[MUSIC] I stayed on at Stanford after graduating. I've taught for most of the past 25
years at the School of Medicine, teaching wellness and meditation and
happiness and poetry and things that are hard to believe
that Stanford would pay for. >> [LAUGH]
>> [LAUGH] And I remember the first time, it was in 2009 that my
teaching partner and I started the Happiness Class at Stanford. And I remember first about how
difficult it was to get any department to let us be within 100
miles of their class offerings, offering something on happiness. I remember the psychology
department saying, well, what does happiness have
to do with psychology? >> [LAUGH]
>> And the home bio department and the School of Education, well,
we can't foster anything like that And the director of at that time said,
well, wait a second,
I think this is good for our students. So I will simply use my name, like
a full professor in the medical school. So we offered, believe it not,
the happiness class out of the Department of Pediatrics for
its first x number of years on the campus, because that's the only
place that it would take us. But the first class,
I remember this clearly, just how peculiar it was
to be asking kind of hyperactive 18 and
19 year olds to sit still and contemplate the bounty and
blessing of their life. To actually sits still and
reflect upon how unbelievably luck they are to
be at Stanford University. To not just be in
the future with what this education will bring, but to bring it in. To sit with, how the heck is it possible in a world of 7 billion people, that I got lucky enough to be sitting in
this room, at this time, at this school? So one of the first practices that we did,
and do, to remind people of how lucky
they are to be at Stanford is we send them outside to take a walk for
a little bit around campus and appreciate the natural
beauty of the environment. That's an actual class exercise. Get up, put your phone down,
apologize to your phone for leaving it. >> [LAUGH]
>> Tell your phone you promise you'll be back. >> [LAUGH]
>> And then go outside, quietly, and
reflect on just how beautiful it is. Not how much you have to do,
not how important you are, not what you're going to do in the future, not all of the need-based drives
that we have that dominate us. But a simple, quiet walk reflecting
upon what it feels like for the breeze to hit your arm
here in Northern California, or how direct and gorgeous the sun is, and just enjoy for
a few minutes the gift that exists. So the first time we did this,
we sent him out for, I don't know, 10 minutes thinking,
how many of them are going to come back? [LAUGH] And what are they going to say? And so when they came back, we kidded with
them and said, if any of you speak to your parents tonight, the likelihood is if they
say, so what did you do in school today? And you tell them that some teacher
sent you outside to stare at trees, they may be a little concerned about
where their tuition dollars are going. >> [LAUGH]
>> And yet, as I've gotten more into this question of happiness,
I'm struck more and more deeply about,
that's probably one of the handful of few actual questions that
might really matter to us. How do we become happy? How do we take this gift of our life, this short confusing [LAUGH],
mysterious gift, and how do we live it in a way that we
can say with most of it, thank you? Thank you for the opportunity to be here. Thank you for the experiences. Thank you, at some very deep level, for the capacity to learn how it
is we navigate this place. And thank you for
the intelligence, aspiration, whatever it is,
to try to figure it out, thank you. But most of us don't do this. Most of the students here don't do this. Most of the adults here don't do this. Most people don't do this. They don't take just this staggering mystery question, what is life? What are we here for? What can we do here to make it meaningful? They don't bring that in deeply enough. And so if you don't bring that
question in deeply enough, it's very hard to say thank you for the
opportunity to try to live that answer. What is this life for? And why am I here? And what was I created to do? I think being an ex kind of late 60s,
early 70s hippy, I think all the time about
Abraham Maslow's pyramid. And I now teach another generation
of students that simple, elegant description of,
what are we here for? What is it that motivates us? And it's as relevant today as it
was when I first discovered it, maybe, in 1970 in a high
school psychology class as to, how much of our time do we want to
spend at the bottom of that pyramid? One of the great, I'm going to say,
failures of Stanford students, more than I would like to see,
Is in their determination and their drive and
their massive amount of energy they spend getting to this school,
they've lost some of their wonder. And some of their curiosity about,
okay, yes, I can be successful. I can become a physician or I can make a lot money in business,
or whatever I can do. But why? And what's the benefit? And to whom? Well, we're all struggling with that. We're all in enough of a hurry. We are affluent,
at least the people in a room like this. We're all affluent enough not to
have to worry about many things. But we haven't thought deeply enough
about life to recognize the necessity of climbing that pyramid in terms of what
it is we wake up to in the morning. And the most brilliant part of Maslow's work is the part that's
probably least known. So most of you learned,
probably in high school and then in a Psych I class in college,
of the pyramid. That at the bottom level of
the pyramid is first, safety needs. So food, clothing, shelter, sex,
whatever the most basic needs are. That's the strongest motivation
