5 Things podcast: How can we cultivate happiness in our lives?

On Sunday's episode of the 5 Things podcast: Most people say that happiness is what they most want for themselves and the people they love. But is it possible to make it into a practice? What techniques and traits are critical to generate more happiness in your life? Arthur C. Brooks, a professor and social scientist, began studying happiness because he wanted more of it in his own life. His new book, co-authored with Oprah Winfrey, is called “Build the Life You Want: The Art & Science of Getting Happier.” He joins the 5 Things podcast to discuss how gratitude, journaling and metacognition can all help us live happier lives.

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Hit play on the player above to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript below. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.

Dana Taylor:

Hello and welcome to 5 Things. I'm Dana Taylor, and today is Sunday, November 5th, 2023. Before we get started, 5 Things will have a new name beginning this Tuesday. We're calling it The Excerpt. It's the same show you know and love and Taylor Wilson and I will continue to be your hosts, just a new name and well some new theme music. We'll continue to bring you the news seven mornings a week plus special deep dive episodes on Wednesday and Thursday afternoons. Happiness is what people say they want for themselves and the people they love. Why then does it seem so elusive for some? Arthur C. Brooks, professor and social scientist began studying happiness because he wanted more of it. His new book, co-authored with Oprah Winfrey is called Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier. Arthur, thank you so much for coming onto the podcast.

Arthur Brooks:

Thank you, Dana. Wonderful to be with you.

Dana Taylor:

Well, you wrote a whole book about this, but if you had to distill this down to one thing, what's the single most important thing people can do to be happier?

Arthur Brooks:

The first thing to understand is that happiness is not a feeling. The biggest thing that people can do is to avoid the largest error that people tend to make. They chase feelings. They think that happiness is a feeling that comes to them usually if they're lucky and that's wrong. Happiness is not a feeling. Feelings are evidence of happiness. Feelings are like the smell of your turkey, which is not the same as your Thanksgiving dinner. The Thanksgiving dinner itself is a more concrete thing, something that you can cook and you can eat and you can enjoy. And understanding that happiness is not feelings allows you to become the architect of your own happiness.

Dana Taylor:

So how did this book come about and how were your and Oprah's approaches different to this?

Arthur Brooks:

The book came about because I've been teaching about the science of happiness at Harvard for some years and writing a column about the science of happiness every Thursday in The Atlantic. It turns out that one of my readers was none other than Oprah Winfrey. You never know. I mean, I have half a million readers per week, and it turns out one of them was somebody I have admired for most of my adult life. Well, Oprah Winfrey called me up at one point and said, "What if we brought these ideas to a much larger audience, the people that I've always worked with?" She said, "When I had my show for 25 years, and ever since then, since I've worked with people all across the world, they always say the same thing. They say they want to be happy, but they don't know what it is and they have no strategy for doing so." She said, "Let's take the science and bring it to them," and a partnership was born.

Dana Taylor:

So in your book, you introduce a new term, metacognition. What is that and how can people utilize it to feel better in general?

Arthur Brooks:

Emotions are processed in a part of the brain called the limbic system, and all they are is a way to take outside stimuli in our brains and transfer them into information so that we can use that information to run away, or to be angry, or to be joyful, or to be interested. And so the key thing is to remember that there are no good or bad feelings. There are positive and negative emotions, but they're not good or bad. It's all just information.

At that point, to get happier, we have to use the information appropriately, and that means not just leaving them as unimpeded, unmanaged signals in our brain. We need to understand them by paying attention to them, studying them as if they were happening to another person, to be aware of them, to think about our own thinking, and that's metacognition. When we do that, we experience our emotions in the more executive centers of our brain, the prefrontal cortex, the part of our brains that make us most evolved among all of the creatures. And when we learn the techniques for moving the experience of our emotions from the ancient limbic system into the prefrontal cortex, then no matter what we feel, we can choose our reactions, we can choose better emotions, we can choose to disregard our emotions as is appropriate. We have a repertoire, but that starts with metacognition. Thinking about thinking.

