In the last essay series we explored how the most prominent founders of America strove to embody the practical wisdom of ancient philosophers regarding how one should conduct their daily life, to excellent effect -- their productive habits led to the creation of the United States. Today, a recent book entitled Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier, co-authored by, of all people, Arthur Brooks (former head of the American Enterprise Institute think tank) and Oprah Winfrey (famous talk show host), does an excellent job re-introducing Americans to the wisdom of the founders, and showing how that wisdom is backed by modern science. The practical science of happiness as it is understood today is the subject of this essay series.
As Brooks and Winfrey write:
America is in a happiness slump. Just over the past decade, the percentage of Americans saying they are “not too happy” rose from 10 percent to 24 percent. The percentage of Americans suffering from depression is increasing dramatically, especially among young adults. Meanwhile, the percentage saying they are “very happy” has fallen from 36 percent to 19 percent. Most of us don’t have the ambition of pulling the whole world out of the slump; we’d be content to help just ourselves. But how, when our problems come from the outside? If we’re angry or sad or lonely, we need people to treat us better; we need our finances to improve; we need our luck to change. Until then, we wait, unhappily, and can only distract ourselves from discomfort. This book is about showing you how to break out of this pattern … You, too, can become the boss of your own life, not an observer. You can learn to choose how you react to negative circumstances and select emotions that make you happier even when you get a bad hand. You can focus your energy not on trivial distractions, but on the basic pillars of happiness that bring enduring satisfaction and meaning.
Brooks and Winfrey’s book is less heavy on the science of happiness than some of the other books on the subject we’ll consider in this series. But they do a good job of framing what could be an unwieldy subject in manageable, personal terms:
If the secret to total happiness existed, we would have all found it by now. It would be big business, sold on the internet, taught in every school, and probably provided by the government. But it isn’t. That’s kind of weird, isn’t it? The one thing we all want, since Homo sapiens appeared three hundred thousand years ago in Africa, has remained elusive to pretty much everybody. We’ve figured out how to make fire, the wheel, the lunar lander, and TikTok videos, but with all that human ingenuity, we have not mastered the art and science of getting and keeping the one thing we really want. That’s because happiness is not a destination. Happiness is a direction. We won’t find complete happiness on this side of heaven, but no matter where each of us is in life, we can all be happier. And then happier, and then happier still. The fact that complete happiness in this life is impossible might seem like disappointing news, but it isn’t. It’s the best news ever, actually. It means we all can finally stop looking for the lost city that doesn’t exist, once and for all. We can stop wondering what’s wrong with us because we can’t find or keep it. We can also stop believing that our individual problems are the reasons we haven’t achieved happiness. No positive circumstance can give us the state of bliss we seek. But no negative circumstance can make getting happier impossible, either. Here is a fact: You can get happier, even if you have problems … Happiness is a combination of enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose … [I]f you were reading closely, you noticed one funny thing about all three: they all have some unhappiness within them. Enjoyment takes work and forgoing pleasures; satisfaction requires sacrifice and doesn’t last; purpose almost always entails suffering. Getting happier, in other words, requires that we accept unhappiness in our lives as well, and understanding it isn’t an obstacle to our happiness … The truth is … that feelings associated with happiness and unhappiness can coexist. Modern psychological research has shown that positive and negative emotions are in fact separable, allowing us to conclude that happiness is not the absence of unhappiness. In an experiment, people were asked to go through their entire days and think about how much positive or negative “affect”—that is, feeling—they got from each activity, instead of blending the two emotions together. In general, people had more positive feelings than negative feelings, but this depended a lot on the activity. Some activities (like socializing) had really high positive feelings and low negative ones. Others (like taking care of children or working) were more of a blend. The activities that were most negative and least positive were commuting and spending time with one’s boss. It might sound like splitting hairs here, but this is actually a crucial point. If you believe you have to eradicate your feelings of unhappiness before you start getting happier, you’re going to be unnecessarily held back by the perfectly normal negative feelings of everyday life … The secret to the best life is to accept your unhappiness (so you can learn and grow) and manage the feelings that result.