that human beings have. Then, right above,
those are the survival needs, right above that are the safety needs,
such as okay, I have food now. How do I make sure I'll have it tomorrow,
or next week, or next month? I have a roof over my head, but how do I make sure that roof will be there
in a month, or six months, or a year? So that's survival and safety needs. The two brilliant things
that Maslow elucidated about happiness were no matter how well,
no matter how often, no matter how deeply you meet those needs,
they will never make you happy. That is such a powerful
challenge to almost any culture that exists on this Earth. That no matter how well you survive, and no matter how safe you are, that in and
of itself will never make you happy. That just set the conditions for which you
can begin to actually explore happiness. And I want to make that abundantly clear. That most of the time, survival and
safety are necessities for going up the ladder to
actually confront happiness. But our world has conflated survival and
safety with happiness. That we have been taught,
and almost all of us have bought the Kool-Aid, that surviving, making sure that you and
the people you love survive, is an ultimate value rather
than just a necessary step for the actual deeper truths to emerge. Then, being safe,
which is also absolutely essential. So having money in the bank,
having physical health, having enough possessions,
having enough entertainment, having enough protection
against the elements. That, too, is necessary for happiness,
but only as a precondition. Having money in the bank,
taking a vacation to France instead of Monterey, those don't
contribute to happiness. What they do is they're
buffers against anxiety. And they're buffers against
the existential angst and anomie that paralyze people. And we're taught very deeply and
very strongly all over the place that those safety needs, like having 10
times what you need in the bank, or earning 20 times more than the people
at the bottom of the food chain, somehow that will make you happier. Starting with Maslow, and 25 years
of research show that it's not so. It's not that having more and
being able to vacation in France or Bali make you less happy, they just make
nothing to do with whether you're happy. They're epiphenomenon for happiness. But the thing that Maslow distinguished,
which is so powerful, besides the fact that safety and
survival are not happiness, is he postulated, and this is not taught to most undergraduates. Is that we actually have
two separate need pathways. We have deficit needs, and
something he refers to as meta needs. We have deficit needs, such as on
the whole practice of his pyramid, the deficit needs are I need to survive. I need to have shelter and
food and everything else. I need that because I don't have enough. I need safety because I'm not safe enough. I need relationships because I'm lonely. I need esteem because I'm empty. I need beauty to fill my space. But what he postulated that's just so powerful is that human
beings have meta needs, or sufficiency needs,
as well as deficit needs. And this is where you
start getting sketchy with most dominant cultures
which are teaching us how to meet our deficit needs through
the vehicle of the culture. But the meta needs are different. The meta needs are I need to be the kind of person that other
people get comfort from. That's a meta relationship need. I need to be stable so
other people can depend on me. I need to create relationships
in this world so I can give. Those are meta relationship needs. There are esteem needs, such as I
feel great that I was given an award because it recognizes my good work,
so I feel better about me That's a wonderful deficit esteem need,
but we have meta needs. Which is to feel good
because we've simply helped. Because we've added a little
more beauty to this world. That we have made a contribution,
or that we have grown in a way that is beneficent, is generous, not arising out of deficit. We also have what Maslow
called like beauty, understanding, knowledge,
a whole ethereal set of needs, which is you can read and learn and study to gain something,
which is graduate school, which is great. But you can read and learn and
study to become in awe of this world we inhabit,
which is a meta need. The deficit need is absolutely essential,
but happiness more emerges when we're able to
touch the meta part of the need as well. So learning because learning is fantastic. Going to a museum, or climbing a mountain
not just to say you've been there, like the kind of tourist thing. Yeah, I've been to the Louvre,
I've climbed Everest. That's a deficit need. A meta need is,
I go because it gives me a chance to touch the unbelievably profound beauty that
human beings in this earth have created. And it's not about
nourishing the separate me. It's about opening up to a bigger
something that I'm a part of. And I feel most full when
I recognize the absolute, remarkable experience that I'm
entitled to visit for awhile. And Maslow postulates
that the last need or so factualization is an arising from a place where you've touched
each of the needs below it. And the wonderful thing about
self-factualization from Maslow is, it's not that there is
a predetermined endpoint. It's that each one of
us has a distinct and unique path through this
life that nobody else has. And the self actualized drive
which is what pushes all the other drives is to
try to take this life, to figure out what your
unique contribution to it is. For some people, it's relationship. For some people, it's learning. For some people, it's esteem,
it's that giving esteem. For some people, it's creating safety. It's not the same for each of us. But the brilliance of Maslow was
