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.
A big part of happiness is learning to live in the moment.
What does that actually mean?
And more importantly, how do we do it?
It turns out that living in the moment or at least being fully alive right now has two
components, mindfulness and curiosity.
Mindfulness has been kind of in the zeitgeist for a long time.
It's this idea that you're missing your life if you're not here right now.
And so you need to figure out a way to focus on the present, to be really experiencing
your current timeframe as opposed to thinking about the past or thinking about the future.
Now, there's a reason that that's hard to do.
And there's a lot of neuroscience that's gone into this.
It effectively comes down to the unique nature of the human mind, probably compared to any
other species that's ever existed.
The human brain makes it possible for us to be in other time periods in the current moment.
I can imagine that I'm in the future practicing future scenarios in my life.
Whenever I'm done recording this podcast, I'm going to do something else.
I can think about that and I can think, should I do this or that?
I can walk myself through those scenarios and kind of live in the future and figure out
which one I like best.
I've already lived them effectively.
And so I'm choosing the one that I like best that has the fewest mistakes, at least
according to my projections.
That's called prospection.
That's about living in the future.
And this incredible ability for us to do this means that we tend to do it a lot.
Some psychologists believe that we do that about 30 to 50% of the time.
If you're a real go-getter, ambitious about the future and maybe optimistic or at least
hopeful about the future, you might be doing this 60, 70, 80% of the time.
Other people tend to think about the past a lot.
One of the things that we know from research on the elderly is they tend to be kind of
retrospective thinking about the past.
But once again, retrospection is taking up time in your life when you're not here right
now.
Now, I'm not against prospection and retrospection thinking about the past and joining your
memories, for example, or looking forward to the future, especially if these things are
positive, they're great.
They can aid happiness.
The problem is if you're excessively prospective and or retrospective, it can crowd out your
ability to be alive right now.
The famous Vietnamese Buddhist master, Tick Not Hon, his most famous book is called The
Miracle of Mindfulness.
He starts the book by describing washing the dishes.
It's funny.
You'd think that that's a really boring thing to do, but it's riveting because he talks
about being truly there, turning over each dish.
When you're washing the dishes, wash each dish.
So that's number one.
Number two is curiosity.
If you want to be fully alive, you can't be bored or muted or numbed to what's going
on around you.
You have to have interest, a keen interest, which we call curiosity, in this mindful present.
Now curiosity is intensely pleasurable.
Curiosity implicates dopamine, which is one of the great neurotransmitters of pleasure.
It makes you fully engaged in this mindful present to be curious about what's going
on around you.
And the good news is that you can cultivate that kind of curiosity.
Just as you can become more mindful, you can become more curious.
And as such, your mindful present won't be something boring or mundane.
It can be as interesting as Tick Not Hon's dish washing.
That's the importance of mindfulness.
What it comes down to is being there.
You don't want to get through the new life and say, where was I?
Well, I was in the future, I was in the past.
I wasn't there.
What I mean by you're not there is that you are more or less behaving like a robot.
Everybody has had that experience.
You are miserable and somebody says, hi, how are you?
And you say, fine, thank you.
And you're not aware of it.
You're not trying to hide it.
If you know about mindfulness today, it owes to people who got interested in it.
And they probably heard about it for the first time from the work of Dr. Ellen Langer.
As the first ever tenured female psychology professor at Harvard University, Dr. Langer's
research and the positive impacts of mindfulness on health and well-being affected millions
and actually ushered in a whole movement of interest in mindfulness.
Dr. Langer's early clinical work in the late 1970s revolutionized mindfulness studies.
Lots of people confuse what I do with meditation, even though I did some early research on that
topic.
But meditation is a practice.
Mindfulness is the result of that practice.
The mindfulness that we study is immediate.
It's simply noticing new things.
And in the process of noticing new things that puts you in the moment, you know, you have
all these people who say, be in the present.
And that's great, but it's an empty suggestion.
And even simpler than this, if one deeply appreciates uncertainty, recognizing everything
is always changing, everything looks different from different perspectives.
So you can't know.
And when you recognize that you can't know or you don't know, you tune in.
When you think you do know, you don't pay any attention.
