280 ‒ Cultivating happiness, emotional self-management, and more | Arthur Brooks Ph.D.

this is the Salient theme take charge man take charge don't don't leave your health up to what feels good right now take charge of it I mean you're the boss you're this is the startup is you you're the entrepreneur you're the the guy in charge of the Enterprise you're the CEO treated as such you know the CEO doesn't do what feels good all the time the CEO does what's right not withstanding her or his feelings and that's the secret of happiness is treating your life like a startup it's like it's living it's your philosophy of Health and Longevity is my philosophy of happiness because it's all one thing you know when you talk about better happier years or you know Health span I'm talking about happy span that's what it comes down to and you're just not going to do it by doing what feels good in the moment it's just not you're not going to discipline the will sufficiently to be able to make the decisions that lead you on this Divine path that can give you this thing that you actually seek is it perfect no but it can you learn and grow and have progress all throughout the journey absolutely absolutely hey everyone welcome to the drive podcast I'm your host Peter [Music] AA Arthur thanks for making the trip to Austin although maybe it's only partially to see me it's mostly to see you Peter I love seeing you it's it's the best and you know doing this in person is great last time we did it by Zoom this is better um congrats on the book this is your not your first second or third Rodeo but I'm sure each time it's a little little bit of a what's the world going to think oh yeah no no it's like having a child I mean well it's not I mean the child you live with for a super long time and they torture you decade after decade but a book is something where as you bring it into the world you know you go through you remember Elizabeth Kubler Ross the Swiss psychiatrist wrote that you know famous book about death and dying on death and dying and you have to go through five stages I mean most of that that that research has been questioned since then but it's pretty interesting you go through you know bargaining and denial and rage and all that's like as you you know when a book is coming out you're going through you're writing a book and your denial and bargaining and raise finally there's acceptance but you're still nervous for sure look there's a there's a lot of stuff I want to I want to kind of talk about with with you on this topic um but let's begin with a a question which is what's the difference between happiness which is what you write about right and happy feelings are they the same thing they're not and this is a really important misconception that all of my students and most of us actually have we live in the era of feelings if you'd talk to my parents or God knows my grandparents about feelings they would scratch their head you know what do you talking about I mean talking about your emotions all the time ephemera of feelings seems so counterproductive and in point of fact our grandparents were right about that feelings are not happiness anymore than the smell of the turkey is your Thanksgiving dinner feelings are evidence of happiness and that's incredibly good news I mean a lot of people think that happiness is a feeling it's quite incorrect there's a there many better technical definitions of happiness but they produce a lot of feelings they're associated with a lot of emotions which is lyic system activity a part of the brain a 40 million year evolutionary process that developed the lyic system to create emotions that's signals information is what it comes from and so if you mistake these feelings for the underlying phenomenon of Happiness you're going to be chasing it all over the place you'll be Chasing Ghosts now what I how I slept last night what I ate for breakfast if my spouse yelled at me this morning that's what's going to in my happiness and then you become you you're you're you wind up being managed as opposed to having any prayer of managing your own happiness and so that's the first thing to keep in mind it's not feelings it's hard to differentiate though yeah I mean it having read this stuff several times it's you have to remind yourself when you're in the throws of what I just refer to as negatively valanced feelings that this is not a statement of my you know overall state of Happiness yeah for sure and then what's the relationship between unhappiness and happiness are they polar images are they OPP yeah how do they coexist well for the longest time if you even go back to the ancient philosophers there was the idea that happiness and unhappiness exist on the Spectrum so unhappiness would be the lack of Happiness we know a lot better now given the you know the explosion of Neuroscience and the way that that emotions are produced that in fact you can be happy and unhappy or have happy and unhappy feelings in parallel uh so for example the average person spends about 40% of their time with with predominantly positive feelings and it it kind of sits in a in a neutral Idol of positivity most people do not everybody about 16 or 17% of the time the average person has predominantly negative feelings something is going on that's more intense and part of the reason is because negative emotions get your attention and they're supposed to Evolution favors negative emotions positive emotions nice to have negative emotions pay attention because that could cost you your life if you don't so what what are some of those if you think about this evolutionarily and and and not even going back to you know millions of years ago but just going back hundreds of thousands of years ago to the origin of our species as Homo sapiens what are what what do we think are some of the most powerful negative emotions that would drive action and why so there's basically six uh uh they're fundamental emotions they're basic emotions these are the building blocks of all emotional life that are produced by the lyic system of the brain four negative and two positive the four negative emotions are are sadness anger fear and disgust all four of those have a a very strong evolutionary basis fear and anger of course have to do with threat and they they they involve the amydala of the brain you know when a car is about to run you over and you're a pedestrian in a crosswalk that crosses your visual cortex and is recorded by the in the occipital lob of your brain as as an enormous Predator that signals to your to your amydala to send you know the signal through the hypothalamus of your brain to your pituitary glands which signals your adrenal glands above your kidneys to spit out stress hormones that happens in 74 milliseconds and by that time you're sweating your your heart is pumping you've jumped out of the way and you've flipped off the driver a combination of fear and anger in response to the enormous predator 3 seconds later your prefrontal cortex catches up and you say I shouldn't have flipped him off that's not my values or whatever it happens to be so that's your lyic system keeping you alive that's fear and anger then of course there's disgust which involves the insular cortex of the brain also part of the lyic system that's when you pull something out of the back of your fridge you forgot about a few weeks ago and you hold it and you're like that signals don't eat it and so anything that might carry a pathogen signals that basic negative emotion of disgust to you now it can be it can be misattributed to people and that's what demagogic politicians always do that's what the media does to us it tries to reprogram the insular cortex the insula of the limic system of the brain so that you when somebody disagrees with you politically you look at them like a cockroach that's what demagogic leaders and dictators have done for time of Memorial so that people will undertake you know barbaric acts against people in their own countries Lisa sore Etc and then last but not least is sadness sadness is also evolved sadness is the the is the what you feel largely in the dorsal anterior singulate cortex of the brain another part of the lyic system that has that's mental pain usually when you're either socially excluded or you're separated from a loved one now that's something that's evolved because you don't want to be you don't want to be uh separated from your tribe you don't want to walk the frozen tundra and die alone but what happens for example in grief grief is is unremediated sadness and the reason is because your brain is saying you know make this separation go away and you can't because other person is permanently gone as AKA dead or divorced or whatever it happens to be and so the grief is just this pulsating activity in the dorsal interior singular cortex of the brain saying I must be reunited with that person but I can't be and it takes a lot of time in in many cases for the dorsal anterior singular cortex to stop registering that that that sadness that pain so so the the the sadness we feel when a person dies which would be the ultimate form of Separation right is in a more extreme version of say a social isolation that you might feel like what a kid feels if they go to sit at the cafeteria table and all the other kids get up and walk away yeah and there's interesting studies that actually look at how the how that that that registers in the brain so um the brain is so Thrifty as as we all know that Neuroscience of this is super interesting so when you stub your toe there's actually two processes going there's sensory pain and affective pain sensory pain means you you can feel it in the nerve endings and it's you know it's very unpleasant affective pain is I hate this right and you feel both in physical pain the affective component involves the same part of the brain the dorsal anterior singular C when you have something that emotionally bothers you when you're being excluded we know that because there's these interesting studies that that people are similar in fmri machine they're looking at the part of the brain that's illuminated and they're they're being subjected to to being rejected by somebody else and they can see the part of the brain that's actually illuminated and isn't there a way to kind of and is there I guess there is a way to do it but is there is there a benefit to the reverse right so uh I I love going into cold plunges so I do it almost every day and it's insanely uncomfortable like there's not a day that I step into that 42 Dee ice bath with jets shooting water around me that I'm like this doesn't hurt right um but it doesn't come with the I hate this because I'm choosing to do it and I think there's value in it what you does the brain treat that differently does that how would we think of that as an emotion so what it is is a controlled aversive emotion under your own under your own power and so for example if you go to a haunted house on on Halloween and get scared scared you're controlling the fear if you're on a on a really radical amusement park ride it's the same sort of thing and what you're doing is you're subjecting yourself to a little bit of the stress hormones and the experience of the aversive emotion but since it's under your own control you actually use it in a way that that you enjoy and so people who do extreme sports this is the same kind of thing they do they like to feel a little bit in danger one of my kids is is somebody who likes this he really likes this a lot he likes to expose himself to things that actually hurt as long as he's under control he's any evidence that others species do this no a unique human phenomenon yeah for example there's also no evidence that you can train any other species to appreciate spicy food so you know to to to ingest capsacin no other species can be trained to like the feeling of spicy food that hurts your mouth only humans can do that and so this is a really higher order phenomenon where we have aversive emotions other animals have aversive emotions but we actually can dominate them through a process called met cognition where we experience the emotions not just in the lyic system of the brain but in the prefrontal cortex this is where it really gets interesting this is the human difference is where this comes around so the dog you know the dog wants the cookie eats the cookie right pure dogs are limbic creatures little kids are lyic right when your when your kids were little when my kids were little they'd be screaming over something there's a piece of rice on their chair whatever thing that bums them out you're like use your words what you're telling them to do is to experience the emotion in the prefrontal cortex of the brain where they can decide how to react they can think about what their own emotions are and when you're doing that then you can then you can get in the cold plunge and say it hurts so good right because that and that's what metac cognition brings to you it also you can say something like I'm really sad about this what am I learning that's how you can be a far more evolved human being by becoming more and more metacognitive using the techniques for doing so which is a lot about what I'm writing about these days okay so what about the two positive the two positive and and this is actually the pretty much all the neuroscientists agree on the four negative not all the neuroscientists agree on the on the two positive some people believe that surprise is a positive uh basic emotion uh and so there's a lot of different schools of this but but but two that pretty much everybody agrees on are joy and interest now this is useful to us to for us to think about Joy is obvious it's ordinarily when you're reunited with somebody that you love or something good happens pursuant to struggle so you know the joy you get after you work really hard for something and you get it that's that's a that's a basic positive emotion and that's a reward and evolved reward so that you go you work hard to find some berries on a bush and you get your caloric needs met for the day you want to make sure that you get an emotional reward for that and that's that's actually stimulating a part of the brain called a ventral statom which is your reward system and boom that feels good want to do it again do it again do it again interest is different interest is you get intense pleasure people people are listening to you know the the drive which I do why because I learned something from it why do I care I mean it's not like my it's going to dramatically change my salary trajectory or my professional success if I listen or don't listen to your show I want to learn because learning is intensely pleasurable that's really a a fascinating phenomenon because that's how people evolve and make progress and it makes sense that that would be an that would be an evolutionary phenomenon we would favor learning so that people can get ahead and feed themselves and find new sources of food and find new mates and all the things that they do and that's that's the way that that's adapted to the current environment as they listen to your show it seems to me that both of those could be found in creatures other than us certainly certainly Joy yeah uh I guess learning would be uh that'd be a testable hypothesis presumably with a maze or something like that whether the learning is is is positively veence right I mean every you you can teach a worm to learn I mean a worm will learn you can teach a worm things we just don't know whether it's a positiv valenced experience because they don't have the kind of brain that that will give you emotions as we understand them I wonder if uh optogenetics would provide insight into that one day when you could get sort of cellular level resolution of different parts of the brain I don't know if you're familiar with Carl des's work I know I've heard yeah for sure you've had him on right I have psychiatrist yeah yeah so that would be that would be an interesting line of inquiry I suppose yeah for sure and we know that that that for dogs for example have rudimentary emotions and they can they can mimic human emotions really really well but it's almost certainly lyic phenomena that look metacognitive more than anything else and one of the things that we do is we selectively breed dogs so that their emotional state more clearly mimics our own we like that they make better companions so you know they do something you're not supposed to do and they look guilty they don't feel guilty that's just a that's an almost certainly an illusion we have a new puppy and uh so so I can I can really relate to this yeah yeah