Speaker 1: Pushkin.
Speaker 2: Hey, it's doctor Laurie Santos here. The science says that
Speaker 2: giving a dollar away can make you feel happier than
Speaker 2: spending on yourself, and if you're in the mood to
Speaker 2: make every dollar you donate count this holiday season, the
Speaker 2: Happiness Lab has teamed up with GiveDirectly dot org. If
Speaker 2: we all pull together, we can make a huge difference
Speaker 2: to one African village in twenty twenty four.
Speaker 3: Kibobo, I think is a great place if people want
Speaker 3: somewhere to support people there are living in really desperate situation.
Speaker 3: They lack almost everything.
Speaker 2: Rory Stewart from GiveDirectly dot org says money from Happiness
Speaker 2: Lab listeners will go directly to the people of Kebobo
Speaker 2: in Rwanda, who'll be loved to decide on their own
Speaker 2: how to best spend it to improve their lives.
Speaker 3: Getting a little bit of cash is what will allow
Speaker 3: you to fix your house, buy a cow which could
Speaker 3: provide milk for your family, get a relative who's ill
Speaker 3: to the local hospital. These things that are genuinely life transforming.
Speaker 2: So if you can spare just a few bucks and
Speaker 2: want to join me and other fans of the show
Speaker 2: to help the folks in Cabobo, then go to this
Speaker 2: website give directly dot org slash happiness. That's give directly
Speaker 2: dot org slash happiness. Just a few dollars can make.
Speaker 4: A huge difference.
Speaker 2: Happy Giving, Hey Happiness Lab Listeners, Today we're bringing you
Speaker 2: an extra special treat. It's an episode from another podcast
Speaker 2: that I think you'll like a lot. It's the new
Speaker 2: Build the Life You Want series from Oprah's SuperSoul. In
Speaker 2: the series, Oprah and Harvard professor Arthur Brooks offer listeners
Speaker 2: a better understanding of the science behind happiness, which is
Speaker 2: something that we constantly aim for on our show. Check
Speaker 2: out the episode because you'll walk away with tips on
Speaker 2: how to make your own lives happier. You can also
Speaker 2: listen to the Build the Life you Want series on
Speaker 2: Oprah's SuperSoul wherever you get your podcasts. Now here's the episode.
Speaker 1: Thanks to the Heart for supporting this special bonus episode
Speaker 1: of SuperSoul. So Arthur Brooks, Arthur, welcome back, Thank you,
Speaker 1: and I'll started right here. During the pandemic, I came
Speaker 1: across a column in the Atlantic magazine and noticed that
Speaker 1: I started to look forward to reading it every week.
Speaker 4: It's called how to Build a Life by Arthur Brooks.
Speaker 1: I knew I had to meet the man who wrote
Speaker 1: such insightful advice, So, Arthur Brooks, it is my great
Speaker 1: pleasure to meet you.
Speaker 4: I am such a huge fan of yours.
Speaker 1: Arthur Brooks is a world renowned social scientist.
Speaker 5: Happiness is really a combination of three things, enjoyment, satisfaction,
Speaker 5: and meaning.
Speaker 1: The author of many books, including the number one New
Speaker 1: York Times bestseller From Strength to Strength.
Speaker 4: I'm a big fan of how to Build a Life
Speaker 4: column in The Atlantic. I find myself sharing with my
Speaker 4: kids all the time.
Speaker 1: And a professor at Harvard Business School who's course onhappyess
Speaker 1: is so popular there's always a long wait list thought.
Speaker 5: About it and I thought, it's not about them. It's
Speaker 5: not about Harvard. This is about everybody who needs the
Speaker 5: science of happiness. The whole world is of the waiting
Speaker 5: list for this class.
Speaker 1: This year, Professor Brooks and I teamed up to co
Speaker 1: write a book we call Build a Life You Want
Speaker 1: The Art and Science of getting Happier, and I am
Speaker 1: very happy to say a debuted at the top of
Speaker 1: the New York Times bestseller list.
Speaker 5: We cooked up the whole book here in this room.
Speaker 5: It's really it's it's incredibly gratifying, And isn't it gratifying?
Speaker 4: Also?
Speaker 1: I mean I was really excited to hit number one
Speaker 1: on the New York Times Bestsellers. I mean, one of
Speaker 1: the reasons why it's so gratifying is because, first of all,
Speaker 1: number one is always gratifying.
Speaker 5: R a nice number.
Speaker 4: It's a nice, nice ring to it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I love that. But it also means
Speaker 1: that the work that we conceived in this room was
Speaker 1: well received, right, yeah.
Speaker 5: You remember we talked about it. We discussed not what's
Speaker 5: going to be the book, but the why of the book.
Speaker 5: This was the big thing that we did here. We said, okay,
Speaker 5: what's the point. What are we trying to do? And
Speaker 5: it was lift people up and bring them together with
Speaker 5: science and ideas.
Speaker 1: So we decided to do a three part series y'all
Speaker 1: to dive further into the book here on Super Soul,
Speaker 1: because my intention for this platform has always been to
Speaker 1: enhance the human experience and to bring you information that
Speaker 1: will open up your life. So I know that you
Speaker 1: listeners are interested in learning new ways to explore a
Speaker 1: life with meaning and purpose, which is what you, Arthur,
Speaker 1: are all about and before we get started, I think
Speaker 1: you should tell everyone actually about your day job or
Speaker 1: what you do.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, yeah, So my day job is I'm a teacher.
Speaker 5: I'm a college professor. I teach the science of happiness
Speaker 5: at the Harvard Business School. I also teach at Harvard
Speaker 5: Kennedy School, which trains people to go work in government.
Speaker 5: And I research and think and teach about behavior, human behavior,
Speaker 5: what motivates people to do what they do. I'm a
Speaker 5: social scientist.
Speaker 1: Yes, I was going to say, you don't just teach
Speaker 1: there you are Actually.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I'm a yeah so, and I've been a social
Speaker 5: scientist for the past thirty years. That's what I've been
Speaker 5: doing with my life, EHD social science indeed, indeed, and
Speaker 5: so that's and I teach. People ask ask you know,
Speaker 5: you're a professor. I say, yeah, Harvard Busines School. They say,
Speaker 5: what do you teach accounting, finance, marketing, supply chain management,
Speaker 5: you know, something really practical like that. I say, no,
Speaker 5: I teach happiness. And they think I'm lying, Yeah, but
Speaker 5: it's it's I teach happiness with the same seriousness that
Speaker 5: you would teach supply chain management. Look, your your life
Speaker 5: is an enterprise your life is your startup. Treat it
Speaker 5: as such, treat it with seriousness, you know, treat the
Speaker 5: inside of your head the same way you would treat
Speaker 5: your p and L statement. Yeah, is the bottom line.
Speaker 4: Your life is your startup, the biggest startup you're ever going.
Speaker 5: To have, totally is the best enterprise you could be
Speaker 5: part of, and the most serious one of that.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So on this series, we're exploring the ideas in the
Speaker 1: book where Arthur the author for science based practices and
Speaker 1: wisdom that anybody can use to become happy.
Speaker 4: I call it happier nest.
Speaker 5: It was so good that you coined that helpful to
Speaker 5: me because for the longest time, people would say, you know,
Speaker 5: the goal is happiness, and I would say, no, it's
Speaker 5: getting happier, but that doesn't have a ring to it.
Speaker 5: And I told you that for the first time and
Speaker 5: you said, so, the goal.
Speaker 4: Is happier nes happierness.
Speaker 5: It's the right word.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I love it, uh huh. And now people are
Speaker 5: saying it.
Speaker 4: My students are saying, yeah, we need a T shirt.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Before we dive into the book, let's talk about your
Speaker 1: own journey though, because people want to know your story,
Speaker 1: because you are the professor of happiness and how did
Speaker 1: you get here?
Speaker 4: At age fifty five?
Speaker 1: You left a very successful career and you were chief
Speaker 1: executive of a think tank, and now then you started
Speaker 1: studying happiness. Was it to bring greater happiness to yourself?
Speaker 5: For sure and other people? You go through kind of
Speaker 5: a not necessarily a dark night of the soul, but
Speaker 5: at certain points of your life they're hinge points when
Speaker 5: you have to ask yourself, why am I doing what
Speaker 5: I'm doing? And what is mission of my own life?
Speaker 5: And the truth is, as I thought about it and
Speaker 5: prayed about it and talk to the people I love
Speaker 5: about it, it was very clear the mission of my
Speaker 5: life is to lift people up and bring them together
Speaker 5: and ideas of love and happiness using this.
Speaker 4: Well, you were also doing that with the think tank, right, I.