The big theme that I really want to talk about here is how to enjoy our lives more.
And I realize that that's really, really broad.
But there's so many strands in your work that all lead back to how to enjoy your life
more.
One of the things that you emphasize in your work a lot is that we don't enjoy our lives
enough because we're not actually there.
What does that mean?
One of these sports some ideas, we find that my listeners is pervasive.
Most of us are not there.
And they're not there to know they're not there.
You know, the only way some people realize they experience this is imagine you're driving
and you want to get off at exit 28.
And all of a sudden you see you're at exit 36.
So then you say, wow, where was I?
What I mean by you're not there is that you're more or less behaving like a robot.
You just had that experience.
You know, you are miserable and somebody says, hi, how are you?
And you say fine, thank you.
And you're not aware of it.
You're not trying to hide it.
Most of what we do is done on, as it's called, automatic pilot.
But the mindlessness goes far beyond that.
I wanted to write a book a long time ago, author.
I never wrote this one.
That was called, is there life before death?
Because I found all these people worrying about life after death.
Many people come alive, sadly, after they get some terrible diagnosis or they have a
stroke or they find out they have cancer.
When I speak to people who are miserable or whatever, I simply tell them that all you
need to do is take care of the moment.
Just write this second.
And if you keep doing that, then at the course of the day, you know, you've had a fine time.
The way I define mindfulness is actively noticing new things.
Now interestingly, as you're actively noticing, the neurons are firing and it's literally
and figuratively in live name.
So this active noticing is not only good for you as the 40 years of research has shown,
it leads to a longer life, happier life, it improves virtually everything.
But that other people recognize when you're mindful and they're drawn to you.
If you're dealing with somebody who's present with you rather than behaving like a robot,
it gives everybody a greater sense of control.
But anyway, the bottom line to all that we're going to say is that the way to be happy
is to be engaged, the way to be engaged is to simply notice.
And by the way, this is the kind of thing that you'd say when your kids are in the back
of the car and you're on a long drive and they say, I'm bored.
And you say, how can you be bored as beautiful out here because you're noticing how beautiful
the countryside is?
And your kids aren't.
The problem is not that our kids do that.
The problem is that we do a version of that and the way that we take care of that is
to take our own advice.
Look out the window and look at all the beautiful things that are going on.
So why do we do that?
I mean, why is it that we're so distracted from the present?
What is distracting us from actually noticing things around us?
Well, we have an illusion of stability.
We think things are staying still.
So if you've seen it once, you've seen it.
You don't need to keep paying attention to it.
But there's something I think that needs to be added, which will explain why people
keep doing this.
Many people pre-tend because they think they should know.
They think you know.
So therefore, I don't want you to know that I don't know.
And here's the big secret for everybody.
Nobody knows.
You change from making a personal attribution for not knowing.
I don't know, but it's knowable.
Therefore, I'll pretend, I'll feel stupid and secure.
To a universal attribution, I don't know.
You don't know nobody knows.
Okay, so now let's find out together and explore together.
If you think you know something, there's no reason to pay attention.
So Arthur, let's make this clear to your listeners.
How much is one in one?
I'll say one in one is two.
I feel like I'm falling into a trap here with Professor Langer.
Now if you add one cloud plus one cloud, how much is one?
Well, it's one large cloud, but we call it, we call it, it would probably, you'd say
one cloud.
Yeah, yeah.
It's one.
If I say, if you take one watt of chewing gum and you add it to one watt of chewing gum,
how much is one in one?
If they're coming out of opposite people's mouths and I'm pretty grossed out at this
point, but it's one big watt of chewing gum.
Could you just add, you know, this is a simple test.
Okay, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm playing with this one.
How much is one pile of laundry plus one pile of laundry?
It's one big pile of laundry, yeah.
The point is that in the real world, one plus one doesn't equal to, probably is often
or more often as it does, but because we think we know it, that's the simplest thing
that we think we know.
You're taught that, you taught how to be a good student, but typically not you, but that
you memorize and then you know the answers and that all of that treats the world as if
everything is still.
And all that I'm sure of is that everything is always changing, everything looks different
from different perspectives.
And so that certainty is a mistake.
Okay, back to Dr. Ellen Langer in a second.
