Happiness Habits, with Harvard Professor Arthur Brooks

23:49And that's when metacognition comes to the rescue. Because once you say, I'm ruminating again, I'm doing that thing again, then it starts to actually be funny. And the moment that you start to find humor in your own obsessive rumination, you can find a way out. You can find the escape hatch from that and get out of it. But it takes a bunch of practice. Wow. And so the archetype of the poet that you described, now there are four emotional profiles, right? There's the poet, there's the cheerleader, there's the mad scientist, and there's one more. The judge. The judge. That's right. The judge, which could also be described as a little bit of a surgeon.

24:23You've described the poet archetype. Can you describe the others? The opposite of the poet is the cheerleader. So what we're talking about is the intensity of positive and negative affect. Affect means mood. That is not the same thing as happiness. Remember, feelings are evidence of actual happiness. Happiness is a real thing, enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose, et cetera. But you have moods that are affected by them. When people think that happiness is a feeling, they're making a big mistake. But we have feelings, and that's what we're talking about here. We all have the same feelings, but we have them in different intensities.

24:55There are four kinds of people. People who have high positive intensity of emotion and low negative intensity of emotion. Those are cheerleaders. Everybody wants to be that person. Those congenitally cheerful, annoying people. There are people who are the opposite, who have intense negative affect and low intensity positive affect. Those are the ruminators. Those are the melancholics. Those are the poets who tend to be very creative because of that VLPFC that's going on. Then you have people who are very high in both. Some people think the big mistake about thinking that positive and negative mood are opposites.

25:31No, you can have both. You can be way above average in both. That's high affect people. Those are people who are like, everything is great or terrible, but nothing in between. I'm a super mad scientist. That's what we call that quadrant of people who are above average intensity positive and above average intensity negative. The mad scientist profile. It's a quarter of the population. And then there are people who are low, low. These are low affect people. These are people who have plenty of happiness and unhappiness, but the intensity of their emotion on both sides of the ledger tends to be lower than average.

26:01These are the judges. They tend to be unflappable, cool as a cucumber. They don't freak out. That's why they're good surgeons. They're good spies. They're good judges. They're good parents to teenagers. And there's an important place for all four of these, but you have to know who you are so that you can manage yourself and you can surround yourself with people who compliment you as opposed to firing you up even more. You talked about the VFPLC as the brain basis for the poet. But is there a brain basis for the others? Yeah, it's all in the limbic system. It's all in the limbic system. So what you find is, for example, that sadness tends to reside largely around this ventrolateral prefrontal cortex and et cetera.

26:43And there's also a lot of emotional pain from another part called the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. That's when you feel grief. That's when you feel emotional pain, rejection, et cetera. So these things are working in concert where the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex is making you feel pain, mental pain, and then you're ruminating on it in the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex. You're running all these cycles on this. There's other sets of systems that work the same thing, but they're all within the limbic system of the brain that people are just better at certain things than they are others.

27:12And neuroscientists are increasingly using technologies like the functional MRI scans to figure out what part of the brains are bigger in these different affect profiles. And it's not that all psychology is biology, but there's a lot of biology in here that's really interesting. So I'm trained as a social scientist in behavioral economics and social psychology, and I'm having to learn more and more and more neuroscience as the years go by. I mean, I've retrained myself to a very large extent in a lot of the neuroscience literature over the past five years, just because this is the vanguard of what we're understanding about ourselves.

27:46Wow. We're bringing in a different book here, but is that an example of crystallized intelligence because you're now gaining multidisciplinary insights? Yeah, there's a lot of that. But it's also I'm just learning how to explain it. The most important thing is that if I were learning, if I'd gotten my PhD in neuroscience, I wouldn't have been able to talk to any humans. I would only have been able to talk to neuroscientists. And that's what was happening when I first got my doctorate. And I was doing this really sophisticated mathematical modeling. I was doing early artificial intelligence modeling called genetic algorithms.