Speaker 5: Was trying, But it was good. It was good. I
Speaker 5: was grateful for having done that. I did that for
Speaker 5: eleven years, but it was time for somebody else to
Speaker 5: do that. And at fifty five, I still had plenty
Speaker 5: of still had plenty of gas in the tank, and
Speaker 5: I wanted to use everything that I knew for other
Speaker 5: people and quite frankly for me too. I wanted to
Speaker 5: dig into this thing called that we now call happierness
Speaker 5: and see whether or not it was achievable in my
Speaker 5: own life, and if it was, could I bring it
Speaker 5: to others.
Speaker 1: Well, you know, studies are showing that America is in
Speaker 1: a happiness slump. I don't think you even need a
Speaker 1: study to figure that out. You just look around you,
Speaker 1: or you turn on your computer, you look at your phone.
Speaker 1: I mean, the news, the conspiracy theories, what is going on.
Speaker 5: Yeah, no, it's true. I mean the data are unambiguous
Speaker 5: and the experience that we all have that it feels
Speaker 5: like people are less happy. It's true. And there's kind
Speaker 5: of two things that we need to understand there. You
Speaker 5: could say that there's problems in the climate and problems
Speaker 5: in the weather. The climate has been changing for happiness
Speaker 5: for decades now, since the late eighties, maybe the early nineties.
Speaker 5: People have been gradually getting a little less happy year
Speaker 5: after year after year, just a little tiny bit. And
Speaker 5: that has to do with the fact that people are
Speaker 5: less likely to live a spiritual or religious life or
Speaker 5: find a life of meaning in those institutions. They're less
Speaker 5: likely to have a close relationship with their families. People
Speaker 5: have fewer and fewer friends who know them well. People
Speaker 5: have less of a sense that they're serving others with
Speaker 5: their work. That's the climate, and that's been a problem
Speaker 5: for a long time. Then there's weather storms. There have
Speaker 5: been two big storms in the past couple of decades
Speaker 5: that we have to pay attention to. The first was
Speaker 5: around two thousand and eight, two thousand and nine. Now,
Speaker 5: I know everybody watching us is like, oh, obviously the
Speaker 5: financial crisis, that wasn't it.
Speaker 4: I thought it was.
Speaker 5: It was social media. Same time. That's when everybody started
Speaker 5: looking at social media. Everybody, right, just nine.
Speaker 4: That's when I got on what used to be Twitter.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, yeah, the artist formerly known as Twitter. Yeah yeah, yeah,
Speaker 5: yea yeah, yeah, exactly right. And that's when when and
Speaker 5: a couple of things were happening. So so Twitter, for example,
Speaker 5: became a platform for people to be intensely negative. Instagram
Speaker 5: is not the same way. It's more of a platform
Speaker 5: where people compare themselves to others. But that had a
Speaker 5: big impact, especially on young people, especially on women and
Speaker 5: girls fifteen to twenty five years old. It created a
Speaker 5: new kind of culture that was intensely comparative and problematic.
Speaker 1: So social media actually, where people think it's bringing you
Speaker 1: closer together and you're communicating up Facebook, it's actually made
Speaker 1: people less happy.
Speaker 5: Lonelier, lonely. Here's the weird thing. It's when you're super
Speaker 5: hungry and it's like, oh, man, I haven't eaten, you know,
Speaker 5: I haven't eight hours an hour and there, and you
Speaker 5: passed by a fast food place. Yeah, you're like, good, Yeah,
Speaker 5: that'll get the job done. And so you gorge yourself
Speaker 5: and your stuff. You do feel so good. An hour later,
Speaker 5: you're hungry again. What's what happened? The answer is you
Speaker 5: didn't meet your nutrient needs. All you metage your caloric needs,
Speaker 5: and so the result is you stay hungry even though
Speaker 5: you don't need the calories. Social media is the junk
Speaker 5: food of social life. It's like getting all of your calories.
Speaker 4: That is a tweetable moment, but we don't tweet anymore.
Speaker 1: We x call it.
Speaker 5: But so that's that's like getting all your meals at
Speaker 5: seven eleven.
Speaker 4: Social media is the junk food.
Speaker 5: Of social life. Social media is the junk food or
Speaker 5: social life. You'll get too many calories and not enough nutrients.
Speaker 5: That's the reason you'll binge and get Lonelier. Yes, that's
Speaker 5: a problem. Yes, And a lot of young people have
Speaker 5: never developed in a way where they can finally figure
Speaker 5: out how to use it responsibly.
Speaker 1: What's going to happen to the generation that was born
Speaker 1: at that time, and that's all they've ever known.
Speaker 5: We don't know. That's a big social experiment. That's a
Speaker 5: massive social experiment.
Speaker 4: Now we're in the midstuff right now.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's not as if social media is all evil.
Speaker 5: I mean you can use it responsibly.
Speaker 4: Absolutely.
Speaker 5: If you would not let somebody into your house who
Speaker 5: bears you ill will you shouldn't let them into your head.
Speaker 5: And that means you shouldn't be looking at the social
Speaker 5: media where somebody can be tweeting at you or exing
Speaker 5: at you or yeah, and telling you that you know
Speaker 5: some you're that. Frankly, that's a big problem. That's the storm,
Speaker 5: that's the short of a century.
Speaker 4: Wow, So let's get happier.
Speaker 5: Let's do that.
Speaker 4: Let's get happier.
Speaker 1: On page five, you say happiness is not a destination,
Speaker 1: Happiness is a direction. I know that was a shift
Speaker 1: in mindset for many who are reading this book.
Speaker 4: Can you expand a little bit on that?
Speaker 5: Yeah, And you know, this is the problem with happiness
Speaker 5: is such a funny thing because we all want it.
Speaker 5: Every philosopher and theologian has talked about it. Everybody. I mean,
Speaker 5: how many times have people said that on your show?
Speaker 1: I know that's what I say in the beginning of
Speaker 1: the book that thousands of times. Well, I became interested
Speaker 1: in the subject because every time I would sit with
Speaker 1: the audience and I'd say, what do you want? Everybody
Speaker 1: would always say multiple people would answer, I just want
Speaker 1: to be happy. I just want to be happy. But
Speaker 1: yet when you ask them, what does that look like
Speaker 1: for them? Hard to define for sure.
Speaker 5: And part of the reason is because it's not something
Speaker 5: that you can define in any meaningful way. We think
Speaker 5: it's a feeling, we think it's a destination. It isn't either.
Speaker 5: You know, happy feelings are nothing more than emotions, and
Speaker 5: emotions are nothing more than information that we need in
Speaker 5: reaction to the outside environment. And as a destination, what
Speaker 5: would you why would you want to be completely happy
Speaker 5: as a destination? You'd be dead in a week. Because
Speaker 5: you actually need negative emotions and experiences to train you
Speaker 5: to keep you vigilant, to keep you safe, and to
Speaker 5: be happy.
Speaker 4: Yeah, to keep you alert, to keep you, to keep
Speaker 4: you on it.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, I mean maybe when I dine I'm in heaven,
Speaker 5: I see the face of God, the beatific vision will
Speaker 5: be pure happiness. But on earth, I'm telling you, I
Speaker 5: need my negative emotions to keep me alive and safe.
Speaker 5: I need my negative experiences to learn and grow. And
Speaker 5: so that's what people. They want to stay alive and safe,
Speaker 5: but they don't want the feeling that keep them alive
Speaker 5: and safe. And that's this conflict that they have, which
Speaker 5: is why they feel so unsettled.
Speaker 1: Okay, So I think, particularly in this world of social media,
Speaker 1: people think if I just get that, I mean I
Speaker 1: see people toasting on private jets, and I see them,
Speaker 1: you know, on beaches and you know, hair their hair
Speaker 1: blowing in the wind and all that, and people think, well,
Speaker 1: if I just had that, I could be happy.
Speaker 4: But we know.
Speaker 1: You have the science to back it up that they're
Speaker 1: really four pillars, and if you don't have all of
Speaker 1: those pillars working in your life, you will eventually end
Speaker 1: up feeling not necessarily sad, but lonely or distanced or disconnected.
Speaker 4: So the four pillars, there.
Speaker 5: Are four pillars. There's kind of the four pillars you
Speaker 5: think that you need, and those four pillars that you
Speaker 5: really do need. The idols, the things that look right
Speaker 5: but aren't, or money, power, pleasure and fame. Those are
Speaker 5: the things that mother Nature said, you get those, you're
Speaker 5: going to be happy.
Speaker 4: Money, power, pleasure and fame.
Speaker 5: That's right. But she lies. Mother Nature lies. She lies
Speaker 5: a lot because she wants us to keep running, run
Speaker 5: and run and run and run it right.