and you want and so you and you know there are certain ways that they are you know quite similar to us for example they have there's a lot of you know research that suggests that they have um you know serotonin balance issues and if you give a dog a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor it will actually have some of the same effects it can have on people um you can give your dog proac and your dog will be less depressed or at least have fewer depressive symptoms in some cases so there are ways they are similar to us for sure so when you think about the sort of Arc of evolution um a purely a purely darwinian approach to our existence would be uh evolutionary Fitness where does happiness fit into that now that's a question that I've dealt with or thought about for a long long time and a lot of people sort of assume that Evolution would favor happiness and the reason is basically this um Evolution gives me a bunch of desires it gives me desires for calories and and and interesting things and and and sexual partners and all those things that Evolution wires into me and there are certain things that I want and one of the things that I want is those things but also I want to be a happy person so therefore Evolution must favor happiness that's wrong there's no indication that mother nature cares about your happiness she cares really about two things survival and Gene propagation right that's what mother nature mother nature wants you to survive and pass on your genes you being happy does that help that maybe maybe not maybe it doesn't I mean we find that dark Triad personalities malignant narcissists they tend to be way unhappier than normal and they're extremely sexually attractive to the opposite sex what's up with that you know people are finding terrible mates that make them miserable and they have extremely high levels of success in mating markets and that militates against the idea that happiness would be evolved and so I'm i' I've become persuaded that happiness is sort of the Divine path path versus the animal path and it's many times you need to stand up to Mother Nature's imperatives so that you can be happy and I I give a lot of examples in my own research of actually how that's the case let's talk about a bit of them because you know in part where I want to be able to to go with this is the heritability of Happiness right right so um which we know about yeah yeah so let let's let's talk about both of those things right what can we what can we learn about the genetics of Happiness um and talk maybe a little about your research as well yeah so the we know that that well happy that the the Baseline levels of mood balance which is not the same thing as happiness it's the the extent to which you feel positive and negative emotions um over the course of the day varies a lot between individuals there's sort of four four personality patterns with respect to positive and negative emotions over the course of your day and they have to do with the intensity and the frequency of negative and positive emotions there's four equal-sized groups there are people who are yeah let's talk about them and uh I haven't taken the test yet but I'm positive I know which one I am I know you are too so so there there are people who have extremely intense positive emotions and extremely intense negative emotions now it doesn't have to be extreme in my case it is it has to be above average to be in a quadrant called the mad scientist quadrant that's a quarter of the population they're above average positive intensity and mood and above average negative there are some and this is the one everybody wants to be is above average positive and below average negative in intensity these are the cheerleaders right there's a quarter of the population that's above average negative and below average positive those are the poets and that's a really interesting from a neuroscientific perspective these people that's a quarter of the population as well and then there's the low low people who are low affect people people who have low intensity positive low intensity negative it doesn't mean they're un not unhappy or happy it means the intensity of their feelings puts them in that bottom quadrant and those are the judges those are the unflappable people with enormously good judgment who don't get freaked out about anything each one of us and this is roughly a quarter yeah it's it it's actually by construction a quarter because it's above and below average across the population so it has to be in those quarters and I have a thing on my website where people can take the test you can just go take the test we don't keep the data just so that people can know who they are because you need to know who you are to manage yourself and a large part of who you are is genetic based on on what we know about the the basis of Happiness so when we talk about the heritability of happiness is it with respect to exactly that phenomenon as opposed to the definition of happiness that we'll get to that you write about not exactly because we haven't looked at identical twin studies with respect to those four quadrant the four quadrant testing is is the positive a negative aect series the panis series which is very well scientifically validated but we haven't actually compared the identical twin data on nature versus nurture and personality with those data what the identical twin studies do is they look at the extent to which your mood balance and your you know your self evaluated General happiness scores are related to your parents and grandparents and the heritability and so what happened in those studies is that they will they will take identical twins that were separated at Birth adopted to separate families this was not a social science experiment cooked up like guys like me at Harvard this is it it happened you know naturally and then they were reunited as adults in given personality tests and they find that between 44 and 52% of your Baseline self-evaluated well-being is is evolved you know your mother literally made you unhappy yeah so for context I mean for folks listening um you know obesity is probably 60% heritable uh you know height much higher much higher you know one of the highest probably 80 90% heritable um alcoholism 50% yeah autism probably 80% depression probably 60 70% so you know I guess my takeaway from that is your genes are not your destiny when it comes to happiness but they play a role they play a role and furthermore you need to know your genetic proclivity because then you can manage it you know I talk to a lot of people who um you know both parents drink too much and all four grandparents they're not doomed to alcoholism because once you know your tendency you manage your habits that's where life really gets interesting this is the reason we need to be we need to manage our health so that we know where we are what our Tendencies are you know there's some people who they have such incredibly good health they need to go to the gym half as much as I do a quarter as much as I do they can eat all kinds more junk than I can but once I know what my Tendencies are then I know where to compensate on the basis of my habits and that's where knowledge about your about what you've inherited is true power so I'm going to guess I'm a mad scientist I think you are as well correct I'm the maddest of the mad I'm I'm at the 95th percentile in positive the 90th percentile and negative okay I I can't wait to take the test to see where I am on percentile I wouldn't be surprised if I exceed you by the way I feel like I'm insane so and it's hard to be married to you right yeah my wife would say it's my wife reminds me as recently as yesterday that it's it's not a walk in the park being married to me what do we know about compatibility of those types in friendships and Partnerships yeah so this is the interesting thing one of the biggest mistakes that a lot of young people make today my average the average age of my students is 28 I teach graduate students and they've been told that to find a good romantic partnership you have to find maximum compatibility and that's wrong you need minimum a minimum Baseline of compatibility on top of which you need complimentarity so back in the day the Matchmaker in your village would find somebody they're the same religion you know they live in the same place they're basically they're both sort of a match on on on on physical attractiveness now let's find one completing the other this is one of the reasons that inter ints and extroverts make very good Marriage Partners typically two extroverts can be a real problem as dagger drawn they're competing with each other all the time two introverts there's not enough typically there's not enough conversation there's not enough human connection they'll be isolated too much they'll drift apart is what we find and when it comes to these these personality profiles with respect to affect you need to find somebody who completes you so but you have to appreciate differences so mad scientists do really well with judges because judges mellow them out can help them see two mad scientists it's like it's craziness it's it's a hurricane all the time because what'll happen is you'll get into a Vortex of getting more and more spun up and then going all the way back down again it can it can turn into you can you can be an accelerant to each other that can be really a big problem so look for somebody different than you now the problem with dating is that the platforms that people use I mean you don't meet somebody in a restaurant anymore you don't and and and young people aren't going to church very much much so where do you meet online you're like a stalker a serial killer if you're not meeting people online and they curate their profiles to find somebody who's like a sibling which is you know as my adult kids remind me not hot what's hot is complimentarity is the adventure of somebody different than you somebody that you're discovering something you love somebody because of their differences not despite their differences and you can find a lot of that and it's especially productive when we come to these person profiles what do you do with your with your knowledge base so as a mad scientist what what are the what are the what are the tools you use from that to manage yourself which is is kind of a recurring theme here I mean as we we keep coming back to it and I want to come back to it more formally to talk about metacognition but just you know briefly maybe what what are the you know most important things that you think about as a mad scientist to regulate your own emotions and to presumably keep the balance more on the positive versus negative veilance for the longest time uh I mean the reason I've done this research Peter is because I need it this is me search that's really what it is and I know you do too I mean you do this work because you want to live a long time and have a high quality life is what it comes down to it's not there's there's no in our community of health and wellness and fitness and Longevity and we're all doing the best we can for our own lives and then sharing with other people and this is absolutely the case with me if you're a mad scientist and you don't self-manage you're going be you're going to be all over the place you're going to be a big mess you're going to have difficult relationships and you're a lot of the time you're going to be miserable and it's avoidable it's it's actually unconstructive not to self-manage but self-management is not is not one weird trick as they like to say on the Internet it's not there's no hacks it's really all about mental habits it starts with the knowledge of the science it goes into specific practices and then a lot of it has to do with the with teaching other people as you know the the best way way for you to live better is to teach other people how to live better that's you know like if you want to be healthy start a health podcast or something and and make sure you've got good science on your side so when it comes to Mad Science that were the the mad scientist profile that's hard to manage otherwise the mistake that people get into is they try to stay on the positive side right I mean it's funny makes sense that's a logical thing to do bipol disorder you know um uh we find that the biggest problem that they have is staying on their meds because they like the men they don't like the depression but they can't time it and so you actually have to stabilize your mood so that you're not seeking the highs and trying to avoid the lows but that's that's the first reason the second and and by the way I'm not saying that every mad scientist has bipolar disorder I'm just saying that they tend to have Mania they tend to have a little bit of a hyper there's kind of a hyper manic as you know John Gardner talks about right the hyper manic Edge and that's what most mad scientists have a little bit of that's why they tend to make pretty good entrepreneurs like you um but they fall prey to a lot of you know mood issues that that are pretty avoidable the at the pro level of self-management in the mad scientist category is to not seek the highs because the highs don't help you that much what you actually need to be is a full person not writing the wave of your emotions you need to manage your emotions and never let them manage you and that gets into the whole topic you're talking about which is metacognition that is to experience your emotions in your prefrontal cortex as opposed to living according to your limic system never be managed by your lyic system your lyic system is nothing more than than the factory for your emotions that's really what it's doing and if you're basically taking raw Factory materials and trying to live according to them as opposed to assembling them making them into a set of experiences learning from them growing from them you're not fully Alive you're subject to something you're subject to a crazy machine all the time and so that's a lot of what I write about is actually how do you experience emotions more fully in the in the in the pre the cortex of your brain what are the techniques for doing so and when you're doing that what what is the repertoire of reactions and responses that you can bring to a highly volatile emotional state and are there any folks where uh for example uh the poet where you actually push them to be more in that lyic system or is it the same for everyone because the poet of course is the one Who's disproportionately down right these are the great artists yeah so poets um there's interesting research that parallel to this that doesn't doesn't use the same panis test but but it's it's pretty provocative nonetheless the people who have a tendency toward um depression um not bipolar but you know depression um they tend to be more creative they're ruminate they're ruminators you know and and they also tend to be kind of Romantics and you know this follows a pattern a pop sort of a a person uh you've met people like this that have this pattern of you know romantic creative depressive poetic people really interesting Neuroscience research suggests that there's a part of the brain that's especially uh active for these people it's called a ventrolateral prefrontal cortex and this is the part of the brain that you use a lot when you're ruminating on something which depressive people do is they think about the thing think about the thing think this is also what's going on when you're in love with somebody you can't stop thinking ruminating on another person this is the same thing that's going on when you're working on a business plan or writing a symphony or actually writing a poem so that's what they're really good at but also what they're really bad at they can't stop thinking about things which is good for them and really bad for them their strength is their weakness and and Peter this is the same thing on across all the profiles your strength is your weakness your weakness is your strength learn to manage it wire to the strengths remediate the weaknesses and complete yourself so I encourage everybody to be more metacognitive everybody so that you're a poet you can be really really poetic but it won't ruin your life do we think that and this is tangential and maybe not relevant but do we think that the most extreme form of greatness that we've seen like the the most genius type of phenomenon that we've seen as a species always come from Extremes in these categories it's almost certainly not true it's actually not certainly not it's sort of a character yeah for sure and part of the reason is because those are the