What is the biggest mistake people make when thinking about how to be more happy?
The first mistake that people always make is thinking it's a feeling, because they have feelings of happiness and they have feelings of unhappiness. But most people are not brought up as kids learning about the functioning of the brain's limbic system. I mean, that's not standard educational fare.
But the limbic system is the console tissue inside your brain, between two and forty million years old. It predates Homo sapiens. It's really a mammalian feature of the brain. That's the console that creates emotions, which are signals that you have ascertained a threat or an opportunity.
I mean, we sentimentalize our emotions. Feelings, feelings, feelings, feelings. Right? As if that's what makes us human. No, feelings don't make you human. Feelings keep you alive, and it keeps your golden retriever alive, and it keeps the mouse alive in much the same way. And you have positive and negative emotions that signal to your brain, that are signaling to you that you've perceived a threat or an opportunity. You know, that's what it's all about, is what it comes down to.
Now, when things are pleasant, when you've seen an opportunity, when something inspires you and you have a positive emotion, you mistake the positive emotion for the happiness itself.
And that's an error because if you go searching for happy feelings...
Yeah. I mean, you're going to go as a vapor. You're going to go to bed at night saying, 'I sure hope I feel happy tomorrow.' And that's a hell of a way to live.
That's not good living, is what it comes down to. So, you have to get beyond that. Now, the way to think about it is this, from the culinary aspect, because this is, you know, we're the doctor's kitchen after all.
Your feelings and happiness are related much the same way that the smell of your dinner is related to your dinner. Feelings are evidence of dinner, okay? They lead you to do particular things, and they're, you know, something special is going on at mom's house because of the smell, but it's not good enough to content yourself with the smell. You got to go for the dinner.
And so therefore you describe dinner, you would, I mean, how we would talk about it as, you know, people involved in science, dinner itself, if you wanted it to be nutritious, filling and good, you talk about it as macronutrients. You define food, and that's what we do with happiness, is to define happiness.
Okay. And so what would be these macronutrients of happiness?
Macronutrients of happiness, and by the way, this is sort of the basis of my work, which is when I moved fully into the happiness space.
The problem with the research from a psychological perspective is it just defines happiness as feeling happy and knowing that you're happy or something that's completely unhelpful in this way. So I went back to the nutrition literature actually to create a definition for happiness that is both accurate and helpful.
You don't tell somebody, go be happy. It's unhelpful. What you tell somebody is do things so that happiness can find you, live in a particular way. So don't go be healthy. No, eat in a particular way and health will find you.
Right, right. This is kind of how this is how you talk, right? This chimes very much with the way I talk because we already have the inherent knowledge and our body knows what to do with the macronutrients when you provide an environment where they are.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, you can tell somebody who's trying to, you know, basically get in shape, but they're trying to be efficient about it, you know, stay to, I don't know, maybe 2,200 calories a day and get 175 grams of protein and then eat clean and a few other things with your micronutrients and health will find you. You know, your lipid profile will improve, right? The same thing as happiness.
So the macronutrients of happiness, the thing that we really want to pursue, are the protein, carbohydrates and fat of happiness, are enjoyment, satisfaction and meaning. Okay, those are the three things.
And how do I know that? When you look at the well-validated studies and good survey data on happiness and unhappiness, the happiest people have those three macronutrients in balance and abundance. So what I spend a lot of my time on is, you know, I'm going into companies and I'm talking to people, I'm teaching my students at the university and I'm giving them tests to see where they're deficient. I'm giving them nutritional tests for their happiness. And I can tell based on these tests if you don't enjoy your life enough.
Now the problem is also, I mean, this is more complicated because most people don't even know what enjoyment is.
So I have to define the macronutrients, right? Most people have no idea what satisfaction is and they especially don't know what meaning is. So that goes into the education behind all of this stuff and it gets super interesting. But once you know and then you know where you're deficient, you can put together a life plan and your life gets dramatically better.
Let's talk about this idea of like rewiring our brains for happiness. Why does boredom help rewire our brain for happiness?
Yeah, you know, this is really paradoxical because there's so many things in our lives that we don't like but we need, right? There's so many things like that. This is, you know, when you're a kid and your mother said, 'Eat your vegetables.' When you're a little kid, you probably don't like them. Personally, I was nuts about vegetables. I've been eating broccoli since I was a little boy. I would eat it literally at every meal.