28:16And I was applying them to different kind of policy mechanisms. And, you know, like there's nobody understood. It's like 14 people in the world could read my papers. And now I write for half a million people a week in the Atlantic on the science of happiness. And I have to explain a lot of this neuroscience. And, you know, people are listening to us right now and they're not like going, what's the bleep, bleep, bloop, bloop coming from, you know, professor, what's his name's mouth? I'm talking in ways, I'm using terms people have probably not heard, but I'm trying to do so in a way that people can actually understand.

28:44And that comes later. That comes after 50 is the ability to teach in that particular way. That's crystallized intelligence. We'll come back to this episode after this word from our sponsors. You know, when you're a kid, you dream about being an astronaut or working with wildlife or all these cool things. And then when you grow up, you think about not just what you want to do, but also you think about this other layer to it, which is how do I want to impact the world? What legacy do I want to leave behind? And how do I want to do that through my work? For a lot of people, that's when you start dreaming about owning your own business.

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31:56Going back to the topic of happiness, you've often said it's not happiness, it's happiness. Can you explain that? Yeah, so this goes back to what we were talking about a minute ago, which is happiness is not a destination, it's a direction. If you actually think you're going to be happy, well, good luck, you're going to be running for Shangri-La and never finding it. You know, this ancient city that people were looking for and people died looking for, El Dorado, which was, you know, people, the Spanish explorers, they had heard there was a city of gold in South America. And they just like hundreds of thousands died looking for the city of gold because it didn't exist.

32:32That's happiness. Happiness is a city of gold. Happier-ness is the state in which you're making continuous progress. That's really the way that we want it. We want to make progress in life is the whole point. We want to not get rich. We want to get richer. We don't want to get happy. We want to get happier, right? We don't want to have perfect love in our life. We want to have more love in our life than we had before. We want to be more charitable. We don't want to be some sort of mythical level of charitability that you can't go beyond because none of this stuff exists on this side of heaven.

33:06It doesn't, and that's not how we're wired. Human beings are wired to have greater satisfaction coming only from progress. Let's actually dive into that. So what is the basis of our deeply, innately human drive for progress? It's a good question, except that humans are going to die when they're not actually trying to move forward. You know, if humans actually could ever be truly satisfied, look out. You know, if you're on the Pleistocene, you know, Paul and Arthur's ancestors are like, hey, hey Paula, ancient Paula, hey caveman Paula, I found berries on a bush that are just so delicious over here.

33:46And then we go and we eat the berries off the bush and we stand there for two or three days feeling like really cosmically, metaphysically happy. We'd be some Sabertooth Tigers lunch for sure. The whole point is you got to keep moving. You got to get new berries, new berries on a new bush. You have to, and avoid all these predators all the time. So we're evolved to always be moving forward, moving forward, moving forward, actually better, you know, learning more, doing more, eating more. That's a tyranny because, you know, that progress principle means that you're always going to want to have more, you know, podcast downloads, more millions of podcast downloads, more famous, more, you know, advertisers paying more money for the show.

34:24It's natural that you're going to want that, but you have to recognize that you're never going to get there, which means that You have to temper your expectations and make sure that your ambitions really are more transcendent to these worldly things, or you're never going to find happiness. And again, because Mother Nature doesn't care. She doesn't care if they're happy. But in the animal kingdom, every species wants to survive and reproduce, right? But I don't see other species, like I look at my household cats, and I don't see them driven for progress. Yeah, well, they don't have a prefrontal cortex, so they can't actually understand.

34:58So the progress principle that we have makes it possible for us to actually strategize about that. Now, your household cat, if you've got a tomcat and you don't neuter him, he's going to try to have as many mates as possible. And every time there's a cat in heat out in the neighborhood, he's going to try to escape. Why? Progress. He wants to be the top cat. He wants to be the one at the top of the hierarchy. So even animals try to do that. One of the reasons that you regulate your cats from eating is because they'll eat and eat and eat and eat until they're morbidly obese. and it's really bad for them because they're going to try to get more calories, which is their primordial sense of progress.

