56. Arthur Brooks on Living a Better and Happier Life

Speakers

Greg McKeown, Arthur Brooks

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Greg McKeown

My guest today is Arthur C. Brooks, Harvard professor, behavioral social scientist and columnist at the Atlantic, who specializes in using the highest levels of science and philosophy. To provide people with actionable strategies to live their best lives, is the best-selling author of 11 books on topics ranging from economic opportunity to human happiness, is the host of the popular the art of happiness podcast available on Apple and Spotify. He was selected as one of Fortune Magazine’s 50 world’s greatest leaders and awarded six honorary doctorates. He’s originally from Seattle, but now lives in Massachusetts with his wife and three children. You can find him online at ArthurBrooks.com. Arthur Brooks, welcome to the What’s Essential Podcast.

Arthur Brooks     

Thank you, Greg, as your audience are all existing fans of yours, but I am too. And what a wonderful opportunity to talk to you, you were on my podcast. And it was so well received, and it was so much fun. Now we get to continue the conversation, thank you.

Greg McKeown     

Oh I hope people will go there and listen to that conversation and subscribe to your podcast too and hearing you say that. I mean, of course, you’re being polite, but to say that you’re a fan of my work is is such a thrilling it’s thrilling moment for me, because it’s one of the real pleasures of doing a podcast, I think, at all, is the opportunity to talk with people that you know of by rumor or by reputation or by reading. And then you then you get to talk together and get to know each other and have a relationship. And it really is one of my happiest things with having done this. And so it’s my honor to have you on here. I mean, beyond the formal intro. What I should say to people listening is that Arthur Brooks is the real deal. You know, this is this is someone who’s trying striving to live by virtuous principles. Trying to teach not just trying to be an influencer in some surface level but trying to be a teacher making the classroom beyond Harvard’s classroom, which matters to but to, you know, to the rest of us. There’s so many things we could talk about. Maybe it’s a little too forced to do this. But I, I’m looking to you for a discussion today about let’s call it five rules for how to be happier right now. And how to make it easier to be happy right now. I think a lot of people could sign up for insight on that, after a year and a half of the pandemic and the civil unrest and the challenges that we’ve been alluding to here. What’s top of mind? What when I asked that question to you what’s something that just pops first?

Arthur Brooks      

So the first thing that that that pops for me is what a lot of people are getting wrong, which is misunderstanding the goal and trying to become happier. And the goal is not to make suffering go away. The goal for most people in being happier is to be more fully alive, more engaged in their own lives. See, most people understand that happiness, real happiness, it requires sort of macronutrients if you will. Like food is fat, carbohydrates and proteins. Well, happiness really is three things its enjoyment, satisfaction and purpose.  

Greg McKeown     

Okay let’s hear that, enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose. Okay

Arthur Brooks     

Yeah, enjoyment is all positive is pleasure with me. So it’s pleasure with education and so you enjoy thing and pleasure is kind of a base a base kind of sense that we get it’s positive but you can elevate it with a little bit of education. This is a reason that the more you learn about music, the more you like it because it actually goes from pleasure into enjoyment. The second is satisfaction and that is the reward for a goal met or a job well done. Satisfaction is the prize at the at the end of the road for something and it has its own problems. You can’t you know, Mick Jagger saying I can’t get no satisfaction he should have saying I can’t keep no satisfaction. Because there is all sorts of evolutionary tendencies to not let you keep satisfaction, but there’s a whole, a whole topic. The last one is, in a way, the most interesting. The biggest mistake that people make is they want happiness without purpose. How do I know that because they’re trying to alleviate the suffering from their lives assiduously, too m uch. I mean, everybody has suffering and by the way, suffering can tip over your boat, it can become so debilitating that it becomes a medical problem, I understand that. And I’ve had a lot of that and members of my family. But the truth is that to be fully alive, to put one foot in front of the other requires a lot of suffering, it requires a lot of challenge, requires a lot of sadness. That’s what being alive partly is and, and nobody finds the purpose in their life without unhappiness. And so the paradox of happiness, the mistake that we make, and the first way to be happy today is to accept unhappiness. It’s it took me a long time to figure that out as the happiness scholar. Happiness and unhappiness are not the same thing. They’re literally processed in different hemispheres of the prefrontal cortex. But unhappiness is a key in moderation, properly understood, and, and diligently managed unhappiness isn’t an experience of life, which helps us find your purpose and purpose as a macronutrient inhappiness. So the first thing that we can do today, to be happier is to make peace with our unhappiness.