Not my son. I'm crazy about broccoli. But that's unusual, right? Eat your vegetables. Why? Because you don't like it, but you should, is what it comes down to. There are all kinds of things where we have aspirations that are not in accord with our immediate animal impulses. Short-term, long-term, big goals, you know, it's like satisfaction in the short term versus the goals that you actually want in life.
And you know, you want the pizza, you want the potato chips, you call them crisps. Chips you call them, or French fries. I mean, it's so confusing over here, right? You want that stuff because it actually feeds the dopamine circuits in your brain telling you you're getting these really easy calories, which is your Pleistocene brain from 250,000 years ago. But you know that that's maladapted to the current milieu where we have an abundance of calories and we have all kinds of nutritious food around us.
And so you don't do all the things that you actually want, is the way that this works. Boredom is just like that. Now, boredom, it's maybe not the right word. It's lack of distraction. When you're undistracted, what turns on in your brain is a series of structures called the default mode network.
That's a bunch of structures that you use in concert with one another. It's like a little symphony in your brain that gives you mind wandering and flights of fancy and weird recursive thoughts. And that's what you need to start understanding the meaning of your life.
Now, if you're never distracted, you'll never actually turn on the parts of your brain that you need to consider the most important things. It doesn't feel important. I mean, you're sitting on the train and your phone is out of battery or something, which is like hell for young people. You know, if you die and go to hell, it's like you're holding your iPhone and it's out of battery forever, right? And it's stuck to your hand, right?
So, imagine you're on the train and this is actually happening. You got nothing to do. You got nothing to read. So, you're just looking out the window, sheep, trees, right? It feels like a waste of time and it's actually unpleasant in the short term, but your brain needs to do that. Mother nature wants your brain to do that. And for the longest time, you naturally did.
I mean, my great-grandfather Leroy Brooks, born in 1862 in Thayer, Kansas. This is Americana. It was generations before that. They came from, you know, Lancashire. They snuck out at night in 1630 and came to Massachusetts and then went going west, west, west. Very American.
And Leroy Brooks had no iPhone. He had no podcasts, not even yours or mine. Shocking. He had nothing to do. And he was just behind the mule all day long. But I guarantee you he never came home to my great-grandmother Mary Ellen and said, 'Honey, you know, I had a panic attack behind the mule today.'
Because his brain was working the way it was supposed to. His HPA axis wasn't flooding. He wasn't having these weird adrenal effects actually happening, which happens when your brain isn't working the way it's supposed to, when you never have these flights of fancy, when you never have this mind wandering, when you're never able to calm yourself. Now, the biology is what we're studying right now.
But the reason that we have to study this biology of why people are having so much anxiety and so much depression and panic attacks has everything to do with the fact that our brains are broken in no small part because we're never bored. And so I have to prescribe boredom to my students. It's amazing.
And for anybody who's still unpersuaded, Leroy, his life moment to moment was objectively boring, right? He was looking at a mule's butt, right? Ours, but his life wasn't boring, right? His life overall wasn't boring at all. He didn't say on his deathbed, 'Honey, that was boring.'
It wasn't boring. It was a huge adventure, his life was. He was living and loving and having kids and having grandkids and making a living and talking to his neighbors and he was alive, going to church. He's fully alive, right?
People today, young people today, young people, but also, you know, I'm no young guy and I know a lot of people my age, they're never bored moment to moment, but their lives are grindingly boring.
That's the irony. That you must be bored moment to moment to have an interesting life. And that's what you need to understand meaning and purpose and be happy.
I've recently started doing a lot more dives into Ayurveda. You know, getting back to my roots, understanding where a modern scientific lens can actually provide some clarity as to why certain practices are beneficial, and one of them is silence.
So every year now for the last couple of years I do silent retreats where there's no talking, no reading, certainly no phones, no email. You just walk around usually in like places that are stunningly beautiful like the Lake District or I was recently in Devon a couple of months ago for four or five days and I sit on a bench, I eat some food and that's about it.
And I just allow my mind to wander and I sort of unpack loads of things like my childhood and what things make me happy and you know, ponder some of these questions, but without the extreme of doing something like a vipassana.
It is hard for a lot of people and you know, I mentioned this to my wife and that sounds like hell to her. Like she famously tells me... yeah, you know, I mean, so are you, but she has this like, she's Australian, right? She's Australian-Italian by background, but you know, 30 minutes of like boredom for her, it's like, wow, you know, even that, even that.
So, how would you prescribe boredom to your students or the folks listening to this?