35:31So even in the animal kingdom, we kind of do that, but we're just much better at strategizing so that we feel like we're more sophisticated than your cat. We're kind of not.

35:44So that then leads to the question of to what end do we strategize? And you've talked about the happiness 401k, the four accounts that you make deposits in, right? Yeah. Yeah, for sure. I mean, if we're not emotionally self-regulated, we're super distracted. And we're unbelievably uncomfortable all day long. And we're just trying to avoid negative emotions. And we're trying to get positive emotions, which is so dumb. It's like the hippies used to say, if it feels good, do it. That is the worst strategy for living ever. That's as bad as 20-somethings today saying, just make my suffering stop. If it feels bad, make it go away.

36:20That's just the hippie dictum in reverse. And all it is is saying, I am willing to be completely managed by my emotions. It's like, fine. And my only technique for actually making myself feel better is trying to either avoid my emotions or numb my emotions or whatever it is. And what that does is it sets you into a cycle of distraction. The reason that people are on their phones all the time is they're distracting themselves from negative emotions, from boredom, from pain, from fear. And they're just distracting themselves by these means. It's the same thing with any dangerous activity or behavior.

36:53And what it does is it actually changes your brain chemistry, which keeps you in a cycle of actually not paying attention is really what it comes down to. But once you can become properly metacognitive through everything we've talked about from therapy to meditation to prayer to journaling to counting to a million. Yeah. That once you've got these techniques and you're actually able to emotionally self-manage, you can stop wasting your time. time and you can focus on the stuff that will authentically, realistically bring greater happiness on which the pillars on which you can build a happy life.

37:26And there's really four. I mean, there's thousands that can do good things for you, but the real practices for raising your happiness, not your mood, your happiness or your faith, your family, your friendship and your work. Those are the big four. Those are the things that really matter. And I don't mean my faith. I'm Catholic, super important to me. But as a social scientist, I can tell you that anything is transcendent to your individual psychodrama. Paula's lunch, and Paula's podcast, and Paula's commute, and Paula's cat. You're going to be stuck in the psychodrama. It's like watching the same episode of the same show over and over and over again.

38:04And the result of that is that you can't zoom out and get some perspective and peace. Your family life, that's pretty self-explanatory, but a lot of people are not talking to family members, either because of laziness or stupid things like political differences. So dumb. Friendship requires real work because deal friends and real friends are different. They're not the same thing. And a lot of us who have big jobs and big careers and we think we're so, so important, then it becomes all deal and no real. And that's really lonely. And then last but not least, it's your work. And the only thing that doesn't matter about your work is earning your success and serving other people.

38:37That's it. And you need a certain base of financial security to moderate the avoidable sources of unhappiness. And that's all money does is that it keeps you above avoidable unhappiness. It's really all money does so that you can focus on these things, which really will bring you the happiness that you seek in life. I want to dive deeper into all four of those. Let's start with faith because the people who are listening to this podcast come from a wide variety of faith viewpoints. and those who are very certain of, you know, I am Catholic, I am Jewish, I am Hindu, I am Muslim. Nothing, right. Yeah.

39:18But so to the people who are listening who don't identify with a particular organized religion, what advice would you have for them in terms of incorporating these lessons? Get small. Get small. Make yourself small. When you're too big in your own psychodrama, there's a big problem. You know, when it's the Arthur show, I'm a mess. It's misery. The Arthur show is boring. The Arthur show just crowds out everything. So the whole point is get small. Now, there's lots of ways to do that. You know, I have a friend named Ryan Holiday. You know Ryan Holiday. Oh, yeah, I know Ryan. He does all the stuff on the Stoics.

39:48Ryan's great. He, I mean, it's unbelievable how effective it is to study the Stoic philosophers, which is why so many young people today are reading the meditations of Marcus Aurelius. like a 1900 or 1800 year old text, a guy's personal diary, or the writings of Epictetus or Cicero or Seneca, these ancient ideas of self-management through stoic philosophy that makes you small. Walking in nature is an incredibly good way to do this. I recommend that people who want to start on a transcendental journey, which is really what this is, is to go out before dawn every day and walk for an hour without devices and watch the sun come up and be just present in that.

