As a college professor, my intention for this platform has always been to enhance our human experience and to bring a summary of valuable information that will open up our lives. So I know that you listeners and readers are interested in learning new ways to explore a life with meaning and purpose.
Happiness is really a combination of three things, enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning.
ARTHUR BROOKS: Look, your life is an enterprise. Your life is your start up. Treat it as such. Treat it with seriousness. You know, treat the inside of your head the same way you would treat your P&L statement is the bottom line. OPRAH WINFREY: Your life is your start up, the biggest start up you're ever going to have.
They coined the idea of happierness by offering science-based practices and wisdom.
The goal is not happiness because the goal of getting happy doesn't have a ring to it.
They mean being happy is finite and we want the infinity by happierness by always become happier.
Everybody wanted to dig into this thing that we now call happierness and see whether or not it was achievable in our lives.
And that has to do with the fact that people are less likely to live a spiritual or find a life of meaning in those institutions.
There are two main reasons that since the late '80s, maybe the early '90s, people have been gradually getting a little less happier year, after year, after year just a little tiny bit: Climate and weather.
And that has to do with the fact that people are less likely to live a spiritual or find a life of meaning.
Climate
They're less likely to have a close relationship with their families.
People have fewer and fewer friends who know them well.
People have less of a sense that they're serving others with their work.
That's the climate. And that's been a problem for a long time.
Weather
Then there's weather, storms, and social media.
There have been two big storms in the past couple of decades that we have to pay attention to. The first was around 2008, 2009. Now, I know everybody watching us is like, oh, obviously the financial crisis. Uh-uh. That wasn't it.
That's when everybody started looking at social media in 2009.
social media
So Twitter, for example, became a platform for people to be intensely negative. Instagram is not the same way. It's more of a platform for people to compare themselves to others. But that had a big impact, especially on young people, especially on women and girls, 15 to 25 years old. It created a new kind of culture that was intensely comparative and problematic.
So social media actually, made people less happy and lonelier. Here's the weird thing.
When you're super hungry (for food or communication) and it's like, oh, man, I haven't eaten (seen anyone) in hours, and hours, and hours. And you pass by a fast food place. And you're like, good. That'll get the job done. And so you gorge yourself, and you're stuffed, and you don't feel so good.
An hour later, you're hungry again. What happened? The answer is you didn't meet your nutrient needs.
You'll get too many calories and not enough nutrients
All you met is your caloric (weak human relationship) needs. And so the result is you stay hungry, even though you don't need the calories. hat's like getting all your meals at 7-Eleven.
Social media is the junk food of social life.
That is a tweetable moment, but we don't tweet.
That's the reason you'll binge and get lonelier. That's a problem.
That we're in the midst of right now.
It's not as if social media is all evil. I mean, you can use it responsibly. If you would not let somebody into your house who bears you ill, you shouldn't let them into your head.
"happiness is not a destination. Happiness is a direction." I know that was a shift in mindset for many who are reading this book.
Every time I would sit with the audience and I'd say, what do you want, everybody would always say multiple people would answer, I just want to be happy. I just want to be happy. But yet, when you ask them, what does that look like for them? It is hard to define. We think it's a feeling. We think it's a destination. It isn't either.
You know, happy feelings are nothing more than emotions. And emotions are nothing more than information that we need in reaction to the outside environment. And as a destination, why would you want to be completely happy.
happy as the destination? You'd be dead in a week because you actually need negative emotions and experiences to train you to keep you vigilant, to keep you safe, to keep you alert.
But on Earth, I'm telling you, I need my negative emotions to keep me alive and safe.
people want to stay alive and safe, but they don't want the feelings that keep them alive and safe. And that's this conflict that they have. And people think, well, if I just had what the others have, I could be happy. But we know, you have the science to back it up.
There are really four pillars that you really do need. And if you don't have all of those pillars working in your life, you will eventually end up feeling not necessarily sad, but lonely, distanced, or disconnected.
The idols, the things that look right, but aren't, are money, power, pleasure, and fame.
