The Art & Science of Getting Happier - A Conversation with Arthur Brooks

Summary

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Faith Matters — "The Art & Science of Getting Happier"

Guest: Arthur Brooks
Hosts: Faith Matters Team (Aubrey Chavez and co-hosts)
Release Date: October 19, 2024

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Episode Overview

In this episode, the Faith Matters team welcomes Arthur Brooks—Harvard professor, acclaimed social scientist, and co-author (with Oprah Winfrey) of Build the Life You Want—to discuss the real science, sacredness, and practice of happiness. The conversation explores happiness as a learnable skill, the interplay of genetics, brain chemistry, and agency, and offers practical strategies for navigating negative emotions, building meaningful lives, and approaching faith, family, and love with renewed understanding.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Arthur Brooks’ Connection to LDS Community

• Affinity and Respect: Arthur shares fondness for Utah and the LDS community, noting a "synchronicity of values, of Christian values." (02:10)
• The ‘Magic Briefcase’ Story: Brooks recalls how carrying a BYU-branded briefcase made him more mindful of his actions, symbolizing how social identity can shape behavior and morality. (04:07)

  "It was carrying this BYU briefcase, LDS briefcase, I was being nicer. I didn’t want to besmirch the well-earned reputation of kindness of the LDS." — Arthur Brooks (04:21)

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2. Rethinking Happiness: More than Just a Feeling

• Skepticism about ‘Selfish Happiness’: Hosts raise doubts over self-focused happiness; Brooks affirms that real happiness comes from transcending self. (07:30)

  "If you’re all about selfishness and self-care, here’s the punchline: You’re not going to get happier." — Arthur Brooks (07:35)

• Scientific Components of Happiness: Brooks defines happiness as a combination of enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning—not pure pleasure or fleeting feelings. (08:00)
• Happiness as Skill & Practice: It's not merely a byproduct of genes or circumstances; habits and practices matter.

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3. Genetics, Brain Chemistry, and Agency

• 'Genetic Lottery' & Baseline Mood: About 50% of mood is genetic, but mood is distinct from deep happiness.

  “Your mood is not your enjoyment and satisfaction and meaning. Those are the things you’re actually trying to get better at.” — Arthur Brooks (10:15)

• Agency in Response: Personal practices can elevate overall satisfaction and meaning, even with genetic limitations.
• Suffering as Sacred: Negative emotions are necessary, evolutionary signals; suffering can be sacred and growth-producing.

  "My suffering is sacred. My suffering has meaning. I'm going to learn from my suffering..." — Arthur Brooks (11:24)

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4. The 'Macronutrients' of Happiness

• Enjoyment, Satisfaction, Meaning (Purpose): Each aspect is essential; pleasure alone leads to addiction and emptiness.
  • Enjoyment Requires Presence & Connection:

    "If you're doing it alone, you're probably doing it wrong." (15:15)

  • Bringing consciousness and others (people + memory) turns pleasure into true enjoyment (13:55)
• Negative Emotions as Signals: "Good feelings and bad feelings don’t exist. There are positive and negative emotions that tell you when there are opportunities and threats." (12:13)

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5. Agency Over Circumstances – Story of Arthur’s Mother-in-Law

• Transformation through Inner Change: His mother-in-law, despite hardship, found happiness not by changing the world, but by changing herself

  "She realized, ‘I can’t change the outside world...But I can change the inside world. I can change me.’" — Arthur Brooks (16:21)

• Waiting on Circumstances is Futile: Brooks details the kinds of circumstances people mistakenly wait to change—health, finances, relationships—and emphasizes claiming agency over one’s own mindset and actions (19:35–20:26)

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6. The Direction, Not Destination, of "Happierness"

• ‘Happierness’ over ‘Happiness’: Coined by Oprah, this concept reframes happiness as an ongoing journey of progress, rather than a final state.

  "The goal isn’t happiness...It’s not a destination, it’s a direction...the goal is ‘happierness’.” (20:43–21:41)

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7. Metacognition: Managing, Not Suppressing, Emotions

• Healthy Emotional Management:
  • Not about making negative feelings vanish, but understanding and moving them from limbic system (reactivity) to prefrontal cortex (conscious processing).
  • When angry, “Count to 30 while imagining the consequences of what you want to say.” (28:12)
• Tools for Metacognition: Journaling, lists of fears/disappointments, writing down anxieties, and especially prayer.

  "'My limbic system is going bonkers. I'm going to deliver it to my prefrontal cortex and then offer it up to heaven.'" — Arthur Brooks (37:16)

• Petitionary Prayer as Metacognition: Prayers of petition ("help me...") help articulate worries, reinforce humility (“thy will be done”), and move negative feelings into constructive action. (37:15–44:41)

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8. Faith, Family, Friends, and Work: The ‘Big Four’ Practices of Fuller Living

• Four Domains:
  1. Faith (not always denominational; transcendence—a connection beyond self)
  2. Family (cultivating close, unconditional relationships)
  3. Friendship (real vs. deal friends; oxytocin & true connection)
  4. Work that Serves Others (a sense of meaning from labor that benefits others)

  "You got to do something. That's what I mean by faith. And again, I'm not a syncretist...but my point here is what actually brings people a lot of the worldly happiness that we're seeking." — Arthur Brooks (46:03–48:05)

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9. Navigating Family Values Breaches and Unconditional Love

• When Family Members’ Faith Changes: Brooks counsels not to center happiness in controlling others’ beliefs or behaviors.
  • Children are "not your kids...they're God's kids. And you're just stewarding it."
  • Maintain unconditional love, even if dreams for unity or faith continuity are dashed.

  "There should be nothing your kids do...that should put your love for them in question. And they should know that." — Arthur Brooks (53:42–54:01)

  • Avoid ‘values breach’ rifts: Disagree without withdrawing love or rejecting the person (54:20–57:46)

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10. Real Friends vs. Deal Friends, and the Loneliness Crisis

• Deal Friends: Those connected through utility (work, acquaintances); not enough for a fulfilling life.
• Real Friends: Offer "cosmic usefulness"—useless in a material sense, but essential for meaning and love.

  "Your real friends are useless. Beautiful useless, cosmically useless." — Arthur Brooks (60:33)

• Social Media Is Not Friendship: Oxytocin, the love molecule, comes from presence and real connection—not likes or messages (58:13–59:51)

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11. The Centrality of Love

• All Four Practices Are Forms of Love: Love of God (faith), love of family, love of friends, love through work.
• Love as a Decision, Not Just Feeling:

  “To love is to will the good of the other as other. That's St. Thomas Aquinas, based on Aristotle. And perfect love drives out fear, according to the apostle John. But that means it's a decision to love, a commitment.”

• Radical Love: Deciding to love, not just when easy or sentimental, but especially when hard—including loving one's enemies (Matthew 5:44).

  “Whenever you’re in doubt, love more. And how do we know this?...When couples are struggling...when they learn how to practice approach...that's a stronger couple...Love is decision, right?” — Arthur Brooks (60:56–63:17)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the Social Science of Happiness:

  “Happiness is something that is scientifically valid and observable and something that we can study and we can practice and get better at, and a good deal of it is actually transcending yourself.” — Arthur Brooks (08:00)

• On Suffering:

  “Suffering is an incredibly sacred and beautiful thing. That’s the only way that we learn and we grow.” — Arthur Brooks (11:17)

• On Agency:

  “I can’t change the outside world. That’s an incredibly inefficient strategy. But I can change the inside world. I can change me.” (16:21)

• On Friendship:

  “Social media is the fast food of social life. You’re craving oxytocin...you'll binge...but the problem is you'll get lonelier and lonelier.” (58:29–59:35)

• On Prayer:

  “Prayers of petition, for sure...when you bring your concerns to God...you’re articulating them and they're no longer ghosts in the machine...you’re bringing them to your prefrontal cortex.” (37:16)

• On Love:

  “Love, by the way, is not a feeling. Love is a decision. To love is to will the good of the other as other.” (61:33–61:41)

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Key Timestamps

• 02:00 — Arthur Brooks describes his relationship with Utah and the LDS community
• 04:00 — The Magic Briefcase story: how visible identity changes behavior
• 07:30 — Debate about the point/purpose of happiness: self vs. others
• 10:00 — The heritability of happiness and distinction between mood and true happiness
• 11:24 — “My suffering is sacred"
• 13:55 — Pleasure vs. enjoyment: the importance of presence and people
• 16:04 — Brooks’s mother-in-law and the lesson of inner transformation
• 20:43 — ‘Happierness’: reframing happiness as a direction, not destination
• 22:09–32:11 — Metacognition and techniques for dealing with negative emotions
• 37:15–44:39 — Petitionary prayer as a metacognitive tool and the role of radical acceptance
• 45:27–48:05 — The four practices: faith, family, friends, work that serves others
• 53:42 — Navigating family faith differences with unconditional love
• 57:56 — Deal friends vs. real friends: friendship and loneliness
• 60:56 — The primacy of love as the key to happiness

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Final Takeaway

Arthur Brooks and the Faith Matters team articulate an expansive, actionable, and spiritually grounded vision for seeking happiness—not as endless positivity or absence of pain, but through conscious engagement with our emotions, lived values, and loving connection. Faith, family, friendship, and purpose-driven work—not social media followers, not material gain—are the macronutrients of a meaningful life. And when in doubt, the answer is almost always: Love more.

