Build the Life You Want... Advice from Arthur Brooks and Oprah

Oprah Winfrey and Arthur Brooks want you to be happier - so the TV megastar and the Harvard academic teamed up to write a book setting out the steps you can take to be a little happier each day. 

Over the summer, Dr Laurie Santos read Build the Life You Want, the Art and Science of Getting Happier and loved it. So she recorded a conversation with Arthur touching on how his son found meaning in the marine corps; why you should remove the all mirrors from your home; and whether happiness experts can ever be happy themselves.  

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin, It's going to be a busy fall on Happiness Lab.
I'll soon be embarking on a new season of shows
with some of the sweetest, most joyful co hosts. Imaginable
That's us with the help of Sesame Streets, Big Bird,
Grover and Abbi Kadapi, I'll be bringing you happiness hacks

(00:36):
that work whether you're age three or one hundred and three.

Speaker 2 (00:39):
Oh, I am so excited.

Speaker 1 (00:41):
Me too, Grover. And after all that, we'll launch into
an important news series about the ways we can share
happiness with those around us if we can bring ourselves
to be a bit more sociable. We'll look at how
to connect with strangers, how to deepen our existing relationships
with friends, and even how to negotiate the tricky move
of revving up friendships that have fizzled. But before all that,
I couldn't help but share a conversation I recently recorded

(01:04):
with best selling author Arthur Brooks. In the last few years,
Arthur has set up a new are at Harvard dedicated
to the same ideas that we discuss on this podcast,
called the Leadership and Happiness Laboratory, or just Happiness Lab
for sure. Arthur's work has gained legions of fans, with
people lining up all over to collaborate with him. A
lot of these folks are important and respected scientists and researchers,

(01:26):
but some are just well, absolute megastars.

Speaker 2 (01:29):
I've just finished a book called Build the Life You Want,
The Art and Science of Getting Happier, co authored with
the Queen Oprah Winfrey.

Speaker 1 (01:36):
I read Arthur and Oprah's book over the summer, and
I was totally hooked. It's not only full of smart
insights and great advice, that also touches on a question
that's close to my heart. How happy can happiness experts
really be? As someone who runs a lab on happiness
at Harvard and teaches about it to companies and leaders
all over the place, someone who doesn't know you might
assume that you are, by nature a very happy person,

(01:59):
that happiness comes easy to you.

Speaker 2 (02:01):
Is that the case? It is not? And you know
happiness is funny. You've been in the happiness business for
a long time, and you and I both know most
of the practitioners of happiness science, as it were. They're
not desperate, they're not dark necessarily, but happiness is a
bit of a struggle for them, and what they figured
out is as social scientists, they can turn their toolkit

(02:22):
on themselves. And that's certainly the case for me. We
know based on the research that about half of your
baseline mood from day to day, good and bad, positive
and negative, it's genetic, and I have gloomy genetics. I
have on both sides of my family, got a lot
of gloomy people. And I figured out along the way,
after I really got interested in this topic, that I

(02:43):
was interested in it because I wanted more of it.
The problem was I was treating it as if it
were something I could observe but not affect through my habits.
And I said, well, that doesn't make sense. This is
supposed to be a hands on science. You were supposed
to be able to help people with psychology and behavioral
economics and change their behavior. Professor teach thyself, I said
to myself in the mirror one day, and Lauria, it worked.

Speaker 1 (03:05):
I need some help on this insight from your wife.
I think that she was one of the people who
pointed out this importance of applying this to yourself, right,
I mean.

Speaker 2 (03:12):
She pointed out the irony that I was a gloomy
happiness expert. I mean, come on, I was talking about
happiness because it was so incredibly interesting, and I was
hearing back from people that would read whatever I'd written
saying it was very helpful. But I wasn't actually trying
not only to use it for myself, I wasn't actually
talking about the applications of it. And part of the
reason is because you and I are trained as academics,

(03:34):
and academic papers don't have a section called how to
use this in your life. On the contrary, that would
get an automatic rejection from an academic journal. It would
be stripped out by the editors. But that's really what
people need, isn't it. And my wife was the one
who pointed out that I was doing work that could
be useful, but wasn't I think her words were, don't
you have a PhD for a reason? And she was

(03:56):
right and it changed my life.

Speaker 1 (03:57):
And one of those changes was really like writing down
what you wanted to do. I love this idea that
you wrote yourself a mission statement when you came to
this work. What was in the mission statement?

Speaker 2 (04:06):
The mission statement was I had a lot of different interactions,
but they all came down to the following. I was
in my mid fifties at the time, I had, I
don't know, twenty good years left in my career. Academics
tend to work fill they're pretty old. And I was
going to spend the rest of my life lifting people
up and bringing them together in bonds of happiness and love,
using science and ideas full stop. And I started doing it.

(04:28):
And I'm telling you, I'm telling you, Laurie, it's amazing
because when I basically did three things, I had learned
that you need to understand, you need to change your habits,
and you need to teach it to others. And so
that's really what I did. I'd been really good at
learning the science, but I had not been so good
at changing habits for myself or others, and I'd not
taught it. And so I did those three things in sequence,

(04:49):
and the gears started to turn in my life and
I started to really have a big impact in the
lives of other people, which was what I wanted.

Speaker 1 (04:56):
And You've had lots of amazing partners in that impact
on other people. I know you've done work with the
Dalai Lama and all kinds of like academics in the
field of happiness science, but most recently, you've been able
to connect with, as you put it, the Queen herself,
win Free. I'm so curious how did that first meet?

Speaker 2 (05:11):
And go?

Speaker 1 (05:12):
Like? Did you just get a call and the caller
idea said Oprah Winfree, Like, how did that work?

Speaker 2 (05:16):
Yeah? Hi, this is Oprah Winfrey And I said, yeah,
and I'm Batman. You know who's spoofing me today? It
wasn't exactly like that, because you know, there's lots of
layers of communication, and so it turns out that she
reads my column in the Atlantic, and my column in
the Atlantic was an effort to bring the best ideas
in academia, including yours, to these massive audiences of people
that ordinarily wouldn't read academic journal articles. It's the same

(05:38):
kind of mission as the Happiness Lab, which is to
not popularize, but to make accessible these ideas to people
because they're so critically important. This is something you've dedicated
yourself to as well. And I don't know who reads
the Atlantic column. You know, it could be anybody. Turns
out one of them was Oprah. During the lockdowns for
the coronavirus epidemic, she was at her house in Monticito, California,
and she wasn't really leaving the property. So she was

(06:00):
reading a lot and learning a lot and using the
opportunity to, you know, get interested in new things. And
one of those things happened to be the call. And
so when my last book came out, which was called
from Strength to Strength, about how to build a life
that made you happier as years went by. It was
a strategic plan for people in the second effort their lives,
because we need a happiness plan for the rest of us.

