Speaker 1: Pushkin, It's going to be a busy fall on Happiness Lab.
Speaker 1: I'll soon be embarking on a new season of shows
Speaker 1: with some of the sweetest, most joyful co hosts. Imaginable
Speaker 1: That's us with the help of Sesame Streets, Big Bird,
Speaker 1: Grover and Abbi Kadapi, I'll be bringing you happiness hacks
Speaker 1: that work whether you're age three or one hundred and three.
Speaker 2: Oh, I am so excited.
Speaker 1: Me too, Grover. And after all that, we'll launch into
Speaker 1: an important news series about the ways we can share
Speaker 1: happiness with those around us if we can bring ourselves
Speaker 1: to be a bit more sociable. We'll look at how
Speaker 1: to connect with strangers, how to deepen our existing relationships
Speaker 1: with friends, and even how to negotiate the tricky move
Speaker 1: of revving up friendships that have fizzled. But before all that,
Speaker 1: I couldn't help but share a conversation I recently recorded
Speaker 1: with best selling author Arthur Brooks. In the last few years,
Speaker 1: Arthur has set up a new are at Harvard dedicated
Speaker 1: to the same ideas that we discuss on this podcast,
Speaker 1: called the Leadership and Happiness Laboratory, or just Happiness Lab
Speaker 1: for sure. Arthur's work has gained legions of fans, with
Speaker 1: people lining up all over to collaborate with him. A
Speaker 1: lot of these folks are important and respected scientists and researchers,
Speaker 1: but some are just well, absolute megastars.
Speaker 2: I've just finished a book called Build the Life You Want,
Speaker 2: The Art and Science of Getting Happier, co authored with
Speaker 2: the Queen Oprah Winfrey.
Speaker 1: I read Arthur and Oprah's book over the summer, and
Speaker 1: I was totally hooked. It's not only full of smart
Speaker 1: insights and great advice, that also touches on a question
Speaker 1: that's close to my heart. How happy can happiness experts
Speaker 1: really be? As someone who runs a lab on happiness
Speaker 1: at Harvard and teaches about it to companies and leaders
Speaker 1: all over the place, someone who doesn't know you might
Speaker 1: assume that you are, by nature a very happy person,
Speaker 1: that happiness comes easy to you.
Speaker 2: Is that the case? It is not? And you know
Speaker 2: happiness is funny. You've been in the happiness business for
Speaker 2: a long time, and you and I both know most
Speaker 2: of the practitioners of happiness science, as it were. They're
Speaker 2: not desperate, they're not dark necessarily, but happiness is a
Speaker 2: bit of a struggle for them, and what they figured
Speaker 2: out is as social scientists, they can turn their toolkit
Speaker 2: on themselves. And that's certainly the case for me. We
Speaker 2: know based on the research that about half of your
Speaker 2: baseline mood from day to day, good and bad, positive
Speaker 2: and negative, it's genetic, and I have gloomy genetics. I
Speaker 2: have on both sides of my family, got a lot
Speaker 2: of gloomy people. And I figured out along the way,
Speaker 2: after I really got interested in this topic, that I
Speaker 2: was interested in it because I wanted more of it.
Speaker 2: The problem was I was treating it as if it
Speaker 2: were something I could observe but not affect through my habits.
Speaker 2: And I said, well, that doesn't make sense. This is
Speaker 2: supposed to be a hands on science. You were supposed
Speaker 2: to be able to help people with psychology and behavioral
Speaker 2: economics and change their behavior. Professor teach thyself, I said
Speaker 2: to myself in the mirror one day, and Lauria, it worked.
Speaker 1: I need some help on this insight from your wife.
Speaker 1: I think that she was one of the people who
Speaker 1: pointed out this importance of applying this to yourself, right,
Speaker 1: I mean.
Speaker 2: She pointed out the irony that I was a gloomy
Speaker 2: happiness expert. I mean, come on, I was talking about
Speaker 2: happiness because it was so incredibly interesting, and I was
Speaker 2: hearing back from people that would read whatever I'd written
Speaker 2: saying it was very helpful. But I wasn't actually trying
Speaker 2: not only to use it for myself, I wasn't actually
Speaker 2: talking about the applications of it. And part of the
Speaker 2: reason is because you and I are trained as academics,
Speaker 2: and academic papers don't have a section called how to
Speaker 2: use this in your life. On the contrary, that would
Speaker 2: get an automatic rejection from an academic journal. It would
Speaker 2: be stripped out by the editors. But that's really what
Speaker 2: people need, isn't it. And my wife was the one
Speaker 2: who pointed out that I was doing work that could
Speaker 2: be useful, but wasn't I think her words were, don't
Speaker 2: you have a PhD for a reason? And she was
Speaker 2: right and it changed my life.
Speaker 1: And one of those changes was really like writing down
Speaker 1: what you wanted to do. I love this idea that
Speaker 1: you wrote yourself a mission statement when you came to
Speaker 1: this work. What was in the mission statement?
Speaker 2: The mission statement was I had a lot of different interactions,
Speaker 2: but they all came down to the following. I was
Speaker 2: in my mid fifties at the time, I had, I
Speaker 2: don't know, twenty good years left in my career. Academics
Speaker 2: tend to work fill they're pretty old. And I was
Speaker 2: going to spend the rest of my life lifting people
Speaker 2: up and bringing them together in bonds of happiness and love,
Speaker 2: using science and ideas full stop. And I started doing it.
Speaker 2: And I'm telling you, I'm telling you, Laurie, it's amazing
Speaker 2: because when I basically did three things, I had learned
Speaker 2: that you need to understand, you need to change your habits,
Speaker 2: and you need to teach it to others. And so
Speaker 2: that's really what I did. I'd been really good at
Speaker 2: learning the science, but I had not been so good
Speaker 2: at changing habits for myself or others, and I'd not
Speaker 2: taught it. And so I did those three things in sequence,
Speaker 2: and the gears started to turn in my life and
Speaker 2: I started to really have a big impact in the
Speaker 2: lives of other people, which was what I wanted.
Speaker 1: And You've had lots of amazing partners in that impact
Speaker 1: on other people. I know you've done work with the
Speaker 1: Dalai Lama and all kinds of like academics in the
Speaker 1: field of happiness science, but most recently, you've been able
Speaker 1: to connect with, as you put it, the Queen herself,
Speaker 1: win Free. I'm so curious how did that first meet?
Speaker 2: And go?
Speaker 1: Like? Did you just get a call and the caller
Speaker 1: idea said Oprah Winfree, Like, how did that work?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Hi, this is Oprah Winfrey And I said, yeah,
Speaker 2: and I'm Batman. You know who's spoofing me today? It
Speaker 2: wasn't exactly like that, because you know, there's lots of
Speaker 2: layers of communication, and so it turns out that she
Speaker 2: reads my column in the Atlantic, and my column in
Speaker 2: the Atlantic was an effort to bring the best ideas
Speaker 2: in academia, including yours, to these massive audiences of people
Speaker 2: that ordinarily wouldn't read academic journal articles. It's the same
Speaker 2: kind of mission as the Happiness Lab, which is to
Speaker 2: not popularize, but to make accessible these ideas to people
Speaker 2: because they're so critically important. This is something you've dedicated
Speaker 2: yourself to as well. And I don't know who reads
Speaker 2: the Atlantic column. You know, it could be anybody. Turns
Speaker 2: out one of them was Oprah. During the lockdowns for
Speaker 2: the coronavirus epidemic, she was at her house in Monticito, California,
Speaker 2: and she wasn't really leaving the property. So she was
Speaker 2: reading a lot and learning a lot and using the
Speaker 2: opportunity to, you know, get interested in new things. And
Speaker 2: one of those things happened to be the call. And
Speaker 2: so when my last book came out, which was called
Speaker 2: from Strength to Strength, about how to build a life
Speaker 2: that made you happier as years went by. It was
Speaker 2: a strategic plan for people in the second effort their lives,
Speaker 2: because we need a happiness plan for the rest of us.