spectacular cases you see somebody who's unbelievably good at something and who's weird you focus on their weirdness there tons of people who are extremely accomplished and not that weird you don't have to be weird I mean it's the kind of thing where it's like yeah I guess to be a great entrepreneur you have to be the kind of person that Walter Isaacson wants to write a biography about if Walter isacson is writing your biography get help but you know there are tons of people very successful entrepreneurs artists um athletes just people who Excel who have decent relationships and who are able to self-moderate and who don't abuse drugs and alcohol now a lot of them do and part of the reason is because they have certain personality characteristics that go relatively unremediated and we have people who are highly limic they tend to be successful in spite of their messy mental hygiene not because of their messy mental hygiene yeah you know it's even better if you've got some of these characteristics and you're really creative and really hardworking and really driven and you manage it that's even better okay so let's now talk about these three components of Happiness yeah you wrote about this in uh uh strength to strength but but let's go over them again and talk about what what each one means so happiness is not a feeling we've established that y feelings are evidence of Happiness when we look at the happiest people and the way that we do that typically there's some indirect ways to figure that out you know I could ask your wife um how happy is Peter and you're not there and I would get some really probably very accurate information I could there's some tests that're not very good but I could ask you a series of targeted questions when you're under fmri but the really the best way to do it the most cost effective and efficient way to do that is for you to anonymously answer a bunch of questions that are sort of like this imagine all the people you know were the happiest person you've ever met I mean really happy is 10 and and the most miserable SOB you've ever met is one all things considered at this period of your life not this moment this period of your life all things considered thinking of those people what's your number that turns out to be incredibly accurate you got to have a large sample because some people answer it in a wonky way and it has to be anonymous because you if you answer this in front of Jill you'll probably lie right because people that they don't tell the truth in front of their spouses necessarily in front of their friends because they give answers that people want to hear but if it's really honest and you're by yourself I'll get EXT extremely um effective data from that note with based on these data you find that the happiest people they have three macronutrients in balance in abundance by the way before we get to those are those responses normally distributed they are normally distributed but the mean is not five oh what the mean is is more like seven and a half so this scale okay and the reason the reason for the skew is because you know you feel like if it were it would be better if it were a five right because then we would if it were a five it would be saying that a three is you know within one Center deviation there's nothing wrong with being a three nobody wants to be a three numbers have numbers have cultural veillance yeah right they they really do and so people will kind of uh yeah it's like you know being normal happy that's like seven eight right and what you find is that most people over the course of their adult lives early 20s to early 50s they they they're between seven and nine most people are from 7 to n most of the people that I talk to that I work with especially the executives that I work with one-on-one who are threes they're depressed they're actually suffering from from Clinical issues they're behind the line of scrimmage there's nobody who's like yeah I'm pretty normal I'm like you know probably the 40th percentile that probably makes me a three and a half 40th percentile is probably a five is the way that that works and they they they would like to be better and they feel like they're not as good as they should be despite the fact that in the in the scale that looks like the middle of the scale it's not the middle of the scale okay got it so what do you find that the people who are in the upper end the eights and nines and like my wife n and a half um I don't get it but there you go um they tend to they tend to be really healthy and healthy means they have balance and abundance across what I often refer to as the happiness as macronutrients and I do this you know it's very easy and you know your audience because everybody knows it's protein carbohydrates and fat and the best diets are those that have all of them in balance and abundance and the and you have to get your your Macros and you're not going to have you know 100% protein that sounds good for somebody for a week until they become miserable and and so the three macronutrients are enjoyment satisfaction and meaning those are the three macronutrients of happiness and and none of those by the way is straightforward any more than protein carbohydrates and fat is straightforward you know it's like I I'll be fine I'm going to eat a chicken and a stick of butter and a and a ho hoo and then I'm going to eat that exclusively for the rest of my life and it meets my macros so I should be fine no no no it doesn't work that way you actually have to understand that understand what each one of those things are enjoyment satisfaction and meaning and you have to have strategies to understand why they're so hard to attain and what you need to do exercises to make sure that you can be better and more skillful at attaining each one so let's start with enjoyment then yeah so enjoyment seems sort of straightforward I want to enjoy my life get a lot of pleasure that's wrong pleasure is lyic enjoyment is is part of the is involves the prefrontal cortex enjoyment is a much more complex uh phenomenon than pleasure pleasure is a signal from the limic system that says this thing that you're doing will help you survive usually through caloric needs or pass on your genes through something like sex so that's what pleasure is really all about it's nothing more it's you know it's it's just like any any positive emotion it sends a signal saying do more of this that's not the secret of Happiness that's incredibly evanescent it's extremely temporary and if you pursue pleasure what you'll be doing is you'll be engaging systems in your brain the dopamine system for example which is the anticipation of reward the reward being pleasure you'll hit the lever get the cookie hit the lever get the cookie it will never last and you'll become an addict pleasure seeking I mean the hippie phenomenon the hippie motto of it feels good do it is life ruining advice it's just the dumbest thing ever if it feels good do it you'd never go into the ice bath I mean you wouldn't stay married if it feels good do it all the time it's just terrible advice so what do you need for enjoyment the answer is the source of pleasure adding two things people and memory that's where you're you're engaging your prefrontal cortex so you know anheiser Bush never runs ads for beer of a dude alone in his apartment pounding a 12pack you never do that right A lot of people use the product that way why don't they show that because that's the pursuit of pleasure and that's dangerous that's bad for you use of methamphetamine is bad for you what we're incredibly good at using science today is to take things that give a little bit of pleasure evolutionarily and supercharge them so you know the natural endorphins that you get that will block pain under normal circumstances we can supercharge them in a lab and make fentel and 100,000 people died last year right and that that pursuit of that pleasure is utterly ruinous we can take some something that is you know we look at a random series of events and when it's random we get payoffs a little bit we'll seek those events and that gives us a little bit of pleasure we turn that into slot machines in Vegas and then you're sitting there at 400 a.m. by yourself that's that's really really bad for you that's the problem seeking pleasure alone not making memory will make you miserable if usually something gives you pleasure and you're doing it alone you're usually doing it wrong you know pornography is a problem it's a it it it uses the sexual function in a way that leads to addiction and huge problems in people's lives it's contraindicated it's not good for especially young people to use that but that's the same thing as fentanyl in its way okay so what do you do you make sure you're with people especially your the people you love and you're making memories that's why anheiser Bush's ads have two dudes or 10 dudes or a family cracking open a bud and drinking it and laughing cuz in the ad they want you to associate the beer with happiness which is part which is enjoyment is the central Factor not the pleasure that the little bit of alcohol will bring you and that's what we need to do that's the strategy it's very interesting we we we um we're working on a um and maybe by the time this podcasts come out it'll it'll be out but we're we're working on a a a very very in-depth newsletter on the basically the conflicting data on alcohol right specifically around wine right so why is that at a biochemical level uh and and certainly looking at the mandelian randomizations alcohol is toxic at any dose and it's a monotonically increasing function so there's no amount of alcohol that is healthy um yet the epidemiology is pretty significantly in favor of modest drinking over abstinence and once you even strip out all of the obvious confounders that would lead to that you're left with the phenomenon you describe which is it's if you dig into the data really deeply it's the Mediterranean drinking pattern that seems to be associated with some benefits at low doses there people in memory right and it's it's it's the food and the wine and the people combo that seems to be beneficial not the vodka and Red Bull in the dorm issue exactly right and and those are even though it's the same molecule right it's a very different experience yeah processed sugar is the same thing you find the people who eat candy one to three times a month on average live a year longer than people who abstain completely from Candy cand is terrible for you it rots your teeth it leads to metabolic syndrome eating candy one to three times a day is very different than eating it one to three times a month and and so the whole point is you do something that you enjoy you that means that you're G something that gives you a little bit of pleasure which you know something really sweet does because of our Evolution something that gives you a little bit of euphoria like alcohol makes you feel good but you do it with people and you make a memory in which case you're almost certainly doing unless all your friends are drunks which is bad you can get into an unhealthy Community um that you're doing it in a in a pretty moderate way and then it's life enhancing despite the fact that it's a poison and you can use a little bit of poison in a productive way but it has to be about enjoyment never about pleasure per se such an interesting distinction totally and it took man I'm 59 it took me this long you know there's if I this is information that I wish I had uh been able to use when I was in my 20s it would have saved me a lot of grief it really would have because all the time that I wasted you know with drinking with just unproductive activity and you know the way that I missed opportunities to love and be loved and to have a happier life um this is this is really really news that people can use and this is probably one of the stronger arguments against Evolution being in favor of Happiness it's clear that evolution is in favor of pleasure pleasure might be one of the most potent fuels that drives the engine of evolution at least when it comes to reproduction um but certainly other other aspects of evolution as well you're exactly right but but enjoyment is a is a is a is a higher order process um and I guess would not necessarily have the same evolutionary Drive although I suppose that being with people obviously also has a strong evolutionary um bent if for no other reason then we we couldn't have survived alone you know even even through the industrialization of Agriculture no absolutely right the the problem is that the maladaptation that comes with technological progress is that you can strip off the component of enjoyment that is pleasure and then supercharge it in the lab that's the problem you know the internet makes it possible to do that chemistry makes it easy to do that there are all kinds of ways that we strip out that component of enjoyment so it's no longer part of the the the evolved societies that would have been more traditional so do you think that that's a decent litmus test Arthur where the person who's listening to this who loves to smoke says you know guys I enjoy smoking like I really enjoy it right and you would push back on that and say no you find pleasure in smoking and you find just as much pleasure if you're sitting by yourself doing it puffing away getting the physiologic high of the tobacco but you're not forming new memories you're not you're not sharing in this with someone else that's right my wife smokes two times a year when she's with her sister in Barcelona she loves her sister her sister smokes only after meals only with people um maybe once or twice a day which is by the way too much I mean there's conflicting evidence on that but it it's suffice it to say that you know any amount of tobacco and any amount of smoke in your lung is not good for you my wife smokes twice a year because she's with her sister my wife's not a smoker I used to be a smoker I don't touch it I don't dare touch it not even twice a year is the way that that works out because for me I'm like it's like I got the monkey on my back immediately and and and I don't want that thing to come back because I so thoroughly stripped the the pleasure from Tobacco off from the enjoyment of communally smoking that I can't handle it anymore part of that is my mad scientist part of that is get back to what we talked about earlier in the conversation okay so what is satisfaction then again I mean people are like wow that was enjoyment is complicated and it's all complicated that's why that you need to that's why the knowledge is so critically important I mean that's why happiness is a serious business satisfaction is the joy after struggle that's what satisfaction really is you struggled for it you worked for it you got it it feels awesome um with my students cheat to get an A on my exam there's no satisfaction but if they worked really hard you might say chump stupid you know Brooks probably gave the same exam last year go find last year's exam but if they actually struggle for it and they study for it they get a ton of satisfaction when they get an A because that's how we're wired we're wired to after you struggle for something a lot that again this comes back to the evolutionary psychology even biology is that you go looking hard for something and you get it you want that to be reinforced as a good thing to do that's why Mother Nature really wants that to happen and that's why we have that evolutionary imperative okay so that's great but here's this little twist that mother nature throws into it if you knew that that satisfaction that Joy wasn't going to last you'd think twice before going through the struggle you'd you'd think twice about the cost benefit analysis like if you said yourself you know like that watch it's nice watch that's a like I don't know what kind of watch that is that's a it's a sea master or something right GMT it's a GMT um it's a nice watch but if you'd thought to yourself like this is a pretty expensive watch I'm going to really really like it for a week you think you'd think twice about it trivial example but there's all kinds of things that we do you know that relationship that Conquest that business plan that you know fill in the blanks I'm not going to enjoy it for very long um so mother nature Shields you from that truth now you have to you have to have it wear off quickly because you wouldn't be ready for the next thing if you're a caveman and you're looking for calories and you find berries on a bush after a long hike that's incredibly satisfying that gives you a bunch of Joy but if you sat there enjoying