Those are the things that Mother Nature says you get those, you're going to be happy. But she lies. Mother Nature lies. She lies a lot because she wants us to keep running, running, running, running, running.
Well, Mother Nature gives us these imperatives because she wants us to be hungry, you know?
And she wants us to survive and pass on our genes. And the way that you do that is with money, power, pleasure, and fame.
And she doesn't want us to figure out that those things never really satisfy so that we'll keep running, and running, and running. That's called the hedonic treadmill. What we really want-- and this is backed up by a lot of psychology, neuroscience, behavioral economics, all the research that we want is that there's kind of four things that are the virtuous things that we should be looking for that Mother Nature doesn't necessarily tell us, but that if we take the divine path in life, a better path in life, we'll be happy.
Our society does aid in Mother Nature's lie because you know, the marketing colossus tells us that if you get that car, man, you're going to be really happy.
And those are our faith, family, friends, and work that serves.
There's nothing wrong with those things. But if you get those things, if we are so lucky to get those things, they should only ever be in service of the big four, the good four.
How do you use that money, power, pleasure, and fame to enhance your faith, family, and work? And friendship=Basically, your love.
Your love and your life and the love and lives of the people around you. That's really what those worldly goals should be used for if you want to have any shot at true happiness.
sharing is one of the principles of enjoyment, which is what actually defines happiness, enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose.
The macronutrients of happiness: are enjoyment (pleasure to enjoyment: by adding friends and making memories), satisfaction, and purpose.
Happiness is not a feeling. Happiness is not a destination. It's a direction toward happierness
And another wrong idea has to do with this one that I'm going to be happy if I can just hit the pleasure lever over, and over, and over again.
And an addiction that gives you little pleasure and goes away, regardless if it's methamphetamine, or if it's your work, or if it's shopping, or if it's whatever it is. That can be gambling. That can be eating or checking social media.
If you're hitting the pleasure lever over, and over, and over again and you're alone, then you know there's a problem.
you need to change the pleasure to enjoyment: how? by adding friends and making memories.
That's what all the beer commercials do because they want you to be happier when you use their product. And the reason is they want you to have enjoyment, not just pleasure in their ads by bringing boxes of beer for a group of friends!
do not get rid of pleasure. Instead, improve the pleasure to reach enjoyment.
ARTHUR BROOKS: Exactly. You need to have the source of pleasure, plus people that you love, plus memories.
People tend to seek pleasure to cope with disappointment, sadness, or anger.
The basis of getting happier is knowledge. it is not feeling.
There's a cycle in hitting the lever to get the pleasure, hitting the lever to get the pleasure. You have to disrupt. You disrupt that cycle with love, with another person, with people that you care about.
When you talk to people who have suffered from addiction, one of the things that they always talk about is that the addiction was, like, my closest relationship, it was my lover. It was my best friend. And I wanted to go away with my best friend.
You need to add the person who disrupts that little relationship. You disrupt that by adding a real living human being.
The secret to the best life is to accept your unhappiness, so you can learn, and grow, and manage the feelings that result.
People may say: I'm supposed to surrender to it? I'm unhappy. No, it's not the idea. The truth is that you need to accept it as normal. And this is a big part of our culture today is that we think that if we feel unhappiness or pain, there's something wrong with us, that there's evidence that something's broken if you feel unhappy. You know, if you're in college, you go to campus counseling and say, I'm really feeling anxious, and I'm really feeling depressed--and you know, my university is a really hard university. If you're not anxious when you're at Harvard University, that's the problem. Who's walking around at Harvard not feeling anxious? my students, they don't quite figure out that I'm, like, freaking out too.
When something bad happens to you, move on, don't ruminate on it. Rumination is not the same thing as understanding. Don't have it be kind of like a ghost around haunting the limbic system of your emotions. benefit from it tremendously if you analyze it like a scientist.
The second macronutrient of happiness, satisfaction, is that thrill from accomplishing a goal you worked for is what you say. Why is satisfaction also the key to getting happier?