Speaker 2: She read that and called up and said, I want
Speaker 2: you to come on my book club podcast. She has
Speaker 2: this thing called super Soul, which is a very good
Speaker 2: podcast where she reads a book and boy does she
Speaker 2: ever read the book. I mean she was quoting to
Speaker 2: me from my book by memory. She's that good. And
Speaker 2: we had a long conversation. It was like a house
Speaker 2: on fire. It turns out that she and I have
Speaker 2: a very similar mission about trying to lift people up
Speaker 2: and bring them together. That's what she wants. But she's
Speaker 2: been in a different world than me, and so after
Speaker 2: that we said, wow, this is a synchronicity. We did
Speaker 2: a couple of other things together on the internet, and
Speaker 2: finally she said, you know, if I had my show still,
Speaker 2: she said, I would have had you on the show
Speaker 2: twenty or thirty times, and that would have introduced you
Speaker 2: to the American public. Why don't we do something like
Speaker 2: that in the form of a book. I said, let
Speaker 2: me think yes, because it's great, and I got an
Speaker 2: opportunity to work with her, and so I went out
Speaker 2: and I spent some time in her place and we
Speaker 2: cooked it up in person, just really, you know, this
Speaker 2: chapter should do this, and here's the big challenge. And
Speaker 2: it's interesting because her input to it was so critical
Speaker 2: for focusing what I was trying to get at. There
Speaker 2: were some critical moments when she made the book real
Speaker 2: by saying this is the wrong question or this is
Speaker 2: the wrong title. Is really really, really valuable. And then
Speaker 2: we went away and we independently worked on it and
Speaker 2: setting chapters back and forth, and now it's coming true.
Speaker 1: I absolutely love the book, and this is you know,
Speaker 1: I think a lot about how we can translate you know,
Speaker 1: so many different findings and so many different insights, and
Speaker 1: you both have just done it in such an elegant way,
Speaker 1: in such a suggest of a way.
Speaker 2: By the way, I just have to tell you, Lorie
Speaker 2: Santos loves my book. You realize how much that means
Speaker 2: to me. I mean, you're, I mean you're, you're you're
Speaker 2: such a big figure in this field. I mean, you're
Speaker 2: you're so inflecting in the way that this field has gone.
Speaker 1: I just I'm showing Arthur the book, and you can
Speaker 1: see he can see that it's got like all these
Speaker 1: post it notes stuck in of like different notes about
Speaker 1: oh that was such a cool point about humor and
Speaker 1: Saint Augustine and all this. So you should get it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you're made. Thank Thank you, Laurie. I really really
Speaker 2: appreciate that a lot, because your work has meant so
Speaker 2: much to me.
Speaker 1: Dido. But I mean so one of the big premises
Speaker 1: of the book that I absolutely adored is this idea
Speaker 1: that happiness is not a destination, it's a direction. It's
Speaker 1: not a state of being, it's a state of doing.
Speaker 1: What do you mean with that?
Speaker 2: You know, everybody, when you ask them what do you
Speaker 2: want to say? I want to be happy and a
Speaker 2: Socrates says, and St. Augustine says the same thing. You
Speaker 2: know is he says without proof because it's so obvious
Speaker 2: that everybody wants to be happy. But actually that's craziness
Speaker 2: because happiness is a destination is completely unattainable. And you've
Speaker 2: said this in your show, and you've said this in
Speaker 2: your research for so long, that we need on happiness
Speaker 2: in our lives to stay alive. By the way, I
Speaker 2: mean that you know the work on emotions that you've
Speaker 2: contributed to and that so many of my colleagues here
Speaker 2: at Harvard have as well, on the science of emotion,
Speaker 2: that negative emotions keep you alive, sadness discussed, anger, grief,
Speaker 2: these emotions, these basic emotions, we need them or will die.
Speaker 2: And if we have these things, we can't have pure
Speaker 2: and unremitting happiness. So it's the wrong goal. It's a
Speaker 2: goal that we can't attain. It's El Dorado, the city
Speaker 2: of gold in South America that the Spaniards died keep
Speaker 2: trying to find because it didn't actually exist, and so
Speaker 2: understanding that is important. Look, you want to direct yourself
Speaker 2: toward happiness, understand what it might mean. Understanding also that
Speaker 2: you can't attain it in this life. But in pursuing
Speaker 2: this goal, you're going to get what you really wanted
Speaker 2: all along, which is to get happier. Oprah really nailed
Speaker 2: this point down. We were talking about it. She said, So
Speaker 2: you're saying, she calls me, professor, professor, that the point
Speaker 2: is not happiness. The point is happierness. That's the directionality
Speaker 2: of the best life is happierness. This is really what
Speaker 2: we want. And I'm telling you because I know that.
Speaker 2: But it pointed out this critical truism to me that
Speaker 2: helped me understand my own research. It helped me understand
Speaker 2: what I was trying to do with my own life,
Speaker 2: and it started to make me personally, or the course
Speaker 2: of writing this book, more comfortable with my own misery
Speaker 2: because in that happiness, I can use that unhappiness. I
Speaker 2: can grow and learn from that unhappiness and have it
Speaker 2: be part of my happierness.
Speaker 1: So in this journey towards happierness, you also make the
Speaker 1: point that we need to get the coordinates right, which
Speaker 1: is tricky because we need to know what happiness or
Speaker 1: happierness really is. And so give me your definition of happiness,
Speaker 1: what are the different parts.
Speaker 2: There are a lot of definitions of happiness that have
Speaker 2: come up in the social science literature, and you know
Speaker 2: that's disconcerting to a lot of people. As if we
Speaker 2: somehow disagreed across the field, and that's not true. I
Speaker 2: was trained as an economist.
Speaker 1: We'll forgive you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I know that. I've tried to, you know, make
Speaker 2: my way over to the psychology world along the way.
Speaker 2: You know, for example, economists you say, what's money. I mean,
Speaker 2: it's the currency of everything that we're doing, sort of
Speaker 2: like happiness is the currency of how we're trying to
Speaker 2: build our lives. And economists will say it's a medium
Speaker 2: of exchange. No, no, no, no, it's a store of value.
Speaker 2: Those are both true, and it depends on what you're
Speaker 2: actually trying to get at. And so if you look
Speaker 2: at the science of happiness just to descriptively understand what
Speaker 2: the experience of happiness is, it's one thing. But if
Speaker 2: you're trying to build a definition of happiness that helps
Speaker 2: people put together a game plan for how to get happier,
Speaker 2: that's a different thing. And that's usually how I come
Speaker 2: at it, because I'm trying to do something that people
Speaker 2: can use to build their lives. Aka the title of
Speaker 2: the book, how to Build the Life you Want. So
Speaker 2: I think about happiness in terms of the three macro
Speaker 2: nutrients of it and again, this is completely compatible with
Speaker 2: all the more traditional psychological definitions of happiness. So the
Speaker 2: free macronutrients are sort of the protein, carbohydrates and fat
Speaker 2: of happiness, which you need and balance and abundance to
Speaker 2: score high on the happiness indicies. And again there's a
Speaker 2: ton of psychometrically valid ways to measure well being that
Speaker 2: you and I have worked on over the course of
Speaker 2: our careers. There are a lot of bad ways to
Speaker 2: do it too, but there are a lot of good ways,
Speaker 2: and you find the people who score high they're balanced
Speaker 2: and abundant in three dimensions enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. You
Speaker 2: need to enjoy your life, which by the way, is
Speaker 2: not straightforward, not the same thing as pleasure. You need
Speaker 2: to have satisfaction, which is really paradoxical because it's you know,
Speaker 2: Mick Jaggers saying I can't get it. The truth is
Speaker 2: you can get it, you can't keep it, which is
Speaker 2: a real problem. And last, but not least, there's meaning.
Speaker 2: And meaning is just completely full of sadness and difficulty
Speaker 2: and sacrifice. And so the result is ironically that it
Speaker 2: requires a lot of unhappiness, and that so each one
Speaker 2: of those macronutrients takes a game plan, as it turns out,
Speaker 2: and that's a lot of what we write about the
Speaker 2: book how to get it and then how to embrace
Speaker 2: the inevitable unhappiness that comes along with it, so that
Speaker 2: you can have happiereness along the way.
Speaker 1: And so there's this interesting irony with these three parts
Speaker 1: of happiness, which is that you know, I think we
Speaker 1: often assume that we'd get to happieriness by things going
Speaker 1: our way, everything going smoothly, amy avoiding any potential suffering
Speaker 1: or problems. But in each of those three ingredients, the
Speaker 1: research seems to show that those parts of happiness come
Speaker 1: because of this suffering, not in spite of it. And
Speaker 1: this fits with this general idea that happiness takes work,
Speaker 1: it takes kind of effort, but it also takes problems
Speaker 1: and challenges. You talk about some of these different aspects
Speaker 1: of happiness and how the suffering.
Speaker 2: Yeah, sure, and I know that this is something you
Speaker 2: talk a lot about in your famous class at Yale.