Brooks and Winfrey then describe in modern language what the founders from our previous essay series so well understood:
[Y]ou can’t choose your feelings, but you can choose your reaction to your feelings. Feelings, in the enterprise of your life, are like weather to a construction company. If it rains or snows or is unseasonably hot, it affects the ability to get work done. But the right response is not trying to change the weather (which would be impossible) or wishing the weather were different (which doesn’t help). The process of managing this weather is called metacognition. Metacognition (which technically means “thinking about thinking”) is the act of experiencing your emotions consciously, separating them from your behavior, and refusing to be controlled by them. Metacognition begins with understanding what emotions are and how they work. From there, you can learn some basic strategies for reframing emotions about your present and your past. And with some practice, you’ll be able to stop letting your feelings direct your behavior—conscious you can be the adult in charge.
Brooks and Winfrey explain some of the evolutionary processes that led to our negative emotions:
[T]here is fairly wide agreement that the primary negative emotions are sadness, anger, disgust, and fear. None of these emotions are fun, but they are protective. Fear and anger help us respond to threats with fight-or-flight reactions. Disgust alerts us to pathogens by making us avoid contact with something. Sadness makes us want to avoid losing the things and people we need (which explains grief, the psychological distress of being unable to locate a loved one). Of course, these emotions can be maladapted. For example, while fear of rejection by others is an evolved trait from a time when it meant being cast out of your tribe and wandering the frozen tundra and dying alone, today you might feel it if someone says something critical about you on Twitter. While disgust is a trait helping you smell rotting food before you eat it, today a politician might encourage you to feel it for someone who disagrees with you politically. That’s why we need to learn how to manage our emotions to live a better life … Your emotions are signals to your conscious brain that something is going on that requires your attention and action—that’s all they are. Your conscious brain, if you choose to use it, gets to decide how you will respond to them. Think of metacognition as moving the experience of an emotion from the limbic system of the brain into your prefrontal cortex. You might compare it to the process of taking petroleum from the well (your limbic system) to a gas refinery (the prefrontal cortex), where it can be made into something you can use purposively. We all know the feeling of lashing out when angry and then feeling sorry afterward, or shrieking in fear at something without thinking and then being embarrassed. You might say this is being “authentic,” but it is also failing to be metacognitive. When you tell your young child, who is having a tantrum, “Use your words!” you are telling her to be metacognitive: to use her prefrontal cortex instead of just the limbic system. Similarly, metacognition is what you were taught to do when you are angry: before saying anything, count to ten. That is basically giving your prefrontal cortex time to catch up to your limbic system so it can decide how to react. Social scientists refer to people who react automatically without thinking as “limbic,” and now you know why. By the way, the advice to count to ten can be made a little more precise. Thomas Jefferson once wrote, “When angry, count ten, before you speak; if very angry, an [sic] hundred.” In other words, count longer the angrier you are, or the lower your general level of self- control. One good rule of thumb devised by psychologists is to wait thirty seconds while imagining the consequences of saying what’s in your head. Say you receive an insulting email from a client at work and want to fire back an indignant response. Don’t write back yet. Instead, slowly count to thirty, imagine your boss reading the exchange (which she might), then imagine seeing the person face- to- face after he reads your response. Your response will be much better, because your prefrontal cortex, not your limbic system, answered the email.
The more readily achievable goal is not to try to rid yourself of emotions altogether, but to manage them:
Metacognition doesn’t mean you can avoid negative feelings. Rather, it means you can understand them, learn from them, and make sure they don’t lead to detrimental actions, which is principally how they become a source of misery in your life. A moment of fear is not necessarily a big deal; it can even be an interesting bit of data—remember, bad feelings are normal and fine. The fear becomes a problem when it makes you behave with hostility or timidity, which hurts you and others for no good reason. Let’s now turn to some ways to apply these ideas to our lives. Between the conditions around you and your response to them is a space to think and make decisions. In this space, you have freedom. You can choose to try remodeling the world, or you can start by changing your reaction to it. Changing how you experience your negative emotions can be much easier than changing your physical reality, even if it seems unnatural. Your emotions can seem out of your control at the best of times, and even more so during a crisis—which is exactly when managing them would give you the greatest benefit. That can be blamed in part on biology. As you read a minute ago, negative emotions such as anger and fear activate the amygdala, which increases vigilance toward threats and improves your ability to detect and avoid danger. In other words, stress makes you fight, flee, or freeze—not think, “What would a prudent reaction be at this moment? Let’s consider the options.” This makes good evolutionary sense: half a million years ago, taking time to manage your emotions would have made you a tiger’s lunch.
