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Office Hours with Arthur Brooks
Find the Meaning of Your Life Part 1 of 3: Get Better at Boredom
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I want to talk today about finding meaning by being bored. Is your overall life kind of boring? I hear that a lot. People who say to me I feel like I'm living a simulation of an ordinary life and it's not that interesting. And you don't like it. Neither do I. I'm waiting. And I remember when I had this epiphany about this that it was the thing I least liked in my life. We hate a low sense of self autonomy. We hate that external locus of control. We want to be in control. Mother Nature doesn't care. She doesn't care if you don't like it. There's all kinds of things that you don't like that Mother Nature allows. Your preferences are not her concern. And you know what I'm telling you here, right? You can only find the meaning of your life if you allow yourself to be bored. Hi everybody. Welcome to Office Hours. I'm Arthur Brooks, a behavioral scientist dedicated to lifting people up and bringing them together in bonds of happiness and love. And this is a show about how to do that using science. I want to share these ideas with you because I need you in the movement with me lifting people up all around you. I want you to become a teacher of happiness. And this is a show dedicating to help you do so, starting with yourself. This is a show that we've been working on every week for a long time and it's really picking up a great audience. Thanks to to you. You're recommending the show to a lot of people. I know. It's word of mouth is how it all works. And, and this week I actually want to start on a multi week set of episodes dedicated to my new book, the Meaning of youf Life. Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness. You can see it right here. It drops on on March 31st. I hope you'll pick up a copy or, I don't know, get a couple thousand copies and give them to your closest friends. And I want to talk about the book and what's going on in the book about the problem of finding meaning in ordinary life. This is like everything else, my opportunity to talk about what I think is the biggest problem. But also, as you know, if you're somebody who regularly watches the show, this is the opportunity for us to do something really great for the world. Because in every problem you find the biggest opportunities. If you didn't have any problems, there wouldn't be any opportunities. Weakness is strength. That's one of the most important principles of behavioral science, but it's also a common sense principle about life on earth. So if you see a meaning crisis, the meaning of life, that's an opportunity for you to find yours and help other people find theirs as well. So I'm going to do a few episodes on exactly that about the book itself. Now, I'm interested in hearing what you have to say about this show, this episode, this series, as always. So please do feedback. Send me your thoughts at office hours, arthurbrooks.com, the email that's listed right below me here. And don't forget to leave a review on Spotify or Apple or on YouTube or wherever you're watching us or listening to us here today. Also, because I want to talk a little bit more about that book and you might want to learn more about it, please go to the book's website, themeaningofyourlife.com the website that's appearing in front of you right now. That's all one word, themeaningofyourlife.com to learn more about a big event, a virtual event that you can actually attend from your house. I'm hosting that on March 27th so you can go deeper on this topic. It's completely free and you can learn a lot more from the book itself, the meaning of your life. I want to talk today about finding meaning by being bored. Boredom is something that I've studied an awful lot. It's a very big area of interest to both psychologists and neuroscientists. And you don't like it. Neither do I. I'm going to talk to you about whether you like it or not you need it, and how to incorporate it more seriously as a part of your meaningful life. How to make it not just easier, but something you can potentially look forward to. I want to talk about re engineering certain parts of your life that include what you might have thought was boring, but in point of fact is something that will help you understand who you are as a person. Now stay tuned for a lot of reasons for that. Let me start by telling you how I started thinking about this particular topic. It goes way, way before I was a behavioral scientist, as some of you may know, because you've been watching the show or have followed my work for a while. I started off my career as a. As a musician when I was 19. I left college because I was a classical musician. That's all I wanted to do. And I didn't need a bachelor's degree to be a classical musician. When you're auditioning for an orchestra and nobody's asking where you went to college. And I went on the road, I actually didn't start with an orchestra. I started playing chamber music. I was playing with a brass quintet. I was on the road about seven months a year, starting when I was 19. So I am an inveterate road warrior. These days. I travel 48 weeks a year for touring and speaking and media. And that just started when I was a teenager. It's become kind of a way of life. Happiness is the open road. I really love it. As a matter of fact, I don't hate Courtyard Marriotts. I don't hate airports. I don't. But there is one thing that I don't like about all this travel that I've been doing since I was a lad, since I was a classical musician all the way until today. Decades ago, I realized I hate waiting. I hate waiting. And I remember when I had this epiphany about this, that it was the thing I least liked in my life. We didn't have any money when I was a. When I was playing chamber music and traveling around, and I was actually on tour with the great jazz guitar player Charlie Bird, who introduced bossa nova jazz to American audiences. We were someplace, North Dakota or something, which is beautiful, by the way, But I was eating at a Howard Johnson's, for those of you kids. That was a chain of. Of motels and restaurants, real popular back