Dana Taylor:

Well, you write that since you followed the practical habits that you share with students and the readers of your column, you've learned how to manage your negative emotions without getting rid of them. So what does that mean for you and why is it important not to rid yourself of them? What's your approach?

Arthur Brooks:

One of the things that I do with my students that are grappling with a lot of difficult emotions that they need is I ask them to carry around a little notebook of failures and disappointments. Now, it seems kind of negative, but you'll see in a minute that it isn't. Every time something bad happens to you or just something you don't like that's really unpleasant, you take out your notebook and you write it down. Now that's every day, by the way, and then you leave two lines under it. The first line you come back to a few weeks later, maybe set an alarm on your phone for three weeks later and that line when your alarm goes off, what did I learn from that experience? Then the second thing comes back, you come back three or four months later and you ask this question, what good thing happened as a result of that negative feeling in the moment now? Otherwise, you'll just forget. You'll just push the bad things away. You'll try to get out from under the negative feelings,

But if you're doing this, you're going to get serious about the serious work of managing your emotions so they don't manage you. If you have a bad evaluation at work and it's a really big surprise, you're going to be pretty upset about that. Okay, take out your notebook and say, "I got a bad evaluation." Three weeks later, come back and say, "What did I learn?" Well, you might've learned that maybe you weren't such a good fit for this job and you're thinking about going on the market. Furthermore, you thought you're going to be upset about it for months and months, and it was really only a week. Then after a few months, you come back and say, "What good thing happened?" Maybe you went and found a new job that was a better fit for you, where you really are doing a good job for the organization. You wouldn't have known it had it not been for the discomfort. Once you start using your negative emotions in this way, you can really rejoice and be glad in it.

Dana Taylor:

Many of the lessons you describe are about getting away from external validation and focusing instead internally and on what each of us values. What are some thoughtful ways for people to get more comfortable with doing that?

Arthur Brooks:

Intrinsic rewards are the rewards that you get because you really enjoy something. Extrinsic rewards are things that you want because you get something from the outside world. Money is an extrinsic reward. Enjoyment and love are intrinsic rewards. There's all kinds of research on what happens to people that really enjoy something, but they start getting paid for it. One of the examples that I like is when you have a bunch of little kids and you let them play with their favorite toys, they do so just joyfully. But as soon as you give them a cookie to play with their favorite toy, they like it less. All of us need to take that to heart.

We have all kinds of intrinsic motivations and the things that we like. We have to think a lot about What do I love? Well, the truth is you love well, love. You want relationships. You want friendships. You want relationships with your family. You want a job where you can express yourself, where if you can, if you can find it, where you can earn your success and you can serve other people. Those are intrinsic rewards. The more that we can have intrinsic rewards motivating us in our life as opposed to simply the money and the power and the admiration of other people, the happier we're going to be.

Dana Taylor:

And then you described gratitude as an emotional caffeine. Can you tell us about the data you've observed on how gratitude hits the human brain and why it's so transformative?

Arthur Brooks:

I call a lot of positive emotions, emotional caffeine if you have metacognition working for you. If you're really deciding how to use your emotions, sometimes you have a negative emotion and you can substitute a positive emotion for it that's also appropriate. And why do I say caffeine, by the way? Because that's how caffeine works. Caffeine actually blocks a different neurochemical called adenosine that makes you feel tired. But gratitude is a perfect case of an emotion that you can use instead of one, but very appropriately so when you feel a particular way. We go through life with kind of a negativity bias, not because we're negative people, but because our brains are wired to be on alert for negative things all the time.

Well, the way to counteract that in modern life is to consciously adopt gratitude. Gratitude will block out resentment. Gratitude will block out the hostility that we typically have as a part of our negativity bias. And the way that we do that is by consciously saying, "What am I really grateful for right now?" And when you make a list of those things, they become salient, they become conscious for you, and then they block out the hostility and the resentment that you might've been feeling as a kind of part of your emotional baseline, but that is not working for you very well.