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For more, find Arthur Brooks’s book Build the Life You Want or visit faithmatters.org.

Transcript

[Sarah Perkins Sabie]

Hi, this is Sarah Perkins Sabie, one of the authors of the Bible Storybook. We're so excited to have partnered with Faith Matters to bring you beautifully told scripture stories as a podcast that you can listen to with your kids and share with your friends and family. We're making half of the stories available completely free is a podcast called Scripture stories for little Saints and the other half are available to donors and friends of Faith Matters as a thank you for your financial support that makes this collaboration possible. If you have trouble accessing them, you can email faith [e-mail] and they'll be happy to help. Thank you so much for your generous and ongoing support. We're so excited to share these stories with you and can't wait for you to hear them. Now onto the podcast.

[Aubrey Chavez]

Hey everybody, this is Aubrey Chavez from Faith Matters. Today we're so honored to welcome Arthur Brooks to the podcast. Arthur is a renowned social scientist, Harvard professor, and best selling author and we were so excited to talk with him about his latest book, build the life you want, which he co authored with Oprah Winfrey. In our conversation today, Arthur offers some profound insights on happiness, emphasizing that though genetics and circumstances influence our baseline, we have significant agency over the way we feel. It's a skill that we can practice and improve. He says that happiness isn't about avoiding suffering, and he shares how negative emotions can actually serve as signals that help us grow. This episode is so full of advice for creating a life of enjoyment, satisfaction and meaning, and has lots of practical tips for exactly what to do when you are feeling overwhelmed by negative feelings. We're so grateful to Arthur for joining us and for his work and we really hope that you'll find his insights on happiness and purpose inspiring and practical. And with that, we'll jump right into our conversation with Arthur Brooks.

[Faith Matters Host 1]

Well, Arthur, thank you so much for being here. It's an absolute pleasure to have you.

[Arthur Brooks]

Thank you. I've been looking forward to it.

[Faith Matters Host 1]

Oh, good. I guess based on the pre talk, it's probably still inappropriate to call you an honorary Latter Day Saint, but you do have some relationships.

[Arthur Brooks]

I'm not sure what it means. Does that mean do the honoraries go to heaven or not? Yes.

[Faith Matters Host 1]

You've had some relationship over the years with the church and with.

[Arthur Brooks]

Yeah, I spent a lot of time in Utah and if I had any good sense, I'd lived here. It's a wonderful place and it's a community I feel a lot of affinity with and a lot of affection and love for. I first came I think it was 2007. I had a great friend named Gary Kornia, who is the dean of the business school at byu, and he was guest lecturing at the university where I was teaching. He said, you should come out to BYU and give it a look. And sure enough, I got there. I just fell in love with the place. I did a Friday forum, was the first big talk I ever gave at byu, which is this big thing at the basketball position.

[Faith Matters Host 1]

Yeah, the Mary Center.

[Arthur Brooks]

Yeah. I gave a talk on charitable giving. Who gives and who doesn't? Of course. Lds, we do give. Yes. And it was being broadcast on BYUtv. I had no idea what the reach is. And then I gave the talk and I got in the car and I went. Drove down from Happy Valley down to Salt Lake and went to the airport. People were recognizing me in the airport two hours after I'd given my talk.

[Faith Matters Host 1]

Reach than you thought.

[Arthur Brooks]

Broader reach than I thought. Sure enough. It was lovely. But ever since then, every year I've done stuff. Now my secondary academic affiliation is uu, and I go to BYU to do something every year. I just love it here.

[Faith Matters Host 1]

That's awesome.

[Arthur Brooks]

I love the people, and there's just such synchronicity of values, of Christian values, and I really value it a lot.

[Faith Matters Host 1]

What was the story that you told in the Friday Forum?

[Arthur Brooks]

Yeah. When this became like a chestnut, one of these things that, you know, the stories that you tell every Thanksgiving, I just made the point that one of the ways that you can bring happiness to other people is through the example of your life. And I told the story of this later, not in 2007, but later. Because at the 2007 visit, every time you go to BYU, they give you a lot of stuff, a lot of branded swag. And so it's shirts and hats and mugs. And they gave me this briefcase. It was a pretty nice briefcase at Brigham Young University. And this briefcase. And I brought it home. I brought all the stuff home and threw it in the closet. I didn't need a briefcase. And like a month later, my briefcase broke.

[Faith Matters Host 1]

Oh.

[Arthur Brooks]

And it was brand new. And I was annoyed about it. I was complaining about it to my wife. I said, honey, you know, I just bought this briefcase. It's cheap piece of junk. You know, the handle breaks. She's like, well, you know, why don't you go get that Mormon briefcase from the closet? And I. And I said, I don't know. She said, I think you're afraid people are going to think you're a Mormon. And I said, I was indignant. I was like, no, I'm not.

[Faith Matters Host 1]

How dare you?

[Arthur Brooks]

So I went and I got it right and I put all my stuff and I started carrying it around. And I'm like, on the road all the time. And I've been on the road for years and years and years. I do like 150 speeches a year on the road, so. And I'm in airports constantly. And when you're carrying branded swag, people read it and they look at you and they kind of make this assessment. And it was weird because I could read people's minds. They were looking at my briefcase and looking at me and going, oh, it's a Mormon guy. And I'm like, no, I mean, false advertising. But then a weird thing happened, which I noticed that it was changing my behavior. It was carrying this BYU briefcase, LDS briefcase. I was being nicer. I didn't want to besmirch the weller reputation of kindness of, you know, the lds. So I'm like, standing in line after getting bumped from a flight. I'm like, it's okay, you know? And then I realized I stopped carrying cups of coffee. Okay, I was gonna. Because, you know, I'm just an inveterate coffee drinker. I'm a Catholic, which means it's part of the religion and it's against your religion. It's like, you have to. In my religion. And I used to usually carry, like, Venti dark roast from Spark 20 ounce coffee. I didn't do it when I was carrying the bag because I didn't want some guy to go like, yeah, I saw this Mormon guy in the In o' Hare Airport, and wouldn't you know it, when he thought nobody was looking, he was in line to Starbucks. I didn't know. It wasn't right. It was improving my life. In other words, just to carry the LDS briefcase, I'm like, thank you for the briefcase. Because it turns out that you could save the world. Just give everybody in the world a briefcase and it might be as effective as the mission. Just carry it around. Trust me, it has this magic effect. I called it my magic briefcase. And from then on now, every time I come to Utah, somebody yells out from the audience, tell the briefcase story.

[Faith Matters Host 1]

Now a lot more people know. Oh, that's awesome. Well, thank you. That's very, very kind of you to be careful. Not with our reputation.

[Arthur Brooks]

I love your reputation because it's well earned. This is the thing, is the reason I love to come here, because people are. They have a goodness and kindness to them. That. That is the essence of the Christian witness.

[Faith Matters Host 1]

Yeah.

[Arthur Brooks]

You shall know us by our fruits.

[Faith Matters Host 1]

Yeah.

[Faith Matters Host 2]

That's beautiful.

[Faith Matters Host 1]

Thank you. Yeah. Well, thank you again for being here.

[Arthur Brooks]

I love it.

[Faith Matters Host 1]

Yeah. It's our honor and pleasure. We're here to talk about this book, Build a Life. You want. It's a beautiful book.

[Arthur Brooks]

Thank you.

[Faith Matters Host 1]

I want to start out with a. I guess a preface saying that I always approach books on happiness with what may be a healthy amount of suspicion. And suspicion may not even be the right word. It's skepticism. Some skepticism, potentially, yes. And part of it I've realized for me is that as a person, you know, who was raised religious, I have this idea that the purpose of life is to be sort of like self emptying. You know, it's like it's not about. It's not about me, it's about everybody else. And so sometimes when I encounter positive psychology or books on happiness, I'm kind of like, well, that's not the point. You know, like, this shouldn't be about me just attempting to feel better. I know that you thought about this and you actually do address it in the book. Could you start there and maybe like how you think through that particular.

