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 [Music] first up at simpi Samantha 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 simply Samantha my guess is that you know you've got someone happiness 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 going to bring it so it won't make you happier it's not the secret to happen this but it sure is good for having less unhappiness have a good night's sleep queen of fire 85. does anyone ever experience depression or uncertainty after achieving a goal oh yes yes they do this is the 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 going to 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 oh oh I guess I need to start again here's a it'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 halves divided by once you can work on on wanting less that turns out to be the right formula kitoff or Shake It Off shake it off I got it Shake It Off masks 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 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 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 and just kind of a limbic State being delivered emotions and if you're a 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 notwithstanding my feelings here's what I ask my
students to do at Harvard I ask them to make a gratitude list on Sunday nights I make that they make a list of the five things they're most grateful for that 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 going to be between 15 and 25 percent happier because you decided to be grateful you manage your emotions so they didn't manage you and if you do that it's Game Changer being in charge you're never going to be the same Haze
1136 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 is not just pleasure it's 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 George styles 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 going to have an existential crisis and you need to go in search with your life of an answer to those two questions I'm not going to 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 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 if 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 going to use social media make sure it only ever comes implements 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 substituting for an in-person friendship if it substitutes for any friendship or goes outside of those bounds it's going to lower your happiness Puja escal got to 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 going to happen
let's just say you're in your late 20s are you going to be happier unhappier in 10 years now most people watching me are optimists most people think they're going to be happier at 38th and there were 28th and the reason is because they all these have these goals and they think that they're going to meet their goals most people think they're going to get happier as they get older and it's going to reach a Max point and then it's going to 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 they're late 40s early 50s but it's like eight to seven on a one to ten 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 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 at laughing all the way 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 going to get it and they're going to enjoy it and and it's never going to go away and
then it does they also think that if something bad happens to them that they're going to 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 in 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 is better than the last or it can be next up this runs from father poster and I'm just going to 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 and 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 Marana Sati death meditation walk yourself through that why because you're going to 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 by experiencing the fear and making it ordinary
and it will no longer be a ghost and it will no longer be a problem at third eye pryan because I've been working on being present to be present means to be here now that's the words that Ram Das 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 I'm gonna I'm gonna make some memories so I'm going to take a 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 tick not Han y'all have to read the miracle of mindfulness because 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 want to miss my life finally shimeri underscore 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 to solve problems to think quickly people tend to Peak in knowledge professions at their 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 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 want to lock it in here's the secret you got to think about it and you gotta adopt new habits in your life and most of all here's the most important part you got to share it go share it then you'll never lose it thanks for taking some time with me today [Music]