them for the next week you'd be a saber-tooth Tiger's dinner you have to be ready for the next set of emotions that's homeostasis you go back to the Baseline physical Baseline emotional Baseline you always go back but if you realize that you won't make the effort in the first place so mother nature in tantalizes you with a joy that's going to come after the struggle and and and then and then fails the knowledge that you're not going to enjoy it forever so people actually think if I move to California I'm going to be happy for the rest of my life because the sunshine I got the data it's a few months the taxes are forever I mean I see this constantly with people you know they think that my students the reason they think they're going to be happier at 38th and 28 which is generally not true generally your happiness is lower at 38 than it is at 28 and lower at 48 than it was at 38 the reason they don't know that they get it exactly up upside down is cuz they think that they're going to get things they want and they're going to be satisfied forever with them when they get married they'll be permanently happier have you been able to quantify the length of satisfaction the duration of satisfaction when they get admitted to Harvard Business School there are some studies on that and it shows that the satisfaction that they get is usually a few weeks so before they even matriculate oh yeah for sure so there's interesting studies that ask this question when you get a bonus at your job when do you enjoy it the most when it hits your check or the day you find out it's a question that answers itself you go home because your boss says D you're you're the Lynch pin in this company what a great job you're doing 40% bonus boom dollars you don't have the dollars but you go home and open a bottle of champagne with your spouse ah I earned it it's great three weeks later it shows up in your check and you're like huh yeah yeah good good I can do something with that but that's not where the real satisfaction happens because the homeo stasis now the fact that that surprises you leads to deeply suboptimal Behavior if you keep getting surprised again and again and again and again the satisfaction doesn't last the natural conclusion is that you just needed more it just wasn't enough so go get more and more and more and this leads to this Chase what we call it in my business the hedonic treadmill that a lot of people know that expression at this point honic means feelings the treadmill is you're you're running running running and running to keep maintain and to get more of certain feelings and you never figure out that you're on a treadmill and not making progress the homeostasis is that you you catch up immediately with you get ahead by two inches and immediately starts running you backwards and unless you keep running running running running then you're going to be going the wrong direction and that's terrifying and terrible so people not figuring out Mother Nature's cruel little hoax they wind up on the honic treadmill of more more more more more have more but why are we fooled by this I mean because Mother Nature wires it into fool is it wants us to be fooled I mean we're born to be fools when it comes to this sa this is actually one of the macronutrients where it seems that evolution is fully engaged yeah unlike I mean clearly Evolution favors um pleasure over enjoyment but evolution is all for satisfaction all for satisfaction and and all for fooling you into believing this is the the one that's going to be the Eternal satisfaction that is the animal path absolutely but there is there is a glitch in that Matrix that we can exploit if we're willing to stand up to our natural impulses so this is and and this is where every philosophical and religious tradition comes in because most I mean life is suffering according to the first Noble Truth of Buddhism right that doesn't mean life has to be suffering it means life is naturally suffering what the Buddhists are saying is that left to your devices you're going to suffer and and the word for suffering in that first Noble Truth of Buddhism is not it's it's mistranslated the word in Sanskrit is dukka and Dua actually means dissatisfaction the first noral truth of Buddhism is that life is is unsatisfying because of the honic treadmill because of homeostasis and how do you get beyond that well you recognize that the course of that that the that the reason for your dissatisfaction is the second truth is is is attachment and the third inable truth is that you need to detach and the the fourth Noble Truth is the eight-fold path which is entirely contrary to Nature the eight-fold path is not natural that's why it's hard so here's the way to think about it just in sort of Drive listener terms right Mother Nature says satisfaction will come and stay if you have more more more what's your life strategy more more money more power more pleasure more admiration more Instagram followers more more huh actually the right model a model that better satisfies that that gives you more satisfaction that lasts is Hales divided by wants all the things you have divided by all the things that you want the way to and this is basically kind of what the eight-fold path of Buddhism comes into this is a this is a baby version so I apologize to the Buddhists who listening to us is that you don't need to have more strategy you need to want less strategy the eight-fold path is a want less strategy we need to want less we need to manage our wants in this life and in so doing then holy mackerel then satisfaction hangs around man that's what the dolly Lama always says you shouldn't you shouldn't have what you want you should want what you have really which is another way of talking about this and there's all kinds of techniques there's visualizations one of the things that I like for doing this is that because I have an arts background my mother was a painter and I was a musician for many years professionally and um we have a tendency to think of our lives that we're building especially the hustlers the go-getters the Strivers who listen to you that your life is like a beautiful painting and you're the artist with a brush and that canvas is your life and you're putting the brush Strokes on the canvas the problem is by the time you're 45 and you're a striver that canvas is full man it's dense I defy people that add another brush stroke you need to use the metaphor that your life is actually a sculpture that you're chipping away that you are in there but there there's too much stuff stuck to you you need less less less want less strip away the detritus get out the chisle so the way that's the exercise I give my St because this has to be practical here's the exercise I give my students they will hear that the way for them to be successful is through the visualization and manifestation that comes from having a bucket list right the bucket list on your birthday you list all your Ambitions and all your desires and your cravings and you imagine yourself getting all these things visualize yourself getting these things that's a good way to blow up the denominator of your satisfaction equation and feel like a complete loser you need a reverse bucket list where you make a list of all of your worldly attachments and you cross them out not that you won't get them but that now they're not lyic now they're in your prefrontal cortex now that you can actually manage those Cravings in an entirely different way and this absolutely works I do this on my birthday every year now so give me an example so this last year on my birthday I thought thought what are my attachments that are holding me down and I realized it was a lot of my political opinions tick not Han the Vietnamese Buddhist monk who started the a plum village community of Western Buddhists um he said that the greatest sour source of misery and attachment for most people is their opinions you know we're so attached to our opinions it's like we're hoarding our gold and if you get between me and my opinions your stupid and evil I'm going to cancel you or you know whatever dumb thing that we're doing today and I thought to myself my political opinions are too strong I'm too attached to them so I wrote down about half of my political opinions I still have them but I crossed them out which which negated their importance their moral importance in my life I mean I need fewer opinions because I need more friends it's really what it comes down to and I'm way lighter I'm way Freer tell me is the act of acknowledging the opinions the exercise Crossing them out the exercise and how does that translate to you act I mean we sit here today on the heels of a tragedy that took place very recently a terrorist attack and it's a very dividing um uh a very dividing event politically um it's hard for me to say even though I'm not a political person I don't talk about my political views publicly I have very strong views and as a result of that I'm prone to be very judgmental of those who hold opposing views uh especially the stronger my view so there's certain views where I'm like all about nuance and then there's some views where I'm like nope this is black and white um so how would that exercise help in this situation so this gets back to metacognition metac cognition once again is not being limic but rather experiencing emotions and emotional phenomena in the prefrontal cortex of the brain where you can make conscious executive decisions is letting your CEO do it as opposed to you know the kids do it um and so what you do is when you have a an opinion a strong volatile political opinion which is not just terrorism is bad okay it's that anybody who disagrees with me about this particular situation is a that's what goes on the list and what you do is you cross that out not because you don't think that but because you're willing to consider that you're willing to let your CEO think about that as opposed to sort of axiomatically assuming that that it's no longer a limbic opinion where you see something on TV and you get a sense of revulsion where your insular cortex engages because you have a sense of disgust on the contrary and so do you think that that's a better strategy than my strategy which is to tune all of that out right is to basically say I'm not going I'm going to do something that feels cowardly right which is I'm not going to engage in any of this by reading any of it by watching any of it by participating I'm going to focus on what I do best yeah I'm going to do my job and not become a spectator well there's a lot to that because you should specialize on what you can do well you should focus on the things you can control as opposed to the things that you can't so these are two different phenomena the fact although you could argue my strategy is a dangerous strategy from a societal perspective because then if everybody took that approach nobody would do anything absolutely you wouldn't it wouldn't you wouldn't have any Collective action everybody would be ignorant for sure but what you're trying to do is protect yourself from your limic system right when you're when you block out information and you know this is basically I don't like the news so I'm going to cancel the newspaper is you know I'm no longer going to get the news from the newspaper you shouldn't be afraid of information and that's all your limic system is delivering to is information you should learn how to use information so ideally you don't have to do that ideally what you do is you metacognitively you process the information make decisions on how to use the information sometimes that's not efficient sometimes that's suboptimal because you don't have time to do it now I have found that I use a combination of the of the of the two techniques um I was I was a president of a think tank in Washington DC for almost 11 years and so I was man I was sadly in the no I was so aware all the time of everything everybody was saying and doing and I knew it was going on and I knew if there was going to be a budget resolution I could tell you what was going on with a farm bill the whole deal now I know a lot less and the reason is I I ration my access to news I read a little I use I read a total of 15 to 30 minutes of news per day all at once because I I need more bandwidth for my work right and I don't want it to intrude on my work but I'm not afraid of my lyic system I'm not afraid of what this information will actually do to me because I'm working metacognitively to make sure that when I do have this information I can process it in in executive ways as opposed to childlike ways it's no longer ghosts in the machine then I have a repertoire of ways I can deal with it I can I can choose my reactions to my emotions I can use substitute emotions I can act as if I had different emotions and I can disregard my emotions but all of that is on purpose and those are the fruits of metacognition all right so the third macronutrient is sense of purpose right um meaning yeah meaning and and obviously it extends far beyond quote unquote work yeah for sure so meaning is the most important because you it's the protein you know you you'll die right you can vary carbs and fat a lot you can't mess with protein too much you can't mess with protein it's a basic building block and you're in big big trouble when you become protein deprived because there's no other way to get it it's not like your carbs are going to transform into proteins right so meaning the first and and everybody knows when they don't have a sense of meaning because their life is empty they're the most miserable when they don't have a sense of meaning but nobody knows exactly what it is it's like I need this thing but I don't know what it is so philosophers and psychologists by the way Define meaning is actually a combination of three things coherence purpose and significance coherence is things happen for a reason that's the first that's the first part of meaning I believe that things happen for a particular reason that doesn't mean my way is the right way and it might be Randomness my father was a PhD biostatistician also very religious and he used to say that the greatest miracle in the world was Randomness that God built the universe with Randomness and and and regular distributions of events such an extraordinary he thought that Miracles were events on Extreme tale events in in random distributions and God loved Randomness he had in other words this is there's lots and lots of different ways to understand the coherence part why things are coherent right the second is is purpose which is is Direction your life has Direction I have in there's there's a word in in s you're not a sailor are you I can't I can't there's a word called the rum line rhu M line it's actually a much more common word in Spanish roombo and it's actually part of common Paran roombo means means the the end point toward which your your Voyage is tending yep you're not going to get there and you're going to vary from it but you have to have you have to have something you're nating something right navigationally and the last is is significance it would matter if I weren't alive it would matter if I'm not here so these are the component parts now these are worth thinking about in detail in our lives but here's the way I have a kind of a diagnostic test to see if somebody has a meaning crisis and the reason this is useful it's a two- question exam and and if somebody doesn't have real answers everybody's got PC answers you know answers you give your mom or whatever but if you don't have real answers to this the good news is these are the two questions to go looking for answers to in your life this is your vision quest is to find the answers to these by reading by experiencing by meditating by spending time by yourself by praying by asking people's advice by therapy I don't know do your thing right question number one is why are you alive why are you alive you got to have an answer it's not my answer your answer a real answer question number two is for what are you willing to die today now the wrong you flunk this quiz by saying I don't know that's how you flunk the quiz but then the adventure actually begins after you flunk the quiz CU like I'm going to figure that out I'm going to go find those answers I'm going to read I'm going to consider I'm going to do all the things that you do metacognitively to find the answerers to these questions but let's think about that for a second there are probably a lot of people who cannot answer one who can answer two or who can answer one but can't answer two I'm alive because you know some biological