Speaker 4: Because is my mother nature telling us that?
Speaker 1: Or is society telling ussel? Well, so I think mother
Speaker 1: nature is telling us that. It's the four pillars.
Speaker 5: Well, mother nature gives us these imperatives because she wants
Speaker 5: us and wants us to be hungry, you know, and
Speaker 5: she wants us to survive and pass on our genes. Yes,
Speaker 5: and the way that you do that is money, power, pleasure,
Speaker 5: and fame, right, And she doesn't want us to figure
Speaker 5: out that those things never really satisfy, so that we'll
Speaker 5: keep running and running and running. That's called the hedonic treadmill.
Speaker 5: What we really want, and this is backed up by
Speaker 5: a lot of psychology, neuroscience, behavioral economics, all the research
Speaker 5: that we want is that there's kind of four things
Speaker 5: that are the virtuous things that we should be looking for.
Speaker 5: The Mother Nature doesn't necessarily tell us but that if
Speaker 5: we take the divine path in life religious are not
Speaker 5: religiously understood. A better path in life will be happy.
Speaker 5: And those are our faith, family, friends, and work that serves. Now,
Speaker 5: if you give any teenage kid the choice between money, power,
Speaker 5: pleasure and honor or faith, faith, family, good friends and
Speaker 5: good times and a work that serves others, I mean
Speaker 5: you're going to take yeah, right, I mean our society
Speaker 5: does aid in a bed. Mother Nature's lie. Yeah, because
Speaker 5: you know, the marketing colossus tells us that if you
Speaker 5: get that car man, you're gonna be really happy. If
Speaker 5: you get that job, you get that money, if you
Speaker 5: get that one hundred thousand Instagram followers or whatever your
Speaker 5: number happens to be, it's never high enough, by the way,
Speaker 5: you're gonna be happy. But that's a lie, is the bottom.
Speaker 5: There's nothing wrong with those things. Yeah, But if you
Speaker 5: get those things, if we are so lucky to get
Speaker 5: those things, they should only ever be in service of
Speaker 5: the Big Four, the Good Four. They should only ever
Speaker 5: be in service. They should be intermediate goals or rest
Speaker 5: stop in the New Jersey Turnpike, Manhattan. Where you're trying
Speaker 5: to get is faith, faith, and by that, Yeah, how
Speaker 5: do you.
Speaker 1: Use that money, power, pleasure in fame to enhance your faith,
Speaker 1: family and work and friendship and friendships.
Speaker 5: Basically your love, Yes, your love and your life and
Speaker 5: the love and the lives of the people around you.
Speaker 5: That's really what those those worldly goals should be used
Speaker 5: for if you want to have any shot it through happiness. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I know we have a lot of questions from our readers, readers,
Speaker 1: people who have already read the book.
Speaker 4: I'm so excited. Yeah, Okay. Eric from Denver, Hello, Hi, I'm.
Speaker 6: Eric, and I learned from this book that you can't
Speaker 6: be happy, but you can be happier and that really
Speaker 6: resonated with me because it makes happiness feel like a
Speaker 6: thing I can incrementally work towards every day versus this
Speaker 6: big place to arrive.
Speaker 4: My question is for you, Oprah.
Speaker 6: I'm wondering how as you've gotten older, your approach to
Speaker 6: getting happier has changed.
Speaker 4: Thank you for noticing that I've gotten older, Eric, Thank you.
Speaker 4: I think that's actually I like that.
Speaker 1: Question, Eric, because as I've gotten older, and one of
Speaker 1: the reasons why I was so excited about working with
Speaker 1: Arthur here is because Arthur you confirmed my belief system.
Speaker 4: So I have been. I have known since I was.
Speaker 1: A kid that life is better when you share it,
Speaker 1: and I learned that with my first three Musketeers bar
Speaker 1: Because growing up poor, I so seldom got candy. I
Speaker 1: would save it until like cousins came by, so because
Speaker 1: it tasted better when I could share it.
Speaker 4: And now I know Eric.
Speaker 1: That that is one of the principles of enjoyment, which
Speaker 1: is what actually defined happiness, enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose.
Speaker 4: And so being able.
Speaker 1: So to answer your question, I would say that now
Speaker 1: that I know that the science actually backs me up
Speaker 1: on life is better when you share it, I want
Speaker 1: to share it more so it used to be I
Speaker 1: would just love doing a random act of kindness or
Speaker 1: doing something meaningful for somebody that would help them in
Speaker 1: their lives or enhance their lives.
Speaker 4: Now I make it a habit.
Speaker 1: It's a part of my spiritual practice to include the
Speaker 1: enjoyment for myself of making other people happier. So I
Speaker 1: would say, as I've gotten older, that's what I've actually
Speaker 1: learned about how to enjoy happiness, not just for myself,
Speaker 1: but how to spread it to other people. So one
Speaker 1: of the things we talk about in the book is
Speaker 1: how enjoyment and satisfaction and purpose are the macro nutrients
Speaker 1: of happiness. So let's talk about enjoyment first and the
Speaker 1: difference between pleasure and enjoyment.
Speaker 5: Yeah, this is a big mistake that a lot of
Speaker 5: people make. I mean, one of the things that we
Speaker 5: do in the book is we disabuse people of mistake
Speaker 5: and notions of happiness. Happiness is not a feeling. Happiness
Speaker 5: is not a destination. It's a direction or a happy eriness, etc.
Speaker 5: And another one has to do with this idea that
Speaker 5: I'm going to be happy if I can just hit
Speaker 5: the pleasure level over and over and over again. Yes,
Speaker 5: here's some words that have never been uttered. I'm really
Speaker 5: happy because of methamphetamine. Nobody's ever said that. That is
Speaker 5: not what people say. And the reason is because if
Speaker 5: you use illicted drugs and drugs of abuse, you're going
Speaker 5: to hit the pleasure lever. It's going to feel good,
Speaker 5: but it's not going to make you happy. It's going
Speaker 5: to lead to addiction. It's going to lead to a
Speaker 5: super physiological level of dopamine in your brain. And all
Speaker 5: that does is gives you a tiny little reward and
Speaker 5: then goes away, tiny little reward and it goes away.
Speaker 4: That's why you have to keep getting more and more
Speaker 4: and more and it doesn't.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and then what happens is because that becomes an
Speaker 5: incredibly isolated thing.
Speaker 1: And that's regardless if it's methamphetamine, or if it's your work,
Speaker 1: or if it's shopping, or if it's whatever it is
Speaker 1: on this that's just giving you pleasure for sure.
Speaker 5: I mean that can be gambling, that can be that
Speaker 5: can be eating, that can be all kinds of things
Speaker 5: that whatever your thing is. Yeah, and here's how you
Speaker 5: know if it's a problem. Yeah, if you're hitting the
Speaker 5: pleasure lever over and over and over again and you're alone,
Speaker 5: then you know there's a problem. That's what it is.
Speaker 5: And that actually there inside the diagnosis, there is the solution.
Speaker 5: That's why you know. That's why Vandheuser Busch doesn't have
Speaker 5: a beer commercial of a guy alone in his apartment
Speaker 5: pounding a twelve pack. That's why that's not the ad.
Speaker 5: That's because that doesn't lead to happiness, that leads to problem, doesn't.
Speaker 4: That looks sad and pitiful.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, for sure. No, what they have is a
Speaker 5: guy with his buddies making a memory, the guy with
Speaker 5: his friends or his family making a memory. And therein
Speaker 5: lies the answer to this is not that you've got.
Speaker 4: To because lots of advertising does that totally.
Speaker 5: That's all the beer commercials do because they want you
Speaker 5: to be happier when they use their when you use
Speaker 5: their product, and the reasons they want you to have enjoyment,
Speaker 5: not just pleasure. Now, a lot of the problems that
Speaker 5: we have in kind of a puritanical culture about this
Speaker 5: would say that the solution is if you're hitting the
Speaker 5: pleasure lever repeatedly by yourself, get rid of the pleasure lever.
Speaker 5: But that's not necessarily the.
Speaker 4: Solution, because the pleasure has its pleasures.
Speaker 5: Totally, you need to add two things you need to
Speaker 5: add in order to have enjoyment. Exactly, you have to
Speaker 5: the source of pleasure plus people that you love plus memories. Now,
Speaker 5: what you're doing is you're moving the experience of the
Speaker 5: pleasure from the limbic system of your brain, which is
Speaker 5: deep down evolved over a forty million year period. All
Speaker 5: it is sending signals to you about how to survive.
Speaker 4: I have the perfect example of this.
