Transcript of Arthur Brooks: Unlock Lasting Happiness With These Science-Backed Strategies | Mental Health | YAPClassic New

Yap fam, some people chase happiness like it's a finish line. Hit the goal, buy the thing, get the title, and still feel weirdly empty. That's why we're bringing back a YAP classic that cuts through the hype and gets to the real science of what actually makes life feel good. Arthur Brooks is a Harvard professor, best-selling author, and the Atlantic's happiness columnist. And today, he joins us with powerful insights from his book, Build a Life You Want, co-written with Oprah Winfrey. In the conversation, Arthur breaks down the three components of happiness, enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning, as well as the four pillars that truly support a fulfilling life, faith, family, friends, and work that serves something bigger than yourself. If you're ready to build a life that feels rich on the inside, then this is a must listen. Yeah, fam, let's open the vault and dive into my conversation with Arthur Brooks.

Hey, Arthur. Welcome to Young and Profiting podcast.

Thank you, Hall. It's great to be back with you again.

Yeah, I'm super excited for this conversation. You are one of my favorite episodes and conversations from last year. I brought up your name in so many different episodes talking about fluid intelligence and crystallized intelligence. That was one of my favorite learnings of last year, so I'm incredibly happy to have you back. When I was doing research, I found out that you you're not naturally a happy person. You actually say that naturally you're anxious and gloomy. You actually started looking into happiness to solve your own problem. Can you talk to us about how you first got interested in the work of happiness.

Yeah, sure. Absolutely. Thanks, Paula. I appreciate that. I'm a college professor. I'm a social scientist. I study human behavior. My PhD is in behavioral economics, and I always applied it toward public policies and how to design systems that had good incentives and all that stuff. But somewhere along the way, over the past 30 years, I realized that I'm missing the boat. I read all this work on human happiness, but why don't I actually put a strategy together using my expertise so I can actually become a happier person? The truth is that I always thought of happiness as something you observe, like astronomy. You study the stars, but you can't affect the stars. But happiness really isn't like that. The truth of the matter is there's a ton of neuroscience and There's a lot of social science and a lot of evidence out there that shows that if you have some knowledge and if you change your habits, you can actually get happier as a person. So I thought, huh? It shouldn't have taken me this long. But what I did was, I was, some years ago, I was a CEO of a big nonprofit organization in Washington, DC, and I wasn't very happy.

And I thought, you know what? I'm going to throw all my intellect at this thing. I'm going to see if I can actually become a happier person. So I left my job. I quit my job. I moved back to the university. I took a job. I teach happiness at Harvard University, and I apply all these things to my life, and I write about it every single week in the Atlantic that says, Here's how you can use science to become a happier person. You know what? I'm 60% happier than I was five years ago. It actually works.

Wow, I love that. And so like you mentioned, you changed your career at 55 years old to focus on this work of happiness and to learn more about it and teach other people how to be happy. Talk to us about some of the work that you've done and the research that you've done in this are you so far.

Yeah. So early in my career, I mean, I've done a lot of different things. And one of the things that this is a much younger audience, a lot of people who are real strivers starting out in their careers, and they want to be really successful. One of the things that a lot of young people find, and I teach this in my happiness class at the Harvard Business School, is a lot of people think that their career is just going to be this straight line going up. But a lot of people are actually more of a spiral pattern people, which is to say that they're going to be happiest if they have a set of mini careers. That's certainly the case with me. A lot of people figure that out too late. So I've had four different 10-year careers is really what it comes down to. I was a musician for a decade, a professional classical musician, most of it in Barcelona, in the symphony in Barcelona. Then I went away and got my education, got my PhD, and I was a college professor for 10 years. And then I left all that behind. I was a CEO for 10 years.

And so now I get this 10 years where I can actually write, speak, and teach, do research on the science of happiness. This is a 10-year block. Who knows? Maybe longer than that. So what I do in is I teach a class. I teach classes on happiness at Harvard. I write an article every week. I write a column on the science of happiness at the Atlantic for about 500,000 people. I do about 175 speeches a year all over the country speaking about the science of happiness. And then I write a book every two years on some big new topic in happiness. Last time you and I talked, I'd written about how to get happier as you get older. And now I've got this book coming out about how you can actually build a happy life on fundamental pillars of what the science says are the pillars of true happiness. So that's how I structure my work. And the best part, Hala, is that the mission is I want to lift people up and bring them together using public education about love and happiness. And that makes me plenty happy.

I love that. I love this concept of, I think you call it a spiral career that you just mentioned. There's a method to the madness. You're not just picking a random career. Can you talk to us about how you're actually leveraging skills from your past experiences for this new endeavor? It's not like you're just totally starting from scratch, right?

Yeah, for sure. The best way to think about this, and this is what I teach my students, is that there are four kinds of career patterns. The linear career pattern is you get out of school, you get a job, you only quit that job when you get a better job. That better job uses all the skills that you have and you go up in a stair-step fashion for the rest of your career. That's what strivers do. However, the other three career patterns, one is called the expert career pattern, where you're not going up like a rocket. You're going up little by little by Why? Because you want a job that can support your hobbies and your relationships, and you want a lot of security. That was my dad. My dad was a college professor. He was at the same college for 40 years. And just little by little by little, he maybe got a one or two % salary increase every year, but he was super secure, and he knew what was going to happen. That's the second pattern. The third pattern is called the transitory. And that's what everybody's parents, all of our viewers and listeners, are worried.

Their parents are worried because when they change jobs, it's lifestyle jobs. I'm going to work as a waiter in Tucson and then a mover in North Carolina. And then I think I'm going to, who knows? Then I'm going to go work for the Forest Service for a little while. And it's just because I want to see different things or maybe I met a girl or whatever that's going to make me move someplace. Those are lifestyle jobs. That's not people watching Young & Profiting. The real big bulk of the audience that people don't really know about, they think they're linear, but they're not happy on this drive upwards, this spiral career where all of your skills actually build into the next flight of fancy, your next career, where you're going to do something big. Now, this might mean that sometimes you take less money. It might mean that for 10 years, you step back and you work part-time while you raise your kids, and then you go back into a new career when you come out of it. But you build the career. And here's the spiral lifestyle. Your life is your startup. Your company is not a startup.

Your life is a startup. And if you have a company, it's an extension of the enterprise of you. And you got to think about your life creatively and dynamically and build it the way that you want to build it. That's the spiral life.

