How Radical Honesty Can Fix Your Life

There's a bunch of research that comes out of University of Massachusetts in Amherst that shows that the average person tells something like 2 lies to a stranger within the first 10 minutes of conversation. We lie a lot. When you say little white lies to people just to kind of get through the day, make things a little bit easier, et cetera, et cetera. Now, there's a problem with that, which is that there's a literature out there that suggests that people who are telling whopper lies and actually committing crimes almost always that there's an algorithm that starts with this. If you want a real relationship that stands the test of time, closeness is what you want and honesty is actually how you get it if you do it right. So consider this, would you like to be freer and happier? Well, maybe honesty is the way for you to love yourself and love each other more. Hey friends, welcome to Office Hours. I'm Arthur C. Brooks. This is the show about love and happiness, specifically the science of love and happiness, how you can use the science to live a better life, and how you can bring these ideas to other people as well. I try to be as practical as possible while bringing you really interesting ideas such that you can use them over the course of your life and you can explain them to other people. And I appreciate very much that so many of you are writing in to say that you're teaching this material to the people around you all the time. Please do keep doing so. One of the ways that you can spread these ideas, of course, is to share the show. Please send a link wherever you're listening or watching this to people that you love and people that you know, because the more that we spread these ideas, the happier and better off the world gets, I think. And that's exactly what I want. And I dare say that's probably what you want as well. If you're a longtime listener, viewer, thank you for staying with us. Um, please feedback telling us how we could make this show more interesting, how we could make it more useful, easier to look at besides getting a different host. And, and, and you write into us at officehours@arthurbrooks.com. That's the email for the show. Or just put it in the comments wherever you're watching or listening to this. While you are thinking about going to the website, ArthurBrooks.com, that's where you find the email address. You can also sign up for the newsletter. My newsletter is free. It comes out every Friday. It's full of antics and jokes. Most importantly, it's also the kind of things that you find on this show. 300 to 500 words every single week. It's very, very practical or right to the point. You can start your day on Fridays with a little bit of happiness science if you want. Once again, no charge. Please do sign up at ArthurBrooks.com/newsletter. Newsletter. And if you're interested in meeting in person, we have retreats that are going on. I'm teaching this particular material with people that I have trained and some of which I'm actually doing myself. So go to retreats.arthurbrooks.com. Love to see you. So what do I want to talk about today? I want to talk about honesty. This is something that I think about an awful lot that people have asked me about many times about how much does being completely honest affect your happiness? And it could go either way, right? Being a really honest person, really saying what you think in a society, in a world that doesn't encourage that, what'll it do to you? I want to make the case today that honesty is a form of love. I want to make the case that being more honest with others and yourself, if you do it right, and that's a very important caveat, can make you a happier person and can make other people happier as well. And if I do my job, I want to make the case that in point of fact, you can turn the corner in the way that you communicate with other people that makes you known as somebody who's honest out of a sense of love, which will be very life-enhancing. I want to talk about why, and then I want to tell you about how to do it because that's what we do here is the how-to as much as anything else. Now, before we get started, I'm going to ask you a question. What is your most controversial opinion that you're hiding. Now, it doesn't have to be something really horrible and offensive, just for some reason, something that you believe that you don't share with other people for some very good reason. Put it in the comments, especially if you like to comment anonymously. That might be a good way to unburden yourself. But I'd like to know, you know, maybe it's feelings about your family that you're not comfortable sharing for whatever reason. Maybe it's your religious beliefs or non-beliefs about religion that are different than the community that you live in. Maybe it's something that you believe that everybody says yes to, but just isn't true as far as you're concerned. I'd, I'd love to hear that in the comments, but I'd also like you to think about this and sort of keep hold of it in your head and ask yourself why. Almost everybody has things that they believe to be true or things that they have come to believe are untrue, and, and they're not forthright about these things. As a matter of fact, they might even lie about their actual true beliefs. Almost everybody has these things. I don't know anybody, as a matter of fact, off the