How to Age Up｜How to Build a Happy Life: Identify What You Enjoy

📖 Transcript

This is How to Build a Happy Life, the Atlantic's podcast on all things happiness.

I'm Arthur Brooks, Harvard professor and happiness correspondent at The Atlantic.

In this special bonus episode of How to Build a Happy Life series, I sat down with the Atlantic's

own Laurie Gottlieb.

We reviewed a lot of what we've covered in this series, from enjoyment and emotional

management to the practical ways to apply the science of happiness to our daily lives.

Enjoy!

Hi everybody and welcome to the Atlantic Festival.

I'm really delighted because this episode of the podcast, it features one of the top

psychotherapists in America today.

The Atlantic's Laurie Gottlieb.

We're going to talk through some of the how-tos in navigating the natural ups and downs

in life.

Later in the episode, we're going to feature some of my very favorite guest stars, which

is you, our listeners.

So, let's start by saying hi to Laurie.

Welcome to How to Build a Happy Life, Laurie.

Well, thank you so much.

It's great to be here.

Yeah, it's wonderful to have you here.

I've been looking forward to working with you in some way for the longest time.

When I, on the first day of class, I teach a class at the Harvard Business School called

Leadership and Happiness.

In the first day of class, I define happiness.

Now, most of my students, they think, happiness is a feeling.

That's wrong.

I mean, happiness has a lot of feelings attached to it, and feelings are really important,

but it's not a feeling per se.

I describe happiness as more of a way that you would take a part of meal.

This is like a banquet, and you can define it in a lot of different ways in terms of the

ingredients you can define in terms of the dishes, but I like to start with the macronutrients

of any meal.

Now, if you're eating a, literally, a meal, the three macronutrients are protein, carbohydrates,

and fat.

And I say that similarly, there are three macronutrients to happiness.

They are enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose.

People who are truly happy about their lives, they have all three, and they have them in abundance,

and they have them in balance.

People who are out of balance in enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose, they tend to define

themselves as unhappy.

They know that something is wrong with their happiness.

And so when I'm talking to somebody who says, I'm really unhappy, I start digging in on

one of those dimensions.

So that's where I want to start, and I want to start with the first of those, which is enjoyment.

I define enjoyment as pleasure plus elevation.

When you learn something about the sources of your pleasures, it turns into authentic

enjoyment, which is a part of a happy life.

Do you agree with that?

I do.

I would say that enjoyment plus connection.

I really feel like connection with people.

Right.

Well, there are certain, there are solitary enjoyments.

You know, let's say that you're an artist, or let's say that you're a musician, or let's

say you're reading a book.

You know, that's enjoyable to you, depending on who you are.

But I think that when you talk about the ingredients, I think connection really has

to be in there.

And what I see in the therapy room is that when you look at those ingredients of happiness,

if you don't have connection added to those ingredients, it's going to be hard.

And I love the way that you are talking about happiness, not as a feeling, because I

think that happiness as a byproduct of living our lives in a meaningful way is what we all

aspire to.

But happiness as the goal in and of itself often is a recipe for disaster because they're

not looking at the ingredients that you're talking about.

Yeah, for sure.

And this is completely consistent with the findings of Bob Waldinger and George Valleant

and all those guys who have done all that longitudinal work that shows that the happiest

people in their 70s and 80s are people who established most of the most human connections

in their 20s and 30s.

They got really, really good at love.

They've got good love chops is the bottom line.

So this is the number one ingredient, probably in enjoyment satisfaction and purpose,

human connection.

Well, right.

And I think that the question that people ask themselves, I think that we all ask ourselves

when it comes to happiness is how can I love and be loved?

I think that that is the essential question.

And so, you know, that's where the enjoyment, I think, comes from too, is what does it

mean to not only love someone and be loved, but how do you love yourself too?

And so often we don't know how to do that, we can make ourselves incredibly unhappy

by being unloving to ourselves.

I want to talk about the specific macro nutrient of enjoyment here for a second.

It's one of the characteristics of people who present with clinical depression is a syndrome

called anodonia, which all that means is the inability to experience pleasure and enjoyment.

Even if you're not clinically depressed, clearly, if you're having a hard time enjoying

things, you're going to be unhappy as we just talked about a minute ago.