I love that. I think I fit into that category. And I know that work has a lot to do with happiness. We'll talk about that in a bit. But first, let's learn about why you wrote this new book, and that's co-authored by Oprah Winfrey. And I'm a huge, huge fan of her. So how did you meet Oprah? How did she find out about your work? And how did you end up writing this book together?

Yeah. So Oprah Winfrey and I have been working together for more than a year at this point. And the reason is because she reads my column, The Atlantic. There's half a million people reading it, so you don't never know who's reading your column. During the coronavirus lockdown, she was locked down like everybody else, and she got really interested in the science of happiness and started reading my column pretty carefully every single week. Then the last book came out, which you and I talked about about a year ago, From strength to strength, about building a life where you get happier and happier and happier as you get older. She read that in the first couple of days it was published. She called and she said, I have a... I mean, she She had her podcast team call... Anyway, it's not like she called them and said, This is Oprah Winfrey. I'm like, Yeah, and I'm Batman. It's not like that. She called and asked me to come on her podcast, Super Soul, which talks about books. She's a huge reader. I went on her podcast, we talked about the book, and then I went on a web show that she's got through Oprah Daily.

We were like a house on fire. We see the world in the same way. Our careers are here to lift people up and bring them together. And neither one of us is a kid, and we actually know what we want to do with our lives, and we're doing it just from different ways. Her in mass media and me in this more academic world of science and ideas. We got together socially a couple of times, and finally, she came up with the idea, Why don't we get this material, What Should Teach in your Class at Harvard, in front of millions of people? Millions of people who can realize that they can build the life they want with knowledge and changes in their habits. We wrote it over the past nine months or so. What a thrill. Passing chapters back and forth. She came up with a title. We made a bunch of changes along the way, and we read it in the studio. So anybody who wants to get this thing on audio, Oprah and I will read you to sleep with it.

Oh, my God, I love it. I didn't realize that Oprah is part of the audiobook. That's awesome.

Oh, yeah. We read our parts of the book for sure, and we go back and forth on it. She introduces things, and we intersperse our... It's really super fun.

That's awesome. And who's the book written for? Who's the target audience?

The target is anybody who actually is willing to build a life that they want. A lot of people, they say they want to get happier, but they don't act that way. Anybody who wants to be in the serious business of building a better life, it's all of these people, all these spirals and all these other people who realize that the enterprise is themselves, and the currency is not money in the enterprise of you. It's love and happiness. That's the currency of your startup. If you want to get richer, that means you need to get happier and have more love, and that's who this book is written for. This is It's not a PhD dissertation. There's literally a thousand links in the endnotes. So it doesn't bother anybody. To all of these super long hair neuroscience journals and all that stuff that I do, it's not going to bother the reader at all. It's just completely accessible. We have lots of people read it and say, Yeah, I get it. Yeah, I get it. But it's only for people who want to learn about the serious business of themselves and take themselves on as a project.

And the guarantee is, if you do this stuff, the science doesn't lie, and my life doesn't lie, and Oprah has done it, too. And this stuff really, really works.

I love it. Can you talk to us about the struggle that Americans have with happiness? Why is this a problem?

Yeah, it's a problem to begin with. We see bad trends in happiness in the United States than in many developed countries around the world. Most rich countries are getting unhappier. It's been a slight downward-ticking trend since the late 1980s, early 1990s. And then it just tanked around 2008. And that was not really because of the financial crisis. It was because too many people were on social media. And social media just doesn't give you happiness. It makes you lonely. It sets you up for social comparison with other people. You get a real deficit of a hormone, a neuropeptide that functions as a hormone called oxytocin, which is a hormone of bonding, you get a huge deficit of it. And so you tend to binge the social media because you want more, but you're not getting enough. And so it's like filling up on burgers and fries. You can actually become overweight and malnourished. So I'm simultaneously. That's what happens with social media. It's the junk food of social life. And so that really drove it down, especially among young women, actually. That was the worst. And then, of course, Corona. Corona virus came, and coronavirus just tanked happiness even further, and happiness hasn't come back.

So the real problem is that we have a happiness crisis. The second thing is that most people don't understand even what happiness is. They think it's a feeling, which it's not. Feelings are evidence of happiness. They're not happiness. That's like the smell of the turkey is evidence of Thanksgiving dinner, but they're not the same thing. That's feelings and happiness. And so they need to understand it. And last but not least, too many people think that happiness is their destination, and it's not. It's getting happier. As Oprah says, the goal is happy-earness. You got to make progress all along the way. And that's really what the goals have to be.

So let's dig deeper on this, happiness is not a feeling. I know we talked about it last episode, but in case people didn't listen to it, why is happiness not a feeling?

Well, happiness is not a feeling because that would leave it up to an absolute chance. It does have this vaporous quality to it. You know, happiness is the feeling I get when I'm doing the things that I enjoy or when I'm with the people that I love. All those things are true, but that's not the happiness. That's actually evidence that you're experiencing happiness. And happiness is something you can actually define. Happiness is a combination of three distinct phenomena. And we know this because in the scientific research, we've been able to measure self-evaluations of people's happiness that are living in different ways, and they have different levels of these phenomena. Think of happiness as having three macronutrients. So a lot of people who watch this podcast, they know that if you want to get healthy, you have to get an abundance and balance of protein, carbohydrates, and healthy fats. That's what they know. Those are the macronutrients of all food. The macronutrients of happiness are enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. And that's what we have to maximize. And it turns out that all three Any of those things are super important, and none of them are straightforward.

We make tons of mistakes. Any one of those three, I can tell you about the mistakes that people make. That's what we talk about in the book, is how not to make those mistakes so that we can focus on enjoying life more, getting more satisfaction, and getting a life full of meaning. When we do that through emotional self-regulation and walk away from trying to get the feeling of happiness all the time, then we're not so distracted. Then we can focus on the building blocks of a happy life, which we also talk an a lot about.

Let's dig into macronutrients since you already brought it up. Let's start with enjoyment. You make it clear in your book that that's not pleasure. What's the difference between enjoyment and pleasure, and why do we have to make that distinction?