in the day. And they were just basically diner food at the Howard Johnson's. And I had to eat my lunch or my dinner or whatever it was. And I was sitting at the Howard Johnson's, and I realized, you know, what bugs me about this is not the fact that I'm going to eat, you know, a grilled cheese sandwich and some chili or, you know, whatever I was eating, which I wouldn't eat today. The problem is I come in and I sit down and I wait and I wait for somebody to give me a menu, and then I wait for somebody to ask me my order. Then I wait for my food, and then I wait for my check, and I'm just waiting the whole time. And it drives me Crazy. I don't like it, as a matter of fact. So what can I do to change all that? And I started putting together routines in my life that would make it easier. I would start walking into restaurants and I would order on the way in before I even sat down. And then when I got my lunch, I would ask for the check with my lunch. Because I was trying to develop all of these sort of engineered protocols to it until at one point, I had kind of an epiphany that the way to solve that problem. Because you're never going to solve the problem of waiting. You're never going to solve it because you know you're going to wait for your flight. Sorry, you can't do anything about that. You're going to wait for your groceries. You're going to wait. The way to actually have it not make me bitter was not to change the world. It was to start changing myself. I needed to change the inside, not to change the outside world. Now, there's lots of things that you can do, and I still do. But the truth is I became more comfortable with the thing that was bothering me the most about waiting, which was my. My boredom. And when I did, I realized that that level of comfort with what I had to endure actually led to big happiness results in my life. That's what I want to talk about today. Because when I became more comfortable being bored, I didn't know it at the time. I do know now I was using my brain in such a way that I was exercising the parts of my brain that I need to ascertain the meaning of my life. And that might be just what you need as well. Okay? Now, the problem with waiting, as I mentioned just a minute ago, is when you're doing nothing because there's nothing occupying you, it's unbelievably boring. And we hate boredom. Now, I don't have to probably convince you of that, but of course, behavioral scientists have tested our aversion to boredom, how much we actually don't like boredom, which is to say doing nothing or using our time unproductively, where the locus of control is outside of ourselves, we hate it. My colleague at Harvard, Dan Gilbert, he's done these great experiments, you know, where people have to sit in rooms and do absolutely nothing. And there's a bunch of experiments that are pretty interesting. Where people are. Are in the experiments, usually undergraduates, because they'll do anything for 20 bucks. They'll bring them into the laboratory and they have to watch movies. And they. There are three kinds of movies. Sad movies, neutral movies or boring movies. Okay, so you know, some tragedy or, or something that is just a basic adventure. Or maybe it's like a, you know, a French art film which is, you know, known for being really, really boring. Sorry to all my French art film friends out there. But anyway, and then what they had was they had this like key fob where they could press a button and, and self administer electric shock. Kind of painful. As a matter of fact, I don't, I do not know how they got through that. Through an ethics committee at a university. But the people watching the films would occasionally shock themselves and they found that they shocked themselves a lot during the boring films. In other words, people prefer pain to boredom. You're sitting there and ah, man, this movie is like just not moving. It's like, hey, there we go. What they found also in, in, in a number of these self shocking experiments is that on average about 25% of women shock them and about 2/3 of the dudes. So that's another problem. The difference between men and women in their propensity to choose pain over boredom. Maybe that explains a lot in your life. I'll put in the show notes some of these interesting studies in here. There's one that was in Psychiatry Research in 2016. Self inflicted pain out of boredom kind of sums it up that you can actually see how they, how they did the experiments. They're really well done, they're nice. So why, why, why would they do that? And the answer is we hate a low sense of self autonomy. We hate that external locus of control. We want to be in control when something else is controlling us. It's inherently unpleasant. And so the result of it is that we want to take back control. And shocking yourself is one of the ways that you can take back control about what's happening when you're bored. It's like.
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+@1peloton.com waiting for a delayed flight. And you all know how that feels. That long delayed flight. And you're waiting and you know every 15 minutes they give you an update and they're like, yeah, you know, the inbound flight's been Delayed. And then there's a mechanical and we have to change out the crew or there's a flight attendant who has a connecting flight and isn't getting here and it's getting later and later and later and there's nothing. And this kind of helpless feeling. And so you fritter away your time on your phone, but you hate it. Don't tell me you love playing solitaire on your phone. You don't. You're doing it to distract yourself from what? From feeling frustrated and bored. Because the boredom itself is actually unpleasant. That's an interesting thing. Also that here's one of the great paradoxes is how boredom changes our time perception. And there's a lot of stuff I've actually written, done work on our perception of time. When you're not engaged in something and you pay attention to time, time feels like it slows down. I mean, time doesn't slow down. Obviously, when you're not paying attention to it and you're doing something that's really entertaining, time feels like it goes by really quickly in the extreme. This is what the great social psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmichaly wrote in his book Flow. Flow is when hours turn to minutes. And the reason is because you're losing yourself in a particular task and you all know how that feels. I mean, for me, it's when I'm writing and I'm in the zone, man, and it's like, wow, four hours. Especially if I set it up right with my morning protocol to optimize my brain chemistry. Go back to that episode if you want. My six part morning protocol. That's one of my earlier shows. I got a million and a half views or something. People really wanted to know what those protocols were. But what it does is it sets you up neurochemically so that you can get more easily into a flow state. And that's really, really highly pleasurable. We're talking about the opposite here. Not the flow state, the anti flow state where you're not doing anything and there's nothing and it's frustrating you and you're paying attention to time. And so time slows down. There's a bunch of interesting experiments on that. There's one where people who are afraid of spiders, arachnophobia, are exposed to pictures of spiders. And then they, they, they make them estimate how much time has passed as they're looking at pictures of spiders. And inevitably they think they've been looking at these things for, you know, 15 minutes. And it's been more like 15 seconds. I'll put that paper in the show notes, of course, in case you're an arachnophobe or something. But also you can, you know about this when you're doing certain exercises. So I plank every day. Really, really good for your core. It's a great exercise for your back. You know, I, my back hurts a lot, so I gotta do this. And you know, my, my PT says, you know, you gotta plank two minutes every day. It's like two minutes every day. Okay, two minutes. I can do two minutes. Two minutes feels long, man. I mean, it's easier than it was because I'm stronger than I was. But I'm looking at the, I'm looking at the timer on this, and that's the longest two minutes of my day is my morning plank when I'm at the gym. That's just kind of how it works. That's the paradox of boredom, is that boring use of time actually feels like it takes longer than non boring use of time. So it's not just the time itself is the perception of the time. And, and, and this leads to this kind of vicious cycle where you got nothing to do and so you're bored, which makes you unhappy. That means time appears to slow. And when time slows, there's more boredom. And the whole thing goes around and around and around and around. Now it's interesting because the work that I've actually done on alcohol abuse and substance abuse, the two main predictors of alcohol abuse are anxiousness, anxiety, and boredom. So people who are really bored, they drink to relieve the boredom. But of course, life becomes incredibly boring when you're no longer doing interesting things because you drink too much and so you drink more. Same thing is true with anxiety. If you're really an anxious person and anxiety is very effectively dealt with in the extremely short run with alcohol, it literally cuts the connection between the limbic system of the brain where the feelings of anxiety are at least originating in conjunction with your, with your stress hormones and your prefrontal cortex where you're aware of the anxiety, so you're anxious, you just don't know it. Alcohol cuts that connection. But of course it comes rushing back the next day and you're more anxious. And so this gets you into these cycles. That's the problem with boredom. And it's the same kind of cycle that we get into with, with abuse of substances. So here's a question. Why would evolution allow this? I mean, why is it that we would actually be bored? Ever be bored? Why wouldn't we eliminate that in, in, in evolutionary biology. And here's the reason. Number one, Mother Nature doesn't care. She doesn't care if you don't like it. There's all kinds of things that you don't like that Mother Nature allows. Your preferences are not her concern. Quite frankly, your happiness is not Mother Nature's concern. If you're getting anything from office hours from the show, it's that you gotta take control of your own happiness by standing up to your own natural proclivities. That's how you live in the space of moral aspiration, not in the space of animal impulse. This is kind of a case in point. Mother Nature doesn't care if you're bummed out because you're bored. And that's the first reason. But there actually are a bunch of benefits that come from boredom. And this is the big point that I want to get across. And this is why I'm doing this episode in conjunction with this new book. When you're bored, in other words, think about nothing, there's nothing to do. When you're sitting there in your thoughts. There's a set of structures in your brain that are collectively called the Default Mode Network, the dmn. To neuroscientists, it's basically three sets of, of structures in your brain. The medial prefrontal cortex, the posterior cingulate cortex, and the inferior parietal lobule. So these are three parts that have a few functions in common. They allow you to. No, no. They govern and force you to self reflect. Thinking about yourself, thinking about your life, thinking about the mystery and what's going on around you. You don't self reflect all that much. I mean, you think about yourself, you know, my job, my car, my sandwich, my money. But you don't self reflect that much about the deeper things in your life. Self reflection is what you need to do to understand the meaning of your life. Why am I doing all these things? You know, why do things happen the way they do? What are my goals? What are my directions in life? Why does my life matter? That's self reflection. And by the way, those are the big questions. Those are the deep questions I'm going to talk about in a future episode that constitute the three parts of meaning. Meaning is all about coherence. Why do things happen the way they do? Purpose, why am I doing what I'm doing? And significance. Why does my life matter? Those are the three big why questions of meaning according to psychologists and philosophers. And that's exactly what you will naturally involuntarily Start to assess