top of my head, who isn't doing that in some way, shape, or form. Think about that thing in your own life and ask yourself, why are you doing that? Why are you doing that? And by the way, I'm going to assume that you have very good reasons. So let's think about why that might be the case. Now, number one, let's say that you have a belief that is at odds with the people that you care about and would affect the people that you care about potentially. You might just not want to hurt people. You might not want to offend people because that's not a nice thing to do. And out of basic charity, you're not sharing everything that's written on your heart. But actually, there might be fear that's motivating you. There might be a fear that somebody won't like you. They won't love you. They won't admire you. They won't take you seriously. Or even worse, maybe you have an opinion that's so at odds with your— if your employment situation or your school situation, that it might lead to professional or social consequences. You might be ostracized, you might be thrown out of the group. Fear, in point of fact, is almost always the motivator of people actually not being forthright with the things that they believe. It, it is fear for their own personal security or their own personal prosperity is where it comes from. Now, if that's the case for you, it doesn't mean you're a coward. There's something morally faulty about you. On the contrary, that's evolutionary biology. I've talked about this ad nauseam. On the program that evolutionary biology guides so much of what we do. The Middle Pleistocene period around 250,000 years ago when the human brain was about its current dimensions, not its exact configuration today, but we were effectively modern by about that period. And that was a time when, when all Homo sapiens lived in small kin-based bands, hierarchically arranged of 30 to 50 individuals that were hunters and gatherers. That was basically the whole human race. Now, during that time, you needed to get along with the people that you lived with, 30 to 50 people. And it was a hostile world. You do not want to be apart from those people. So the result of it is that you had an incredible incentive, a biologically wired incentive to not rock the boat, to stay in line with other people think. If you had a differing opinion about something, about, you know, a differing opinion about does elk meat taste good, I don't know, Does that animal skin look good on us? Whatever, whatever the, you know, the controversy might have been. And you don't think like the rest of the tribe, the rest of the band, you're not going to share that. If you do, if you're particularly at odds with people about things that are important, you might find yourself walking the savanna alone. And that's the perfect way to become a cheetah's lunch. So therefore our brains are literally wired to be terrified of going against the crowd of social exclusion. On the basis of something that we do, the, the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, I've talked about it 3 or 4 times on the show for the past 40 episodes or so. That's a little part of the limbic system that's designated, that's been evolved to, to give us very, very aversive emotions, very uncomfortable feelings because we're afraid of social exclusion. It gives us a sense of sadness and we don't like it. And so the result is that, that it's not that you're afraid of being left alone. You're afraid of how you'll feel if you're left alone. You're afraid of the feeling of social exclusion, and that's what will induce you to choose dishonesty over honesty a lot of the time. This is not a moral failing. This is a feature, not a bug on the human genome. But of course today that can be maladapted. You can easily see how we would, we would think about walking the frozen tundra and dying alone. And we would port that, that, that basic primeval fear into Having the wrong opinion in a biology class at the university. I say the wrong thing. I think something that, that my colleagues think is retrograde, and the result is that I'm gonna be socially ostracized or God forbid canceled on social media. And that gives me the same primordial terror because it uses the same parts of the brain as, as the consequences would've been 250,000 years ago, or for that matter, 10,000 years ago. Well, that's anachronistic. We need to move on, but we have to have the proper knowledge. We have to have the proper information. Set such that we can use the updated circumstances and stand up to our limbic system and choose the way we want to live as opposed to going according to our animal impulses. That's what I really want to talk about when it comes to going your own way. Now, I've talked in the past in this show— I'm not going to talk about it today, but I've talked in the past about my favorite philosopher, who's Ralph Waldo Emerson. He wrote Self-Reliance in 1841, an essay beautiful essay that was so controversial that his own aunt publicly denounced him for the rugged individualism of going your own way. You know, the whole idea that, you know, that when he talked about a very famous expression in that essay was he talked about the hobgoblins of little minds. You probably heard that expression before. It actually came from Ralph Waldo Emerson, where he said the little minds are the conformists, the people who don't believe something, but