And even better if you're enjoying things in connection in communion with other people,

because that actually creates the most fulfillment.

Do you see patients who, because of whatever is going on in their lives, because of an

oversense of discipline or because they're excessively stoic or for whatever reason,

that they have insufficient enjoyment of their lives?

And if so, what do you tell them?

How can I enjoy my life more?

Well, this is kind of like a chicken or the egg thing.

So anodonia is when people are depressed, they literally cannot experience joy in the

things that would normally bring them joy if they were not depressed.

So it's not that they don't know how to enjoy things.

It's that because of the depression, they aren't enjoying activities that would normally

be pleasurable to them.

But yes, I think that there are people who don't know, so separate from that.

There are people who don't know how to have fun.

And I think that we have, we think somehow in our culture today of ambition and moving

forward and all of the sort of pressures that people think that fun is frivolous.

They don't realize that it's actually essential.

So when you talk about enjoyment, people think, well, that's optional.

Like if I have time and then, of course, they don't make the time because they think

that it's something that is not necessary.

And it absolutely is.

So what's an example of somebody who would come to you and they're not enjoying their

lives, they're not taking time to have fun?

What's the assignment that you give them?

Because in your show, you give somebody an assignment and then you see how it's going.

So if I came to you and said, yeah, I just don't have it, have fun.

I work and I work and I work all the time and I'm not very happy.

And it'd say Arthur, do these three things.

What's the kind of thing that you would tell me?

What's the assignment?

Well, actually, on the dear therapist podcast, so we do a therapy session with people.

And then as you said, we give them a homework assignment that they have a week to do and

they report back to us.

We had this actually 16-year-old on who presented with this exact issue.

She said, I am just like trying to get into college doing all of these things.

I never have any fun.

And so we gave her an assignment where we wanted her to have more balance in her life.

And we gave her a specific assignment, this is the Libby episode in season one.

And she was somebody who was very reluctant to do this because she thought that it would

somehow hold her back, that it would somehow make her less competitive for college, that

it would affect her in a way because nobody around her was having fun, by the way.

And everybody was pretending to have fun.

And social media looks like everybody's having just a great time.

But in reality, everybody was really stressed out.

Nobody was making time for fun.

And so she did that and she found that not only when she made time for fun, did she enjoy

her life more, but she found that actually it made her more productive.

It actually helped her to get ahead.

And so it was interesting because I think that we have this idea that having fun is going

to hold us back somehow.

And in theory, we want to have fun.

But we don't actually say, I'm going to put that on my calendar.

I'm going to make that a priority.

And I think we really need to.

That's pretty interesting in our hyper-scheduled and highly-skimaticized life that certain people

have to actually put it in their outlook for 45 minutes have fun.

You know, it seems like fun would be the most natural and spontaneous thing that people

could have or do.

And yet for people who are so scheduled all the way up into the tree, they actually need

to treat it like anything else and take time for it, right?

Is that what you're saying?

I think it needs to be specific to it's not just have fun, right?

It's getting in touch with how you have fun.

A lot of people don't even know how they have fun anymore as adults.

They grow up, they forgot what fun looks like because they're so busy with all of their

responsibilities and then all of the things they think they need to be doing.

And they don't realize, first of all, how they're spending their time.

So so many people say, I don't have time for this kind of thing.

And yet if they actually do a 24 hour diary, which is what I will prescribe in therapy

a lot, where they have to write down everything that they're doing for 24 hours and sometimes

48 hours.

And when they realize that they're like, oh my gosh, I spent like an hour and a half mindlessly

scrolling through the internet.

And it actually dampened their mood.

It didn't, you know, it wasn't a pleasurable activity for them.

It was like, oh, I'm so behind.

Look at what everybody else is doing or look at that person.

They went to Hawaii and I don't get to go to Hawaii or whatever it is.

So it wasn't even a pleasurable activity.

And then that hour and a half could have been spent doing something that would have actually

brought them joy.

And I want to use the word joy here because when we talk about, you know, happiness,

you're right, happy, happy is not in emotion, joy is in emotion.

And so what brings you joy?

And so specifically people don't know they're like, if I had the time, what would fun even

look like?