The first, a quick time out for some science.
Are you the kind of person who likes to take pictures on vacation, wherever you're going
or you're pulling at your iPhone?
Well, that can actually be a problem for your enjoyment.
Why?
Because it's taking away from your ability to be living right here, right now.
Now, remember when I told you in the beginning about this incredible set of skills that we
have called Prospection and Retrospection, where Prospection means you're thinking about
the future or the past, where you imagine something or remember something and it gives
you pleasure or you might even change that past to think about how things might have
turned out differently.
Well, it turns out these all come to bear when we're taking pictures on vacation or whatever
is going on around us.
Those amazing abilities are what we're actually trying to use by taking pictures.
For example, if I take pictures on vacation, why am I doing it?
Almost likely, either I want to post them to social media to make somebody envious or show
us somebody who's not with me in the future, how much fun I'm having, or I myself want
to look back on those pictures and say, didn't I have a great vacation in the past?
In other words, I'm blending Prospection and Retrospection in this amazing, genius, uniquely
human way, but all it's doing in total is distracting me from actually being here now
on my vacation.
Ask yourself the question, when you're on vacation, you're taking pictures.
Why are you taking them?
Most likely, you're taking these pictures because you're anticipating future enjoyment of
the past.
Think how convoluted this is.
Well, okay, let's go to the science on how much it actually lowers your enjoyment of
vacation.
There are a couple of good papers on this, one in the journal Psychology and Marketing
and the other in the Journal of Consumer Research that look at the enjoyment that comes from
taking pictures on vacation.
What the researchers find is if you take pictures of highly pleasurable experiences for the
future, that will in fact lower your enjoyment of the experience.
Oh, wait, there's more.
If you take vacation photos to share on social media, because then what are you doing?
You're thinking about the future, but you're also thinking about other people more than
the enjoyment that you yourself are getting.
You're so not in the moment that lowers your enjoyment of the vacation itself by 16%.
Is that what you're anticipating?
Remembering your enjoyment of your pleasurable experiences and your vacation by a pretty
non-trivial amount because you're hoping that you'll get a pleasant memory sometime in
the future.
If the answer to that question is no, that's not my intention.
That's not what I want to do.
Well, put away the phone.
Be here now.
Okay.
Now back to Dr. Ellen Langer.
Anything can be made exciting.
Anything can be made boring.
I picked up these kids.
This is back in the years ago when it was okay to pick up hitchhikers.
I was in Italy and they were wearing New York City t-shirts, so you knew they were from
New York.
I picked them up and asked them, so how'd you like New York?
One of them answered right away and said, he didn't like it at all.
It was boring.
There was nothing to do.
There are a few places to mind that are more exciting.
You can, and if you took me and you put me in the middle of a wheat field, I'd probably
would look at it, well, it's all the same, but not to a farmer.
So your point about mindfulness is it has a lot less to do with meditation technique
and it has a lot more to do with experiencing your life being fully alive, right?
Well, it's not, but it's a better understood, not as fully experienced in your life because
that's the result of this mindfulness and that it has nothing to do with meditation.
It's immediate.
It's simply noticing and that the more you notice, the more you see, you didn't know the
thing you thought you knew and then your attention naturally goes to it.
And when you start off with this more general view of everything changing, which means that
you start off not knowing, then everything is potentially interesting.
Everything old is new again.
In so many ways, it's this belief that we know that keeps us unhappy because it keeps
us from recognizing how things are changing.
But beyond that, I think that the biggest thing for me in all of this and this did come
from my work was the realization that behavior makes sense from the actor's perspective
or else the person wouldn't have done it.
So you don't wake up in the morning and say, today you're going to be bigoted, clumsy,
obnoxious.
What are you saying, Ellen?
What are you saying?
I realize I shouldn't say you.
And your audience should know we've just met that even if those things are true, there's
no way that I could know it.
Well, I've not acquitted myself very well in the first 15 minutes of our conversations.
The point that I'm making is that when we see people in a negative light, we're misunderstanding
why they're doing what they're doing from their perspective.
So for example, you may see me as gullible from my perspective I'm trusting.
I may see you as inconsistent from your perspective you're flexible.