Speaker 1: So all my life, from the moment I was working
Speaker 1: in Baltimore making twenty two thousand dollars a year, my
Speaker 1: first vacation I spent on going to a spa.
Speaker 4: So I love a spa ying.
Speaker 1: So I've been to mini spas by myself, were you know, massages,
Speaker 1: the whole pedicare, manicure, or the whole thing walking around
Speaker 1: in Europe. And this past April I went spa ing.
Speaker 1: I did a thing that when the first spy I
Speaker 1: went to, there was a very wealthy woman there. I
Speaker 1: remember a Getty I think was her name, and she
Speaker 1: was there with all of her friends, and I thought, wow,
Speaker 1: what would that be like to have enough money to
Speaker 1: go with all of your friends for fun? It looks
Speaker 1: certainly more fun than me walking around alone in my bathroom.
Speaker 1: And this past April I did that with dear friends.
Speaker 1: And it's the most fun I ever had at.
Speaker 5: A spat because you took the pleasure, yeah, added the
Speaker 5: people and made the memories. And we made the memories
Speaker 5: exactly right. That's enjoyment. Now. That means you don't have
Speaker 5: to forego the sources of pleasure. You have to add
Speaker 5: the people in the memory.
Speaker 1: Now you got to take the plus memory people makes
Speaker 1: it exactly, makes it enjoyment.
Speaker 5: Pleasure plus people plus memory. Now you can mess this up, right,
Speaker 5: You can have all your friends can be drunks, you know,
Speaker 5: and they can kind of then you can kind of
Speaker 5: go into a cycle like, yeah, a lot of people,
Speaker 5: you know, So I drink too much and he drinks
Speaker 5: too much, and we all drink too much and we
Speaker 5: all get really drunk together. Yeah. So I mean, obviously
Speaker 5: there are exceptions to this, but that's the basic rule
Speaker 5: of phone. You don't have to do less, you have
Speaker 5: to add more. This is not a subtractive formula. This
Speaker 5: is an additive formula. Almost everything in the science of
Speaker 5: happiness is additive. You've got to add more ingredients to
Speaker 5: make it good.
Speaker 1: So I think this is so great whatever it is
Speaker 1: you So this is this is an easy formula. Whatever
Speaker 1: it is you take pleasure in, yeah, find a way
Speaker 1: to add other people into that pleasure, and it becomes
Speaker 1: more enjoyable when you're making and you're making memories, babe,
Speaker 1: that's right.
Speaker 5: And so you know, I'm not saying don't go to Vegas,
Speaker 5: just don't go alone. Four o'clock in the morning, going
Speaker 5: by yourself. No, no, no, no, go with your buddies, go
Speaker 5: with your spouse, go with your friends. And by the way,
Speaker 5: if you're being compulsive, they're going to say, dude, really, yeah,
Speaker 5: can you afford that?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 5: And you're going to want to have more fun with
Speaker 5: the company, as opposed to compulsively pulling the lever again
Speaker 5: and again and again to get that little spritzer of
Speaker 5: dopamine onto the nuclear succumbence of your brain giving you
Speaker 5: that little relief, and that just goes away and you're
Speaker 5: still by yourself.
Speaker 1: So enjoyment is one of the components. And in order
Speaker 1: to enjoy you've got to add other people and make
Speaker 1: it more conscious. Exactly right, Okay, Monica, what's your question
Speaker 1: from Michigan?
Speaker 4: Hi, my name is Monica.
Speaker 7: And when you talked about the difference between pleasure and
Speaker 7: enjoyment in the book, that really struck me and I
Speaker 7: realized that I tend to seek pleasure to cope with
Speaker 7: disappointment or sadness or anger. So I would love to
Speaker 7: hear some examples from both of you, Arthur and Oprah,
Speaker 7: around how to disrupt that pattern when, as you say,
Speaker 7: pleasure is easy and enjoyment is hard.
Speaker 5: That's good disruption, right, I mean the whole idea is
Speaker 5: you get it. She knows. I mean, by the way,
Speaker 5: the first she's good. Yeah, Monica is good because Monica
Speaker 5: realized she already has got knowledge about this. The basis
Speaker 5: of getting happier is knowledge. Yeah, you know, this is
Speaker 5: the thing. A lot of people are just like, I'm
Speaker 5: gonna feel let me feel something different.
Speaker 7: No, no, no.
Speaker 5: The Dali Lama says, think more, feel less, okay, which
Speaker 5: is really important. So that's why we wrote a book
Speaker 5: that has a lot of science in it because people
Speaker 5: need this particular knowledge. And she's really really on her way,
Speaker 5: and she understands that there's a cycle and hitting the
Speaker 5: lever to get the pleasure, hitting the lever to get
Speaker 5: the pleasure, you have to disrupt that cycle. That gets
Speaker 5: back to just what we were talking about before. You
Speaker 5: disrupt that cycle with love with another person, with people
Speaker 5: that you care about. You add the person who disrupt
Speaker 5: that that little relationship, and you talk to people who
Speaker 5: suffer from addiction. Yeah. One of the things that I
Speaker 5: always talk about is that the addiction was like it
Speaker 5: was like my closest relationship you know it was it
Speaker 5: was like.
Speaker 4: It was like my way. They were consumed by it.
Speaker 5: Yeah, for sure, it was my lover. It was my
Speaker 5: best friend. And you know, I wanted to go away
Speaker 5: with my best friend, which was booze or whatever it
Speaker 5: happened to be, gambling the want I wanted to I
Speaker 5: wanted to go away with them. You disrupt that by
Speaker 5: adding a real, living human being. That's how you disrupt
Speaker 5: the cyclist at a person you love and.
Speaker 1: Also accepting unhappiness. You say, without unhappiness, you wouldn't survive,
Speaker 1: learn or come up.
Speaker 4: With good ideas.
Speaker 1: Even if you could get rid of your unhappiness, it
Speaker 1: would be a huge mistake. The secret of the best
Speaker 1: life is to accept your unhappiness so you can learn
Speaker 1: and grow and manage the feelings that result. I think
Speaker 1: that's hard for people because what does that mean? To
Speaker 1: accept the unhappy? When you say accept, it often feels like, so,
Speaker 1: I'm just supposed to like do nothing. I'm just supposed
Speaker 1: to accept it. I'm supposed to surrender to it. I'm unhappy.
Speaker 5: Yeah, No, that's that's not It's not the idea. The
Speaker 5: truth is that you need to accept it as normal.
Speaker 5: And this is A big part of our culture today
Speaker 5: is that we think that if we feel unhappiness or pain,
Speaker 5: there's something wrong with us, that there's evidence that something's broken.
Speaker 5: If you feel unhappy, you know, you go to if
Speaker 5: you're in college, you go to campus counseling and say,
Speaker 5: I'm really feeling anxious and I'm really feeling depressed. And
Speaker 5: you know, my university it's a really hard university. If
Speaker 5: you're not anxious when you're at Harvard University, that's the problem.
Speaker 5: That means you're not working hard enough. Maybe that's when
Speaker 5: you need therapy. Quite frankly, you know, And I talk
Speaker 5: to young people and says, feeling really anxious about my studies.
Speaker 5: Of course you are. That's a normal thing. That's the acceptance,
Speaker 5: the acceptance of the fact that you have feelings, including
Speaker 5: negative feelings, and you'd be dead if you didn't.
Speaker 4: Who's walking around at Harvard not feeling anxious?
Speaker 5: Totally totally mean, by the way, including the faculty. Yeah, yeah, tell,
Speaker 5: it's like my students don't quite figure out that I'm
Speaker 5: like freaking out too.
Speaker 4: Gane from Atlanta has a question about regret. Jane hi
Speaker 4: oprah hi Artha.
Speaker 8: I'm Jane build the life you want has been the
Speaker 8: gift that I didn't even know that I needed. On
Speaker 8: page twenty, when I read that people who do not
Speaker 8: regret tend to make the same mistake over and over again,
Speaker 8: I thought, that's me. When I was eighteen years old,
Speaker 8: I failed an exam that would enable me to get
Speaker 8: into the university and my dad said, no, crying, move forward.
Speaker 3: And I didn't.
Speaker 8: Now my question is, how do I today begin to
Speaker 8: use regret as a tool when my African upbringing has
Speaker 8: dictated that I move forward and get on with it.
Speaker 4: I love that.
Speaker 5: It's a great question.
Speaker 4: That is great.