Brooks and Winfrey point out that while evolution has left us with tendencies toward emphasizing the negative, we can train ourselves to open up to a broader perspective:
In the modern world … stress and anxiety are usually chronic, not episodic. Odds are, you no longer need your amygdala to help you outrun the tiger without asking your conscious brain’s permission. Instead, you use it to handle the nonlethal problems that pester you all day long. Your work is stressing you out, for example, or you aren’t getting along with your spouse. Even if you don’t have tigers to outrun, you can’t relax in your cave, because these ordinary things are bothering you … You can’t alter history. You can, however, change your perception of it. The next best thing to a time machine is rewriting the story of your memories using metacognition, making the baggage of your past a little lighter on your shoulders as you travel through the present and future … The particular details you retrieve about past events generally correspond with your current emotional state. For example, researchers have observed that when you are feeling afraid, you tend to construct memories that focus on the sources of threats and remember the past as more full of specific things that hurt you than you otherwise would. In contrast, if you are happy today, your memories will probably be broader and more general. Neither set of memories is erroneous—they are just reconstructed in different ways, based on current emotions … Metacognition requires practice, especially if you haven’t ever thought about it before. There are four practical ways to get started. First, when you experience intense emotion, simply observe your feelings. The Buddha taught his followers that to manage emotions, one must observe them as if they were happening to someone else. In this way, one can understand them consciously and let them pass away naturally instead of allowing them to turn into something destructive. Try this yourself when, for example, you have a strong disagreement with your partner or a friend and are feeling angry. Sit quietly and think about the feelings you are experiencing. Imagine them moving physically from your limbic system into your prefrontal cortex. There, observe the anger as if it were happening to someone else. Then say to yourself, “I am not this anger. It will not manage me or make my decisions for me.” This will leave you calmer and more empowered. Second, as we touched on briefly before, journal your emotions. You may have noticed that when you are upset, if you write about what you are feeling, you immediately feel better. Journaling is in fact one of the best ways to achieve metacognition, because it forces you to translate inchoate feelings into specific thoughts, an action that requires your prefrontal cortex. This in turn creates emotional knowledge and regulation, which provide a sense of control … For example, if you are feeling frantic about all the things you need to do, without metacognition there is no way to organize the problem in your mind. Your limbic system is designed to send alarms, not make lists. On a busy day, start with your coffee and calmly make a list of the things you need to do, in order of importance. Your prefrontal cortex is now in charge and you will feel much more in control. You will also have the presence of mind to decide which things get done today, which you will leave until tomorrow, and which you might even decide to do ... never. As another example, say you are in a relationship that is souring against your wishes. Don’t use a confrontational (limbic) reaction right off the bat. Instead, take a few days to record what is happening as accurately as possible, as well as your reaction to it. Write down different ways you might react constructively, based on different possible responses from the other person. You will find that you are calmer and better able to cope with the situation, even if it feels unfixable. Third, keep a database of positive memories, not just negative ones. Mood and memory exist in a feedback loop: bad memories lead to bad feelings, which lead you to reconstruct bad memories. When you are in a highly limbic state, your mind can be saying everything is terrible and always will be, even though that is surely wrong. However, if you purposely conjure up happier memories, you can interrupt this doom loop. Fourth, look for meaning and learning in the hard parts of life. Try methodically to see how such painful memories help you learn and grow. Scholars have shown that when people reflect on difficult experiences with the explicit goal of finding meaning and improving themselves, they tend to give better advice, make better decisions, and solve problems more effectively. In your journal, reserve a section for painful experiences, writing them down right afterward. Leave two lines below each entry. After one month, return to the journal and write in the first blank line what you learned from that bad experience in the intervening period. After six months, fill in the second line with the positives that ultimately came from it. You will be amazed at how this exercise changes your perspective on your past.
