The Science of a Happy Life

[MUSIC PLAYING] Welcome, everyone. I'm Dr. John Whyte. I'm the Chief Medical Officer at WebMD. Are you happy? Do you want to be happier?

Can science help you on the path to happiness? My guest today says it can. He's co-authored a book with no other than Oprah Winfrey that's entitled Build the Life You Want-- the Art and Science of Getting Happier. Dr. Brooks, thanks for joining me today.

Thank you, John. It's wonderful to be with you.

I have to say, I really enjoyed your book. And what I was fascinated by up front you say people say to you, you must naturally be very happy. But you say, that's hardly the fact. What's going on here?

There is a small handful of social scientists and neuroscientists in the United States who study happiness. I think I know them all. And I think it's fair to say that they're not an above average happiness group. And that might sound strange to begin with, but it really shouldn't surprise anybody.

We study happiness for a reason. We want it. Everybody wants it. And if you have the tool kit to find more of it, you're going to dedicate yourself to the discovery of that. And the good news is that you're not going to find happiness per se because happiness is not a destination. It's a direction.

But you can get a lot happier, and I'm living proof that that's the case. Since I've dedicated myself to the science of happiness, my happiness has risen every year. And I'm looking forward to it rising for the rest of my life as long as I stay on the path.

You say the science of happiness, and I want to push back for a minute on that. Help us understand how are you creating a science because that's what the book is about, using neuroscience to give us tips and tools to make us happier.

Well, there's two ways that science really helps us to understand happiness. One is psychology, and the other is biology, believe it or not. So on the psychological side, that's social science. That's how I'm trained.

I'm trained as a behavioral economist. And what we're trained to do is to look at large data sets and then use statistical techniques to simulate these drug experimental conditions. In other words, we can net out the things that are probably not causal IN helping us to understand a phenomenon under consideration.

If you find a group of people and some of them are happier than others, you want to look at all the things in their background and all the things that they're doing, and then they want to see statistically how each one of those things individually affects or is associated with their happiness. If you want to get even better at it, you do experiments. And that's what the field is really doing in social psychology where we simulate real life in experiments where half of the people are exposed to a certain condition and randomly, another half are not exposed to it. So it really does look like a drug treatment and control experiment. And that's where we're finding our most cutting-edge data.

How do we do that? Do we do that by a survey or you talk in your book about neuroimaging? We can actually look at PET scans.

Well, this is where the biology comes in. This is where neuroscience starts to play a very exciting role. So some of the times you just ask people about the differences in their life, and that's how you figure out whether or not something is having an impact.

But sometimes you want a little bit more biological verification of what's going on. And we're getting better and better at understanding how the brain is processing different kinds of cognitions, different sorts of mental states. We understand more and more about the so-called limbic system.

Your limbic system creates emotions nothing more positive and negative to give you information about whether something is something you should avoid or something you should approach. And all those emotions, all those feelings are created in different parts of the brain. And we can actually see how the brain is processing those different emotions with brain imaging.

What's the role of genetics? There's not a gene, as there is for some other conditions, where we can test for genetic predisposition, correct?

That's correct. We don't have that kind of specificity. We can't get that granular with what we're doing, and that's too bad. I wish we did. But we'll do the best we can nonetheless and get things that are directionally right so that we can give people good advice.

What about one's environment, is that the bigger play? You said 50%, which is more? Is it genetics? Is it environment? I'm going to come to a couple different things.

Well, it's sort of 50-50, but environment is split into two baskets itself circumstances and habits. So that matters an awful lot. Now your circumstances, you don't control them very much. You can give yourself better luck through your habits, but generally speaking, bad things are going to happen to you or negative things are going to happen to you even in the best of lives. And positive things are going to happen and the worst of lives.

You find that in any given moment about a quarter of your happiness it comes from what's going on. If good things are happening, it pushes your happiness up by a quarter. If bad things are happening, it pushes your happiness down by a quarter.

But here's the thing, it doesn't last. Your circumstances never, never affect your mood for very long because your mood has to be transient because remember, emotions are information about the outside world. And you need to be ready for the next set of circumstances.