Great question. Pleasure is what we call a limbic phenomenon. Now, the limbic system is a part of the brain that was evolved before the prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex is the bumper of brain tissue right behind your forehead. It's the most evolved, conscious human executive part of your brain. It's your CEO inside your head. That's when Holla says, This is the way I'm going to get to work today because I see this traffic. This is the guest I'm going to have on my show. Those are all prefrontal cortex decisions. Now, what motivates it? What motivates you to want to make decisions? The answer is inputs, information, largely emotional information that's coming to you, and that comes from your limbic system. Your limbic system is all about giving you emotions, anger, fear, sadness, disgust, joy, a sense of affection, surprise, interest. Interest is a primary emotion, and all of that's evolved so that you'll survive and pass on your genes. It's all evolved. Here's the thing, the big mistake that a lot of people make. I don't want to have bad feelings. Oh, yeah? Well, you're going to die. You're going to die unless you don't have bad feelings.

Why? Because they keep you alive every single day. You need fear, you need grief, you need sadness, you need anger, you need all these things. Now, they can be maladapted. You don't need fear when you open up Twitter. That's stupid. I get that. But the whole point is when a car is barreling toward you and you're in a crosswalk, you better feel fear through the amygdala of your brain, which is part of your limbic system, and jump out of the way. So back to the conversation at hand. Pleasure comes from your limbic system because it sends a signal saying, That's a good thing to give you calories, to give you sexual partners, to give you all that stuff. It gives you inputs on how to survive and pass on your genes. That's not the secret of happiness, because that's the secret to addiction. That's the secret to hitting the lever pleasure again and again and again. To get enjoyment, which is a true source of happiness, you need the source of pleasure plus people plus memory. Why? Because you need relationships and memory. You need to have the experience of that pleasure in the prefrontal cortex of your brain, in the executive center of your brain.

Here's the way to think about it without all the neuroscience. If there's something that gives you pleasure, don't do it alone. If you're doing it alone again and again and again, you're going to do it compulsively and it will lead to addiction. And that nobody has ever said, You know the secret to my happiness? Methamphetamine. Nobody's ever said that. Nobody's ever said that. And so anything that you do behaviorally or chemically, the rule of thumb is add people and memories. So you don't have to get It's a bit of anything, but add people and add good memories that you're making, and then you'll get into a healthy lifestyle that give you enjoyment, and that leads to happiness.

A good example is, Don't eat ice cream alone. If it gives you pleasure, go and have an ice cream date with a friend instead.

Exactly right. If you eat ice cream alone, you'll eat three times as much because you want the pleasure, the pleasure, the pleasure hitting the lever. There's a neuromodulator in the brain called dopamine that we've all heard about. That's this anticipation of reward. When you're by yourself looking for pleasure, you'll hit that lever again and again and again. When you're with people, you don't. You actually don't do that. Now, by the way, there are exceptions to this. Never drink alone, of course, but also make sure all your friends are not drunks because that's That's the special case of where doing it together might actually make it worse. By the way, if you do that, you probably won't have memories. So maybe that is interesting.

Awesome. Well, the next one is satisfaction. So what needs to happen for people to actually feel satisfied? And what are the common reasons for people to feel unsatisfied with their life?

Satisfaction is the joy you get after struggle. Now, Young and Profiting, you know what this is all about because can defer gratification. If you want to be a successful person, you know how to defer gratification. I bet you everybody of the hundreds of thousands of people who are regular listeners to this podcast, they defer gratification. They've been doing it since they were kids. That's why they're listening to this particular podcast. I don't have to tell you to do that. The problem is, and you'll get the joy, the problem is it doesn't last. That's the problem with satisfaction. Mick Jagger, I was saying, I can't get no satisfaction. He's actually still singing that, and he's like 100. That song has been popular literally since I was one, and I'm 59 years old. That's an old song. That's a popular song because it speaks this truth. But the real truth is not that you can't get no satisfaction. The real truth is you can't keep no satisfaction. The problem is you get it and it goes. I get the promotion and then I'm struggling again. I get the raise and the day I enjoy it is the day I find out about it, not even the day it shows up in my check.

I think that if I get that relationship, it's going to give me satisfaction I'm actually bored two weeks in. What's wrong with me? The answer is nothing. Your brain is not evolved to let you enjoy things forever, because if you did enjoy things forever, you wouldn't actually stay on the wheel. You wouldn't keep running. You'd end up admiring When you're wearing something wonderful and beautiful in your life while a tiger sneaks up behind you and makes you lunch. You got to be ready for the next set of circumstances. So nature makes you think you're going to enjoy things forever, but you don't, and you never figure it out. So here's Here's the workaround. Here's that glitch in the matrix that we can exploit. Real satisfaction is not about having more. That's the formula most people have. More, more, more. How do I get satisfied? More. Simple, right? No, no, no. Satisfaction is all the things that you have divided by the things that you want. Now, think about that. Everybody remembers their high school fractions. You got a numerator, you got a denominator. If you want the number to go up, the inefficient way to do it is to increase the numerator.

The really efficient way to increase the number is to decrease the denominator. You don't need to manage more, more, more, more, more. That'll take care of itself, young and profiting strivers. You need to want less, less, less, less, less. You need to want less strategy in life. Ready for that? That's not a bucket list. That's a reverse bucket list that we're talking about. If you even think about that, your life is going to start to change and you're going to start to get happier. That's satisfaction.

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The third macronutrient is purpose. You say this is the most important one. You say that we can make it without enjoyment and even without satisfaction, but without purpose, we're utterly lost. Why is that?

People are made for meaning. This is the divine element in human life is that we have to have a sense of why we're here, of why things happen in our lives, the direction that our life is going so that we can make progress. Otherwise, we'll just go in circles. Last but not least, we need this feeling like it would matter if we weren't here, that sense of significance. Now, a couple of things about meaning. Meaning, to find a sense of meaning in life requires a lot of pain. This is the biggest mistake that a lot of young people make. If you went back to 1969 to Woodstock, I wasn't there. I was a little kid. I was four. My parents wouldn't let me go because they were squares. But the hippies used to say, If it feels good, do That's awful life advice. That's like life-ruining life advice because you're hitting the pleasure lever over and over and over and over again. A lot of hippies want to end up ruining their lives. But we've got an equally anti-hippie message today that's equally dangerous, which is if it feels bad, make it stop. If I'm suffering, there's something wrong with me and I got to go get treated immediately.