Brooks and Winfrey then advise practicing a process in which you choose your emotion, rather than having your emotion choose you:
You often don’t have to accept the emotion you feel first. Rather, you can substitute a better one that you want. Think back to the last time you got a performance review at work or a written evaluation in school. Maybe it was positive: lots of compliments and pats on the back. But then there was that one mild criticism . . . a little thorn among the roses. That’s what you focused on, right? You knew the evaluation was good, but that little dig from your boss or teacher put it all in doubt. You knew it was silly, but it bugged you for a few days. You did this because Mother Nature gave you a little gift called negativity bias: a tendency to focus on negative information far more than positive information. The reason is simple: compliments are nice, but nothing happens when we ignore them. But we ignore criticism at our peril. A couple thousand years ago, that could mean being cast out of the tribe. Today it can mean losing your job or strife with a friend. So we naturally focus on negative information. This might be a good way for a caveman to stay alive, but it is generally a distortion of reality today. You can be sitting in first class on an airplane and feel annoyed that the coffee is a little too cold. Think of all the ways that life is better today than it was when you were a child, and notice that we still always seem to be complaining. Further, people are terrible at discriminating between negative information that matters and that which doesn’t. Emotionally, you get the same feeling from a random person who insults you in traffic (which doesn’t matter) as you do from a letter from the IRS (which can matter a lot). This is because the “sensitivity” of your negativity bias is too high. You need to be able to turn it down so you can see the difference between negative signals and pay attention only to the very few that matter.
Brooks and Winfrey advise opening your mind wide enough to perceive the many things in your life, and life in general, that are on balance good, such that you come to feel gratitude:
The single best way to grasp the reality of good things in life and turn down the noise that makes real threats hard to distinguish from petty ones is to occupy some of the negative emotion receptors with a different, positive feeling. The most effective of these positive feelings is gratitude. Researchers have shown that you can call gratitude into existence by choosing to focus on the things for which you are grateful—which we all have—instead of the negatives in your life. For example, writing in 2018, four psychologists randomly split a sample of 153 human subjects into groups that were assigned either to remember something they were grateful for or to think about something unrelated. The result was amazing: the grateful-remembering group experienced more than five times as much positive emotion as the control group. A 2012 study of nearly three thousand people found that when people agreed with the statements “I have so much in life to be thankful for” and “I am grateful for a wide variety of people,” they experienced positive emotions and fewer symptoms of depression.
One way to widen your mind such that any negative thoughts will tend to shrink into the background is through a process of focusing less on yourself:
In fact, adopting more of an outward focus on life—observing the world and caring for other people without making so much of life about yourself—is one of the best ways to increase your own well-being, and is the third principle of emotional self-management. This means being good to others as selflessly as possible—as the preceding experiment suggests, of course—but more subtly, it means deflecting your own constant attention from yourself and your desires—by looking in the mirror less, disregarding your reflection on social media, paying less attention to what others think about you, and fighting your tendency to envy people for what they have but you don’t … First, avoid your own reflection. Mirrors are inherently attractive, as are all mirrorlike phenomena, such as social media mentions. We are magnetically drawn to them. But mirrors are not your friend. They encourage even the healthiest people to objectify themselves; for people with self-image-related maladies, they can be sheer misery … Virtual mirrors are even easier to get rid of than literal ones. Turn off your social media notifications. Adopt an absolute ban on googling yourself. Turn off self-view on Zoom. Don’t take any selfies. Second, stop judging things around you so much. Judging might seem like pure observation, but it really isn’t. It is turning an observation of the outside world inward and making it about you. For example, if you say, “This weather is awful,” this is more about your feelings than it is about the weather. Further, you have just assigned a negative mood to something outside your control. Third, spend more time marveling at the world around you. In his research, the University of California, Berkeley, psychologist Dacher Keltner focuses on the experience of awe, which he defines as “the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your understanding of the world.” Among its many benefits, Keltner has found, awe diminishes the sense of self … Spend more time enjoying things that amaze you. Incorporating awe into your daily life might mean making sure you see the sunset as often as you can or studying astronomy—or whatever it is that blows your mind. One last exercise you might try if you have a free day: use it to wander. In one famous Zen koan (a story that requires philosophical interpretation), a junior monk sees an older monk walking and asks him where he is going. “I am on pilgrimage,” the senior monk says. “Where is pilgrimage taking you?” the junior monk asks. “I don’t know,” the elder answers. “Not knowing is the most intimate.”
