to manage your own feelings and emotions like a pro then you'll no longer be distracted and you can focus on the things that actually matter for your life and that's how you build your life and you you called me um a mad scientist earlier I'd have to take the test I think you nailed it I think you nailed it most likely yeah a which is that which appears in your book in the the section about the unique sort of unique mix of um Happiness and happiness and you talk about this panas schore system what are these categories and why did you call me a mad scientist so the panis test is in the book and it's actually on the website um at Arthur brooks.com where anybody can take it for free it's a it's a personality test based on the intensity of your positive and negative affect AKA mood everybody's got more or less the same emotions everybody feels joy and interest and surprise and anger and sadness and disgust and and and fear but we have them in different intensities depending on who we are and there's really four kinds of people with these different intensities there's some people that have very high affect High
positive affect they have high highs and high negative effect effect low lows these are mad scientists that's a quarter of the population Now by construction it's the quar of the population because it's above average on both then there are people who are high highs and low lows I mean I should say that they have intense positive emotion but but weak negative emotion right these are cheerleaders okay so they have they feel their positive affect very intensely and their negative effect effect very weakly oh okay so they're like always happy they're not always happy but they tend to they tend to be in a better mood and see the brighter side of things they tend to downgrade threats and think everything is going to be okay okay that's a quarter of the population M and everybody wants to be that by the way but that's not necessarily the best way to be and they don't make the best CEOs because they're they have a hard time paying attention to threats they don't want bad news and they have a terrible time giving bad news or giving people bad valuations so working for a CEO who's a cheerleader is great for a minute but then it starts to become very frustrating because you hear him telling the the incompetent idiot in the cubicle next to you that that she's doing an an unbelievably good job ah okay so you I mean you got to be realistic to be a good I mean you're an entrepreneur you know perfectly there's lotss of threats out there you got to take them seriously yeah yeah yeah so then there are people who are high negative low positive these are poets these are people who generally speaking there's a place in the lyic system called the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex that's the part that makes you a ruminator ruminators are people who this part of the brain this this part of the brain is dedicated to making on problems and negative things and regret and that I can't believe that I said that thing I feel so stupid for saying that thing and what does she really think of me etc etc it's also the part of the reing that you use when you're highly creative comedians yeah well for sure for sure you know I pal around with a guy Nam rain Wilson who was in the American version of the office he played Dwight and Rain told me that comedians tend to be depressed but
the reason is because they find out that they're funny and they can substitute humor for sadness it's a substitute emotion it's called a metacognitive Technique we talk a lot about that in the book so then poets are they tend to be high ruminators so high negative affect they focus a lot of negative things because of this hyperdeveloped part of their brains they also tend to be really creative because that's the same part of your brain that when you're working on a business plan or a symphony and they also tend to be romantic because infatuation is ruminating on another person that's kind of the poet profile right and then last but not least there's low low people who are low affect people these are Judges these are people who they they're happy and unhappy but they feel their moods less intensely than other people and so they they don't freak out you know these are really good surgeons these are really good judges they're very good Secret Service agents you don't want somebody to cut you open and say oh my God you you don't want your surgeon to be like that and so there's a a gift and a role for all four of these quadrants most great entrepreneurs are mad scientists because they they the reason that they're Entre is because they want to feel things intensely because everything is intense and they do everything intensely right you don't have that many people who are just like super chill like yeah interesting yeah it fits that's why you just having a deep conversation with you you I can see that you have a lot of mad scientific characteristics to you you feel things deeply is that fair it is fair yeah I mean that's the one I I resonate with the most and I do describe myself as being a bit intense my team know me I think I'm I think I come across as a bit intense what's your girlfriend I'm going to say that she is a cheerleader a I'm married to a cheerleader oh really yeah and what you find is that cheerleaders they can they can have the best of times but cheerleaders tend to be struggle with the mad scientist yeah right it's like like why like everything's so great for you why are you gloomy you know it's like why can't you look in the bright side of things like why are you grouchy all the time what's wrong with you Steve