Now, I got it. There are certain things with anxiety and depression that people have to take care of. But the truth is, suffering is really normal. If you're trying to do hard and you're trying to live your life like an enterprise, you're going to suffer a lot. You got to suck it up because that's the only way that you're going to find meaning. It's the only way you're going to get strong and resilient is by going, Bring it on. That's super important. The second thing that's worth keeping in mind is that people don't know the questions to answer to find their sense of meaning. They're just hoping that meaning will find them, and it's not true. I actually have a little test to see if somebody has a sense of meaning in their life, and I have have a project for everybody watching us if they want their life to have more meaning. Okay, you ready?

Yeah.

Okay. Because my average student is 28 years old, and I bet you the average age person who's watching and listening to us right now is 28. So this is like, you're perfect. Okay, you need answers to two questions. Here's the quiz. If you don't have answers that you really believe to these two questions, there's a meaning problem. But that's actually an opportunity for you to go on a quest, a vision quest, to find your answers to these two questions. So I'll go slow because I know people are getting out pencils on this, the two question test. There's no right answers, but you have to have answers. Question number one, why are you alive? You got to have an answer. A lot of people are like, I don't know. Sperm and an egg? I don't know. Stork beats me. Why am I alive? And there's two ways to answer that. Either why were you created? What cosmic entity created you? Or what are you on Earth to do? There's two ways to answer that question, but you got to have one answer or the other. Here's the second question. Now it gets heavy. For what would you be willing to die today?

This is a showstopper for a lot of people because a lot of people is like, nothing, really. It's like, I wish there were something, but I don't know. You can make stuff up so you look good and noble. But this is an internal question. It's really a question that's written on somebody's heart. Then if you don't have answers, real answers, there's an issue, but it's a huge opportunity. These are the questions to find your answers to. You got to go look in. You got to discern this. I've seen this with my kids. My kids are in their 20s. My middle son, his name is Carlos. He's a good dude. He's all about it. But in high school, he was like a lot of teenagers. He was looking for himself, and he wasn't even having fun, which is the problem. And the reason is because he didn't have this sense of meaning in his life. So when he's graduating from high school, I did what I do with all of my kids, which is your life is an enterprise. You're the startup entrepreneur. I'm VC. And since I'm VC, I I get a business plan. If I'm going to invest, I get a business plan.

So go write your business plan. It's super fun being my kid, right? Holla, I bet your West is like, Too bad, Brooks is not my dad. Yeah, right. No. And I made them when they were juniors in high school, write their business plan. And that was going to be really what they thought the next 10 years of their life was going to look like. No actual business sticks to its business plan, but you have to have a business plan so you have intention is the whole point. And if it was not original enough, I sent it back for revision. So Carlos's business plan goes back for six rounds of revisions because he was just like, I don't I guess I'll go to college. I'm like, No, you're not. No, you're not. You hate school. I mean, you go to college. I didn't go to college until I was 30. I know that it's fine, but I need something original. He's like, I want to find the answers to those questions. I think I'm going to find those alone outside working with my hands. I said, Okay, I'm listening. So I knew his business plan when he was going to be a farmer.

Now, there's no farmers in my family for 125 years. We're college professors. We're musicians. It's like farming. So he gets a job as a dry land wheat farmer in Idaho. I kid you not. Oh, my God. He's picking rocks out of the soil. He's making 15 bucks an hour. But he's working so many hours mending fences, driving a combine. He's making a bunch of money. And then the second part of his plan kicks in, he joins the Marines at 19. Boom. I mean, it goes to basic training, an Infantry Training Battalion. And then he becomes a Scout sniper, which is a branch of the Special Forces. Now my son, 23 years old, married Corporal Carlos Brooks, Scout sniper, US Marine Corps. I know. It's all him. It's not me. It's like, I'm not a military guy. But I ask him, and he's got his answers, not my answers. Why are you alive? Because God made me to serve. For what would you be willing to die? He says, For my faith, and for my family, and for my friends, and for the United States of America. Boom, mic drop. And again, people watching us, you might be like, Yeah, that guy's drinking the Kool-Aid.

Okay. But those are his answers. And he's happy because he found his answers.

So something as I was reading these macronutrients and learning more about them, I realized that you're really a proponent of hard work and not cutting corners, right? This isn't easy. Again, it's not pushing the pleasure button and getting a dopamine rush. This is about hard work and doing the work. Is that right?

Yeah, for Sure, for sure. Everything in life is really about that. But the whole point is, I don't have to convince your audience. I mean, I have to convince a lot of audiences. I don't have to convince your audience that hard work is awesome. Hard work is the best. It's so fun, it's so satisfying. It's such a big payoff. And furthermore, that discipline is the thing where you get just so much better at it. One of the things that I do with a lot of young people is I really work on their discipline so they can get into the space where hard work gets more fun and is more interesting. I'll give you an example of how I do this. For almost everybody, you have to divide up your day between grunt work and creative work. For you, for sure, you have this big popular podcast, and part of your day is stuff that you can do without a lot of creativity. And part of your day, you need tons of creativity and ideas. Put the creative part of your work from 8: 00 to 11: 00 in the morning. And here's how to do it.

Here's actually how to neurochemically set yourself up for this with pure discipline. If you want a three-hour window of pure creativity, you have to maximize the dopamine to your prefrontal cortex. This is the neurotransmitter of the anticipation of reward and focus and creativity. It's an amazing thing, but you have to optimize it. The way to do that, if you're going to do that at 8: 00 or 7: 30 in the morning, which is the best time to do it, get up at 4: 45. I kid you not, 4: 45 in the morning, every day. Work out, usually resistance training from 5: 00 to 6: 00 without taxing your creativity. Don't listen to me giving a neuroscience while you're working out. Plus, actually, when you're doing lifts, your blood pressure will go up too much and you won't be able to concentrate and you'll miss the most important parts. 5: 00 to 6: 00. Take a shower, do your meditation or your prayer or whatever your concentrated spiritual or philosophical work is. Maybe you're reading the stoic philosophers. That's when you use that particular time. Then take your caffeine. Make sure you haven't had any caffeine until that point.

Tank up on caffeine and you will be in the zone. Phone off. No distractions. You'll get three solid hours. People will be like, How are you getting all this done? The answer is that. That's actually how you do it. Discipline leads to hard work, leads to results, leads to great fun and good times.

I love that morning routine. Okay, so another key concept in your book is happiness is a choice. Now, you give a story about your mother-in-law, I believe. Can you please tell us that story?