I don't even know what that looks like.

And so really being able to identify, how do you have fun?

What does fun look like for you so that when you schedule time to have fun or make time

so that it becomes not a thing that you schedule after a while, but just something that's

a natural part of your existence?

What does that look like?

People don't even know sometimes.

If you said to them, how do you have fun?

They look at me like, fun, what's that?

It's interesting that people don't know how to have fun.

And maybe they've used to and maybe they've forgotten.

So if they present to Lori Gottlieb and say, I'm not having any fun or I don't have

enough enjoyment in your life, the first assignment is not go have fun.

The first assignment you're going to give them is think about the last time that you had

fun, what were you doing so that you can remember how to have fun in the first place,

is that right?

Yeah.

And a good way to figure out what is fun for you is to look at your envy.

People don't like to feel envy.

They feel like it's kind of like a taboo.

They don't want to feel that.

They think that they're a bad person for feeling that.

But actually envy is very instructive.

Envy tells us something about desire.

And so I always say to people, follow your envy.

It tells you what you want.

And so when you are envious of someone or something or some experience, that's a clue

to what might be enjoyable for you.

We are so hesitant to look at our desire.

We don't want to give space for desire.

We're so much about the should as opposed to the what do I want, what does desire look

like for me.

We feel like it's almost like a selfish act.

That's really interesting because one of the things that I talked about an awful lot

in the study of discernment, which is a part of every philosophical and major religious

tradition from Buddhism, the Judaism, the Christianity and even stoicism.

That discernment is actually not about what should I do.

Discernment is about what do I want.

It's finding the nature of your own desire.

And so that is as old as the hills and yet it somehow escapes us again and again and

again.

And when I talk to young people, a lot of my students, they think they're trying to figure

out what they want to do.

And actually they should be thinking about trying to figure out what they want.

That's what they really don't know is what they want.

And that's what you're trying to get at, right, Laurie?

Yeah, absolutely.

And I think that there's so much noise out there where sometimes people can't hear

themselves.

So they can flate what society wants them to want, what their parents want them to want,

what they have been, what the culture tells them is something they should want versus

what they inherently want.

And if it goes against some of those things, like some of those culturally accepted things

of what we should want, it's very hard for them to even acknowledge that that's something

that they want.

Let's move on to the second pillar, the second macro nutrient of a happy life with just

satisfaction.

Now this is a killer.

Satisfaction is really tough.

And Mick Jagger was saying, I can't get no satisfaction.

The truth is you can get satisfaction.

The problem is you can't keep satisfaction.

Satisfaction is the reward when you meet a goal.

It's the reward for a job well done.

It's the promotion.

It's the raise that you get.

It's the little burst of joy that you get from meeting one of your own personal goals.

And the big problem that people have is that they get it, they get a little burst of this

joy perhaps, but then it goes away.

And then they're running, running, running, running again.

And there's a whole lot of neurobiology about homeostasis that helps us understand this.

And there's the metaphor of the hedonic treadmill that shows us why we keep running and running

and running.

And which is really good because it shows that after a little while you're mostly running

out of fear because if you stop on a treadmill, you know it's going to happen.

But the real question then becomes how do we deal with that?

I mean, satisfaction, you do need satisfaction to be a happy person, but you can't keep it.

So what do you tell people who work a hallex and they're addicted to success and they're

just trying and trying and trying is Mick Jagger saying to get satisfaction and they're

not getting it.

And the result is that they're missing something from their lives.

So somebody presents with the satisfaction dilemma.

What do you tell them?

Well, as you were talking, I was thinking about the people who they present almost like

a colander instead of a bowl.

So it's kind of like, you know, something goes in and it doesn't stay there.

The satisfaction gets there.

And then like it just goes through the holes.

It doesn't, it doesn't stay like in a bowl, right?

And so it just seeps through every time.

It doesn't last very long.

And I think that the people who are happiest when we talk about people, and I would say I

would use maybe the word contentment.

The people who are most content, who feel most full and fulfilled in their lives are people

who are what are called status-ficers.

And this is very short from the paradox of choice.

And he talks about the difference between status-ficers and maximizers and status-ficers

are the people who, let's say you're trying to buy a sweater and you go into a store and

you find a sweater that fits you.