40:30There's another way to do that. Some people will study things that will bring them true awe through beauty. So studying the fugues of Johann Sebastian Bach, great way to do that. Blow your mind and you'll never be done for the rest of your life. Some people actually will start a meditation practice, which is very important, especially a vipassana or insight meditation in which you're consciously, metacognitively considering your own emotions. And some people will, another way, of course, is the faith of your youth, which, you know, a lot of people listening to us are young adults and they're like, ah, I was a kid.

41:00It was such a drag. It's like, yeah, you need a grownup version. And believe me, there's a grownup version of your religion out there just waiting for you to check it out. And it's not what you thought because you got the third grade version in your head and that's kind of a drag. I got it. But the grownup version can I mean, it's unbelievably profound because people much wiser and smarter than us are the ones who thought it up. So look at it from new eyes and new perspective. All of these things actually work in that particular category, but you've got to do something every day. Let's talk about family because there are going to be, again, a wide variety of people listening to this, some of whom have a great happy family life, but some of whom they have no spouse or partner, they have no kids, and maybe they're estranged from their family of origin.

41:45Yeah. And sometimes that's unavoidable. I mean, it's not like you can snap your fingers and, you know, be married. I mean, that's not the way it works. This is not, you know, my dad traded 100 goats for me and now I'm married. I mean, it's not, this is not the old days. This is not, obviously, it's a complicated. Yeah, there's no arranged marriage system. Yeah. Not so much. Although, you know, it's unbelievable how, you know, we look at the data on that. It's not perfect, but it's a lot better than Tinder, it turns out, for the effectiveness of partnerships, as it turns out. The real shame that I see today is that people are voluntarily estranged from family members because of things as trivial as political differences.

42:27One in six Americans is not talking to family members because of political differences. And that's a kind of a propaganda brainwashing approach where a lot of baby boomers have tried to conscript millennials into their pointless culture war. And the way that they do that is by saying walk away from your love relationships because anybody who disagrees with you on important social or political issues is somehow erasing your existence. That is patent nonsense. There's one reason for schism with family, and that's abuse. And differences of opinion are not abuse, even if they're substantial differences of opinion.

43:00And we have to get back to the point. We need young adults, Gen Z and millennials to fight back. We need a rebellion against these bad baby boomer and Gen X ideas that are creating this incredibly polarizing culture war. Because who's paying? The people who are not speaking to their parents are the ones who are paying. Now, I write a lot about actually how to turn the gears on this. One of the biggest reasons that there's schism inside families is that there's values rejection. Behavioral differences almost never create schism. So if you're living in a way that your parents don't approve of, they will almost always forgive you.

43:37But if you say, I reject your values because they're stupid, they probably won't. Live your life, let them live theirs, love them all the same, and don't reject their values. That's the important thing. And then you won't have the schism, but your parents will get over it. Almost always. I've had the data. In virtually 100 % of the cases, is your parents will learn to live with however you're living your life. What they can't deal with is if you come home and say your religion is stupid, your politics are stupid, your opinions are stupid. So when your teachers in college are telling you to go home and stand up to mom and dad and tell them they're morons, that's your teachers trying to conscript you into their war.

44:16Don't play ball. You just talked about the culture war being the baby boomer and Gen X. But do you see that also originating in millennials and Gen Z who maybe their parents are willing to talk to them, but they don't want to talk to their parents because of political differences or viewpoint differences? It takes two to go to war, for sure. It takes two to go to war, for sure. But the problem is that largely we're in a fear-based culture in our politics and social environment in the United States. And a lot of people are making a huge profit by generations not speaking to each other. And people with different political affiliations not speaking to each other, which is so absurd.

44:52The way that this works is 93 % of Americans recognize how destructive our polarizing culture really is around politics and social issues and hate it. And the other 7 % don't hate it because they're getting rich and getting followers and getting viewers and getting votes. And that's a big problem. And so you can actually find people of all different generations that are dining out on our misery. And when it comes to family, don't play ball. I mean, you got it. And I'm not talking about not playing ball with people with whom you disagree. That's easy. Don't play ball with the people with whom you agree because they want you to sacrifice your own relationships for a particular agenda.

