Arthur Brooks is a social scientist, professor at Harvard University, columnist for The Atlantic, and bestselling author. In this episode, Arthur returns to the podcast to discuss his new book, Build the Life You Want. He delves into the nuanced concept of happiness, differentiating between momentary feelings and overall wellbeing. He explains the importance of understanding one’s personality pattern with respect to positive and negative emotions in order to better self-manage emotions. He delves into the three key elements of happiness, offering practical strategies for enhancing those specific domains through methods such as metacognition, transcendent experiences, discipline, minimizing self-focus while directing attention outward, and more. Through personal examples, Arthur demonstrates that one can actively track well-being levels and take intentional steps to cultivate happiness and enhance overall well-being.
Distinguishing Happiness from Feelings
- Happiness is not the same as happy feelings. Feelings are merely **evidence of happiness**, not the phenomenon itself. Mistaking these feelings for happiness can lead to a futile pursuit, making one feel "managed" by their emotions rather than managing them.
- Happy and unhappy feelings can coexist in parallel. Our brains are evolutionarily wired to prioritise negative emotions (fear, anger, disgust, sadness) for survival, as they demand immediate attention. These four negative emotions are considered fundamental building blocks of emotional life, produced by the limbic system. For example, fear and anger are responses to threats, disgust prevents ingestion of pathogens, and sadness signals social exclusion or separation from loved ones, crucial for tribal survival. Positive emotions, like joy and interest, are also evolutionarily advantageous, rewarding desirable actions such as finding food or learning.
- Humans possess the unique ability of **metacognition**, allowing us to experience and control aversive emotions through the prefrontal cortex, rather than solely the limbic system. This enables us to find enjoyment in experiences that other species would simply find aversive, such as cold plunges or spicy food.
- Evolution primarily favours **survival and gene propagation**, not necessarily happiness. Often, cultivating happiness requires consciously acting against our natural, limbic impulses.
Understanding Your Emotional Profile
- Individuals exhibit different baseline levels of mood balance, characterised by the intensity and frequency of positive and negative emotions. These can be grouped into four personality patterns, each comprising roughly a quarter of the population:
- Mad Scientists: High positive and high negative intensity. The speaker identifies as one, being at the 95th percentile in positive and 90th percentile in negative intensity.
- Cheerleaders: High positive and low negative intensity.
- Poets: High negative and low positive intensity, often associated with creativity and rumination.
- Judges: Low intensity in both positive and negative emotions, typically unflappable individuals.
- Knowledge of your genetic predisposition for happiness (which is 44-52% heritable, based on identical twin studies separated at birth) is crucial for self-management. This awareness allows you to actively manage your habits and compensate for inherent tendencies, rather than being a passive recipient of your emotional state. For example, "mad scientists" need to proactively manage their emotions to avoid being overwhelmed by their intense feelings.
- In relationships, **complementarity is more important than maximal compatibility**. Finding a partner who completes you, rather than mirrors you, can lead to a more adventurous and productive partnership. For instance, "mad scientists" often do well with "judges" who can provide a calming influence, whereas two "mad scientists" can create a "hurricane". Dating platforms, by encouraging self-curation for similarity, often lead to suboptimal matches.
The Three Macronutrients of Happiness
To cultivate happiness, you need a balanced and abundant intake of three "macronutrients":
- Enjoyment: This goes beyond mere pleasure. Pleasure is a limbic signal for survival or gene propagation, temporary and often solitary. The pursuit of pleasure alone (e.g., excessive solitary drinking or social media use) can be detrimental and addictive. Enjoyment, however, engages the prefrontal cortex and is enhanced by **people and memory**. For example, consuming alcohol or candy moderately, with loved ones, and in a way that creates shared memories, can contribute to enjoyment despite their inherent risks when consumed for solitary pleasure. If something gives you pleasure and you're doing it alone, you're usually doing it wrong.
- Satisfaction: This is the **joy experienced after struggle or earned success**. Mother Nature wires us to seek this reinforcement. However, our evolutionary wiring often tricks us into believing this satisfaction will last indefinitely, leading to the **hedonic treadmill** – a constant chase for "more, more, more" when previous achievements cease to provide lasting happiness due to homeostasis. To counteract this, adopt a **"want less" strategy**. This involves consciously managing your desires and attachments. A practical technique is creating a **reverse bucket list**, where you list worldly attachments (e.g., political opinions) and symbolically "cross them out" to reduce their emotional power and bring them under metacognitive control. This allows your "CEO brain" to process them rather than reacting limbicly.
