- I'm Arthur Brooks, a professor at Harvard University
and the happiness columnist at "The Atlantic."
I'm here today to answer your questions on Twitter.
This is Happiness Support.
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First up, @simpysamantha, who just, "Found out
"that the key to happiness is a good sleep schedule.
"Who knew?"
Well, the secret to happiness is not lots of sleep
or even a good sleep schedule.
One of the funny things about diet, nutrition,
exercise, sleep, they don't actually bring happiness,
but they do lower unhappiness, which can be your problem.
Now it sounds like I'm splitting hairs, right?
Most people think that unhappiness
is the opposite of happiness.
It's not.
They're actually processed
in different hemispheres of the brain.
Happiness on one side, unhappiness on the other.
The right side is negative basic emotions,
and the way that we know this
is because the left side of the face,
which is controlled by the right side of the brain,
is more active when we're feeling negative emotions.
So, simpysamantha, my guess is that, you know,
you've got some unhappiness in your life,
and look, we all do.
Some of us have higher negative feeling levels than others.
If you've got that and you want some relief,
that's what's gonna bring it.
So it won't make you happier,
it's not the secret of happiness,
but it sure is good for having less unhappiness.
Have a good night's sleep.
Queenoffire85, "Does anyone ever experience depression
"or uncertainty after achieving a goal?"
Oh, yes. Yes, they do.
This is the real riddle of happiness.
This is the satisfaction dilemma in a nutshell.
Yeah, if I get that watch, I'm gonna love it forever.
I get that car, I get that house, I get that relationship,
I get that job, that money, that, fill in the blank,
it's gonna be so great, and it is for a minute.
Now there's neurophysiology behind this, too.
There's a neuromodulator in the brain called dopamine,
and you want it, you work for it, you're gonna get it.
Dopamine, dopamine, dopamine, you got it, [grunts].
Oh. Oh, I guess I need to start again.
Here's just a little, tiny way
to think about how to solve that problem.
You, I, everybody, Mother Nature teaches us
that to get satisfaction and keep it you need to have more.
That's the wrong model.
Your real satisfaction is all the things you have
divided by all the things that you want.
Now you can try to increase your satisfaction permanently
by having more, or you can work on the denominator
of haves divided by wants.
You can work on wanting less.
That turns out to be the right formula.
Shaikitoff, or shaikitoff.
Shaikitoff. I got it!
Shaikitoff asks, "How do I practice gratitude
"when all I feel is sadness, frustration, and confusion?"
Back to your question, how do I feel gratitude?
You decide to be grateful is the bottom line.
The brain kind of is in three parts.
It's not exactly this way, but just for reference,
there's the ancient part that has all your motor functions
and breathing and brain stem and spinal column.
Then you got the middle part, your your limbic system
that takes signals from the outside world
and takes a kind of machine language
and turns it into feelings that happen to you.
And then from there it delivers those signals
into the neocortex of the brain,
the wrinkly part on the outside of your brain,
the most evolved and amazingly human of which
is the prefrontal cortex,
a bumper of brain tissue right behind your forehead,
and it gets these emotions, and you decide what they mean
and what you're supposed to do.
Now, a lot of people go through life
in just kind of a limbic state being delivered emotions.
And if you're sort of a limbic person
feeling like you're managed by these things,
kind of hoping for the best,
then your limbic system is in charge.
But that's not your only option.
You can be in charge yourself,
but what you have to do is to experience your emotions
in the prefrontal cortex of your brain.
And it's a very simple process, if you put your mind to it.
It's called metacognition.
Metacognition means being aware of your emotions
and your thinking.
This is what humans are uniquely available to do.
My dog, Chucho, he's not metacognitive, he can't be.
He feels it. He does it.
He sees the cookie. He eats the cookie.
But I can actually deliver that information
to my prefrontal cortex and make an executive decision
about what I'm going to do, not withstanding my feelings.
Here's what I ask my students to do at Harvard.
I ask them to make a gratitude list on Sunday nights.
They make a list of the five things
they're most grateful for,
then every night during the rest of the week
take five minutes and look at your gratitude list.