when you're in the process of self reflection, which you will do when the default mode network of your brain is illuminated, which you will illuminate when you get bored. But only when you get bored. You can't just turn it on, you gotta let it turn on. That's the sneaky little trick of Mother Nature. And you know what I'm telling you here, right? You can only find the meaning of your life if you allow yourself to be bored. And if you don't allow yourself to be bored, if you eliminate your boredom through. Well, we'll talk about that here in a second. You're no longer going to be using your brain the way it needs to be used for you to find the meaning of your life. Now, when does this happen naturally? When you're in the shower, right? You ever notice you get your best ideas in the shower and epiphanies come to you and you realize certain things about your life when you're in the shower? Why is that? Oh, here's a reason. You probably don't have your phone in there. Yeah, I know. A bunch of you are like, yeah, I have my phone in there. Get your phone out of there, for Pete's sake. I know it's waterproof, but come on. So I'm going to get back to this in a second, because you know where I'm leading you to? I'm leading you to the ways in which we've learned how to eliminate boredom and the inventions that make that possible and the role that they're having for eliminating the meaning of life. I'm going to get there, trust me. But I want to ask another question before I do that. Why now? Why now? You know, why is it that kind of, for the first time in history, we're having this big meaning crisis. And it's actually not exclusively now. I mean, I go back and I look at the autobiography of Leo Tolstoy, you know, the greatest, probably along with Fyodor Dostoevsky, the greatest Russian existentialist, the novelist. There's a lot of new interest among adults under 30 today. And the Russian existentialist, this is kind of the new thing that I'm seeing actually among my students. People are very interested in it. In Leo Tolstoy's autobiography, he talks about the fact that when he was 51 years old, he wanted to do himself in. He wanted to end his life. And you're thinking to himself, well, you're thinking to yourself, well, that must be because he's a writer. I mean, he's A tortured artist. He was probably poor and life was tough, especially in 1890s Russia. Man. No, no, no, that's not the reason. Leo Tolstoy was literally the most famous writer of his time. He was rich, he was famous. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times. He had a marriage that lasted his entire life. He didn't have these weird relationships. He had a complicated marriage, actually. They fought a lot, but they had 13 kids, so they were doing something right. They loved each other enough for that. That's not why he was so profoundly depressed. Tolstoy was depressed, he said, because he didn't know the meaning of his life. Now he, which sounds an awful lot like today. So many people tell me, so many people tell me that again and again and again. He was like ahead of his time. If you're struggling, you're a modern day Tolstoy, because he said, you know, I, I, I, I turned to my art, I turned to my writing, I turned to my work. So he said at one point he turned to science because science was uncovering everything which today would be technology that's going to figure out everything. AI is going to figure out the meaning of my life right today. Then it was biology and mathematics working out everything with infinitesimal certitude and exactitude. No, I didn't do it either. By the end of the day, he realized that, or he, he felt that his life just didn't have any meaning at all and it wasn't worth living until finally he decided to, in one last effort, he, he ran away temporarily. He ran away for a few months to think, do I need to end it? He went to a little village some distance from Moscow. And in this little village, he lived among these really simple Russian peasants, farmers mostly. And they didn't know who, who had just come to their village. This is like this guy with a beard showed up and Tolstoy, the most famous writer of his time, was completely unknown to them because they were illiterate, which is exactly what he wanted. He just wanted to live there and, and he just wanted peace and quiet. He didn't want people asking for his autograph. And what he found was, he found meaning from them. He said it wasn't because they were, you know, rubes and hopeless and didn't care. Well, not at all. He said they found tons of meaning in their ordinary lives, of their faith, their simple faith, the family relationships that they had, the close friendships that they had, the things they would do together, the way that they put their effort into their Work, their agricultural work. And they found meaning in those ordinary old fashioned things he found. And that's what saved his life because he realized that he needed to live like people in the old days. Now, here's my point. If you're struggling, struggling with meaning, which millions of people are today, like that was rare during, during Tolstoy's time. It's not rare today. It means you need to take his epiphany into your life as well. Why is it that your great grandfather never came home from work and said something like to his wife, your great grandmother, honey, I had a panic attack behind a mule today? No, the reason is because his brain was working the way it was supposed to. It wasn't a thing. The flooding of the, of the hypothalamic pituitary axis, the HPA axis, wasn't happening where the adrenal systems were completely freaking out because his brain was working the way it was supposed to. Now, here's the irony of your great grandfather's life. Compared to yours, his life was actually moment to moment behind that mule or behind the machine or at the post office or wherever he worked. Pretty objectively boring. He didn't have a phone, he didn't have anything. He couldn't. He just had to live his life from moment to moment. So objectively speaking, his life was pretty boring. And all the ways that I've been complaining about in my own life too. But when he got to the end of his life, I guarantee you that at his funeral, his widow didn't