The Formula for Happiness w/ Arthur Brooks

a universal goal. We all want to be happy. Scientists and philosophers have been setting the idea of happiness for centuries, and we search for constantly with our thoughts and our actions. Because in life, as we are taught from infancy, and which advertising has built an empire around, the top goal in life is to be happy. But what is happiness really? Is it that feeling that rushes over you when you achieve a goal, when you have your first child, when

you love somebody and they love you back. You know it when you're happy or not, But sometimes it can be hard to define. So here's my intro. Here's the man who writes about happiness, Arthur Seabrooks. He's an American social scientist and contributing opinion writer for The Washington Post. He was a president of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, for a decade. As of July twenty nineteen, he joined the faculty of the Harvard Kennedy School and

Harvard Business Schools. You're written eleven books, currently writes a column in the Atlantic and has a podcast called The Art of Happiness with Arthur Brooks. So with all of this, and believe may go to his Wikipedia goes on for pages. I'm thrilled to experience happiness with Arthur Brooks. Hello Arthur Brooks, Hello Ali, really happy to be with you. I haven't seen you in months. I know, I know, and thank

you for saying happy. Um, have you found that people at Harvard Business School gasp when you say I'm teaching about happiness? Well, now, it's an established course and it's it's one of the most popular courses that hbs, believe it or not. So I have hundreds of students on

the waiting list for this happiness class. And and it turns out, I mean, they need a lot of NBA traditional knowledge so they can get jobs in business, but they really need this because you know, I've been looking at data on our NBA graduates ten years out, and they suffer a huge amount of dissatisfaction. They get all

of the things that the world promises them. If you have your NBA from the Harvard Business School, they get it and more, and they find that it's still not enough there on this kind of treadmill, and they don't know what to do. And so based on that, you know, people are looking at people who have graduated before them. They said, well, what are the lessons that we need to learn about our own lives? You know, I'm good at managing a business, but how do I manage me?

How do I manage my psyche? How do I manage my heart? My relationships? And and so that's what my classes all about. It's about the neuroscience and social science of human happiness. You know, what do we know? What do we not know? How do we manage our emotions? How do we move things out of our limbic systems into our meta cognition? And how can we be good leaders to us? And how do you how do you define happiness? The first day of class, everybody comes in,

They're all staring at you. How do you start. So, happiness is basically a combination of three big things. It's a combination of enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose, and they're all really different things. There's sort of the macronutrients of well being is you know, the great macronutrients and nutrition or protein, carbohydrates, and fat, and there are three of those in happiness as well. And so you know, when people say it's some feeling, it's not. It's a lot of different feelings,

it's a lot of different experiences. Enjoyment is something that's pleasure plus your ability to kind of add education and and life to your pleasures. So what do you mean by enjoyment and pleasures? So let's define that, okay. So pleasure is something it's pretty an it's just something that makes you feel good, but you add human capital to it, you add you know, a little bit of sophistication to it,

and pleasure can become enjoyment. So, for example, you know, drugs and alcohol can bring you a tremendous amount of pleasure, but becoming a wine connoisseur is actual enjoyment. And so enjoyment it's still extremely pleasurable, but it's a more elevated sensation than pleasure itself. Then the middle of satisfaction, which is to say, I want to be able to do

something and feel satisfied as opposed to inherently unsatisfied. And the big mystery is that people, you know, when they go after money or power or or or fame, that it leaves them deeply, deeply unsatisfied. That's a that's a phenomenon called the hedonic treadmill, which is a nice metaphor. And the last is the most profound of all. Purpose is the big one, because purpose and meaning in life or how you figure out what life is all about,

and that requires unhappiness. Here's the great paradox. To be happy, you also have to be unhappy. To love your happiness. You need to cherish your unhappiness and understand it and manage it. You need to be fully alive, is the bottom line. And you basically have to take those three macro nutrients and you have to get them in adequate quantities, and you have to understand how to get them and not neglect any of them. And so it's a serious business. Yeah, I was going to say, do you talk about too