Sundays, update your list.
In 10 weeks, you're gonna be between 15 and 25% happier
because you decided to be grateful.
You managed your emotions so they didn't manage you,
and if you do that, it's a game changer.
Being in charge, you're never gonna be the same.
Hase1136, Pretty Rabbit, "As I lay here,
"I wonder what is the true meaning of happiness?"
Happiness is actually a combination
of three identifiable things that we all need
and we all want in both balance and abundance.
These are the macronutrients of happiness.
Your Thanksgiving dinner is protein, carbohydrates, and fat.
Well, your happiness is enjoyment,
satisfaction, and purpose.
Enjoyment is not just pleasure,
it's pleasure with consciousness.
It's using your prefrontal cortex.
Satisfaction is the joy that you get from a job well done.
It's your reward for striving, for working,
for even suffering.
Purpose, what's that?
Well, that's really a question
of finding coherence in your life,
finding goals in your life,
finding significance in your life.
If you have those three things, you have happiness.
GeeorgeStyles asks,
"Is happiness connected to having a purpose?"
Purpose is literally one of the macronutrients of happiness,
but it's a weird one.
It's actually hard to figure out even what it is.
If you're feeling like life doesn't have enough purpose,
that life doesn't have enough meaning,
answer the following two questions:
why am I alive, and for what would I be willing to die?
If you don't have an answer to one
or both of those questions,
you're gonna have an existential crisis.
And you need to go in search with your life
of an answer to those two questions.
I'm not gonna tell you what those answers are.
They're different for different people.
So yes, does purpose lead to happiness? Oh, yeah.
How do you find your purpose? Answer those two questions.
Find the answer to those two questions.
That's your assignment.
Syedafati, "Can social media cause depression?"
Yes, so it seems.
Here's the basic bottom line.
Social media is like the junk food of social life.
High calories, low nutrition.
You're starving for this neuropeptide called oxytocin.
It bonds people together.
You get almost none of it
when you don't have touch and eye contact,
but you crave more and more social contact
when you've been on social media for so long,
so you binge it.
It's basically like binging french fries
and then wondering why you feel crummy
and you're gaining weight,
but you're not getting your nutrition.
Here's the deal.
If you're gonna use social media,
make sure it only ever compliments
your in-person relationships and you use it very sparingly.
I'm talking about a total of 30 minutes a day
across all platforms
and never, ever, ever, ever substituting
for an in-person friendship.
If it substitutes for any friendship
or goes outside of those bounds,
it's gonna lower your happiness.
Poojasgoyal, gotta get the middle initial, I know,
"How does age affect happiness?"
And she encloses a graph,
and what it does is it looks at different ages
the average happiness level in a particular country
at a particular time, and it looks the same every place.
What do you think is gonna happen
if, let's just say, you're in your late 20s?
Are you gonna be happier or unhappier in 10 years?
Now most people watching me are optimists.
Most people think they're gonna be happier at 38
than they were at 28,
and the reason is because these have these goals
and they think that they're gonna meet their goals.
Most people think they're gonna get happier
as they get older, and it's gonna reach a max point,
and then it's gonna head back down again.
The truth is exactly the opposite.
Most people, on average, they get a slight diminution
of their happiness from their early 20s
until their late 40s or early 50s,
but it's like eight to seven on a 1 to 10 scale.
This is not a huge problem.
Noticeable but not horrible.
Then in your early 50s it turns around
and you start back up again,
and almost everybody actually gets increasing happiness
from their early 50s until about 70, except two groups:
people who have unremediated mental illness
and people who have untreated substance use disorders.
So if this is you, get treated for anxiety and depression
and mood disorders and get treated for addiction.
All right, next question comes from @LaughingAllTheWay,
"How do we adjust our expectations as we age?"
That's a good one.
One of the things that actually gets better
and better and better as you age
is your expectations about the future
because you understand how things work.
There's this tyranny that people don't understand
until they're usually a little after 50 years old.
They think that if they get that thing that they want,
they're gonna get it and they're gonna enjoy it
and it's never gonna go away, and then it does.