Speaker 2: You don't just help people not suffer, you help them
Speaker 2: to put their inevitable human suffering in context, which is
Speaker 2: one of the reasons that people love the class. So
Speaker 2: much because it finally rings true. It's not just some
Speaker 2: internet hack, you know, It's really about how to be
Speaker 2: fully alive. As you know, when I look at your
Speaker 2: syllabus and I've listened to the way that you lecture,
Speaker 2: it's like this is a fully alive class with Marie
Speaker 2: Santos at Yale and people like finally somebody who understands
Speaker 2: that I'm a human, breathing being and there's nothing defective
Speaker 2: about me because I'm sad today, and this really is
Speaker 2: part of how happierness works. The first is enjoyment. The
Speaker 2: biggest problem that people have with enjoying their lives is
Speaker 2: that they mistake enjoyment with pleasure. People who pursue pleasure
Speaker 2: but not enjoyment, they never get happier. Pleasure is actually,
Speaker 2: you know, itself, not a component of happiness, and pursuing
Speaker 2: pleasure per se leads to addiction and usually misery. There's
Speaker 2: never been anybody I've ever talked to or heard of
Speaker 2: who says, my happiness secret is methamphetamine. Uh, you know,
Speaker 2: and almost anything that you pursue for the pleasure of
Speaker 2: that will lead you in the wrong direction. Here's sort
Speaker 2: of the way of thinking about it. Which is that
Speaker 2: enjoyment starts with pleasure, but it adds sociability and memory,
Speaker 2: it adds people in memory or communion with others, and consciousness.
Speaker 2: And there's a bunch of neuroscience behind this. You need
Speaker 2: to have a pleasurable experience, but you need to be
Speaker 2: able to remember it, and you need to be able
Speaker 2: to share it with other people, and then it becomes
Speaker 2: this enjoyment that involves higher parts of your brain. Is
Speaker 2: the way that it works. So here's kind of the
Speaker 2: rule of thumb that I talk about. If there's something
Speaker 2: that gives you a lot of pleasure and you're doing
Speaker 2: it over and over again alone, you're on the wrong track.
Speaker 2: Now I realized there's certain things that you do alone,
Speaker 2: but a loneness actually is a problem with a lot
Speaker 2: of these pleasure based activities. And you know, there's a
Speaker 2: reason that Anheuser Bush doesn't do beer ads showing some
Speaker 2: guy pounding a twelve pack alone in his apartment. Why
Speaker 2: because they know that that's pleasure that doesn't lead to happiness.
Speaker 2: They show a bunch of people with their family and
Speaker 2: friends crack and open a cold Budweiser and having a
Speaker 2: big drink and having a nice time together in making
Speaker 2: a memory, because that leads to enjoyment, and enjoyment leads
Speaker 2: to happiness, and they want to be a happiness company,
Speaker 2: and that's great. The same thing is true with almost
Speaker 2: anything that we do. If you're alone in Vegas at
Speaker 2: three am in front of a slot machine and nobody
Speaker 2: knows where you are, you're probably not pursuing a happiness strategy.
Speaker 2: And it's the same set of principles as the way
Speaker 2: that works.
Speaker 1: Out, and things get worse in terms of the kind
Speaker 1: of stresses you need to build in. When we're talking
Speaker 1: about satisfaction, right, we tend not to really be satisfied
Speaker 1: with stuff that's super easy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I know. I mean you talk so compellingly about
Speaker 2: the hedonic treadmill. I've heard you talk about it, and
Speaker 2: the way that I really understood it was like looking
Speaker 2: at your stuff and listening to you, actually, because it's
Speaker 2: so clear the way you talk about it. So, first,
Speaker 2: what is satisfaction. Satisfaction is really the joy you get
Speaker 2: if you work for something. So if you don't have
Speaker 2: to work for something, there's really no satisfaction. If one
Speaker 2: of my graduate students cheats to get an A in
Speaker 2: my class, there's no satisfaction with the A. But if
Speaker 2: they stay up all night, even though the A is trivial,
Speaker 2: nobody cares. But if they work hard for it, they
Speaker 2: get a lot of satisfaction from it. Problem is that
Speaker 2: that satisfaction doesn't stay around because we have a natural
Speaker 2: human tendency toward what neuroscientists call homeostasis. Homeostasis is anybody
Speaker 2: who listens to the Happiness Lab knows is that nothing lasts,
Speaker 2: none of your emotions last, and all of your biological
Speaker 2: processes always return to equilibrium. So, for example, you can't
Speaker 2: stay angry that long, you can't stay sad, you can't
Speaker 2: stay happy, you can't stay joyful. Your moods they change
Speaker 2: because your moods are signals to you that something is
Speaker 2: happening that you should react to. So you don't want
Speaker 2: somebody to stay in a particular mood because they won't
Speaker 2: be ready for the next That are circumstances. People misunderstand emotions,
Speaker 2: people think of them as nice to have or wish
Speaker 2: could avoid all these other ones. No, no, no, no. This
Speaker 2: is the machine language of life that translates what's going
Speaker 2: on around you into how you should react. And it's
Speaker 2: the universal language. It doesn't matter where you're from or
Speaker 2: what language you speak. We all have these same emotions,
Speaker 2: so we should be really really grateful for them. We're
Speaker 2: always chasing the good ones. They don't last, so we
Speaker 2: can be ready for the that are circumstances. Mother nature
Speaker 2: tricks us into thinking that if we get that nice emotion,
Speaker 2: we will keep it forever. I mean, mother nature lies
Speaker 2: to us a lot, you know. Mother nature says you
Speaker 2: can keep that satisfaction. You'll love that watch forever, that
Speaker 2: car forever, that house forever, that relationship forever. And then
Speaker 2: when you don't have it, you conclude that you needed more,
Speaker 2: and so you run and run and run, and that's
Speaker 2: your hedonic treadmill, which of course is a metaphor running
Speaker 2: to get the feeling, running to get the feeling again
Speaker 2: and again and again. That's the problem, and that's a
Speaker 2: really painful thing that we have to come to terms
Speaker 2: with that we can't just have more and suddenly be
Speaker 2: permanently satisfied. And it makes life feel like a real tyranny.
Speaker 2: But it gives you a whole lot of learning and
Speaker 2: growth if you have a real life strategy for how
Speaker 2: to deal with it and a balance an abundant.
Speaker 1: Way, and the same kind of struggle that we need
Speaker 1: is true for purpose.
Speaker 2: For sure too right, for sure? You know the question
Speaker 2: that's almost a cliche, you know, what's the meaning of life?
Speaker 2: You go to the cave and the Himalayas and the
Speaker 2: Guru in there, and you sit at his feet and say,
Speaker 2: your holiness, what's the meaning of life? You know, there's
Speaker 2: a million jokes kind of around that, But the truth
Speaker 2: of the matter is that's the wrong question because it's
Speaker 2: too general. Philosophers and even some psychologists that you and
Speaker 2: are familiar with, have broken the meaning question into three parts.
Speaker 2: We call them coherence, purpose, and significance. So coherence is
Speaker 2: the question why do things happen the way they do?
Speaker 2: The purpose question is what am I trying to do
Speaker 2: with my life? What's the arc of my life? Was
Speaker 2: the goal of my life? And significance is why does
Speaker 2: it matter that I'm alive? And you need answers to
Speaker 2: those questions. I've actually found that there's a kind of
Speaker 2: a two question diagnostic. I can ask my students or
Speaker 2: anybody that they need answers to. If they don't have answers,
Speaker 2: then they have a meaning crisis. Question number one, why
Speaker 2: are you alive? Question number two for what would you
Speaker 2: be willing to die today? And it is extraordinary how
Speaker 2: many people can't honestly answer that question to their own satisfaction.
Speaker 2: I mean, some people will give you answers that are plausible,
Speaker 2: but they don't actually believe them. See this with a
Speaker 2: lot of young adults that one of the biggest problems
Speaker 2: that they have is they can't answer those questions, which
Speaker 2: is signaling blinking lights on the seven forty seven dashboard
Speaker 2: of happiness, of coherence, purpose and significance. Is they can't
Speaker 2: answer those two questions, why am I alive? And for
Speaker 2: what am I willing to die? I remember with my
Speaker 2: own kids, I mean, I have adult kids, and it's
Speaker 2: super fun for them to, you know, be the children
Speaker 2: of the social scientists. As you can imagine. Becau said,
Speaker 2: Dad's working on a book. He's asking a lot of.
Speaker 1: The two questions.
Speaker 2: Again, Dad, Yeah, no, for sure. But you know, my
Speaker 2: middle son, it was really hard for him. I mean
Speaker 2: he was a cut up and you know, the most
Speaker 2: popular kid in high school, but he wasn't actually happy
Speaker 2: and it was really a meaning crisis for him. And
Speaker 2: I remember asking those questions like I don't know dad,
Speaker 2: and when it was time for him to go to college.