Now if you and I are close friends and my being gullible is driving you crazy and you try
to get me not to be gullible, I don't want to be gullible.
So I'll agree, but I'm always going to fall back to being gullible as long as I value
being trusting.
And once you see that in fact I'm being trusting you kind of like that and our relationship improves.
When I stop seeing you as inconsistent and realize that you're being flexible, something
I also value, then I treat you with more respect.
Now if I'm treating you better and you're treating me better, we're liking each other more,
it's easier for us to not behave like robots.
Let's go to the future.
So one of the things that I talk a lot about with Marty Seligman is prospection.
And Marty believes that we shouldn't be called homo sapiens, we should be called homo
prospectus.
One point he had this dispute with his holiness, the Dalai Lama, where Dalai Lama is talking
about mindfulness and he said, no, you're holiness, it's unnatural.
We live in the future, especially people who are ambitious and go getters.
And it's actually important because we have to practice future scenarios, etc.
So the question is, how can we live enough in the future to be successful, but at the
same time enjoy our lives?
How do we get that balance, right?
I think that everything that you're doing because of the future is based on a mistaken
notion about predictability.
Prediction is an illusion.
Now I know Marty doesn't believe that.
Let me convince your audience just quickly.
I do this with my advanced decision making class and I say to them, I've been teaching a
version of this class for the last 40 years.
I've never missed a class.
What is the likelihood I'm going to be here next week?
It's a small class.
We go around the room.
These are Harvard kids, so they don't say 100%.
They say ridiculous things like 97% as if there's some calculation.
But essentially, they're all saying I'll be there.
Now I say, okay, I want each of you to give me a good reason why I won't be there.
The first one always says, well, you've been doing it for 40 years, you've been there,
you deserve the time off.
The next one says your dog has to go to the vet.
The next one says you've got a flat tire and they easily come up with things.
Then I say to them, okay, what is the likelihood I'm going to be here next week?
And it drops to 50%.
And when you fully realize that we don't know that you can plan all you want for some
future event and then something else will happen that pulls you away.
But if the planning for the future is giving you a happy present, that's fine.
And there's nothing lost by it.
But you have kids when they're tiny kids and they say they want to be a doctor.
How can you know what it's like to be a doctor?
You have no idea.
Maybe you want to be an astrophysicist.
Maybe you want to be an architect.
When you stick to your predictions, you're limiting yourself rather than expanding your
universe of possibilities.
From your perspective, goal setting is valuable to the extent that it enhances the quality
of your life right now.
At the moment, yes.
And I think that what we want to do and the way I describe being mindful is to be rule,
routine, and goal guided.
Most of us are mindless, so we're rule, routine, and goal governed.
You don't want to have a rule that says you do something at time one.
That's when you're committing to that rule.
When in time two, it's totally irrelevant.
And to recognize that outcomes are in our heads.
They're not in events.
And so there's always a way to take what's ever happened and understand it differently,
which leads to something that most people don't realize, which is that emotions are choices.
But given that the experience of that emotion depends on how you view it and the way you
view it is dependent on how mindful you are, that people say, you made me angry or some
event caused them to be sad.
A simple example.
If you and I go to lunch and the food is good, that's great.
You and I go to lunch and the food is awful.
That's great.
Presumably I'll eat less.
And that'll be better for my waistline.
If I take the view that the event is good or bad, then I'm in this position where I do
everything I can to get the good and I run away as fast as I can from anything bad.
And once I recognize that the good bad is in my head, I can be still and just enjoy
whatever happens.
Three different things you said made me think of stress and boredom, which lead us to
be mindless and a result from our mindlessness.
And they're all both the same thing.
That if you're bored, it's because, as you said in that car trip, that people are not
paying attention, not seeing that things are changing and are new.
So your bored, you notice new things and that takes care of the boredom.
If you're stressed, you liken it to old things.
So let's say teaching, September, I'm going to go back to Harvard and we'll be teaching
of course, I've taught so many times.
Oh, it's the same old, same old, the young people come in, you know, they all are scared,
they don't really know, man, anywhere.
So terribly boring or I can say, you know, these kids, they just lived a year of this pandemic,
I have no idea how they're going to take to this material.
I don't know if they're going to appreciate anything I have to say.