that he mentioned, even in the 60s, that the handful of people who get
to that self actualized place. They are mostly a cultural. They step out of the majority
of the people in their culture because they take the risk,
to march to their own drum. But he was very clear in understanding
that they weren't anti-cultural, they weren't rebellious,
and they weren't hostile. They were inner directed, and
that they knew they couldn't do what everybody else did or
what the baseline was. Because that would inhibit their
ability to live the one as Mary Oliver said, what the one wild and
precious life that we all have. What are we going to do with it? So when I have been teaching happiness classes here and
giving talks all over the place on it. The basic orientation is that question. What am I going to do, what are any of us going to do with
our one wild and precious life? And that's a very hard question to answer. It's made even more
difficult when all of us don't know the research on what
it is that makes people happy. So the great thing about
teaching happiness classes, is that there finally is some research. When we started, there was less, and
20 years ago, there was very little and now, there's some. And the essence of
the research on happiness is that it depends mostly on three things. One, that you focus more
on people than things. That you focus more on people than money,
and that you focus more on people,
even then acquiring. Now, what that means for most people, is that they drew their things or
acquiring with other people. So they have found that in cultures
that have family and shared meals. The act of actually sharing the meal and
family style, leads to an increase in happiness for
everybody who's a part of that. So it's not that,
you just have to do people. But we have, I'm going to say,
a business ethic which has instructed most
of us to feel that our economic lives are way more important
than our interpersonal lives. That it makes sense to
sacrifice people for economics, that it makes
sense to sacrifice people for the value of buying things and
having material rewards. Because we have been
taught that things and status which are wonderful
are mediators to happiness. That when we have enough things and when we have enough influence,
then we'll be happy. We're taught that it's a mediator. The problem is that if
you practice on happiness While you're going towards the mediator,
so like if you work too much, or you ignore your kids because
you're too busy, then you are practicing qualities that train
your brain in patterns of unhappiness. It's a very challenging dialectic. But the key finding is that
at the end of your days, and they've come at this from two things,
one, over the last 20 or 30 years they've interviewed many, many, many dying people in hospice,
people with terminal illnesses. And some of you have seen that where they
have asked people, what are your regrets? And you know the colloquial
thing is that nobody wished they had spent more time at the office. But when they asked people what their
regrets were, people who are dying or at the end are in hospice,
they mentioned a few things. One, they mentioned they
didn't have enough fun. Two, they mention that I have
lost track of my friends. That I got too busy and
I got too distracted, and many of my precious friends drifted away. And three,
they wished that they had spent a little more energy and
time giving to their families. Giving, a Maslow meta-need. Giving to their families. Those were the top three, having more fun, not losing track of friends, and giving more within the family. The other data point that is
reaching that in a similar way and many of you because, the Stanford Reunion,
so you're all well-educated and smart, is many of you have
seen either the Ted Talk or the Data on that 80-year Harvard
study that they began in the 30s and they followed two years of Harvard
sophomores for their lives. And then the Harvard people were so engaged in the study that they followed
their children and their grandchildren. So they now have 80 years worth of data. And as successful as
Harvard people were and are, as much as they accomplished. The two times that they have
fully analysed the data and revealed it publicly. Back in the 70s the first time
that this data was discussed, the psychiatrist who revealed the data, he didn't know what to do with
it because it was Harvard. And he had trouble explaining culturally, he wrote a book but
he had trouble explaining culturally that in the school that had
the highest rate of success, cultural and material success for
the United States. The elementary that most was aligned
with happiness was relationship, How happy were you with
your relationships? How much time did you spend
with your relationships? Was it a reciprocal
giving of relationship? That contributed more. They re-edited or followed the cohort for
another 40 years. And just recently in about 2015 they had another social unveiling of this. And this time the psychiatrist,
because he already had the original data of relationship,
this time he was even more Both specific and chagrined. Because the data showed that the one and
a half or two qualities that most predicted happiness,
were the ability to give and receive love. And that's quite telling, that from convergent data. Relationships and
love appear to be the underpinning of what a happy and
successful life actually is. One of the things that I read years ago,
and since I do teach here and I have some of that
professor kind of interest, which is I love finding silly steams
of studies that have no meaning, and just remember them to be
able say it talks because studies contradict each other,
they're small. But I remember one study