Speaker 2: This is where the rubber hits the road, you know,
Speaker 2: this is where you can use this to help people
Speaker 2: you love. I said, you shouldn't go to and this
Speaker 2: is hard for me. I'm a college professor. You shouldn't
Speaker 2: go to college until you have some answers to these questions.
Speaker 2: How are you going to find the answers to these questions?
Speaker 2: And he thought about it, and he said, he's a
Speaker 2: big canet boy. You know, he's a big, hard working, strong,
Speaker 2: handsome he's six foot four. And he said, I want
Speaker 2: to go work with my hands by myself. And he
Speaker 2: became a dry land wheat farmer for two seasons. It's amazing,
Speaker 2: you know. He was digging rocks out of the soil
Speaker 2: and building fences and cutting down trees and spending long
Speaker 2: days by himself. And then he joined the Marine Corps,
Speaker 2: which was a hard thing to do. And boy, they
Speaker 2: ever test you. And he became not just a marine,
Speaker 2: he became a Special Forces Marine. He's a scout sniper
Speaker 2: in the Marine Corps, which is scary for me and
Speaker 2: his mom, I can tell you, but he's got answers. Now.
Speaker 2: He found the answers six years later after graduating from
Speaker 2: high school. If you ask him, I'll say his name
Speaker 2: is Carlos. I say, Carlos, why are you alive? And
Speaker 2: he says, because God made me. I say, Carlos, for
Speaker 2: what would you be willing to die today? Immediate? He says,
Speaker 2: my faith, my family, my friends in the United States
Speaker 2: of America, mic drop very solid. They might not be
Speaker 2: the answers of every single listener to the Happiness Lab,
Speaker 2: but they're his answers. And that's the point. That's how
Speaker 2: we actually find the answers. And he found those answers
Speaker 2: through pain. I'm telling you you're becoming a Scout sniper
Speaker 2: and Marine Corps intails lots of broken bones, lots of
Speaker 2: pain and a lot of fear too, and that's how
Speaker 2: we find it. That's one of the examples about unhappiness
Speaker 2: is key to our happierness.
Speaker 1: And the other way that our got mind gets happierness.
Speaker 2: Wrong.
Speaker 1: Isn't just that we kind of neglect the importance of
Speaker 1: some of these painful moments, you know, in terms of
Speaker 1: seeking purpose and things like that. We also are really
Speaker 1: evlusionarily drawn to some of the bad stuff. We kind
Speaker 1: of have this bias to finding suffering and bad things
Speaker 1: all around us. Talk about why we're wired to have
Speaker 1: this not so good outlook on life.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of work that's been
Speaker 2: done in our fields about, for example, negativity bias, and
Speaker 2: negatativity bias is basically, pay more attention to the bad
Speaker 2: than the good because the good is nice to have,
Speaker 2: but the bad can kill you. So there's a very
Speaker 2: strong evolutionary argument about why we would be sort of,
Speaker 2: you know, negatrons. As my kids will like to say,
Speaker 2: you know somebody who's always being super negative all the time,
Speaker 2: But five hundred thousand years ago on the placeiscene, you know,
Speaker 2: you're looking around. A face that's smiling sweetly at you
Speaker 2: is nice to have, but a face that's frowning at
Speaker 2: you if you ignore it might be the death of you.
Speaker 2: It makes a lot of sense for you to be
Speaker 2: more tuned. You know. Some people believe to have more
Speaker 2: brain space dedicated to negative emotion than positive emotions, and
Speaker 2: neuroscientists disagree on all this, because neuroscientists disagree on absolutely everything,
Speaker 2: and a lot of them actually believe that we were
Speaker 2: built to feel the pain, because the pain actually keeps
Speaker 2: us alive so that we can survive and pass on
Speaker 2: our genes and fight another day. Now, interestingly, we tend
Speaker 2: to look in the rearview mirror more positively than negatively,
Speaker 2: which is called fading affect bias. And so what happens
Speaker 2: is that when something bad is happening to you, and
Speaker 2: this is one of the exercises that I ask my
Speaker 2: students to do. They have this negativity journal that they
Speaker 2: keep and when something bad happens, which is inevitable. I mean,
Speaker 2: you're twenty eight years old. Somebody's going to break your
Speaker 2: heart today, and then somebody's going to disappoint you tomorrow,
Speaker 2: and you're going to get a be on an exam
Speaker 2: and it's going to bum you out or something. And
Speaker 2: every time that happens, you open your journal and you
Speaker 2: write it down, and then you leave two lines under it.
Speaker 2: The first line you have an alarm on your phone
Speaker 2: that comes up after one month, and you go back
Speaker 2: and you have to write down what you learned from
Speaker 2: that one month later, and then six months later you
Speaker 2: have to come back and say, actually, a good thing
Speaker 2: that happened because of that. Why Because you need to
Speaker 2: be more alert to fading affect bias, and you need
Speaker 2: to put your negativity bias in context. It doesn't need
Speaker 2: to get rid of your negativity bias. It means you
Speaker 2: need to understand your negativity bias. And it's amazing. When
Speaker 2: people do this, they start to feel that they start
Speaker 2: to grow as people enormously. They start to look forward
Speaker 2: to putting entries in their negativity journal because they get
Speaker 2: to look back at the last one and look back
Speaker 2: at the last one and say, yeah, yeah, you know.
Speaker 2: It's like, my boss gave me a really really bad
Speaker 2: evaluation and I thought I was doing a good job,
Speaker 2: but I got a bad evaluation and it was horrible.
Speaker 2: And then what I learned a month later, I learned
Speaker 2: that I only felt bad about it for three days,
Speaker 2: even though I thought I was going to feel bad
Speaker 2: about it for five months. And then six months later
Speaker 2: what happened. It suggested to me maybe I was working
Speaker 2: in the wrong place, and I went on the market
Speaker 2: and I found another job and I'm happier there. And
Speaker 2: if you don't write that down, you're not going to remember.
Speaker 2: The fading affect bias will teach you something potentially, but
Speaker 2: it won't enhance your happierness, which is really important.
Speaker 1: We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be
Speaker 1: back with Arthur Brooks and more of his tips to
Speaker 1: build the Life you Want. In just a moment before
Speaker 1: the break, happiness expert Arthur Brooks was explaining how keeping
Speaker 1: a journal can help us put our feelings into perspective.
Speaker 1: A bad grade or breakup might bring heartbreak in January,
Speaker 1: but when we look back from June, it's just not
Speaker 1: so bad. That's advice we can all learn from. But
Speaker 1: in the new book he wrote with Oprah, Build the
Speaker 1: Life you Want, The Art and Science of Getting Happier,
Speaker 1: Arthur makes it clear that we shouldn't fear being scared, disappointed,
Speaker 1: or sad.
Speaker 2: It's very important once again for us always to remember
Speaker 2: that emotions are not just nice to have it bad
Speaker 2: to have. These are not luxuries and just a pain.
Speaker 2: These are the things that are literally keeping us alive.
Speaker 2: I mean, back in the nineteen eighties, you know people
Speaker 2: my age, I'm ten years older than you and say
Speaker 2: you want you're not going to remember this, but back
Speaker 2: in the nineteen eighties, or the show called Cosmos that
Speaker 2: we all knew about, We're Carl Sagan. He would talk about,
Speaker 2: you know, astronomy and you know, the mysteries of outer space,
Speaker 2: but sometimes you would talk about the mysteries right here,
Speaker 2: and sometimes you talk about the brain. He used the
Speaker 2: old triune brain theory of Paul McClain, of neuroscientists from
Speaker 2: the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties who tried to explain
Speaker 2: the human brain. It's funny because you know, our colleague
Speaker 2: here at Harvard, Josh Green, says, it's actually okay. It's
Speaker 2: still okay to describe the human brain and the triune brain.
Speaker 2: It's not as simple as this. But basically, the brain
Speaker 2: does three things. It has these ancient functions which sometimes
Speaker 2: they call the you know, the lizard brain, which is,
Speaker 2: you know, the brain stem and the parts of the
Speaker 2: brain that are ascertaining things going on outside us. You know,
Speaker 2: you're not conscious of it, but as sending signals that
Speaker 2: you can breathe without thinking, you can walk up right
Speaker 2: without having to think about it, right a bicycle, if
Speaker 2: you've learned how to do so, et cetera. Then the
Speaker 2: second part of your brain that that first part sends
Speaker 2: signals to about the outside world is the limbic system.
Speaker 2: This is inside a sort of deep buried inside your brain.