So, I usually do it with respect to not using tech, because this is really what we're talking about is not using tech. I mean, and again, we could back up and say, okay, 20 years and say, don't watch too much TV. Or you could go back before that and say, stop listening to the radio all the time.
Or you could go back and, you know, Einstein one time said that people read too many books, and part of the reason was because deep learning doesn't come from reading five books a week. That's just an overload of knowledge.
There's an ancient philosophical concept called concupiscence, and that's just idle curiosity. Okay. And a lot of so-called intellectuals, they just want to flood themselves with information all the time. More and more and more stimulus. And part of the reason is because they don't want to be lost in their thoughts to process what they've learned and figure out what it means.
And so when you read a book, you should read a book and then you should put it down and you should take some notes and you should think about it and journal on it a little bit and go walk around and figure out what the book means. That's the way to learn, right? That's the whole idea.
Now, fast forward to the present. It's gotten easier and easier and easier to distract ourselves to the point that we have this perfect anti-boredom device. I mean, we've mastered anti-boredom and broken our brains completely. I mean, it's like I would love to be back in the problem of books, right?
So, I have protocols that are, you know, based on, there's a lot of research on this. You don't have to throw your phone in the ocean. You don't have to actually become a monk. I interviewed for my own show a hermit in the Himalayas last year, okay? You know, a Tibetan hermit, and he sees other humans two times a year for the past 27 years.
He granted me an interview. It's just me and the hermit and a bunch of monkeys. Yeah. So, his friends are all these monkeys. And he meditates all day and he reads and he studies and, you know, he lives the Tibetan Buddhist life.
And then, you know, when he's asleep, people who serve the hermitage will come up the mountain and leave some food, you know, once a week or something. And yeah, it was pretty interesting. But okay, you don't have to do that.
Sure. I'm not going to do that. I thought my practice was extreme, but that's another level.
And by the way, that goes from solitude, which you need, to isolation, which is really, really hard and bad for a lot of people, that you become very lonely.
So, what I recommend based on the science is that there's really only kind of three things you need to do. Number one is tech-free times, ideally every day. The second is tech-free zones, physical zones, and then the last is tech fasts, like what you did with Ayurveda.
So the tech-free times that really matter the most are, number one, the first hour of the day for neurocognitive programming. A lot of young men write to me, and nobody writes to me and says, 'Hey man, hey professor, I just want to write and say I'm feeling super happy and I wanted you to know.' I mean, they don't come to you and say, 'Doctor, I feel great.' People write to me because they're unhappy, right? And they ask for advice.
And a lot of young guys, my heart goes out to them. You know, 'I'm living with my mom. I graduated from college. I can't find a job. I was smoking a lot of weed,' you know, and all these things are not good, you know. I don't care what anybody says, smoking weed's bad for you, right? Euphorics are not good for you.
As a matter of fact, because they're anesthetizing you from the experience of living because you're in distress. That's what it comes down to.
So the first thing that I recommend to them is something that in India is called the Brahma Muhurta. Have you ever heard of this? The Brahma Muhurta? It means the creator's time in Sanskrit.
Ancient idea. It's probably between four and six thousand years old. And so it varies kind of from the idea of, you know, Lord Krishna practiced in Mathura, practiced the Brahma Muhurta. The greatest time, a muhurta is 48 minutes. The Brahma Muhurta is two muhurtas before dawn. An hour and 36 minutes before dawn.
Yeah. Getting up an hour and 36 minutes before dawn. Modern neuroscience is very clear that getting up before dawn is super good for you. If the sun is warm when you get up, you lost the first battle.
I know everybody's like turning off the podcast right now.
Yeah, right. Especially in British summertime where you have to get up at like 3:30.
That's a problem. I know. I mean, don't make the perfect the enemy. This is from cultures that are pretty close to the equator. And so we're really far north in Europe. I'm from Seattle too. It's the same latitude.
But basically it's getting up early and then without your phone. Now, some people, like you're running a business, if you're a journalist, whatever, you got to look to make sure nothing's on fire, but that takes five seconds. Boom.
And then the whole first hour, which is the most important hour for neurocognitive programming, you know? So people who have OCD or people who have nervous tics or something like that, the only way that you're going to break tic-like behavior is by the only time that willpower is actually helpful in that is the first hour of the day because you neurocognitively program yourself.
The only hope you have if you have something that's obsessive and compulsive is to not do it the first hour because you're not going to break that tic at four o'clock in the afternoon. So the first hour of the day is a magic hour. It's the creator's time.