(06:21):
She read that and called up and said, I want
you to come on my book club podcast. She has
this thing called super Soul, which is a very good
podcast where she reads a book and boy does she
ever read the book. I mean she was quoting to
me from my book by memory. She's that good. And
we had a long conversation. It was like a house
on fire. It turns out that she and I have
a very similar mission about trying to lift people up

(06:43):
and bring them together. That's what she wants. But she's
been in a different world than me, and so after
that we said, wow, this is a synchronicity. We did
a couple of other things together on the internet, and
finally she said, you know, if I had my show still,
she said, I would have had you on the show
twenty or thirty times, and that would have introduced you
to the American public. Why don't we do something like
that in the form of a book. I said, let
me think yes, because it's great, and I got an

(07:05):
opportunity to work with her, and so I went out
and I spent some time in her place and we
cooked it up in person, just really, you know, this
chapter should do this, and here's the big challenge. And
it's interesting because her input to it was so critical
for focusing what I was trying to get at. There
were some critical moments when she made the book real
by saying this is the wrong question or this is

(07:27):
the wrong title. Is really really, really valuable. And then
we went away and we independently worked on it and
setting chapters back and forth, and now it's coming true.

Speaker 1 (07:34):
I absolutely love the book, and this is you know,
I think a lot about how we can translate you know,
so many different findings and so many different insights, and
you both have just done it in such an elegant way,
in such a suggest of a way.

Speaker 2 (07:46):
By the way, I just have to tell you, Lorie
Santos loves my book. You realize how much that means
to me. I mean, you're, I mean you're, you're you're
such a big figure in this field. I mean, you're
you're so inflecting in the way that this field has gone.

Speaker 1 (07:59):
I just I'm showing Arthur the book, and you can
see he can see that it's got like all these
post it notes stuck in of like different notes about
oh that was such a cool point about humor and
Saint Augustine and all this. So you should get it.

Speaker 2 (08:14):
Yeah, you're made. Thank Thank you, Laurie. I really really
appreciate that a lot, because your work has meant so
much to me.

Speaker 1 (08:20):
Dido. But I mean so one of the big premises
of the book that I absolutely adored is this idea
that happiness is not a destination, it's a direction. It's
not a state of being, it's a state of doing.
What do you mean with that?

Speaker 2 (08:31):
You know, everybody, when you ask them what do you
want to say? I want to be happy and a
Socrates says, and St. Augustine says the same thing. You
know is he says without proof because it's so obvious
that everybody wants to be happy. But actually that's craziness
because happiness is a destination is completely unattainable. And you've
said this in your show, and you've said this in
your research for so long, that we need on happiness

(08:53):
in our lives to stay alive. By the way, I
mean that you know the work on emotions that you've
contributed to and that so many of my colleagues here
at Harvard have as well, on the science of emotion,
that negative emotions keep you alive, sadness discussed, anger, grief,
these emotions, these basic emotions, we need them or will die.
And if we have these things, we can't have pure
and unremitting happiness. So it's the wrong goal. It's a

(09:14):
goal that we can't attain. It's El Dorado, the city
of gold in South America that the Spaniards died keep
trying to find because it didn't actually exist, and so
understanding that is important. Look, you want to direct yourself
toward happiness, understand what it might mean. Understanding also that
you can't attain it in this life. But in pursuing
this goal, you're going to get what you really wanted

(09:36):
all along, which is to get happier. Oprah really nailed
this point down. We were talking about it. She said, So
you're saying, she calls me, professor, professor, that the point
is not happiness. The point is happierness. That's the directionality
of the best life is happierness. This is really what
we want. And I'm telling you because I know that.

(09:58):
But it pointed out this critical truism to me that
helped me understand my own research. It helped me understand
what I was trying to do with my own life,
and it started to make me personally, or the course
of writing this book, more comfortable with my own misery
because in that happiness, I can use that unhappiness. I
can grow and learn from that unhappiness and have it

(10:20):
be part of my happierness.

Speaker 1 (10:21):
So in this journey towards happierness, you also make the
point that we need to get the coordinates right, which
is tricky because we need to know what happiness or
happierness really is. And so give me your definition of happiness,
what are the different parts.

Speaker 2 (10:33):
There are a lot of definitions of happiness that have
come up in the social science literature, and you know
that's disconcerting to a lot of people. As if we
somehow disagreed across the field, and that's not true. I
was trained as an economist.

Speaker 1 (10:44):
We'll forgive you.

Speaker 2 (10:45):
Yeah, I know that. I've tried to, you know, make
my way over to the psychology world along the way.
You know, for example, economists you say, what's money. I mean,
it's the currency of everything that we're doing, sort of
like happiness is the currency of how we're trying to
build our lives. And economists will say it's a medium
of exchange. No, no, no, no, it's a store of value.
Those are both true, and it depends on what you're
actually trying to get at. And so if you look

(11:06):
at the science of happiness just to descriptively understand what
the experience of happiness is, it's one thing. But if
you're trying to build a definition of happiness that helps
people put together a game plan for how to get happier,
that's a different thing. And that's usually how I come
at it, because I'm trying to do something that people
can use to build their lives. Aka the title of
the book, how to Build the Life you Want. So

(11:26):
I think about happiness in terms of the three macro
nutrients of it and again, this is completely compatible with
all the more traditional psychological definitions of happiness. So the
free macronutrients are sort of the protein, carbohydrates and fat
of happiness, which you need and balance and abundance to
score high on the happiness indicies. And again there's a
ton of psychometrically valid ways to measure well being that

(11:48):
you and I have worked on over the course of
our careers. There are a lot of bad ways to
do it too, but there are a lot of good ways,
and you find the people who score high they're balanced
and abundant in three dimensions enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. You
need to enjoy your life, which by the way, is
not straightforward, not the same thing as pleasure. You need
to have satisfaction, which is really paradoxical because it's you know,

(12:09):
Mick Jaggers saying I can't get it. The truth is
you can get it, you can't keep it, which is
a real problem. And last, but not least, there's meaning.
And meaning is just completely full of sadness and difficulty
and sacrifice. And so the result is ironically that it
requires a lot of unhappiness, and that so each one
of those macronutrients takes a game plan, as it turns out,
and that's a lot of what we write about the

(12:30):
book how to get it and then how to embrace
the inevitable unhappiness that comes along with it, so that
you can have happiereness along the way.

Speaker 1 (12:38):
And so there's this interesting irony with these three parts
of happiness, which is that you know, I think we
often assume that we'd get to happieriness by things going
our way, everything going smoothly, amy avoiding any potential suffering
or problems. But in each of those three ingredients, the
research seems to show that those parts of happiness come
because of this suffering, not in spite of it. And

(12:58):
this fits with this general idea that happiness takes work,
it takes kind of effort, but it also takes problems
and challenges. You talk about some of these different aspects
of happiness and how the suffering.

