Arthur Brooks (12:44)
It's beautiful. It's beautiful because what that says is there's this metaphysical love for me. I'm significant. I'm significant in God's eyes. Why am I significant in God's eyes? Or how do I know I'm significant in God's eyes? Because even before I was born, God knew me. He knew me. You need that. You need that in the divine sense. And if not that, you need that in the human sense. And that's really what it's all about. Now. No one knew Poe well. No one knew Edgar Allan Poe well. I mean, it was by his own admission. He wrote a poem on it called Alone but in his obituary we know that no one knew him well because he didn't want to know anybody well. And this is going to get to the punchline of what I'm talking about here. You want people to know, you go know people. That's what it comes down to. That's the most important thing. But there's a problem here. There's a problem which is that that's hard to do and we don't have an incentive to know other people. Well, we want to be known, but we don't necessarily want to know people very well. And therein lies the trouble that we have in our modern society today with loneliness not quite there yet. So hold that thought. Now let me go to a little bit more of the, of the basic science, even the neuroscience, of how important it is to be understood. There's a bunch of interesting papers that use FMRI technology. So imaging of the brain, functional imaging of the brain, where neuroscientists are experimenting with people where they feel understood or they don't feel understood. And there's a lot of ways that you can do this. You can imagine you put somebody in an FMRI machine and you're communicating with them and they're talking to you and you're going, yeah. And you showed that you really understand what they're saying, or you don't understand what they're saying and you don't care. And then you look at what's going on in their brains, which is a classical type of study that neuroscientists like to do today. When people feel understood, it activates the pleasure centers in their brain, notably the ventral striatum, the ventral tegmental area. If you follow my work, you know that I talk about these parts of the brain a lot. And while they feel misunderstood, it stimulates their pain centers, most notably the anterior insula of the brain. Yeah, that's right. It's physically pleasurable to be understood and is physically painful to be misunderstood. That's how important this is. That's the neurophysiology of how this relates to your well being. When you're not understood, when you're not known, when you're lonely because nobody knows you, well, look out. This is highly correlated with premature mortality, bad cardiovascular health, high inflammation, hormone disruption, sleep disorders. I mean, fill in the blanks, man. You know, when you don't, when you don't have this, it's gonna, it's gonna rain chaos in your life. And this kind of makes evolutionary sense, by the way, especially when we talk about the neurobiology of how this works. We, our brains are built to give us pleasure and pain on the basis of things that are good for us, for passing on our genes and surviving. Being understood is a really, really good thing to survive another day. Right? When people understand what you're all about and they're sympathetic to what you're talking about, you're more likely to be able to exist well in your kin group and your 30 to 50 person band. Being misunderstood, chronically misunderstood, not known. Well, being a stranger, that's a predicate to walking the frozen tundra and dying alone. So therefore, you need to have a neurocognitive incentive to be misunderstood and to have an aversion to being misunderstood. And your brain is actually equipped for that. Marvel at the human brain. It's so beautiful. It's such a miracle, isn't it? We always like, oh no, I want to get rid of all my bad feelings. No, your bad feelings are incentives for you to understand that there's something that is not good for you. They're alerting you to something that you should avoid and that's good and healthy. And that's a beautiful thing. And it's a gift, actually. And this is a perfect case in point. We shouldn't feel lonely because loneliness is dangerous for us. And so we feel horrible when we're actually lonely. Now here's the problem, and I hinted at it before, we really thrive by being known. I just showed you that in the paper that I was talking about a minute ago, by the way. Let me cite it specifically. The neural basis of feeling understood and not understood. And this is social and cognitive and affective neuroscience going in the show notes. Here's the problem. We thrive from being known a lot more than knowing others. We have a huge incentive to be known, but we don't have very much of an incentive to know others. But you already know, you get into Poe syndrome, is that when you don't know others well, they're not going to know you either. And so what we need to do consciously to get the thing that we want unconsciously is to consciously do the thing for which we have less of an incentive. This is the same lesson that you learn over and over and over again in life. It's better to give than to receive. You read, that's biblical, but it's also common sense. And your grandma taught you that. Give the thing that you actually want to get. If you're at a dinner party and you want people to listen to your point of view, listen to their point of view. If you're having an argument with your spouse and you don't want it to become really, really bitter, then don't do the Things that will actually make it bitter. Guess what? Everything goes better. Give the thing that you want to get. That's a good rule in life, and this