Speaker 5: It really is good because that's a lot of advice
Speaker 5: that we give our children. You know. It's like suck
Speaker 5: it up, suck it up, yeap, you know, and like
Speaker 5: move on, move on, move on. Now there's there's like
Speaker 5: ajournal of I mean, good for her father, because what
Speaker 5: he was really telling her was not forget about everything
Speaker 5: had happened. What he was telling her was don't ruminate
Speaker 5: on it, don't you know, go over it again and
Speaker 5: again and again and and have it, you know, create
Speaker 5: a constant source of sadness in your life. On the contrary,
Speaker 5: you got to you got to keep moving. And that's true.
Speaker 5: But here's the thing. Rumination is not the same thing
Speaker 5: as understanding what you want. When something bad happens to you,
Speaker 5: you benefit from it tremendously if you analyze it like
Speaker 5: a scientist. Yes, so that's one of the reasons that
Speaker 5: I tell my students they keep a failure journal like
Speaker 5: a disappointment that we talked about in the book. Absolutely,
Speaker 5: we talked about how you can do it. Yes, when
Speaker 5: something bad happens, you write it down and think about it.
Speaker 5: Don't ruminate on it. Don't have it be kind of
Speaker 5: like a ghost, you know, around haunting your the limbic
Speaker 5: system of your emotions. Then's use it as an opportunity
Speaker 5: to think about what actually happened. And when you do that,
Speaker 5: by the way, when you think about it as if
Speaker 5: you were analyzing a problem that somebody else had, this
Speaker 5: is something we're talking a lot about in the book,
Speaker 5: then you will learn and grow. So the point is,
Speaker 5: don't ruminate. Understand. That's the way that you can actually
Speaker 5: use the information. Take the time to understand these things
Speaker 5: appropriately and learning grow.
Speaker 1: The second macro nutrient of happiness satisfaction is that thrill
Speaker 1: from accomplishing a goal you work for.
Speaker 4: Is what you say? Why is satisfaction also the key
Speaker 4: to getting happier.
Speaker 5: We're made to make progress. Human beings are made to
Speaker 5: make progress. We're you know, we want to achieve. The
Speaker 5: funny thing is that people always think, when I get
Speaker 5: to my goal, then I'm going to be finally happy.
Speaker 5: But that commits that. That's this incredible fallacy that's called
Speaker 5: the arrival fallacy. You know, like you and I are
Speaker 5: doing high fives because the book hit number one in
Speaker 5: New York Times bestseller list. But if we're like, okay,
Speaker 5: now Oprah and Arthur are going to be happy forever,
Speaker 5: we're kidding ourselves. No, next week we're going to be
Speaker 5: in doing a new project, doing a new thing. That's
Speaker 5: the truth. The arrival fallacy is once I finally get
Speaker 5: the money, once I finally get the marriage, once I
Speaker 5: finally get the car of the house to boat, then
Speaker 5: all will be well. The truth is that the greatest
Speaker 5: joy comes from the progress toward the accomplishment, even in
Speaker 5: spite of the fact that it requires a lot of struggle. Yeh,
Speaker 5: Satisfaction is that moment that you hit it, which is
Speaker 5: a real moment of joy. Now the paradox in that
Speaker 5: is it doesn't last, and it can't last if you actually,
Speaker 5: if you know.
Speaker 4: That's why you couldn't get no satisfaction.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's right. And the truth is you can't keep
Speaker 5: no satisfaction. That's the real problem. I mean, Mick Jagger
Speaker 5: had it almost right.
Speaker 4: That's what I was thinking. Jagger couldn't get no satisfaction.
Speaker 5: That's right, I mean, and the truth is, if you
Speaker 5: couldn't get it, you wouldn't keep trying and trying and trying.
Speaker 5: Like he says. The problem is you can't keep no satisfaction.
Speaker 5: And that's what seems kind of like a bitter fruit
Speaker 5: with a satisfaction dilemma. You need to struggle. If you
Speaker 5: don't struggle. By the way, there is no satisfaction. If
Speaker 5: my students cheat on my exam and they get an A,
Speaker 5: there's no satisfaction, satisfaction. They do an all nighter and
Speaker 5: they work really hard and they get an A, they're like, yes,
Speaker 5: and you know how it feels. I mean, you and
Speaker 5: I were we worked hard on this book. Yeah, I
Speaker 5: mean it was it was. It was a quick job,
Speaker 5: but real quick turn.
Speaker 1: And we were yeah, from the time that it Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's miraculous from the time we decided.
Speaker 5: Chapter I don't know, and it was, but then boom
Speaker 5: and this satisfaction. Then the problem is thinking that once
Speaker 5: we arrive, it's going to be good forever, and then
Speaker 5: having a little the frustration that comes from the satisfaction
Speaker 5: is dispelled and there's a way to fix there's a
Speaker 5: way to a round that. But once again, you got
Speaker 5: to fight mother nature.
Speaker 1: Okay, So you need enjoyment, you need satisfaction, and you
Speaker 1: also need purpose.
Speaker 4: Those are the macro nutrients, like.
Speaker 5: The protein, carbohydrates and fat.
Speaker 1: Okay, and and how okay, so explain to people how
Speaker 1: the macro nutrients fit into the pillars.
Speaker 5: Yeah. So the macro nutrients are basically the elements that
Speaker 5: we find that you need in balance and abundance. You
Speaker 5: can't just have a life of enjoyment. You also need satisfaction,
Speaker 5: you need goals, you need to struggle, and you need meaning,
Speaker 5: which is the why, the essence of your life. You
Speaker 5: need those things. The happiest people have those three things
Speaker 5: and they work on them. They take them seriously, and
Speaker 5: we spend tons of time about how to actually do that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, then this is why this is so great. For y'all,
Speaker 1: and I mean y'all meaning myself too, because when I
Speaker 1: me and yeah, when we figured it out. I mean,
Speaker 1: those are the that's the baseline. You need enjoyment, you
Speaker 1: need satisfaction, and you need meaning and purpose, right, And
Speaker 1: let's talk about what meaning and purpose means because I
Speaker 1: think people get all confused about the purpose.
Speaker 4: It like I don't know my purpose. I don't know
Speaker 4: my purpose. Yeah.
Speaker 5: So those macronutrients are just like the macronutrients of food,
Speaker 5: the component parts of food. Yeah, and then you got
Speaker 5: the dishes and the dinner, which are the pillars that
Speaker 5: we'll talk about later, Okay, the things to actually be
Speaker 5: focusing on the things that you're working on. But the
Speaker 5: last macronutrient is meaning or purpose. Meaning is the essence
Speaker 5: of your life. You know, who am I? It's this
Speaker 5: whole finding yourself thing, right, Like I gotta find myself
Speaker 5: and people from the beginning of time, it's like who
Speaker 5: am I? Right? And that's a that's no, that's no joke.
Speaker 5: That's a hard thing to do. I mean some people
Speaker 5: believe that you could discover it because of your essence
Speaker 5: precedes your existence. Yes, I mean most religious people, you know,
Speaker 5: people raised in the Christian faith like you and me.
Speaker 5: I mean, we believe that we're made in God's image
Speaker 5: and that's our essence and it precedes us.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 5: Other people think that they can create their own essence.
Speaker 5: This is you know, different philosophies believe. That's a tricky one, right.
Speaker 5: Some people believe there is no essence. That's a real problem, right.
Speaker 5: But the truth of the matter is that to do
Speaker 5: that And we talk about this in the book a
Speaker 5: little bit, that there's a quiz that you've got to
Speaker 5: give yourself and you have to have real sincere answers
Speaker 5: to two questions. Now, if you don't have them, it
Speaker 5: means there's a crisis of meaning in your life. But
Speaker 5: that's a good thing to know that because then you
Speaker 5: have the opportunity to go in search of just the
Speaker 5: answers to just two questions. Yeah, question number one, why
Speaker 5: are you alive? And again I can't tell you that.
Speaker 5: I mean, it's like you gotta have your own answer
Speaker 5: to that, Yes, go in search of that answer. In
Speaker 5: the second for what are you willing to die today?
Speaker 5: And the answer probably shouldn't be no food, right, There's
Speaker 5: got to be something. And once you actually find the
Speaker 5: answers to those questions. It's extraordinary, Oprah. You know when
Speaker 5: you see this my you know, you know a lot
Speaker 5: of my family not my family, and one my son,
Speaker 5: you haven't met yet because he's still an active duty marine.
Speaker 5: He's a scout sniper in the US Marine Corps. And
Speaker 5: you know he struggled in high school because meaning you know,
Speaker 5: it's like he was goofing off and he wasn't even
Speaker 5: having fun because he's like, who am I? So I
Speaker 5: I'm a business school professor. I make my kids do
Speaker 5: a business plan when they're a junior in high school,
Speaker 5: you know, a business plan because the enterprise of life. Yeah,
Speaker 5: and they're entrepreneurs. I'm VC, I'm venture capital, so I
Speaker 5: deserve a business plan. I realized it's pretty nerdy, but
Speaker 5: there you go.