Greg McKeown     

How do we do that? If I’m unhappy about something right now, how do I make peace with it?

Arthur Brooks   

To begin with, it’s to take it out of the realm of feelings. So the old Buddhist masters that was talking about observing your feelings, and what they’re talking about is actually making emotions, negative emotions, in this case, metacognitive. Become aware of your emotions and your emotions, your primary emotions are all produced in the limbic system of your brain is sort of, affectionately known in my profession as the lizard brain, or as Daniel Kahneman, or Preston calls it system one. It’s where you think fast, because it’s automatic, but it’s not conscious. This is below the level of your conscious imagination of your executive thinking. Your limbic system is the emotions that you have automatically, for all of the evolutionary and survival reasons. You need anger, you need sadness, you need disgust, you need especially fear, because that keeps you from being threatened and eaten by a sabretooth tiger. The problem is when your unhappiness, is when your negative emotions are purely limbic. Because then they happen to you, you’re controlled by them. Where it gets really interesting,  where life gets interesting is where you can take these limbic sensations and make them metacognitive, which is to say, to sit with them to be aware of them, when you’re actually are observing your own primary emotions, you’re moving them to the prefrontal cortex of your brain where they can be managed, and where they can become an opportunity for growth. That’s the way that we deal with these things. Now, I’m not going to lie and say I like negative emotions. No, I don’t like them at all. But I understand that they’re necessary and fruitful and meaningful. And they give me something that I need, in much the same way that you know, any negative ingredient can be a stimulus. I mean, it’s interesting, there are all sorts of things, pathogens that we, that we, that we introduce into our lives that have a paradoxical impact of making us more resilient or creating a particular, you know, having a particular place in the production process are things that we need. And this is a perfect case. If you want negative emotions, to not be purely perceived as negative. And by the way, they’re not purely negative, they’re keeping you alive. But if you want them to be fruitful in your happiness, you need to make them metacognitive by thinking about them by analyzing them. And by thinking, how can what just happened to me that I don’t like that’s making me sad or angry or fearful, what am I learning from this? And how can it be an opportunity for growth?

Greg McKeown     

Yeah, I mean, what I think you’re saying is that the very second you say, as I’ve heard people suggest, I am feeling this, I am feeling fear, I am feeling angry, I am feeling out of control, the very act of naming it already improves your situation, because you’re now shifting the emotion into as used to describe the different parts of your brain. And it allows you to observe the emotion rather than just being totally flooded with it.

Arthur Brooks     

That’s right. And that’s one of the key observations behind cognitive behavioral therapy, which is a wonderful adjunct to medication for people who are clinically depressed, talk therapy, self-talk. All that self-talk does is you’re not convincing yourself of something that’s not true. You’re simply taking your emotions and making them more than automatic. You’re also making them manageable by simply naming them.

Greg McKeown     

Yeah, I love that. And some of naming is using words you already have to simply state this is this, I am feeling x. And then the second is to discover new words for things you didn’t have words for before, new phrases, and you say, oh, I’ve had this emotional forever, this is what I’m experiencing. And somehow naming it in that way, also gives you greater control of, of the emotion that you’re grappling with.

Well, I don’t know how many things we just covered. It feels hard to call that number one. But, but I feel like, let’s break that down. So you certainly covered one thing, which is, which is this naming of the emotion so that we can stand apart from I that I would take as one different thing? Did we cover a second that we can unit as a number two?

Arthur Brooks     

We could call number two making peace with your own happiness? Although they’re they really are part and parcel of the same meta idea, I think.

Greg McKeown     

Yeah, I think so. So we just call that well, that’s still going to be bucket one. What’s the second idea for what somebody can do to increase their happiness right now?