I don't know if it's going to be a successful class.
Oh my God, it'd be stressed.
The same experience.
And so when people again recognize that nothing out there is stressful, nothing out there
is boring.
It's all a function of the way we understand it.
And so if you're bored, see the ways it's new, if you're stressed, see the ways it's
familiar.
No kidding.
So you're actually looking for the balance between the new and the familiar.
You're looking for that.
What I'm saying is that newness or oldness is something we impose on the world and we
do it mindlessly.
You know, when you say something is boring, you know, you've been doing it for forever
and how could you stay at that job, even a marriage, I mean, gosh, it's been 25 years,
I'm bored to death.
Nobody says that about their college kids.
You know, kid comes home from college and says, oh, please go away.
You know, knowing you for 25 years and you're boring.
And the reason for that is that they expect the child to change.
And so they look for the ways the child's is changed because they're looking for the
ways they're different, but everything is always different.
So everything is potentially exciting.
Yeah, yeah.
If you're understimulated, make sure that you're noticing the new.
If you're overstimulated, remember the old.
But now we're off that way to second.
Are you showing off because it took me 10 minutes to say that and you said it in one nice
phrase.
Oh, you know, I'm just a synthesizer.
I've been drafting behind you and you're outstanding colleagues in my college for years.
Now you've been giving me tons of material.
Let's say you and I are going back to the classroom, like in person for the first time
in a super long time.
And let's say that your fall class weirdly, unexpectedly goes really, really poorly.
What's your strategy then without getting straight because you're not going to get stressed?
I have a one-liner that I, friends of mine, put on their refrigerators, which is ask yourself
is it a tragedy or an inconvenience?
Yeah.
Yeah.
To law family respond to things, you know, if the class didn't go, oh my god, my life's
going to be up.
No, of course not.
Even for the young, even for the young person.
And we tend to treat individual events as more important, you know, you and I are going
out and we have a bad conversation and it's, oh my god, that's going to destroy the relationship.
No, no, no relationship is going to be made or fall apart based on one situation.
No life is going to depend on failing one test or giving one bad class.
And this is not based on research and I, but it, it seems to me that this belief in certain
tease helped maintain the status quo.
The big shot can stay the big shot because everybody else presumes that that person knows
more can do more.
So I wrote this little song for my six year old grandkids.
I can't carry a tune and I must say, author, this is the thing I'm most proud of myself
of a long life is that I'm willing to sing, knowing I can sing because it's very easy
to do things when you can do it.
Well, you're built, this is a build up, Ellen.
I can't wait to hear this.
And the orchestra is cranking up and back here.
It's the words that matter, but it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, everybody doesn't
know something, but everybody knows something else.
Everybody can't do something, but everyone can do something else.
When you recognize this, then not knowing is not something you have to run away from.
So with my six year olds, one of them was whistling the other day and I said, you're
such a good whistler.
These are twins.
His brother then said, because they've lived with me for a while now during the pandemic,
his brother said, well, well, Theo was learning how to whistle.
I was learning something else.
Nice.
You know, six years old.
I think it's beautiful.
The secret is curiosity.
It's saying, I don't know.
It's noticing the new and what you thought was not new.
And so doing you will banish mindlessness, you will embrace greater true mindfulness,
whether you're a meditator or not.
And that's really the secret to being fully alive today.
It's not curiosity because the way we mindlessly understand curiosity is that there is an answer
there.
Oh, I see.
Once I find it and then you no longer curious.
So you can say perpetual curiosity about the same thing.
Alan Langer, what a joy.
What a gift that you've given to our audience today.
What a gift that you've given me.
So thank you very much.
And it's my pleasure out there to stay well.
Each week on the show, we'd like to pay homage to our listeners and their unique insights
on happiness.
We put out a call to action for listeners to answer this question.
When is the last time you remember being truly happy?
Hey there.
My name has been Washington DC.
Well, what is happy is I've found bliss and peace while doing kind of really engrossing
sports like skiing or kite boarding.
I've found joy and de-relation on the piece of mountains after hiking them in the kind
of runners high that comes after exercise and accomplishments.
Happiness is a longer struggle though.