from not that long ago, which was looking at business success, and it was only looking at men,
and maybe this is 15 years ago I can't remember, but
they were trying to figure out and this is why science is both wonderful and
ludicrous. They try to figure out if
getting a promotion at work led men to want to have more sex. >> [LAUGH]
>> Did it make them feel more studly? Did it throw testosterone now that
they were the king of the heap? And the answer was yes for
about three weeks. >> [LAUGH]
>> [LAUGH] And then they went back to the same
old guy that they were. But they took married men, so
they had a reliable sexual partner, and they just wanted to see did getting
a promotion at work lead them to more, whatever, macho testosterone. And it lasted three weeks. And then the human tendency to take for granted what you have took over. The human tendency to normalize and
stabilize and become inured to what you have took over. Our brains are wired so
that about 85% of our neuronal connections are designed for
stability. About 15% are designed for newness. So the 85% is to make sure you go to work, you do what you're
supposed to do everyday. You don't have to sit there thinking
about, what do I do with the pencil? Do I sharpen it or stick it into my ear? You know what to do with the pencil
because the majority of your brain is designed for stability and
a kind of homeostatic experience, right? You have 15% of your brain which gets
a lot of play now is neuroplasticity. You do. You have a part of your brain
that can learn adapt and change. But that part of your brain
is designed to be 15%. It's not designed because you would
go crazy if you responded to all new situations and stimuli,
without a stable pattern underneath it. The problem is that 80 or 85% makes us miss much of our life. It makes us take for
granted much of our life. This allows us the capacity to
sit as the Stanford students sit, and not recognize how
unbelievably lucky we are. It forces us to not acknowledge that
being able to sit in a room like this, with your body comfortably breathing, with your mind functioning,
is an unbelievable gift that will end. The 85% has us take stuff,
in the best way, for granted, but to be happy, you have to keep some edge on that. Unfortunately, most of us use
the cell phone as that edge. That we use that to satisfy
the part of us that goes for newness and stimulation and easily grasped interest instead of going deeper, and looking at what is it that
we really want to grow. How is it that we really
want to unfold in our lives? And how is it at a minimum
we can be not just happy, but content with what we have and
not take it for granted? So happiness is a couple
of different streams. It's the pyramid thing of Maslow's hierarchy of needs and it's a present centered kind of awareness of,
what am I doing? What are my values, and
what is it about my life right this moment that's rich and
important? So I want to do a few practices,
because if I just yak for an hour, it doesn't get in, but I want to do a couple practices
with you with my time that will help you understand,
one, what happiness is. It's a present-centered
experience on an appropriate path towards greater wholeness and growth. That would be my encapsulation of it. It's a positive presence
centered experience and appreciation of you being
on your appropriate road to your own self actualization. That sounds really fancy,
but unfortunately, that's one of the costs
of teaching of Stanford. You don't sound like a normal human
being but it's this and this. And the link of this,
before I ask you to do some practices, which is the theme of the talk
that I offered to give is the relationship between happiness and
stress. Albert Schweitzer gave the best definition
of happiness that I've ever seen. It's wanting what you have. This is a brilliant man. Of course, he didn't teach at Stanford, because he would have turned that
into a four paragraph thing. >> [LAUGH]
>> Because it had to be published like all that nonsense. Wanting what you have, which is only in the present,
which is only now. Wanting what you have,
wanting who you are, loving who you're with as best you can,
being happy. What my tiny little contribution
to that is, I added, and stress occurs when you
want anything else but what you have, that's what stress is. You need stress. You can't just stay at comfortable and
homeostatic. You need stress. You need to strive. You need to grow. You need to argue with your environment. You need to create change. You need to problem solve. The problem is most of us
have too much stress and not enough wanting what we have. In fact, many of us believe that if we
want what we have we're going backwards. That's such a mistaken experience because
that's the only time that you're happy. Is wanting what you have within
a framework of growth for its self-actualization. Happiness is wanting what you have,
stress is wanting something else. We need stress. Here's the other problem, and then I'm
going to give you the couple of practices. In our current culture
of hurrying everywhere, of always being in a rush, your brain, under the quality of hurry,
is simply stressed. You might say, I'm in a hurry. Your brain and nervous system
take it as you're in danger, because the only reason you wouldn't be
enjoying your life is because it's danger. That's how your nervous
system interprets it. Why would this person be rushing
around when it's a beautiful day and there's people they love? Okay, there's gotta be
something really wrong here. Rushing and multitasking are signs to your
nervous system that things are not okay. So when you're on your phone and
doing something else, which we all are, our nervous system takes it as if