One important element of focusing less on yourself includes focusing less on what other people think about you:
It is important to note that caring about and paying attention to others is very different from worrying about what others think about you. The first is helpful and good; the second is often egocentric and destructive. In fact, to manage emotions, almost all of us need to work to care less what others think about us. That’s even harder than getting rid of all your mirrors, though. Just think of the last time some random person criticized you—someone you would certainly not invite into your home for a conversation, but whom you invited into your head as you stewed about the criticism. Maybe it was a sarcastic barb on social media or a belittling remark at work. You kicked yourself for even caring—but you did care nonetheless. In fact, for most people, a source of stress is what others think of them. Many of them are deeply wounded by criticism, go to extraordinary lengths to gain the admiration of strangers, and lie awake nights wondering about others’ opinions of them. Why is this? Once again, it’s Mother Nature making our lives difficult. We are wired to care about what others think of us, and we obsess over it. As the Roman Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius observed almost two thousand years ago, “We all love ourselves more than other people, but care more about their opinion than our own,” whether they are friends, strangers, or enemies. For happiness, then, thinking of others’ opinions of us is even worse than obsessing over ourselves directly. Unfortunately, the instinct to want the approval of others is woefully maladapted to modern life. Where once you would have justifiably felt the terror of being expelled into the forest alone, today you might suffer acute anxiety that strangers online will “cancel” you for an ill-considered remark, or passersby will snap a photo of a poor fashion choice and mock it on Instagram for all to see. This tendency may be natural, but it can drive you around the bend if you let it. If you were a perfectly logical being, you would understand that your fears about what other people think are overblown and rarely worth fretting over. But none of us are perfectly logical, and most of us have been indulging this habit for as long as we can remember. In the Tao Te Ching, the ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu wrote, “Care about people’s approval and you will be their prisoner.” The prison of others’ approval is actually one built by you, maintained by you, and guarded by you. You might add a complementary verse to Lao Tzu’s original: “Disregard what others think and the prison door will swing open.” If you are stuck in the prison of shame and judgment, take heart: you hold the key to your own freedom … Another way we focus on ourselves is by indulging the deadly sin of envy. When we envy, we obsess over what we have or don’t have. Once again, this may seem outward-focused, but it is really all about what you wish you had. This tendency spoils our relationships, makes us worse to others, and makes life impossible to enjoy. Scholars in 2018 studied eighteen thousand randomly selected individuals and found that their experience of envy was a powerful predictor of worse mental health and lower well-being in the future. Ordinarily, people become psychologically healthier as they age; envy can stunt this trend. To feel envy, you need to have exposure to people who appear more fortunate than you. That is simple enough in ordinary interactions, but the conditions of envy explode if we expose people to a wide array of strangers curating their lives to look as glamorous, successful, and happy as possible. Obviously, this is a reference to social media. In fact, academics have even used the term Facebook envy to capture the uniquely fertile circumstances that social media creates for this destructive emotion. And in experiments, scholars have shown that, indeed, passive Facebook use (although no doubt this is not limited to Facebook) measurably decreases well-being through increased envy.