like there's a spelling mistake on our I know it's like why why is that bothering you yeah yeah so that's That's a classic thing everybody can be with everybody else but the compliments are really important the biggest mistake that people make in dating markets is they look for their their op they look for the their their doppelganger they look for their clone you shouldn't look for your clone you should look for your compliment why because you'll be happier when you complete each other that's when people who complete each other you find that very happy marriages often happen between an introvert and an extrovert if they learn to appreciate each other so it's not you know hammer and T songs all the time for the differences but when people for example one of the reasons that dating apps are so unsuccessful for giving people you know satisfactory dating experiences people have more and more and more choice but they're more likely to say they're not satisfied with the people they're dating and not attracted to the people that they're dating it's because they'll set up a dating profile saying I vote this way I like this music I live here I like these things I want somebody with these preferences and they get somebody who's their sibling which is as my adult children will remind me is not hot difference is hot it's so true because I never would have said I want someone that is spiritual um that is really involved in spirituality and believes in things that you just can't see my girlfriend believes in all the chakras and these energies and she'll read and she just believes in it all and it's funny because I never would have said that's what I wanted but I absolutely love it and that means that I actually she's actually pulled me into her world she's made me more spiritual she's made me believe in things I never would have believed before uhhuh and she's completing me in that regard it's really great it's really great you mean you crack the code in that way and finding all the ways that you're different and celebrating those particular differences is really key to a to a good relationship and not wishing the person were more like you this is very important that this is a relationship killer is that wishing that your partner were more like you is is
just a form of egotism everyone tries to change their partner though don't they yeah well I mean it's interesting it's like there's there's the old Axiom that women are frustrated because they thought they could change their husbands and they can't and and um h husbands are frustrated because they thought their wives would never change and they do I don't know there is truth in that relationships and love how important is this as a subject for happiness it's the number one area of interest of my students really my average student is 28 years old so they're MBA students they're Master's students they've all gone through college they've gone to work and they've come back to the Harvard Business School you have to have some business experience to get the business master's degree and this is the number one thing they want to talk about they want to learn about they want to learn about it scientifically they want toar learn about the neurochemical Cascade of what's actually happening in your brain and at what point you can't control it anymore we have a lot of case studies at the business school about you know CEOs who were dismissed for inappropriate relationships with subordinates I mean it's a classic theme you know it's I and the last line of the case study is I was the the CEO looking out the window of the train after being dismissed going I don't know what happened yeah and so we look at brain scans and say this is what happened and you can see it in the brain kind of I mean that somebody who's really in love uh has you brain activity it looks an awful lot like a methamphetamine addict brain scan I mean your brain is if you're at a certain point in the falling love process your brain is captured so I mean at the beginning when people meet there's a there's a a hormonal um reaction with testosterone and estrogen which are you know sex hormones obviously and you know when people see somebody who's really attractive that's why they they want to look attractive because that's the that's the ignition mechanism that typically happens after that you see a big uh increase in in noradrenaline AKA nor um epinephrine and dopamine level so you have anticipation of reward and Euphoria that's sort of the second line of things that tend to
happen in this chemical Cascade that's going on when you're falling in love after that you see a dip in serotonin which is really interesting so serotonin we think about as the as the neurom modulator of of peace and happiness which is what a lot of the psychiatric drugs are trying to manipulate when when they feel that it's an imbalance so people who are clinically depressed will often get selective serotonin reuptake Inhibitors meaning you maintain a higher level of Serotonin and that's all really controversial still I mean because we don't really understand that very well but we do know that when people are falling in love that they're more likely to be ruminative and infatuated remember that part of the brain the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex that does rumination it'll be more active when serotonin is low and so serotonin will be low so you start ruminating on the other person that's when the infatuation part of the relationship really kicks in and then you get to the point of attachment which is which is invol which involves oxytocin which is a neuropeptide that functions as a hormone that makes you attached to the other person very profoundly attached to the other person that's intensely pleasurable so it's like and the longer you let it go the harder it is for your brain not to be really really captured you wouldn't go to a methamphetamine addict and say why did you buy methamphetamine that's illegal they' be like I'm an I'm an addict I'm a junkie it's the same thing as when somebody's sleeping with a subordinate are people that are in love in in relationships happier statistically no on the contrary because being in love especially in the early stages of being in love is not associated with what we would associate with actual happiness because it has jealousy tons of jealousy which is you know the rumination part when your serotonin levels are really low it's hard for you to say ah I feel so great you feel euphoric and you like it in its own way but if you kept that if you stayed in that stage you'd go out of your mind and you'd be miserable because there's jealousy there's surveillance behaviors are really common and you know this there's no nobody would say that when I'm surveilling my intimate partner that's when I'm