- Meaning: Considered the most vital "macronutrient," meaning is the "protein" of happiness, without which life feels empty. It consists of three components:
- Coherence: The belief that things happen for a reason.
- Purpose (Rum Line): Having a clear direction or end goal for your life's journey.
- Significance: The feeling that your existence matters.
Strategies for Self-Management and Metacognition
- Create Mental Space: Metacognition involves deliberately creating distance between your limbic (emotional) system and your prefrontal (executive) cortex, allowing for thoughtful responses instead of automatic reactions.
- Techniques for Cultivating Metacognition:
- When angry, **count to 30** and visualise the consequences of your potential actions.
- Engage in practices like **therapy (e.g., Cognitive Behavioural Therapy), meditation, or prayer** to observe and process your emotions consciously.
- **Journaling** is a powerful non-meditative tool. For anxiety, write down your top five fears to make them concrete and less overwhelming, forcing your prefrontal cortex to take over. For personal growth, maintain a **"failure and disappointment journal."** Record setbacks, then revisit them after 30 days to identify lessons learned, and again after six months to find positive outcomes that resulted. This process transforms negative experiences into growth, converting "negative" emotional information into data for learning.
- Cultivate Hope, Not Just Optimism: Optimism is merely a prediction that things will turn out well. Hope, by contrast, is an empowering belief that "no matter what happens, I can do something". Despair is the absence of hope, often rooted in disempowerment. Avoid adopting an identity of "victimhood," as this can foster hopelessness and is often manipulated by leaders.
Addressing the Decline in Societal Happiness
- Happiness in the United States has seen a secular decline since the late 1980s, punctuated by severe "storms". This decline is largely attributed to a decrease in **faith, family, friendship, and work that serves others**.
- Key contributing factors include increased loneliness due to technological shifts reducing in-person interaction and less oxytocin exchange, less healthy attitudes towards work leading to diminished workplace bondedness and greater career mobility, and the widespread adoption of **social media** (around 2008), which has been catastrophic for happiness by fostering hatred, social comparison, and loneliness. Political polarization (post-2016) and remote work trends (post-COVID-19) have further exacerbated isolation. Interestingly, major national threats like 9/11 have historically led to a temporary increase in happiness by fostering unity.
- To navigate these challenges, embrace the concept of "happier" – a direction, not a perfect destination. This involves gaining knowledge about happiness, consistently applying that knowledge through changed habits, and sharing it with others.
Living a Deliberate Life
- Approach your life as a **startup**: You are the CEO, making deliberate choices and disciplining your will, rather than solely acting on immediate feelings. This is the "Divine path," as opposed to the "animal path" of impulse.
- Love is a commitment and a decision, not just a feeling. It involves "willing the good of the other as other," even when it requires personal sacrifice, as exemplified by making coffee for a spouse.
- Recognise the difference between **complicated and complex problems**. Happiness is a complex, adaptive human phenomenon that cannot be solved with simple, replicable "complicated" solutions (e.g., a dating app for love). It requires living it, working on it, and accepting progress and failures.
- To manage this complexity, employ a **multi-dimensional "dashboard"** for your happiness. Track "micronutrients" (e.g., warmth of marriage, relationship with children, career value, philanthropic efforts, professional interest) and periodically rate your progress. This structured self-assessment helps make progress on a complex life challenge, akin to creating an "imperfect linear model" for a complex problem. The speaker does this on his birthday and half-birthday, avoiding evaluation during periods of extreme emotional noise.
Minimising the "Me-Self"
- We all have an "I-self" (the observer of the world) and a "me-self" (the self being observed). Modern society, particularly through social media, encourages an unhealthy obsession with the "me-self" through constant self-reflection and concern for how others perceive us.
- To foster greater happiness, strive to **minimise the "me-self" and maximise the "I-self"**. Practically, this means turning off social media notifications, avoiding checking mentions, and even physically removing mirrors from your environment to reduce self-obsession. By looking outward more, rather than inward, you can increase your engagement with the world and your overall happiness.
Personal Transformation is Possible
- Even someone who has studied happiness for decades and identifies as a "mad scientist" (prone to high negative affect) can significantly increase their happiness. The speaker's own well-being rose by **60% in four years** by actively applying these principles and changing habits. This demonstrates that **anyone can achieve greater happiness** through deliberate and sustained effort.