Speaker 2: It includes things like the amygdala and the dorsal anterior
Speaker 2: singular cortex and the nucleus accumbent and all these parts
Speaker 2: of the brain. And whether they do they create your
Speaker 2: desires and your feelings and your emotions. Why are they
Speaker 2: doing that so that they can send that signal to
Speaker 2: your brand new part of your brain, the crinkly part
Speaker 2: on the outside called the neocortex, especially the prefrontal cortex,
Speaker 2: the bumper of tissue behind your forehead, And then you
Speaker 2: can decide what to do consciously, but you need the signals.
Speaker 2: You got to have that language. And that's really what
Speaker 2: emotions are all about. The negative emotions in particular, their
Speaker 2: alarms go do something, and they're all evolved for an
Speaker 2: incredible purpose. Anger and fear is because there's a real
Speaker 2: threat to you. It might be a threat to your
Speaker 2: well being. Now that's maladapted. When somebody points a gun
Speaker 2: at you, it makes you feel a particular way, and
Speaker 2: you might feel the same way when you get somebody
Speaker 2: writes something mean about you on Twitter or x or
Speaker 2: whatever we call it right now, And that's a maladapted
Speaker 2: modern version of that. That you need to manage, but
Speaker 2: you can't manage it till you understand it. Discussed is
Speaker 2: a basic negative emotion that's actually a part of the
Speaker 2: brain called the insula or the insular cortex that governs discussed.
Speaker 2: The idea is that you should feel discussed for something
Speaker 2: that's a pathogen might kill you. You need that. The
Speaker 2: problem is when that's maladapted in modern life, when people
Speaker 2: use it to make you feel disgusted about people who
Speaker 2: disagree with you politically, and that's what populist, polarizing politicians
Speaker 2: do all the time. But that's really important because once
Speaker 2: we're aware that polarizing politicians are trying to stimulate our
Speaker 2: insular cortex to feel discussed toward fellow human beings, they
Speaker 2: can't do it anymore. They don't have power over us anymore,
Speaker 2: which is really important. And last, but not least, there's sadness.
Speaker 2: And sadness is really important because you feel it incredibly painful.
Speaker 2: It actually stimulates the anterior singular cortex of your brain,
Speaker 2: almost like physical pain, especially when you're separated from a
Speaker 2: loved one. And the reason is because you're evolved and
Speaker 2: not be separated from your kin. Half a million years
Speaker 2: ago that would mean walking the frozen tundra and dying alone.
Speaker 2: Is the way that that works. All of this stuff
Speaker 2: has evolved, all of it is useful, but when you
Speaker 2: understand it, this is when it gets exciting because it
Speaker 2: won't be maladapted. Then you can actually manage the versions
Speaker 2: of these negative emotions not appropriate. You can say, ah,
Speaker 2: Arthur is feeling discussed toward a person because he read
Speaker 2: something on social media. No no, no, no, no no, I'm
Speaker 2: not following for that anymore.
Speaker 1: And you've also argued that once we understand how negative
Speaker 1: emotions work, we can kind of swap them out for
Speaker 1: something healthier. Use this caffeine metaphor, which I love being
Speaker 1: a coffee drinker, having brought my coffee in it four
Speaker 1: o'clock today.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, yeah, no, no, that's true. And all emotional
Speaker 2: self management starts with a broad suite of techniques that
Speaker 2: a lot of psychologists and neuroscientists refer to as metacognition.
Speaker 2: And metacognition is just awareness of your own thinking. If
Speaker 2: you are reactive to your limbic system, your sadness, your anger,
Speaker 2: you're discussed your fear or your joy, even your interest
Speaker 2: in other things, then you're just going to react. You know,
Speaker 2: when you have little kids and they scream when anything
Speaker 2: bad happens, you always say the same thing to him.
Speaker 2: You say, use your words, and what you're saying is
Speaker 2: be metacognitive, use your prefrontal cortex, not just your limbic system.
Speaker 2: And so people like us that have suffered through a
Speaker 2: PhD and the social sciences, we don't talk about reactive people.
Speaker 2: We talk about limbic people. And that's really what it means.
Speaker 2: They're using their limbic systems, but not their prefrontal cortex.
Speaker 2: It takes time, it takes awareness to use your prefrontal
Speaker 2: cortex and choose your reaction and choose more appropriate emotions. Now,
Speaker 2: that requires a repertoire of techniques on ourselves. That's the
Speaker 2: beginning of emotional self management. If you recognize that if
Speaker 2: you wait when you feel something, you can move the
Speaker 2: experience into your prefrontal cortex and make conscious decisions about
Speaker 2: your own emotions. A good way to do this is meditation.
Speaker 2: Meditation practices where you're observing yourself with a certain remove.
Speaker 2: Laurie is feeling sad right now, that's funny. Why is
Speaker 2: laur feeling sad? Right? Now, which is a typical meditation technique.
Speaker 2: I use prayer with in a traditional religious context to
Speaker 2: do this where I'm basically observing myself. Other people use journaling.
Speaker 2: Journaling is incredible because when you're writing something down, you're
Speaker 2: using your prefrontal cortex, but you're journaling about something that
Speaker 2: was in your limbic system, which is unbelievable. But one
Speaker 2: way or the other. Once you do this, once your
Speaker 2: prefrontal cortex is involved, you've got choices, and that's so
Speaker 2: much power. So you can choose to accept the emotion
Speaker 2: and choose the reaction. You can look at the emotion
Speaker 2: and decide to substitute it with another emotion. You can
Speaker 2: literally do this. And this is the metaphor that I
Speaker 2: give in the book which you just referred to, is
Speaker 2: that of caffeine. So caffeine is a substitute molecule for
Speaker 2: one you like less. Most people think if I drink
Speaker 2: caffeine it PEPs me up. It doesn't. It blocks a
Speaker 2: molecule that makes you feel too relaxed. They get up
Speaker 2: in the morning and there's this molecule in your brain
Speaker 2: called a dentosine that's floating around and it has receptors
Speaker 2: that the molecules go into. And the molecule goes into
Speaker 2: the receptor for a dentosine, it makes you lethargic. So
Speaker 2: what does caffeine do. Caffeine looks just like a dentosine.
Speaker 2: It fits into the receptors. It like goes into the
Speaker 2: parking spots of the a dentisine receptors, dentosine can't get in.
Speaker 2: You actually feel like you have more energy. And if
Speaker 2: you drink too much coffee, there's not any dentisine you
Speaker 2: feel jit That's the way that that works, and the
Speaker 2: same thing is true with your emotions. But you got
Speaker 2: to know how it works. You have to have a
Speaker 2: substitute emotion. I was talking about this with a friend
Speaker 2: of mine, a guy who's an actor. He was in
Speaker 2: a show called The Office that most people have seen,
Speaker 2: and he played Dwight. He's a friend of mine. We
Speaker 2: grew up together at the same time in Seattle, about
Speaker 2: five miles apart. I didn't know when we were kids,
Speaker 2: but we've become good friends these days. And he said, yeah,
Speaker 2: I've got a good example of substituting emotions on purpose.
Speaker 2: I said, what is it? He said, most comedians they
Speaker 2: tend to suffer from depression, and when they feel sadness,
Speaker 2: they decide to make a joke. They use humor when
Speaker 2: they feel sadness, and they do it on purpose. That's
Speaker 2: incredibly effective and incredibly metacognitive. But you've got to practice
Speaker 2: metacognition so that you can manage your emotions and they
Speaker 2: don't manage you.
Speaker 1: But in addition to swapping our emotions out, you've also
Speaker 1: talked about a different way to get out of our
Speaker 1: emotions altogether, and that's just to stop focusing on the
Speaker 1: self like it's not our brand anymore. We're just not there.
Speaker 1: You know, what do you mean here? What is getting
Speaker 1: out of our own self focus look like?
Speaker 2: So there's really three choice. When you're feeling something and
Speaker 2: you're metacognitive enough to recognize the emotion and the emotion
Speaker 2: is uncomfortable. Now to begin with, don't numb your emotions.
Speaker 2: Don't take the equivalent of emotional fentanyl. What we don't
Speaker 2: want is to not feel anything. And by the way,
Speaker 2: when people engage in many addictive behaviors drugs and alcohol,
Speaker 2: but they're really numbing is not their physical pain. They're
Speaker 2: numbing their emotions. They're trying to get rid of them.
Speaker 2: That's a bad idea because once again we talked about
Speaker 2: this before, you need your emotions. What you want to
Speaker 2: do is blunt it in a lot of cases, and
Speaker 2: there's really three ways to do this with metacognition. Number one,
Speaker 2: choose the reaction you want notwithstanding your emotions. Number two
Speaker 2: is substitute a different emotion, which we talked about before.