happiest nobody likes that but but people tend to do that because you're there's a lot of your brain is basically saying I'm trying to figure out if this is somebody who's going to betray me back to evolution is this somebody who's going to wander off and raise somebody else's kids is this somebody who's going to be when I don't know it carrying somebody else's baby which is how men and women actually they tend to express sexual jealousy in those two interesting there's a guy at um University of Texas at Austin that studies jealousy the most jealousy provoking thing for men is an image of their intimate partner having sex with somebody else for women it's an image of their intimate partner saying I love you to somebody else and the reason is because traditionally or evolutionarily women have to be worried that their partner is going to take go take care of somebody else's children and men have to be worried that they're not the actual father of the children which According to some estimates is 15% of paternity which is misattributed worldwide makes sense that's a lot no it makes sense well so fortunately my kids look like me yeah I one that's adopted she doesn't look like me this idea in chapter four of your book of focusing Less on yourself leads to happiness how can you prove that's the case so there's a there's a lot of experimental tests that actually show this using human subjects and so one of the classic uh experiments there's these guys at at Northwestern there's a fabulous social psychologist named Adam weights I don't know if you've had him on your show before he's a really impressive and Innovative social psychologist he did a an experiment where he took the undergraduate students you always use the undergraduate pool at your University because they'll do literally anything for 20 bucks and and and he put them into three groups one had to do moral Deeds they had to do random acts of kindness one had to do moral thoughts they had to sit and think beautiful thoughts about other people and one had to do self focus sort of self-care things go do something something that really makes you feel good and they looked at their happiness over you know a series of weeks with these interventions and we they found that moral Deeds were happier than moral
thoughts and moral thoughts were happier than self-care that's what they found in other words you and again this this is basically showing the same thing that you know I did research for years and years and years about happiness and sharable giving if you're lonely the most important thing you can do is volunteer just is if you give money away statistically you're more likely to make more money next year incredible investment strategy and the reason is because you see yourself as an agent of of positive change you're empowered when you're helping other people you when you give love you get love that's the bottom line is what it comes down to and so all of these experiments find kind of the same thing if you put uh you know two groups randomly selected of people um one group is playing board games and the other is helping you know sixth graders with their math the ones helping sixth graders with their math will have a mood boost for days afterward I mean this is just helping other people helps you not focus on the Psycho Drama inside Steve's head and it makes it so that life actually has a Transcendent aspect to it you get perspective you get peace and furthermore you get empirical confirmation that you are that person that you want to be is happiness or negativity contagious yes that's emotional contagion there's a lot of literature on emotional contagion it's a virus it's a mind virus negativity is a virus negativi is a virus but so is POS positivity that you can actually so you find that you know when I go into companies which I do a lot these days I do a lot of Happiness teaching inside you know executive teams and corporations and when I walk into a company I can I can I can pretty quickly ascertain which virus is going around you know this is why the mood and emotional well-being and emotional self-management of CEOs is so critically important because you know everybody's like oh the bosses the boss is having a hard time today though I think a boss got yelled at this morning at breakfast or whatever it happens to be because the they can see it and the result is it tends to the virus tends to pass around a this sucks attitude is horrible inside families and we see it and it will transmit from one person to one person to another person to another person
that's why it's hard to live with a high negative affect person that's why because High negative affect people will spread a negativity virus even if you live down the street well it depends on how much contact you have with that person and so you know that's why you want your kids to hang out with positive friends that's why would you you'll when you have your kids and when my kids were little they would have that one friend who's like happy all the time you love that kid you have the one kid who's just bummed out all the time you're like I don't want my kid to be around that because that that infects the attitudes of of the of your children in the book you say living within a mile of a friend or family member who becomes happier makes you 25% likelier to become happier too if you have contact with that person obviously it it's not going to transmit just through the air it's not you know it's not the Corona virus but uh but you have to have contact with the person but you know and the way that they they measured that that's called the Framingham heart study which was out in fra that's a suburb of Boston but for many many many years they were looking at the trajectory of people's lives to look at heart you know issues but then they started measuring everything else and they found for example that obesity is highly is is is very easy to catch when your friends become obese you become more obese that when your friends get divorced you're more likely to get divorced that when your friends get happy you're more likely to get happy is what we see and and and the more proximity that they have to you measured geographically or in terms of the intimacy of the relationship the stronger the transmission mechanism I think a lot about that and how we take on other people's problems when they're friends and family um what you say to that and does it matter that we take on other people's problems sort of I mean that's there's a big distinction between empathy and compassion so the best way to be a parent or a partner or a friend is to be compassionate and that's not the same thing as empathy our society overvalues empathy empathy is feeling somebody else's pain that's Tak taking on their problems the worst parents of teenagers are empathetic or highly empathetic people it's like yeah I feel