process etc etc but number two is I don't know what I'm willing to die for okay so I want to Let's clarify that right so are you asking one through the lens of biology it depends on how you answer it and what actually gives you meaning so the F the way to answer the first question why are you alive is either a spiritual person or a religious person would have a Divine response to the first question an atheist would respond to the first question in terms of biology and they would really understand and that would give them and that biological answer could give you a tremendous sense of meaning and a sense of place in the universe although it's interesting because as someone who leans far more towards the agnostic atheist side I spend most of my time coming to grips with mortality which is a very difficult thing to come to grips with which is the second question right um but I come to grips with that by a addressing your third Point around sense of purpose which is my insignificance so in other words it's only through accepting my complete and utter insignificance that I can have some semblance of peace with my finitude and my eventual and relatively quick demise yeah this is one of the reasons that Transcendence is uh is a basic element in is one of the happiness practices you know the practice of of Transcendence whether it's secular or religious Transcendence it's really important because it makes you small it makes you small you stand in awe of a sunset you stand in awe of seeing somebody committing an unbelievably selfless act it makes you actually feel smaller which gives you peace through a sense of perspective that's a very common phenomenon um one of the people who works in my area daker Kelner at at UC Berkeley he has a book called A A we that talks about the neuro cognitive processes involved when you're experiencing a and why it gives you such deep peace and it's really all about what you're talking about you got to get small like Steve Martin used to say in the 70s get small and and if you can find ways to get small you're going to be a lot better off for sure is the whole thing but how do we reconcile that with the need to have significance through your sense of purpose well the key is at the same time you you realize that you matter but at the same time it's okay that the the will be just fine if you die and those are they seem like conflicting phenomena but but they're actually I think that they're weirdly compatible I think that they're weirdly compatible these these ideas this balance between the two it matters that I exist here and things will be just fine if I don't you think about this with your you know when you a lot of people when you're when you get married for the first time you say you know you want you love me and if I'm gone you'll be okay it's this sense of peace with the with what it's that balance between those two things turns out to be the trick I've never been able to find that yeah well I it's I guess practice makes perfect I haven't found it either for sure but the way to think about this and the way to find the answers of the questions is really interesting and I've I've worked on this with my kids um my adult I have adult kids my kids are a little older than yours um and my 23-year-old you know he's a I mean he's a he's a piece of work man um his name is Carl and uh he likes you and he's a I mean he's Human Performance Machine he's a scout sniper in the US Marine Corps and he's two 204 4% body fat 6'5 he's all about it um he needs the information that you're providing obviously so you know he he didn't have the answers to that because many adolescence don't and young adults don't but he found the answers to that as he did something that was truly difficult you know going through Marine basic training and then the you know infantry training Battalion and then doing the indoc for the as he's an operator and the Marines now in the scout sniper platoon stuff's no joke it's hard and you ask him the question now why are you alive who would simply say because God made me to serve and that that is both the how and the why of the first question and the second question for what are you willing to die very simple sure for my faith for my family for my fellow Marines and for the United States of America and for our allies you know this is this is these are very solid answers these are not the right answers for somebody listening or you or me necessarily but they are answers that he actually believes and that's what gives him his sense of meaning is the content of those two answers and finding what we really do think about those things what really is persuasive to us is a journey really a a philosophical and and for some a theological Journey really worth taking it's definitely something I've spent much more time thinking about in the past year than than certainly any time before people typically do around age 50 yeah people typically do you know the um our the in ancient vadic physics there's a uh the theory of the four quarters of life you know we think about you know adult and kid and adult and all that and you know weal last time we talked we were talking about from strength to strength which was my last book and but uh which was a lot of about that but the according to this ancient Hindu thinking you've got baharia which is your student phase the first quarter of your life the second quarter of your life is called gasta which is the householder phase where you're you know you're hustling and you're starting your family and your work the third quarter going in from the second to the third is the second adolescence into something called Vana prosta which means these two Sanskrit words to retire into the forest and it's supposed to happen around age 50 and what happens is that that certain things fade and Other Things become more Salient to you um more transcendental things start to become more important to you and part of this has to do with the change in your brain change in your strengths the change in your crystallized intelligence these are real phenomena that neuroscientists have identified and social psychologists as well but as a spiritual matter it means what is my retirement into the forest what does that actually mean it means I need to certain things more important to me than they used to be these are important questions not because I'm going to die but because I just want to know you know what does this actually mean about and a lot of people wind up coming back to the faith of their youth when this happens a lot of people will develop a meditation practice some people will find that they will get deeply deeply into fitness and ways they hadn't before and doing things that are super hard for them that challenge them as human beings some people will change careers um due do something that they've always wanted to do but something that has more artistic significance than it more creative significance than it had before but all of that is this Vana prosta and the whole point of that is to get to the fourth quarter which is called Sasa and that's Enlightenment to sit at the feet of the guru and to and the bask and the glow of the master is kind of how the Hindus will talk about it but you got to do the work to get there you got to ask the questions and be on the quest and that's your third quarter around age 50 and do you think that each of these quarters which I recall from our first discussion don't necessarily reflect equal chunks of time on the calendar um but do you think that they require an emphasis on different elements of those three macronutrients of happiness I do I do and and and again this is um this is mixing you know Neuroscience plus social psychology plus viic wisdom and this is like where no man has gone before um but I do and I've actually asked this to some teachers that I haven't every I go to India every year and I study with you know various gurus and and spiritual teachers which is outside my tradition I'm a Catholic but it makes me better Catholic and it makes me a better social scientist too quite frankly and I have a teacher in picad which is in Southern India a guy named notra venkataraman a taml guy and I was asking him about you know precisely these sets of questions and he said that people pass through these phases you know depending on how Adroid they are spiritually at different times and different periods of time but you have to do all the learning from each one you need to be a student you need to develop your life then you need to retire into the forest and contemplate these questions such that you can get to the the ultimate destination which is this this Period of Enlightenment in your life and and in so doing you need to develop these different parts of your life you you can't do this without the love that you share with other people which is inherently enjoyable you can't do this without achieving certain things and understanding that your life requires a certain amount of satisfaction and that has achievement that has earned success involved in it and of course you can't do that without understanding what meaning is to you and what the meaning of your life really is so we've talked about medic cognition let's let's let's talk about it a bit more you've already very quickly rattled off the components of it but the techniques yeah but but let's go into it in a bit more detail um there were basically four techniques Associated is that yeah more or less I mean you can break them up into sub techniques etc etc and this is this is an artificial distinction between them but again what you're trying to do is get Space you know when your grandmother said Peter when you're angry count to 10 everybody's grandmother did that the research suggests by the way count to 30 when you're angry and while you're counting to 30 Envision the consequences of what you're what you're thinking of doing and then you will be fully metacognitive then you will be processing the information in the prefrontal cext of your brain so that was really good advice from Grandma and we can put a finer point on it other ways to do that that what what you want is space between your lyic system and your primtive cortex you want space so that your executive brain can experience emotions and deal with them appropriately if you don't give it space you'll be reactive and your lyic system will manage you that's the problem that a lot of people have in life it's like I'm sad I cry I'm angry I yell I'm happy I laugh you know whatever it happens to be but that's no way to live because then the then the kids are in charge of the of the family budget big problem big problem problem depends on the kids obviously but that can be a big problem and that that kind of spontaneity comes at enormous cost how do you put space in it therapy is a good way for some people it's not my thing some people do some people get a lot of they learn about their emotions this way cognitive behavioral therapy CBT is super useful for a lot of people meditation can do that because most meditation techniques that will allow you to they'll require that you analyze yourself at a certain remove Peter's feeling sad right now how interesting that Peter is feeling sad it's just information it's just information just analyzing information being a scientist about yourself prayer is really good for this why because you're bringing in a higher power to help you manage these things and in so doing you're experiencing them very consciously in in the executive the bumper of tissue right behind your forehead where that's where you want that's where you want it to reside that's where you can make some people do this through intensive exposure to Nature you know walking Before Dawn for an hour without devices some people will do this indirectly by I don't know studying the fugues of Johan Sebastian Bach and learning how to analyze them or whatever it happens to be one way or the other you don't want the lmic system in charge and then when you get this distance then when you really have it in the executive when you when when but so just to be clear you feel that this can be done without a mindfulness based meditation practice which is clearly the the the the potent exercise that one uses to distance self from thought exactly right well for example one of the most effective ways to do this that has nothing to do with meditation at all is journaling journaling if you write down your for example a lot of people suffer from anxiety a lot of people listening to us suffer from anxiety anxiety is basically unfocused fear that's what it is it's a bombardment of stress hormones having to do with the fact that there's a sense of pervasive sense of Doom that's undefined undefined Fe unfocused fear that's what anxiety generalized anxiety is really all about and so you can do a lot of things you can take you know Pharmaceuticals to to you can take benzo aspenes that will you know mute the the stress response etc etc but the whole point of metacognition and journaling when it comes to anxiety is that you force your prefrontal cortex to take over by writing down the five things you're most afraid of right now it's like God I'm freaking out man I am freaking out my heart is fluttering I've got the butterflies in my stomach I can't sleep or I wake up too early I don't know what's going on it's like I'm feeling like I'm under threat okay get out the patent paper number one what am I actually afraid of number two what am I actually afraid of put it and what you've done is you've you've taken the sense of anxiety it's not perfect but this as a strategic technique will work miracles in your life if you consistently Journal about your emotions and then by the way throw it away afterward because you want everybody in your family to find it um because who knows maybe you're thinking forbidden thoughts or have forbidden fears that you can you absolutely determine the things and that's anxiety is a maladapted kind of fear you know I'm doomed is not the way cavemen were supposed to feel fear fear is so that you can run away from a tiger fear is supposed to be extremely episodic you know our forbears in the place to scene they were mostly hanging out all day and then occasionally something bad would happen that to run really fast and climb a tree that's what fear is for it seems like it was 99% boredom 1% extreme Panic yeah or 99% Fellowship 99% hanging out 99% with your friends 99% with your tribe making jokes and you know popping a grub in your mouth from time to time that's really what it was it was you know some anthropologists think that the quality of life is dramatically fallen in the modern era uh in what we have today but it's also one of the components of Modern Life is this General anxiety where we're processing outside stimuli as minor threats we get a little drip of cortisol into our system constantly constantly constantly and it's really unfocused so focus it focus it write down the five things and they suddenly will feel a lot less threatening and they'll be more bounded and they'll be determined in a way where you can actually deal with them and and and start getting some solutions as opposed to just feeling afraid that's what that's really so that's an example of non-m mindful meditation medic cognition as simple as a pad and paper what about this idea of journaling positive experiences as kind of a database I like doing that but what I like doing better is I like journaling negative experiences and learning from them meaning does that mean learning from them or finding meaning in them and are are those the same things well here's the here's the way to do it that can really really change life a lot I ask my students to keep a failure and disappointment Journal when you're 28 there's one thing after another it's like she broke up with me or she didn't return my text or you know that professor gave me a c on an exam or the job market isn't turning out the way I wanted it to there's something bugging you in a big way every time write it down write it down just write it out even if it's stupid write it down then leave two blank spaces two blank lines under it under each entry the first one you come back to after 30 days set an alarm on your phone come back to it and you have to write what did I learn about this thing in the last 30 days days about that thing after 6 months you get another alarm that says go back to it and say tell me something good that happened as a result of that now if we don't do that we won't remember and we won't grow on the basis of this what happens I'll give you an example so you're at work and your boss say time for your performance evaluation