[Arthur Brooks]

And the first day of class, I teach a class at your alma mater at Harvard Business School called Leadership and Happiness. And right now it's one of the most popular electives at HBS. I have 180 students enrolled. I have 400 of the waiting list. I've got an ill legal zoom link they think I'm not aware of. Like their parents are watching the class by about the third week. And the reason is because they want to be happier. People, everybody wants to be happier. It's the natural order of things. Aristotle talked about that. I mean, people want to be happier, and it's natural and it's good to want to be happier. The real question is, what does it mean and how do you get it? That's really what. And if you're all about selfishness and self care, here's the punchline. You're not going to get happier. You're not actually going to get happier. So the first day of class, I ask them what it is and they start talking about their feelings. And I say, beautiful. Wrong. You know, happiness is not how you feel when you're with the people that you love. Because happiness isn't a feeling. Feelings are evidence of happiness. Like the smell of your turkey is evidence of your Thanksgiving dinner, which is a really important distinction. Happiness is something that is scientifically valid and observable and something that we can study and we can practice and get better at, and a good deal of it is actually transcending yourself. So real happiness is a combination of enjoyment of your life, satisfaction with what you're doing in your accomplishments, and the sense of meaning that you get. And you won't find satisfaction if you're selfish. You won't actually enjoy your life if you're focused on the psychodrama of your boring day to day existence. You simply won't find meaning unless you understand that you live for something bigger than yourself and you're willing to die for it as well. And so these are the things that I study scientifically in the neuroscience and social science worlds. That's what I teach. And so we get to the point that you've always learned as a Christian person and that we're trying to teach. You hook people in by wanting them to feel better. You send them out as apostles, helping other people to be better.

[Faith Matters Host 2]

Yeah, that's really beautiful. The other preface that feels important for this conversation is the idea of brain chemistry. Because my concern always when I start a book about happiness is how much agency do we actually have though at the end of the day, doesn't this just come down to dopamine? And it is what it is. And these are ideas for getting some more dopamine flowing. But it makes me nervous that maybe we just have this baseline that we're gonna always be pushing, and maybe you win the genetic lottery and you just feel like a happy person, and maybe you don't and you're gonna struggle your whole life no matter what strategies you use.

[Arthur Brooks]

No, I hear you. And there is a genetic lottery. There is absolutely 50% of your baseline mood levels. That's how you feel when you wake up most mornings. That's actually genetic. I mean, your mother literally made you unhappy, sorry. Or happy.

[Faith Matters Host 1]

You know, you're not naturally used to happy.

[Arthur Brooks]

I study happiness because I'm not a very happy person naturally. I had very, very gloomy parents and gloomy grand. And I needed to understand how to get better at the skill of developing the habits to improve my circumstances and to manage my genetics. So there are genetic correlates to it, about 50% of your happiness. Your baseline mood level, which is different than your happiness, your mood is not your enjoyment and satisfaction and meaning. And those are the things that you're actually trying to get better at, such that you can raise your mood level, but also to live a life richer in meaning and satisfaction and to bring more joy and love to other people, which is really what it means to live a satisfying good, a life. That's where you're alive. You're living in it. One of the things that I teach my students is that to be a happy person doesn't mean that you're trying to eliminate your unhappiness. Suffering is an incredibly sacred and beautiful thing. That's the only way that we learn and we grow. It's the only way that we can verify that we're actually still alive on earth is the fact that there's negative experiences and negative emotions. I make my students repeat, my suffering is sacred.

[Faith Matters Host 2]

Oh, that's beautiful.

[Arthur Brooks]

My suffering has meaning. I'm gonna learn from my suffering and to grow as a person as a result.

[Faith Matters Host 2]

Let's go back to those macronutrients. I love that you call it that of happiness, enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose.

[Arthur Brooks]

Meaning.

[Faith Matters Host 2]

Yeah. Or meaning.

[Arthur Brooks]

Yeah.

[Faith Matters Host 2]

How do you. Yeah. Talk about how unhappiness sort of plays a part in those. Because I think that was really illuminating for me, that I like the difference, for example, between pleasure and enjoyment. Feels so subtle until you. Until you sort of. You talk about that when you bring conscious and connection to pleasure, like, that's a totally different experience than pleasure all by itself. And it's not subtle, you know, like unexamined. It feels that way. But anyway, talk about that. And how is unhappiness part of all of those things that can create such depth of happiness in our life? Even though there may be negative emotions, There are.

[Arthur Brooks]

There are negative emotions to begin with. Negative emotions are necessary to keep you alive. We have evolved negative emotions to help us understand threats in our environment. They're nothing more than signals. Good feelings and bad feelings don't exist. There are positive and negative emotions that tell you when there are opportunities and threats. That's the machine language of the brain. That's what emotions actually are. If you could somehow suppress to zero your negative emotions of fear and anger and disgust and sadness, you'd be dead in a week. You get run over by a car, you get hunted down by a tiger. Depending on your circumstances, bad things would happen to you. You need those things to be able to react, to be sure. And so we should be grateful for the fact that we have those signals to us indicating that there are things that we should avo, for example. But it goes deeper than that because it turns out that suffering is part of the process that we get to get to the deeper things that give us these satisfactions that we crave. You mentioned enjoyment. People often think of it as the search for Pleasure. And we've all met people that their strategy in life is pleasure is feeling good as much as possible. It never ends well. It never ends well. It ends with addiction and subjugation and the degradation of the human being. When you're trying to hit the pleasure centers. The reason for that is that there are structures in the brain that process pleasure. That process that sense of ebullience. And it's called the ventral tegmental area, the ventral striatum. These are parts of the limbic system of the brain. And it feels dang good when you hit the triple seven on the one arm bandit in Vegas. And I realize that this is not an audience that's regularly frequenting.

[Faith Matters Host 1]

Could you explain what you're talking about there?

[Arthur Brooks]

But the whole point is that the drugs and alcohol and all addictive things. They touch the pleasure centers in the brain. There are also other ways that we do it. In healthy and unhealthy ways. But if your life's philosophy is getting as much pleasure as possible. You'll be tapping those pleasure centers. And you'll never have a fully human experience. You'll also become an addict. What you need is not to get rid of pleasures. But to make them complete by adding two things. Namely people and memory. Which delivers the experience to the prefrontal cortex of the brain. Is the tissue behind your forehead. 30% of your brain by weight. And that's your consciousness resides there. The executive centers of your brain. Brain. You won't get happier unless you have a true consciousness of these wonderful experiences. Which requires that you consume them with other human beings and that you make these memories. So beer commercials, for example. They never feature a dude alone in his apartment pounding a 12 pack. That's how a lot of people use the product. But that would be pathetic and dangerous. What they show is somebody drinking beer with his friends. Which is beer plus people plus memories equals enjoyment. And that's part of happiness according to their marketing formula. And that's actually true. I tell my kids. All my kids are in their 20s. But I teach my students as well. If there's something that gives you pleasure, feels good, and could be addictive. Which most pleasurable things can be. If you're doing it alone, you're probably doing it wrong.

[Faith Matters Host 2]

Wow.

[Arthur Brooks]

And that's a rule of thumb. That usually works.

[Aubrey Chavez]

Also.

[Faith Matters Host 2]

Such a quick fix. Go find somebody to enjoy this with and do it with a lot of presence.

[Arthur Brooks]

Yeah. For sure. People will say, yeah, but what about walking in the forest? Not addicted to.

[Faith Matters Host 1]

I see.

[Arthur Brooks]

Not addictive. So it's something that actually can capture your brain neurophysiologically. Because you made an important point a minute ago, which is the psychology is just biology. It really is. Right. I mean, the big question is where does the biology come from?

[Faith Matters Host 1]

Exactly.

[Arthur Brooks]

That's where it really gets heavy and interesting and good and beautiful. Yeah.

[Faith Matters Host 1]

So on this question of how much agency we have, there's the brain chemistry question and then there's the circumstances question.

[Arthur Brooks]

Right.

[Faith Matters Host 1]

As well, you actually, you sort of start here in the book and I think you mentioned, you're not mentioned. You tell the story of your mother in law who had very difficult circumstances.

[Arthur Brooks]

But she had a hard life.

[Faith Matters Host 1]

Yeah. Could you, could you talk a little bit about her? I found that fascinating. Yeah.