And so using that, and I'll tell these young guys, go for a walk without your devices while the sun is coming up and the air is cool and let your mind wander. 'Yeah, but I'm thinking about stupid nonsense. I'm thinking about that girl and who knows, I will have thought obsessively.' I don't care. I don't care.
People don't understand meditation. Westerners are horrible about meditation. The Dalai Lama told me that Westerners do it wrong, right? It's like, you guys just want to be all spaced out, the Dalai Lama, right? He says, and you also, you just meditate so you can feel better. You should meditate so the whole world feels better. That's very profound.
So don't worry about it. You let your brain do what it's supposed to do. It's first hour of the day. Second tech-free time is when you're eating.
And there's special properties. I recommend that you eat alone as infrequently as possible, okay? It's very good to eat with another person, and this is actually, according to evolutionary biology, this is when we get a lot of oxytocin because we communicate with our kin while we're eating. We're sort of evolved to sit around a campfire and talk to our kin while we put, you know, pieces of yak meat into our mouth or something.
That's a normal thing to do. Sometimes you do eat alone, but you should really never scroll while you eat. You should not eat mindlessly, and especially when you're with somebody, the phone shouldn't even be on the table face down because that will interrupt the oxytocin exchange that you have.
The third is the last hour of the day. And that's really, really important for sleep architecture, and that's all the stuff that everybody who watches the show already knows. I mean, the functioning of the pineal gland because of blue light and endogenous melatonin production and structure of sleep, etc.
But it's also highly spiritual and social. You know, the last hour of the day, you and your wife need to be together. Right. I mean, that's a holy hour. That's a really big deal.
And you know, the worst thing you can do for your marriage is scroll your phones looking at stupid reels individually while you're lying in bed. That's such a waste of a marriage.
You know, I readily recommend that people read to each other and then look into each other's eyes and have a little conversation for five minutes before they go to sleep. This is really, really good for your sleep. This is super good. I mean, don't read individually. Read to each other.
Right. I mean, that has special properties and the science backs it up. But, you know, anybody who's in love right now is like, 'I know, I know,' right? You know, so for me, it's like if my wife reads to me in this exotic Barcelona accent, it's like pharmaceutical-grade narcotics.
Addictive indeed, but it actually won't put me in an early grave. It might actually keep me alive. So, those are the three tech times: first hour, last hour, meal times.
Tech-free zones are, number one, the bedroom. You should not have your phone in the bedroom. It should be locked up and plugged in downstairs from an hour before you go to bed until an hour after you wake up. Never look at it during the night.
Now, if you do that for six weeks, you'll be out of the habit of ever looking at it at night. You can even use it as your alarm clock after that, but you got to break the habit, right?
And the second tech-free zone is schools. And I'm a real advocate for this. There shouldn't be any iPhones in any schools from kindergarten through PhD.
Totally. I mean, it's so insane that we abuse children by, you know, putting predators on their screens and hijacking their brains this way.
It's made so many kids depressed and anxious by having unfettered access. They're so lonely, and especially during lunch, by the way. They shouldn't have their phones. And so, we have all kinds of technologies to lock them up at the beginning of the day and unlock them at the end of the day.
Then the last is tech fast. And I recommend 96 hours a year. More is better, but I mean, for most people you can't. But 96 hours a year, I mean, just a four-day fast, it's the first day you're, it's like lost children screaming in your head.
The second day you're calming down. Your autonomic nervous system is starting to, and then the third day you like it and the fourth day you wish it were longer. That's the typical experience.
And then if you go longer or do it more frequently, you can really, really reset how dopamine is working in your brain. And Anna Lembke's stuff is really good on that. You know, she wrote 'Dopamine Nation'. And she talks about how long it takes, and it's a little bit longer than that, but 96 hours a year. Those are the things that you can do.
So, you know what? It sounds simple and almost, you know, laughable that we've been talking about this, but the number of people who do scroll back-to-back or scroll at the table is shockingly high. And I don't think people understand the gravity of what these habits are doing to steal their happiness.
And this is why I wanted to talk to you about rewiring your habits for happiness. One thing that I've definitely been doing a lot more of is finding micro-moments in the day to experience boredom, because running a business and doing the social content stuff, I'm running from screen to screen. And I think a lot of people do that in the workplace as well.
And so I'm even trying to steal like 60 to 120 seconds where I go outside and I just look outside. In fact...
