Harvard Professor: You MUST Do this in the Morning! | Arthur Brooks

Imagine a scale between zero and ten. Zero is the unhappiest person you know. Ten is the happiest person you've ever met. What's your number?

Today we are joined by social scientist and professor Arthur Brooks, previously at Harvard Business School.

The depression and anxiety epidemic that we see all around the world, that's not because of work burnout.

You think that when you get into the corner office, you're going to be happier. You're not. I have the data.

He has researched happiness for the past 30 years and has coached hundreds of CEOs, billionaires, people that have achieved incredible success.

People think, if I get a boat, will I be happier? No, you won't. If I get the world's most expensive car, will I be happier? Nope.

A fourth house, these things won't do it. But there are ways that you can spend money on that you actually should that will bring greater happiness.

There's five ways you can spend your money. What are some of the qualities of the happiest people that you've met?

There are four behaviors that I see of the happiest possible people. Here are the rules that we need to teach our kids. So I want to go back to the morning.

So set the scene for me. I get up from 7.30 to 11.30.

I just want to start off with the course that you taught at Harvard. Right.

And I heard that it was one of the most popular courses ever at the school,

almost to the point that there was a Zoom link that was shared illicitly. Is that true? Yeah.

No, for the longest time, this was a class in elective that the students would take in the second year.

And there's a lot of competition to get into some of these electives. And my class usually had 180 students enrolled and 400 on the waiting list. Wow.

So they were looking for ways to kind of get the insight from the class and they say, are there other ways that I can get it?

And it turned out that a lot of them were using the COVID link and passing it around. And so that was the illegal Zoom link they thought I was not aware of.

They want to be happier. And that's what people want. That's what people want in their lives. They want to be happier people. They want to have happier children. They want to bring more happiness to others.

And it turns out that just studying business doesn't do that. I mean, business is great. I'm a business school professor.

I've been a CEO. I've done a lot of things with my career.

But one of the things that I know is that the the rewards of the world are

not the secret to happiness and they're figuring that out over the course of

their MBA Well, I've been doing work on the science of happiness ever since

I got my PhD almost 30 years ago And I have seen big changes

in young people and their orientation toward happiness So my

students for sure my adult kids For sure, but people all over the world largely the change started change started happening in 2008 There thereabouts is it the financial crisis?

That's what I was thinking. It turns out it's devices that actually changed the way that we live.

It was kind of a hurricane, a downward force in human happiness.

When devices started to take over people's lives, people started to get more depressed and more anxious and lonelier.

And the reason is because they were putting a screen between themselves and other people. The secret of happiness is love and relationships. That's what it comes from.

And when you're more isolated, what you're getting on your phone is a simulation of relationships.

It's not real relationships, and your brain knows the difference. So a lot of the work that I do is how we've broken our brains with technology, and it's made us a lot less happy.

I want to ask a fundamental question. Sure. How do you define happiness? Yeah, and that's the first thing that I did when I came into this field.

There have been a lot of people writing about happiness over the years, and the biggest problem is they don't have a good definition of happiness. Everybody has kind of their own sense of it.

It could be a hundred different things. It could be, and when I ask my students on the first day of class, what do you think you're studying, and I would say the same thing.

They say, well, professor, I can't put it into words, but I know it when I feel it.

And what they're saying is that happiness is a feeling, but that's wrong. Happiness and the feeling of happiness are not the same thing.

Feelings of happiness are evidence of actual happiness. Like the smell of dinner is evidence of dinner. It's not the same thing.

And if you're looking for feelings, you're just looking for evidence of something. You'll never actually get it.

You need something that's more fundamentally rigorous, something that has content. And so I went back to the best scientific definitions.

And I also noticed what were the attributes of the lives of the happiest people.

And what we found in this research is that the best definition of happiness is kind of like the definition of food with macronutrients, which is a combination of carbohydrates, protein and fat.

The same thing with happiness. Happiness is a combination of enjoyment, satisfaction and meaning.

So you need to enjoy your life to be a happy person from day to day. You have to take satisfaction with your accomplishments, meaning you get joy after a struggle.

And you have to find the why of your existence, the meaning of your life. And those are the three big objectives, as it turns out.

So when I'm teaching people how to be happier, I'm working on those three things. I test them to see where they're weak, and I give them techniques to get those things stronger.

I see. What are some of the qualities of the happiest people that you've met?

The happiest people that I meet, and there are so many, about half of it is genetic. Oh, really?

Yeah, so I don't want that to be true because I want everything to be under our control. You know, we're entrepreneurial people, and this is the entrepreneurial endeavor.

Exactly right. But the truth is about half of your happiness, half of the difference in happiness that we see between individuals is explained by their genetic similarity.

The science of the brain. Yeah, exactly. And so we know this from identical twins that are separated at birth and adopted into separate families, and they're reunited as adults.