Speaker 2: And number three is decide to disregard the emotion by
Speaker 2: not focusing on yourself. And again, I mean, maybe it
Speaker 2: sounds obvious, but it really isn't. It's kind of incredible
Speaker 2: that even if you go to therapy along a lot
Speaker 2: of times, what they do is they make you focus
Speaker 2: on yourself exhaustively. And a lot of people have said,
Speaker 2: you know, the problem with therapy is I've just I
Speaker 2: feel like I'm getting worse obsessed with my own emotions.
Speaker 2: And I say, well, that's you're learning metacognition, but you're
Speaker 2: not using it in the right way. A lot of
Speaker 2: times that the right solution is to decide to disregard
Speaker 2: your own emotions and focus on what's going on outside.
Speaker 2: And by the way, it's an incredible relief to have
Speaker 2: this in your emotional arsenal. There's this famous Zen Buddhist colan.
Speaker 2: You know, Zen Buddhism is taught to junior monk slurgly
Speaker 2: on the basis of riddles. The's questions that the senior
Speaker 2: monks will say. We'll ask them questions like what is
Speaker 2: the sound of one hand clapping? And you say, well,
Speaker 2: it doesn't have an answer, but it really it does.
Speaker 2: One hand clapping is an illusion. It only becomes a
Speaker 2: real sound when you add a second hand. That colan
Speaker 2: is about is the illusion of your own individuality. You don't, actually,
Speaker 2: Laurie doesn't exist in this conversation except in an interaction
Speaker 2: with Arthur. That's how that coalan is ultimately deciphered, and
Speaker 2: it shows the illusion of individuality, which is called emptiness
Speaker 2: in Buddhism. Here's another coan. A junior monk is walking
Speaker 2: along the road and he sees a senior monk coming
Speaker 2: toward him. He stops the senior monk and he said,
Speaker 2: where are you going. The senior monk says, I'm on
Speaker 2: a pilgrimage. The junior monk is immediately interested and says,
Speaker 2: where's your pilgrimage taking you? The senior monk says, I
Speaker 2: don't know. He says, why don't you know? And the
Speaker 2: senior monk says, because not knowing is the most intimate.
Speaker 2: That's a co aan that talks about the incredible knowledge
Speaker 2: that you get simply by observing and not thinking about
Speaker 2: your own intention. This is incredibly important that we can
Speaker 2: live this way. You can look at the Eiffel Tower
Speaker 2: and be amazed, or you can take a selfie of
Speaker 2: yourself in the Eiffel Tower, which really becomes a picture
Speaker 2: of you. And we're going through life, which is pictures
Speaker 2: of us and contemplating our emotions and who am I
Speaker 2: and how am I in relation to all these things
Speaker 2: that I'm doing? And it's just, Laurie, it's just terrible.
Speaker 2: It's just terrible. It's tedious.
Speaker 1: It's the kind of thing we get wrong so often.
Speaker 1: You know, I see so many articles about self care
Speaker 1: and you know, treat yourself in these things, and it's
Speaker 1: like the real way to feel better is to actually
Speaker 1: become no self, right, to start paying attention to others or.
Speaker 2: Other care, other care, other care. And you talk about
Speaker 2: this so much with your students. I mean, there's a
Speaker 2: reason you're telling your students to go out and do
Speaker 2: something kind for somebody else. It's not just because the
Speaker 2: other person needs it, It's because the person who does
Speaker 2: it needs it. They need to be the I self,
Speaker 2: which is the observer of life, and not the me self,
Speaker 2: which is the observed serving other people. As a way
Speaker 2: to do this, there are other ways to do this
Speaker 2: that a lot of young people need to understand as well,
Speaker 2: which is, for example, getting rid of all the mirrors
Speaker 2: in our life. Now that might be literal. I have
Speaker 2: a guy that I work with, and he was the
Speaker 2: dreaded fitness influencers, and he was a fitness model on
Speaker 2: magazine covers but also in social media. And he never
Speaker 2: ate anything he liked for ten years, and he had
Speaker 2: single digit body fat and you're really highly visible abs.
Speaker 2: And he said he felt horrible and unhappy, and so
Speaker 2: he tried to figure out how to get out of it.
Speaker 2: This guy is an adept. He's a spiritual adept. He
Speaker 2: figured this out on his oun. I mean, I'm not
Speaker 2: that smart. I couldn't do this. And here's how we
Speaker 2: did it. He moved into a new apartment, he took
Speaker 2: every mirror out of the apartment, and he showered in
Speaker 2: the dark for a year, and he was cured. He
Speaker 2: was cured because he realized it didn't matter how he
Speaker 2: looked to himself or even how he looked to other people.
Speaker 2: Now there's another way to do that, which is to
Speaker 2: get rid of all your notifications on social media. Those
Speaker 2: are nothing more than mirrors. Never take another selfie, or
Speaker 2: at least don't take any more selfies for a month.
Speaker 2: See how that feels. Get rid of all the mirrors
Speaker 2: in our lives, because then we're looking outward and we
Speaker 2: can enjoy life for the first time, maybe in a
Speaker 2: long time.
Speaker 1: It's time for another short break, but the Happiness Lab
Speaker 1: with Arthur Brooks will be back again in just a moment.
Speaker 1: If we follow Arthur's advice take down all the mirrors
Speaker 1: in our homes and stop looking at ourselves, what should
Speaker 1: we focus our attention on instead. One option is something
Speaker 1: we haven't touched on all that much on this podcast,
Speaker 1: and it falls roughly under the title of the spiritual
Speaker 1: or transcendental. That can mean being spell bound by a
Speaker 1: beautiful view, an amazing piece of music, or the kind
Speaker 1: of life changing religious experience. Arthur underwent on a school
Speaker 1: trip decades ago.
Speaker 2: And I'm not a super mystical guy. I mean, I
Speaker 2: worked at the RAND Corporation on military operations research. I mean,
Speaker 2: this is not my ordinary terrain. But when I was
Speaker 2: a teenager, I was on a trip to Mexico, a
Speaker 2: school trip to Mexico, and they were trudging us through
Speaker 2: these boring old churches. And you know, I was fifteen
Speaker 2: years old. How much appreciation can I have for these
Speaker 2: incredible monumental things. And we were at the shrine of
Speaker 2: Go Out to Lupe in Mexico City, which is the
Speaker 2: site of an incredible thing in the history of the
Speaker 2: Catholic Church. So during the early years of the Spanish
Speaker 2: occupation of Mexico and the Spanish Catholic Church was trying
Speaker 2: to convert you know, vast numbers of indigenous peoples and
Speaker 2: having horrible luck. I mean, nothing was happening. It was
Speaker 2: and you can imagine why this is not exactly a
Speaker 2: good sales pitch, you know, convert else and it didn't
Speaker 2: look very welcoming. But then there's the story of an
Speaker 2: incredible miracle actually where a peasant man by the name
Speaker 2: of Flan Diego was outside you know what is now
Speaker 2: downtown Mexico City and he saw an apparition of the
Speaker 2: of the Virgin Mary, and the Virgin Mary appeared to him,
Speaker 2: and this is you know, this just sounds kind of
Speaker 2: normal to us now, but it's incredibly transgressive at the time.
Speaker 2: She appeared to him as a woman of mixed race.
Speaker 2: I mean, just like no way that would occur to
Speaker 2: some Spaniard. I mean, forget about it, right, she was
Speaker 2: appearing to Juan Diego as if she could be related
Speaker 2: to Juan Diego, and furthermore that she was the mixture
Speaker 2: of all of the peoples of the world. That's what
Speaker 2: it is interpreted. And as the story goes, and again,
Speaker 2: I mean, some people believe it and some people don't
Speaker 2: believe it. She appeared to him and imprinted herself on
Speaker 2: the tilma, you know, sort of the poncho of Plan Diego,
Speaker 2: and he showed it to the bishop, and the bishop
Speaker 2: didn't believe him. And you know, it goes back and
Speaker 2: forth in these typical stories of the way that they were
Speaker 2: and these miracles, these apparitions of the blushed Virgin Mary,
Speaker 2: which have happened in history all around the world. The
Speaker 2: tilma still exists of Juan Diego. You know, some people
Speaker 2: say it's authentic. And you know, some people say it's
Speaker 2: not authentic, et cetera. It's just exactly what you'd expect.
Speaker 2: But it's sitting in the shrine of Guadalupe in Mexico City.
Speaker 2: And I went there when I was fifteen years old,
Speaker 2: and like, whatever, whatever is what is this thing? What
Speaker 2: is this legend? I don't know? And I looked at
Speaker 2: it and again, you know, I wasn't Catholic. I didn't
Speaker 2: know any Catholics. And I'm staring at it, and she
Speaker 2: was staring at me. Now to be sure, I could
Speaker 2: be looking at Elvis on velvet and the eyes would
Speaker 2: have followed me. I mean, that's a technique. I understand
Speaker 2: how that worked. But it had a big impact on me.