say his life was boring, man. No, because his life wasn't boring. His moments might have been, but his life wasn't. Now think about your own life. I bet you're never bored moment to moment because you found a way that we're going to talk about right now to eliminate your boredom. Moment to moment. But is your overall life kind of boring? I hear that a lot. People who say to me, I feel like I'm living a simulation of an ordinary life and it's not that interesting. The reason is because the moment to moment boredom elimination is adding up to a boring life, the exact opposite. That's what Tolstoy found. But we got to talk about how we can find that too. Now this whole series on finding the meaning of life is going to talk about living in a new kind of old fashioned way. Part of this is going to require that we, that we understand how technology and engineering has made that harder. But part of this is going to be really, really practical on how we can do exactly that. While still being fully modern human beings. Now let's talk for a moment about what I call the doom loop that people get into that you might be in, in, in your own life as well. Addiction medicine is always about, at least in this, the initial stages of addiction recovery, breaking the doom loop that all addicts are in. So for example, you have boredom or anxiety or both in your life and you find yourself drinking too much. And this goes on for a long time and this leads to actually objectively more boring life and certainly a lot more anxiety. And that leads to escalation and that's a trap that becomes a doom loop. I drink, the problem gets worse, I drink more, the problem gets worse. And you don't know how to clip that, right? Well, there's a doom loop that we're in as well. You're bored and so what do you do? Well, you wiped it out with the anti boredom device in your pocket, didn't you? You know, it's like I'm sitting at a stoplight. The stoplight's red. Man, this taking a long time. I don't want to set at a stoplight for three minutes. Out comes your phone, you look at your notifications, you look at your text, you know there's nothing there. What you're trying to do is not let the default mode network turn on because that's uncomfortable for you, it's frustrating for you, you don't like it. So the device leads to the off switch on the default mode network. That leads to a lack of you understanding meaning. And, and this really starts to add up very quickly, such that you have less ability to cope with your boredom, more depression, more loneliness, which comes when you don't know the meaning of your life and you're not assessing the meaning of your life. And that leads to escalation in the behavior. I might as well look at my devices. And that leads to the crisis that a lot of people are in and the addiction and the simulation of a real life. That's the doom loop. And it goes around and around and around. This eats away at your happiness. This eats away at the depth that you're actually feeling about your own life. That's a problem that you need to solve, that you want to solve. And if you're still watching this episode, it's because you're committed to doing exactly that. And I want to help you do it. Okay? So this requires that you have a different orientation to your devices and a different orientation to your boredom. Let's start with part one, which is a different orientation toward your devices. Now, I've done a whole show on phone addiction. I have a whole phone protocol show. And I'm not going to go over that entire episode. Suffice it to say that you need to change your behavior with your phone, not throw your phone away. If you actually want to break out of this doom loop to clip that. It's not abstinence, it's moderation. And part of the reason is because I could tell you to abstain entirely from your device use, but you wouldn't do it because you can't, you can't get into your bank account. You probably can't get on an airplane anymore. You gotta have that thing in your pocket. And besides, your mom's gonna call you and that's a good thing. Here's all you need to do. Fundamentally, you need these basic phone free times, phone free zones, and then phone fasts during the year. The phone free times that I've talked about in this show before are first hour of the day. You shouldn't look at your phone in the first hour of the day. And then a lot of neural programming actually happens in the first hour of the day. You set yourself up for a day when you're going to use your brain the way it should be used, but not if this is the first thing you look at when you wake up. It's like next to you. And then you look at it first thing, and then you start scrolling immediately. That's, that's catastrophically bad. The second is the last thing before you go to sleep at night. And part of that is blue screen activity which interrupts the functioning of your pineal gland, leading to lower levels of natural melatonin. And it messes up your sleep architecture. And you know that, but also it's because you need to be thinking about the meaning of your life. You need the default mode network to be working as you go to sleep. Because sleep time is real time. It's really important for you to have a proper working of your brain with a proper lead up to the proper working of your brain. That's really, you'll, you'll sleep better, but also you'll use your sleep. That'll help you understand the meaning of your life in a better way. The last time is mealtime. And part of that is just has to do with evolution. We Homo sapiens still have brains that are accommodated to the circumstances in the Pleistocene, as far back as 250,000 years ago. And the way that we understand meaning, like what's going on in life is by talking to each other as we eat in groups, like putting yak meat in your mouth around a campfire, looking at each other in the eyes, you will get oxytocin, a neuropeptide that is intensely pleasurable. You'll bond to each other and understand meaning more when you do that. But if your phone is sitting on the table, even seeing the inanimate object and imagining the notifications and the texts that you're not experiencing will interrupt the oxytocin flow. So that's why you shouldn't actually even have your