Arthur Brooks     

The second thing, I think, for people to remember is that we all have a baseline level of happiness that is governed at least half in 50%, by our genetics. That’s incredibly powerful and believe it or not empowering information. Because every one of us has a baseline and our baseline might be lower than somebody else’s. But understanding that helps us to understand also, that we have a unique charism, we have a unique set of gifts. And that in an ebullient, enthusiastic, optimistic outlook on life might not be part of our gifts, but that we have unique gifts. In spite of that we’re wired in a particular way. And let me let me explain what I mean by that. There’s a test a personality test that I administered to my students at Harvard Business School, every spring. It’s called a positive effect, negative effect survey, or is called PANAS. And you can find it online PANAS, you can find it online all over the place. And what it’ll tell you is whether you’re unusually high or low in positive effect, which is to say good feelings. And unusually higher, low and negative effect, which is to say, bad feelings. And what people find is that bad feelings and good feelings are not mutually exclusive. Just because you’re high in negative effect doesn’t mean you’re low in positive effect. On the contrary, you can be high in both low in both high in one or high in the other. And this is really interesting, because what it what it turns out, it has a lot to do with your heredity, heredity, your genetic or epigenetic wiring, in terms of your happiness, and the emotions that you have a tendency to feel and feel really deeply. And why that’s really empowering is because you know I can if you’re somebody who has incredibly strong positive and negative effect, you’re both happier than normal, average and unhappier than average, then you’re kind of a mad scientist. And there’s a world for you, there’s a role for you, but it’s hard for you to find it unless you know it. And believe it or not, knowing about your unique personality profile makes you happier because it gives you power to understand where you fit in. People who are low in low, low effect and high in positive effect and low negative effect. I know lots of people like this. I call these judges. They’re sober, they’re stable. You don’t want to be as a judge. No way. I’m jumping all over the place. You want somebody who is low in positive and negative effect, who has not moved to excess emotion that can be counted on all the time.

Greg McKeown     

Two things were interesting to me, one, can people go and take that assessment?

Arthur Brooks     

Yes, absolutely, there’s a website that my old friend Martin Seligman, who teaches at University of Pennsylvania, he invented the field of positive psychology. And he has a website called authentic happiness. So if you just Google authentic happiness, and then you log into their website, and there’s a battery of about 30 personality and happiness tests, and PANAS, is one of them, it’s one of the most interesting.

Greg McKeown     

The other thing that was interesting to me is just that simple point that that understanding that you are a particular type is itself correlated with feeling happier. and end up and it seems that, that that makes sense to me. But it names something that we do, like a deep breath, like, I don’t have to be like everyone else. There’s a version of me that I get to be, and I don’t need to try and force my way out of certain ranges that I’m in. And so this idea of becoming more and more of who you really are, and less and less of who you really aren’t, I think is key to happiness. But also, I think key to just a more effortless life, or less wasted effort on, you know, on things that just aren’t going to produce great results.

Arthur Brooks     

We’re in your turf, I mean, we’re talking about effortlessness. And you can’t, your life is full of needless effort, when you’re not being yourself, when you don’t actually understand what your unique talents are. If you’re trying to, you know, get in the big leagues of somebody else’s personality and you don’t fit, you’ll just feel incompetent. That’s there’s no way that you can lead an effortless life. When you don’t understand yourself. Well, so that brings a lot of happiness to take a lot of the excess effort out of what you’re trying to do to succeed.

Greg McKeown     

As I listened to you, it just had a feeling of relief. I can imagine people hearing it just oh, yeah, I That’s right. I don’t have to be like everyone else I need to embrace that actually, a lot of me is fixed a certain way. And there are things I can do beyond Of course, through action, to improve or to be happier. But I one of the ways to get that isn’t to just be like my old optimistic spouse, child, mother, father, whatever. Like, there’s a there’s a place for me and my particular way of being exactly right. Give me number three.

Arthur Brooks   

Number three is what comes out of the all of the data on how to live a happy and successful life and all appeal on this to there’s a famous study that came out of Harvard University called the Harvard study on Adult development, which is an 80 year longitudinal study that started with college students, match them up with people who didn’t go to college, then look to their kids and grandkids and over 80 years, became a crystal ball. And if you are this, most likely, it’s going to turn out like that. It’s very, very powerful. And the end of the end is, there’s a lot of things that go into it. I mean, there’s, there’s a lot of, you know, the seven things that you should do if you want to age well, you know, you if you’re there’s any clue that there’s drinking problems in your family or in your life, you stop drinking, because that that will lead to huge problems. You shouldn’t smoke, you should exercise you, you should stay interested in things, you should read, etc, etc, etc. But number one on a walk is good relationships and having a lot of love in your life. That’s the secret to a happy life and it fits in with the 80 years of the Harvard adult development study that happiness is love, full stop. And so what we need to be doing is cultivating the love relationships in our life. If you want to be happier today, love more today. If you don’t feel any love, it doesn’t really matter. Because to love is to will the good of the other, you can act out love and the feel the feeling will come naturally. And so secret number three, to becoming happier today, tomorrow, next week and for the rest of your life is to love others more.