we're in a difficult situation for us, and then it releases adrenaline to help
us handle the conflict and the stress. It's one of the reasons why you see so
few people looking genuinely content. Because very few of us are not rushing or
multi-tasking, and when you're rushing and multi-tasking, it's impossible to
say I'm happy with what I have. because those are both signs of not
being happy, with was you have. because you wouldn't be doing that. So the challenge is to
find moments of practice where you're happy with what you have. So I'm going to give you one
of those moments of practice. If you'll all please close your eyes. And sit comfortably for a moment Very gently relax your breathing, And allow yourself to enter
the Mind-body experience where you could even begin to be happy,
which means you're quieter. You want your breathing to relax and
stabilize. Which doesn't mean,
you can't be doing things, we just doing this as a practice, but
you want to quiet and slow your breathing, And you want to gentle your breathing. Make it gentler. This is because your nervous
system's basic omnipresent question is, are you safe? And if your nervous system can't answer
that you're safe, you can't be happy. So when your belly relaxes and
your breathing deepens, then your mind can start to entertain
positive, loving, beauty based thoughts. because your nervous
system is in a safe mode. So you want to practice maybe two or
three slow deep breaths when your nervous
system is relaxed, and gentle. And then you want to bring an image to
your mind of someone you dearly love. You want to bring an image to your
mind of someone you dearly love, and you want to try to hold that image in
a way, that you feel the love you have. And you want to relax into that
open-hearted sense of fullness. And just for a moment,
remember why this would be, the more you can experience this would be
the closer you get to a successful life. The more you can feel this as a present
centered experience of your life. Let that go. Take a deep breath, and
gently allow your eyes to open. And so,
I'm going to give you another practice. What I'd like you to do is,
let me explain the caveat first. Human beings on average spend between
75 and 80% of their day complaining. >> [LAUGH]
>> I don't know what's funny about that but it's true. But that's what the research suggests. And that's because of the tremendous
negativity bias that our brain has. I do some of these kind of
practices with people at work. I mean, I work for a couple of
companies that have me come in and teach their people how to be a little
more happy because the bad news and good news is that people who
are happier tend to be more productive. That over time stress wears you out,
not encourages you to do your best, even though short-term, it's phenomenal. But what I'd like you to do, since we live
in a brain world of 85% complaining or 75%, I'd like you to turn
to somebody near you and talk about what's one part of the work you
do, no matter how you define that work. It could be employment,
it could be volunteer, it could be cleaning your house. What's one part of the work you do
that you absolutely love, and why? And I want you to talk about
it with no complaining at all, which is almost impossible for
human beings. My way of describing it is I think root
canal is easier than this for people. Because we want to complain and
bitch all over the place. I'm asking you to spend a few
minutes describing one part of your work in positive terms,
what you love about it, and only talk about
the positive part about it. because the way most of us are is, well,
at work, I love the creative part except every 15 minutes, my boss comes in and
tells me to do something useful. >> [LAUGH]
>> None of that, because if you're going to be happy, you have to create
the brain pathways that recognize happy. So quieting down,
opening to love, a happy pathway. Speaking with deep conviction about
what you love, a happy pathway. You need to practice things. I mean, again, if I had a whole day, but you need to practice creating environments
like this at the work you do. So that people have more of their
brain to bring to their job. If we just have threat-based
parts of our brain and scarcity-based parts of our brain,
then we'll do good work. But if we bring the met to needs to work,
if we bring the abundance parts of ourself, if we bring the desire
to be kind and helpful too, we have much more real estate
up here to bring to work, which is how happy people
are more effective. They are heartier and
they're more stress hearty. Anyway, please find somebody to have this
conversation with for a few moments. Thank you. I want to just finish with just one or
two thoughts about this. In the research,
one of the things that really distinguishes happy from
less happy people is so duh, that it's embarrassing. I'm sure the NIH needed a $2
million grant for this, but happy people actually
wake up in the morning and think, what can I do to have a better day? Less happy people wake up in the morning
and think, I have so much crap to do. >> [LAUGH]
>> So there's the world's wisdom
boiled down right there for you. But recognize again, and
I will end this, that within a pyramid of needs, values and perspective. You want to always be aware of
the rising nature, the need for you to ascend that pyramid over time for
the full flourishing of your humanity. The second piece is also to
remember day by day moments, where everything about
your life is it should be. And that you're thankful for
what you have, not just acquiring what you don't. Like that's such a simple but challenging
thing to remember what you have, not just bent on acquiring
what you don't have. Anyway, I thank you for your time. >> [APPLAUSE] [MUSIC]