they say it anyway. And so there's this moral aspiration to be honest. In an appropriate, non-hurtful way, but there's a fear about doing it. That's what I want to adjudicate. And the reason is because I believe that you can be honest, and if you do it the right way, you'll be happier. That's what I really want to argue. But it takes skill. So, so that's where I'm going. Done properly, honesty is an act of charity toward others and an act of charity toward yourself. Now I have a friend who is in kind of the same business as me. He's very public-facing, you know, a thinker, a public educator, kind of like me. He's in front of audiences all the time, both in media and in public, doing a lot of public events, et cetera, et cetera. And he talks about pretty controversial stuff. He talks about politics, for example. He talks about public policy where everybody's constantly at each other's throats in America today, God knows. He takes honesty to an extreme because he says, that honesty is an act of love and committing an act of radical honesty, saying what he thinks in the spirit of love actually makes him a lot happier. He thinks it's his happiness secret. He regularly disagrees with people on controversial topics. I mean, you know, friends, and he disagrees with me all the time. He doesn't, you know, he thinks I'm wrong. He tells me when he thinks I'm wrong. And I say, so what do you think? Just to make it easier to grease the skids. He doesn't say it's You know, it's fine, whatever. No, that's wrong. Right? And he does that with audiences. He does that with strangers. You know, he believes that getting at the complete truth of things is a favor he's doing to other people. As a matter of fact, he calls those love conversations. Imagine that. His theory is that people can only understand each other deeply and act accordingly when they are completely honest. And he generally speaking, gets away with it. People have a sense that he's looking out for their welfare and he's offering up his opinion not out of egotism and not out of aggression, but as kind of a gift, as it were. He doesn't expect you to agree with him at all. On the contrary, if you don't agree with him, he expects you to tell him. What a way to live, right? Now, as a philosophical matter, you would say that he's Emersonian, or even better, You'd say he's Kantian. Now, Ralph Waldo Emerson and his, his best friend, Henry David Thoreau, who wrote Walden, these were called American Transcendentalists of the Transcendental School. And the name was actually taken from kind of their, their, their philosophical godfather who lived earlier than they did in Germany, who is the originator of what we would think of as Transcendentalism. That was Immanuel Kant. Kant was the sort of the father of transcendentalism, continental transcendentalism, European transcendentalism. And his whole gig was honesty. That's what he was really all about. Here's a quote from Immanuel Kant in his perhaps his greatest book called The Metaphysics of Morals that was published in 1797. It was 1841 that Ralph Waldo Emerson was writing. So this was roughly not exactly a contemporary, but more or less the same period, just a little earlier. Here's what Kant said, "By a lie, a human being throws away and as it were annihilates his dignity." In other words, when you lie to somebody for transactional purposes or for just basic ease or especially because you're afraid, you hurt yourself and you hurt them. And Kant, he believed in complete radical honesty all the time. Now, I will rush to to share that Kant was a single man. He never got married. And so it's pretty easy for him to say, yeah, yeah, tell it like it is all the time. He lived by himself and there might be a reason that he lived by himself and he was very eccentric, kind of a loner as a matter of fact. So perhaps that's an easier thing for him to do than you. And that's one of the reasons in this episode I'm going to tell you how it can be a little Kantian or Emersonian. Emerson was happily married and you can maintain your relationships at the same time because that's the trick, Right. That's pulling the rabbit out of the hat in this way. So how can you be a Kantian? How can you be an Emersonian? How can you make it work for you? Let's go to the present and let's think about somebody who's written philosophically about this, not in 1841 or 1797, but somebody who's writing about it in kind of a more contemporary self-improvement kind of way. And that's from the 1990s, a, an author by the name of Brad Blanton. Arthur C. Brooks, who wrote a pretty big bestseller from the 1990s and early 2000s. He had a book that actually came out in 2005 called Radical Honesty: How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth. And he was of this Emersonian belief that you got to go your own way and tell the truth all the time in a way that's actually helpful to people. And he made the case because he's a modern writer and he's got the data that when you do that, It has consequences for sure, but it's really, really worthwhile. And he shows in that book, and I'll put the book as always into the show notes so you can click on it and get it easily if you want. It's nice to read. And then it can reduce stress. And, and, you know, your, your mom told you don't lie because you're going to actually weave this web of deceit and you're going to get caught up