phones on tables while you eat. But that's just it. That's it. First hour, last hour, mealtimes, that's it. The phone free zones. They most importantly include your bedroom. You shouldn't have your phone in your bedroom. You'll sleep very poorly now after you get used to this protocol. You can have your phone in the bedroom because you won't look at it. I could, I can literally have my phone in my bedroom. I can use my phone as my alarm clock. I won't look at it at night because I'm out of the habit of doing that. But it takes a while to do that. I had to keep my phone, which I actually ordinarily do when I'm home, which is I'm home half the time I'm on the road half the time. The, half the time that I'm home, my phone is closed up in a closet that has plugs in it and a different floor of the house. So you need something like that. Kel Newport, who teaches at Georgetown and writes great books about optimization of time, he has his phone FOIA method. When he comes into the house, his phone stays in the foyer of his house and he has to go out there to look at it if he actually at any time when he's home. So he's even more hardcore than I am. And then of course in classrooms, I mean I'm, you know, been pounding the table and for years about getting phones out of classrooms. Half the states still have phone use with absolutely no restrictions, which is insanity. It's just weak willed politicians and, and school officials that are actually letting that happen. It shouldn't be happening. And then last but not least, you need time away from it. Every year you should take at least four days a year away from your phone. Just do that. I'm not asking you to throw it in the ocean. I'm not asking you to join a monastery unless that's your thing. Just doing that will clip the doom loop. It's basically detox. You'll change the way that your brain works and then you'll be better able to at will, turn on the default mode network and reintroduce this really important idea into your life of blessed boredom. The way that your brain is supposed to work, and that's part two, is the practice of boredom. It's gotta be a thing. And again, you wouldn't have to tell great grandpa, you know, go practice boredom, you say? What? What are you talking about? That's stupid. I mean, why do I need to practice boredom? I'm bored all the time. You do, because you're not. That's what it comes down to. You need to simulate the more ancient environment under the circumstances. And there are a bunch of different ways to do that. You know, this is one of the things that I recommend, is that people work out more without headphones. And I do that at least once a week, sometimes more, when I'm really chewing on a problem in my work. I mean, not like a problem, like a crisis, but you know, I'm writing a column all the time for the Free Press. I gotta, I gotta come up with an angle. I gotta come up with something interesting. And, you know, that's the hard part that actually requires the epiphany. I'm not gonna get the epiphany if I'm never bored, quite frankly. Cause when you're bored is when it happens. That's the shower effect, right? Could take hour long showers. I prefer to work out for an hour and take a two minute shower. And so when I need the idea, I don't use headphones when I work out. And it works the same way. Cause the default mode network turns on when I'm working out, especially if I'm doing zone two cardio. And I get the idea. Inevitably I get the idea because I'm using my brain the way it was supposed to be used in the first place. When I'm commuting a lot of the time I will, which I don't do a lot, but my commute is largely on the plane. But often if I'm flying from Boston to Washington, which is a very frequent commute to me, or New York to D.C. or these relatively small flights, I won't get Internet and I won't take out my computer and I'll sit there, I'll sit there, I'll actually, I'll, I'll use the commute in that particular way. Or if I have a long drive for something and it's actually beautiful at first, it's like, ah, gotta do something. But then it's like, this is good. And once you get used to it, this is something that you'll really, really value. There are people, I mean, I have students at the Harvard Business School who talk about using long flights to do this. They'll, they'll use. There's actually a rude expression for it that I'm not gonna dignify in this show because this is family entertainment that, you know, they'll, they'll, they'll stare at the seat in front of them. You know, some people talk about like six or seven hour flights. No entertainment, no food, no sleeping, no bathroom. I mean, that's pretty hardcore. But the whole point is, what can you do to actually bring this back into your life Now? What, what this really is in the, in the literature on meditation is a practice of mindfulness is what it comes down to. Mindfulness is hard because mindfulness is boring to a lot of people and we're just really bad at boredom. You might think of mindfulness as kind of an exotic Buddhist meditation technique, but the truth of the matter is that, that it isn't that sophisticated. My colleague at Harvard, Ellen Langer in the psychology department, she wrote the first big book that took the west by storm about mindfulness. It's called Mindfulness, look it up. She wrote it 25 years ago, what she talks about, and I've actually had her on a previous podcast where she defined it as noticing new things. Simply noticing new things. So here's how you practice mindfulness. According to her. You're sitting on the train and the train rides like an hour and you put your phone away and you put your hands in your lap and you look out the window. Yeah, you sick and twisted freak. You're not even looking at your phone and there's a tree out there that you go by and you're like, huh, a tree? Actively notice things is what it comes down to. As opposed to inactively noticing simulated things. That's what you're doing on your phone. You're inactively, you're passively being fed fake things all day long. You like that. I know you don't actively on purpose notice real things. That's mindfulness. That's all it is. Now you can turn it into something really sophisticated and, and do your soul cycle