Speaker 4: I like it.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and so they and if it's not original, I
Speaker 5: send it back for revisions. Those are my son, Carlos.
Speaker 5: He's a good boy, and carl is like his business
Speaker 5: plans kind of. I don't know. I don't believe it.
Speaker 5: So I say, you need to find the answers to
Speaker 5: these questions. How are you going to find the answers
Speaker 5: to these questions? So in his business plan, he says,
Speaker 5: I'm not going to college, which is fine. I didn't
Speaker 5: either until I was thirty. You know, I took me
Speaker 5: a long time to get through college too. I wasn't ready.
Speaker 5: He went to work on a farm. He spent two
Speaker 5: years on a dry land wheat for in Idaho. Then
Speaker 5: he joined the Marines. And he's twenty three. Now he's married,
Speaker 5: and he's got to going on and he's got answers
Speaker 5: to those two questions. And I asked him, Carlos, why
Speaker 5: were you born? Why are you alive? He said, because
Speaker 5: God made me to serve. For what are you willing
Speaker 5: to die today? He says, for my family, for my faith,
Speaker 5: for my friends, and for the United States of America.
Speaker 5: Boom boom. And you know that's not everybody's answers were
Speaker 5: watching us. Yeah, but that boys got answers at three,
Speaker 5: at twenty three, and his life is different than it was.
Speaker 5: His life is meaning it's beautiful. As a father, I
Speaker 5: couldn't be prouder. I couldn't be prouder of the enterprise
Speaker 5: that he's building of his life. M he because you
Speaker 5: know he's becoming a good man.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, yes, yes, I love that you're the venture
Speaker 1: capitalist and bringing the plane.
Speaker 4: Yeah all right, business school, Yeah, okay.
Speaker 1: Chapter two is entitle the power of metacognition and what
Speaker 1: I call field to feel and then take the will
Speaker 1: explain medicognition. I think this is just one of the biggest, biggest,
Speaker 1: biggest contributions to people getting happier in their lives once
Speaker 1: you get the metacognition.
Speaker 5: It's changed my life. Yeah, it's just changed my life.
Speaker 5: And part of the reason is because people go through
Speaker 5: life relatively unexamined in their emotions and just hoping that
Speaker 5: their emotions will get better, and with a complete inability
Speaker 5: to separate their own essence from their emotions. And that's
Speaker 5: a crazy thing to do. You're not your emotions. Look,
Speaker 5: I'm not my hand, you know. If it's it's I'm
Speaker 5: not my my hand is not completely independent. It was
Speaker 5: like it's like one of the whole horror movies. But
Speaker 5: that's how people are with their emotions, where their emotions
Speaker 5: are controlling them. Metacognition is thinking about thinking. It's it's
Speaker 5: the ability to look at your own self with a
Speaker 5: certain intellectual remove at a distance. It's putting distance between
Speaker 5: your feelings and your reactions and doing it on purpose.
Speaker 5: When you have that ability, your life isn't going to
Speaker 5: be the same. It just isn't because you're not going
Speaker 5: to wonder like, is something bad gonna happen to tomorrow?
Speaker 5: By the way, answer, yes, am I going to feel
Speaker 5: bad about it? I'm going to decide how I'm gonna
Speaker 5: work on this. I'm going to decide my reactions. I'm
Speaker 5: going to substitute emotions that are more appropriate for what
Speaker 5: I'm doing. Now, you have emotions for a reason, you're
Speaker 5: not going to block them out. But once you have
Speaker 5: metacognitive skill where you can put space between the emotions
Speaker 5: that are simply signals from your brain about what's going
Speaker 5: on around you.
Speaker 1: And the emotions are there to tell you that something's off,
Speaker 1: is just and you need to do something. It's it's
Speaker 1: just that your emotions are just information.
Speaker 5: They are.
Speaker 4: You can get that, and if you.
Speaker 1: Can separate yourself from the thing that you're feeling, feel
Speaker 1: the feeling and then take control exactly right.
Speaker 5: And the way that you do that is by putting
Speaker 5: space between the emotions and your reactions. Tell us how
Speaker 5: to do that, So you do that by by studying yourself.
Speaker 1: Now, no don't you that Also by observing the feeling
Speaker 1: exactly as though it were happening, is somebody else's how
Speaker 1: you do you identify what this feeling as you say, oh, gosh,
Speaker 1: I'm feeling so sad right now, I'm feeling so put upon,
Speaker 1: I'm feeling so betrayed, whatever it is. But you separate
Speaker 1: that feeling from yourself. You're observing all those feelings inside
Speaker 1: your body so that you see that the feeling is
Speaker 1: really different from you.
Speaker 4: You're in control of the feeling.
Speaker 5: Exactly way, and you're you're able to react in an
Speaker 5: appropriate way. I mean, it's that we're so maladapted to
Speaker 5: the way that our feelings occur to us. I mean
Speaker 5: I talk to people all the time where once again
Speaker 5: back to social media, Yeah, I got a bad tweet
Speaker 5: and what are to do?
Speaker 4: It?
Speaker 5: It raised your stress hormones or through the roof. You've
Speaker 5: got butterflies in your stomach and the whole thing. The
Speaker 5: reason for that is because nature wants you to run
Speaker 5: away from a saber tooth tiger by injecting stress hormones
Speaker 5: in your system when you think there's a threat but
Speaker 5: or you don't want to wander the frozen tundra and
Speaker 5: die alone. But you know, folks, look around, no tundra,
Speaker 5: Twitter's not ton And so the result is metacognition is
Speaker 5: very important so that we can we make it feel
Speaker 5: like it sure, And if you don't have an examined life, yes,
Speaker 5: then you're not going to be able to make those distinctions.
Speaker 5: And so you can actually laugh at yourself when you're
Speaker 5: actually observing your own emotions at a certain remove, as
Speaker 5: if they were happening to another person, and you see
Speaker 5: yourself freaking out because of a tweet, you will start laughing.
Speaker 5: You will start You'll be like, really, Arthur, really really, Yeah,
Speaker 5: you're you're really I mean, it's like you're a grown man.
Speaker 5: You have a PhD or social scientist. You're supposed to
Speaker 5: know all this stuff. And somebody said a mean thing
Speaker 5: to you on Twitter, and you're acting as if you
Speaker 5: know an axe murder is chasing you. Come on, man,
Speaker 5: and it's just funny and life gets better. And that's
Speaker 5: what metacognition can do for all of us if we
Speaker 5: have the right techniques.
Speaker 1: Okay, so let's explain the emotional caffeine metaphor you mentioned
Speaker 1: on page seventy one.
Speaker 4: We all love this the first time we heard it.
Speaker 5: Tell us about it. So emotional caffeine. This is just
Speaker 5: a metaphor. Most people of something like ninety five percent
Speaker 5: of Americans use caffeine on a regular basis. I'm crazy
Speaker 5: about coffee. I lived. I grew up next to the
Speaker 5: first Starbucks in the world in the nineteen seventies. There
Speaker 5: was one Starbucks. My house was near it. I've been
Speaker 5: drinking in Seattle. Yeah. I grewu to Seattle on in
Speaker 5: the queen An neighborhood and he us to walk down
Speaker 5: to Pike Place mart. Yeah, the first one. Yeah. I've
Speaker 5: talked to Howard Schultz about this. He thinks it's quite charming.
Speaker 5: But I've been drinking caffeine, I mean taking caffeine regularly
Speaker 5: since I was seventh grade, which means I have the
Speaker 5: most enervated adrenal system. And who knows. I mean, it's
Speaker 5: like the autopsy is going to be a fun time anyway. So,
Speaker 5: but what happens with your brain is you think it
Speaker 5: PEPs you up because it gives you all this energy.
Speaker 5: Is not what it does. Is it blocks another neurotransmitter
Speaker 5: called a dentisine. A dentisine is a neurotransmitter that's floating
Speaker 5: around your brain that goes into these certain receptors and
Speaker 5: it mellows you out. So it makes you when you
Speaker 5: have time to be tired, time to lower your energy.
Speaker 5: Whatever it is. The problem is you got too much
Speaker 5: of it, Like in the morning, you're feeling kind of lethargic,
Speaker 5: too much a dentisine feeling those receptors. You get this
Speaker 5: caffeine where the molecule is the same size and shape
Speaker 5: and it goes into the parking spots for the a
Speaker 5: dent scene blocking it. So it just can't mellow you out.