you've been killing it you've been killing it working hard doing a good job and your boss is like you're a bee around here and you're crushed I mean I'm B Talent dude really and and so you write it down in your Journal I thought I was an A+ turns out my boss thinks I'm a B minus okay now the your natural tendency is to say I'm going to go out and drink with my friends and complain about my boss with my partner and then make the make the discomfort go away I want it to go away make it go away that's wrong write it down 30 days you come back and you say to yourself what did I learn I learned I wasn't as good a fit as I thought for this job that's number one I also learned by the way that I thought I was going to be bummed out about this for the rest of my life and actually I was bummed out about it for like three days interesting H you learn from it because you write down the thing that you learned and now it's permanent because you committed it to your Executive Center six months later you come back and say given the fact that I wasn't as good a fit as I thought I went on the job market and I found a job for which I am a better fit and I'm a lot happier and then when you start doing this consistently you'll start looking forward to writing down things in your failure Journal because you've converted you've this is alchemy practically you've converted the negative into the positive there's no good or bad emotions there's only information you've treated the emotion emotional information the way you're supposed to you're learning from the data and that's how you do it that's what I like even a lot better than I saw fluffy clouds today and I'm really grateful for that gratitude lists are great I got nothing against gratitude lists but failure lists that's powerful that's actually even better for life let's talk about the difference between optimism and hope yeah you comment on this yeah it's a people use them interchangeably there's so much you know um uh empathy and compassion you know it's like they're not the same these things are never the same one of the things I do in my classes I always have a distinction between two things that seem the same and then see what the distinction will actually do for our lives if we understand them and optimism and hope are it's a classic case optimism is nothing more than a prediction things will be okay it'll be okay everything's going to be all right maybe yes maybe not hope is no matter what happens I can do something something can be done and I can do something about it hope is empowering you can be a very pessimistic but very hopeful person you can be an optimist who's hopeless you know I think things are going to be okay thank God because there nothing I can do right hope actually is tied to happiness optimism generally is not optimis op ism is something it's just kind of a sunny predictor you might be an optimist because you're a happy person but the optimism itself doesn't make you happier hope is what is the opposite of Hope despair is despair is hopelessness you should be hopeless about it to say this there's nothing I can do nothing can be done and there's nothing I can do right that's almost never true and what is the root of that feeling or belief system despair usually is the is an extreme form of disempowerment and you know people get it from childhood trauma I mean there's some research that suggest that the way that people are brought up can make them inherently hopeless but people actually can get into kind of a hopeless stance and part of it is self- defin for example you know we have a real tendency in our culture to want people to live on the basis of victimhood and grievance people will actually their identity will be victim I'm a victim and and their identity will be grievance against the people who have power over me and I get it I mean there're people who have power over us and there's legitimate grievance and people are victims but to identify as a victim is the recipe for hopelessness and despair and why is that becoming more prevalent or does it just seem that way well it it it goes in waves and what happens is in in we have an identity culture at this point and and one of the one of the things that you typically find is that that especially manipulative leaders will tell people that they can be virtuous on the basis of victimhood that victimhood is inherently virtuous that's called virt literally in the social science literature is called virtuous victimhood and it's incredibly disempowering for the followers it's incredibly manipulative um and malignant on the part of leaders who are actually doing this and we're in a period in our culture of polarization and hatred and contempt where there's just a lot of that going around and it seems that both sides have a you know have agency in this just different flavors of it oh totally oh totally you you look at the most manipulative leaders and those these manipulative leaders they have the characteristic almost always of what we call the dark Triad of Personality which is a combination of narcissism melanism and psychopathy that happens in 7% of the population according to Scott Barry Kaufman who's done the best work on the dark Triad so that means trait psychopathy it doesn't mean you're an Axe Murderer it means you have that means you you're you're way less remorseful about your negative actions than people in the population if you're narcissistic melanism and have trait psychopathy or dark Triad you're most likely going to want to disempower people create a movement of people who are relatively disempowered because you want to manipulate people and do we see that more concentrated in politics yes right now in particular so when politics does this where we reward dark Triads and what we're doing is we're rewarding dark Triads on both sides of the political Spectrum right now so it's a war of dark Triads and their followers are being systematically disempowered into a climate of virtuous victimhood that's what we actually see how you know what's what's the source of my virtue the fact that I'm getting screwed is the source of my is the source of my virtue that's okay I mean agree or disagree that that's a a hell of a way to run a country right but for sure this is why happiness is in Decline yeah where do we think we are on the long Arc of Happiness so I I'm not again I I'm Pro I would probably be less optimistic that our ancestors were were that happy I think they I think it would be hard for us to relate to what they went through depending on how far back we want to go but um I the feeling that most people would much prefer to be alive today than to have been alive a hundred years ago let alone a thousand years ago 10,000 years ago or 100 thousand years ago of course you choose it of course so so so on the one hand we all have this amazing good luck which is as you said there's eight billion people on the planet um a 100 billion have already died in the last hund last 250,000 years 100 billion people have died so how lucky are we that we were born right now or or you could say which should be a lot better if I were born 200 years from now perhaps who knows maybe um a sense of dread yeah I I don't know I I kind of wish I I kind yeah I don't know I thought about this a little bit but regardless it is what it is and yet there are probably objective data that would say we are what what's our happiness today relative to 10 years ago 20 years ago 30 years ago like if you go back to immediately following World War II what has been the trajectory of Happiness so we we have imperfect data on that we have really good data going back to the 1970s okay um that's really when the national opinion Research Center started to through the General Social Survey which is University of Chicago data is the best data available we can really trust it that started to ask people about their self-evaluation of their life and you don't want to look at it between countries the comparisons between countries are nonsense that you know Denmark is happier than Mexico it's meaningless oh how come well because they define happiness differently and they have different cultural languages langu all the Germanic languages like dut and it comes from the word for luck in German happiness is is is is Gluk Gluk is luck and and GL is happy and so that means lucky and and in in Middle English the word for for luck was hop from which we actually get happiness whereas Felicity the idea of felicitous in the in the in the romance languages has a completely different sense to it of what that means plus you know for example in Denmark happiness is a lot about contentedness there's a word in Danish Huga h y g g which means the Cozy conviviality in the in the presence of friends or something like on a comfy couch it's like a paragraph but it gives me the heie gbes I don't want that I want Adventure which is why my grandparents left Denmark and came to the United States to start a farm because there's too much so we're not going to do the across country so so let's just focus let's be on a particular country over time you can look at the same group of people over time that's pretty legit and what you find is that it was from the 1970s through the 1980s it was pretty constant and pretty decent in the United States and then it started to fall so by the way that's interesting right the 70s You could argue were a pretty depressing time in the United States in the 80s maybe less so but you're saying it was relatively constant Rel Conant AC here and there you know things ups and downs Etc you you go into a recession it dips a little bit you come out of the recession it goes up morning America all good right okay but then around 1989 1990 it starts to fall and it starts to decline just a little bit and there's two phenomena going on there's weather and climate for happiness the climate is just these little declines one percentage Point here and the percentage of people who say they're very happy little a little increase in the percentage of people saying they're not happy about their lives usually these are the three groups not happy not too happy somewhat happy very happy and there's they're just kind of closing in on each other a little bit little bit a little bit then there's storms then there's weather and the weather would be the big ones were around 2008 but wait wait wait still what happened in the 90s that we think well okay so what happened in the '90s what led to the climate drift of the 90s the climate drift of the 90s was the four the four habits of the happiest people all went into decline Faith Family friendship and work that serves other people the attitudes we have toward our work all changed really in the 1990s and the 2000s and this was a secular decline in the number of people that were practicing in faith okay secular decline in the formation of families having children getting married having families secular decline in the number of people who know you well there was more and more loneliness and fewer intimate friendships that people had it's a really good question Vic Murthy our Surgeon General has written a whole book on loneliness and there's a lot of speculation the UCLA data on loneliness you know people using those data are always asking what it is probably it has to do with the fact that people are more more and more likely to move away from their families and technological uh changes have made it so that we don't have to be in person as much as we have been in the past and so we're just more disted that even true in the early 990s yeah I mean more and more I mean it was certainly True by the by the mid 1990s when you know people when you could didn't have to pick up the phone anymore um I was writing a lot of emails in the middle of the 1990s for sure but every way that we get more efficient in the way that we communicate we become less there's less of the oxytocin interchange which of course the neuropeptide of human bonding it only comes from eye contact and touch that's how we get it and we're we're evolved to link to each other and and and experience intense pleasure when oxytocin is produced endogenously in the brain from eye contact and touch and so if we're actually communicating with each other not getting eye contact and touch we're going to get less of it and so that's what happened where people say I have fewer people who know me well there's more isolation in our communities that's been happening it's been just drift just drift and last but not least people have fewer and fewer health the ideas about their work my work really serves other people and we see this over the decades fewer people saying that my work why has that changed is that basically the change from a largely manufacturing sector to finance Information Technology like where where has that change I don't know the answer to that I mean it's like I'm I'm a a real Enthusiast for the free enterprise system and my friends who are not would blame the free enterprise system for making us into just these incredible efficiency machines and the way that we do our work and so work is just less humane less human we have less of a we have are we less Tethered to a product that we made for sure and we're less Tethered to a workplace too and this is one of the things that work um you know fewer people are less I mean my dad worked for the same University for his whole career 40 years teaching the same University day in and day out didn't like it a lot of times complained about the dean all the things the college professors do but he knew his colleagues and he he had students to the house you know we had his students you know his math students to the house all the time and they'd be playing guitars and singing and you know my mom would be making a big pot of spaghetti and doing the whole thing right I don't do that I don't do that and I've changed universities a bunch of times and I have the same career why why don't we do that because we have an incentive and a cult our culture is actually telling us that we need to move when it's time to get a better deal you need a better deal I see so we're not into laying down Roots anymore we don't lay down Roots particularly professionally and that's why we have less of a sense of bondedness in the workplace a less of a sense that we're more we have relationships that we're serving in the workplace and it's not just efficiently producing a product that's all that's the best explanation that we can find that people have worse of attitudes toward their work they're less likely to have close friends they are less likely to form and cultivate families and uh and and they're less likely to practice faith and that's the weather I mean sorry the climate the climate change the drift then we get these bad storms so how how big an impact was 911 on the American psyche not that bad on the contrary it was momentarily it was basically a blip and then the Spree de cor that came about actually lifted happiness and that's what often happens no no doubt that would have been World War II if we were if we were we had data then big National threats that bring us together raise our happiness you find that I mean it's not reliable data the data notwithstanding that we have suggests that during wartime clinical depression Falls by 75% yeah I'd seen these data in in in the UK during World War II exactly yeah yeah again you can't rely on that because this is not treatment and control experiments and like half the population got a war and the other half of the population didn't get a war and all that so this is longitudinal data and we're doing the best that we can but it is almost certainly the case that a collective threat brings us together and that does not hurt our happiness what hurt our happiness was around 2008 and originally we all thought it was because of the financial crisis right that certainly didn't help it was the Advent of social media yeah that was when everybody adopted social media it was 2008 2 social media has been catastrophic for for American happiness especially among young people especially among young women is what we see John height Jonathan height at NYU who I've worked with for a long time and jeene twangy who teaches at San Diego State University just they it's the case is closed right the work that the data they've got on this the studies they've collected on this show that this was this was just inflecting when when different platforms which lowered happiness in different ways I mean Twitter creates more hatred and and and contempt in our culture in stagram it creates social comparison which is the thief of Joy U Tik Tok when you see