It looks good.

It's the right price.

You buy it.

You're happy.

You're done, right?

It's a pretty good price for a criteria.

The maximizer will see that sweater, kind of put it under the other sweater so nobody will

buy it just in case.

Go to the next store and keep looking because maybe they'll find something a little bit cheaper

or a little bit more attractive or whatever it is, right?

Just something that's like a little bit better on some dimension.

And they keep looking.

And then maybe they find it, maybe they don't, but if they do find it, they tend not to

be as happy with that purchase as if they had just bought the original sweater.

And if they don't find it, then they regret that they didn't get the original one.

And the problem is even if they buy that first one, the maximizers, even if they buy that

first sweater that met all their criteria, they might be happy for about a week, like you

were saying.

And then like the next week, they're like walking by a store and they see something else

in the window and they think, oh, that one would have been better.

And so they're just never satisfied with what they have.

And you see this in relationships.

People do this in relationships all the time, too.

It's not just with things like sweaters.

It's with people.

It's with jobs.

It's with everything.

So it's a kind of almost like a personality type.

Like are you a satisfacer or are you a maximizer, even when you're shopping on Amazon and

you're trying to like, which set of cookware should I buy?

And it's like the people who will spend like, you know, an hour going through all the

different options instead of like, you know, 10 minutes going, oh, this is good.

Let me just get this.

It really takes up your emotional energy in a big way because you're always thinking, you

know, it's almost like it's a perfectionism type of thing.

And it really gets in the way because it takes up all of your energy, all of your time.

And then you're never satisfied with what you have anyway.

That's really interesting.

And you know what you're saying is, it sounds like kind of a western version of what is

holiness, the Dalai Lama always says, which is the secret to enduring satisfaction is

not to have what you want, but you want what you have.

The satisfacer is one who wants what she has and the maximizer is the one who's always

he's always chasing trying to have what he wants.

And another way of thinking about this that actually works in the literature on the science

of satisfaction is that you shouldn't think of your satisfaction as a function of what

you have, but rather what you have divided by what you want.

And if you can actually devise a wants management strategy, the denominator of that fraction

is going to decrease and your satisfaction is actually going to rise.

So how when a patient presents with a satisfaction deficit, what specifically do you, what assignment

you give them on your show, if this is somebody who's unsatisfied, or if you have a patient

who says, I'm just, I just not, it just nothing's good, Laurie, nothing's good.

What do you tell them to do specifically starting today?

I think this is the difference between what a friend would say to this person and what

a therapist would say to this person because what the friend tends to do is to say, look

at all the wonderful things you have in your life, which is not helpful at all because

they can't see it anyway.

It's very funny when you look at the difference between how we talk to our friends and how

a therapist might approach this because I think that people would expect a therapist to

do that to say, well, look at all these things that you're not seeing.

But no, indeed, in fact, what I would probably do is I would agree with them and say, yeah,

it's really, I can see that you're really not satisfied.

What happens for them is the more that you go into their mindset that they start to see

something new, that they start to say, well, actually, I have this really great partner,

and I have this really great job.

But there are a lot of butts with that.

But they start to change their mindset when you're not arguing with them about whether

they should be satisfied or not.

You can't convince someone to be satisfied with what they have.

They have to come to it on their own.

And I think that a lot of people have very low tolerance for people like this because

they feel like, well, you have so much.

How can you complain?

But I think it speaks to something in our culture, which is we don't really value what's

important.

We don't really value what's going to bring us happiness.

And so people tend to take for granted all of the things that they do have that would

normally bring a person happiness.

That's really interesting, and it actually leads, which we'll touch on briefly, before

we go to our listeners, about the last macronutrient of happiness, which is maybe the hardest

of all, which is purpose or meaning.

And the reason that this is really hard is because it's the most counterintuitive when

it comes to the science of happiness.

When I ask in surveys, large scale surveys or experiments using human subjects, what brings

happiness and purpose to life, people always talk about the most painful parts of their lives.

They never talk about that weak in Ivita with my friends.

They never say that's when I actually found out my life's meaning.