Speaker 5: That's what caffeine does. It blocks the neurotransmitter that you
Speaker 5: don't want. That's what it's doing. So it's not up,
Speaker 5: it's not it's preventing you from being perked down. That's
Speaker 5: that's not an expression. Is it to mellow you out?
Speaker 5: You don't want to be too much.
Speaker 4: There's happierness. We can be perked down too, creating language.
Speaker 5: I love it. So so that's what it's. And so
Speaker 5: the reason I use that particular metaphor, and you and
Speaker 5: I talk about this metaphor in the book, is because
Speaker 5: that's what you can do once you're a metacognitive and
Speaker 5: you're aware of your own emotions, and you're studying your
Speaker 5: own emotions. So many times throughout life you've got a
Speaker 5: particular emotion, but it's not the emotion you want. Choose
Speaker 5: another one, choose.
Speaker 1: So you should have a store, like a little storage
Speaker 1: of better emotions, repertoire.
Speaker 5: You need a better repetoi.
Speaker 4: That's right, a repertoire better emotions.
Speaker 1: So when you're in a funk, when you're perked down,
Speaker 1: you can go to something that.
Speaker 5: Perks you up, exactly right. You can actually block the
Speaker 5: anxiety and depression.
Speaker 4: Give me an example.
Speaker 5: So, and it's an example from a mutual friend of ours,
Speaker 5: Rain Wilson. You know, the actor who is in the office. Yeah,
Speaker 5: he I noticed, you know, just through basic observation, that
Speaker 5: a lot of professional comedians are depressed. So I said, hey, man,
Speaker 5: what is it about professional comedy that bums you out
Speaker 5: so much? That makes you melancholic? And he said, no, no,
Speaker 5: you got it wrong. It's the opposite, is that we
Speaker 5: tend toward depression and we make a joke when we
Speaker 5: feel down, and that solves the problem. That's emotional caffeine.
Speaker 5: When you make a joke and other people laugh. Life
Speaker 5: gets better. You lighten somebody else's load, and you lighten
Speaker 5: your own load, and you get relief. You get a
Speaker 5: little cup of Starbucks dark roast at that moment.
Speaker 1: Is it also sort of like you know when I
Speaker 1: every time anybody knows this too. I'm sure this happens
Speaker 1: to you. You go to the doctor, the blood pressure
Speaker 1: cuff goes on. My blood pressure immediately goes up when
Speaker 1: I see the blood pressure cover coming.
Speaker 4: I got the way. I definitely have the white coat syndrome.
Speaker 1: I've literally I go to Cleveland clinic like once a
Speaker 1: year and they leave me in the room for a
Speaker 1: few minutes before so I can calm myself down because
Speaker 1: I got the white coat syndrome. And I start thinking
Speaker 1: about every happy thing. Walking in the woods with my dogs.
Speaker 1: I've always loved water sprinklers on a green lawn, you know,
Speaker 1: when you're walking and you can see the rainbow in
Speaker 1: the water.
Speaker 4: So I start I have like this little storage, just
Speaker 4: a little place.
Speaker 1: Yeah, a little repertoire of things to calm me down
Speaker 1: to think about.
Speaker 4: So is that what emotional caffeine.
Speaker 5: Emotional caffeine works exactly that way, And the key thing
Speaker 5: is thinking about the things, the things that the bew
Speaker 5: you know, the particular experiences that you have that are
Speaker 5: the problematic emotions that are that are maladapted. They're not exact,
Speaker 5: they're not the wrong emotion, they're just the emotion. It's
Speaker 5: just information. Yeah, But you can have another emotion that's
Speaker 5: also extremely appropriate and choose that. If you're studying yourself
Speaker 5: and you've got distance between your reaction and to what
Speaker 5: you're feeling. If you're very reactive, if you're like a
Speaker 5: little kid, you know, you're angry, you yell, you're sad,
Speaker 5: you cry without thinking about it. On the contrary, when
Speaker 5: you're something is, it's and and it's fine. I mean,
Speaker 5: we like spontaneous people, but that's no way to live,
Speaker 5: you know, when when you have little kids. When my
Speaker 5: kids were little, my wife and I would say, use
Speaker 5: your words. Let's say being metacognitive. That's what that really means,
Speaker 5: because when you use your words, you've moved the experience
Speaker 5: of the emotion into your prefrontal cortex, into your executive brain,
Speaker 5: and there you can make decisions like emotional caffeine. You
Speaker 5: can you can decide on on on different emotions that
Speaker 5: are more appropriate to the circumstances. So here's a you.
Speaker 4: Can think of better thought.
Speaker 5: You can think a better thought, and you can think.
Speaker 1: A better thought if you have a repertoire, a thought
Speaker 1: to go to to think. It's hard to think a
Speaker 1: better thought when you're in the midst of the if
Speaker 1: you're all down.
Speaker 5: So give yourself some space, get some space in there
Speaker 5: and say, okay, huh, I'm gonna go to the library.
Speaker 5: I'm gonna pick out that one. Here's a classic one
Speaker 5: that you do all you do super well, I've seen it.
Speaker 4: You do it again and yeah, yeah, yeah, right, you're
Speaker 4: talking about.
Speaker 5: Talk about ut Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 5: So we feel resentment and we feel bitterness or we
Speaker 5: feel anger a lot, and the reason is because we're
Speaker 5: evolved to have those as dominant emotions. This is called
Speaker 5: the negativity bias. The negativity bias is that, you know,
Speaker 5: we actually have more brain space dedicated to producing emotions
Speaker 5: that are negative than positive, because negative emotions on the
Speaker 5: place to scene keep you alive. Yeah, somebody smiling sweetly
Speaker 5: at you in the tribe, that's great. Somebody frowning at
Speaker 5: you might be a big problem when you step outside,
Speaker 5: and you.
Speaker 1: Will remember that frown longer than you remember the twelve
Speaker 1: people who smiled.
Speaker 5: Oh yes, oh yeah, because that's evolved to keep you alive.
Speaker 5: The problem is hugely maladapted and what it'll ruin big
Speaker 5: parts of our lives. Yeah, because we're so we're negative
Speaker 5: all the time. It's also unrealistic, the truth.
Speaker 1: It's why in the beginning of the Oprah Show, when
Speaker 1: we were still just you know, taking phone calls and
Speaker 1: people were writing real letters by snail mail, if somebody
Speaker 1: wrote something negative or said something, I would track them down.
Speaker 4: I'd get a thousand great letters.
Speaker 1: I wouldn't respond but oh that's nice, that's nice, that's nice,
Speaker 1: and one negative thing. I would track them down. I'd
Speaker 1: find them in Louisiana.
Speaker 4: Alabama, wherever you were. I'm gonna and.
Speaker 1: Then call them up and say, excuse me, this is
Speaker 1: Oprah calling and they're like, what I know.
Speaker 5: It's like I know, yeah, yeah, it's crazy. But you know,
Speaker 5: there's a there's a lot of literature on this. Social
Speaker 5: scientists and looks at us a lot. If you're out
Speaker 5: for dinner with your friends having a great old time
Speaker 5: and there's one point of disagreement, that's what you remember
Speaker 5: from the whole night that's.
Speaker 4: The thing saying stays with you.
Speaker 5: Right Thanksgiving dinner when you know Aunt Mabel, yeah something,
Speaker 5: you know, she she she went after you know, her
Speaker 5: nephew Jake because you know they disagreed about President Trump
Speaker 5: or something like that. And that's what everybody's like, Oh,
Speaker 5: that was the Thanksgiving or Aunt Mabel went berserk about
Speaker 5: politics or something. That's what you remember about.
Speaker 4: Because we can't invite An Mabel again.
Speaker 5: Yeah, because of that thing happened. You had a great
Speaker 5: time for three hours or four hours, and it was
Speaker 5: like three minutes. But the negativity bias, man, that's like
Speaker 5: a blinking life and.
Speaker 4: We are so you're saying we're born that way.
Speaker 5: We're born that way. Absolutely, we're born that way. And
Speaker 5: sometimes it's great because it saves your life. But a
Speaker 5: lot of times it just embitters beautiful things and it's unrealistic.
Speaker 5: It's not even right. Yeah, you know the truth is
Speaker 5: a lot of the times we're feeling resentment because it's like,
Speaker 5: can you believe the quality of this airline food. It's like, dude,
Speaker 5: you're getting all the way across the country in six
Speaker 5: hours on your middle class salary and you're complaining about
Speaker 5: the fact that you don't like the food it's nuts,
Speaker 5: or it's like can you believe it's it's a little
Speaker 5: bit too cold on this plane, or you know whatever
Speaker 5: it happens to be.
Speaker 1: That that we say that people just allow themselves to
Speaker 1: be absorbed by that.