is really a case in point. Work to know other people and then you will be known. But that's hard because of this dislocation between incentives. We want to have the thing, but we don't have very much of an incentive, especially if we're not thinking about it, to go give that particular thing. Okay, now this, a ton of research actually bears this out, that we show that knowledge of one's spouse, if you really know your spouse, it's great, it feels great, for sure. It enhances intimacy, it improves your adjustment to marriage, it increases your trust. But being known by your spouse improves all of your measures of marital happiness a lot more than that. So knowing your spouse is great, but being known by your spouse is pure pleasure. That's the data that we get that actually supports this, this dislocation between the two goals that we've got. Now. Even when you're trying to understand your spouse, it turns out that that succeeds in giving your spouse what your spouse actually needs so that they don't. Even if you really don't understand. If I don't understand, you know, Mrs. B, we're having an argument. We have tons of arguments. She's Spanish, and that's like basic communication in Spanish households is arguing. And sometimes I don't understand. I don't understand. I'm just a doofus. I don't get it, right? But if she actually feels like I'm trying to understand, that's more than half the battle, really. And good research shows this. My friend Bob Waldinger has a great paper in the Journal of Family Psychology about how couples, they do better when at least they're trying, when they're trying to know each other. This kind of explains the vicious cycle of POE syndrome that we're seeing more and more and more of where especially in the way that we use modern technology today, we have less of an incentive. We have. We're less with other people. And so the result of it is we're getting worse with the electronic mediation of our relationships. We're getting worse at knowing others. And as we're getting worse at knowing others, other people don't know us as much. And that's what puts us into the post syndrome of, you know, not being a very good friend. And so therefore not having very many good friends. And this actually explains, I mean, this whole thing explains this downward cycle, this, this, this self reinforcing pattern of loneliness that we're seeing that's actually increasing, particularly among people under 30. And that's a weird ahistoric thing. If you go back 25 and 30 years and before that the loneliest people were never between 18 and 25 years old. But that's where we see the highest levels of loneliness today. Because that's what's being disrupted by the misuse and overuse of technology, which is the known and being known stuff that we're talking about. We're a bunch of Edgar Allan Poe's. That's what the misuse of technology is actually getting us. So here's the question. How do we get out? How do we get out of it? Now, there's a lot of things in life that put us in a downward cycle. A self reinforcing negative pattern in life. Homelessness, for example, is a classic case of a policy and social problem that we see that tends to be very self reinforcing. If you're homeless, it's hard to get out of homelessness because to be not homeless you need a place to stay and you need a job and a way to support yourself. But if you're living outside, it's very, very difficult. Have an address and you probably don't have a means of communication and you probably don't have clean clothes. And so therefore you can't get a job and you can't get a job, you don't get money, you can't. You see my point? That's a self reinforcing pattern. Once you're in the vortex, it's hard to break out of that. Poverty is the same way. Once you're in poverty, it's really hard to break out of poverty. Joblessness, if you're unemployed, you lose your job, you lose your job skills. And the longer that there's a big space in your, in your and your cv, the more that potential employers go, huh? I'm wondering if there's a reason for this. And so you get my point. Loneliness works the same way. It's very self perpetuating. And part of the reason for this is when you don't feel known, you have less and less of an incentive than you had before to know other people. It's weird, you know that when you're feeling lonely and you're feeling kind of sorry for yourself, what do you want to do? It's like, I don't know, man, I'm not going out, I'm feeling crummy. I'm going to wrap myself in a fuzzy blanket and lie down on the couch with a pint of Haagen Dazs and binge a show on Netflix which makes you feel lonelier. Nothing against Haagenas or Netflix, but you know, being by yourself and cocooning is the opposite of what you need to do. And part of the reason for that is that there's very interesting research that shows that loneliness interrupts your executive function. Your executive function which is largely having to do with rational decisions that are being made in the prefrontal cortex of your brain, the C suite. That executive centers of your brain, those are decisions that will make you do the right thing, but that's interrupted by your feelings, by loneliness. There's a lot of signals that you're not actually taking all the way to your executive center to make rational decisions. On the contrary, you do a lot of self defeating things when you're lonely. Loneliness is bad for you because you tend to make the wrong decisions about getting out of loneliness is the whole point. That's how all self defeating patterns work. So what do you do? Let's just say now that you're in a cycle of loneliness and we've all been in this, by the way. I'm the world's biggest extrovert and I've been lonely too. I remember when I first moved away, when I first dropped out of college, dropped out, kicked out splitting hairs when I was 19 years old and I went on the road as musician, but I was living on the west coast. I'm from Seattle originally. My parents were in Seattle and I went out east. I moved to the Washington D.C. area and I didn't know anybody except the guys that I was working with. And they had their own lives and they had their own stuff going on. So I was alone all day long except for when I was on tour with my musical group. 