Exactly. Boredom snacks. That's actually a good way of framing it, you know.
Yeah. I mean, more and more what we're actually finding in the psychology literature, but also just basic biology, because psychology is biology, right? Fundamentally, is that almost anything good for you is really good in snacks.
And so, you know Rhonda Patrick, right? You know her show. Have you been on her show before?
I haven't been on her show. No. She is great.
She's smart. She's nice. She's deep. She's philosophical. Yeah, she's great. And she talks about exercise snacks, you know, so little, they'll just, you know, could do 10 air squats.
Once an hour, do 10 air squats once an hour. It has huge benefits for your, I mean, for your, they've done studies on your lipid profile when you do 10 air squats every hour during the workday, and your lipid profile gets better. I mean, you have less plaquing in your arteries. Crazy stuff that you can actually see.
And it's better than a lot of other things. So, for sure, boredom snacks. That's a really, really good thing to do. And just if you need to put an alarm on your phone, you know, and once an hour, you get up and go look out the window.
Yeah. We had Andy Galpin on the pod a couple of months ago. He's awesome as well. And like, we were talking about volume and intensity when it comes to exercise, but you don't need to do that all in like an hour, an hour and a half every single day. You can actually spread that out, and as long as it's across the week, you get enough volume, you're going to have those benefits for muscles and...
For sure. I mean, actually, you know, one of the things I talk about because I'm very, very interested in health and fitness as it relates to happiness, but also it's just a big, big part of my life. I have physical protocols that I actually walk people through, you know, five, ten-part protocols for, you know, the beginning of the day, the end of the day, because people need guidelines, is what it comes down to.
Yeah, for sure. But for people my age, you know, when I was your... how old are you?
Oh, you're a mere child. You're a mere child. And look at that. I'm glad you're telling me that. Beautiful head of hair. Black hair. Unbelievable. I remember those days.
So I'm 62 at this point. And you know, Andy Galpin is really, you know, but I've figured out how to just both stay in shape and stay healthy. And the way that you do that, for example, with exercise is doing exactly what Andy Galpin is talking about. You know, when I was your age, I was doing bro splits.
Do you use that expression over here? The bro split. And so, you know, Monday is National Chest Day, right? And then you got one leg day, and it's like using Mike Mentzer's, you know, you're just going to wreck your joints, right?
And so when I was your age, I've been on the road forever. I've been touring since I was 19 years old. So I travel all the time. Every city I would be in, I would go to the oldest iron gym I could find, right? It's like those old-school weightlifting gyms, or with a picture of Arnold on there.
And I would find those guys who knew him at Gold's Gym in Venice Beach. And now they're like a hundred, but they're still lifting. And I would go to them and I would say, 'Teach me, Sensei. Teach me.' Right? And they will, right? And so they gave me all these practices.
And one of the things I learned way before guys like Andy Galpin were talking about it is you need to, the older you get, the less the bro split's going to work for you. The more you need to do full-body training and spread out your volume over the course of the week.
And so instead of doing leg day once a week, then it became two times a week, then it's three times a week. And it's paradoxical because I work out an hour a day, seven days a week, I can lift seven days a week. I just have to spread everything out, and then my joints don't hurt. And I get the same amount of volume. That's the whole point. So you got to have the protocols that are appropriate to your age.
Yeah. I love how we started this conversation talking about happiness and now we're talking about bro splits.
But it's really important to spread it out, just, you know, whilst we're on this tangent, because when you do get older, you've got anabolic resistance is the first thing. So, you know, the protein that you consume is not going to have the same desired effect, and the same goes for muscle stimuli, but it doesn't mean that you can't have that stimulus.
But the other thing is you really got to be careful about injury. I mean, I'm realizing this now at 41, I can't do some of those intense exercises back to back anymore. I do need to spread out over the...
Your CNS works differently. I mean, it's just you feel things differently.
Totally. Yeah. Not just the mechanics of it. Yeah.
Yeah, for sure. So a lot of my work to actually become... Look, what we want is to be happier people with more wellbeing overall. And that requires that you pay attention to your temple.
I mean, you have to take care of your body, is what it comes down to. So what I put in my body, what I do with my body, also what I think about and how I worship and how I love, it's all one thing.
Actually, so which is one of the reasons that my students in the science of happiness class, I'm giving them exercise protocols.
I know. And they're super interested in it, right? They thought they wanted to exercise so they could look better in their bikini or something like that. No, it's so that you can look in the mirror and not start crying. So you can actually feel better about your soul, is really what it comes down to.