ordinary people doing fun things makes you feel lonely I mean these are they're unhappiness machines and and obviously you can use them in a way that doesn't denigrate your happiness but most people don't that was 2008 then political contempt and polarization in the you know 2016 era one in six Americans stops talking to a family member because of politics after the 2016 election that's second storm the third storm is the Corona virus when everybody went home and nobody came back you know remote work it's death for happiness it's very convenient 7% of the population actually gets happier because of they because they're introverts but the rest those are the cats the rest of us are dogs and and and it's it's terrible that something pulled us apart like that and then we didn't get back together it's it's I go to my university and it's like tumble weeds going down the hall still oh yeah go in at 3:00 in the afternoon to the you know place for my offices and the lights are off because of the motion sensor it's people didn't go back to work and and the result of that is we don't congregate there's still fear in some places um it's not as bad as it was but there are permanent changes and that was the third storm and today we actually see ordinarily you'll see twice as many people say they're very happy as not happy that's flipped twice as many people today say they're not happy is very happy and that's the first time we've seen that so there's no conf the signal is clear there has been an a very clear reduction in happiness over 50 years yes yes there's a secular decline with periodic storms periodic downdrafts and happiness so as individuals now thinking about some of those things um I I I just based on my own personal experience would agree that you know social media usually does not produce a feeling that is a positive one it's usually a negative one um what what do you think are now if we're going to put on our our me metacognitive hats and self-manage right so so if we're if we if we think of ourselves as capable to self-manage through difficulty as opposed to saying look we're all going to move to India and we're we're going to you know take up take up a monst tradition take sitar lessons or something right I mean again most of us have don't have that luxury and we still want to coexist in this world what what are the what are the steps we want to take to minimize the damage of these things um and at the same time you know sort of try to find this this this this semblance of Happiness so that's the reason I do my work is precisely because greater happiness not perfect happiness that's not the goal it's not even desirable you know people say I want to be happy no you don't pure happiness that would mean the eradication of your negative feelings and you'd be dead that would be the eradication of negative experiences you wouldn't learn and grow right well also I would argue we would get back to the same problem with satisfaction wouldn't we for sure I mean it's impossible to begin with it's point the point is is that happiness is not a destination it's a direction and we want to get happier that's Oprah Winfrey calls it happier that's the goal it's a it's a good neologism to actually get the point across so to do that you need information that's why I teach about the science of happiness because it's it's a super interesting body of knowledge I write about it every week because it's Fascinating People like to learn about it then you have to make do the work to change your habits and then you need to share with other people so it becomes permanent in your Consciousness you know that's really what it's all about everybody can do that I'm dedicated to making an entire generation of happiness afficionados and teachers that's what I want I want a movement of people say my hobby my hobby is learning about happiness and in my job I'm a happiness teacher whatever your job is whether you're you know managing a family or managing a company or just trying to manage yourself is what I talk about and to do that you have to know the facts on this there's certain things you need to protect yourself from and there's certain things you need to do you need to be you need to you need aversion and you need approach there are certain things you need to approach you need to take seriously your spiritual life you need to take it seriously doesn't mean you have to let's talk about that for the nonreligious person which is I guess I mean most people listening to us are not religious right right sure and by the way I think most people would look at someone like you and be a bit confused because on the one hand you're a scientist you're a serious intellectual guy and yet you describe yourself as having a very strong religious faith and yet you don't have a hard time talking about things that occurred you know hundreds of thousands of years ago and millions of years ago in other words so so you know you don't have a difficult time reconciling science and Faith no not at all and part of the reason for that is because relig faith and reason have to coexist in so far in the same way that understanding a Picasso painting and understanding Picasso the man are utterly reconcilable but not the same thing the painter and the painting are not in conflict with each other they're both important things to understand but there are many religious people who take a very literal view of say the Bible and would say well the Earth is 6,000 years old whatever science yeah is my my view that that that's basically they're taking things too literally they're taking things not not just too literally they're not understanding that there's a an intellectual bifurcation between the concept of the creation the myth of how that actually creation takes place which is the literalness that you're talking about and then the the evidence the awe inspiring evidence of the cre of the creation itself you know one of the reasons I'm religious is because of Science and every time I learn something new I'm like oh thank you what a wonderful GI gift now and again it doesn't also freak me out that I might be wrong it doesn't freak me out that I might be wrong about the science it doesn't also freak me out that I might be wrong about the religion I don't think so but you know maybe that's okay that's absolutely okay so if a person listening to this says you know I sort of accept I mean I my view has always been those who have a religious view are more fortunate yeah um and I especially think that in in terms of dealing with death right I think it's much easier to to process death if you believe that there is a life after death there's meaning in a different on a different in different dimension really only think about this through the lens of biochemistry you know it's a blank screen um well that's because in if you only think of it in terms of biochemistry death is is a what question which is in a spiritual Dimension Death Becomes a why question right and those are different interrogatives that have different philosophical and emotional content now there's this in between of spirituality which is not religion and if I were going to lump myself into a category it would probably be around the idea that I find enormous pleasure in nature yeah um and that is the closest I suppose I get to religion that's a Transcendent experience and that's really what we're talking about it's why I live here you see where I live I live in the middle of nowhere so beautiful and it's why I have to be outside every single day yep I get it I get it no I I get it and that's very common by the way a lot of people get Transcendence from nature so what does a person do who lives in a very busy urban center where they are surrounded by a wall of concrete all day every day well if that turns out to be uh destructive to your Transcendence is that a reason to move yeah for sure absolutely for some people not everybody I know some people don't want to leave Manhattan and part of the reason is because they get their Transcendent from other dimensions of life right maybe they are religious maybe they're traditionally religious maybe they are serious meditators maybe they do actually get it from they become completely a Struck from music Y and you know or human genius you know those kind again it really gets back to transcending your littleness transcending that and that Transcendent experience is has it what what it does is it gives you the same benefit as a religious Journey so basically what you're saying is yeah we need we need to talk about something much broader than uh religion in a formal sense and awe can be the religious belief it could be an an obsession or an appreciation of of great music or art yes or meditation can be the place where you tap Transcendence uhhuh yeah absolutely now it's also very convenient to not invent your own physics on this and so the Catholic church is really really good for me and one of the things also is not what I feel it's what I've decided to do this is an important thing to understand about Transcendence you don't feel Transcendence all the time you decide to experience Transcendence and put yourself in in in in the circumstances to experience awe you know a lot of times you I'm I'm sure you go outside and there's a lot on your mind you've got a very busy and hectic and stressful life and you don't feel it you don't feel it every single day like I got a mass every day I don't feel it every day I wake up an atheist a lot and why do you do that I do that because it's part was part of the protocol for for living the life that I want to live I mean I get up at 4:45 like you right I work out for an hour body I go to mass Soul then I work that's when my creativity is highest now of course I'm also you notice I'm optimizing my dopamine I'm bringing I'm I'm sucking as much dopamine into my prefrontal cortex which gives me creativity and focus for the three hours that I need to write and that's a that's a good motivation to do so but I also want to optimize both Body and Soul at the very beginning of the day so I'm I'm I'm centered on the things that really matter to me not withstanding how I feel I wake up at 4:45 in the morning I'm like back day I don't want to do back day I don't want to leg day I don't want to do that but I do it I do it and it's it's the it's the discipline of the will that in of itself is so important then I go to mass I don't want to do it a lot of days I don't want to do it but that's not the point do you do you think that there is a a deficit of that as well of that idea of so so for example you know you alluded to marriage earlier and anybody who's listening to this who's married especially who's been married for many many years will be the you know they'll acknowledge that so much of the kind of almost perverse Joy of marriage is that you make a lot of sacrifices for another person and you find yourself putting someone else ahead of yourself and for for me that's a very hard thing to do like I'm just so hardwired to be such a selfish guy that it's it's really a wonderful practice to to to to do something where I know like I'm going to make my wife's coffee today because you know she would do the same for me well part of that is that you have discovered and not enough people have that love is not a feeling either happiness is not a feeling but love isn't either love is a commitment Mar Luther King one time he gave this very beautiful sermon on the most transgressive passage in the Christian Bible which is Matthew 5:44 love your enemies right and he says Jesus says today I give you a new teaching you have heard that you should hate your enemies and love your friends I tell you love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you now he says Jesus doesn't say to like your enemies because that's a Sentimental thing to like is to feel to love is to decide this is what's going on between you and your wife the satisfaction the disciplining of your own will comes from the decision to love her that's the magic that's the Magic in marriage that's the Magic in Friendship that's the magic that you can have relationship with your kids like if it were all about your feelings hell I'd be I'd be divorced God knows my wife would bail on me I'm it's a pain being around me she decides every day to love me she decides to love me she so Thomas aquinus based on Aristotle Aristotle talked really compellingly about love and friendship arist aquinus in in 1265 writes the Suma theologic gu his you know magisterial contribution to philosophy I mean he introduced he reintroduced Aristotle to the West everybody was a platonist till till ainus and he defined love as to will the good of the other as other when you're making your wife that cup of coffee notwithstanding your feelings you're willing her good for her not you and that that discipline of the will to love another person like that that decision to do so is completely transformative that's Transcendent to the day-to-day experience till the animal path is oh I'm not going to make coffee I don't feel like it the Divine path is to love her is to will her good as her and that's that's the that's the human distinction that's what that's organized life so it really seems that that's almost a a theme Here of happiness that happiness is much more about deliberate decision making deliberate choices as opposed to reactive feelings which I I mean that's obviously the extent to which we've discussed it but you know I I I I think I like this thing that that Oprah said right which is what what did she say um uh not happiness but uh happier happier the thing I like the most that she said was let's write a book but yeah totally she said let's spread this idea to a bunch of other people and I mean this is like I've been listening to your show for a long time this is the this is the Salient themee take charge man take charge don't don't leave your health up to what feels good right now take charge of it I mean you're the boss you're this is the startup is you you're the entrepreneur you're the the guy in charge of the Enterprise you're the CEO treated as such you know the CEO doesn't do what feels good all the time the CEO does what's right not withstanding her or his feelings and that's the secret of happiness is treating your life like a startup it's like it's living it's your philosophy of Health and Longevity is my philosophy of happiness because it's all one thing you know when you talk about better happier years or you know Health span I'm talking about happy span that's what it comes down to and you're just not going to do it by doing what feels good in the moment it's just not you're not going to discipline the will sufficiently to be able to make the decisions that lead you on this Divine path that can give you this thing that you actually seek is it perfect no but can you learn and grow and have progress all throughout the journey absolutely absolutely so finally H how would you think about the biomarkers happiness right so if we if we think about my world we have so many biomarkers it's one of the things that makes our job relatively straightforward we have blood-based biomarkers we have biomarkers of performance you know your V2 max strength we can look at body composition all of these things if if someone comes to you and you were the doctor in this sense and they they they want to they want to obviously first have some sort of assessment of happiness and then they want to be able able to track their progress I mean does that is that a silly idea here because it's so self-evident no it's not a silly idea at all and I've thought about it so much and I've had dozens of entrepreneurs want to want to engineer the idea and app IE it you know because like I could popular class Harvard you know you got to be able to turn it into some sort of a product and the way that you would do that is by having relatively complicated but measurable phenomena that you could look at and get better at and and that's would be a marker for the underlying construct which is happy happiness here's the problem with that here's the fundamental problem it's a different species of challenge we talked about this one time before about the difference between two there's two types of problems in human life there's complicated problems and complex problems and for those who didn't actually listen to the last time that we did our show did did your show together the complicated problems are really really tricky and take a lot of computational horsepower and and learning but once you solve them you can replicate the solution with effortless EAS forever right you can you can do the