Speaker 5: Yeah. I mean, we have this incredibly privileged lives. I
Speaker 5: get it that we also have problems and we have
Speaker 5: suffering and not everything is perfect and all that, but
Speaker 5: on balance in modern life most of the time is
Speaker 5: pretty good. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, And this is the point
Speaker 5: that we can actually get that. I've seen you do
Speaker 5: this a bunch of times.
Speaker 4: Oh. The gratitude thing is huge.
Speaker 5: And I know it's been since you were a little kid. Yeah, right,
Speaker 5: that you basically, when you feel the resentment welling up
Speaker 5: inside you, when you feel the anger, even when you
Speaker 5: feel fear, that's when you start to That's when you
Speaker 5: start to reflect on the sources of heath and not.
Speaker 1: Just reflect because it's not not enough sometimes just to
Speaker 1: like think about it. I actually I have volumes of
Speaker 1: gratitude journals.
Speaker 5: Right, this is a really good thing because this is the.
Speaker 4: Volumes of gratitude journals.
Speaker 1: And now I hear like everybody talking about it, and
Speaker 1: I see these reels where people are talking about gratitude.
Speaker 1: I've been doing it for years and years and years.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and when you write it down, by the way,
Speaker 5: it can't stay in your limbic system. Then it's in
Speaker 5: your prefrontal cortex. The act of writing something down and
Speaker 5: putting it into words puts it into the executive centers
Speaker 5: in your brain and it sits there. I mean, this
Speaker 5: is in your memory banks. At this point, you're really
Speaker 5: going to use it, and you have it in the
Speaker 5: most conscious, metacognitive way possible. This is the mac Gratitude
Speaker 5: journals are great. Everybody should keep a gratitude journal. I
Speaker 5: the failure journal is fantastic. We talk about it in
Speaker 5: the book and all ways that you can take your
Speaker 5: sources of disgust and discontent and turn them into learning
Speaker 5: and growth.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: But the gratitude journal is a must for everybody, and
Speaker 5: there are a lot of ways to do it. You know.
Speaker 5: The easiest way is every Sunday night, write down five
Speaker 5: things you're grateful for. It doesn't matter how stupid they are.
Speaker 5: It's like my team one, right, I ate a three
Speaker 5: Musketeers bars with my cousins. Yes, like you said, right, yeah,
Speaker 5: whatever it happens to be that delights your heart a
Speaker 5: little bit. And then you know, Monday through Saturday, look
Speaker 5: at those things and ponder them a little bit, give up,
Speaker 5: maybe a word of thanks, maybe a little prayer. Sunday
Speaker 5: update it. The data say that on average, after ten
Speaker 5: weeks you'll be twelve percent happier.
Speaker 1: I believe that, yeah, And I believe that in the
Speaker 1: moment when you are feeling the worst, if you can
Speaker 1: just take a deep breath and go to the thing
Speaker 1: that first of all, grateful for your breath, right, and
Speaker 1: start you know, actualizing for yourself. And you're saying writing
Speaker 1: down is more important than just thinking about it. The
Speaker 1: things you're grateful, you can feel your own vibration change.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, for sure, Yeah absolutely.
Speaker 4: But for me also a walk in nature too.
Speaker 5: Yeah, there's a lot of work on that. It's really
Speaker 5: interesting to begin with. That's a that's almost a form
Speaker 5: of worship for a lot of people.
Speaker 4: It is for me.
Speaker 5: You and I have walked here and and it was
Speaker 5: sort of magic. I remember that we were working super
Speaker 5: hard on cooking up this book and we walked all
Speaker 5: they were really really super time and then we took
Speaker 5: a long walk on twilight.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: It was so beautiful, right, yeah, because everything was crazy.
Speaker 4: Is a picture of that?
Speaker 5: Yeah, there is a picture of that. Yeah, yeah, that's right.
Speaker 5: And it was somebody took a picture of us. It
Speaker 5: wasn't us, but it wasn't staged. Yeah, and it was
Speaker 5: it was I remember, it was relaxed and it was nice.
Speaker 5: And some researchers are asking what it is about the
Speaker 5: experience of touching nature and that you can even get
Speaker 5: more if you're barefoot. That's a that's a whole thing
Speaker 5: called grounding that I've heard of that, you know, as
Speaker 5: a social scientist, I'm like, but you know, it's funny.
Speaker 5: The data are actually quite compelling that.
Speaker 4: There's there's some truth to that.
Speaker 5: There appears to be that, you know, your feet on
Speaker 5: the grass and soil, I mean, actually touching the grass
Speaker 5: and soil has a particularly profound impact physiologically on the
Speaker 5: what we're experiencing.
Speaker 1: That's really interesting because I enjoy walking outside barefoot on
Speaker 1: the grass. But I thought it was because that's the
Speaker 1: way I was raised, you know, back to your Yeah, Mississippi.
Speaker 1: I thought it was like dirt road, Mississippi, and you're
Speaker 1: just just like a primal thing.
Speaker 4: I didn't know that it was.
Speaker 5: Yeah, no, there's there's there's work on that. And I
Speaker 5: do a lot of people, a lot of us remember
Speaker 5: when we were kids that you know, out in the
Speaker 5: backyard or you know, in the neighborhood and running around
Speaker 5: with our bare feet, and it brings us back to
Speaker 5: those particular times. You can smell certain things from your childhood,
Speaker 5: but there is more to it than that. There scientists
Speaker 5: believe that there is more to the experience of touching
Speaker 5: nature than that. A lot of times I wind up
Speaker 5: giving a lot of counsel and support to young people
Speaker 5: who are in their twenties and they feel quite lost,
Speaker 5: and I get it, you know. There they don't they
Speaker 5: don't know the why their life. They haven't haven't read
Speaker 5: our book yet, you know, and uh. And so one
Speaker 5: of the things that I'll tell them to do is
Speaker 5: to go on a process of discernment about their life
Speaker 5: to understand meaning of life. And one of the best
Speaker 5: ways to do it, I recommend to everybody, but not
Speaker 5: just young people, is to get up before dawn it's
Speaker 5: hard for some people and walk for an hour as
Speaker 5: the sun comes up. There's something profoundly mystical. It's cooler,
Speaker 5: it's quiet. You're alone with your thoughts, no devices, no
Speaker 5: podcasts except this one. Do that, just with with the
Speaker 5: with the sounds in your head, with the music of I.
Speaker 4: Know somebody who does that every day.
Speaker 5: It's super important to do that. That's actually one of
Speaker 5: the ways that you can satisfy the you know, the
Speaker 5: spiritual element of what a good and happy life actually needs.
Speaker 5: A transcendent life, one that transcends your day to day
Speaker 5: Quotitian ordinary, boring, you know, work.
Speaker 1: Existence, because you get to see how small you are
Speaker 1: and compared to the largeness of everything else.
Speaker 5: I'm alive, Yeah, I'm alive. I don't know what the
Speaker 5: stay will bring. I don't know, And that's okay. I'm
Speaker 5: just really grateful to be alive, to stay and to
Speaker 5: be walking on this road at this moment and to
Speaker 5: see the sun rising. It puts you in a state
Speaker 5: of awe. It puts you in a moment of peace.
Speaker 5: And if that becomes a product, and by the way,
Speaker 5: you get ten thousand steps, that's a good thing to
Speaker 5: do too.
Speaker 4: Okay. So that's a good place to end, right.
Speaker 1: That's all the happiness we can squeeze into our first episode.
Speaker 1: We've only just begun. Remember that song I did, We've
Speaker 1: only just begun?
Speaker 4: Who saying it? Carverringers, thank you.
Speaker 5: I mean, it's like I was a classical musician growing up.
Speaker 5: It's like I was raised there. I know, I know,
Speaker 5: but I was like every freaking wedding for every no
Speaker 5: I know, you know who knows we play bock at
Speaker 5: our wedding.
Speaker 1: Okay, So my gratitude to you and to all of
Speaker 1: our readers for their thoughtful questions. Guys, and we so
Speaker 1: appreciate that you're reading the book. I think I just
Speaker 1: want to say this. I think this is a great
Speaker 1: gift idea for your loved ones. There's something in here
Speaker 1: for everybody. I am not just saying that, I think
Speaker 1: I actually today sent three copies off to people that
Speaker 1: I know and I think will benefit from it. So
Speaker 1: next up episode two of our three part build a
Speaker 1: Life You Want series, and we'll be discussing chapters four
Speaker 1: and five specific strategies for you to start taking action
Speaker 1: and building what matters to you. So thank you, Arthur,
Speaker 1: thank you Oprah, See y'all next time.
Speaker 4: Thanks to our episode sponsor, the Hartford