What about folks that say, Arthur, you can just wish yourself to be happy. You can make yourself happy. Is that true?

Well, you can and you can't. You're not going to wish yourself happier, but you can work yourself to greater happiness by managing your emotions so that they don't manage you. And that means being conscious of what your emotions are and then using a set of techniques that we talk about, that Oprah Winfrey and I talk about in this book about actually how to do that.

So, for example, you can substitute one emotion for the other, but you have to be very aware of your own emotions. I recommend that you meditate on your own emotions or that you journal your emotions or that you pray about your emotions, or you get therapy or whatever you need to do. But the more you're conscious of your emotions, then you can substitute one emotion for the other. But when you're not conscious of them, you'll be managed by them.

I can't be at WebMD and not ask you about the role of health and happiness. What is that connection, because many people that have chronic disease, that are suffering in pain, who don't have good health aren't happy? So, what's that connection between health and happiness?

This is one that I've studied a lot because I'm kind of interested in nutrition. And I'm an inveterate exerciser. And for the longest time I thought, well, you know, really improves my happiness a lot. It turns out it doesn't, but it does improve my well-being.

And I'm not splitting hairs here. It's important for us to understand that happiness and unhappiness are separate. Happiness and unhappiness are largely processed in different hemispheres of the brain. And you need to manage happiness to be higher, and you need to manage your unhappiness to be lower.

Now people who have naturally high levels of negative emotion-- and negative emotion is the same for everybody. It's fear and anger and disgust and sadness. Those are the four negative emotions.

We all have them. They're all important. There's nothing wrong with those emotions. But if you have very high or intense negative emotions, you need to learn how to manage them, not to get rid of them, not to numb them with drugs and alcohol, but to manage them.

One of the ways to manage negative emotions is exercise, health. That's what you find is that when people have really bad health, either because of their bad habits or for no fault of their own, it tends to raise their negative affect levels. And that means you need to manage your negative effect levels by taking those things on directly.

Most of the time when people are really worried about their health when they go to WebMD, which is an incredible resource it's working on the negative side of their affect profiles. They're working on the negative side of their emotional lives is what it comes down to. And you don't read WebMD and you get happier. You read at WebMD, take control of your health, and get less unhappy actually.

And it's about empowering people with information so they can have better health. But you also say in the book, you have to be unhappy to be happy. Wow.

You are made as a human being to have a full range of emotions. If I offered-- John, if I offered you the deal, hey, John, I got a deal for you. I'm going to get rid of your sadness forever. You should not take the deal because if you did, you'd lose your marriage, you'd lose your friends, and you'd lose your job. And the reason is because you'd no longer care about losing connection with other people.

That's what sadness is all about. It makes you averse to losing something you really care about, usually a relationship with somebody that you love. That's the quintessential kind of sadness.

The same thing is true with fear. If I got rid of your fear, you'd be dead in a week because you wouldn't actually be averse to threats. If I said I'm going to get rid of your disgust, you'd get poisoned.

The important thing for us to understand is that a full life full of well-being has the full range of emotions and experiences. One of the biggest ways that we poorly serve young people today is to say if it feels bad make it stop. No, no, no, no, no, no, you need suffering in your life.

You need pain in your life. You need fear in your life. You need these things so that you can learn and grow. They could be maladapted. They can be too strong.

They can become a medical problem to be sure. But the idea of thinking there's something wrong with me because I'm sad, no, because you're alive is why you're sad. And you need to learn about managing it and learning from it and growing from it. Unhappiness is literally part of happiness.

Arthur, what's the role of faith? And how does that play into our happiness?

Faith is a class of experiences that we call the transcendent. The transcendent might be about heaven, but it might just be about things that are bigger than us. What people need is something that transcends their daily psychodrama.

If we're left to our devices, we're the star of the most boring television show on planet earth, and yet we're fascinated, we're obsessed with this television show. And it drives us crazy. It drives us mad.