much happiness? I mean, like manic happiness, to me, seems sort of counterintuitive to what you're talking about. Well, manic happiness usually means an unbalanced profile. It usually means just tons and tons of enjoyment and not very much purpose in life. And so let's just prefer to that as your undergraduate experience. You know, when you're basically the tons of parties, tons of fun, but not very much direction

and purpose and meaning in life. On the other hand, you can have all purpose and meanings like the American Gothic, you know, the guy with the pitchfork next to his grim life, all purpose and meaning but no enjoyment. And trying to find a balance between the macronutrients is the same thing that we try to do to keep a balanced nutritional profile and to stay healthy. We need all of those things that the most elusive of which is satisfaction, the one right in the middle. But getting those those

ones on the sides right is really key. And so this is one of the things I talked about with my students, and I talked about when I write and when I do a podcast, is I talk about the different parts of life where you can get adequate enjoyment, a shot at satisfaction and then taking the risks and feeling the pain that you need to to have purpose and meaning in life. Yeah, because you you need sadness and anger and all those other fabulous emotions to go

along with it. I would assume, Yeah, you know, that's like if you didn't if you had never seen light, you wouldn't know a darkness is. And and so those contrasts are really part of a good life. Now. People who have only sadness, who have only anger, who have these primary negative emotions and overabundance, I mean, this is something that we have to deal with. And so one of the things that I talked about a lot is

how to manage unhappiness as well as managing happiness. And the interesting thing is that the you know, the modern neuroscience and psychological literature shows clearly that happiness and unhappiness are not opposites, that in fact, they're processed in different

hemispheres of the brain. And that means that one of the first things when I'm doing executive coaching, you're working with people one on one, the first thing I'll find out is if they have a happiness problem or an unhappiness problem, and then you figure out which side they need to manage, and so what is a happiness problem and what is an unhappiness problem? Well, happiness is well, just so to back up a little bit, happiness as we measure it, you know, generally speaking, we do you know,

big surveys. We ask people, you know, to say, all things considered, you've got ups and downs, obviously, but what number would you say is most reflective of your happiness level overall? And so I'll ask that to you, Ali.

So let's see on a one to seven scale, where one is misery and seven is pure unmitigated bliss, you know, over the last couple of years, despite all the ups and downs, and you know, you and I have teenage kids and all the things that happen in life, and a pandemic, yeah, that's that, but teenage kids are worse than the pending pandemic. That, um, what what's your number? You know, what do you say? What would you say? Your number is? You know, one to seven? Five? That's

pretty good, that's pretty good. So is that the number you've had your whole life, your whole adult life. Do you think that's gone up down? I think it's gone extremely up and down. I was in my twenties in a depression for six months, so and that was a one that was a clinical depression. So that's actually a medical problem. Yeah, yes, well, which which I wanted to

ask you about in terms of happiness. How do you you know, when you think about the whole serotonin you know, anti depressants of the world, couldn't we all just medicate ourselves into a nice happiness plateau. What we could do is we could actually find ways to greatly lower our unhappiness, but that doesn't do anything for our happiness. So so continuing on that, so you've got a five, yes, I'm about a four okay. And my wife, she's guys, she's

a six point eight. Wow, I mean it's unbelievable. And also she's Spanish, so she's got a different attitude on this whole thing. So I'll say six eight, What are you talking about? Why are you with six? Asians? Because I want to be And there's a lot of wisdom to that, by the way, yes, yes, So so where do you get these numbers? How do we build these numbers? They come from three basic parts are genes, are circumstances,

and our habits for happiness. Now, genes are about half of your happiness, which I don't want to be true. I hate that. I hate that too. But but here's my question about about genetics, because when I was first reading that, I thought, oh God, well, then I'm doomed because I've come from a family of depressives. You know. My mother said to me, um, why are you depressed? You know, have an English muffin, you'll feel better. And I said, is there a history of depression in our family?