[Arthur Brooks]

So she, my mother in law, all of my in laws are Spanish. So my wife is from Barcelona. And so her, her family, she grew up in Spain in poverty. And one of the reasons she grew up in poverty is because she was raised by a single mother. Her mother, my mother in law, a woman I lost love like my own mother. I mean, a 35 year beautiful relationship with her. And she really taught me a lot. She was actually from the Canary Islands and she had grown up as a little kid during the Spanish Civil War. Really, really hard, I mean, times. Her father was in prison through her growing up. And that didn't leave any sort of trauma or mark on her. On the contrary, that brought everybody closer together, as trying times often do for families. Her problem was after the greatest thing in her life happened, which she got married, which was the worst thing, which was to a not great husband, my father in law, he was chronically unfaithful to her. Affair after affair after affair. And finally, when my wife was six years old, he took off with another woman and bailed out, didn't pay child support and they were really poor and it was hard on her. And to top things off, she was still in love with him. And she would see him out the window coming to work each day from her apartment. And my wife's earliest, these early memories of her mother's watching her cry at the window and her husband still her husband because they never divorced. And one day she tells me later, because I didn't meet her until she was in her late 50s, after her husband had come back. Weirdly, there's so many wrinkles to the story. She says that she had this epiphany that she was waiting for years for her life, the world outside her to change so that she could be happy and railing and being angry with the World and being sad about the world and waiting around, waiting for. For somehow somebody to support her economically and for her husband's heart to turn. And she realized, I can't change the outside world. That's an incredibly inefficient strategy. But I can change the inside world. I can change me. And so she made a little plan. She went back to school. She got her teaching certificate. She got a job. She felt empowered. She made a living. She made her friends. She started to change her relationship to her Catholic faith. She built a better relationship with her family. And the result is, by the time I met her, she was fully alive. And her old man came home. He's like. Because it turns out his mistress threw him out, probably for being unfaithful. And he came home and said, can I come home? And she said, you know what? Yeah, but not the old way. There's gonna be some new rules around here. And the result was that they had a very beautiful relationship from then on, where she was empowered. She was a modern person. She was not a claimant on his time and on his resources. On the contrary, she made her own life. And she. For the rest of her life, she said, I'm in charge. I'm in charge of this. By the time, at the end of her days in her 90s, she was bedridden and she was happy. And the reason is because she was in charge of her own happiness. She was the manager of her own emotions. It was extraordinary. Most of us are not that strong or wise. And so the result is, I mean, I have to go get a PhD to figure out how to do it and write books.

[Faith Matters Host 1]

When people get this really wrong and think that their circumstances need to change in order for them to be happy, what types of circumstances do they try to change?

[Arthur Brooks]

Most commonly, they try to change their health, obviously. They try to change their finances when they're trying to. Well, if they're waiting around, what are they waiting for? More money? They're waiting around for better health. They're waiting around for their marriage to Mr. Seriously get better. They start to wait around for their kids to stop being rotten. They start waiting around for people to stop treating them with disrespect. They start waiting around for their boss to be a little bit nicer, and you're going to be still waiting. It's going to be written in tombstone is the bottom line. When they're taking control, they'll look at each one of these things and they'll do what they need to do to improve the relationship with their Children to take control of their marriage according with the levers that they actually can take control of. They'll make their work relationship better, get a new job. They'll go to the gym and eat right. That's the kind of things that they'll actually do when they're in charge.

[Faith Matters Host 2]

Wow. I love. Oprah says in one of these notes that she writes in this book, that this book really is about becoming happier, not achieving something. It's really about this progression, this movement towards something new and better and happierness. Happierness.

[Arthur Brooks]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's her neologism, actually. So she asked me. We were working on this book at her house in California. Yeah, it's great for days. And it was very intense. We were structuring the whole thing. She's like, give me this straight. The goal isn't happiness. I said, no, because you can't achieve happiness. I believe that you can. It's called heaven. I believe I'm going to die and be with the Lord. That's happiness. But on this earth, you're going to have negative emotions because you need them to stay alive, and negative experiences because they're inevitable and you need them to grow and change. And so the result of that is that perfect happiness without any problems is never going to be in your future, in your earthly future. So she says, so the goal isn't that because you can't get that? I said, right. She said, so it's not a destination, it's a direction. I said, correct. She said, so the goal is happierness. Oh, wow. I said, that's like 30 years of my career. And it's like, if you have, like, five minutes. Oprah's good with words.

[Faith Matters Host 2]

Yes, she is.

[Arthur Brooks]

She's good with a lot of things.

[Sarah Perkins Sabie]

Yeah.

[Arthur Brooks]

How cool.

[Faith Matters Host 2]

Yeah. So my favorite part of the book was this. This whole chapter about metacognition and figuring out how to manage your emotions when they're negative. Because, you know, who among us are our best selves when we're feeling extreme negative emotions? But so I think my question for you really is, what's the difference between managing emotions versus resisting or ignoring or suppressing emotions? Because I know that doesn't work.

[Arthur Brooks]

Yeah, it doesn't work. Except that that's what everybody's trying to do all the time. And that's what the whole. A lot of the mental health industrial complex is dedicated to doing for young adults today. One of the biggest problems that we have is that we're telling young people if they're sad or anxious, that that means they're broken or defective, and that we need to treat it right now. Now, I understand that needing to manage maladapted or exaggerated negative emotions is really important. It can be a serious medical problem. But the idea that if you go to counseling to say, I feel sad and anxious, and they say, well, we got to make that go away, that that's really misguided. Everybody listening to us feels sadness and anger and fear and disgust, and that is normal. If you don't feel those things, then you need therapy. That's really important to figure this out and to come to terms with that fact. So there's nothing abnormal about it. Quite the contrary. We're bending. We're trying to bend young people into being abnormal by trying to suppress these emotions. And it's unhealthy. And by the way, it's also impossible.

[Faith Matters Host 1]

Fascinating. What do you make of Jonathan Haidt's recent work that sort of shows these increases in anxiety and depression, especially among young people?

[Arthur Brooks]

Yeah. So John Height, is that a problem? Yeah, hugely. So John Haidt and I are our old friends and colleagues. We go back to when we were both wet behind the ears as academics. And so I've, you know, we've intersected in our careers and we've done similar work for a long time. And he's probably the most consequential social scientist of his generation. Wow. His work is that important. Jonathan Haidt, his new book is called the Anxious Generation. It's about the effects that screens and social media and safetyism and protection affecting our kids is having on their anxiety and depression. He's a social psychologist, incredibly good researcher, very adept at using data, and he's a careful data analyst. And he's become totally persuaded that were it not for the way that we treat our kids, which is keeping them inside and giving them screens, they would not be as anxious and depressed as they are. And that the depression anxiety epidemics have everything to do with screen misuse, social media overuse, the fact that we're not playing, our kids are not playing outside, they're not taking risks, they're not building relationships. And the result of that is kind of what we see. And that's not normal levels of negative affect. That's exaggerated and unnecessary negative affect because of bad policies and bad parenting.

[Faith Matters Host 1]

Yeah. So the solution. So it shouldn't be that we should let our kids stay on screens and then go to therapy. Right. It's like, we gotta solve this before.

[Arthur Brooks]

Yeah. It's basically like giving your kid a bottle of whiskey and then taking them to detox. It doesn't make sense. Now I get it because a lot of people listening to us have kids and they're thinking, yeah, well, thanks, Brooks. Thanks for your advice to not give them screens because that's. But there's tons of stuff that we can do and John High talks about in his work and it's just common sense. I mean, the problem is not tech, it's misuse of tech. It's what it comes down to. It's like anything else. I mean, you can misuse a phone, you can misuse almost anything that we have in our lives.

[Faith Matters Host 1]

Yeah.

[Arthur Brooks]

You know, you can misuse your relationships in all sorts of dysfunctional ways that can turn something as good and beautiful, wonderful in your marriage and turn it into something that's abusive and rotten and, you know, that's all we're talking about. So we need to learn how to use tech appropriately. And that's what his work is all about.

[Faith Matters Host 1]

Yeah. This is certainly a nuanced conversation. I didn't mean to say, you know, screens should be outlawed by any means.

[Arthur Brooks]

A lot of people do, though. A lot of people really do that. But it's not gonna happen.

[Faith Matters Host 1]

It's not gonna happen. First of all, and we have a child who more than our other children, sort a happy place in front of screens. He feels just a lot more pressure from the world than our other children do for whatever reason.

[Arthur Brooks]

He's a sensitive child, very sensitive.

[Faith Matters Host 1]

And it's helped. And sometimes that can be a release that we have seen as a good thing that can calm him. So I don't mean to, I don't.

[Arthur Brooks]

Mean to all kinds of ways. And we will learn as a society. The problem is that our brains are still designed for the Pleistocene. You know, our brains are still accommodated to the environment 250,000 years ago and our tech and our society and our culture. And it's not in the Pleistocene. We're not walking across the savannah, living in close knit hierarchical kin groups in a tropical location. That's just not the way things are working. And so the result is we have a hard time accommodating ourselves to this blindingly fast pace of technological change. And this is a good example of that.

[Faith Matters Host 2]

So what does healthy emotional management look like when, you know, let's say you're in the realm of normal, but like you're noticing, you know, when you feel extreme anger and maybe it's healthy anger, it's a signal something really is wrong. What is it? It's such an uncomfortable place to live in. What does Healthy management look like healthy.