It's not all about what you put in your body. It's not all about how you move, but it's all integrated. It's all really one thing, is how it comes about. So I do have to give them step-by-step protocols. How do you start your day? How do you end your day? Etc. If you have a relationship, what do you do? What are the protocols, daily practices?
To make sure that you don't just get married, but you stay married.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. On the subject of temples and soul, one of the things I took from the book was this idea of being made to feel small every day, and like, be aware of how insignificant we are, to use your words, to transcend. Why is this important for rewiring our brains for happiness?
There's a lot of new literature on consciousness. Have you read Michael Pollan's new book?
I haven't read the new one, no.
'This Is Your Mind on Plants'. No, his consciousness book. 'How to Change Your Mind'. No, the new one, 'A World Awaits'. It's a really, really fine book. It's good. And he's a journalist, so he's not a scientist, but he's adjacent to science and knowledgeable enough, and he's a beautiful writer. And consciousness is a hard thing to write about. You write a book about consciousness, like, you got to be a good writer to pull that one off, right?
But there's a paradox about consciousness. Consciousness is the experience of life. It's the experience of being you, you know? It's like something to be you. It's your interiority. It's the inner conversation. It's the awareness of you.
And it's a huge paradox because neuroscientists have never figured out the part of the brain where you experience self-consciousness. I mean, you do all kinds of other things where you're aware of other things. We know parts of the brain that do that. Where you have feelings, we do that. Those are lower forms of consciousness. The highest form of consciousness is you being aware of you. But paradoxically, too much of that makes you deeply unhappy.
So William James, the father of modern psychology, who taught at my university in the late 19th century. So my colleague William James, right? How pretentious. He talked about the two selves: the I-self and the me-self.
The I-self is what you use to look out at the world, and the me-self is your consciousness of yourself looking in at yourself. So one is you're the subject, and one is where you're the object.
The I-self, as I'm, you know, I'm looking at you right now. I'm thinking about you in this conversation right now. But if I were thinking, 'I wonder how I'm coming off in the things that I'm saying right now,' just now I boomeranged it back on myself.
So the highest form of consciousness is the me-self, and your dog doesn't have any me-self. I mean, it's like you're sitting there with your dog on a park bench and you're thinking about my job and, you know, what I'm going to do next year and, you know, prospectively, you know, all my hopes and dreams. You're not...
Here, you're not that happy.
Your dog is thinking about, 'I'm sitting with my master right now,' right? I'm not thinking about me. I'm thinking about what actually is happening. And that's what you're trying to get with mindfulness practices and all that sort of thing.
The easiest way to get that is this is what philosophers call transcendence. See, you have to have the me-self or you'll get run over by a car. You have to have self-awareness.
Or you'll be divorced in a week. You know, you have to be paying attention to yourself, but not too much because it'll make you miserable because then it's me, me, me, me, me. And back to the internet, by the way. That's all it is is a mirror.
Like, how many likes do I have? You know, how many followers do I have? What did people think about my post?
Right? You know, how, you know, that famous movie star, how do I relate to that? You're thinking about yourself all the time, so you need fewer mirrors and you need to stand in awe of things that are bigger than yourself. That's transcendence. To transcend yourself is to be more purely in the I-self, in the state of observation. You know, Zen Buddhism, have you studied Zen Buddhism at all? Zen Buddhism, of course, which is the Buddhist component which is largely in Japan.
It's less a religion, and the Zen Buddhists are all going to write into the comment section, though. It's more an attitude of observation.
Right. As I'm going to observe life. Vipassana is very much like this too, by the way. You've done that. I'm going to observe what's going on with me without relating to me.
It's like, Arthur's feeling sad and unhappy right now. What's happening? You know, and just with a detachment to it, right? The ultimate detachment that you want is standing in awe of the universe. Now, maybe that's by studying philosophy that blows your mind.
Maybe that's listening to the fugues of Johann Sebastian Bach, the greatest composer who ever lived. Right? I'm an old musician, so it's my opinion. Maybe that's walking the Brahma Muhurta without devices. Maybe that's a Vipassana meditation practice, which I strongly recommend. Or maybe that's practicing your religious faith, which is the easiest way for many people to do it. You know, a lot of people wind up reconnecting with their faith because they realize they need more transcendence in their life, and then they have an actual experience of God. And they have a deep spiritual awakening. They have a deep sense of divine love. But they go there because they need the I-self more. They need to be in transcendence more. I mean, I'm a traditionally religious person. Before we did the podcast, I went to mass. I go to daily mass, right? I need it. I need it. I need to stand in awe. I need to be separated from me because it's just too hard every day.