And she said no, not at all. I said, well, didn't all four of my grandparents commit suicide? And she goes, yes, but that's not depression. So my point is at if you're from a family that has medical depression or issues or alcoholism, then are we automatically doomed We will not ever catch the happiness we deserve because we're predisposed genetically. Yeah, we can have a predisposition genetically, but there's nothing that's deterministic about that. So I can have a predisposition for

lots of things. You know, there's there's substance abuse issues with my family. I don't drink alcohol why because I want to keep the switch off. In other words, I want to keep that forty percent or something of alcoholism that tends to be written on the DNA someplace not expressing itself. So you've got genetics, and you've got sort of epigenetics. You've got the expression of genes as well. They're really interesting parts of life for the that are

that are not genetic. And by the way, you can also have a across the population forty percent of genetic but that's not you in the same way that you know, I don't look very much like my dad did, so you know, I could have looked just like him. One of my sons looks just like me a scept that he's six ft five and his hair and you know, and he's in the Marines and he's cool and I'm not. But but we have the same basic physical features. It's it's it's uncanny. And my other side doesn't look anything

like me. But they have the same genetic background, the same two parents from the same gene pooled. And you have a story about twins, right right, And that's how I've actually figure out that that your happiness is forty eight percent genetic is because when they take these identical twins that were adopted to separate families, you can get them back at age forty you can use statistical techniques to pull apart in the nature, in the nurture and

their happiness. So that's forty percent genetic. And and it's really important to understand that because if you have gloomy parents, then you can understand what your baseline is probably going to be. So I have very gloomy parents and have mental health and substance abuse issues. Okay, good to know, But there's and that's where the action is. Half of that, or say a quarter, is from circumstances. And those circumstances

are the ups and downs. And that's what we think is really going to be the big swinger, Like if I get this job, then I'm gonna be happy. If I it in the you know, Harvard Business School, I'm going to be happy. If I have an accident, I will be unhappy. Or if my girlfriend breaks up with me, I'm gonna be unhappy, etcetera, etcetera. That turns out to be mostly wrong because the circumstances, they do affect your happiness,

but they're transitory. You get over it super fast. There's a whole lot of science on why that doesn't last. The part that really really really matters that we should all be paying attention to. And these are the drivers of happiness that we can control. Are the happiness portfolio, which is about your happiness and it only has four elements in it. Your faith, your family, your friendship, and

your work. Those are the big four. By by faith, I don't mean my faith or your faith, I mean a sense of philosophical transcendence, something bigger than than Ali and Arthur. And the reason that's important is because spirituality works. Spirituality or even philosophy stoic philosophy. The reason is because when you don't have that, you tend to focus only on yourself in your own life, which is like watching the same TV show over and over again every single day.

It's just so boring. It's still defying. And in a sense of philosophy or the transcendent or faith or spirituality, it lets you zoom out forty feet, so you have it's an adventure. Actually, So that's family is pretty self explanatory. Friendship is something that we're in an epidemic loneliness in this country, so people have fewer and fewer and fewer friends. And then then work is really critical. Work doesn't is not any particular kind of job has nothing to do

with income level or education level. It's only work that has two characteristics, which is to earn your success, to feel like you're achieving something where your skills meet your passions, and to where you can serve other people. That's the character Any job where you earn your success and serve others will give you a tremendous amount of happiness. So happiness that we should care about. Forget your genetics, Forget the fact that mom and dad we're kind of messed up.

You can't do anything about that. Circumstances. Disregard them to the extent that you can, because tomorrow you're gonna feel better or worse. I think every single day about putting a deposit in these four accounts. Your faith, family, your friendships, and work. This meaningful because you're serving others and earning

your success. If you put all of your energy into those four accounts and have a diversified portfolio so you're not neglecting any one of those every day, you'll be taking control of happiness as much as you possibly can. There's a lot more to come after this short break and we're back. Does money buy happiness? Money does not money?