Speaker 2 (13:09):
Yeah, sure, and I know that this is something you
talk a lot about in your famous class at Yale.
You don't just help people not suffer, you help them
to put their inevitable human suffering in context, which is
one of the reasons that people love the class. So
much because it finally rings true. It's not just some
internet hack, you know, It's really about how to be
fully alive. As you know, when I look at your
syllabus and I've listened to the way that you lecture,
it's like this is a fully alive class with Marie

(13:31):
Santos at Yale and people like finally somebody who understands
that I'm a human, breathing being and there's nothing defective
about me because I'm sad today, and this really is
part of how happierness works. The first is enjoyment. The
biggest problem that people have with enjoying their lives is
that they mistake enjoyment with pleasure. People who pursue pleasure
but not enjoyment, they never get happier. Pleasure is actually,

(13:54):
you know, itself, not a component of happiness, and pursuing
pleasure per se leads to addiction and usually misery. There's
never been anybody I've ever talked to or heard of
who says, my happiness secret is methamphetamine. Uh, you know,
and almost anything that you pursue for the pleasure of
that will lead you in the wrong direction. Here's sort
of the way of thinking about it. Which is that
enjoyment starts with pleasure, but it adds sociability and memory,

(14:18):
it adds people in memory or communion with others, and consciousness.
And there's a bunch of neuroscience behind this. You need
to have a pleasurable experience, but you need to be
able to remember it, and you need to be able
to share it with other people, and then it becomes
this enjoyment that involves higher parts of your brain. Is
the way that it works. So here's kind of the
rule of thumb that I talk about. If there's something

(14:39):
that gives you a lot of pleasure and you're doing
it over and over again alone, you're on the wrong track.
Now I realized there's certain things that you do alone,
but a loneness actually is a problem with a lot
of these pleasure based activities. And you know, there's a
reason that Anheuser Bush doesn't do beer ads showing some
guy pounding a twelve pack alone in his apartment. Why
because they know that that's pleasure that doesn't lead to happiness.

(15:02):
They show a bunch of people with their family and
friends crack and open a cold Budweiser and having a
big drink and having a nice time together in making
a memory, because that leads to enjoyment, and enjoyment leads
to happiness, and they want to be a happiness company,
and that's great. The same thing is true with almost
anything that we do. If you're alone in Vegas at
three am in front of a slot machine and nobody

(15:23):
knows where you are, you're probably not pursuing a happiness strategy.
And it's the same set of principles as the way
that works.

Speaker 1 (15:30):
Out, and things get worse in terms of the kind
of stresses you need to build in. When we're talking
about satisfaction, right, we tend not to really be satisfied
with stuff that's super easy.

Speaker 2 (15:38):
Yeah, I know. I mean you talk so compellingly about
the hedonic treadmill. I've heard you talk about it, and
the way that I really understood it was like looking
at your stuff and listening to you, actually, because it's
so clear the way you talk about it. So, first,
what is satisfaction. Satisfaction is really the joy you get
if you work for something. So if you don't have
to work for something, there's really no satisfaction. If one
of my graduate students cheats to get an A in

(15:59):
my class, there's no satisfaction with the A. But if
they stay up all night, even though the A is trivial,
nobody cares. But if they work hard for it, they
get a lot of satisfaction from it. Problem is that
that satisfaction doesn't stay around because we have a natural
human tendency toward what neuroscientists call homeostasis. Homeostasis is anybody
who listens to the Happiness Lab knows is that nothing lasts,

(16:21):
none of your emotions last, and all of your biological
processes always return to equilibrium. So, for example, you can't
stay angry that long, you can't stay sad, you can't
stay happy, you can't stay joyful. Your moods they change
because your moods are signals to you that something is
happening that you should react to. So you don't want
somebody to stay in a particular mood because they won't

(16:42):
be ready for the next That are circumstances. People misunderstand emotions,
people think of them as nice to have or wish
could avoid all these other ones. No, no, no, no. This
is the machine language of life that translates what's going
on around you into how you should react. And it's
the universal language. It doesn't matter where you're from or
what language you speak. We all have these same emotions,

(17:02):
so we should be really really grateful for them. We're
always chasing the good ones. They don't last, so we
can be ready for the that are circumstances. Mother nature
tricks us into thinking that if we get that nice emotion,
we will keep it forever. I mean, mother nature lies
to us a lot, you know. Mother nature says you
can keep that satisfaction. You'll love that watch forever, that

(17:23):
car forever, that house forever, that relationship forever. And then
when you don't have it, you conclude that you needed more,
and so you run and run and run, and that's
your hedonic treadmill, which of course is a metaphor running
to get the feeling, running to get the feeling again
and again and again. That's the problem, and that's a
really painful thing that we have to come to terms

(17:43):
with that we can't just have more and suddenly be
permanently satisfied. And it makes life feel like a real tyranny.
But it gives you a whole lot of learning and
growth if you have a real life strategy for how
to deal with it and a balance an abundant.

Speaker 1 (17:57):
Way, and the same kind of struggle that we need
is true for purpose.

Speaker 2 (18:01):
For sure too right, for sure? You know the question
that's almost a cliche, you know, what's the meaning of life?
You go to the cave and the Himalayas and the
Guru in there, and you sit at his feet and say,
your holiness, what's the meaning of life? You know, there's
a million jokes kind of around that, But the truth
of the matter is that's the wrong question because it's
too general. Philosophers and even some psychologists that you and

(18:22):
are familiar with, have broken the meaning question into three parts.
We call them coherence, purpose, and significance. So coherence is
the question why do things happen the way they do?
The purpose question is what am I trying to do
with my life? What's the arc of my life? Was
the goal of my life? And significance is why does
it matter that I'm alive? And you need answers to

(18:43):
those questions. I've actually found that there's a kind of
a two question diagnostic. I can ask my students or
anybody that they need answers to. If they don't have answers,
then they have a meaning crisis. Question number one, why
are you alive? Question number two for what would you
be willing to die today? And it is extraordinary how
many people can't honestly answer that question to their own satisfaction.

(19:05):
I mean, some people will give you answers that are plausible,
but they don't actually believe them. See this with a
lot of young adults that one of the biggest problems
that they have is they can't answer those questions, which
is signaling blinking lights on the seven forty seven dashboard
of happiness, of coherence, purpose and significance. Is they can't
answer those two questions, why am I alive? And for
what am I willing to die? I remember with my

(19:25):
own kids, I mean, I have adult kids, and it's
super fun for them to, you know, be the children
of the social scientists. As you can imagine. Becau said,
Dad's working on a book. He's asking a lot of.