ARTHUR BROOKS: We're made to make progress. Human beings are made to make progress. You know, we want to achieve. The funny thing is that people always think, when I get to my goal, then I'm going to be finally happy. But that's just an incredible fallacy.
The arrival fallacy is once I finally get the money, once I finally get the marriage, once I finally get the car, the house, the boat, then all will be well. The truth is that the greatest joy comes from the progress toward the accomplishment, even in spite of the fact that it requires a lot of struggle. Satisfaction is that moment that you hit it, which is a real moment of joy. Now, the paradox in that is that it doesn't last.
The problem is you can't keep no satisfaction. And that's what seems kind of like a bitter fruit with the satisfaction dilemma. You need to struggle. If you don't struggle, by the way, there is no satisfaction.
Then the problem is thinking that once we arrive, it's going to be good forever and then having a little the frustration that comes from the satisfaction is dispelled. And there's a way to fix-- there's a way around that.
But once again, you got to fight Mother Nature. So you need enjoyment. You need satisfaction. And you also need purpose.
Those are the macronutrients. so explain to people how the macronutrients fit into the pillars.
So the macronutrients are basically the elements that we find that you need in balance and abundance.
Meaning is the essence of your life. You know, who am I?
And that's no joke. That's a hard thing to do. I mean, some people believe that you could discover it because your essence precedes your existence. The answer is your essence. And it precedes you.
Question number one, why are you alive?
And the second, for what are you willing to die today?
There's got to be something. And once you actually find the answers it's extraordinary,
He's a scout sniper in the US Marine Corps.
He was goofing off, and he wasn't even having fun
The life is an enterprise alive. And we are entrepreneurs.
I'm VC. I'm a venture capital, so I deserve a business plan. I realize it's pretty nerdy, but there you go.
How are you going to the answers to these questions in your business plan?
Chapter two is entitled, "The Power of Metacognition" and what I call feel to feel and then take the wheel.
Explain metacognition. I think this is just one of the biggest, biggest, biggest contributions to people getting happier in their lives once you get the metacognition. ARTHUR BROOKS: It's changed my life. And part of the reason is because people go through life relatively unexamined in their emotions and just hoping that their emotions will get better and with a complete inability to separate their own essence from their emotions.
And that's a crazy thing to do. You're not your emotions. Look, I'm not my hand.
But that's how people are with their emotions where their emotions are controlling them.
Metacognition is thinking about thinking.
It's the ability to look at your own self with a certain intellectual remove at a distance.
It's putting distance between your feelings and your reactions and doing it on purpose.
When you have that ability, your life isn't going to be the same. It just isn't because you're not going to wonder, like, is something bad going to happen to me tomorrow? By the way, answer, yes. Am I going to feel bad about it?
I'm going to decide how I'm going to work on this. I'm going to decide my reactions. I'm going to substitute emotions that are more appropriate for what I'm doing. Now, you have emotions for a reason. You're not going to block them out. But once you have metacognitive skill where you can put space between the emotions that are just simply signals from your brain about what's going on around you, and your reaction.
OPRAH WINFREY: The emotions are there to tell you that something's off and you need to do something about it.
emotions are just information. That's all they are.
OPRAH WINFREY: And if you can separate yourself from the thing that you're feeling, feel the feeling, and then take control
And the way that you do that is by putting space between the emotions and your reactions.
you do that by studying yourself by observing the feeling exactly as though it were happening to somebody else? You identify what this feeling is. You say, oh, gosh, I'm feeling so sad right now. I'm feeling so put upon.
But you separate the feeling from yourself. You're observing all those feelings inside your body, so that you see that the feeling is really different from you. You're in control of the feeling.
And you're able to react in an appropriate way.
I mean, we're so maladapted to the way that our feelings occur to us. Your stress hormones are through the roof.
You've got butterflies in your stomach and the whole thing. The reason for that is because the nature wants you to run away from a saber-toothed tiger by injecting stress hormones into your system when you think there's a threat.
Or you don't want to wander the frozen tundra and die alone. But you know, folks look around. No tundra. Make it feel like it really is.