Money lowers the sources of unhappiness. And this is really interesting, and there's research on this that goes back years and years and years, but it's never been able to sort

it out until relatively recently. And which you find is that people will say early on in their lives, when they don't have very much money and they're just starting out in their careers, for example, that they earn more money and they feel better, and so they say, oh, I'm getting happier, and so they chase that sensation their whole life, and after a certain point that's a relatively

low point, they're not getting any more life satisfaction. The reason for this is that it's actually getting rid of the sources of unhappiness. The sources of unhappiness are the things that drag you down, feeling hungry, having avoidable diseases, your children, being neglected, whatever. With a little bit more money, you can solve those problems. But you say ciate at a really low level from that unhappiness effect, and you

never actually buy happiness. So at about seventy or a hundred thousand dollars a year, you say cate the unhappiness effects, but you never get more happiness effects. But you don't learn that, and so you're going through life basically trying to get those like early hits of money and how they made you feel better, but they don't. You don't know why. Well, maybe in the next hundred thousand, maybe the next fifty dollars, whatever happens to be, then I'll

finally and you never do. That's the hedonic treadmill. Run, run, run, run, run, run, run to never get ahead. I was thinking about what you talk about with work, and say you had a radio show and I called you up right now and I said, listen, you know, I wish that I could find something about what I do that would give me happiness. I don't have the luxury of pursuing passion or you know, I cut heads off fish in a dark factory. So

what are you talking about. Yeah, some people have very sophisticated jobs, very high being sophisticated, high prestige jobs that they hate. One question that I always ask is who's benefiting from your work? And the one answer that I always get from people who don't like their work, who don't get joy from their work, is they don't know

or they've never thought about it. And so this is one of the things that I was recommended people do is the thing who is benefiting when I know it sounds ridiculous, I know, but somebody is benefiting when you cut the head off that fish. Somebody is benefiting when you trade that stock. Somebody is benefiting from it. Imagine

that person and dedicate your work to that person. So that's number one, and number two is you need to find yourself to the extent that you can in a work situation where you can be rewarded for your hard work and merit and personal responsibility, where you can be it doesn't matter if you're cutting heads off fishes or whatever. If you actually don't believe that you can get ahead when you do better, you're gonna be really frustrated. So this is actually a lesson for leaders as much as

it is for people who are frustrated about their work. Leaders, if they want to have employees that are not just bummed out and unproductive and sabotaging the whole operation, they say, how am I going to make sure that the people who work for me feel like they have a trajectory to greater success, that there's merit that's being rewarded, that they can earn the success and how can they feel more like they're doing something good for the world, that

they're providing a service that people actually need if you can provide those two things. And most cases, except for when people are really really in trouble from money, it's more important in money. And when you think about the depositing of these things for our happiness, if you're a little anemic in one area, can you make up for it in another? Yeah, for sure. You know. One of the best ways to remediate a job that's just really a drag but that you need is to find something

where you're earning your success in another area. So you don't remediate the work problem with more family. You remediate the work account with a better work account. And we can all do more than one thing. We live in this hyper specialized society where it's like, Okay, I do one thing and one thing only. We have this like weird cult in America called work is Um where work is absolutely everything. All of our self worth comes from work, and the only thing we talked about at parties with

other people is our work. And you go to sleep thinking about your work, and the first thing you do when you wake up in the mornings you think about and it's like, that's like a cult. It's insanity. It is a cult. I lived. I lived in d C, and I lived in Los Angeles. And when I lived in d C, you could only talk about Paul politics, And when I lived in Los Angeles you only talk about the entertainment industry. And every once in a while I would say, does anybody know a dentist? Is there

anybody else health care that we can talk to? No? I know, I know, it's insanity, and it's the craziest thing. And and you know, we have a group of friends here in Boston and we have a moratorium on talking about work. You know, we get together, we talk about life, we complain about our kids. You know, we do it normal people are supposed to do. And it's just so

much more enriching. So that's really really critical. So you can remediate a problem in other areas by doing more than one thing, and a classic I mean, you really hit on it. Ally, if you don't feel like you're serving others and earning your success, go help others. Everybody

can help others in all kinds of interesting ways. But the biggest problem that I see for a lot of people who are listening to us right now, is that they have an undiversified and unbalanced happiness portfolio because it's all work and they're neglecting faith, family and friends, you know that, which is basically like putting your entire pension in Greek bonds. It's like it might work out, but

recommend it. It's a it's a imprudent investment strategy. So, especially when'm talking to people who are really quite successful in their professions, I asked them if they're lonely, I asked them if they feel spiritually fulfilled. I asked them about you know, the quality of the relationships with their children and with their spouse. And almost always that's where