Speaker 2: It made me hungry for more transcendental, more mystical truths.
Speaker 2: And so I started to read. And as a kid,
Speaker 2: you know, I was just a musician. It's all I
Speaker 2: was doing in those days. All I wanted to do
Speaker 2: is play music and goof off. But I couldn't stop reading.
Speaker 2: I was reading about various mystical traditions, about different religious traditions.
Speaker 2: It just, for some reason that sparked a hunger in me.
Speaker 2: That experience and I couldn't get it out of my mind.
Speaker 2: I couldn't get it out of my head, and I converted.
Speaker 2: I became a Catholic, and that experience actually still it's
Speaker 2: as if it were still happening to me today. I
Speaker 2: can still see it. And some listeners are going to
Speaker 2: be like, Ah Brooks is full of himself, But I'm not,
Speaker 2: because I know what I saw, and I'm not saying
Speaker 2: that it is exactly the magical thing that I might
Speaker 2: have interpreted it as or many Catholics. To all I
Speaker 2: know is it sparked something in my soul, a hunger
Speaker 2: for transcendental experiences that I got and I've only ever
Speaker 2: gotten through these religious experiences and in no other way
Speaker 2: for profound insights in my life. That led me as
Speaker 2: a social scientists to study these transcendental experiences. And it
Speaker 2: turns out there's a vast literature that shows that religious
Speaker 2: and other philosophical and transcendental experiences, not just the Tilma
Speaker 2: of Juan Diego of the Blessed Virgin Mary, I mean
Speaker 2: in Buddhism, in Hinduism, and various religious traditions and non
Speaker 2: religious traditions. Reading the Stoics, the experiences of awe, as
Speaker 2: in walking in nature. But these things can give you
Speaker 2: transcendental moments that will illuminate different kinds of experiences and
Speaker 2: use parts of the brain that are typically unavailable in
Speaker 2: any other way.
Speaker 1: And so we don't often think about these transcendent experiences
Speaker 1: as being connected with happiness, but there's lots of social
Speaker 1: science research this suggest that they really are connected with
Speaker 1: feeling happier. So walk me through some of the evidence
Speaker 1: that these kinds of moments of faith are really connected
Speaker 1: with improving our well being.
Speaker 2: So we find that when people have these transcendental experiences,
Speaker 2: they're much much closer to the sources of meaning in
Speaker 2: their life. So we talked about this a minute ago.
Speaker 2: Why am I alive? And for what am I willing
Speaker 2: to die? My Catholic faith answers those questions. It really does, right,
Speaker 2: and having answers to those questions is critically important. They
Speaker 2: talk to you about the coherence of life, the purpose
Speaker 2: of life, and the significance of life, and so providing
Speaker 2: answers to that is no joke from a neuroscientific perspective.
Speaker 2: They stimulate parts of the brain that are very hard
Speaker 2: to access in any other way. You know, the whole
Speaker 2: idea of accessing the periaqueductal gray of the brain. This
Speaker 2: is implicated and deep feelings of calm, of belongingness, of
Speaker 2: deep feelings of love that they are very hard to
Speaker 2: find other ways. And a lot of studies that have
Speaker 2: looked at both Buddhist monks and Catholic nuns, they find
Speaker 2: that it stimulates the theta waves in the brain, which
Speaker 2: are associated with dream sleep, giving profound insights even when
Speaker 2: they are awake, and so you can access things that
Speaker 2: are hard to get otherwise. And again, people differ in
Speaker 2: whether or not the things that are happening are actually real.
Speaker 2: I happen to think that they are. I think that
Speaker 2: there's a realm beyond what we understand that I'm fumbling
Speaker 2: with the shadows and the dark to actually find what
Speaker 2: it is, and my Catholic faith is the best way
Speaker 2: that I know how to do so. But I have
Speaker 2: this deep love and appreciation, and I have these real friendships,
Speaker 2: which is you know, for example, has led me to
Speaker 2: work with this holiness to Dali Lama on the commonality
Speaker 2: of the religious experiences that we both have had and
Speaker 2: how it can impact the way that we're trying to
Speaker 2: live our lives with greater compassion and greater insight.
Speaker 1: And this was also a big connection that you had
Speaker 1: with Oprah herself, right, I mean this is something that
Speaker 1: you both talk about. Is this being one of these
Speaker 1: four pillars that have happeness has been so important for
Speaker 1: both of you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, We've discussed this an awful lot. And you know,
Speaker 2: one of the things that it really makes it relevant
Speaker 2: in you know, our society today is that people will
Speaker 2: often assume, even if it's unstated, that the next big
Speaker 2: breakthrough in tech and consumer life in media is finally
Speaker 2: going to give us the feeling that we're looking for.
Speaker 2: It's going to finally fill that hollowness that we all feel.
Speaker 2: You know, Facebook is going to connect us to other
Speaker 2: people and make us less lonely. AI is going to
Speaker 2: explain the answers to these questions. Things as silly as
Speaker 2: streaming Netflix or shopping therapy are going to just make
Speaker 2: us feel fulfilled in some way, shape or form. And
Speaker 2: the problem with that is that everything that these techniques
Speaker 2: and technologies bring us are answering complicated questions. They're they're
Speaker 2: fulfilling complicated problems, but all the things that we really
Speaker 2: want for that emptiness in our souls, that sense that
Speaker 2: we don't have deep fulfillment. These are complex and adaptive
Speaker 2: human problems. These are problems of love. It's almost as
Speaker 2: if you know, I want a cat because cat is
Speaker 2: alive and warm, and the world keeps giving me toasters,
Speaker 2: and every time I say I want a cat them
Speaker 2: only you know, Silicon Valley gives me this great whiz
Speaker 2: bang toaster. I said, well, I got a toaster. It's
Speaker 2: like there's a better toaster. I think, okay, I'll take
Speaker 2: the toaster. But then I keep wondering what's actually wrong.
Speaker 2: Only these transcendental approaches to life about understanding a love
Speaker 2: of the divine, or at least trying to understand some
Speaker 2: of the cosmic forces of the unseen of our lives
Speaker 2: by reading Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus, or walking in nature,
Speaker 2: or trying to absorb. This is what Schopenhauer talked about.
Speaker 2: You know, Schopenhauer was an atheist, but he peop believed
Speaker 2: we couldn't get it, We couldn't get the reality, and
Speaker 2: the only way that you could was unusual moments of insight,
Speaker 2: typically through music. Only then, Schopenhauer believed we could have
Speaker 2: these transcendental moments of absolute clarity, which is the complex,
Speaker 2: not the complicated, you know. So maybe it's studying and
Speaker 2: listening to the great works of Johann Sebastian Bach, which
Speaker 2: has been a good deal of my life. I've made
Speaker 2: my life my living as a musician, off and on
Speaker 2: through various parts my life, and that's what we all
Speaker 2: need to get in touch with. And for me, religious
Speaker 2: faith is the best, most efficacious way to do so.
Speaker 2: And again, none of this discussion is who's right. Those
Speaker 2: are different questions and not. Of course I have my
Speaker 2: opinions and other people have their opinions on that as well.
Speaker 2: I'm just talking about the fact that this is a
Speaker 2: great way to get happier.
Speaker 1: And so even though you've self described as somebody who's
Speaker 1: like genetically gloomy, you do seem to have your finger
Speaker 1: on the pulse of things that are transcendent in terms
Speaker 1: of their experiences. Right, you were a musician and this
Speaker 1: rich religious faith. What I'm about for somebody who wants
Speaker 1: to kind of dive into this pillar but they kind
Speaker 1: of struggle with some of these experiences, let's talk about
Speaker 1: how we can get started. Yeah, in your book, you
Speaker 1: mentioned that one of the first practices is just like
Speaker 1: trying to find other ways to tame the monkey mind.
Speaker 1: Either if you're religious, maybe through a practice like prayer,
Speaker 1: but even through something like meditation. Why is taming the
Speaker 1: mind such an important part of these transcendent experiences.
Speaker 2: The problem that we have in modern life is that
Speaker 2: we're not actually alive. There's a famous book that many
Speaker 2: of the happiest readers will have read of they haven't
Speaker 2: you order it today, called a Miracle of Mindfulness by
Speaker 2: Tik nott Han, the great Vietnamese Budhist Bunk, and it
Speaker 2: starts with this description of washing the dishes, and he says,
Speaker 2: when you're washing the dishes, you should be fully aware
Speaker 2: of washing the dishes and nothing else. Because if you're
Speaker 2: not fully aware of washing the dishes, you aren't really
Speaker 2: washing the dishes, and you're not really alive right now.