19 years old. So I got this little house. I didn't know anybody in my neighborhood and I was just like lonely as a cloud. It was just terrible. And I remember just lying on my couch going, this is really nothing to do. What am I going to do? I wish I had the information I'm about to give you now. If you need to get out of loneliness, here's what you do. You need to do four things. Four things. There's always a list. Number one, you need to practice the opposite signal strategy. When you're feeling crummy about your life, probably your limbic system is lying to you and you're impairing the functioning of your prefrontal cortex, the executive centers of your brain so what do you need to do? Especially loneliness. Loneliness is the biggest example of this. Do the opposite of what you want to do. You want to cocoon, don't cocoon. You want to isolate yourself, don't isolate yourself. You don't want to talk to anybody, talk to people. The opposite signal strategy means ignoring your instincts when you're having these negative cognitions and emotions. Think of it like a workout routine, because that's another example where you need to focus on the opposite signal strategy. The more sedentary you are, the more sedentary you're going to want to be. And this is a really common problem. You know, when people get out of the cycle of moving and walking and working out and going to the gym, they tend to, you know, get stuck in the sedentary behavior of lying on the couch and not working out. And what you need to do is to do the opposite signal strategy. Do the opposite of what you want to do. When you're working out a lot, you're working out every day, you'll want to work out every day. When you stop, you don't want to stop stopping. You don't want to get back into it. Getting back into it is really hard. That's why you need to say, okay, I'm going to do the opposite of what I feel, and that's the right thing to do. Loneliness works the same way. Follow an opposite signal strategy. That's the first big thing to do. Okay, two, what should I do with my opposite signal strategy when I want to cocoon and draw inward to myself? That's a function that St. Augustine, he called curvatus in se curvatus inse, which means curving in on yourself in Latin. That's what we do egotistically, but that's actually what we do psychologically too. When we're feeling, feeling really bad. And we need to not be curvatus in se. We need to be proactive about being outward focused to do some things that we might not otherwise do. And that means proactively going and knowing other people. My friend David Brooks, the columnist at the New York Times, among other places, he has a really great book called how to Know a Person. And, and he observes that there's a lot of people that are diminishers, that they're self involved to the point that they make other people feel small and unseen. They're. They don't know others, they're not interested in knowing other people. And they'll speak about themselves, for example. And then there are people who are illuminators he calls them illuminators. And those are the people who are persistently curious about others, asking questions and listening to others. So the first area of Opposite Signal strategy when you're feeling lonely is to get more curious about other people, to be engaging other people about their own lives, to try to learn more about them, to try to know other people, even though you don't want to because you're in curvatus in search of. Right. And I think about this a lot of time, about the people I really admire the most in life. For those of you who followed my work for a while, in 2023, I published a book with Oprah Winfrey. And that was this incredible experience. Incredible experience. Because, I mean, just writing a book with Oprah Winfrey is sort of awesome, but that's not the point. The point was actually getting to know one of the maybe five most famous people in the world and who she is in private. And one of the most extraordinary things about Oprah Winfrey you need to understand is that she's the same person in private as she is in public. Public, which is to say, super interested in other people, super curious about other people, really trying to know other people. That was the secret to her success on her show. Besides just being highly intelligent and really good at media, she was intensely interested and focused on knowing other people in depth. That's why everybody watched her show. Four or five million people a day watched her show. Well, it turns out that if you're having dinner with her alone, she's the same person. This is one of the reasons that fame and fortune haven't been bad for her. On the contrary, she sees those as a gift to refract on other people, to lift them up because she cares about them. And so when I first met her and had dinner with her and we were talking about a project, working together, she really wanted to know me. She wanted to know me as a person. And that was really evidence, and that was an amazing thing. And so when you are lonely. I'm not saying that she is, she's not. But we can more be more like her on purpose if we decide to be. So channel your inner Oprah of being