Of course, what “other people” think of you can include educators and bureaucrats of various sorts. I came across this 2024 commencement speech by Professor Robert Parham, in which he makes the following points:
Based on every objective measure of well-being—safety, health, wealth—if you are a college student in America today you are better off and wealthier than the king of England was 300 years ago. You have better access to education, entertainment, leisure, and healthcare. You have cleaner water and more abundant food. You have a significantly safer and longer life. And you have access to all of the world’s knowledge, including this piece, in the palm of your hand … Which then raises the question: Why? Why is it that “everything is amazing and nobody is happy”? Let’s go back to comparing you with the king of England. If you’re anything like my students—I’ve tried that line on them, too—you felt that something was off with that statement. How can it be that you’re better off than the king of England? You certainly don’t feel better off, do you? We economists call this phenomenon “relative wealth concerns” or “keeping up with the Joneses.” These are just fancy terms to describe a simple psychological fact: we are constantly busy comparing ourselves to our peer group and feel bad when we fall short in that comparison. Peer group is an essential term in the previous sentence. No one cares that they’re enormously better off than their grandparents; they just care that they’re worse off than Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk. You don’t feel wealthy, despite the fact the median human lives on the equivalent of $5,000 per year. Yes, you read that right. Imagine if you lived in the U.S. but spent only $5K a year at current U.S. prices, and you’ve imagined the life of the median human today. Your “peer group” isn’t humanity; it’s social media influencers and billionaires, and you are deeply unsatisfied when comparing your lives to theirs. You live in the wealthiest country in the history of the world, yet you feel economic anxiety. The late Charlie Munger summarized it succinctly: “The world is not driven by greed. It’s driven by envy.” And in this era of instantaneous communication networks and social media, envy has been put into hyperdrive. But envy has also been transformed and rebranded. Once a deadly sin, it became a virtue. We call it “fairness” (or sometimes “equity”) now and concentrate our attention on all the ways the world is “unfair.” Mostly the ways that lead to others in our peer group having more than us. The world is unfair. Deeply so. It’s just that you’re the lucky ones. You won the birth lottery. In a truly fair world, any dollar you make or spend above $5,000 a year would instead be given to someone else. Maybe a poor Kenyan, or Bangladeshi, or Indian. But that’s not the kind of fairness and equity anyone talking about “fairness” and “equity” around you seeks. You’ve been lied to. You’ve been told by the media, social networks, and not least your professors, that this fantastic world we live in is evil. Not only that, you’ve been told it’s your fault. You’re too racist, too greedy, too white, too privileged, not sufficiently attuned to the plight of the marginalized. It is not enough to be non-racist, they say; you must be anti-racist. Anything less than that, and you’re complicit in evil. Some of you are better by default due to some accidents of birth; some of you are worse. Small wonder you feel suffocated, anxious, and depressed. Any human, weighed down with this responsibility and guilt, would be just as down. The cognitive dissonance of being told colonialism is evil, American slavery is uniquely evil, that wealth and the markets that enable it are evil, while going to school at a top-tier U.S. institution built on “Monacan land” using slave labor would incapacitate anyone. The people pushing these ideas may have meant well. I like to give people the benefit of the doubt. But we’ve seen more than enough to know that the outcomes of this worldview are terrible. And yet many of your professors keep reinforcing these harmful lies.
As Brooks and Winfrey write, another way to focus less on yourself (and what other people think of you) is to surround yourself with family and friends:
In truth, truly “happy” families exist only in the minds of the writers of wholesome family television shows. They don’t exist in the wild. In real life, families are made up of people mashed together. This can result in the most mystical kind of love—the love you didn’t choose but that was given to you. It inevitably also means plenty of conflict. Even in the best of situations, tension between family members is normal, and crises are par for the course. In one pair of researchers’ words, family bonds are frayed by “the give-and-take between autonomy and dependence and the tension between concern and disappointment.” That’s academic-ese for “Family life can be a huge mess.” … First, don’t try to read minds. As the years go by, many families fall into a tendency to assume that communication need not be spoken—that everyone understands one another without saying anything. This is an invitation to miscommunication. Evidence shows that it’s best to have a clear family policy of speaking for yourself and listening to others … The key isn’t asking anyone to change their reactions to your actions or feelings; it’s giving them the chance to hear your side of things and respond before you start assuming that you know what their response will be.
Brooks and Winfrey then set out their understanding of the elements most important to feeling happiness and well-being:
Fortunately, if we look at all the best social science research together, just four big happiness pillars stand out far above all others. These are the most important things to pay attention to in order to build the happiest life each of us can, and thus they deserve the lion’s share of our attention as we invest in ourselves and our loved ones. This is where to spend the time, attention, and energy released by emotional self-management. The four pillars are family, friendship, work, and faith. Family. These are the people we are given in our lives and generally don’t choose (except our spouses). Friendship. This is the bond with people we love deeply but who aren’t our kin. Work. This is our toil to earn our daily bread, to create value in our lives and in the lives of others. It might be paid or unpaid, in the marketplace or at home. Faith. This does not mean a specific religion, but rather is a shorthand term for having a transcendent view and approach to life.
In the next essay in this series, we’ll begin to focus more closely on these elements, and a few others, and delve deeper into the science behind them.