My mother-in-law, she died last year at 93. She had a good long... That was okay. She had a good long life. But it didn't look like things were going to go really well for her. Now, early on, she grew up in Spain. She's Spanish. My wife is Spanish, and so all of my in-laws are in Spain. She experienced the Spanish Civil War up close and personal. Her father was a surgeon for the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War, which was the people that were fighting the fascist dictatorship. Their side lost. He was a battlefield surgeon. He was accused of something. Anyway, he spent a bunch of time in prison after the war in the Canary Islands, which is where my mother-in-law wound up growing up. Sounds sad, sounds hard. It turns out tons of people around. Her parents loved each other. They saw their father every day, even though he's in prison. She had a super great childhood despite these adverse circumstances. Okay, good news so far. Okay, turns out that because of her father, the guy in the next jail cell over introduced my mother-in-law, when she was a teenager, to a guy she fell in love with who became her husband.

Even better, right? It turns out he wasn't a super good husband, and this is an old story. So the Spanish Civil War doesn't set back her happiness, but getting married does. So he runs off multiple times She finally leaves definitively with another woman when my wife is six. No child support, poverty, the lights are shutting off. It's just the worst. Furthermore, she was, for whatever reason, still in love with a guy. My wife said that when she was a little girl, she would see her mother at the window crying. She might see him as he went past. It was just awful. She said, Okay, so this goes on for a number of years until... And I learned about this later from my mother-in-law because she and I were really, really close. I was as close to my mother-in-law as to my own mother. I loved her so much. I I've known her for... I've been married 32 years. So of course, I knew her for decades. She said that when she was 45 years old, she woke up one day and she had this flash of realization. She had been hoping and waiting for the whole outside world to change so that she could get happier.

She said, I can't do that. I can't change the whole world. I can only change one thing, me. She started thinking to herself, What could I change about me that would change my circumstances? She thought about it. She thought, Well, the problem is I am still stuck on being an appendage to that guy, and he's gone. I need to actually become independent. So she went back to college. She got her teaching degree. She became a teacher in the public schools, teaching super marginalized immigrant kids in the worst neighborhood in Barcelona, where they lived at that time. The result is, over the next few decades, she had a career she loved, kids she loved, friends that adored her that she worked with. About 14 years later, he's a weird thing, Alaa, her husband wanted to come back. The reason was because she was different. She was independent and she had it going on. He's like, Can I come home? I'm sure that the other woman had thrown him out, by the way. Anyway, Can I come home? She thought about it and she's like, I don't need this, but I want it. And she invited him home, and their marriage was great until the end.

He died at 89. By the end, her health was terrible. And so she was bedridden. He was doing all the cooking. He would lift her in the bed. He loved her. He took care of her. And so she said, in the end, she said, We had 54 really wonderful years of marriage. Of course, we were married 68 years, but it was pretty rough for those 14 when he was gone. But the 54 years that we had that were really beautiful, especially the last ones, were wonderful. That was because she built the life that she wanted around four basic pillars: her faith, her family life on her terms, including her marriage, her friendships, which were her friends, and getting a job where she served other people and earned her success. And those are the four pillars that all of us need to build our lives on as well.

So I hope we get to touch a little bit on those pillars. I know we did touch on work pillar earlier in this conversation. Hopefully by the end, we get time to talk about the other three. But first, I want to talk about some tactical ways that we can improve our happiness right away. One of the ways, you say, is learning how to better manage our emotions. So First of all, why is it important for us to be more aware of our negative feelings and emotions? And why are those negative feelings and emotions actually not a bad thing?

Yeah. So to begin with, you die without them. You die without the bad feelings because your bad feelings alarms that something's going on that you got to pay attention to, but they're maladapted in modern life. We have the same physiological stress reaction to being chased by a tiger and getting a really bad tweet. I mean, that's not normal that we have the same. But because We're very rudimentary creatures, and we're not adapted to the modern environment very well. That means that we don't need to regret our bad feelings, our bad emotions, or our negative emotions. What we need to do is to understand them, to manage them so we can learn and grow them. That's the goal. The goal is not to eradicate them because we don't want to die and we actually need them, but we got to make sure that we have enough knowledge so that when they're maladapted or they're becoming a source of rumination and even mental illness, that we have the knowledge, the self knowledge and practice and techniques that we can actually treat ourselves a little bit without feeling so helpless all the time or, God forbid, turning to substances, which so many people do to numb themselves.

That's really why emotional self-regulation is so critically important. Now, here's This is basically how it works. We already talked about the limbic system and emotions. These are simply, they're signals that come to the very ancient part of your brain, the brain stem and all that that says something's moving around you, you smell something, You heard something that sends a signal to your limbic system that that should turn into an emotion, which is a machine language that will deliver to your prefrontal cortex so that you can react. It's a relay, this limbic system. If you don't actually use the relay, if you don't actually figure out what your emotions are so you can react the way you want, then you'll just be limbic. You feel angry, you yell. You feel sad, you cry. You see something funny, you burst out laughing. It's like a little kid.

Is that monkey brain? Is that the same thing as monkey brain?

Well, monkey brain is one that just can't focus on anything for any period of time. That's really not here all the time. But it is a monkey brain for sure. I mean, the whole point is it's like emotions are ghosts and the ghosts are running the show. Or maybe it's the CEO The CEO is in front, but the CEO is not paying attention, and the workers are running around the company doing whatever they want without a leader. So the way to deal with this is you need to move the experience. You need the emotions, but you need to move the experience of the emotions into the prefrontal cortex of the brain. There's a bunch of ways to do that. That's called metacognition, being aware of your own thinking, being aware of your own emotions, metacognition. How do we do it? Number one, you got to put time between your emotions and your reactions, and you have to experience them in the executive centers of your brain. That's why when you learn to meditate, one of the things you'll do, and I studied meditation for years and years and years and years, and one of the classic meditation techniques is to say, I'm going to look at myself as if I were another person.