45:26And you agree with the agenda. That's fine. But your relationships and your love are more important because it's your life. It's your life. And, you know, these are the people in your these are the most mystical relationships. These are your love relationships. You didn't choose. God knows you wouldn't have chosen them, but you didn't choose them. And so you can't let somebody make you walk away for some amorphous, your political opinions are not going to keep you warm. It's very important that we not be manipulated in that way. And we are largely today. We'll return to the show in just a moment.

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49:18All right, let's talk about the third category, which is friends. You talked about the distinction between real friends and deal friends. So my follow-up to that is deal friend, that sounds like a relationship that's purely transactional. Am I understanding that correctly? Kind of, although lots of deal friends are really warm. I mean, there are a lot of people that I work with that I love them. They're really wonderful people. But the real friendship is usually characterized by a cosmic uselessness. Deal friends are useful. real friends are useless. And that's the important thing for us to keep in mind.

49:54And I don't mean worthless. I mean, I've got friends like that too. It's, it's, it's useless insofar as that there's this love for each other. And usually it's, it's kind of based on a love for a third thing. Um, you know, I have really close friends who share my faith. I have really close friends who they care a lot about my relationship with my wife and my family. And they don't ask me very much about, Hey, I heard you're on the bestseller list. It doesn't really mean that much to them. And they may or may not be people who read my books. They care about me. But you can't be distracted from the fact that you need people in your life who are going to be interested in more than your financial position, more than your success position.

50:33We all want to be admired for our success at work. We all want that. That's the reason that people buy fancy cars is they want to be their signifiers. I mean, it's the Ferrari is a signifier of the fact that you can afford a Ferrari. So people infer a lot about your level of financial success and they will admire you and you will rise in a cognitive hierarchy. It's all biological evolution. It's evolutionary psychology. And I get it. I mean, we all fall prey to that, but you can't let that evolutionary psychology get in the way by dominating all your relationships and all your ambitions and your whole life of the love that you need, or you'll just be desiccated.

51:12You'll die inside. You'll die inside your Ferrari. And that's not that great. Right. Right. All right. And then the fourth is profession or work. And that seems, again, going back to our earlier conversation about happiness equals enjoyment plus satisfaction plus meaning and purpose. It seems as though to be satisfied with the work that you're doing almost feels like a contradiction against wanting to climb the corporate ladder. But yet there's that drive for progress and that drive for wanting to make that climb. Yeah. No, and it is very healthy and good to want to do that. But you have to understand yourself to the point that you don't become obsessed with that and sacrifice the things that really are enduring and that matter a great deal more over the course of your life.

51:58And that's the kind of balance that you can only get through metacognition and say, I'm doing it again. I'm doing it again. I'm doing this thing. I admire ambitious people. I mean, my kids are super ambitious. I mean, it's like one of them wants to be an entrepreneur, and the other one wants to start a school, and the other one wants to do cognitive neuroscience and go into the family business with me. And it's just so awesome, right? But I have to tell them, remember, it's love that matters. It's love that matters. And you can have both. You just have to be metacognitive about the way that you're doing that.

52:29When it comes to happiness at work, there really is two characteristics. neither of which is how far you are up on the corporate ladder. You know, the prestige that you actually have at work and the admiration of others is nice in the moment, but what brings enduring joy from work is feeling like you're earning your success, which means that you're creating value and being recognized for it, which is why I'm a real enthusiast for the free enterprise system, by the way, because it's really good at letting people, you know, work in a labor market that's kind of efficient, at least, and then people tend to get ahead when they work harder, which is a really good thing, you know?