intensely curious about knowing another person. Even when you don't feel it. No, especially when you don't feel it. That's number two. Be proactive. Number three, to do that. These are all building on each other. Ask more questions without being weird. Interview people. If you don't know what to do and you want to know somebody, ask them a whole bunch of questions about their own life. And this is incredibly important. So I have a colleague at the Harvard Business School, Allison Wood Brooks. She's not related to me, but, you know, the fact is that she's a Brooks and I'm a Brooks. Mean, we get each other's email all the time. So I know all the people who are writing to Allison Wood Brooks, but I know her too, and I really like her work a lot. She's done work on, on dating. She's done work on how people actually interact with each other on dating. At some point, I'll have her as a guest on the show. She'. Terrific. And if you ask a lot of questions on a first date, you will be 9% more likable. 9% is the difference between meeting your soulmate, your future spouse, and not quite frankly, how do you meet your soulmate? When you go out on a bunch of dates, always ask a ton of questions, which is, of course, being proactive, which is if you've been lonely and suffering before, that an opposite signal strategy to what you actually want to do. And it's shocking how many people actually don't do that. How many people actually ask, you know, ask zero questions on dates. You know, a lot of my students, especially young women who are my students, I'll say, you know, they date. They're dating, of course. And I say, how. How many questions do guys ask on dates? And they're usually like, zero. Like, bad strategy guys. But the bad strategy for anybody people are super interesting. You know, if you sit down next to me on a plane and have the bad judgment of engaging me in convers, I'm going to interview you and I'm going to find out. I'm going to ask you questions like what are you most afraid of? I'm not going to be. I'm trying not to be weird here, but I want to know. I want to know if you're going to talk to me. I want to know what actually makes you tick. Now, part of it is because I'm a behavioral scientist and this is like my lab is figuring out what you're most afraid of. But, but mostly I'm a person and I want to have connections, real human connections with other people, even if I'm not going to know them for more than an hour. And that's the kind of questions I'm actually going to ask. I'm going to find out what really makes you tick, what's on your. What's written on your soul. And that's super fun and really Interesting. Now that requires, however, listening to the answers. The worst thing that you can do is ask people questions and then not listen. So, and the first one, by the way, is what's your name? And then one second later you don't remember. That's because you weren't listening. You were thinking about the next thing. People chronically don't listen at universities. At universities, listening is also known as waiting to talk. Don't be that person that's not listening. And you're doing that if you can't remember somebody's name that you've just asked for. And so the key thing is listen to learn, and then make a note of what you're actually hearing, because that's actually how you're going to know that person. And they'll know, and when they know, they'll want to know you. And that's the basis of actual human connection. And that's the basis of you being less lonely. One more thing, one more modern thing, and I wouldn't have had to bring this up 25 years ago. If you're trying to know somebody, here's the biggest opposite signal strategy of all. Don't look at your phone. Don't look at your phone. I had this friend who was with a great big private equity firm in New York City, and he was doing a lot of the hiring for a lot of the junior talent people coming out of places like where I teach at the Harvard Business School. The one thing he was looking for in an interview as well, they could connect with another human being. And the biggest giveaway that they can't really connect with another person is if during the interview they'd peek at their phone. Don't be that person. It's a huge mistake. It's basically you showing that you're. You don't want to know that person. You want to know. You want to look in the mirror. That is your phone. Which is to say, is somebody texting me? Did I get something in my notifications? What was that? Chime. Don't look in the mirror, look at the other person. Be other focused, not self focused. And he actually said that if somebody. That was the, that was the acid test in this interview. If he couldn't have an interview where they got to know each other because the other person even peeked once at their phone, out that candidate was gone. And so this is the fourth thing that is really indicative of probably the greatest source of loneliness. Remember the intermediation of relationships because of our technology, our intermediation with devices and screens. This is the this is the rule. Leave your phone in your pocket, leave your phone in the car, leave your phone at home, don't have your phone. And you're actually trying to get to know a person because that is the first thing that's going to make them believe that you're not really into knowing them and then they won't know you. And we get into the cycle that we're talking about in the first place. Now there's, you know, when I'm talking about trying to solve a particular problem, there's no law of nature saying that this problem is going to solve itself. And that's one of the things that really worries me. When I'm looking at the data on Gen Z today and I see these incredibly