your pain why because you're not actually helping you got to do things that that that you know I may feel your pain but I can't be I can't be paralyzed by that on the contrary I got to do hard things you're not going to like son that's what being it that's the reason we always say you're not his friend you're his dad you know and that's means be compassionate don't be empathetic the same thing is true with the big level I mean I I would argue that our our welfare systems in our countries are need to be more compassionate um as opposed to Simply empathetic and you know that's and that we could actually help people a lot more too being compassionate means being hard as steel and doing the things that people actually need because you love them not just because you're actually feeling their pain so in our families we need to say what does this person that I love actually need notwithstanding the feelings that they're transmitting to me and sometimes that means you got to care for your own happiness like they say in the plane put on your own oxygen mask first take care of your own happiness so you're not you're not getting this negativity virus all the time being paralyzed by somebody else's pain you're not going to help him enough no it's almost never well I mean there there are cases when somebody is just a Schism but I I only recommend pican family Schism when there's abuse and you know somebody being unhappy is not abuse political differences really not abuse those are that's a it's like one in six Americans in this country is not speaking to a family member because of Pol political differences that's insane that's simply insane that doesn't not count as any good reason to do that unless there's actual abuse quick one if you guys have heard me speak on this podcast before about company culture and the secret to building a world-class company you know that everything starts with people which brings me to our sponsor on this podcast which I'm very excited to announce today which is LinkedIn jobs the entrepreneurs and business owners that listen to this podcast you'll probably want to hear this one so stay tuned for a second whenever I'm looking to hire my first Port of Call is LinkedIn jobs throughout all of my companies this is our go-to method of hiring iring and let me tell
you why firstly it's super easy it takes about 5 minutes to create a free job post on LinkedIn and secondly you can add a hiring frame to your profile picture allowing others to know that you're hiring and lastly you can set up screening questions which is linkedin's way of helping you to find the best possible candidate that matches your needs and today I'm giving the D ofo Community a free Linkin job post head to linkedin.com doac now and let me know how you get on and terms and conditions apply that's a free job poster go get it now who's happier introverts or extroverts yes so extroverts is the classic finding tons of studies sign find that extroverts have more positive affect they have higher they tend to have higher mood but introverts have special gifts they have closer relationships they have deeper emotional connections to other people and the result of that is that they have long-term friendship and Marriage Partners that sustain them in a way that extroverts don't extroverts often get can get really lonely because they are you an extrovert it's such an interesting question because you might not be even though you're a mad scientist I don't think I am do you get when you're at a party do you find that you get exhausted I looked at Jackie's know me many many years five years I'm an introvert I just want to be alone so when you're at a party do you find that it sucks energy out of you I don't go to the party certainly your Baseline is introversion but you have extroverted characteristics because you're able to do good entrepreneurs know how to be extroverts when they need to be which is important and you run a podcast if you're a true introvert it's like I got to meet Arthur Brooks what a pain no I like deep conversations I don't like small talk yeah yeah you do you have close friends oh yeah the same five guys i' I've known years that you've known since College yeah basically no others other than this slot here who I consider friends but the same five that I've known for 12 12 years they're real friends not deal friends no they're real friends they were there when I was shoplifting pizzas to feed myself same Five Guys so that's interesting and and but so extroverts they tend to get more
shortterm happiness and introverts tend to have more long-term happiness so what you find is that extroverts they tend to get more enjoyment and and introverts tend to get more meaning metacognition you used this word earlier on when we were talking about happiness it sounds like almost an antidote to unhappiness in respects what is metacognition explain this like I'm a 10-year-old yeah okay so metacognition simply means thinking about your thinking and taking more time as you react to your emotions that's what metacognition is all about so theot are produced in the lyic system of the brain an ancient part of the brain you react to them and decide what they mean in the prefrontal CeX the sea Suite of your head that takes time those are not the same place you need to experience your emotions in your conscious executive brain which is the part the front the part of the front the bumper of tissue right behind your forehead so when your kids are little when your kids are 10 and they're freaking out about something you don't say don't be so limic you say use your word what you're saying is be metacognitive allow yourself to explain this thing that you're feeling and in so doing you're using your prefrontal cortex as opposed to relying on the lyic tissue of your brain so write it down would be an example writing externally is phenomenal classic case so you're anxious yeah anxiety is unfocused fear that's what it is fear was adapted in in the human species so that to be episodic and intense the way that fear is supposed to work is that something happens it alarms you it illuminates the igala of your brain that sends a signal through the hypothalamus to the pituitary gland which then signals the adrenal gland sitting above the kidneys to spit out stress hormones this happens in 74 milliseconds of the the perception of a threat in you know the occipital lobe of your brain where you're you know your visual cortex exists boom this thing happens really really quick this is and saved your life many many times thousands of times you know because you live in London and you can get run over at any given second it's crazy well actually because I'm looking the wrong direction for oncoming traffic that's my problem there so so that's how that's