And so every day, I mean, it was great that you mentioned that you went to mass today. If someone isn't traditionally religious or wasn't brought up in a faith, didn't have the opportunity to stand in awe, how might one start that with regards to actually feeling this sense of getting out of themselves, the me-self?
The me-self. Yeah. That's why so many young people say, 'I wish I could do more meditation,' is because they have a natural hunger to get out of me-self.
And they think that single-point meditation, where you're looking at that thing and getting all spaced out, they're looking for relief. They want relief. 'I want relief' is what they're saying. But that's too hard for most people. Most of the meditation among the Tibetan Buddhists, I've worked for a long time with the Dalai Lama. I've sat in meditation with his monks many times in his monastery in Dharamsala in the Himalayan foothills, and most of what they're doing is actually contemplating a passage of Tibetan scripture, and that's the self. And so you don't have to stare like, do SoulCycle and, you know, have an intention. You don't have to do that. I mean, more power to you if you can actually pull that off, but I got the monkey mind too bad, and so, you know, like single-point meditation, like, it's not for me.
But you can do that by the contemplation of an idea.
What does this mean? Turning it over in your head. You know, two sentences. What might this actually mean? Some people will actually do that through the study of something intensive or a particular activity. I've heard people talk about this through golf. It's like, not my thing, man. I'm not a golfer. I'm never going to be a golfer. It's like, it's so boring. Are you kidding? Also, it kind of irritates me.
I think I'm philosophically opposed to it. But that's just my own hang-ups.
Now the golfers are writing in. Yeah. Um, so much to the golf constituency for The Doctor's Kitchen.
They're gone. They're out of here, man.
More sponsorships from Topgolf.
So, yeah, it's a, you know, people find this in different ways, but you need to get away from yourself. You need to find ways to actually get away from yourself. That Brahma Muhurta is a really sort of a wonderful way to do it in its own way after you get sort of experienced. At the very beginning, your flights of fancy and mind wandering are kind of me-self, but you can get better at it under those circumstances. There are a number of ways people just should experiment. One of my friends took me to a Baha'i temple just outside of Chicago. Have you been to that temple?
Yeah. It's up in the northern suburbs or some place.
Yeah. Yeah. I have one of my great friends is Baha'i, and so I've written about the Baha'i faith quite a bit.
Incredible. Like, it is, I mean, talk about a way in which to get out of yourself, just going there. So for listeners who haven't seen it, just look up, you know, Baha'i Temple Chicago, and it's just this dome structure that you could imagine somewhere in the Middle East, and it's perfectly symmetrical. The architect, I think, was really well renowned, and the Baha'i faith is just really interesting, you know, from an intellectual perspective of, you know, this sort of combination of all these different faiths with this idea of oneness. And I mean, that's how I try and remind myself to, you know, experience awe and experience this idea of, like, yeah, transcending.
Yeah, for sure. The Baha'i faith is a 19th-century faith that came out of Persia. It's a Persian belief system that's quite universalist. It's monotheistic. It believes that there is one God. Um, it's highly structured and moral in its way. The prophet of the Baha'i faith, his name was Baha'u'llah.
And he wrote lovingly about the universe. So one of my great friends is Rainn Wilson. I write about him in the meaning book.
About suffering for those who don't know, because we're in the UK. He was in The Office, the American version of The Office, and he played a character named Dwight Schrute.
In The Office. I think the American version is way funnier. Now, now we lost Ricky Gervais as a viewer. I bet he's a viewer, too.
It's super funny. It's still actually the funniest show on television, even though it went off a long time ago.
And, you know, the Baha'i faith really has saved him. Gosh, it really has. He grew up in it. His father converted in like the '60s because a lot of hippies did that. And there's still 175,000 Baha'is in America.
Yeah. We're so religious. We love religion. You sophisticated, you know.
I mean, I was really surprised that there were that many followers in the US. I'd never heard of it before. It was just so by chance. I was in Chicago. My friend told me to go to this temple, and I was like, 'Wow.' Yeah. You know, people should check it out. It's very, very beautiful.
Yeah. No, it's incredible. Um, okay. So, we've got boredom. We've got these morning routines and feeling small every day. Leisure.