Speaker 2: You're either living in the future or you're living the past.
Speaker 2: You're either retrospective or your prospective, but you actually can't
Speaker 2: apprehend what's going on around you. And that's a big problem.
Speaker 2: The monkey mind makes it incredibly difficult, even impossible. Our
Speaker 2: monkey minds, which is our great, big, meaty neocortex makes
Speaker 2: it possible for us to run future scenarios, to simulate environments,
Speaker 2: to remember the past and learn from it, and that's wonderful.
Speaker 2: My dog Chuccho can't do that. On the other hand,
Speaker 2: my dog Chuccho, he's alive now and he's enjoying his
Speaker 2: life right now. And one of the things that metaphysical
Speaker 2: and transcendental religious, spiritual or philosophical experience do for you
Speaker 2: is they can make you alive right now, and that
Speaker 2: extends your life in a very important way. You know,
Speaker 2: our mutual friend and my colleague here at Harvard Ellen Langer,
Speaker 2: she's arguably, you know, the first person who brought the
Speaker 2: concept of mindfulness to big groups of people in her
Speaker 2: famous book Mindfulness from decades ago, and she didn't talk
Speaker 2: about sitting in a lotus position. She talked about sitting
Speaker 2: on the train with your hands in your lap and
Speaker 2: looking out the window with no devices and noticing things. Well,
Speaker 2: it's hard to do because we're incredibly distracted. And one
Speaker 2: of the ways to become de distracted is prayer, is worship,
Speaker 2: is devotion, is meditation, is focusing on something that's conspiringly beautiful,
Speaker 2: like a fugue of Johann sebashenbachra Sunset.
Speaker 1: And the Sunset really gets to another practice you suggest
Speaker 1: in the book, which is one that I think a
Speaker 1: lot of folks who are not as religious kind of
Speaker 1: go towards, which is the appreciation of nature and kind
Speaker 1: of getting out in nature. What do we know about
Speaker 1: the evidence that nature can kind of bring us to
Speaker 1: these trends and then experiences.
Speaker 2: There's sort of two ways. One is pretty well understood
Speaker 2: psychologically and the other is still kind of mysterious. So
Speaker 2: the first way, you know, it gets to the research
Speaker 2: of our mutual colleague Dakar Keltner at UC Berkeley, who
Speaker 2: does the Greater Good program, and just everything he writes
Speaker 2: we ought to Read is just so good. And Daker
Speaker 2: has a new book out called Awe, which is a
Speaker 2: big best seller. It's really worth reading. And what he
Speaker 2: talks about is the mysterious experience of Awe inspiring happenings
Speaker 2: in our lives and putting ourselves purposively in front of
Speaker 2: things that bring AWE to us. Because what that does
Speaker 2: is it once again, it just throws you into the
Speaker 2: I self. It just extinguishes the me self. And what
Speaker 2: that does is that makes you alive right now and
Speaker 2: you're looking at it. You're alive right now, and you'll
Speaker 2: feel when you do something that inspires all whether it's
Speaker 2: listening to the music that you love or watching the
Speaker 2: sunset or really one of the best ways they do
Speaker 2: it is to experience people in acts of kindness toward others,
Speaker 2: which you know, this is a reason that people cry
Speaker 2: for joy. One of the biggest reasons people cry for
Speaker 2: joy is because they witness beauty in the behavior of
Speaker 2: other people, which is it brings as well that will
Speaker 2: give you these moments of transcendence because it will give
Speaker 2: you relief from the future in the past. The second
Speaker 2: with nature is not just awe and this is something
Speaker 2: that's a I don't know. This is this literature is
Speaker 2: hard to interpret because you know, right now we're in
Speaker 2: social science. We're all wrapped around the axle about replicability
Speaker 2: and data and the whole thing. I mean, it's just
Speaker 2: so complicated. But there have been a bunch of papers
Speaker 2: and replicated a little that suggest that contact with nature
Speaker 2: it stimulates something for us neurophysiologically that we don't quite understand.
Speaker 2: As a matter of fact, walking barefoot outside touching the soil.
Speaker 2: It tends to give you a set of experiences that
Speaker 2: you can't replicate in other ways, and some people have
Speaker 2: suggested it has something to do with the biology of
Speaker 2: what's happening electrical signals. There are a lot of hypotheses
Speaker 2: about what it is. I don't know, but all I
Speaker 2: know is it works for me. You know, walking in
Speaker 2: nature really works for me. I started off this day
Speaker 2: outside of Austin on the coast between Plymouth and Cape Cod,
Speaker 2: walking on the beach for an hour as the sun
Speaker 2: was coming up. And I'm telling you, it's just I
Speaker 2: didn't sleep well last night and I felt really bad
Speaker 2: when my first World Cup. But fifteen minutes into it,
Speaker 2: I was alive. I was alive again, and I came
Speaker 2: back fully alive and I was a new person, And
Speaker 2: that really works.
Speaker 1: I love that story with the beach because it's not
Speaker 1: just about finding transcendence. It's really also about kind of
Speaker 1: finding your focus. You know, when you're kind of feeling
Speaker 1: out of it, you can be in this sort of
Speaker 1: like you know me self and that really you need
Speaker 1: this kind of other focus to kind of get out
Speaker 1: of it. And that's the spot where you really end
Speaker 1: your books. It's not just about kind of finding transcendence.
Speaker 1: Is that we all need the right focus for some
Speaker 1: of our happiness practices, right, we need to kind of
Speaker 1: take it in the right direction. And this is more
Speaker 1: that it's really not all about us. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: explain what the right focus is and what we really
Speaker 1: need the.
Speaker 2: Right focus is. Basically, this is a secret to Laurie
Speaker 2: and Arthur's happiness, which is that we teach happiness. This
Speaker 2: is it. And you know I have discussed this off
Speaker 2: Mike before, and you know I've had lunch and you say,
Speaker 2: what's your secret happiness? Teaching it? It really is and
Speaker 2: it might sell like, okay, so here's the secret to happiness.
Speaker 2: Go suffer through a PhD. And then do you know
Speaker 2: twenty years of research, doing animal studies or in my case,
Speaker 2: doing public policy, running a thinking whatever, no, no, learn,
Speaker 2: practice share. That's the algorithm, the I self algorithm. But
Speaker 2: it's the happiness algorithm. Why because we know that you'll
Speaker 2: really remember what you learn if you teach it to
Speaker 2: other people, you'll practice it if you're recommending it to
Speaker 2: other people. I mean, it's just I don't know rie
Speaker 2: I've been I've been teaching this for four years at
Speaker 2: Harvard now, and I put my students, as you do,
Speaker 2: through a battery of self tests on their values and
Speaker 2: then their mood and their personality, but also their happiness
Speaker 2: and measured in different ways, largely from the tests that
Speaker 2: come from our mutual friends Sonya Lubomirski out at cal Riverside.
Speaker 2: And they're really good tests, and if you take them sincerely,
Speaker 2: you're going to know a lot about yourself. And so
Speaker 2: I take them every semester because I'm teaching it to
Speaker 2: my students. Then kind of want to see my progress.
Speaker 2: And my happiness has kind of by sixty percent since
Speaker 2: I've been teaching this, and since I've been doing more
Speaker 2: and writing more about this, and since I can talk
Speaker 2: about it with people like you. It's really the secret
Speaker 2: of happiness, and so everybody can do that. How learn more,
Speaker 2: change your habits, pass it on. When you're doing that,
Speaker 2: you're in the process of the lifelong process of happierness.
Speaker 2: It works for Laurie, it looks for Arthur, and it's
Speaker 2: going to work for everybody listening to us.
Speaker 1: And it's one of the reasons that everyone out there
Speaker 1: should right now not just go out and buy Arthur
Speaker 1: and Oprah's new book, but they should share it with
Speaker 1: other people, read it, dog ear it, and then give
Speaker 1: it away to someone else. Thank you so much for Thank.
Speaker 2: You, Laurie, thank you for your work. You've enriched my
Speaker 2: life a lot with your research, with your show, and
Speaker 2: now with your friendship.
Speaker 1: Did out if you want even more of Arthur and
Speaker 1: Oprah's ideas on how to pursue greater happierness. I can't
Speaker 1: recommend their book enough. It's called Build the Life you Want,
Speaker 1: The Art and Science of Getting Happier, and it's out
Speaker 1: for you to buy right now. I hope you enjoyed
Speaker 1: the special show, and I really do hope you'll make
Speaker 1: a date to join me, Big Bird, Grover, and Abi
Speaker 1: Kadabbi when The Happiness Lab returns on September. Rating.
Speaker 2: This is going to be so magical. Mhm