Happiness is a couple good days of friends and appreciation from people who it matters to
be appreciated by.
It's things going right when you weren't sure if they would or not.
It's a clean apartment.
It's balanced in your life.
It's physically and mentally and in terms of your expectations.
So I don't know if there is any one time when I would say that I'm truly happy.
Happiness is when I am where I need to be and balanced and lifted up by the foundation
that facilitates that happiness.
Today's exercise is called intention without attachment.
Now, you've been hearing from Dr. Langer that mindfulness is critically important for
living a good and balanced life and it's also incredibly important for happiness.
And no small part because when you're not mindful, you're missing your life.
Mindfulness according to Dr. Ellen Langer is not an exotic thing.
You define it as simply noticing new things, being fully present and noticing things that
are happening around us.
You want to be mindful on the train, put down your phone, stop thinking about the future,
put your hands in your lap, look out the window and say, huh, trees.
Now you can get into much more sort of transcendental or meditative understandings of mindfulness,
but that's a good way to remember it.
And it's a especially good way to remember it in the context of happiness because again,
if you're not noticing the things that are happening right now, you're not noticing what's
going on in your life and you're going to miss your life.
There's a problem, however, if mindfulness is your only goal, happiness also relies on
prospection.
Prospection is the living in the future that's connected to a lot of other psychologists
research and when you're optimistic about the future, that prospection is really important
to happiness as well.
These two ideas, they seem kind of intention, don't they?
You want to be mindful, but you want to be perspective at the same time.
So I ask myself, can I be both a goal-oriented person and a mindful person?
Or do I have to choose?
Or is there some way that I can get both?
Well, the answer is that you can get both.
This is the point of the exercise intention without attachment.
It has three steps.
Number one, use learned optimism to dream up and set long-term goals.
To say yourself, for example, ten years from today, here's what I want my life to look
like.
It's going to be great.
I'm going to be happier than I am today for a bunch of reasons.
What does it look like?
Make it really clear in your mind, write them down.
But what I'm not going to tell you to do is what a lot of self-help people I was telling
you to do, which is to make it into a bucket list and then stare at it and crave it and
desire it and go over and over and over and over it for the next ten years.
No, I'm actually not going to do that because if you did that, you would be purely
prospective and you'd be missing out on mindfulness, take the time to do it and do it right, learned
optimism to set long-term goals.
Here's step two.
Now break those goals into sub-steps.
To get to that ten-year goal or maybe it's a five-year goal, you decide what your time
frame is.
But to get to it, where do I need to be one year from now so I'm on track?
You know, the same way that you would do if you're setting up a business strategy plan.
In ten years, want to be here.
Where do I need to be in five?
Where do I need to be in one?
Where do I need to be in one month to get to one year?
Where do I need to be in one week to get to one month?
Break your big goal into a bunch of little goals with respect to time.
That's step two.
Now here's step three.
Here's where the mindfulness comes back.
Live in day-type compartments.
You just told yourself what you need to do over the next 24 hours.
That sets a goal for being fully alive over the next 24 hours.
So don't spend the next 24 hours thinking about it ten years from now or five or one or
a month or even a week from now.
By the way, I didn't make up this term day-type compartments.
That was made up by a self-improvement author from the 30s named Dale Carnegie.
This was one of his pieces of advice.
To live in day-type compartments.
He never met Dr. Ellen Langer, but he was saying the same thing.
If you want to be happy, you've got to be alive.
If you're going to be alive, you have to notice what's going on.
And to do that, you can't always be living in the future.
His solution was to set up your life in these day-type compartments.
Now you can make that synchronous width and consistent with the future once again by going
through these steps one more time.
Number one, use learned optimism to dream up your big long-term goal.
Break the goal into a bunch of sub-steps that will keep you in line for that goal.
Ending up with what needs to be done today and tomorrow.
And then live in those day-type compartments.
You will have achieved the miraculous.
You will be both mindful and prospective.
And very few people can be doing those two things simultaneously.
That's all for this week's episode of How to Build a Happy Life.
This episode was produced by me, Rebecca Rashid, and hosted by Arthur Brooks, editing by
ACVL Des, fact check by Anna Alvarado.
Our engineer is Michael Rayfield.