That was talked about that divorce, that ugly breakup, when I got fired, that bankruptcy,

when my kid had to go to rehab.

That's when they talk about the stuff that they were made of and when they really understood

the nature of their own souls.

Yet, back when before you and I, when you and I were little kids, and the hippies were

running around in the 60s and 70s, and the Woodstock generation said, it feels good, do

it.

But now, young people, on either side of us, that bookend did people like you and me, their

mantra seems to be, if it feels bad, make it stop.

Paradoxically, if we don't suffer, if we don't have pain, if we don't come to terms with

having a life that's fully alive with the good and the bad, we can't actually get enough

meaning in purpose in our life, right?

Well, that's right.

And I think that's why we assign negative and positive connotations to feelings, even

though feelings are neutral, they don't have a positive or negative connotation.

So people say, like, you know, joy is a positive feeling and anger or anxiety or sadness

are negative feelings.

And that's just not true.

All of our feelings are positive in the sense that they tell us what we want.

Our feelings are like a compass.

They tell us what direction to go in.

And if you don't access your feelings, you're kind of walking around with a faulty GPS.

You don't know what direction to go in.

And people think that if they kind of numb their feelings, like, oh, it's not a big deal

because I have a roof over my head and food on the table.

So the sadness, the anxiety, the insomnia, whatever it is, it's okay because, you know,

it seems very trivial to them.

But it's not.

It's actually a message.

It's telling you something about your life.

It's telling you about something that needs to change.

And so people feel like, you know, like numbness isn't nothingness.

It's not the absence of feelings.

Numbness is actually a sense of being overwhelmed by too many feelings.

And then they come out in other ways, like too much food, too much wine, an inability

to sleep, a short temperedness, a lack of focus.

You see how the feelings are there.

They're just presenting differently.

And so I think it's really important for people to notice their feelings and to really

welcome their feelings and embrace their feelings.

Because the feelings give them information about if you're sad, what is not working?

If you're anxious, what is causing the anxiety?

If you're angry, are there some boundaries that maybe you need to set, right?

You know, is there something you need to change in your life?

What is going on?

So I think that that's really important.

And when we talk about meaning and purpose, if you don't listen to your feelings, they're

going to direct you in the direction of meaning and purpose.

We're going to tell you what is important.

It's interesting, you know, most of the great sages and saints throughout history have

talked about the sacredness of suffering.

And some pretty wise and interesting people today do too.

I mean, there was a famous interview of Stephen Colbert by Anderson Cooper, where Stephen

Colbert talks about the most painful time in his life when his father and one of the

siblings was killed in a plane crash.

And he talks about how grateful he is even for that experience because of the sacredness

of every moment of his life, including the pain.

He says, look, if you're going to be fully alive, if you're going to have a life, if you're

going to enjoy life per se, you've got to take it all.

If you're thankful for life, you've got to be thankful for all of life because that's

the fabric of your set of experiences.

And it sounds seems to me that that is the essence of how you find your meaning and the

essence of how you understand who you are as a person, according to what you just told

me, right?

I don't think that you need to suffer tragedy to feel gratitude.

I think that sometimes it awakens us to feeling gratitude when you have some kind of tragedy

in your life, but I don't think that you need to have some kind of tragedy.

But I do think that you don't get through life without suffering in some way.

So it doesn't need to be that a relative dies in a plane crash.

I think that just being human inherently means that there are going to be times that you

struggle.

And I think if you look at the world today, if you look at, you know, there's so much suffering

that we hear about every day in the world, but then what are we told if you look at social

media, for example, or you're at a dinner party, you know, like you're, you don't, nobody

talks about that.

Nobody wants to talk about that.

It's all like let's pretend everything's great.

And I think it's both and.

And if we don't make room for the both and then, then you're right that we don't see

the beauty.

We don't appreciate the beauty in life.

And it's almost like you can't, you can't, you know, people that we say like I want

to mute the sadness or I want to mute the pain.

And it's like you can't mute the pain and then also feel joy.

If you mute one aspect of your emotional experience, you're going to mute all of that.

There's like one mute button.

So if you mute the pain, you mute the joy.

And so I think that speaks to what you're saying.

And there's one clarification you made that's incredibly important that I want to underline

so everybody listening.