I find the weaknesses. And then we put together a remediation strategy that has very specific elements to it, or there's going to be at least half an hour a day in each one of those categories that's not work, and then scaling up. Yeah, it's It's funny because I've met some very successful, famous people, you know, big names that you would go, oh my god, you met so and so, and they were miserable, And I remember thinking, how is it possible that this person is miserable. They're

uber famous globally, they have more money than anything. They could, you know, buy Spain if they wanted, And then how dare you be unhappy? And then you sort of peel back the layers and you realize, well, they're all alone. And I would imagine that level of fame and fortune is incredibly lonely anyway, because you know, for obvious reasons. But it was always like a head scratcher to me that the thing to keep in mind about that. I mean,

Lady Gaga last year tweeted, fame is prison. It absolutely is. And by the way, great wealth is prison too. The good four that we already talked about, faith, family, friends, and work. They have kind of their opposites, which are the bad for the things that the world tells us will give us happiness if we pursue them, but they never satisfy. But I mean, isn't the whole advertising empire built on that. I mean, if you get this car,

you'll be happy, if you buy this house, you'll be happy. Yeah, it's a conspiracy, but it's mostly a conspiracy of our nature against ourselves. Mother nature wants you to pass on your jeans, but she does not care if you're happy at all, because happiness is not an evolutionary prerogative. Money and power and fame, those are things that we pursue for evolutionary reasons, because you're gonna pass on your jeans, and marketing simply taps into your tendencies, taps into your instincts,

cups into your cravings and animal desires. So the idols that you know that we search after, that we crave after that. We lust after our money, power, pleasure in fame and fame. You know a lot of people are listening like, I don't want to be famous, Well, yeah, you do. Because for anybody who says they don't want to be famous, they want prestige. They want the esteem of people who matter, which is an extremely localized kind of fame. And this is as old as the hills.

My Mondes wrote about this in the twelfth century. All these medieval philosophers said that what we really want is truth and the divine, but those are inconvenient, you know, they're hard to get, so we'll go after money, power, pleasure in fame. And when you're meeting somebody who's really famous who's unhappy, it's because they've fallen prey to thinking that if they just get that stuff, that they'll finally find the life satisfact and that they seek, and they

never will because they're on the treadmill. Run, run, run, run, never get ahead. And by the way, there's an evil guy in the corner turning up the treadmill speed the whole time. And furthermore, after a few years, they realize that they're not actually running for the ambition to find that satisfaction, but out of fear that if they stopped running it, they're gonna be like some hilarious internet meme wiping out on the treadmill, which will happen to famous people.

I mean, that's all we want is for that to happen to famous people. And that is a terrible, terrible existence. So, you know, the person that you hear about that you meet, And you've met a lot more famous actors than I have, and some of them are pretty well equilibrated emotionally, but many many are not because they haven't cultivated their own portfolio. You know, people have basically said, don't waste your time on faith, family and ordinary friendships and trying to find

fulfilling work. We asserve others get as famous as possible and you'll finally scratch that itch, and they're they're not very mature emotionally people, especially those who have been ever since they were young. They've just never learned how to be alive in the world, which is why you know so many of them when they're young end up in

rehab and everything because they literally can't handle it. But also, you know, I was thinking too when you were just mentioning fame, that that people have a tendency when they've sort of hit that peak to not surround themselves by authentic friends and family, but they kind of create like a posse of yes people, so that they aren't even having those real relationships like you talked about, they're not having real friendships where you know, chemicals are excreted in