You sit in meditation in the quiet of your room and you say, Hala is feeling sad right now. Why is Hala feeling sad right now? Something happened. Oh, yes, indeed. Well, that's an interesting feeling, isn't it? I think that's actually an overblown feeling. It might be related to something else. You look at Read yourself analytically. That's a really good way to use sitting in meditation. Journaling, outstanding. You can't write something unless it's in your prefrontal cortex. And so writing about your feelings just to yourself and then burning the notes if you need to. Super important. I mean, there's all kinds of ways. Therapy is supposed to do this. If you have a therapist who says, I'm going to teach you about you, two thumbs up. If you have one who says, I'm going to solve your problem, run, because that's actually not going to be useful to you. Prayer is incredibly useful. People who have traditionally religious practices sitting in prayer and asking God to help you with your emotions is moving them into the prefrontal cortex of your brain. And then what's in your prefrontal cortex, you got choices, man. I mean, you can decide how to react.

You can substitute one emotion for another. You can decide to disregard emotions by simply observing the outside world. You got a whole repertoire of ways that you can manage yourself.

Metacognition, to me, is very interesting. Basically, you're observing things as if they're happening to somebody else. You mentioned journaling, right? Let's talk about that because I thought that was a really cool strategy to try to do this. How can we learn from traumatic experiences through journaling?

The problem with a lot of traumatic experiences for people is that they're a ghost in the brain. They're unsupervised. The memories, the sensations, they're purely limbic, and they're uncomfortable. So the natural tendency is to want to make them go away. Now, some people make them go away by numbing them with drugs and alcohol or other kinds of behaviors that are compulsive and addictive and not good. Other ways to do that are to accept them, but never really to analyze them very much at all, to identifying oneself as a victim, to get the victim identity. This is a very unhealthy thing to do that leads to a lot of misery. And by the way, when you are a victim, you tend to make a lot of misery around you. That's when you go into the... You get radical politics and you spend too much time social media. It's like, Don't do that. Then you're going to spread your misery around. The way to deal with this, and sometimes it's very important to have the help of a therapist to do this, is to say, I want to understand these feelings that I'm actually having. It doesn't mean you have to recreate the feelings.

No, there are plenty there. But to look at these things from a certain remove. To say, This thing is really, really on my mind. To name the emotion that you're actually feeling. It's like, I'm feeling residual fear every time this thing comes up. I'm feeling real sadness about something that happened to me. And to say, not to think about the event, but to think about the sadness itself, to really think about the fear itself, to think about how it makes you feel in the pit of your stomach, that it raises your blood pressure and your cortisol and your stress markers, that is doing all this stuff and really notice that. You don't need to go over the source of your fear because you've gone over that a billion times, but to go over the sensation itself. Then actually, you're understanding that feeling in your executive centers, and that's your CEO being alerted that your leader needs to be a leader.

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I want to talk about Mirro mirrors, because that was one of the most fascinating things that I read in your book, was the fact that we need to be more about other people and less focused about ourselves. You say to avoid mirrors and even digital mirrors, like googling ourselves, self-view on Zoom, social media mentions, and things like that. I thought that was really interesting. Can you tell us about that?

Yeah, there's a lot of philosophical work, and even work from Buddhism and other religions, about what's called the I-self. The bliss that actually comes when we decide metacognitively to disregard all of the inputs, all of our feelings in and of themselves so that we can be in the state of looking outward. There's a phrase in the New Testament to the Bible, in the Christian Bible, Judge not lest ye be judged. And what that basically is when you're going around saying, this coffee is bitter and crummy, and this traffic is terrible, and just judge, judge, judge, judge. You're basically giving the world and you're giving permission to everybody to be judged. And then it's all social comparison, and then it's looking in mirrors, and it's just life is misery. So the way to get around this is to have a strategy of actually not thinking about yourself or referring to yourself. And the right way to start is by manually getting rid of the mirrors in your life. I work with a guy, pretty consistently now, it's a pretty well-known guy, who in an earlier part of his life, until his late 20s, he was a fitness influencer and a fitness model.

So I mean, this is serious. To do that, you have to have discipline beyond what is actually even healthy, to be sure, because you have single-digit body fat all year round, really high muscle mass all year round. He didn't want He had to take PEDs, meaning that he never could eat anything that he wanted. He always had to have his fitness on point. I mean, he was in social media and he was in magazines and the whole deal. And he was completely miserable. He went 10 years not eating anything that he liked. And I was feeling grumpy and feeling sad. And the truth is, you will mess up your hormones if you sit at single-digit... If men sit at single-digit body fat or women are under 18% body fat for extended periods of time, you're going to mess up your hormones. And that's going to mess up your emotional life, and that was what was going on for him. He figured out that what he needed to do was to get away from this addiction to his image. He was addicted to his image. And so many people are. They're like, I'm going to check my mentions.

That's dopamine, by the way. It's a dopamine hit. Did people like my post? Whatever happens to me. Did I get new followers? Yada, yada, yada. That's the way that whole thing works. So here's what he did. He's a fitness influencer, mind you. He got a new job. He actually got a job that didn't require that he be naked all the time, basically. And he took all of the mirrors out of his house, 100% of the mirrors out of his house. And then he showered in the dark for a year. So he didn't know if he had abs. For a lot of people watching this, they're like, Yeah, I don't have that problem. Well, you do. You do. It's probably the mentions on your social media and you're hitting the app too much. So probably you need to get the app off your phone, make it harder to look at, and put a moratorium on looking at any of your mentions, and then limit your social media to a total of 30 minutes a day across all platforms. And trust me, your outlook on life is going to change because you're going to be focused outward and not inward so very much, and you're going to get happier.

As sure as Hall and I are sitting here, you're going to get happier.

Yeah. So I guess a part of that is a little bit confusing to me because I always feel like when you look your best, you dress your best, for girls, you put on your makeup, you feel confident, you feel happy. So for me, also, isn't there a balance? Because if you totally don't care about that, can you also be unhappy because you're not presenting yourself in the best way?

Yeah, I recommend presenting yourself in the best way, but not looking at yourself. That's what it comes down to. Not looking at yourself. Yeah, not looking at yourself. I mean, it's like, Sure, I'm going to put on a nice suit, and I'm going to go out and I'm going to give a speech. I'm going to make sure that my shoes are shined just because I want to make a good impression on people. I want to make a professional impression on people. But let's also think about what we're trying to do to not go too far. If you're a married person, you shouldn't be trying to do everything you can to attract a person that's not your spouse. It's It's productive. All it is is sheer ego and mirrors is what it comes down to. Absolutely, look your best to be productive. And so you can feel professional, you can feel spifted up, and that's great. But stop looking at yourself is the whole idea. You're going to go crazy doing that. And furthermore, you're going to miss life. You're going to miss everything. You'll be able to look in the mirror and there's like, Haley's comet is going past.