We need relief. And the only way we can get relief is through peace and perspective. And that only comes from getting smaller not getting bigger, by zooming out not zooming in. And transcendent experiences bring that.

Maybe that's a meditation practice. Maybe that's walking in nature without devices. Maybe that's studying The Fugues of Johann Sebastian Bach.

Maybe that's understanding the stoic philosophers, or maybe that's the faith of your youth like me. But everybody needs something transcendent that in the vernacular we could just call it faith. But it might be religious, but it might not be.

How do we manage social media? So many of us are aware of the data that suggests constantly scrolling through various social media sites can make people more depressed. But realistically, people aren't going to give them up. So, how do you manage that in a setting of trying to be happier?

Let's first understand what social media does to happiness. It has three effects on happiness. Number one, it sets us up for social comparison. And social comparison is horrible for your happiness, because you'll always find somebody who's better than you, more beautiful than you, richer than you, and you will feel lower than you were before. That's number one.

Number two, it tends to make you feel lonely. And one of the reasons it makes you feel lonely is a very simple physiological process called the pathways of oxytocin. Oxytocin is a neuropeptide as you know full well and many of your listeners do as well. It's actually a functions as a hormone in the brain that's the hormone of human bonding. It really only comes from eye contact and touch.

When you're feeling lonely, that feeling of loneliness really is a is a deficit of oxytocin in your brain and is intensely uncomfortable. And so you look for ways to satisfy your need for oxytocin. One of the things that people often do is they go to social media, but that's like getting all your calories from fast food. It'll give you tons of calories but not enough nutrients, which is one of the reasons that people will scroll social media or spend a lot of time on social media.

And each increasing hour leads you to more loneliness, not less. So loneliness is number two. Social comparison is number one. Loneliness is number two.

And the third is hatred. Especially on a platform like Twitter, I guess, it's X now, you find that it's the algorithms are set up so that you will find your political enemies and feel contempt for them. It'll set you up to feel oppositional to other people.

Now you can curate it in such a way that it doesn't have to do that, but you find that the more time people are politically engaged on social media, the more hateful and contemptuous they become which is horrible for their happiness. The bottom line is less social media is better for your happiness. And if you're going to use it, you have to use it responsibly and much the same way that you would if you use any form of alcohol.

You should moderate it. You should use it responsibly. You should not make it a solo endeavor. So you should connect yourself to friends as much as possible.

And I recommend to be very specific about it that you limit all of your social media use across all platforms to 30 minutes a day or less and do it in all one time period that's scheduled. I also recommend that you not use your phone. I recommend you use the computer to do it because it's less addictive when you do it that way.

People often say to me, what could I start doing today that could reduce my risk of disease? I actually tell them they could focus on quality sleep. That over time is going to have tremendous health benefit, maybe not the next week, but over time. So, what's something that they could start doing today that is overall going to make their lives happier?

The number one input into happiness is simple. It's love. But it's so complex. Love really has four dimensions to it. There's love of the transcendent or the divine.

There's love of family, which are mystical relationships that we didn't choose, and god knows we wouldn't have in so many cases. There's friendships, which are important that they be real friends and not deal friends. And there's love that we express toward everybody in the way that we do our work, if we're doing our work well.

But the bottom line is that every single person listening to us can be better across one or more of those dimensions. The first thing to do today is to write down four words-- faith, family, friends, and work. And then assess your-- take an inventory.

Give yourself a grade on each one, how much love am I getting and giving in each one of those dimensions of my life? And if you're not getting a good enough grade you need to be spending more time on that dimension. And ideally, you should be spending at least a few minutes every single day on each one of those dimensions.

All right, I have some work to do.

We all do. That's the good news. And all of us have things that we can do to feel better and to enjoy better health and to have better health span. And the same thing is true for our happiness. We all have things that we can do, and we all can get happier.

Dr. Arthur Brooks, I have thoroughly enjoyed our discussion. I have thoroughly enjoyed your book. And I highly recommend it to you our listeners. Arthur, thanks for joining me.

Thank you so much. And thanks to all our listeners for taking care of their health and looking out for others as well.

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