Speaker 1 (19:33):
The two questions.

Speaker 2 (19:33):
Again, Dad, Yeah, no, for sure. But you know, my
middle son, it was really hard for him. I mean
he was a cut up and you know, the most
popular kid in high school, but he wasn't actually happy
and it was really a meaning crisis for him. And
I remember asking those questions like I don't know dad,
and when it was time for him to go to college.
This is where the rubber hits the road, you know,
this is where you can use this to help people

(19:56):
you love. I said, you shouldn't go to and this
is hard for me. I'm a college professor. You shouldn't
go to college until you have some answers to these questions.
How are you going to find the answers to these questions?
And he thought about it, and he said, he's a
big canet boy. You know, he's a big, hard working, strong,
handsome he's six foot four. And he said, I want
to go work with my hands by myself. And he

(20:17):
became a dry land wheat farmer for two seasons. It's amazing,
you know. He was digging rocks out of the soil
and building fences and cutting down trees and spending long
days by himself. And then he joined the Marine Corps,
which was a hard thing to do. And boy, they
ever test you. And he became not just a marine,
he became a Special Forces Marine. He's a scout sniper
in the Marine Corps, which is scary for me and
his mom, I can tell you, but he's got answers. Now.

(20:38):
He found the answers six years later after graduating from
high school. If you ask him, I'll say his name
is Carlos. I say, Carlos, why are you alive? And
he says, because God made me. I say, Carlos, for
what would you be willing to die today? Immediate? He says,
my faith, my family, my friends in the United States
of America, mic drop very solid. They might not be

(20:59):
the answers of every single listener to the Happiness Lab,
but they're his answers. And that's the point. That's how
we actually find the answers. And he found those answers
through pain. I'm telling you you're becoming a Scout sniper
and Marine Corps intails lots of broken bones, lots of
pain and a lot of fear too, and that's how
we find it. That's one of the examples about unhappiness
is key to our happierness.

Speaker 1 (21:19):
And the other way that our got mind gets happierness.

Speaker 2 (21:22):
Wrong.

Speaker 1 (21:22):
Isn't just that we kind of neglect the importance of
some of these painful moments, you know, in terms of
seeking purpose and things like that. We also are really
evlusionarily drawn to some of the bad stuff. We kind
of have this bias to finding suffering and bad things
all around us. Talk about why we're wired to have
this not so good outlook on life.

Speaker 2 (21:39):
Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of work that's been
done in our fields about, for example, negativity bias, and
negatativity bias is basically, pay more attention to the bad
than the good because the good is nice to have,
but the bad can kill you. So there's a very
strong evolutionary argument about why we would be sort of,
you know, negatrons. As my kids will like to say,
you know somebody who's always being super negative all the time,
But five hundred thousand years ago on the placeiscene, you know,

(22:01):
you're looking around. A face that's smiling sweetly at you
is nice to have, but a face that's frowning at
you if you ignore it might be the death of you.
It makes a lot of sense for you to be
more tuned. You know. Some people believe to have more
brain space dedicated to negative emotion than positive emotions, and
neuroscientists disagree on all this, because neuroscientists disagree on absolutely everything,

(22:22):
and a lot of them actually believe that we were
built to feel the pain, because the pain actually keeps
us alive so that we can survive and pass on
our genes and fight another day. Now, interestingly, we tend
to look in the rearview mirror more positively than negatively,
which is called fading affect bias. And so what happens
is that when something bad is happening to you, and
this is one of the exercises that I ask my
students to do. They have this negativity journal that they

(22:45):
keep and when something bad happens, which is inevitable. I mean,
you're twenty eight years old. Somebody's going to break your
heart today, and then somebody's going to disappoint you tomorrow,
and you're going to get a be on an exam
and it's going to bum you out or something. And
every time that happens, you open your journal and you
write it down, and then you leave two lines under it.
The first line you have an alarm on your phone
that comes up after one month, and you go back

(23:06):
and you have to write down what you learned from
that one month later, and then six months later you
have to come back and say, actually, a good thing
that happened because of that. Why Because you need to
be more alert to fading affect bias, and you need
to put your negativity bias in context. It doesn't need
to get rid of your negativity bias. It means you
need to understand your negativity bias. And it's amazing. When

(23:29):
people do this, they start to feel that they start
to grow as people enormously. They start to look forward
to putting entries in their negativity journal because they get
to look back at the last one and look back
at the last one and say, yeah, yeah, you know.
It's like, my boss gave me a really really bad
evaluation and I thought I was doing a good job,
but I got a bad evaluation and it was horrible.
And then what I learned a month later, I learned

(23:49):
that I only felt bad about it for three days,
even though I thought I was going to feel bad
about it for five months. And then six months later
what happened. It suggested to me maybe I was working
in the wrong place, and I went on the market
and I found another job and I'm happier there. And
if you don't write that down, you're not going to remember.
The fading affect bias will teach you something potentially, but
it won't enhance your happierness, which is really important.

Speaker 1 (24:10):
We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be
back with Arthur Brooks and more of his tips to
build the Life you Want. In just a moment before
the break, happiness expert Arthur Brooks was explaining how keeping
a journal can help us put our feelings into perspective.

(24:30):
A bad grade or breakup might bring heartbreak in January,
but when we look back from June, it's just not
so bad. That's advice we can all learn from. But
in the new book he wrote with Oprah, Build the
Life you Want, The Art and Science of Getting Happier,
Arthur makes it clear that we shouldn't fear being scared, disappointed,
or sad.

Speaker 2 (24:47):
It's very important once again for us always to remember
that emotions are not just nice to have it bad
to have. These are not luxuries and just a pain.
These are the things that are literally keeping us alive.
I mean, back in the nineteen eighties, you know people
my age, I'm ten years older than you and say
you want you're not going to remember this, but back
in the nineteen eighties, or the show called Cosmos that
we all knew about, We're Carl Sagan. He would talk about,

(25:09):
you know, astronomy and you know, the mysteries of outer space,
but sometimes you would talk about the mysteries right here,
and sometimes you talk about the brain. He used the
old triune brain theory of Paul McClain, of neuroscientists from
the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties who tried to explain
the human brain. It's funny because you know, our colleague
here at Harvard, Josh Green, says, it's actually okay. It's

(25:31):
still okay to describe the human brain and the triune brain.
It's not as simple as this. But basically, the brain
does three things. It has these ancient functions which sometimes
they call the you know, the lizard brain, which is,
you know, the brain stem and the parts of the
brain that are ascertaining things going on outside us. You know,
you're not conscious of it, but as sending signals that
you can breathe without thinking, you can walk up right