Greg McKeown     

I love that. I remember Stephen Covey used to say love is a verb. And we tend to want it to be or it gets presented in any number of movies and books and so on. As a feeling. I mean, there’s almost always presented as a feeling. And he’s saying, of course, love is a feeling as well but it starts as love as a verb. It’s what you do, it’s how you treat someone. And as you as you treat them, as you treat them with love, you tend to receive love, there seems to be a you know, at an almost exact reciprocation. We are we are deeply reciprocal beings. I love principle three.

Arthur Brooks     

It’s open to all of us to because it’s an act of will. So people who say I don’t feel it is yours. You mentioned doesn’t matter. Each of us has this under control. It’s the most, it’s the ridiculous most easy thing that we could possibly do is to show love.

Greg McKeown     

Okay, so now you intrigue me on that, how is it so easy.

Arthur Brooks     

It’s easy insofar as it isn’t a conscious act of will and it can be very small. When you don’t feel like saying I love you, that’s when you should most say I love you. And it’s three words. It’s only hard because we make it hard. And the reason that we make it hard is because of our pride. So when you’re fighting with your spouse, and you don’t want to say I love you, it’s because you’re being prideful. And that of course that pridefulness is hitting yourself in the head with a brick. It’s completely counterproductive. The easiest thing to do is to do it, you want the thing that you want, you crave love, but you’re blocking yourself off, you’re making it harder than it actually should be. There are acts of love that are tricky, that are challenging, that are that take lots of time that are hard for us to do that are relatively hard, but the basic act of will, of willing the good of the other, of expressing something not withstanding our feelings. That’s something that’s open to all of us. We’re all able to do that because we’re sentient human beings. We can go against our instincts. And doing that in and of itself is unbelievably freeing. So that’s what I’m talking about. That’s actually not hard a nd it gets easier with practice.

Greg McKeown     

Well, and and even as you say it, I think about I remember coming across in the research for effortless that the idea that that according to some psychologists and neuroscientists, they’ve measured it between two and three seconds. That’s really the now we experience. And so it has a lot of ramifications. It takes it from the philosophical Oh, the now the Great. Now we all live in the now to going oh, you we have two or three seconds. Like that’s it. That is our that is our actionable window. And so when you say, I love you, it’s three words. Yeah, it’s the two to three seconds we have What did you say love is ridiculously love is ridiculously easy. That’s to me a profound statement. As you know, as I’ve been teaching principles of effortless now, I am amazed at how deeply entrenched people are in the idea that virtuous action, that essential work is inherently the hardest work. What a clever lie. All it really means is looking at someone else and saying something nice to them saying something kind expressing an action, you know, a small sense of love or admiration or encouragement.

Arthur Brooks 

And you will immediately be happier. This is a is a hack, but it happens to have its basis in the deepest deepest truths of philosophy, theology spirituality of all the good things that have gone back for all the millennia of human civilization.

Greg McKeown    

Give me number four?

Arthur Brooks 

Number four follows from number three, which is choose gratitude. Gratitude is, is unbelievably underused by people. And it is free to everybody. And there’s a lot of research that says, you know, if you make a gratitude list on Sunday, just make the list of the five things that you’re most grateful for in your life. And I don’t care if they’re little or smaller, stupid or profound. And then study it every day for five minutes and update it on Sundays, by the end of 10 weeks, you’ll still be somewhere on average between 10 and 25%, happier. Gratitude is the most efficacious, and it’s even easier than love. And it’s way it’s the most efficacious way that people can turn their, their orientation toward the world around. They can become happier immediately, they will also change the orientation that people have towards them. Gratitude in a way it reprograms your brain, there’s a lot of good neuroscience about how gratitude affects your outlook on things and the parts of the brain the from the ventral striatum, which is the part of the brain that  governs good feelings and pleasure, that that you will literally feel better immediately you will have happier sensations and you will become no matter how you started, you will become more grateful if you express gratitude, so number four is express gratitude.