in it because you're not going to remember your lies. And then it's hard to stay consistent with a bunch of lies because they're hard to remember. And he says that therefore it reduces stress to say the truth all the time to everybody. You never have to worry about what you told somebody else. It deepens connections with other people because the people who really are your friends, the people who really do love you, they do appreciate it if you do it right. More on that later. And they reduce emotional reactivity because when you're used to getting and giving the truth, you're not going to freak out when somebody says something that's not completely complimentary all the time. On the contrary, if you get nothing but compliments, you're being lied to. That's the bottom line because you're not perfect. Let's go back to a prior episode when we talked about not being perfect. So Immanuel Kant, Ruffled Emerson, Brad Blanton of that school are making the case that more honesty properly undertaken leads to greater happiness. That's their argument. Now that goes completely contrary to what most people think and how most people act because of the basic physiological functioning of the limbic system of the brain. We lie all the time. But, but there's nothing strange about that. The fact that we naturally do something and, and, and a bunch of philosophers coming along and saying that if we did the opposite, we'd be happier, they very well might be right. Remember, I've made the case again and again and again that you have two choices in life. And this is the, the miracle of the amazing human prefrontal cortex, the supercomputer in the front of your head. You can choose to go according to your animal impulses, or you can choose to go against your animal impulses because you're trying to serve your moral aspirations. I mean, people do this all the time. You know, they're, they're attracted to somebody who's not their spouse, but they choose not to pursue that attraction. That's your moral aspiration as opposed to your, your, your animal impulse. And guess what? The moral aspiration which goes against your animal impulse actually makes you happier. A lot of the time, going against Mother Nature's animal impulses is the best thing you can do. Standing up to yourself, being at war with these impulses. Is the act of self-discipline that makes you truly who you are. Go back to my earlier episode about my morning protocols. You think when my clock goes off at 4:30 in the morning, I'm like, "Hooray, it's another great day." No, I'm like, "Ugh, gratitude, gratitude." What am I doing? I get out of bed, say a little prayer, I go and I get my supplement stack ready and I Go down to my gym because I want my moral aspirations. I want my day to be set up in a particular way because I've decided to do so, not because it feels good. This is another example of this. Your limbic system is on one side and your need, your desire, your Kantian moral aspiration is on the other. How can you do the thing that the philosophers say will make you happier well enough that the consequences, that the costs don't outweigh the benefits. That's what we're going to come back to. But before we do that, because I promise you I'm going to be very practical today, as always, I want to back up and I want to talk about the kinds of lies and why we tell them. And this, I mean, this research has always blown my mind. There's a bunch of research that comes out of, uh, University of Massachusetts at Amherst that shows that the average person tells something like 2 lies to a stranger within the first 10 minutes of conversation. We lie a lot. I mean, and that's not well replicated, but you know, people lie all the time. And, and, and the most interesting and, and reliable part of the social science research on this is the types of lies. So there's a very nice article from 2008, which is now almost 20 years old, but there's no reason to think that this would be out of date. Psychologists writing in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships talked about the big 3 types of lies. This is actually in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. As I mentioned before, it's called Individual Differences and Lying in Everyday Life. It's pretty, pretty much on its face. And, and, and once again, this goes in the notes like everything else. They classified lies in 3 types. Number 1 are self-centered lies to influence others or to make a good impression. Like, you know, hey, you know, President United States asked me to be his vice president, but I, you know, I turned him down. Right? That, that's a kind of a, A self-burnishing lie, that's lifting yourself up. That's a, you know, exaggeration falls into that particular category to make yourself actually look better. People do that a lot. The second type of lie are other-oriented lies to protect the feelings of a person you're, you're, you're lying to. So, you know, people say to me, it's like, you haven't aged a day. It's like, yeah, really? You need to get your eyes checked. You're kidding me. You know, I'll see people I haven't seen in 20 years and say, wow, you look great. I don't have to have a big lie detector to figure out that that one isn't right. What are they doing? They're actually trying to protect my feelings. They're not going to say. You have lost a lot of hair because it's sort of not polite, or they