(25:52):
without having to think about it, right a bicycle, if
you've learned how to do so, et cetera. Then the
second part of your brain that that first part sends
signals to about the outside world is the limbic system.
This is inside a sort of deep buried inside your brain.
It includes things like the amygdala and the dorsal anterior
singular cortex and the nucleus accumbent and all these parts
of the brain. And whether they do they create your

(26:12):
desires and your feelings and your emotions. Why are they
doing that so that they can send that signal to
your brand new part of your brain, the crinkly part
on the outside called the neocortex, especially the prefrontal cortex,
the bumper of tissue behind your forehead, And then you
can decide what to do consciously, but you need the signals.
You got to have that language. And that's really what

(26:32):
emotions are all about. The negative emotions in particular, their
alarms go do something, and they're all evolved for an
incredible purpose. Anger and fear is because there's a real
threat to you. It might be a threat to your
well being. Now that's maladapted. When somebody points a gun
at you, it makes you feel a particular way, and
you might feel the same way when you get somebody
writes something mean about you on Twitter or x or

(26:54):
whatever we call it right now, And that's a maladapted
modern version of that. That you need to manage, but
you can't manage it till you understand it. Discussed is
a basic negative emotion that's actually a part of the
brain called the insula or the insular cortex that governs discussed.
The idea is that you should feel discussed for something
that's a pathogen might kill you. You need that. The

(27:15):
problem is when that's maladapted in modern life, when people
use it to make you feel disgusted about people who
disagree with you politically, and that's what populist, polarizing politicians
do all the time. But that's really important because once
we're aware that polarizing politicians are trying to stimulate our
insular cortex to feel discussed toward fellow human beings, they
can't do it anymore. They don't have power over us anymore,

(27:36):
which is really important. And last, but not least, there's sadness.
And sadness is really important because you feel it incredibly painful.
It actually stimulates the anterior singular cortex of your brain,
almost like physical pain, especially when you're separated from a
loved one. And the reason is because you're evolved and
not be separated from your kin. Half a million years
ago that would mean walking the frozen tundra and dying alone.

(27:57):
Is the way that that works. All of this stuff
has evolved, all of it is useful, but when you
understand it, this is when it gets exciting because it
won't be maladapted. Then you can actually manage the versions
of these negative emotions not appropriate. You can say, ah,
Arthur is feeling discussed toward a person because he read
something on social media. No no, no, no, no no, I'm
not following for that anymore.

Speaker 1 (28:18):
And you've also argued that once we understand how negative
emotions work, we can kind of swap them out for
something healthier. Use this caffeine metaphor, which I love being
a coffee drinker, having brought my coffee in it four
o'clock today.

Speaker 2 (28:30):
Yeah yeah, yeah, no, no, that's true. And all emotional
self management starts with a broad suite of techniques that
a lot of psychologists and neuroscientists refer to as metacognition.
And metacognition is just awareness of your own thinking. If
you are reactive to your limbic system, your sadness, your anger,
you're discussed your fear or your joy, even your interest

(28:51):
in other things, then you're just going to react. You know,
when you have little kids and they scream when anything
bad happens, you always say the same thing to him.
You say, use your words, and what you're saying is
be metacognitive, use your prefrontal cortex, not just your limbic system.
And so people like us that have suffered through a
PhD and the social sciences, we don't talk about reactive people.
We talk about limbic people. And that's really what it means.

(29:13):
They're using their limbic systems, but not their prefrontal cortex.
It takes time, it takes awareness to use your prefrontal
cortex and choose your reaction and choose more appropriate emotions. Now,
that requires a repertoire of techniques on ourselves. That's the
beginning of emotional self management. If you recognize that if
you wait when you feel something, you can move the

(29:34):
experience into your prefrontal cortex and make conscious decisions about
your own emotions. A good way to do this is meditation.
Meditation practices where you're observing yourself with a certain remove.
Laurie is feeling sad right now, that's funny. Why is
laur feeling sad? Right? Now, which is a typical meditation technique.
I use prayer with in a traditional religious context to

(29:55):
do this where I'm basically observing myself. Other people use journaling.
Journaling is incredible because when you're writing something down, you're
using your prefrontal cortex, but you're journaling about something that
was in your limbic system, which is unbelievable. But one
way or the other. Once you do this, once your
prefrontal cortex is involved, you've got choices, and that's so
much power. So you can choose to accept the emotion

(30:18):
and choose the reaction. You can look at the emotion
and decide to substitute it with another emotion. You can
literally do this. And this is the metaphor that I
give in the book which you just referred to, is
that of caffeine. So caffeine is a substitute molecule for
one you like less. Most people think if I drink
caffeine it PEPs me up. It doesn't. It blocks a

(30:39):
molecule that makes you feel too relaxed. They get up
in the morning and there's this molecule in your brain
called a dentosine that's floating around and it has receptors
that the molecules go into. And the molecule goes into
the receptor for a dentosine, it makes you lethargic. So
what does caffeine do. Caffeine looks just like a dentosine.
It fits into the receptors. It like goes into the

(30:59):
parking spots of the a dentisine receptors, dentosine can't get in.
You actually feel like you have more energy. And if
you drink too much coffee, there's not any dentisine you
feel jit That's the way that that works, and the
same thing is true with your emotions. But you got
to know how it works. You have to have a
substitute emotion. I was talking about this with a friend
of mine, a guy who's an actor. He was in

(31:19):
a show called The Office that most people have seen,
and he played Dwight. He's a friend of mine. We
grew up together at the same time in Seattle, about
five miles apart. I didn't know when we were kids,
but we've become good friends these days. And he said, yeah,
I've got a good example of substituting emotions on purpose.
I said, what is it? He said, most comedians they
tend to suffer from depression, and when they feel sadness,
they decide to make a joke. They use humor when

(31:42):
they feel sadness, and they do it on purpose. That's
incredibly effective and incredibly metacognitive. But you've got to practice
metacognition so that you can manage your emotions and they
don't manage you.

Speaker 1 (31:53):
But in addition to swapping our emotions out, you've also
talked about a different way to get out of our
emotions altogether, and that's just to stop focusing on the
self like it's not our brand anymore. We're just not there.
You know, what do you mean here? What is getting
out of our own self focus look like?

Speaker 2 (32:07):
So there's really three choice. When you're feeling something and
you're metacognitive enough to recognize the emotion and the emotion
is uncomfortable. Now to begin with, don't numb your emotions.
Don't take the equivalent of emotional fentanyl. What we don't
want is to not feel anything. And by the way,
when people engage in many addictive behaviors drugs and alcohol,

(32:27):
but they're really numbing is not their physical pain. They're
numbing their emotions. They're trying to get rid of them.
That's a bad idea because once again we talked about
this before, you need your emotions. What you want to
do is blunt it in a lot of cases, and
there's really three ways to do this with metacognition. Number one,
choose the reaction you want notwithstanding your emotions. Number two
is substitute a different emotion, which we talked about before.