biomarkers complex problems are incredibly easy to understand but impossible to solve right they're impossible to solve because there there are too many permutations of what can actually happen so you're you like Formula 1 racing right and so I'm going to set up this unbelievable I'm going to take a bunch of Unix machines and I'm going to wire them together and I'm gonna you know 250,000 lines of code and I'm going to simulate every F1 race for the rest of the year you're like you're an idiot why because F1 is complex that's why it's interesting and you want to watch it that's why it's so exciting to watch a Formula 1 race because it's complex I know what winning looks like you cross the finish line before the other guys it's the simplest thing in the world but a million different things can happen a quadrillion things can actually happen that's the fun of it all of life's Joys are complex problems most of the solutions that we get from technology and science are complicated Solutions the biggest problems that we have right now now have to do with the fact that we want to solve our complex problems like love and we're trying to do it with complicated Solutions like Instagram a complex a complicated solutions to a to to a complex problem will always leave you cold and make you worse off you know it basically I'm going to get rid of all the formula and races because it's dangerous and I'm going to have nothing more than computer simulations of it it's like that's the worst thing I've ever heard that's the dumbest thing I've actually ever heard right so that's the key thing for us to understand and that's the reason I can't app eyes this happiness is a complex and adaptive human phenomenon and you can only get it by living it and working on it and making progress and failing just like your marriage I just described your marriage now in that sense at least I get feedback in my marriage because you know when I screw up and I apologize I see that my wife forgives me right when I you know when I when I make a mistake I feel the lenience and the love when I need the help the help is there um so indirectly I'm getting really good feedback and conversely if a person was to take an honest assessment of their marriage and realize like we're two ships passing and you know we don't fight but we don't have anything in common you know if they were thoughtful enough they'd recognize things are not well so they'd have a barometer there um do you think that using others as a mirror is the best way to get the true barometer of happiness or do we rely on our own internal assessment we wind up with our own internal assessment but it's not good enough to have that be one single metric how happy am i h so we have three so far today in the conversation levels of enjoyment satisfaction meaning we can know whether or not we have those things on the basis of the science that we've talked about and the ways that we can get better at and practice it the techniques for getting more of those things are faith family friends and satisfying work I break it down even further by the way I don't try to make it complicated it's still complex but I have a spreadsheet that I keep on my own happiness that are the micronutrients behind the macronutrients dozens of dimensions and I'm raing myself I weight those things according to my experience of how they feed into the macro the macronutrients and then I have scores on those dimensions and I want to make progress every year I do it on my birthday and half birthday my half birthday is coming up in November November 21st my half birthday and I'm going to fill out my spreadsheet and say I'm not on Pace to get the progress that I had in my strategic plan for my happiness for next May when my birthday comes around again what are the things I need to actually touch up so what am I doing I'm kind of doing a curve fit to the complex problem I'm trying to solve with a little bit of a complicated solution I give all those Dimensions to my students and I say look do the reading do the work you know I've read 10,000 articles about this so you don't have to but I do try to break it down a little bit so that I can have a multi-dimensional problem one of the things that we know with complex problems is the more multi-dimensional you make it the more likely you are to get better Solutions the worst thing that you can do is like how do I feel today that's that's that's you're not going to make progress under those circumstances what are what are some of the micronutrients that go into this for you it'll be the warmth of my marriage the relationship with my kids how well things are going with respect to the the the the the value I'm trying to create with my career you know the stability that I have in my friendships the degree to which I think I feel like properly philanthropic right the interest I'm taking in my professional life you know the closeness that I have with um you know certain Intimates in my life the extent to which I'm avoiding or finding um um conflict in my work relationships all these things go into my spreadsheet right because I know that they really matter across these three dimensions the extent to which I'm I'm I'm enjoying my life of the course of each day um I'm and and I do these particular ratings and then I put them together with a weighted sum across them and I've messed with a weighted sum and I've messed with it and experimented with it until I said yep that seems about right that seems about right with respect to what I'm experiencing at this point in my life so you make it a multi-dimensional problem that's a huge body of social science I talked about imperfect linear models where you take big problems and make them into a bunch of little tiny problems and that curve fits to the complex thing you're trying to Sol you evaluate that twice a year and therefore you can't have it be dependent on the technical noise of the day or you're trying to answer these questions through the lens of the last half of the year yeah and if I'm having like a big conflict with my wife on my birthday I don't do it that day don't do it that day yeah I don't do it that way because I don't want the noise is what it comes down to right and if something really really great happens to me the book is doing great I don't answer it that day either because I don't want my my you know the neurochemistry to be affecting it unduly although at this point my life I've been doing it for 25 years I'm I'm I'm pretty I'm pretty cold and calculating I think that would be a reasonable app to start with could be could be yeah that's very different than the biomarkers for sure because I don't actually know what you would look at in I mean look what are the biomarkers I want to make sure I don't have a problem with my cortisol right I want to make sure that you know I'm my hormones are balanced I want to make sure that my adrenal system is not oh yeah yeah but when I went Biers talking yeah no no no yeah when I went biomarkers I didn't mean blood-based biomarkers I I mean anything that is either subjective or objectively measurable that would serve as a proxy for you know a dashboard effectively a dashboard of your happiness health and in fact I have that yeah I do and and so it's imperfect it's imperfect you know but that's like my you know my fantasy fo any plans to to share that to make that something that that others can use besides your students it sounds like they have access to this I should do that I actually should do that that would be an interesting thing I'd be very interested in experimenting on that with maybe your clients to see what to what extent that that could be a useful tool just to see yeah I think it would be very interesting I'll tell you the last thing I I I I I I think that's very powerful and worth talking about and and I'm curious if you think that this is something valuable for everyone or just a subset of people is is kind of the uh less self yeah the right take away the mirrors oh yeah yeah I I found that to be a very interesting discussion uh because you even talked about that literally like some people will literally minimize their the view of them in a mirror and then of course you talk about broader versions of that such as social media and things like that do you think everybody would benefit from this yeah so William James talked about the I self versus the me self you must have both when you're looking in the mirror you're two people you're the looker and the lookie right and you need both because you need to be able to look to understand what's going on around you but you need to have a reflection of yourself to understand who you are I need to see but I need to be seen by me so I can understand my context I can understand my place in the world if you don't do that you'll get you know run over by a car if you don't have the ey myself or you'll have somebody kill you because you've offended them repeatedly because you don't understand the me sself is the way that this works out the problem is in our society it's all me self no isself most people are not observing the world very much at all they're being observed and they're observing themselves right they're trying to be observed and they're observing themselves so social media is a classic case of this checking your notifications is nothing more than a Mis self obsession like what are they saying about me how what kind of impact am I having on other people and and I get I get it why we do it we're evolved to want to understand where we are in the hierarchy social comparison even Envy are evolved phenomena because it helps keeps us Keep Us Alive and make progress but it's misery when it takes over when technology supercharges our ability to be in the Mis self State there are moments when you can be really confused about the i s and the me self right um one time I was um really think thinking deeply about something and I was kind of obsessed my daughter and I were in the car and I put gas in my car I filled up the car car with gas and then you know took off from the gas station I'm kind lost in thought and about a block later I heard this weird dinging ding dinging dinging like what's going on somebody's dragging a muffler and then I'm like looking for somebody's dragging a muffler around me and then I noticed that cars are honking at me and pointing at me and I'm like what the hell so I stopped the car it turns out I hadn't pulled the hose out of the car out of the out of the pump and I was dragging I pulled out of the pump and I was I was dragging the gas pump down the road right the the the host and I had to go back to the gas station I find out you know how happy they are when you do that which is not and how expensive it is when you have to replace part of a gas pump you know it's pretty bad but the whole point was I was the ey self and the Mis self all at once and it was this weird disequilibrating experience one of the ways to get much happier is to be more in the I self and less in the me self state is to minimize the reflection is to think a lot less of what other people are thinking and to observe yourself a lot less and there different ways to do that so um in the book I talk about this guy I work with pretty closely who he was a fitness influencer and a fitness model I mean imagine that I mean you're living by your abs what a way to live you're I mean if you're seeing lower abs and you're an adult that means you're never eating anything you like ever and you're not getting enough enjoyment your life right and he was miserable for 10 years he didn't eat what he liked he always had headaches he didn't feel good he didn't have normal relationships and and he was and so he decided he had to make a change in his life he wasn't living so he literally got rid of every mirror in his apartment and showered in the dark for a year so he couldn't see his own abs and his life completely changed just on the basis of getting rid of those mirrors when people are miserable in my classes I say take off number one take the notifications off your social media take the notific turn off the notifications so you're not getting notifications don't look at your mentions under any circumstances don't pay attention to that and then actually literally start getting rid of some of your mirrors your literal mirrors and what you'll do is you'll get into more of a state of looking outward and the more you look outward the happier you'll be the better off your life will be when you're walking around going man that's amazing right and you're not you're just not you know what's not amazing me indeed Arthur what surprised you the most when you set out to write this you know you're writing a book on a topic that you've studied for decades you've been writing column after column after column weekly in the Atlantic you're you've you've written other books that touch on similar themes but I I have to believe that there's something that you believe today that you absolutely didn't before or vice versa yeah I mean I've changed my opinion about a lot of different things as science has gotten clearer and my knowledge has gotten deeper you know a lot of things that I would have thought and I can come up with a lot of little examples but the here's the biggie that my my Paradigm has been shifted I've have been studying happiness for a long time I wrote my first book on happiness in 2008 but it was kind of like a book on astronomy it was um it was observing happiness from a distance who are the happy people who are the unhappy people it never really occurred to me that with the science I could change my own life and I'm not a fundamentally happy person mad scientists struggle they just do because negative effect is so much it gets your attention so much more strongly than positive effect does if you're high positive and high negative you're going to feel on balance pretty negative a lot so I was thought to myself happiness is a really interesting thing but it's not my lot it isn't my lot I went through years and years and years like that and when I came back and started the new happiness projects writing my column in the books that I've written in the past couple of years years I said all right let's see if that's true I can't move the stars as an astronomer but maybe I can use the social science and the Neuroscience in ways where I can with the knowledge change my habits and get happier I kind of doubted it I sorted thought I couldn't and I did I actually did I changed my life um I'm usually 8 to nine weeks out on my column in the Atlantic because I'm trying the things that I'm suggesting I'm a lab rat I know you do this too because when you're you're going to you're not going to suggest something to your clients that you don't that you don't feel comfortable with even as a human being this is what I'm doing too and my I mean I'm taking constant updates I take the tests with my students on on positive and negative effect and life satisfaction my well-being has risen by 60% in the past four years 60% I mean it was a pretty low base it was a bad denominator but it's been dramatic and I didn't actually I didn't trust I didn't actually believe but it's actually true and anybody can do this yeah it's actually it's it's a great message Arthur because you haven't wrapped your identity up in being the happiest guy because if you did you'd feel like a hypocrite all day long right you'd feel like any moment you didn't have that warm fuzzy Happy Feeling you'd be like oh my God how am I the guy that wrote the book onhappy yeah and furthermore I'd be I'd be faking it all the time be Faking It my wife would be aren't you supposed to be happy all time and somebody sees me kind of Grouchy in the airport and be like that's very disillusioning yeah yeah yeah well it's funny when people see me eat a donut they're like what and I go hey read the book man I know I didn't I didn't say Don't eat a donut I just said don't eat 10 a day yeah well Arthur thanks so much for making time I know uh I know your time's tight here in Austin so I'm glad we had a chance to sit down to thank you Peter I have so much admiration for the work that you're doing you're making my life better through the work that you do and for a lot of other people too so thank you for that well you're making mine better and likewise all the people that are listening and reading thank you right [Music] on

Channel: Peter Attia MD

Views: 253,488

Keywords: Peter Attia MD, Dr. Peter Attia, Early Medical, The Drive Podcast, The Drive, Longevity, Zone 2

Id: X1GNc70-584

Length: 126min 4sec (7564 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 27 2023