their brain that make them feel good, and you know, it's it's becomes a very performed life, yeah, for sure. And you know sometimes people will have a real epiphany and they'll say, I just I hate this and I'm actually unhappy. And that's one of the things I've dedicated myself to them. And I'm in a very privileged position to know a lot of people that have these exalted positions in the public eye with my friends up. So I'll basically say you're running in the wrong direction. You're

not going to find it. You can't find it. One of the ways that I explained this, by the way, ally, is that there's a formula that's in our heads that we think is going to bring a satisfaction, which is that satisfaction is a function of all the stuff that you have. But that's wrong, because the truth is that satisfaction isn't fraction. It's actually the ratio of what you have,

divided by what you want. And so the only real way to get greater satisfaction is not to maximize your hals, but to minimize your wants, is to start looking in the denominator of that fraction. Because we all remember high school fractions. When the denominator of a fraction goes up, the whole fraction goes down. And so when your wants

go up, your satisfaction actually goes down. So when you're thinking about your crazings and desires and I'm gonna get that house, and I'm gonna get that car and this many followers, all you're doing is you're you're engorging the wants and the denominator of your satisfaction equation. And so one of the exerci as I do when I'm doing executive coaching is I say, okay, okay, what I want you to do is I want you to list your cravings.

I want you to list your desires. And we're gonna say I detached myself from this, and I detached myself from that. And you make a verbal and even written commitment to yourself to become detached from these wants that are subjugating you. And it's incredibly freeing. They say for the first time, it's like, oh, I never thought that it's halves divided by wants. Oh, that makes perfect sense. And you know, things become clear after that. That's the

secret of satisfaction. Actually, so things like you know, cutting off social media, shopping online, those kinds of things. Yeah, for sure. What I mean, I know, like have buddy who very successful in private equity financial guy, and he said, I know I'm going to be truly successful and satisfied when I can walk into a Mercedes dealership and by a Mercedes and cash and and and so he and he walks in, he has the cash at thirty two

and he's plunks down the cash. He says the Mercedes dealer, I want my car, and is he's driving it off the lot. He's like, should have gotten the should have gotten the Ferrari. That is an example of the ws. The wants just expanding in the satisfaction equation. And you know, for most of the people listening, they're not gonna do a Mercedes in cash because most of us don't have that kind of dough. But we all can have a kind of a version of that avarice in the way

that we deal with social media. So one of the first things I recommend that people do is go on to social media cleanse, you know, drop social media for two weeks and daily right how you feel once You're gonna find is that you've got cravings for the first day or two, and then, like the children's voices screaming inside your head, we'll start to get softer and softer, and by the end of your first week, you're gonna

be experiencing peace. And by the end of the second week, you're going to actually say, Wow, I cannot believe how addicted I was to that in the first place. This is important because this is just another one of these sticky cravings. There's a word in Sanskrit duka, which means the sticky craving for inadequate things. There's nothing thing that that describes that more than social media in our age today, because it sums up all the things that we're talking.

But aren't these all connected to two chemicals in our brain? I mean, I've always read that, like with social media, research equates it to the same chemical that's excreted in your brain when you're playing the slots in Vegas, in the same way that it does with friendship, that you excrete chemicals when you have close friendships. Yeah, for sure.

So when you play the slots or you're considering methamphetamines and you're an addict or alcohol or cigarettes or coffee in a small way, but in a much bigger way, social media you excreed dopamine. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that's the human brain uses to to hook you on anything. It's basically it helps you form habits and and and so it's a neurotransmitter that gives you a whole lot of desire, and it gives you a lot of pleasure

when you meet that desire. So It doesn't give you pleasure like you get high, but just meeting the desire per se because of dopamine gives you this big payoff and you get better and better at it. That's how addiction actually works. And social media is just like there's lots you're getting tons of dopamine, but it feels like happiness. That's the thing. Yeah, it feels like you know what it feels like, the satisfaction of an urge. That's what

it actually feels like. And it's extremely temporary. It's seconds long. You know that feeling when you've been looking at Facebook or Instagram or something for an hour and you're like, how did my life get like this? What's happened is that you were looking for that first dopamine feeling and you're trying to get it back for an hour and you can't after the first moment because that's not how the dopamine works. Your brain can't function that way. You die.