(32:49):
And number three is decide to disregard the emotion by
not focusing on yourself. And again, I mean, maybe it
sounds obvious, but it really isn't. It's kind of incredible
that even if you go to therapy along a lot
of times, what they do is they make you focus
on yourself exhaustively. And a lot of people have said,
you know, the problem with therapy is I've just I
feel like I'm getting worse obsessed with my own emotions.

(33:10):
And I say, well, that's you're learning metacognition, but you're
not using it in the right way. A lot of
times that the right solution is to decide to disregard
your own emotions and focus on what's going on outside.
And by the way, it's an incredible relief to have
this in your emotional arsenal. There's this famous Zen Buddhist colan.

(33:30):
You know, Zen Buddhism is taught to junior monk slurgly
on the basis of riddles. The's questions that the senior
monks will say. We'll ask them questions like what is
the sound of one hand clapping? And you say, well,
it doesn't have an answer, but it really it does.
One hand clapping is an illusion. It only becomes a
real sound when you add a second hand. That colan
is about is the illusion of your own individuality. You don't, actually,

(33:54):
Laurie doesn't exist in this conversation except in an interaction
with Arthur. That's how that coalan is ultimately deciphered, and
it shows the illusion of individuality, which is called emptiness
in Buddhism. Here's another coan. A junior monk is walking
along the road and he sees a senior monk coming
toward him. He stops the senior monk and he said,

(34:14):
where are you going. The senior monk says, I'm on
a pilgrimage. The junior monk is immediately interested and says,
where's your pilgrimage taking you? The senior monk says, I
don't know. He says, why don't you know? And the
senior monk says, because not knowing is the most intimate.
That's a co aan that talks about the incredible knowledge

(34:35):
that you get simply by observing and not thinking about
your own intention. This is incredibly important that we can
live this way. You can look at the Eiffel Tower
and be amazed, or you can take a selfie of
yourself in the Eiffel Tower, which really becomes a picture
of you. And we're going through life, which is pictures
of us and contemplating our emotions and who am I

(34:55):
and how am I in relation to all these things
that I'm doing? And it's just, Laurie, it's just terrible.
It's just terrible. It's tedious.

Speaker 1 (35:02):
It's the kind of thing we get wrong so often.
You know, I see so many articles about self care
and you know, treat yourself in these things, and it's
like the real way to feel better is to actually
become no self, right, to start paying attention to others or.

Speaker 2 (35:15):
Other care, other care, other care. And you talk about
this so much with your students. I mean, there's a
reason you're telling your students to go out and do
something kind for somebody else. It's not just because the
other person needs it, It's because the person who does
it needs it. They need to be the I self,
which is the observer of life, and not the me self,
which is the observed serving other people. As a way
to do this, there are other ways to do this

(35:36):
that a lot of young people need to understand as well,
which is, for example, getting rid of all the mirrors
in our life. Now that might be literal. I have
a guy that I work with, and he was the
dreaded fitness influencers, and he was a fitness model on
magazine covers but also in social media. And he never
ate anything he liked for ten years, and he had

(35:57):
single digit body fat and you're really highly visible abs.
And he said he felt horrible and unhappy, and so
he tried to figure out how to get out of it.
This guy is an adept. He's a spiritual adept. He
figured this out on his oun. I mean, I'm not
that smart. I couldn't do this. And here's how we
did it. He moved into a new apartment, he took
every mirror out of the apartment, and he showered in

(36:19):
the dark for a year, and he was cured. He
was cured because he realized it didn't matter how he
looked to himself or even how he looked to other people.
Now there's another way to do that, which is to
get rid of all your notifications on social media. Those
are nothing more than mirrors. Never take another selfie, or
at least don't take any more selfies for a month.
See how that feels. Get rid of all the mirrors

(36:39):
in our lives, because then we're looking outward and we
can enjoy life for the first time, maybe in a
long time.

Speaker 1 (36:46):
It's time for another short break, but the Happiness Lab
with Arthur Brooks will be back again in just a moment.
If we follow Arthur's advice take down all the mirrors
in our homes and stop looking at ourselves, what should
we focus our attention on instead. One option is something

(37:07):
we haven't touched on all that much on this podcast,
and it falls roughly under the title of the spiritual
or transcendental. That can mean being spell bound by a
beautiful view, an amazing piece of music, or the kind
of life changing religious experience. Arthur underwent on a school
trip decades ago.

Speaker 2 (37:24):
And I'm not a super mystical guy. I mean, I
worked at the RAND Corporation on military operations research. I mean,
this is not my ordinary terrain. But when I was
a teenager, I was on a trip to Mexico, a
school trip to Mexico, and they were trudging us through
these boring old churches. And you know, I was fifteen

(37:45):
years old. How much appreciation can I have for these
incredible monumental things. And we were at the shrine of
Go Out to Lupe in Mexico City, which is the
site of an incredible thing in the history of the
Catholic Church. So during the early years of the Spanish
occupation of Mexico and the Spanish Catholic Church was trying
to convert you know, vast numbers of indigenous peoples and
having horrible luck. I mean, nothing was happening. It was

(38:07):
and you can imagine why this is not exactly a
good sales pitch, you know, convert else and it didn't
look very welcoming. But then there's the story of an
incredible miracle actually where a peasant man by the name
of Flan Diego was outside you know what is now
downtown Mexico City and he saw an apparition of the
of the Virgin Mary, and the Virgin Mary appeared to him,

(38:28):
and this is you know, this just sounds kind of
normal to us now, but it's incredibly transgressive at the time.
She appeared to him as a woman of mixed race.
I mean, just like no way that would occur to
some Spaniard. I mean, forget about it, right, she was
appearing to Juan Diego as if she could be related
to Juan Diego, and furthermore that she was the mixture
of all of the peoples of the world. That's what

(38:50):
it is interpreted. And as the story goes, and again,
I mean, some people believe it and some people don't
believe it. She appeared to him and imprinted herself on
the tilma, you know, sort of the poncho of Plan Diego,
and he showed it to the bishop, and the bishop
didn't believe him. And you know, it goes back and
forth in these typical stories of the way that they were
and these miracles, these apparitions of the blushed Virgin Mary,
which have happened in history all around the world. The

(39:10):
tilma still exists of Juan Diego. You know, some people
say it's authentic. And you know, some people say it's
not authentic, et cetera. It's just exactly what you'd expect.
But it's sitting in the shrine of Guadalupe in Mexico City.
And I went there when I was fifteen years old,
and like, whatever, whatever is what is this thing? What
is this legend? I don't know? And I looked at
it and again, you know, I wasn't Catholic. I didn't