think that it's gonna actually be a problem for the relationship. Now with me, it's actually not gonna hurt my feelings very much because the truth is the truth to be sure. But people do that all the time. That's number 2. Number 3 is altruistic lies to protect a third party that would go into the kind of category of, she was with me all night, officer. In other words, to create an alibi or something where you lie to protect somebody. Is the way that that works. And so those are the 3 types of lies that these psychologists actually found. Um, now here's the interesting part about that. With close friends and romantic partners, we're most likely to tell other-oriented and altruistic lies, number 2 and 3, because we love them and we think that we're actually being better with them by doing those things, by lying to them so that we won't hurt their feelings and lying to protect them. But we don't tell very many of these, if we really love them, these self-centered lies. I mean, it's very unlikely that I'm going to go home to my wife and I'm going to tell her something great that happened to me professionally that didn't happen, for example. That would be a weird thing to do, as a matter of fact. On the other hand, with strangers, we do the opposite. With strangers, you're sitting next to somebody on the plane and they ask you what you do for a living and you kind of gilded a little bit, perhaps. So, "You're a writer? Really? Really? What's your latest book? Okay. How's it doing?" "Great, great. People are buying it all over the place." It turns out that 3 people have bought the book. Arthur C. Brooks, whatever. But the whole point is that you tend to puff yourself up more before strangers and you're way less likely to protect them or, or, or, or lie to them to, to spare their feelings, especially to protect them because you have no skin in the game. You've got no reason to actually do that. So that's interesting, isn't it? That we, how we approach lies with respect to people close to us as opposed to people far farther away from us. Now this is starting to create a taxonomy of lies, and I want to add a couple of others that actually come from the research outside of that. Paper I just talked about. There are two other motives for lying that we can add to the first three. Number one is just sheer laziness. So when the waiter asks, how's your lunch? And it's like gross and salty. And you're like, fine. I mean, technically that's a lie. I'm not saying that, you know, you got to go confess to a priest because you told that lie. Um, necessarily you figure that one out yourself, but you said that because you didn't want to go to the trouble. Of explaining, like, my fish tacos were just unbelievably salty. I don't know what was wrong with them. Because you look like a complainer and it becomes a problem, and people will actually say stuff that isn't true because they want to get it in and get out. Sheer laziness is really, really common. These types of white lies, they kind of smooth the flow of interactions. That's what— that's how a couple of scholars put it in a paper called The Effects of Deception in Social Networks. So that's laziness. Here's another one. I guess that was number 4, so this would be lie reason number 5, adding to the first 3 that I talked about. Little white lies are often a social lubricant, and they can actually seem virtuous. You know, you can kind of pat yourself on the back for your sensitivity and tact, uh, when you say something that's actually not really true. But, you know, and again, these are not mutually exclusive, these are related to other things that I've talked about here, but you can turn your lying vice into a little virtue inside your own head when you say little white lies to people just to kind of get through the day, make things a little bit easier, etc., etc. And people do this a lot, actually. Now, there's a problem with that, which is that there's a, there's a literature out there that suggests that people who are telling whopper lies and actually committing crimes, almost always that there's an algorithm that starts with this little white lies that are a social lubricant that are making your life a little bit easier. Or maybe that's the laziness motive. And it turns into something a little bigger and something turns into something a little bit bigger and a little bit bigger. So the, the, these relatively innocuous, um, motivations, they tend to be not innocuous at all because this escalates. Dishonest behavior builds on itself. And again, social scientists have shown that nobody actually wakes up one day from a completely virtuous and honest lifestyle and says, you know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna go rob a bank and lie to the cops. Um, no. What they do is they cut corners here and then a little bit more there and a little bit more there. And they can actually, the people who've done, you know, really big dishonest things like, like building a completely false version of themselves, I wish there was just some whopper cases out there that it, it started with little lies, kind of like the ones we're talking about here. So if you're with me still and you wanna find a way to not lie, don't lie. I mean, even little things, even these little social lubricants, even these little ease of interaction with people. Okay. So no, why not? I mean, okay. I just gave you, I