[Arthur Brooks]

Management is actually moving the experience from your limbic system into your prefrontal cortex. Now, that's a wonky, nerdy way of saying, be conscious of your emotions and understand your emotions. The unhealthiest way that you can deal with negative emotions is not to deal with them, but rather to just react all the time. And we all know people who react a lot. You, You've had four kids, I've had three. And kids are highly reactive. I mean, they're upset, they scream. And you always say the same thing. Use your words. Use your words, which you're basically saying, stop being so limbic. Start using your prefrontal cortex, which would be bad parenting. That's actually how I talk to my kids. Grow up with a scientist, you get science around the dinner table. But what that's basically saying is that move the experience into your conscious center so that you understand what these things are and what it's all about. There's many, many techniques for doing that. When your grandmother said, when you're angry, count to 10 before you talk. She's saying, be metacognitive. Metacognition is moving the experience of emotions from the place where they're produced in the limbic system into the place where they can be understood and reacted to appropriately, which is the prefrontal cortex. And it takes time to do that, and it takes effort to do that. Some people don't know they're supposed to, but the better you get at it, the better off you are. So count to 10. Actually, count to 30. There's research on this.

[Faith Matters Host 2]

Really? Count to 30. Okay.

[Arthur Brooks]

Count to 30. 30 seconds. While you're imagining the consequences of what you want to say.

[Faith Matters Host 1]

Oh, wow.

[Arthur Brooks]

So this is really good marriage advice. Not that I'm here to give you marriage advice, but it's like, hey, I'm older than you.

[Faith Matters Host 2]

I'll take it.

[Arthur Brooks]

I've been married 33 years. Trust me on this, kids. Thanks, gramps. Anyway, but the whole point is that you get angry with each other, and blurting something out is not the best way to deal with it. The best way to deal with it is to think. Here's what I want to say. And there's nothing unhealthy about what I want to say. I'm going to think about it, and I. I'm going to consider the reaction that I'm likely to get, the response I'm likely to get by saying this thing, and you'll almost certainly, at the end of 30 seconds, be more judicious and More loving. And that's because your prefrontal cortex is a gift. It's a gift of doing things the way you want to do them.

[Faith Matters Host 1]

So that's a super helpful script to follow for anger. Could we do one for fear, let's say? I mean, there's so many different ways that fear can come into your life. One that comes to mind for me is that I'm an alternative entrepreneur by trade, and, you know, sometimes we'll see a move a competitor makes that's just like, oh, shoot, you know what I mean? And when you're in startups, you know, it feels like you're always on the edge of a cliff. This may work or it may not. And the consequences of it not working could be drastic for you or for your team or whatever. So, like, when you're feeling, and there are, that's just one example, so many. But when you're feeling fear, that negative emotion in the limbic system system, what's the script to follow? When you bring it into your prefrontal.

[Arthur Brooks]

Cortex, you understand it and you can react appropriately to it. So what happens is that when you're feeling fear or anxiety, which is just unfocused fear, that's all anxiety is.

[Faith Matters Host 2]

Oh, wow.

[Arthur Brooks]

When you're not thinking about what the source of it is, you'll catastrophize automatically. It's like, I'm doomed, I'm doomed.

[Faith Matters Host 2]

And if it's unfocused, you have all kinds of catastrophes to choose from totally, and you see them all at once.

[Arthur Brooks]

Unfocused fear just means that you're lighting up. Your amygdala is highly active, which is the part of the limbic system that's engaged when there's a threat, and that leads you to fight or flight. So fear and anger is adjudicated through that part of the brain. And what will happen is when you're in a highly stressful situation, like being an entrepreneur or raising teenage kids, these are both highly stressful situations. You're getting the stress response, which is your adrenal system reacting to the perceived threat from a signal based on your amygdala, which sends a signal through your hypothalamus to your pituitary glands in your brain, then sending a signal to your adrenal glands sitting above your kidneys. If it's an acute threat, then you're going to feel adrenaline, adrenaline within in 74 milliseconds. I mean, it's just unbelievable. And you jump out of the way.

[Faith Matters Host 1]

Jump out of the way. Yeah.

[Arthur Brooks]

But if it's something that in a few minutes it's going to start stimulating something in the outside of the adrenal glands called cortisol in the cortex of the adrenal glands. And this cortisol is the stress hormone that keeps you alert, it keeps you engaged. And what will happen is if you're doing something that's chronically stressful, like you have a really stressful relationship or a really stressful job, you're going to get a drip of cortisol all day long. And that's going to be basically alerting you and lighting you up and making it impossible to relax and making it hard to go to sleep, et cetera, et cetera, making you jumpy, making you irritable with other people.

[Faith Matters Host 1]

And it's got to become a vicious cycle.

[Arthur Brooks]

Yeah. And here's the problem with entrepreneurs, by the way. Entrepreneurs get addicted to it. And so entrepreneurs don't feel alive unless they've got this cortisol trap going on all the time. So the source of your misery is also the source of your anxiety, which is a real problem. So I have to work with, I work with entrepreneurs all the time time going, dude, you're addicted to what's going to kill you. It's like, it's like smoking. The source of your relaxation is your murderous little friend that wants to give you cancer and put you in a box. And you know, so that's how kind of cortisol works for people who have that high energy lifestyle for sure. So yeah. So you have to deal with it with metacognition.

[Faith Matters Host 2]

That is just. I feel like we've been reading about this for a decade. That is blowing my mind. That was so succinct and crystal clear and it makes perfect sense and it's very exciting and disturbing and yeah, thank you.

[Arthur Brooks]

It's really helped. I mean, that's why the science is so cool. Yeah, that's why I teach a science class. I don't teach a self improvement class. It's science in service of improving your life and sort of running the seam between self improvement and pure science. It's like bringing science to the public.

[Aubrey Chavez]

Where it's very useful.

[Arthur Brooks]

Here's how you can use it. I mean, I write this column in the Atlantic every Thursday morning about science for non scientists. This audience of 500,000 people that get to read about it and okay, I'm thinking every week, is it useful? Is it understandable? Is it entertaining? Not how smart do I look?

[Faith Matters Host 1]

Yeah, yeah, totally.

[Faith Matters Host 2]

Yeah, I mean, that's what I think. That's why we love the book so much. But, like, you have to finish the story. Like, what do you do when you're addicted?

[Arthur Brooks]

Accordingly. Okay. Unfocused fear is not natural. And the place is really. Yeah.

[Faith Matters Host 2]

There's no reason.

[Aubrey Chavez]

Anxiety does not.

[Arthur Brooks]

Well, it makes sense in the current environment, but it's not natural to our habitat. So humans are focused fear. Yes, focused fear, for sure. And the reason is because something's chasing you. Fear is supposed to be intense and episodic and infrequent. That's the way fear is supposed to work. Your amygdala is supposed to be mostly very quiet. You're not supposed to be getting adrenaline shots that often. But in modern life, it's like there's always a tiger creeping up on us. Always creeping up on us because we created it. But it's dumb stuff, and it may.

[Faith Matters Host 1]

Not ever actually pounce either. It's always.

[Arthur Brooks]

Or maybe it doesn't even exist. It's social media.

[Faith Matters Host 1]

Exactly.

[Arthur Brooks]

Like, so Twitter, for example. I mean, I was talking to a guy who's got a big social media following. He's like, every time I open Twitter, I feel my chest tightening up. Now, chest tightening up. That's a stress response, right? And that's because he thinks it's a. He's reacting as if there's a predator with Twitter. Twitter literally doesn't exist when you don't look at it. It's two dimensional, which means it turns sideways and disappears.

[Faith Matters Host 1]

Oh, wow.

[Arthur Brooks]

Wow. Turn off the gap. Yeah, it doesn't exist anymore. It's like, oh, they might show up in my house. No, they're not going to show up at your house. You're just worried about what somebody's saying about you on social media. I mean, it's, it's, it's absurd how, how much importance we endow, but it's, it's neurobiological why we do that. That's the way that that works. So the way to deal with this is to make everything conscious. Everything conscious. I have lists of things I'm afraid of. So number one, when I'm feeling a lot of anxiety, which is freaky, given what I do for a living, and thinking I'm just really anxious. What is it? What are the five things I'm most anxious about? And I'll write them down. Now what am I doing? I'm bringing the experience from my limbic system to my prefrontal cortex. Because you can't actually write something down and have a pencil in your hand with a piece of Paper when it's still sitting in your limbic system. Your limbic system can't write. It's a caveman. Your evolved, most human brain is in the front of the neocortex of your brain, behind your forehead. And that's what you engage when you write stuff down. That's why journaling is so. Keeping a diary is so emotionally healthy. Making lists of things that are bothering you, writing down your emotions will bring them where you need them, such that you can manage them. I also advise that people write down their anxieties such that they'll focus them. And if they're really scary, okay, feel the fear, then react the way that's appropriate for you to react. When you feel the fear, it's never something you should be afraid of. It almost never is. Like, why am I feeling so anxious? Oh, I know. Because there's an axe murderer in my head. No, no, that's actually not happening.

[Faith Matters Host 1]

Wow.

[Faith Matters Host 2]

Oh, that's so interesting.