(39:30):
know any Catholics. And I'm staring at it, and she
was staring at me. Now to be sure, I could
be looking at Elvis on velvet and the eyes would
have followed me. I mean, that's a technique. I understand
how that worked. But it had a big impact on me.
It made me hungry for more transcendental, more mystical truths.
And so I started to read. And as a kid,

(39:53):
you know, I was just a musician. It's all I
was doing in those days. All I wanted to do
is play music and goof off. But I couldn't stop reading.
I was reading about various mystical traditions, about different religious traditions.
It just, for some reason that sparked a hunger in me.
That experience and I couldn't get it out of my mind.
I couldn't get it out of my head, and I converted.
I became a Catholic, and that experience actually still it's

(40:17):
as if it were still happening to me today. I
can still see it. And some listeners are going to
be like, Ah Brooks is full of himself, But I'm not,
because I know what I saw, and I'm not saying
that it is exactly the magical thing that I might
have interpreted it as or many Catholics. To all I
know is it sparked something in my soul, a hunger
for transcendental experiences that I got and I've only ever

(40:38):
gotten through these religious experiences and in no other way
for profound insights in my life. That led me as
a social scientists to study these transcendental experiences. And it
turns out there's a vast literature that shows that religious
and other philosophical and transcendental experiences, not just the Tilma
of Juan Diego of the Blessed Virgin Mary, I mean
in Buddhism, in Hinduism, and various religious traditions and non

(41:01):
religious traditions. Reading the Stoics, the experiences of awe, as
in walking in nature. But these things can give you
transcendental moments that will illuminate different kinds of experiences and
use parts of the brain that are typically unavailable in
any other way.

Speaker 1 (41:19):
And so we don't often think about these transcendent experiences
as being connected with happiness, but there's lots of social
science research this suggest that they really are connected with
feeling happier. So walk me through some of the evidence
that these kinds of moments of faith are really connected
with improving our well being.

Speaker 2 (41:34):
So we find that when people have these transcendental experiences,
they're much much closer to the sources of meaning in
their life. So we talked about this a minute ago.
Why am I alive? And for what am I willing
to die? My Catholic faith answers those questions. It really does, right,
and having answers to those questions is critically important. They
talk to you about the coherence of life, the purpose
of life, and the significance of life, and so providing

(41:54):
answers to that is no joke from a neuroscientific perspective.
They stimulate parts of the brain that are very hard
to access in any other way. You know, the whole
idea of accessing the periaqueductal gray of the brain. This
is implicated and deep feelings of calm, of belongingness, of
deep feelings of love that they are very hard to
find other ways. And a lot of studies that have

(42:15):
looked at both Buddhist monks and Catholic nuns, they find
that it stimulates the theta waves in the brain, which
are associated with dream sleep, giving profound insights even when
they are awake, and so you can access things that
are hard to get otherwise. And again, people differ in
whether or not the things that are happening are actually real.
I happen to think that they are. I think that
there's a realm beyond what we understand that I'm fumbling

(42:38):
with the shadows and the dark to actually find what
it is, and my Catholic faith is the best way
that I know how to do so. But I have
this deep love and appreciation, and I have these real friendships,
which is you know, for example, has led me to
work with this holiness to Dali Lama on the commonality
of the religious experiences that we both have had and
how it can impact the way that we're trying to

(42:59):
live our lives with greater compassion and greater insight.

Speaker 1 (43:01):
And this was also a big connection that you had
with Oprah herself, right, I mean this is something that
you both talk about. Is this being one of these
four pillars that have happeness has been so important for
both of you.

Speaker 2 (43:10):
Yeah, We've discussed this an awful lot. And you know,
one of the things that it really makes it relevant
in you know, our society today is that people will
often assume, even if it's unstated, that the next big
breakthrough in tech and consumer life in media is finally
going to give us the feeling that we're looking for.
It's going to finally fill that hollowness that we all feel.

(43:32):
You know, Facebook is going to connect us to other
people and make us less lonely. AI is going to
explain the answers to these questions. Things as silly as
streaming Netflix or shopping therapy are going to just make
us feel fulfilled in some way, shape or form. And
the problem with that is that everything that these techniques
and technologies bring us are answering complicated questions. They're they're

(43:55):
fulfilling complicated problems, but all the things that we really
want for that emptiness in our souls, that sense that
we don't have deep fulfillment. These are complex and adaptive
human problems. These are problems of love. It's almost as
if you know, I want a cat because cat is
alive and warm, and the world keeps giving me toasters,
and every time I say I want a cat them

(44:16):
only you know, Silicon Valley gives me this great whiz
bang toaster. I said, well, I got a toaster. It's
like there's a better toaster. I think, okay, I'll take
the toaster. But then I keep wondering what's actually wrong.
Only these transcendental approaches to life about understanding a love
of the divine, or at least trying to understand some
of the cosmic forces of the unseen of our lives
by reading Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus, or walking in nature,

(44:39):
or trying to absorb. This is what Schopenhauer talked about.
You know, Schopenhauer was an atheist, but he peop believed
we couldn't get it, We couldn't get the reality, and
the only way that you could was unusual moments of insight,
typically through music. Only then, Schopenhauer believed we could have
these transcendental moments of absolute clarity, which is the complex,
not the complicated, you know. So maybe it's studying and

(45:01):
listening to the great works of Johann Sebastian Bach, which
has been a good deal of my life. I've made
my life my living as a musician, off and on
through various parts my life, and that's what we all
need to get in touch with. And for me, religious
faith is the best, most efficacious way to do so.
And again, none of this discussion is who's right. Those
are different questions and not. Of course I have my
opinions and other people have their opinions on that as well.

(45:22):
I'm just talking about the fact that this is a
great way to get happier.

Speaker 1 (45:25):
And so even though you've self described as somebody who's
like genetically gloomy, you do seem to have your finger
on the pulse of things that are transcendent in terms
of their experiences. Right, you were a musician and this
rich religious faith. What I'm about for somebody who wants
to kind of dive into this pillar but they kind
of struggle with some of these experiences, let's talk about
how we can get started. Yeah, in your book, you
mentioned that one of the first practices is just like

(45:47):
trying to find other ways to tame the monkey mind.
Either if you're religious, maybe through a practice like prayer,
but even through something like meditation. Why is taming the
mind such an important part of these transcendent experiences.

Speaker 2 (45:58):
The problem that we have in modern life is that
we're not actually alive. There's a famous book that many
of the happiest readers will have read of they haven't
you order it today, called a Miracle of Mindfulness by
Tik nott Han, the great Vietnamese Budhist Bunk, and it
starts with this description of washing the dishes, and he says,
when you're washing the dishes, you should be fully aware

(46:21):
of washing the dishes and nothing else. Because if you're
not fully aware of washing the dishes, you aren't really
washing the dishes, and you're not really alive right now.
You're either living in the future or you're living the past.
You're either retrospective or your prospective, but you actually can't
apprehend what's going on around you. And that's a big problem.