Yeah. Leisure. When I think about leisure, I think of things like golf, even though I don't play golf, but sports and all the rest of it. But why is leisure helpful from the perspective of happiness? And what do you mean when you say leisure?
When I talk about leisure, it's largely leisure, as you say, leisure.
When I talk about leisure, you know, it's a... I work a lot with strivers. I mean, I teach at fancy business schools and, you know, people who are going to be the masters of the universe. And I work with, you know, CEOs and entrepreneurs and people like you. I mean, you work all the time, don't you? You're a super hard worker. I love it. Yeah, of course. Of course. You love it. You're obsessed with it, right? But also, it can become a pathology. And part of the reason is because your loved ones will say, 'You need more work-life balance.' But you don't want work-life balance. You want your work to be part of your life and your life to be part of your work. You want work-life integration.
And you recognize you don't want to marginalize your relationships. What you want is to have better relationships and to love your work and to live it all. You know, there are a lot of people out there who don't live that way. Many, many people, they're not going to be watching the show typically, but there are many people out there. It's like, yeah, I want to work for the post office and I want to work, you know, eight hours a day if we're in the UK. It's, you know, three hours a day if it's France. And they want to work a kind of a moderate amount of work and then they want to forget their work when they come home. But that's not what I'm talking about here. People who are looking for a deep integration of life and work, they often get into a pathology that we often refer to as workaholism, and the only satisfaction that you actually get is from work. And what I prescribe to a lot of them to have a better life and better relationships is to understand the true nature of leisure.
Leisure is not chilling on a beach. You know, it's just not like, you know, it's actually the people who are, you know, as sunburned as lobsters down on the coast of Marbella, those Brits who are down there all the time, they're actually working in the post office, right? But real leisure isn't that. That's what the Greeks would have called otium, which is just kind of torpor, which is sort of laziness. The Greeks were not in favor of chilling on a beach.
What they really wanted, and what the German philosopher Josef Pieper talks about, he's a 20th-century philosopher, really beautiful, deeply soulful writer. He thinks that leisure properly understood is the basis of culture. So what I prescribe a lot, I don't do clinical work, but I'm a teacher to people who don't know how to relax, is to understand leisure properly, and in so doing, your work will become more meaningful. So that's the inducement to all the workaholics and success-addicted, self-objectifying people who, you know, it's like, if I work harder, will you love me more? You know, is that your work will be much better if you understand actual leisure. Now, leisure is something that's extremely generative and productive, but they don't pay you for that, you don't get worldly rewards for that, you're not going to get famous for that, won't give you more power, won't do anything for your bank account, but it's really, really productive.
So the way to think about it, according to Josef Pieper, is to do one of three things. Now, again, your results may vary. Figure out which one and then vary it in a way that's... you got to experiment on yourself, right? Like anything else, we talked about caffeine and, you know, the metabolism of caffeine and half-life, etc. Figure out yourself by experimenting on yourself.
The three areas are deepening relationships very purposefully, like doing stuff to improve your marriage, doing stuff to improve your relationship with your friends. The second is to deepen your spiritual life, and that means, like, go read the holy books. I mean, have you read the Bhagavad Gita? A lot of people haven't. Go, especially if you're a Hindu, go read that. It's unbelievably interesting and study that. Go study the writings of Baha'u'llah if you're Baha'i, or even if you're not, right? And for a Christian like me, that's actually reading holy scriptures every day and praying every day and getting a really serious spiritual practice. And if it's not a spiritual practice, it's something transcendent, transcendental.
The third is learning something new, learning something that you don't need to learn. Maybe you need to learn how to paint. That's what Churchill... Churchill learned how to paint. Nobody said, you know, let's elect him again because he's a painter, right? He was learning how to paint because that was actually leisure for him. And he wanted, he said, and he was so interested in it. He said, if I go to heaven, which is debatable. I mean, he's a great leader, but imperfect man. If I go to heaven, the first million years, I'm going to really learn how to paint. But, and for other people, it's learning how to golf. For other people, it's actually learning to do math. For some people, it's actually learning about the science of happiness. For many people, it's actually watching your show and actually doing the recipes.
That's a really wonderful form of leisure, as a matter of fact, because it's so generative. Those three baskets, if taken seriously, and that means doing them seriously, that means setting aside time, that means having a proper Sabbath on the weekend perhaps to do those things, your work's going to improve. What are you doing yourself for leisure, as you pronounce it?