Greg McKeown     

Yeah, I’m completely consumed with this, this idea that you can’t overdo it with gratitude. Most principles have a quite a quick limit to them. You say okay, well, we’ll do this, but not too much. And I have yet to find, I have yet to found anything like the edge of that in my own pursuits. But I’ve kept a gratitude journal for 10 years now. I don’t think I’ve missed a day in 10 years, which means that I have, you know, well beyond 10,000 items written down now. And I love it. I love doing it every day, it’s great for mental health. I started a practice. I don’t remember if you and I talked about this before, but after I complain, I will say something I’m thankful for. That simple rule. And how when we’ve done it in our family and introduced it and so I’m encouraging everyone else to do it. Some will complain and I’ll say it’s fine. Now tell me something you’re thankful for. Right? And, and my son, oh, well, I’m thankful that dad wants to play this game where we always have to say something we’re thankful for after we complain. And everyone laughed and immediately worked. And that’s its power. I love that’s number four, number five?

Arthur Brooks     

Number five is one of the most counterintuitive, but it’s going to make sense when I say we all think that we’re going to find satisfaction in life. If we have what we want, we need to stop managing our halves and start managing our wants. Now the way to understand this basic concept is that your satisfaction is not a function of what you have. You act that way we all act this way. The much-regretted bucket list which Americans are encouraged to I’m so I suppose when you came to the United States, you were amazed by this concept of, of keeping an actual list of your cravings and desires and your attachments. I mean, it’s just so it’s the most non-Buddhist thing. It’s a bucket list. And you’re supposed to look at it and admire it and say I’m gonna get these things, what you’re doing is you’re lowering your satisfaction. The reason is because your satisfaction is actually what you have divided by what you want. And what you’re doing is in keeping a bucket list and considering your cravings and stroking them and building them up, is that you’re expanding the denominator of your satisfaction equation by building up your wants. And in doing that your satisfaction is simply going to fall.

People believe that their satisfaction is a function of what they have. They forget that their true satisfaction is a function of what they have divided by what they want. And we all remember enough of our high school fractions to know that when you increase the denominator of a fraction, the entire number false. That’s just absolutely true in the case of our wants, and so we have this lifelong halves management strategy where you acquire, and you work to get things and you desire, possessions and entertainment and relationships, and status and prestige and power, and especially money and stuff. And you’re on a treadmill, and you can’t get that satisfaction. Why not? The reason is, because you’re not managing the wants. So what I recommend that everybody do to become happier, immediately, is today, to make a reverse bucket list. To make a list, I’ve to take some time to make a list of your desires and your cravings, your the things that you wish you had absolutely. And then make it metacognitive, like we talked about earlier in the conversation by going through that list and say I am detaching myself from these things. I don’t mind if I get these things, but I no longer want them. These are not things that are going to be my priority to have this is what the Dalai Lama says. He says that if you feel stable and steady satisfaction, you need not to have what you want, but you want what you have. And the way to do that is with this idea of wants management. That’s the fifth secret. And that’s a big one. And that actually is a hard one. It requires conscious action, the reverse bucket list is a good place to start. Another good place to start is to go on a consumption fast for one week, a month, don’t buy anything except essentials like food, one week, a month, you’re not going to even look@amazon.com you’re not going to look at eBay, or Etsy or any other or you know, realtor.com or whatever is your vise when it comes to consumption. Because what that’s doing is that’s a halves management strategy, which is leaving you in lower and lower states of satisfaction, which lowers your happiness. That’s one of the macronutrients of happiness, to manage your wants aggressively and confidently counter culturally, Boy, that’s really powerful stuff and you’ll never be you’ll never be sorry that you’ll never go back, quite frankly. I mean, it’s easy to stop these patterns. But once you get into the habit of managing your wants, its life changing.

Greg McKeown  

I that there’s so much more to that one. And I personally can attest to it and struggle with it and love the idea of aggressively managing your wants. I think that’s terrific. Essentially, one and all, thank you for listening to another episode, this time with the marvelous Arthur Brooks. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, I’d be very grateful if you consider leaving a rating and review on Apple podcasts on iTunes. And in fact, the very first person to do this and to leave a review and just take a screenshot of it email me at Greg@GregMckeown.com. I will send you a copy of Love Your Enemies, the last book that Arthur Brooks put out. We just love hearing the feedback. It really helps in spreading this podcast and new listeners beyond in our essentialist community. And I want to end as I always do, reminding you that if you don’t do anything else, just ask what’s essential and eliminate as much as possible of everything else which is so consistent with what you have just taught us. Arthur Brooks, I just can’t wait till the next time. Thank you so much for being with us.

Arthur Brooks     

Thank you. Great thanks to all of our listeners.