[Arthur Brooks]

So fear lists, disappointment lists. This is the way you deal with a lot of aversive emotions is you make them conscious, you make them specific. Then with things I'm afraid of, I'll take the next step. I'll say, okay, what's going to happen here? Best case, worst case, most likely case. If the worst case happens, what would I do? What would I do? And I make a plan for the worst case, and then I put it away, and I always feel better because I'm actually relegating the aversive, the negative emotion to the role that it's supposed to have in my neurophysiological life.

[Faith Matters Host 2]

Yeah. Oh, my gosh.

[Aubrey Chavez]

That is so incredibly useful.

[Faith Matters Host 2]

And I feel like we've learned that slowly and in a bumpy way that when you write it down and you imagine the worst thing happening, you realize that there would be a next step that is obvious. Like, if the worst happened, you would actually know what to do.

[Arthur Brooks]

I would go to chemotherapy, for example. It's like that thing. That thing hurts. That thing hurts. That bump on my leg. That bump on my leg hurts.

[Faith Matters Host 1]

Yes.

[Arthur Brooks]

It's stressing me out. Stress me out. Okay, best case, it's nothing. Most likely case, it's a little abscess. Small case, small likelihood of a case. Worst case, it's cancer. What would I do if I had cancer? Well, the doctor would tell me what to do, and I would do what the doctor tells me to do. That's what I would do. Right. And you say, okay, I got it. But there's a plan of action and all your brain wants is a plan of action. And the problem is that when you're catastrophizing, realizing things aren't concrete, then you really have ghosts in the machine. And that's a big, big problem for your happiness. Another way to do this, by the way, the most effective metacognitive technique is not journaling. It's offering up prayers of petition.

[Faith Matters Host 2]

Whoa.

[Arthur Brooks]

Prayers of petition, for sure. So the formula for prayer, the ideal formula for prayer, according to Christian tradition, lds, Catholic, all of it is, is, glory to you. Thank you. Sorry. Help me more. It's those four things. It's like, hallelujah. Thank you. Sorry. Please help. You know, that's the sort of the standard formula. So when you sit in prayer, I recommend that everybody spend serious time in prayer, because this is how you reinforce your friendship with God. And you don't cut off communication with somebody who's your real friend, right? And when you do this, when you're actually bringing your concerns to God, I mean, God. I mean, Jesus is very clear in the Bible, ask for what you want. Okay? If you're going to be a knucklehead and say a boat, woe be unto you, right? Like, okay, idiot, if you're wasting your time in prayer, right? But if you're basically saying the things you really care about, like a better relationship with my brother, like a sense of, finally, I just want to have a feeling of peace in my life. When you're offering up those things in prayer, you're articulating them and they're no longer ghosts in the machine. You're bringing them to your prefrontal cortex. It's like, I'm freaked out. I'm freaked out. My limbic system is going bonkers. I'm going to deliver it to my prefrontal cortex and then offer it up to heaven. And this is really, really powerful. People always say, I feel so much better after I pray. Well, duh. Neuroscience, man.

[Faith Matters Host 1]

That is really interesting. And it seems like I'm interested in the fact that potentially both ends of the spectrum work here in the sense that, yes, you can articulate it verbally verbalize it and offer it up to God, or you could, I mean, in another way, potentially not verbalize it at all, and do some form of contemplative prayer that sort of rids your brain of the thoughts at all. Do you know what I mean?

[Arthur Brooks]

I do. Although there's really two kinds of. I've done a lot of study of Tibetan Buddhist meditation. I have a long relationship with the Dalai Lama. I go to Dharamsala, to his monastery every year where we do conferences and we've written together and we're shooting a documentary as recently as last April, as a matter of fact. And I've studied with his monks. I've studied meditation with his monks. And one of the things that most Westerners don't understand about Tibetan Buddhist or any Buddhist meditation is that kind of that single point meditation of emptiness, that feeling of emptiness is one kind of meditation. Most Americans want that because they want their meditation to bring them more peace. They're stressed out, and they don't want to be stressed out is the way that that works. And so they want a technique is the way that that works. The Dalai Lama is very critical of that for two reasons. Number one is that's one kind of meditation. Another kind of meditation that's equally prominent in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition is called analytical meditation. In the Catholic tradition, we call it mental prayer. That's where you'll look at a passage in Scripture and deeply try to understand it by thinking about it very, very deeply in the context of your life. In. I mean, you open like, I don't know, open the Book of Helaman and say, okay, what does it mean?

[Faith Matters Host 1]

Deep reference, well done.

[Arthur Brooks]

I like the Book of Helaman. It's really, really good. We can read, too, in the Catholic world. It's a legal book. And think, what does this mean for me? What is this trying to tell me about my life? And then offering up something of great concern in your life to God in the context of the scripture that you're trying to read? I mean, the scriptures have been given, given to us because they're teaching us about us, often through the experiences that the prophets had or that the apostles had at different times in history, or just the basic parables that Jesus is telling. And so that kind of analytical prayer is super valuable. And that's all in intellectually, you're not spaced out at all. So the Dalai Lama says that Americans often forget that. The second thing that the Dalai Lama is critical about is he says that most Americans who practice Buddhism, they just want to feel better. They want to feel better. The point is you not feeling better. The point is you making other people feel better. That's the point of Buddhism. They believe that we have life after life, after life after life. That life keeps recurring until we reach the point of enlightenment. And that's called to be a Bodhisattva, one to have a Buddha nature at that point. Bodhisattvas, people who have this elect Whether or not they're going to come back in future lives or whether or not they're going to stay dead. It's the most different religion, Buddhism, than lds, by the way. Why? Because the point for Christians is to not stay dead, right?

[Faith Matters Host 1]

Yes.

[Arthur Brooks]

The point of Buddhism is to stay literally dead is to not come back.

[Faith Matters Host 1]

That is so interesting.

[Arthur Brooks]

But the whole. Okay, so that's more than a detail. But the Dalai Lama's point is that you can't achieve a Bodhisattva nature. You can't. Samsara is the end of the cycle of birth and rebirth. In Sanskrit, you can't get that. If you're just trying to serve yourself with these techniques, you're going the wrong direction, man. You're trying to lift up the world with your meditation is what you're trying to do. So there's two mistakes that come from this kind of spaced out, single point meditation. Sure.

[Faith Matters Host 2]

What do you think about, like, another concept in Buddhism that I feel like has been really beneficial and maybe just a piece that I felt like it was kind of missing from my spirituality was this idea of radical acceptance. And so I noticed in myself that petitionary prayer felt like the opposite of radical acceptance. It was like it was where I would sit and think of all the things that I was resisting and hope that they changed. And so I felt like in Buddhism, it felt like a real contrast, that it was just this constant choosing to accept what my life is bringing. And I still have a hard time sort of negotiating what I even mean to do when I pray.

[Arthur Brooks]

I know this is common and I understand exactly what you're saying. So one of the ways to think about that that can be quite helpful is that Jesus gave us a prayer. He gave us the perfect prayer. We call it the Our Father, you call it the Lord's Prayer. And the key point in the Lord's Prayer is thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Your ultimate petition is that thy will be done, not mine. So this is it. It's like, I want a boat, Lord, but if you don't want to have me to have a boat, I don't want a boat. That's basically. That's a trivial example. But you get the point that I'm trying to make. And so for those of us that are worried that we're trying to bring too much of our own will to something is to focus more on that critical frame praise than the Our Father is thy will be done. Thy will be done. Thy will be done. So there's this beautiful passage in the annunciation of the angel, Gabriel comes to the Blessed Virgin Mary and he says, guess what? I got news. Right. You're going to be the mother of Jesus. Right. And you know what she says in the Bible in the Gospel of Luke? It says, be it done unto me according to thy will. Be it done unto me according to thy will. So this is a great petitionary prayer for all of us to say again and again and again. Be it done unto me according to thy will. And just say it again and say it again and say it again. Right. And that's my petition is that his will be done.

[Aubrey Chavez]

Thank you.

[Faith Matters Host 1]

Yeah, that's fascinating.

[Arthur Brooks]

That's helped me a lot because I'm such a willful jerk. I'm just such a sinner.

[Faith Matters Host 1]

I've always assumed when we talk about petitionary prayer, how could it be anything other than the petition for my own will? And this is such an issue. Interesting way to flip it around, right?

[Faith Matters Host 2]

Totally.

[Faith Matters Host 1]

I wonder if we could get into sort of the four, I don't remember exactly what you call them, the four areas of your life that one maybe needs to get in order in order to. And I'm trying to be very careful with my words here, but I don't know if experience happiness is the right way to say it.

[Arthur Brooks]

Yeah. The practices lead people to living, to be fully alive.

[Faith Matters Host 1]

Yeah. Okay.

[Arthur Brooks]

I love that in this fulsome understanding of happiness.

[Faith Matters Host 1]

Yeah. Could you talk about what those are?

[Arthur Brooks]

Yeah. So there's a lot of work that people have done about the practices of the happiest people.