So that's the key. And the way that you break that is by breaking any addiction, is by walking away from it and saying I will not be subjugated by my brain chemistry. I refuse. That should be a bumper sticker totally and the other way it's oxytocin. You know, the reason that we're doing a podcast. People are listening to us, but you and are looking at each other right now and zoom is because we get oxytocin by talking to each other. Gives a better conversation, and it's

also more pleasurable. It's like I'm looking at my friend Alle and I get happiness from doing that because there's something in my brain going as opposed to there's just a voice. And they also say even if you hug people eight times a day, that also ups your level of oxytocin for sure. So yeah, yeah, blood oxytocin levels are maximized after a second embrace. So one of the things that I recommended everybody do during this coronavirus where

there's less contact. If you're almost physically uncomfortable, it's because you have an oxytocin deficit. Even if you're living with somebody else, you don't have as much contact with outsiders, so you don't have enough oxytocin. So the person you live with, you should therapeutically hug that person for about twenty seconds every two hours, which will keep you at a much higher rate of oxytocin stimulation and you'll be miraculously happier. And by the way, if you're you know,

it's good for your marriage. Well, I was going to say, George and I did this New York Times thing a while ago where they said, every day, do something incredibly loving to them. The next day, you know, embrace them for no reason, and it does work. Look, hugging works the way I rolling doesn't work in marriage. So the hugging is yeah, now you're talking about the John Gottman stuff on contempt. Yes, you know you're roalize and that's the number one predictor exactly, which made me stop rolling

my eyes. We're gonna take a short break and we'll be right back, and we're back with more. Go ask Alli. I have a question about creativity because I would think that many artists, painters, writers, they would in some ways fear happiness because they would feel that it would somehow diminish their creativity. Artists feel they need to have misery and have unhappiness in order to create. I mean, you know, if van God was happy all the time, he wouldn't

have cut off his ear. So how do you speak to artists that that are concerned that happiness will lead to an insufficiency of product. Well, so, to begin with, Van Go probably suffered from bipolar disorder, and and so when he was in the depths of despair, he probably wasn't painting at all. It was probably when he was manic that he was actually doing most of his painting. That's that's the case with a lot of people that suffer from bipolar disorder. Robert Schumann, the great composer, in

a manic phase, wrote six hundred songs. You know, it's like fun, guy. But the broader point that you're making is that is sure enough that people who are highly creative and not just artists and poets, we're talking about you know, coders and editors and you know, all the people are listening to us that are an idea professions. They know there's some correlation between the depth of negative feeling and the stimulation of their creative juices. And that's

not wrong. By the way, there's a great study that does content analysis on the letters of some great composers Beethoven, Franz list Wolf, Kaminous, Mozart, all of whom suffered from some form of depression. They find that a depressive episode was correlated with a thirty seven percent increase in high quality compositions. And this is a pretty interesting analysis. It's

a Dutch economist who did this work. And the reason for that is because there's a part of the brain called a ventral lateral prefrontal cortex that is stimulated by clinical depression. It's also implicated in the creative process. So what you find is that there's kind of this cross stimulation that happens from these two things. It is absolutely true that you see creativity that is extremely possibly correlated with sadness. Now what that means in the broader sense

is that we shouldn't be afraid of our sadness. You know what I make my students take a test on positive and negative affect and there's some that have unusually high negative affect their poets, you know, in the world needs poets. What we need to do is to not run away from our sadness. We should see that there's

sacredness and our suffering. We just need to know how to manage it because when it gets out of control, it can actually create havoc in our lives and ruin our relationships and make us cocoon and destroy our executive capacity to do what actually we need to do, to exercise and to eat right and all these things. But if you can manage yourself and understand yourself, you can have these emotions which give you creativity and and make you fully human without having it ruin your life. There's