or, you know, whatever happens to be with an intention and all that. But you don't have to make it all that sophisticated. You can just live, you know, in your ordinary life. You're not changing the world when you do that. You notice that you've actually let go. You practiced non resistance to your boredom. And non resistance is your friend when it comes to boredom because what you've done with non resistance is actively decided to change. Your reaction to the non resistance through non reaction to the boredom itself is all the change that you actually need. The world's gonna be the world. And when you do that, you've invited into your own life a process, a neurobiological process that you actually need. But also it's a metaphysical process because when you do that, you're gonna find that you're a more spiritual person. You're a person who's more dedicated to deeper things in life. You're gonna find that this starts to enrich your conversations because of the crazy ideas that actually came into your head that you never would have thought of before. You're not going to talk about some stupid reel you saw on social media. You're going to be thinking about, well, what your parents probably talked about in their late night bowl sessions in their dorm because they didn't have any phone to look at in the first place. Maybe this is going to turn into a set of really deep and interesting dinner party conversations for you and your partner or your spouse. Yeah, that's the benefit your default Mode network can bring to you. This can really change your life. I promise. It has really changed my life. I'm grateful for the epiphany at the Howard Johnson's because it led me on a path that really only came to full fruition when I. When I started studying behavioral science and started working very, very seriously on the meaning of life. This particular problem. If you want more of this, you can find it in this book, the Meaning of youf Life. And also by going to the website themeaningofyourlife.com to participate in events and have discussions and join our community around this and many other topics that you'll be hearing about on the podcast and in a lot of other places. Before I sign off, I want to do as I always do. Some, some, some listener questions. First one comes from Lulu Wilson and the source is Seek Audio. I was wondering, what are your thoughts on the highly sensitive person theory? Is it legit? What's your advice to young, highly sensitive people that are growing up in an overwhelming world that expects young people only to enjoy partying and social media? Now, to begin with, you don't have to be a highly sensitive person to be bummed out about the fact that we have a culture that's putting itself into decline by paying Attention to trivialities and not things that matter. Things that matter. They matter. That's what they're called, things that matter. And news flash, the stuff that's in the simulation crossing your consciousness doesn't include that. So for everybody, highly sensitive or highly insensitive, you need to break out of that doom loop, the cycle that we've been talking about in this show. But back to Lulu's big question, which is the highly sensitive person, which in the literature is just hsp, highly sensitive person who also is somebody who is affected by sps, which is known as sensory processing sensitivity. It is somewhat controversial. You know, does it actually exist? I think it does. Probably like most things today, it's overestimated. Most people who talk about this say it's between 20 and 35% of the population. When 35% of the population has something, it's not a pathology really anymore. It's just something that we all have. You know, this is how I talk about anxiety and sadness with my students. For example, is that you, you're suffering from a lot of ruminative melancholy? Well, yeah, that's called life on earth. If you don't, you need therapy. But I get it because when it's at very, very high and acute levels, it can be corresponding to some level of disability of anxiety and a lot of depression and also just, you know, the way that people actually live. You know, one of my kids was, had a, had a, a doctor that was talking about this and it's like, how do I know? It's like he, he couldn't wear the seam on his socks in the wrong part of his foot, you know, that kind of thing. So bottom line is, if this is bothering you, I get it and I'm sympathetic. But here's the whole thing that I want to point out. The literature also suggests that highly sensitive people have super strengths. And this is true of all areas of neurodivergence or even disability for that matter. There's always super strengths that are behind it. Highly sensitive people, they tend to be more compassionate than average. They tend to be more pro social than average. Do they suffer more? Probably. But are they better for humanity? You bet. So if you're a parent of somebody like this, this is what you need to develop so that your child, or if it's you, you can actually live up to what humanity needs from you and as a result to prosper along the way. Way. So bless you for that. Here's an anonymous question. This, this comes in over the email address. Office hoursthorbrooks.com. this is from Anonymous. Thank you, Anonymous. Anonymous sends me so many. I've noticed that many people who are hoping to find a partner simply wait. These are religious people. And they say, I'm just trusting God's plan. Okay, this is. This is great. You know, this is actually a theological question. I can't help but wonder if that kind of waiting is truly what God intends for us or if we're meant to take a more active role in seeking the right person is a bit above my pay grade. Sweet. Anonymous. You know, the whole point of this is, you know, gets into. In. In Protestant theology and predestination versus free will and, and, you know, should you participate? And faith without works is dead in the. In. In. In the Epistle of St. James. And there's a lot that goes into this that's theologically and philosophically really, really, really dense. But here's how I think about it. As a traditional person of faith, as we say sort of euphemistically, I'm a Catholic, as most of you know, I go to mass every