[Faith Matters Host 1]

Yeah.

[Arthur Brooks]

Do they eat broccoli? Do they eat asparagus? Do they do resistance training or high intensity interval training? And you can find something, you can find a statistically significant effect in there someplace with respect to mood or whatever. But there's really four big areas of life that people focus on every day who tend to get the highest quality, enjoyment, satisfaction and meaning. And those four areas are faith, family, friendship and work that serves others. Those are the big four.

[Faith Matters Host 1]

Are you putting those in any particular order?

[Arthur Brooks]

No, because you can't measure them in the same way and so you can't compare them. We don't have reliable enough data to say one unit of faith versus two hours of work. They're incomparable units is the way that works what you find is that the happiest people, people, the people who have the highest levels of well being and life satisfaction and who are comfortable with their discomfort, the most equilibrated people, they tend to practice these things. Now I don't mean my faith. I mean, it's great. I mean, I recommend Catholicism to everybody. By the way, there's a brochure under each of your seats. But what I mean is that we need to try transcend that we need transcendence, something bigger than ourselves. So as a scientist, what I find very, very clearly. And you've worked with Lisa Miller, and so you know that she talks about the same thing. And I've worked with Lisa Miller. I took Lisa Miller to see the Dalai Lama in April. And she's wonderful because she just has so much love for God. So her kind of transcendence is great. I work with Ryan Holiday, the guy who does Stoic philosophy. His transcendence, ascendance, brings lots and lots of happiness, which is a serious study of the Stoic philosophers. I know people who talk about the Brahma Muhurta, which is, in Vedic philosophy, the Creator's hour. It's an hour and a half before sunrise when it's cool and dark, really, and you walk without devices and you hear the crunch of the trail under your feet and you understand life more. I know people who study Johann Sebastian Bach's great fugues for transcendence. I know people who've practiced Vipassana meditation. And I know a lot of people like the three of us, who love the Lord. But you got to do something. That's what I mean by faith. That's what I mean by faith. And again, I'm not a syncretist. I'm not everybody's. It's not all the same. But my point here is not the metaphysics of what's correct theologically. My point is what actually brings people a lot of the worldly happiness that we're seeking.

[Faith Matters Host 1]

Yes.

[Arthur Brooks]

We're finding that. So that's the first big one.

[Faith Matters Host 1]

Love that. Go ahead, go ahead. I was just going to say I. I love the way that you articulated that, because these paths are clearly not the same.

[Arthur Brooks]

No.

[Faith Matters Host 1]

But I've noticed that in the people that have that particular. Like Lisa Miller, for example, like, even though we come from completely different traditions with completely different. With completely different belief systems, like our hearts, you know, are able to meet, even though you're on a different. On a different path, it feels like at some point the path intersects.

[Arthur Brooks]

It does. And what all of this has in common is stop worshiping yourself.

[Faith Matters Host 1]

Yeah.

[Arthur Brooks]

It's one of the things that the modern world leads to a lot of misery because it has a formula. It's really misbegotten. It says, love things, use people and worship yourself. That's the modern formula for life, right? I mean, go use love things.

[Faith Matters Host 1]

Love things.

[Arthur Brooks]

Love things. Love things. Therein you'll find your bliss. Use people for your gratification, for your advancement, and worship yourself. Because you're the center of the universe and people worship themselves constantly. The more that you think about yourself, as opposed to putting God and others in your life, you're worshiping yourself. And the right formula just kind of changes the nouns around and verbs, which is to use things with abundance and joy. Love people and worship God. Wow, that's good. It's seven words. Yeah. But it. It six. I was like, wait a second. Yeah, that's right, six.

[Faith Matters Host 1]

Wow.

[Arthur Brooks]

Yeah.

[Faith Matters Host 2]

I want to ask you about families.

[Aubrey Chavez]

You.

[Faith Matters Host 2]

You have this really beautiful section about building an imperfect family.

[Arthur Brooks]

Yeah. And which they all are.

[Faith Matters Host 2]

Yes. Yeah, of course.

[Arthur Brooks]

And when you broadcast out to the neighborhood is. I was like, oh, my kids are so great. And the Christmas card. Yes.

[Faith Matters Host 1]

Christmas card. Yes.

[Arthur Brooks]

Little ingrates.

[Faith Matters Host 2]

So I want to talk to you about a particular type of conflict, because you touch on it in the book, and this is something that's very alive right now in our community. And there will definitely be people who are listening, who are kind of in the middle of this, figuring this out. And that's when someone in your family leaves your faith, and where faith is so central, that can feel really disruptive to a family. You talk about a values breach, and maybe that fits into this concept of a values breach. Maybe it doesn't. But I think that's what I would love to hear. Hear from you. Like what? How do. How does a family cope when you start having mismatched expectations about what you want from each other?

[Arthur Brooks]

And we're not, to put too fine a point on it, when your adult kids stop going to church.

[Faith Matters Host 1]

Right.

[Arthur Brooks]

That's kind of what we're talking about here. Right.

[Faith Matters Host 1]

Thank you for not dancing around.

[Arthur Brooks]

You were really eloquent about it. But I mean, this is what a lot of people are worried about. You know, this is something that, you know, I have adult kids, and people ask me this all the time in Christian communities and other religious communities and we. And Muslim communities, the same thing. It's like, so first, back up for a lot of people listening to us. They have little kids, and so there's no values breach yet because they're like four. And the values breach is, I ate the cookie when I shouldn't have eaten the cookie. And so there's nothing about rejecting the faith or having a behavior that's inconsistent with what we believe is God's will. So let's back up a little bit. I've done a lot of work on how, how. And people ask me all the time, what should I do so that when my kids grow up, they go to church. Like, that's a big question, right? And there's an answer. There's actually an answer. You can't guarantee it. Again, God's will be done. God's will be done, not yours, right? And it's really, really, really important when you're having a big crisis. A big crisis. And I've had them. I mean, thank God we're not in a crisis mode because my kids are growing up right now and having their own kids. But there was a time when my son Carlos, when he was in high school, was like, it was touch and go. And I remember my wife, she used to pray every night when we'd say our prayers together. She'd say, lord, you're having a problem with Carlos. How can I help? So number one, for all the Christian people listening to us, they're not your kids. They're not your kids. They're not your kids. They're God's kids. And you're just stewarding it. You're just help. You're just a helper. You're just a helper. So ask God the kind of help he needs. Ask God for, you know, guidance and wisdom them on how you're supposed to help. They're not your children. And again, that could be very easily misconstrued, Right? Somebody listening from the outside, Brooks just said that they're not their parents. Children. I understand what I'm saying metaphysically. The second thing is basically this. You have to let your kids live their lives. You have to let your kids live their lives and you have to love them. So there should be nothing that your kids do. Robbing a bank, you should stop, still love them, right? There's nothing your kids should do that should put your love for them in question. And they should know that. They have to know that. That's really important. That's really important for the relationship. That's what it means to be unconditionally loved, right? So that means that's a contract for life. I realize that in your faith that's a contract for the supernatural, right? We're not so sure in the Catholic faith. My wife says, don't forget in heaven, we're not. We don't marry or given up in marriage. I'm like, what do you mean? Are you going to act like you don't know me.

[Faith Matters Host 1]

We've got a solution for you.

[Arthur Brooks]

I kind of get the feeling like you're waiting this out. It's like, I think I'm going to become lds. Stuck with me, man. So. So, but, but that's really, really, really important because that gives a sense of security to both sides. That's the safety net for both sides. Sides.

[Faith Matters Host 1]

Yeah.

[Arthur Brooks]

I love you and you love me. And I don't care if you're a Marxist. I still love you. I don't care if you vote for that guy. I still love you. I don't care if you reject the faith. I still, I. I'm not going to like it, but I still love you.

[Faith Matters Host 1]

Yeah.

[Arthur Brooks]

Nothing you can do is going to break that sacred covenant.

[Faith Matters Host 2]

Yeah.

[Arthur Brooks]

That's super important that they actually see that.

[Faith Matters Host 1]

Yeah.

[Arthur Brooks]

Then the other thing is to. Is to. Is to. You don't like what they're doing because a lot of people say their adult kids are living in a way that they disapprove of. Right. Okay. I disapprove the way that you live. But I'm not gonna tell you that you're a bad person because of your values. That's a values breach.

[Faith Matters Host 2]

Okay.

[Faith Matters Host 1]

Okay.

[Faith Matters Host 2]

Yes. Say more because I think that gets so tangled up. It's so hard to not see behavior as the values breach all by itself. So can you and I recognize from the studies that you mentioned that that really is all the difference? Like there is really a difference between.

[Faith Matters Host 1]

Behavior and values, or is it difference in values? Values breach on its own, and it sounds like it's not.

[Arthur Brooks]

Well, a difference in values is not necessarily a breach insofar as that you create the breach by saying a breach is in the relationship.