guess, suppose I just gave you a good reason why not, because it'll turn into, you know, you becoming a congenital liar or something. Maybe not. There's a lot between little lies and ruining your life. But there are some real reasons why lying doesn't really necessarily, in my make life happier, quite the contrary. So let's go in the direction that we usually do in this show, which is I want to talk about how being honest actually can make you happier or that being dishonest will actually make you unhappier. Right now, you're like Neo in The Matrix. You can keep scrolling, experiencing a simulation of life, or you can wake up to how your attention is being harvested for profit. It's happening to people all over the world right now. You don't want to be productized like this anymore, but it's hard. Tech addiction is so potent because it's been designed to tap into your dopamine system. Just like heroin, porn, gambling. You've got the cravings. You're addicted. 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The happiness case against ordinary easy lying starts with number one, very clear research showing that lying, even little lies, make you less likable. And people know when you're lying a lot more than you think. Um, there's a a bunch of papers out there on what's called humble bragging, which you probably know that expression. Those of you who are from outside the United States, you might not. Humble bragging is when you're bragging, but when you're not bragging, you're actually looking like you're self-effacing, but you're actually bragging. And so it'll be something like, "Ah, got to go see the President of the United States today, but forgot to get my suit pressed. What a moron I am." That's a total humble brag. You're trying to tell the your audience on social media, if that's where you posted it, that you're going to go see the President of the United States, not that you actually think you're a moron because your suit is wrinkled. That's a dishonest thing to do because you're hiding your motivations. People know. People have 100 ways to detect that. If you think humble bragging is actually serving its purpose, you're wrong. And again, the literature really shows that people who humble brag are despised. It's just really, really terrible. And little lying, even to kind of butter people up, people don't like that either. You might notice that when you go in to buy something and, you know, the person, the clerk or the salesperson is telling you about how great your taste is, that it makes you uncomfortable. The reason it makes you uncomfortable is 'cause you're detecting dishonesty. And when you detect dishonesty, you become uncomfortable around the person, meaning that the person has become less likable to you. Well, you're just a salesman when you're doing that, or a salesman who's not being completely forthright. Now, it's probably better that when I go to buy a car, the guy doesn't come out of the back room and say, hey, who's the bald guy? And start making fun of me. That probably wouldn't work either. But the truth is you don't have to choose between being a jerk and being dishonest. And that's actually where we want to go with that. But the bottom line is, and again, I'll put up a really nice paper from the Journal of Experimental Psychology, Social Psychology. That makes this case of disliking and lying and lying to people who lie to us. That's what the name of the paper is. And you'll see all this. We know our brains are so wonderfully complex that we can detect, we have lie detectors inside us. They're not perfect. The second reason that, that, that so-called innocent lying actually doesn't make you happier is that it harms relationships and it lowers happiness by lowering trust. You know, and this is especially true in intimate relationships. So for example, if you're married and your marriage is kind of resting on a bed of mild, relatively innocuous untruths, that bed of untruths actually adds up to mistrust. The reason is because if you don't tell me the truth about little things, I'm not really going to trust you to tell me the truth about big things. And so you'll find, for example, that spouses who fib to each other, fib to, here, where am I going? How much money did I spend? Or even the kinds of lies to protect the other person. Yeah, you look great in that. Is it how these pants look on me? They look great. They look great. You're never quite forthright with your partner. They won't trust you in the big things either completely. This really, really compromises trust. And I've seen the data on that. I've seen the research on that, but I've experienced that as well. So I've been with Mrs. B for, um, since 1988. So we're going on, you know, 38 years at this point. We met on, uh, July 7th, uh, 1988, Bastille Day in France. Of all places. You know, we got to know each other over the next year or so because we were living in different countries. She was in Spain, I was in the United States, and we were learning each other's language. Didn't learn, didn't speak a word of each other's languages. But as we did and we started to learn to communicate, I had to wonder, why did she fall in love with me? I mean, I honestly wanted to know, um, because she's beautiful, she was interesting, she's smart. And I'm not saying that she was out of my league, I guess she was, But I was really, I was really interested. I