a place for all of us, is the bottom line. Now, if some people pass into a little negative effect, that that requires medical attention. And the saying is always, if in doubt, check it out. But all of us have sadness, and some of us have more sadness than others. You know, some of us are a four on that one the seven scale, and that's has more sadness in the sixes and the sevens. And and you have to learn that

there's a place for it in your life. There's a reason for it in your life, and you should be able to embrace it and love it well at the same time managing it. That's what it means to be, you know, a live, human, adult person. So you've given us so much to digest today. How would you answer this, Arthur Brooks, Professor Brooks, How do I become a happier person? What are maybe first steps? Listeners? Can do right now, Yeah,

for sure. And now to begin with, you have to figure out whether or not the problem in life is too much unhappiness or not enough happiness. So there are a lot of things that you can do to lower your levels of unhappiness. You can get rid of your commute, which will lower your unhappiness. Staying away from negative people can lower your unhappiness because you know that's a contagion. Unhappiness is quite contagious. But if really it is happiness, and what we want to do is to bring happiness.

Remember the first three things in the happiness portfolio around relationships. There's a guy named George Valiant who taught it for many years, and he ran this eighty year longitudinal study of people from the nineteen thirties and forties until they died, and he wanted to know what was what did they do in their twenties and thirty that predicted their happiness or unhappiness in their seventies and eighties. And he said the whole study, across hundreds and hundreds of people and

decades and decades, can be summarized in five words. Happiness is love, full stop. The first three elements of your happiness portfolio are about love and relationships. Everybody I know who is insufficient happiness has insufficient love. And the reason they have insufficient love, generally speaking, is because they're not doing the work. To love is to will the good of the other. It's not a feeling, it's a commitment and it's work. The one thing to ask yourself today

is do I have sufficient love? Love of the divine, love of my family, love of my friends. And if I don't, am I serving enough? There's this hack, this happiness hack, which isn't It's time immemorial, every every great religious tradition has written about this. If you want to be happier, you need to give more happiness in the way that you do that is volunteering love, whether you're getting it or not, and in the process you will

become happier. Guaranteed. It's called the as if principle. Act like happy people do, which is by volunteering to give love to other people. Maybe it's volunteering in a soup kitchen. Maybe it's calling up a friend and giving them words of encouragement. Maybe it's embracing somebody even though you feel like cocooning because you're depressed. All these things that you do give the love that you want to get, you

will stimulate the love in your own life. And it has a neurochemical basis to it, but more than anything else, that's a cosmic basis to it. You will get happier. Well, I can say to you right now, Arthur Brooks, that just having done this podcast with you and connected with you has made me a little little happier. Yeah, me too. I mean, look, we're we've got some oxytosin going, and we have friendship, and this is what it's all about.

And every single person listening to us can get the happiness benefits by calling up a friend and talking about what matters and conspiring to make everybody else happier and more love. Thank you, Arthur, all right, thank you so much. Ali. So, I know sometimes when we think about happiness, we try

to understand really what that is. And I've been meditating about the idea of happiness and where are moments of my life where I've actually felt pure happiness and listen, of course all the big milestones, getting married, having my children, but there's one moment that has always stayed with me. When I was in my twenties. I was in college

and I was teaching improv to underserved children. So these were kids that lived in shelters, some of them on the streets, and once a week we would do improv class where we would just kind of, you know, run around and pretend we were monsters or princesses. And I was driving back from playing with these kids, and I was feeling so good, and then it started to snow, and then I was listening to this music box Brandon bur Concerto, and it was the culmination of all these

things that just sparked a very pure happiness moment. I mean I literally almost pulled over in the side of the road and cried. And it wasn't because I won the lottery, and it wasn't because George Clooney asked me out. I literally had a feeling that was a convergence of all these wonderful things, this great music, snow, and the ability to make these children smile, so that I forever hold as one of the happiest moments of my life.

Thank you for listening to go ask Ali join me next week when I talked about one of the trickiest relationships people have, and that is a relationship with our bodies, doctors and twins Lexie and Lindsay Kite will break it down.

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