(46:41):
The monkey mind makes it incredibly difficult, even impossible. Our
monkey minds, which is our great, big, meaty neocortex makes
it possible for us to run future scenarios, to simulate environments,
to remember the past and learn from it, and that's wonderful.
My dog Chuccho can't do that. On the other hand,
my dog Chuccho, he's alive now and he's enjoying his

(47:03):
life right now. And one of the things that metaphysical
and transcendental religious, spiritual or philosophical experience do for you
is they can make you alive right now, and that
extends your life in a very important way. You know,
our mutual friend and my colleague here at Harvard Ellen Langer,
she's arguably, you know, the first person who brought the
concept of mindfulness to big groups of people in her

(47:25):
famous book Mindfulness from decades ago, and she didn't talk
about sitting in a lotus position. She talked about sitting
on the train with your hands in your lap and
looking out the window with no devices and noticing things. Well,
it's hard to do because we're incredibly distracted. And one
of the ways to become de distracted is prayer, is worship,
is devotion, is meditation, is focusing on something that's conspiringly beautiful,

(47:52):
like a fugue of Johann sebashenbachra Sunset.

Speaker 1 (47:55):
And the Sunset really gets to another practice you suggest
in the book, which is one that I think a
lot of folks who are not as religious kind of
go towards, which is the appreciation of nature and kind
of getting out in nature. What do we know about
the evidence that nature can kind of bring us to
these trends and then experiences.

Speaker 2 (48:10):
There's sort of two ways. One is pretty well understood
psychologically and the other is still kind of mysterious. So
the first way, you know, it gets to the research
of our mutual colleague Dakar Keltner at UC Berkeley, who
does the Greater Good program, and just everything he writes
we ought to Read is just so good. And Daker
has a new book out called Awe, which is a
big best seller. It's really worth reading. And what he

(48:31):
talks about is the mysterious experience of Awe inspiring happenings
in our lives and putting ourselves purposively in front of
things that bring AWE to us. Because what that does
is it once again, it just throws you into the
I self. It just extinguishes the me self. And what
that does is that makes you alive right now and
you're looking at it. You're alive right now, and you'll
feel when you do something that inspires all whether it's

(48:53):
listening to the music that you love or watching the
sunset or really one of the best ways they do
it is to experience people in acts of kindness toward others,
which you know, this is a reason that people cry
for joy. One of the biggest reasons people cry for
joy is because they witness beauty in the behavior of
other people, which is it brings as well that will
give you these moments of transcendence because it will give

(49:15):
you relief from the future in the past. The second
with nature is not just awe and this is something
that's a I don't know. This is this literature is
hard to interpret because you know, right now we're in
social science. We're all wrapped around the axle about replicability
and data and the whole thing. I mean, it's just
so complicated. But there have been a bunch of papers
and replicated a little that suggest that contact with nature

(49:39):
it stimulates something for us neurophysiologically that we don't quite understand.
As a matter of fact, walking barefoot outside touching the soil.
It tends to give you a set of experiences that
you can't replicate in other ways, and some people have
suggested it has something to do with the biology of
what's happening electrical signals. There are a lot of hypotheses
about what it is. I don't know, but all I

(50:00):
know is it works for me. You know, walking in
nature really works for me. I started off this day
outside of Austin on the coast between Plymouth and Cape Cod,
walking on the beach for an hour as the sun
was coming up. And I'm telling you, it's just I
didn't sleep well last night and I felt really bad
when my first World Cup. But fifteen minutes into it,
I was alive. I was alive again, and I came
back fully alive and I was a new person, And

(50:22):
that really works.

Speaker 1 (50:23):
I love that story with the beach because it's not
just about finding transcendence. It's really also about kind of
finding your focus. You know, when you're kind of feeling
out of it, you can be in this sort of
like you know me self and that really you need
this kind of other focus to kind of get out
of it. And that's the spot where you really end
your books. It's not just about kind of finding transcendence.

(50:44):
Is that we all need the right focus for some
of our happiness practices, right, we need to kind of
take it in the right direction. And this is more
that it's really not all about us. Yeah, you know,
explain what the right focus is and what we really
need the.

Speaker 2 (50:55):
Right focus is. Basically, this is a secret to Laurie
and Arthur's happiness, which is that we teach happiness. This
is it. And you know I have discussed this off
Mike before, and you know I've had lunch and you say,
what's your secret happiness? Teaching it? It really is and
it might sell like, okay, so here's the secret to happiness.
Go suffer through a PhD. And then do you know
twenty years of research, doing animal studies or in my case,

(51:15):
doing public policy, running a thinking whatever, no, no, learn,
practice share. That's the algorithm, the I self algorithm. But
it's the happiness algorithm. Why because we know that you'll
really remember what you learn if you teach it to
other people, you'll practice it if you're recommending it to
other people. I mean, it's just I don't know rie
I've been I've been teaching this for four years at

(51:37):
Harvard now, and I put my students, as you do,
through a battery of self tests on their values and
then their mood and their personality, but also their happiness
and measured in different ways, largely from the tests that
come from our mutual friends Sonya Lubomirski out at cal Riverside.
And they're really good tests, and if you take them sincerely,
you're going to know a lot about yourself. And so
I take them every semester because I'm teaching it to

(51:59):
my students. Then kind of want to see my progress.
And my happiness has kind of by sixty percent since
I've been teaching this, and since I've been doing more
and writing more about this, and since I can talk
about it with people like you. It's really the secret
of happiness, and so everybody can do that. How learn more,
change your habits, pass it on. When you're doing that,

(52:19):
you're in the process of the lifelong process of happierness.
It works for Laurie, it looks for Arthur, and it's
going to work for everybody listening to us.

Speaker 1 (52:27):
And it's one of the reasons that everyone out there
should right now not just go out and buy Arthur
and Oprah's new book, but they should share it with
other people, read it, dog ear it, and then give
it away to someone else. Thank you so much for Thank.

Speaker 2 (52:39):
You, Laurie, thank you for your work. You've enriched my
life a lot with your research, with your show, and
now with your friendship.

Speaker 1 (52:46):
Did out if you want even more of Arthur and
Oprah's ideas on how to pursue greater happierness. I can't
recommend their book enough. It's called Build the Life you Want,
The Art and Science of Getting Happier, and it's out
for you to buy right now. I hope you enjoyed
the special show, and I really do hope you'll make
a date to join me, Big Bird, Grover, and Abi

(53:06):
Kadabbi when The Happiness Lab returns on September. Rating.

Speaker 2 (53:10):
This is going to be so magical. Mhm