day. Really important part of my life. I believe I have an opportunity to participate in the divine will for my life. And again, even if I weren't traditionally religious, I would believe that there is a metaphysical design for my life and I want to participate in it. I really do. And I believe I do have free will to participate or not participate in it. And falling in love and staying in love is really part of that. Look, I've been married 34 years. Going on this year will be 35 years that I've been married to Mrs. B and Esther and I. I mean, it's like we have the same sort of difficulties as anybody else. We annoy the heck out of each other. Of course we participate in what we believe is the divine will, which is that I will be laying my eyes on her as I take my dying breath. We participate in making sure that that's the case and that I'm. The gaze that I have in my dying day is one of lovingness. The way that I do that is by participating when the divine will is. Which is to make my marriage into. Into an antenna to the divine. And that means participating in that will. Now, there's a really nice book that's worth reading for people who are religious, but even if you're not, it's philosophically really good. It's by Alphonsus Liguori, and I'll put it in the show notes. It's called Uniformity with God's Will. And what it really says is, you know, this is interesting. A lot of religious people say I give in to God's will. I give in. Not my will, Lord, but yours. I give in. This goes farther. This is way more profound than that. That's like lord, make me love what you want. Make me want what you want. That's uniformity with God's will, with the divine will. And even if you're not religious, look, things are going to happen to you. The elite metacognitive athlete. Of all the things we talk about in my class and on the show and in my column and in my books is this. The elite athlete actually says I want what's going to happen today. Bring it on. That's uniformity with the divine will. Can you do that? Well this book by Alphonsus Liguori is really, really helpful for that. That's the Buddhist concept of right desire by the way, to desire what's happening, not just give into it. So this is not a purely Catholic idea. Last one, then we'll be done. Anonymous Once again, this is a different anonymous. I mean it's like so many people name their kids that these days. Writing into the email address, were you ever afraid of wasting your time and skill? Listen to me, was I ever afraid of wasting my time and skill? What did you do to rectify it? Yeah, every single day. That's actually my biggest problem, is not that I'm wasting my time or my skill, it's that I'm pathologically afraid of it because I am a success addict extraordinaire. This leads to my workaholism, my self objectification. It starts off as a little kid, I got all the attention and affection because I did cool stuff like get good grades or learn how to play the French horn like a professional. Not my parents fault. This is just the way that it was. And the result is that I misprogrammed my little limbic system into the belief that I, that I earned love, which meant that I became addicted to achievement and success. And I got dopamine when I was winning and that's been like I'm 61 years old and I'm still fighting this thing. My problem is not that I'm wasting my time and skill. My problem is that I'm pathologically afraid of wasting my time and skill. Which means I'm trying to put points on the board all the time. Now I'm not talking about me fellow strivers, I'm actually talking about you. You watch and listen to this show because you got the same problems I do, which are not low class problems. I mean, you're winning for a reason. But you deserve to have a happy life and you need to understand yourself in the process of doing so. For me, that it harms a lot of enjoyment. Now back to an early episode of the show. What is happiness? Enjoyment plus satisfaction plus meaning this show today is about meaning. I write a lot about satisfaction and talk about it too. My big problem is enjoying my life because I'm trying to put points on the board all the time. And so what I need to do is actually understanding the true nature of what leisure means. Leisure is not what the Greeks would call acedia, which is chilling on a beach, man. It's really productive, generative activity that people are just not rewarding me for in worldly terms. And so that's the secret, is to break out of this conundrum, to break out of this iron cage of success. Addiction is learning how to enjoy my life. I'm going to write a book about that at some point, but I'm going to do future episodes on you if you are like me and you need to enjoy your life a little bit more about how to do that. Okay, we've come to the end of the episode today and I hope you've enjoyed it. I hope it was super boring for you. That's all I can say. Let me know your thoughts@officehoursothorbrooks.com remember the email address. Keep writing in the questions. We're getting hundreds of them and they're great. Like and subscribe. Hit the like and pound the subscribe button because that's how the algorithm gods the metaphysics of Spotify and YouTube, how they smile on us even more because that will lead other people to get this in their feeds and then they'll learn that this is a show that they can use as well. Leave a comment Leave comments, comments, comments. We read them all, even if they're negative. And I shed a tear. But that's what I need to hear as well. Follow me on all the socials. I put content on the socials that are not actually going into the podcast all the time on Instagram, a lot on Instagram, also on LinkedIn and other platforms and order the meaning of your life and get it for your loved ones. We won't sell out, but the sooner you order it, the sooner you'll get it. I hope this has been useful for you. I love talking to you. Thank you for joining me and I look forward to seeing you next week.
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Spring just slid into your DMs. Grab that boho, look for that rooftop dinner, those sandals that can keep up with you. And hang some string lights to give your patio a glow up. Spring's calling, Ross. Work your magic.