53:02That's good. Without ruining our own lives, of course. So earning your success. But the more important thing is feeling like you're serving others. That people need you. Somebody needs me. That's what's so satisfying about work. You can be selling widgets that don't really have a good purpose that you know of and be extremely successful at it, and it's okay. But when people are writing you emails saying, you changed my life, or you can look into the eyes of somebody who you really helped, or you sell a product and it really enhanced the quality of their life, then it's unbelievably satisfying and you'll get true and enduring joy from your work.

53:43This is you, right, Paula? Look what you're doing with this podcast. I mean, weird. I mean, if I told you 10 years ago, this is going to be your job, you'd be like, what are you smoking? Exactly. And what you're doing is that I bet you, like me, I bet you get 12 emails a day from people who say, thank you for doing that. I was living in my mom's basement a year and a half ago, and now I feel like I got it going on. And I feel like I've got a leg up. And so the joy that comes from that is not the fact that you've got 25 million downloads, some ungodly amount of downloads, which you have. It's that people are writing to you and you're actually changing their lives.

54:16And that's what gives you the enduring sense of meaning and satisfaction from your work. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And particularly when I meet those people in person, And, you know, that's when it really feels real. For sure. For sure. Me too. Me too. Me too. Me too. It's just an amazing thing. And then, you know, the bucks are nice, right? But at the end of the day, that's, you know, you're not going to be lying on your deathbed saying, you know, if I could have helped fewer people but have another million dollars. Right. That's right. Nobody ever. Yeah. If only I'd helped fewer people. Yeah. For more money.

54:50Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What's it like when one of those phone calls or emails that comes in is from Oprah Winfrey? That's weird. That's a weird day. So yeah, it's like, hi, this is Oprah Winfrey. And I'm like, yeah, and this is Batman. Who's this really? But here's the funny thing that you have this podcast and hundreds of thousands of people are listening to each episode of your podcast. You don't know who they are. They could be anybody. It could be, I mean, and it turns out because I have about 500 ,000 people who read my column every week in the Atlantic. And one of them every single week was Oprah Winfrey.

55:28And then I had a book that came out about success and happiness in the second half of life. It came out in 2022 called Build a... No, sorry. It was called From Strength to Strength. I'm getting confused. I wrote two books in two years, which is not my ordinary speed. And it turns out she read that book and called me up and said, let's do my podcast. I always wanted to meet you. And I'm like, you always wanted to meet me? That's crazy. And that's what it feels like. It means that successful people, they want the same things as everybody. They want love and friendship. And they want to understand the meaning of their lives.

56:05And getting a little bit more money doesn't give you special metaphysical information about truth. And that's what I've actually learned over the course of writing books that sell a few copies is that there are people as important and inflecting and beautiful and well-equilibrated like Oprah Winfrey herself that they're interested in these secrets as well. And that's a really – boy, that's satisfaction on that day. Can you describe the process? You've written so many books, 13 books I believe. Yeah. Most of those books you've written by yourself. Right. Can you describe the process of co-authoring a book with Oprah?

56:42It's a different process for sure. And part of the reason is because actually the book was her idea. It wasn't my idea. And she said, what if we collaborated on something? And I said, yeah, name it. And she says, if I had a show, she said, I would have had you on the show 30 times. And then everybody would have been following your stuff. But I don't have a show right now. So let's write a book together where I host the material. where I open up an audience that you wouldn't ordinarily have and say, read this thing that we're doing together. And it's like we're sitting on the couch together talking about this thing, and I'm bringing you on as the expert.

57:16And so we wrote, she weaved her unique voice as a host in between these parts of the science and ideas that I'm talking about. And she talked about how this has helped me, how this can help you. Here's what this really means. Here's a new word that might be helpful. and it's just like every single, it's like pearls. I mean, for example, the word happierness comes from Oprah, not from me. I said, you got to make progress. You have to progress principle, blah, blah, bleep, bleep, bloop, bloop, technical, technical, technical. She says, you mean the goal is happierness? She said, that's it. One word from the queen.