[Faith Matters Host 1]

Yeah.

[Arthur Brooks]

Is what it comes down to. So here's the classic problem that happens. Junior goes to college. Hey, hooray, Junior. Junior got into Harvard. So great. Well, Junior comes back after his first semester saying some pretty crazy things. Right. Like, I don't want to be a Mormon or whatever. Right. I get it. And, and, and if you're really mature about it, you'll say, I love you. We'll see. I love you. You'll see. And, and it's really hard to do that. It's really, really hard to do. But the classic thing is that somebody comes back from college spouting a bunch of things that sound like nonsense to the, to the, the adult kids, to the aging parents. The parents react badly to these behavior. These idea differences, which are often behavior differences. They're living in a particular way, et cetera. And then the child creates a values breach for the parents. That's usually how it happens. And so it's behavior reaction, values breach. And that values breach can create a rift in the relationship that can last years, decades. Yeah, don't let it happen.

[Faith Matters Host 1]

The breach, meaning specifically, it's not just a change in values. It's. I reject.

[Arthur Brooks]

Yeah. Because you don't accept the thing that I'm doing. I reject your values, which are central to who you are as a person. And so I can't. So it's really interesting. You see this a lot. So kids come back and they say, you know, I was raised in a Republican home, and they come back with really liberal values from college for the first time. They're experimenting with. Because of their, you know, their, you know, Marxist basket weaving class or whatever they're taking at the time. And. And they say, dad, the parents are offended by this. And they say, because, dad, you're a racist. You're just a racist. And you know what? I can't have dinner with a racist, so I'm not coming home for Thanksgiving. That's a values breach. And that's how that works. It's a huge mistake on both sides. It's a huge mistake. And so parents usually who are supposed to have more composure because they've been on the earth longer should not let it get to that particular point. And the way to do that is when your kids have ideas that you find obnoxious, you listen. Say, tell me more. You listen. You know, of course I don't agree, but I think it's pretty interesting what you're saying. Of course I don't agree. I'm not going to lie to you and tell you I agree. But tell me more. Tell me more. Wow. Does everybody think this? Yeah. Do all your friends think this?

[Faith Matters Host 1]

Yeah.

[Arthur Brooks]

Is what it comes down to. When there's behavior, it's harder. Right. When there's behavior that's not consistent with the faith, that's harder. And that just means that you got to offer it up and ask for more grace and more strength.

[Faith Matters Host 2]

Yeah. Yeah. And it comes back probably to managing your emotions, like walking through your own fears so that you can stay present in those conversations.

[Arthur Brooks]

Say, I disagree with what you're doing. I still love you.

[Faith Matters Host 2]

Genuinely.

[Arthur Brooks]

Yeah.

[Faith Matters Host 2]

Like, I. I genuinely. I love you and I want you here.

[Arthur Brooks]

And withdrawing love is the wrong response.

[Faith Matters Host 1]

Yeah. Yeah. On the friends section, what stuck to stuck out to me the most was the distinction you made between deal friends and real friends. Would you. Would you talk about that?

[Arthur Brooks]

Yeah. So one of the things that we find this really interesting is, is that. And sad is that there's a loneliness crisis in this country because more and more people say that fewer and fewer people know me. Well, in the era of social media, that makes sense. Because social media friends are not friends.

[Faith Matters Host 2]

Right?

[Arthur Brooks]

Right. They're not friends in any classic sense. And our brain can't process them as friends. We don't get the neuropeptide oxytocin. We only get it from eye contact and touch. You don't get it from social media relationships. You get no oxytocin from social media contacts. So when you're lonely.

[Faith Matters Host 1]

I've never heard that.

[Faith Matters Host 2]

I. I haven't either.

[Arthur Brooks]

Yeah, that's why. So what you want. It's kind of like being hungry and then going to McDonald's once in a while. It's fine. But if you get all your meals at fast food joints, you're going to become both obese and malnourished at the same time. Social media is the fast food of social life. You're craving oxytocin, which we need to be in equilibrium and to have joy and happiness in our life. We're built that way so that we'll have relationships with other people, so that we know our kin and they know us. This is the integrity of our, our families and communities is dependent on. That's why we've evolved this oxytocin, this love molecule in our brains. And so when we're really lonely in modern life, where we're quite isolated, more than 50% of American adults is unmarried. And this is the first time, only about five years ago, it was the first time we'd actually crossed that threshold. Lots and lots and lots of singletons, lots and lots and lots of people living alone. And when you feel that natural loneliness that comes from a lack of oxytocin, you'll go to the fast food joint, which is Facebook, which is Instagram, and your friends, and you'll binge on that. The problem is you'll get lonelier and lonelier and lonelier because they're not real friends. The other problem is that a lot of people who are really ambitious, they're surrounded by people in their work all day long, people who need them, people who find them useful. Those are deal friends. And deal friends aren't real friends either. So virtual friends are not real friends and deal friends are not real friends.

[Faith Matters Host 1]

This is the used people in the.

[Arthur Brooks]

Exactly right. And again, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with deal friends. I have lots and lots of ill friends and I like them, but I don't know when their kids birthdays are right. You know, I don't know how the quality of their marriage. I don't know about their religious beliefs. I do. With my real friends, I really, I mean, my best friend is a guy in Atlanta named Frank. And Frank and I talk and we talk about our Christian faith and we talk about our grandchildren and we talk about all that stuff. We don't talk about work that much at all because we don't get get to it. We talk about the real, not the deal. So. And the key thing to keep in mind is that deal friends are very useful and that's fine, but your real friends are useless. Beautiful useless, cosmically useless.

[Faith Matters Host 2]

Oh, I love that.

[Arthur Brooks]

Not worthless. I mean, I've got those too. You need people who just love you. That's what it comes down to. And there's less and less and less of that in American life.

[Faith Matters Host 2]

Yeah. Oh my gosh, thank you so much. I know we need to start wrapping up, but maybe we can close. You have. We've touched a little bit on love, but I wonder if, just generally, if you could leave us with what you've learned, what this project has taught you about love.

[Arthur Brooks]

Yeah. Remember, we had four things that the practice of the happiest people are faith, family, friends, and work. Those are just categories of love, you know, love of God, love of your family, love of your friends, and love that you express toward other everybody else in the way that you earn your daily bread and serve and serve the world. This is the empirical regularity in all of the research about happiness. It's the one thing that's true and the one thing that you need to know. All of the studies keep coming back to it again and again and again and again is that if you're going to do one thing, love more. If you don't know what to do because you're having trouble with your family member who's behaving in a way that you think is inappropriate, love more. Whenever you're in doubt, love more. And how do we know this? I mean, we know this from all of the studies that show that. That, for example, when couples are struggling, when they feel avoidance toward each other, when they learn how to practice approach notwithstanding their feelings, that's a stronger couple, in other words. Yeah, you're really bugging me right now. Bring it in. I send my wife flowers when I'm really mad. And this is important because love, by the way, is not a feeling. Love is decision, right? To love is to will the good of the other as other. That's St. Thomas Aquinas, based on Aristotle. And perfect love drives out fear, according to the apostle John. But that means it's a decision to love, a commitment. It's not like to like, which is sentimental. No, no, no. It's a steely edge thing and it's the ultimate thing that we actually can do. That's when I say, when you don't feel love, love. When you don't feel it, do it more. That's the ultimate balm of Gilead. That's the ultimate thing. It's what we. And interestingly, by the way, here's the Right now, I guess, for the sign of the times, given the fact that we're recording this in a terrible election year, that's the most transgressive Christian teaching ever, which is Matthew 5:44. Love your enemies. Pray for those who persecute you. He didn't say like your enemies because I don't like a lot of my enemies. So what, I'm going to love him. I'm going to decide to love him. And that's the way that we could actually bring these ideas of happiness, but more importantly, the grace and peace of our Lord and Savior, the rest of the world.

[Faith Matters Host 1]

Arthur, this has been just awesome. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for. Thank you for the book. Thanks for joining us so far from home.

[Arthur Brooks]

Thank you. I feel at home when I'm in Salt Lake City. I don't feel far from home at all. Thank you both for what you're doing, for what you're doing for all of us.

[Faith Matters Host 1]

It's our pleasure.

[Arthur Brooks]

Thank you.

[Faith Matters Host 2]

All right, thanks so much for listening.

[Aubrey Chavez]

We really hope that you enjoyed this conversation with Arthur Brooks. You can find his book Build the Life youe Want on Amazon or anywhere books are sold. And if Faith Matters content is resonating.

[Faith Matters Host 2]

With you and you get the chance.

[Aubrey Chavez]

We would love for you to leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. We read all of the reviews and it really helps us to get the word out about Faith Matters and we appreciate the support.

[Faith Matters Host 2]

Thanks again for listening.

[Aubrey Chavez]

And remember, you can check out more@faith matters.org.