For sure if you don't have an unexamined life, then you're not going to be able to make those distinctions. And so you can actually laugh at yourself.
When you're actually observing your own emotions at a certain remove as if they were happening to another person and you see yourself freaking out because of a tweet, you will start laughing.
And somebody said a mean thing to you on Twitter, and you're acting as if you an ax murderer is chasing you? Come on, man. And it's just funny. And life gets better. And that's what metacognition can do for all of us if we have the right techniques.
emotional caffeine metaphor (on page 71)
Most people, something like 95% of Americans use caffeine on a regular basis. they thinks it's quite charming. but what happens with your brain is you think it peps you up because it gives you all this energy. It's not. What it does is it blocks another neurotransmitter called adenosine. Adenosine is a neurotransmitter that's floating around your brain that goes into these certain receptors.
And it mellows you out when it's time to be tired, time to lower your energy. The problem is you got too much of it. Like, in the morning, you're feeling kind of lethargic. Too much adenosine is filling those receptors.
So you get this caffeine where the molecule's the same size and shape. And it goes into the parking spots for the adenosine, blocking it, so it just can't mellow you out. That's what caffeine does. It blocks the neurotransmitter that you don't want.
So caffeine's not really perking you up? ARTHUR BROOKS: It's not. It's preventing you from being perked down.
OPRAH WINFREY: If there's happierness, we can be perked down too.
So many times throughout life, you've got a particular emotion, but it's not the emotion you want. Choose another one.
You need a better repertoire, a repertoire of better emotions. so when you're in a funk, when you're perked down, you can go to something that perks you up.
Exactly right. You can actually block the anxiety and depression.
this is an example from a mutual friend of ours, Rainn Wilson, you know, the actor who was in "The Office."
He-- I noticed, you know, just through basic observation, that a lot of professional comedians are depressed.
So I said, hey, man, what is it about professional comedy that bums you out so much, that makes you melancholic?
And he said, no, no, you got it wrong. It's the opposite. It's that we tend toward depression, and we make a joke when we feel down. And that solves the problem. That's emotional caffeine.
you lighten your own load. And you get relief. You get a little cup of Starbucks dark roast at that moment. So is that what emotional caffeine is? exactly.
things that bedevil you, the problematic emotions that are maladapted. They're not the wrong emotion. They're just an emotion. It's just information. But you can have another emotion that's also extremely appropriate and choose that if you're studying yourself and you've got distance between your reaction and what you're feeling. If you're very reactive, you're like a little kid. You know, you're angry, you yell. You're sad, you cry without thinking about it on the contrary.
When something is-- and it's fine. I mean, we like spontaneous people. But that's no way to live. You know, when you have little kids, when my kids were little, my wife would always say, use your words. I'd say be metacognitive. That's what that really means because when you use your words you've move the experience of the emotion into your prefrontal cortex into your executive brain. And there, you can make decisions like emotional caffeine.
You can decide on different emotions that are more appropriate to the circumstances. So here's the thing.
OPRAH WINFREY: You can think a better thought. ARTHUR BROOKS: You can think a better thought. OPRAH WINFREY: And you can think a better thought if you have a repertoire of thoughts to go to think.
it's hard to think a better thought when you're in the midst of the-- if you're all perked down. ARTHUR BROOKS: So give yourself some space.
Get some space in there and say, OK, I'm going to go to the library. I'm going to pick out that one.
So we feel resentment, and we feel bitterness, or we feel anger a lot. And the reason is because we're evolved to have those dominant emotions. This is called the negativity bias. The negativity bias is that, you know, we actually have more brain space dedicated to producing emotions that are negative than positive because negative emotions on the pleistocene keep you alive.
when you step outside. OPRAH WINFREY: And you will remember that frown longer than you remember the 12 people who smiled. ARTHUR BROOKS: Oh, yeah, because that's
evolved to keep you alive. The problem is this is hugely maladapted and S ruin big parts of our lives because we're so we're negative all the time. It's also unrealistic.
have a gratitude journal and walk to decide the correct reaction.