57:52Right. Wow. Wow. Are you happier having done this? Yeah, for sure. It's great. It's great. And the reason is because about five years ago, I stepped down from a CEO job. I've been a longtime academic, and I taught for a long time. Then I stepped away, and for 11 years, I was the president of this research organization, a think tank in Washington, D.C. It was a hard job. I mean, and I was just burnt out and exhausted. I was 55 years old, and I stepped back. I was like, what am I going to do? So I spent a whole bunch of time meditating and praying about what I wanted to do with the rest of my career, which, you know, when you're in the thinking business can go on a pretty long time.

58:33It's not like I'm doing something that's so physically taxing that I have to retire. And so it's going to be another 20 years. What's it going to be? And, you know, over a six-month period, it came that I was going to, I wanted to use my ideas to lift people up and bring them together in bonds of happiness and love, employing the highest levels of science. And that, and I, So I took an academic job. I came to Harvard. I became a professor at Harvard, and I started writing for The Atlantic, which is this big public-facing idea magazine, and then started building an audience and building an audience and doing more media.

59:07And now teaming up with Oprah, I get to bring that to more and more and more people. I feel like I have a holy vocation to lift people up and bring them together. And so every day sort of feels like a prayer, Paula. It's amazing, actually. And some days are bad, right? I'm not going to kid you. There's some days that I sleep four hours, and it's like I'm on the plane again, and my flight is canceled. But I get to do 175 speeches a year outside the university. I get to write for 100 ,000 people. I get to work with Oprah Winfrey, and all to raise happiness for people. And so if I'm not happy, I should have a good stern talking, too.

59:42Let's put it that way. Happier. Happier. Happier. Happier is the goal. Are you happier than you were? I mean, how long have you been doing this podcast? How many years now? I've been running Afford Anything since 2011 as a brand, as a newsletter, and the podcast since January 2016. So it's a long time. You're kind of an early adopter. You know, in 2016, I thought I was a late adopter. I was like, I'm so late. But it turns out seven years in, seven going on eight years in, and you build this huge, I mean, everybody listens to this show, and the reason is because they trust you. And that's a big responsibility, but would you say that you're happier now than you were in 2016?

1:00:26Absolutely. Yes, absolutely. It's a joy, isn't it? Yeah, it's that progress. Every step of the way, I'm incrementally more satisfied in every facet of life than I was previously. Congratulations. You deserve it. Well, thank you. We're coming to the end of our time. Is there any final message that you would like the people who are listening to this? to walk away with. Yeah. There's no one weird trick, like not eating bananas, which is sort of the character, which characterizes the internet culture. Do this one weird trick and lose all your subcutaneous abdominal fat, you know, whatever. There's no one weird trick.

1:01:04You have to do the work of learning and then changing your habits and then passing it on. But there's one big thing to remember. You know, the happiness habits are faith, family, friends, and work. And what this has in common is that we're talking about love of the divine, love of your family, love of your real friends. The apex of family and friendship is your romantic life, deep, deep romantic love, which is not passion. It's companionate love where you're the closest of friends. And then love of everybody is expressed through the way that you make your daily bread. And so the one concept that's common across all those things is love.

1:01:43And the truth is, if you're going to remember one thing, it's that happiness is love. And if you can't remember anything else to do because you're freaking out, go love and you'll be fine.

1:01:56Thank you so much, Arthur. What are three key takeaways that we got from this conversation? Key takeaway number one, happiness is not a feeling. People often think of happiness as a singular emotion. But Professor Brooks tells us that it's a framework made up of three distinct pieces. And this is valuable because it gives us a path to navigate to greater happiness or happiness by examining these three distinct parts. Yeah, happiness doesn't have an opposite, really. I mean, happiness, as far as we understand, is simply a combination of three things. It's enjoyment of your life, satisfaction with your life and accomplishments, and a sense of purpose and meaning in your life.

1:02:43Those are the three component parts of happiness. So they make up kind of a meal, sort of like your food is your protein, carbohydrates, and fat. And you wouldn't say, what's the opposite of food, except not food, I guess. And so that's the way to think about happiness as well. The opposite of happiness is, I guess, an absence of enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose, but it certainly is an unhappiness. So enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning or purpose. Those are the three distinct pieces that make up happiness or happiness. And that is key takeaway number one. Key takeaway number two. The topic of managing your emotions might sometimes feel irrelevant within the broader conversation of how to manage your money and design your life.