Here's a little story to remember about this. There's this old Zen Buddhist koan. A koan is a riddle. The Zen Buddhist monks will train their junior monks by giving them these perplexing little stories that they're supposed to think about. That's how they learn Zen Buddhism, based on these riddles. There's one that does this. There's a story of a junior monk who's walking down the road by himself, a path in the forest, and there's a senior monk, an old man coming toward him, and he recognizes him. And the junior monk says, Where are you going? And the senior monk says, I'm on a pilgrimage. Pelgrimage? The young man says, Wow, where's your pilgrimage taking you? And the senior monk says, I don't know. And the junior monk says, Why don't you know? And the senior monk says, Because not knowing is the most intimate form of knowledge. Now, here's the key thing. Here's the point. Not knowing where your life is going to take you requires that you be looking outward and being open to adventure. And if you're looking in the mirror, checking your mentions, like me, me, me, me. First of all, it's boring, boring, boring.

But the second thing is you'll go mad. And third and Last but not least, you're going to miss the most interesting things in life because not knowing is the most intimate.

It's important to observe life, but you also say it's important not to judge. Can you define what judging is and how we can avoid it if we have that bad habit?

Judging is actually not outward. Judging looks like you're looking outward. Judgment is all inward because when you judge something, it's your opinion. It's your cast on what you're looking at. If you can go an hour, just try it, it's super hard. You go an hour and not say, I hate this traffic. This traffic is terrible. Say, The traffic is unusually heavy today. No judgment. This coffee has a strong bitter flavor. Not, I hate this coffee. What crummy music? Say, I haven't heard this music before. It's not the music I usually listen to. Observe without judgment, because basically when you observe with judgment, it's just like looking and looking at your reflection in the thing that you're staring at. And then here's the best part that you get when you You will judge yourself less because everything that you're doing is giving yourself permission and others permission to judge you. And that's all social comparison, and that's just the thief of joy. That's just misery is how all that social comparison. If you can go through life, no, if you can go through a day, if you can go through an hour just by walking down the street and just looking outward in the Majesty of the universe and not judging anything, it's going to blow your mind.

It's going to change your brain chemistry. If you practice that every day, things are going to start to change.

Yeah, I feel like those are the two areas that I could work on most, the mirrors and the judgment and just reframing everything. In your book, you have four pillars for happier lives. We alluded to that previously. Could you at a high level in our last 10 minutes together, go over the four pillars, family, friendship, work, and faith?

There's a million practices of the happiest people. It's what you find. But basically, it comes down to four big areas. There are four big areas to put a deposit in your life. This is your happiness 401k plan. You need to make an investment in four accounts every day if you want to get happier. Now, people don't do it because they're so distracted by their emotions. If you do the stuff that we talked about before, then you won't be distracted. You can focus on these four things more every single day. They're your faith, your family, your friends, and your work that serves other people. So quickly, we'll go through them because it's very easy to misunderstand these ideas. Faith does not mean my religious faith. I'm a Catholic. It's super important to me. But as a scientist, I will tell you that it's the transcendental walk in ideas and concepts every single day that are bigger than you and blow your mind. That's what you need. Why? Because you need to get small. Holly needs to be little. If you don't, then you're going to be focused on yourself and you go crazy. I mean, it's the whole mirror thing again and again and again.

The best way to zoom out is to expose yourself to amazing things. Maybe That's religion. Maybe that's religion, maybe that's a meditation practice. Maybe that's walking in nature for an hour before dawn every day without devices. Maybe that's studying the great works of Johann Sebastian Bach and learning all of the cantatas. But whatever it is, it has to zoom you out. Maybe it's reading the stoics like my friend Ryan holiday. He has all these books about the stoics. That's a great way to do it, but you need that. That's what I mean by faith. That means not me, the whole thing, and I'm little. Second is family life. That's the most mystical of love because it's super intense, but you didn't choose it. God knows you wouldn't have chosen it in certain in so many cases because they drive you crazy. But if you sacrifice family love for anything besides abuse, you're making a mistake. Political differences of opinion are not abuse. This is super important. A lot of problems with people who are Gen Z and millennials is they've been conscripted into a culture war that baby boomers started. Do not be a conscientious objector to the political polarization and the culture wars of people my age because they just want to use you.

The media and politicians want to use you to fight their battles. And the way that they'll do it is turning you against your uncle or whatever. It's a mistake for your happiness. Third is your friendships. And there's two kinds of friendships out there. Real and deal. Deal friends, those are super useful. Everybody that's a fan of young and profiting has a lot of deal friends, useful people, and that's fine. But those are different than your real friends. Your real friends are useless. You don't need them to get you forward and to help your career. They might help you, but that's not the point. You love them no matter if they can help you or not. A lot of young people today have fewer and fewer real friends. Put a line down the side of a paper, write down the 10 people that you see the most and are closest to you every day, and then write real or deal after their names. And you know the difference is, and if it's all deal and no real, you got work to do, and you got to do the work. And last but not least is your work.

We've talked about work. We talked about work in the last time that we got together and we talked about work. I talk about all the time. Work to be a source of joy doesn't have to be high paying, it doesn't have to be high prestige, it doesn't have to be a lot of power. Everybody watching us is going to get those worldly rewards, but those are not the rewards to accumulate for joy. It's earning your success through your hard work, personal merit and responsibility, and being acknowledged and rewarded for your hard work. So get a job where you can get ahead on the basis of working hard and being good, and you get rewarded for it. That's number one. Number two is you serve others. You get dignity from people actually needing you, which is the source of dignity, and you know who they are and you can see it. Those are the way that you can actually be happy. And so faith, family, friends, and work, as we've defined it here, if you're putting deposits in those accounts every day, you're getting happier. As sure as I'm sitting here, I promise it's true.

Okay, before we go, I do have to bring up gratitude. Talk to us about why gratitude is so important and how we can use gratitude to substitute a lot of our negative emotions.