high levels of loneliness, which is to say very high levels of depression, anxiety and unhappiness. This is not a problem that's going to solve itself because there's nothing in nature that says if you wait long enough you'll be happy. Again is not true. We need to actually solve this problem. That's why I need you to solve this problem in your life and help other people solve it as well. This is one of these things that's not a self correcting issue and I don't want to see what's actually going to happen. If these numbers in loneliness continue to go up now to begin with, they don't have to go up in your life. You are the entrepreneur of the enterprise of your life. So at very least that problem stops today with you. Let's take a couple of quick questions before we finish. Let's start with James Walters. Thanks for giving me first and last names. I like that. Mr. Walters, this is by email. Which times of day are most critical for limiting devices? Yeah. Are there certain kinds of digital activities that are more detrimental than others? Yeah, screens. First hour of the day, last hour of the day, that's it. And during meal times, this is the way that you detox from your devices without getting rid of your devices. I'm not getting rid of mine. You're not getting rid of yours. You're looking at me on a device right now, that's fine. But the point is that if you actually want to have them interfere least with your happiness, least deleterious to your quality of life, you shouldn't. If you can avoid it, look at your devices the first hour of the day and the last hour of the day. The first hour of the day because it'll be better for programming your brain for maximum positive affect, minimum negative affect and Highest productivity and the last hour of the day because it minimizes negative affect before you go to sleep and it gives you better sleep. It won't interfere with your, the activity of your pineal gland leading to melatonin production among many other things. And then while you eat. Why? Because we as a evolved species are evolved to look at each other in the eyes as we're eating a chunk of yak meat around a fire. And you interfere with that even if the phone is on the table face down, because it's going to interrupt the oxytocin flow, the neuropeptide exchange, the love hormone that we're getting in our brains from having conversations and having communion with other people. So that's the time to do it. First hour, last hour, mealtime. That's the most important time. Second question is from Dan Clements. This is on Spotify speaking about the anxiety cycle. How does one break free from shame about being anxious? I love this. This is really complex. Some people don't just suffer, they suffer about suffering. It's like this recursive kind of suffering. So, and the classic time would be when you're on a date and which I haven't been on a date for, I don't know, 37 years or something like that. But, but when you're you, you want to be really cool and relaxed, but you're not. And so you're ashamed about not being cool and relaxed, which makes you less cool and relaxed. And that's a problem. That's a self reinforcing cycle. What do you do about that? And the answer is you rebel against your embarrassment by naming it. It's really important. And actually you can see, I mean, it's sort of charming. Not for everybody. It might not work in your particular case, but if you're really, really stressed out on the date, you say, gosh, you know, I'm really nervous right now. I don't know why I'm so nervous. That's sort of charming in its way. I mean, at least that would have been charming to me. I mean, I'm an old guy, so who knows? But rebel against your, your embarrassment or. You know, one of the things is that I used to say this sometimes when you. I'm. I've been doing public speaking for a long time. I get up in front of 10,000 people. I'm not nervous. But when I was running a company, I was a CEO for 10 years and I would get up in front of my own staff, 300 people that were, that they worked for me. I was like my knees were knocking, man. I mean, it was so weird. And so I remember getting up and I said, I don't know what it is about, but you people really just freak me out. And it was just, it broke the ice. And that's how to deal with it. You're ashamed of being anxious. Are you embarrassed about being anxious? Name it, own it. And that's the way that we actually get around a lot of these problems, by bringing them to the surface. Because remember, you can be managed by your limbic system or you can manage your limbic system. The way that you manage your limbic system is moving the experience of the emotion into the prefrontal cortex where it becomes conscious. And that's a perfect example of a technique that we call metacognition. And Dan Clemens, thank you for giving me the opportunity to bring that idea up one more time. Well, we're done. As always, let me know your thoughts. Office hours@arthurbrooks.com that's our email address. Like and subscribe like and subscribe Hit the subscribe button. If you're looking at this on YouTube or any place where you're looking at it on Spotify and Apple. Anyplace else, leave a comment. I will read it, Promise. Even if it's negative. Especially if it's negative. Thank you for watching the show. Even if you've got some constructive criticism. Follow me on all this on the social platforms, on Instagram, a lot of people get new content or original content that I don't post anyplace else on LinkedIn and other places. And in the meantime, please do order the meaning of your life to learn more about all the things I'm talking about here. In the meantime, bring more love and happiness to other people and I'll see you next week.