1:03:33After all, isn't happiness fleeting? Isn't it subjective? Isn't it, I don't know, isn't it a little bit rah-rah rainbows and unicorns? No, it isn't. Arthur Brooks points out that being able to manage your emotions is foundational and fundamental in good decision-making, and as a result, in building a satisfying life. You can't get happier if your emotions are running out of control. It's like the kids, you know, telling you where to go on vacation. I mean, it's going to be a huge mess. You'll be out of money on the first day. You'll be driving in circles. I mean, the parents in the front seat are supposed to be making the executive decisions.

1:04:11And this is the whole point. Your emotions are being created by the limbic system of your brain. All they are is information that's interpreting what's going on outside of you so that the prefrontal cortex of your brain, the bumper of highly evolved tissue right behind your forehead, can then make C-suite decisions. What happens if you don't manage your emotions, then the C-suite is offline. And that's a huge problem because then you will have maladapted emotions all over the place. You'll have excess anxiety. You'll have sadness that's misunderstood. You won't be able to harness your emotions so that you can choose your own reactions in a way that's appropriate.

1:04:47You'll probably have temper control problems. And all these things will get in your way so you're actually not able to design the life that you want. Emotional management is the C-suite of your life. That is the second key takeaway. Finally, key takeaway number three. Metacognition is being aware of your thoughts. It is thinking about how to think. And this skill is fundamental when it comes to managing your emotions. And managing your emotions is foundational to managing every component of your life, from your money to your business, to your family life, to your career. Managing your emotions is the foundation of that.

1:05:28and metacognition is a crucial element of emotional management. When a person is highly reactive, their emotions take over, they hijack the decision-making process. And that means that intentional, thoughtful choices become much harder to execute. Arthur Brooks discusses the importance of metacognition, and he shares strategies with us to help improve metacognition. Metacognition is a series of processes in which your emotions, which are completely natural, they don't control you. On the contrary, you put more space between the information coming out of your limbic system, negative and positive, not good and bad.

1:06:12Remember, there's no bad emotions, just the information, negative and positive. You put space in between and your interpretation of why you're having these emotions and what they mean. And the way that you do that is through techniques like prayer, techniques like meditation, techniques like journaling, techniques like counting to 100 before you actually say the thing that was on your mind. And all of this is unbelievably well documented in the social science and neuroscience literature. The point is, take a break, take a pause, take a minute, and actually say, what is this feeling? What's it coming from?

1:06:46What does it mean? And saying, I am not that emotion. I am a person with that emotion for a particular reason and then use the information appropriately. That is the third and final key takeaway from this conversation with Harvard professor Arthur Brooks. Thank you so much for tuning into the podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please do a couple of things. First and foremost, share this with a friend or a family member. That's the single most important thing that you can do to spread the message of having strong financial health and reaching financial independence. Number two, subscribe to our show notes, affordanything.com slash show notes.

1:07:29And number three, please leave us a review in whatever app you're using to listen to this show. And while you're there, please make sure that you are following this show so you get all of our updates. Make sure that you are signed up for any notifications. If you haven't seen us on YouTube, check us out there, youtube.com slash affordanything. We're on YouTube. We just Actually, announcement, we just surpassed 50 ,000 subscribers on YouTube. Thank you so much for everyone who watches this podcast on YouTube. If you haven't seen us there yet, check us out. And I can't wait for 50 ,000 more. So thank you so much for everyone who has been part of that journey.

1:08:14All right. Well, thank you for being part of the Afford Anything community. Remember, you can discuss this episode with other members of the community. Just go to affordanything.com slash community. You guessed it. All right. Thanks for tuning in. Don't forget to subscribe to the show notes, affordanything.com slash show notes. My name is Paula Pant. I'm the host of the show, and I will catch you in the next episode. See you there.