Dana Taylor:

Well, family, friends, work, spirituality, if a person ascribes to that, are the pillars you describe in the section about building a life that matters. What have you ascertained about balance in the foundation you build here and what pitfalls to avoid?

Arthur Brooks:

Well, one of the things that Oprah and I talk about in this book is that once you've learned to manage your emotions, you're no longer distracted from all the silly trivialities in life, from the social media and the scrolling on the phone. But when you have all that time on your hands because you're managing yourself appropriately, what should you spend your time on? The answer is four things: faith, family, friendship, and work that serves other people. Those are the big four. Those are the four areas of life that the happiest people have in abundance. And by the way, what these things mean is different for different people as well.

Faith is a classic example of this. For some people, I don't mean a traditional religious faith. I'm a Christian, most important thing in my life, but other people aren't, and they can get the happiness benefit by actually thinking deeply philosophically about life, by zooming out on their day-to-day experience and thinking of the majesty of the universe. This turns out to be a critical thing to do. Maybe it's from walking in nature or meditating or studying music. Maybe it actually comes from a traditional religion like me.

Other things like family life, not making sure that these mystical relationships of love that you didn't choose, you don't walk away from them, that having real friendships, this is critically important. And of course, having work to the extent that you can where you're serving other people, finding a way to serve other people with your work is critically important. What's the balance?

Well, really what it comes down to is doing something in each one of these categories every day. Read the wisdom literature for your faith angle. Call your mother or make a list of the people in your family that you want to talk to each day. Make sure that you're making a date with your real friends, not just with work friends, people that really care about you and know you and they're kind of useless, but you love. I mean, useless in the not so professionally useful way. And last but not least, that you're doing something at work every day that serves somebody else. Maybe that's just bringing a fresh, hot cup of coffee to the person in the next cubicle without being asked. There's so many ways to do that. Do it every day, and you've got the right balance.

Dana Taylor:

And then I'm really wondering what surprised you the most in the years that you've spent studying happiness?

Arthur Brooks:

I've studied happiness for decades, and I have to say when I started studying it, I did so because I just thought it was really interesting. I didn't study it because I thought I could change it very much, which is weird. I think I studied happiness, kind of like an astronomer studies the stars. The biggest surprise in my scientific career is realizing that happiness is not just an interesting thing to observe, but a serious activity so that we can be on the journey to getting happier over the course of all of our lives.

Dana Taylor:

And then finally, Arthur, what gives you hope about the future of our world when it comes to more people finding happiness and coming together?

Arthur Brooks:

What really gives me hope is that now that Oprah and I are on tour and we're doing so much media and we're meeting hundreds of thousands of people in virtual and in-person ways, everybody wants to be happier. I mean, I kind of knew that, but when you look around and you listen to politics today, it kind of looks like a lot of people don't want to be happier. They act like they don't want to be happier. They want to be angry or hateful, and they want to be bitter toward their neighbor.

But I think what gives me the most hope is that people want the right thing. The right thing is they want to live happier, better lives. They want to have more love in their lives, and the secret to meaningful social change, it's not shoving some idea in somebody's face, kicking down their door and saying, "Act differently or vote for me." The way for meaningful social change is to give people who have a hunger for something better, an idea on how they can get it. I am so hopeful that we can create a happiness movement, we can create a love rebellion in this country and in this world. I think that the adventure really starts today, and I want to play some small part in it.

Dana Taylor:

Arthur, thank you so much for joining me.

Arthur Brooks:

Thank you.

Dana Taylor:

Thanks to our senior producer, Shannon Rae Green for production assistance. Our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to [email protected]. Thanks for listening, I'm Dana Taylor. Taylor Wilson will be back tomorrow morning with another episode of 5 Things.