how that works is the whole point so fear is supposed to work that way very episodic very occasional the problem in Modern Life is that we have all of these vague threats that are happening that are kind of half Illuminating our our amydala which is giving us a little drip of cortisol into our brain all the time and that's unfocused and freaking us out so the way to actually solve that problem metacognitive is say okay okay I got to focus it take out a piece of paper number one number one thing that I'm afraid of right now that's actually giving me this anxiety that's giving me this discomfort write it down why is it happening what's the worst thing that can happen and what would I do if that happened and you literally moving the thing experience from the amydala which is the emotional Center to the prefrontal cortex which is The Logical which is that's for your SE suite and that should kill the anxiety it will it greatly attenuate the anxiety it will turn it into a logical kind of fear that's the right reaction to these threats and it will change your life so if you do that if you're experiencing a lot of anxiety you know unfocused fear focus it every day for 10 minutes write it down I have a I have a I'm a very anxious person I have a running list of the things that I'm afraid of a running list I have lots and lots of lists I keep lots of lists because journaling is so critically important I also have a failure list what are you afraid of I'm afraid of failure I'm afraid of failing I'm a total striver from the very beginning failing what's what does what would failure look like I know that's the thing it's an unfocused fear and so when I write it down and I focus it I go oh yeah it's true you know that's that's the point so it's failure is a spectre for Strivers it's a kind of a when you look at it it goes away yeah yeah but when you're not looking at it it's there and part of the reason is because your self-image is one of somebody who's successful so you're self- objectifying as a successful person you're success addicted meaning the vental item of your brain gets tapped every time somebody says Steve you got another 7 million downloads or something that is not inherently meaningful in that particular way because the metric is actually what
Taps your ventral stum again and again and again and so then if that's going in the wrong direction and you're not making progress then that sort of feels somehow not successful which means that things are going in the wrong direction and that's just like this fantasm right it's like and so okay focus it focus it look at it poof right disappears it doesn't entirely disappear it turns into what it really is which is a mouse not a lion oh your book is fantastic I mean we could talk for for so long because there's so much more in it there's some of the unb unbelievable stats that I was reading about around social media and this one St about um a study showing that teens who texted more often than their peers experienced more depression anxiety and relationship and po relationships the other things about laughter and that you can feel 35% happier um using some humor therapy all of these things gratitude all of these things that we haven't haven't covered but they're all in this fantastic fantastic book which is so unbelievably accessible for someone that as smart as you Oprah had okay oh okay right okay yeah and I thank you for that because happiness is a complex thing and I think there's an industry out there that are trying to simplify it and put it down to three steps to happiness or one this one secret to happiness one weird trick don't gra you know whatever but your approach provides the nuance and the complexity that the subject matter deserves and I think that offers us a towards being happier as you talk about in the book um that's why I wrote it I wrote it for you oh it actually reads like you wrote it for me that's the kind of but I imagine everyone that reads it's is going to feel that way um I highly recommend everybody goes and gets this book ASAP it's a really really beautiful book as well it's so beautiful um we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're leaving it for what are we supposed to do about the things that we cannot control what is your opinion on this the things that we can't control are virtually all outside ourselves we have to accommodate ourselves to the fact that we live in a
world where there are many things that we can't control and focus on the things that we can how do we deal with things that we can't control by refocusing our attention on the parts of our life that we actually can thus giving us agency and giving us a sense of peace and perspective about the truly uncontrollable ala thank you so much so wonderful to meet you you've energized me this morning and we started pretty early for me this is super early know it's apprciate it I appreciate it so much thank you Steve it's wonderful to be with you I've admired you for such a long time I get to meet you in person it's been a joy that means the well to me someone is uh profound and as smart as you to say that to me means a ton so thank you so much Arthur from the bottom of my heart really really appreciate it thank you you too thank [Music] you as you'll know if you've listened to this podcast before I'm an investor in a company called hu I'm on their board and they sponsor this podcast and I have a very exciting announcement to make this product called Daily Greens is one of the most highly requested products at hu but it's never been sold in the UK before until now it's often difficult to get all of the greens into our diet that we need to have a healthy gut microbiome and a healthy body and with hu's Daily Greens product with one scoop every morning a very very delicious scoop you can get 91 vitamins minerals and whole food source nutrients into your diet the most important Point here is I genuinely believe it tastes delicious it's May my favorite heal product ever for all the reasons I've described so if you want access to this product the link is in the description below it launches in the UK in January because of the demand I'm pretty sure it's going to sell out do you need a podcast to listen to next we've discovered that people who liked this episode also tend to absolutely love another recent episode we've done so I've linked to that episode in the description below I know you'll enjoy [Music] it