Yeah, gratitude is a substitute emotion that actually substitutes for a natural evolved tendency to see the negative. Now, a lot of people who are watching this, they're like, I'm just such a negative person. I go through the whole day and I only see the negative. You, me, and everybody, because evolution gives you the negativity bias. That's why you're alive. If you went through life whistling down the street, only seeing the nice things, you'd be eaten by a tiger so fast. I mean, your ancestors would not have made it past the place to see. Trust me. The negativity bias means that you see somebody sweetly smiling at you. Nice. But somebody frowning at you, pay attention because that's a threat. You pay attention to threats because it's urgent that you do so, and that leads you to a negativity bias. Now, in modern life, that's maladapted because we have a lot more to be grateful for than resentful about or fearful about. And that means we need to calibrate our emotions consciously. Knowledge is power on this. You can choose the emotion of gratitude. When you feel resentment, resentment is the natural emotion, but gratitude is the chosen emotion.

How? By saying to yourself, I'm feeling a lot of resentment right now, but the truth of the matter is I have a ton to feel happy about. It's so easy for me to do this. It's so easy for me to be like, Yeah, my book is not selling as much as I like. I got a book with Oprah Winfrey. I should be grateful. It's so easy for me to forget. I'm the professor of this stuff when I forget. And so the way that you do that is doing it on purpose and being really, really conscious of it. It's basic realism that counter poses against your natural evolutionary tendency. Think about it that way.

Yeah. And I know that a lot of people struggle with this gratitude. They're not naturally a person who expresses gratitude. So for example, I have a boyfriend. I'm madly in love with him. He's great. But when I ask him how his day is, he'll say, It's okay. And I'll be like, Well, did something bad happen? You went to work. We had a walk. You had a nice dinner. We worked out. Is anything wrong? No, it was okay. And he's more of a realist. For me, I'm just like, What do you mean? It was a great day. We had a great day. I'm so positive about it. Talk to us about how we can become more gracious if that's not naturally who we are, if we're more of a realist.

This journey starts with knowing your emotional profile. Just based on this, I'm going to say that your boyfriend is either a judge or a poet. What I'm talking about here is in the book, we actually have a test called the Panis test. The Panis Test, it tests the intensity of your negative and positive emotions. You can be high emotionally positive and high emotionally negative. Intensity, that's called the mad scientist. That's somebody who's super high affect. That's probably you, Hala. Either you're a cheerleader or you're a mad scientist. A mad scientist feels intense positive and intense negative. A cheerleader feels intense positive and low negative. You're one of those two. I can tell that right now. You're one of those two.

Probably a cheerleader, yeah.

You're probably a cheerleader, and that's great. Everybody wants to be a cheerleader, right? Because it sounds like you're happy. That's not not perfect in a marriage. You don't want two cheerleaders together because cheerleaders hate bad news. And so if that's the case, they never see threats. And what they do is they all spend all the money. If it's a cheerleader married to a cheerleader, spend, spend, spend, spend, We didn't know we were going to go bankrupt by running up the credit cards. That's the problem. Anyway. Then you have on the other side, people who have high negative and low positive. Those are poets. They tend toward gloominess, but they're very realistic. They're very realistic about the world. Or you can just be a low affect person, low positive and low negative. Those are the people who just don't get perturbed. They're unflappable. Based on what you told me, your boyfriend is either a poet or a judge, and you're either a mad scientist or a cheerleader. That's great because these are profiles that fit together really well to complete each other. You're not too compatible, you're complementary, but you got to understand each other. You got to lift him up, he's going to meld you out.

That's basically the way that it works. Does that make sense?

Yeah, I love that. I wanted to look up that. You said it's a quiz in your book or an exercise in the book?

Yeah, it's in the second big chapter. It's called the Positive Affect, Negative Affect series. And after you look at it, after people get the book and read about it, they go to my website, arthropbrooks. Com, and take the quiz. And once they actually take the quiz on my website or any place else that you find it, you can figure out which one you are, and then it's going to start make probably a lot of things in your life are going to start making a lot more sense.

Awesome. So I will stick that link in the show notes. I'll make sure your team gives us that link so that everybody can take quiz, and I'll take the quiz and talk about it in the outro. I'm going to close out with this. You say that even if you could get rid of your unhappiness, it would be a huge mistake. Why do you believe that the secret to the best life is to accept your unhappiness?

You need unhappiness You need happiness. You need sacrifice. You need difficulty. You need negative emotions and negative experiences because you need to be fully alive. You need enjoyment, which means you have to defer your gratification. You need satisfaction, which means you need to temper your wants and not just your haves. And most of all, you need meaning. And meaning requires resilience. It requires experiences. It requires learning and growing from the bad things that happen in your life as well. People who try to avoid unhappiness, paradoxically, they wind up avoiding their happiness. And this is the most important way to be profiting in the business of the startup of your life, is to take it all, to wake up in the morning and say, Man, this stuff is going to happen today. And all I can is I'm going to learn and grow from everything happens, so bring it on.

The new book is co-authored by Oprah Winfrey. It's Build the Life You Want. Where can people find it?

Any place for fine books are sold. You can find it on Barnes & Noble, you can find it on Amazon. You can find it almost any place. You can find it at Target. It's at the register at Target, which is really great. I wrote it for everybody who's watching us today, and I hope you get a lot from it. If you like it, make sure that you become the teacher of the ideas to the people that you love in your life.

Awesome. I always close out my interview with the same questions, then we do something fun at the end of the year. What is one actionable thing our younger profitors can do today to become more profiting tomorrow?

The one thing they can do to become more profiting tomorrow is to think about somebody that you love, and they may not know it, and call them up or write them an email or a text that says, I don't know if you know this, but I love you, and see what happens. You're going to start a series of events that might be pretty unpredictable, but That's the basis of entrepreneurship.

I love that. What is your secret to profiting in life? You don't have to bring up anything we talked about in today's conversation, just anything that comes to mind. What is your secret to profiting in life?

The secret to profiting in life for me really is loving more and not pushing love away. I mean, this is really the key. Remember that faith, family, friends, and work, that's love of the divine, that's love of your family, that's love of your friends, and it's expressing your love for all of humanity by the way you earn your daily bread. If you remember one single thing about happiness is that happiness is love, full stop.

Awesome. Well, it was such a great conversation, Arthur. Always a pleasure to have you on Young and Profiting podcast. Where can people find more about you and everything that you do?

Arthropbrooks. Com. It's a one-stop shop. You can watch videos on happiness. You can download activities on happiness. You can read all my articles in The Atlantic there and get links to the books and everything else that you want. If you're interested in learning more about happiness, that's a good place to start. Arthropbrooks. Com.

Awesome. Thank you, Arthur.

You, Hala.