They also think that if something bad happens to them
that they're gonna stay in a bad mood
or sad or angry or afraid forever.
Here's what you learn after 50:
nothing lasts and it doesn't matter.
There's a thing that all biologists talk about,
which is homeostasis,
the tendency of every biological process
to go back to its equilibrium.
Well, it works emotionally as well.
Your anger, your sadness, your disgust, your fear, your joy,
your interest, those things don't last for good and for bad.
Your heart is broken? It won't last.
When you figure that out, this is power,
and if you harness that, every year's better than the last.
Or it can be.
Next up, this one's from Father Poster,
and I'm just gonna take a wild guess
that this is actually not a priest.
"How do I transcend from my mortal anguish?"
Sounds to me like Father Poster is a little afraid of dying,
but we're all afraid of our own version of dying.
There's a meditation that the Theravada Buddhists do.
If you go to a monastery, a Buddhist monastery,
in the southern tier of Asia, especially East Asia,
Thailand or Vietnam or Myanmar,
you'll find pictures of corpses in various states of decay
and that the monks have to ponder
and they have to say, "That is me and that is me."
What are they doing?
They're doing what's called the maranasati death meditation.
Walk yourself through that. Why?
Because you're gonna accustom yourself
to that sort of surreal experience of your own death
as you see it.
How do I transcend my mortal anguish?
By leaning into my mortal anguish.
You beat fear by experiencing the fear
and making it ordinary, and it will no longer be a ghost
and it will no longer be a problem.
@thYrd_eYe_prYin, "I've been working on being present."
To be present means to be here now.
That's the words that Ram Dass used to talk about.
We have a special kind of language
that we put on that now, it's called being mindful.
Mindfulness is hard because we're time travelers.
You're thinking about the past.
You're thinking about the future.
The average person, by the way,
spends 30 to 50% of their time thinking about the future.
That's unbelievable.
You're not here now.
Think about how much you do that, by the way.
You go on vacation, you're like,
"Oh, I'm gonna make some memories, so I'm gonna take
"a picture, picture, picture, picture, picture."
You're thinking about now as if it were the past
in the future when you're looking back on the present.
That's unbelievable time travel.
We do it all the time.
Here's the problem.
You missed your life. You missed it.
You know, the great Vietnamese Buddhist monk
Thich Nhat Hahn, y'all have to read
"The Miracle of Mindfulness" 'cause it starts off
with him describing what it's like to wash the dishes.
I'm washing the dishes,
and I'm conscious of washing the dishes
because if I don't think about washing the dishes
I will not be present in the act of washing the dishes.
That means working on being a mindful person.
Maybe it's with meditation, maybe it's with prayer,
maybe it's with therapy,
and sitting with your hands folded on your lap
looking out the window of the train saying,
"I am sitting on the train right now
"because I don't wanna miss my life."
Finally, Shammeri_AAA
wants to know the definition of wisdom.
Psychometricians, those who study
different forms of intelligence, find that we have a thing
called fluid intelligence early on.
In our 20s and 30s, the ability to focus, to innovate,
to solve problems, to think quickly.
People tend to peak in knowledge professions,
at their ability to solve problems, to innovate,
to focus, working memory in their late 30s.
But there's another curve behind it
called crystallized intelligence,
which increases through your 40s and 50s and 60s
and stays high in your 70s and 80s.
It's the wisdom curve.
The essence of wisdom is teaching, is mentoring.
It's leading teams. It's recognizing patterns.
It's understanding what things really mean
and using that information in service of other people.
And it gets better, and if you choose to cultivate it,
it can make your life as happy as it could possibly be
as you get older.
That's not only the consolation of age,
that's the promise of wisdom.
Well, it looks like that's all we've got for today.
Those are your questions.
I hope you've learned a lot from this time.
I hope you've enjoyed it.
I hope you're a little bit happier.
But here's the key thing,
if you really wanna lock it in, here's the secret.
You gotta think about it
and you gotta adopt new habits in your life,
and most of all, here's the most important part,
you gotta share it.
Go share it, then you'll never lose it.
Thanks for taking some time with me today.
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