mean, what was it? I mean, why did you fall in love with me? And you know what she told me? She said, because you're the first man who's been honest with me ever. Completely honest. You never lie. It's a huh. And you know that I think that reflects very poorly on, on Spanish men, perhaps, that she— at least the ones that she had dated, because she said all the guys she'd gone out with before, they were just like, they say whatever they want. I mean, not really terrible things, not really deceiving her in all these ways, but they just weren't reliable, they weren't trustworthy, they weren't honest with her. Look, since— and over the past 35 years, I know lots of Spanish guys who are impeccably honest. Maybe she dated the wrong guys, I don't know. But the bottom line is that she fell in love with me because I was honest, including in the times when it wasn't that comfortable for me to be honest. Why was I honest? I don't know. I mean, I come from a family where that's super highly prized. I remember that my— I think it probably was It was a tactic on my parents' part. I remember my mother saying when I was a little guy, she used to say, you know, when you were really little, sometimes you'd tell lies, but when you knew how important the truth was, you became an honest boy. You became an honest person. And I just was beaming with that. That just made me feel so good that I was getting complimented by my mom on that. And I remember doing that with my son Carlos too, and he's really super honest. I have to say sometimes to a fault where it just makes me uncomfortable. You know, young guy, my son Carlos, our son Carlos, Esther and my son Carlos. But it's a, it's a big value in our family. It's a big value in our marriage. And, and that's the truth that you will harm your intimate relationships with just the easy lies. I've got the data and I've got the experiences that actually prove that, that, that, that show that while little lies will protect moment-to-moment harmony, it will compromise moment-to-moment closeness. And I'm telling you, friends, um, when it comes to a good marriage or a good friendship, closeness beats harmony 8 days a week. It just does. If you want a real relationship that stands the test of time, closeness is what you want, and honesty is actually how you get it if you do it right, which is where I need to go next. All right, now I believe based on all the things that I've told you here, that Kant and Emerson have got the better of the argument, that the, the Pleistocene brain doesn't have it right, as long as you get serious about honesty and you get good at honesty. Okay, so that's where we get practical here. How can you make sure honesty improves your life? How can you be more virtuoso in honesty? Not— I'm not saying that you could be honest and never have any conflict. You're gonna have more conflict. But where it makes your relationships better and not worse. Here's where it starts. Number 1, and of course all these things are validated, so I'll give you the studies, but this one might sound counterintuitive nonetheless. If you want to be more honest and you want more honesty in your life, the first thing that you need is to seek and accept honesty from other people. I know people who are trying to be good Kantians, good Emersonians, who want to dish out the honesty, but they don't want honesty from other people. They don't want the truth. My dad used to say, I don't want the truth, but I need it to be excellent, to be a good man. I actually need it. And I think he really believed that. Probably that's the basis of this big family value of ours. But I meet people all the time who are really quite willing to tell the truth to everybody, but they become really prickly when they're presented with truths that they find difficult to accept. The tendency is to dish out criticism and being unable to take it. And that's the style of a narcissist. That's the style of a thin-skinned jerk, as a matter of fact, and is not an expression of love. I'll put a nice article from Psychology Today in the notes, The Narcissist Dilemma. They can dish it out, but they can't take it. So here's the first commitment to make. If you want to go on this journey, commit yourself to honesty. That starts with a commitment to be honest with yourself, and to demand and expect honesty from other people. Now, part of the deal is when people are honest with you, they're going to give you the truth as they see it. So you have to make a commitment not to be offended when people tell you— when they give you the truth, right? But you also have to remember that people's opinions are not facts, meaning that you have to use your judgment and the truth that people are giving you to decide whether or not it is something you should accept. And that takes a lot of wisdom, and it also takes a lot of intestinal fortitude. It takes a lot of strength and, and it takes practice is the bottom line. Sometimes what you'll hear will be intended to offend you when you do this, as a matter of fact, but you can almost always choose not to take offense. Bottom line, step 1, be honest with yourself and demand honesty from other people, even when it hurts. Okay, now that's hard. I'm a defensive soul, but boy, oh boy, is it important in my life. Here's the second protocol for living an honest life. Offer the truth to everybody, always to heal, never to harm. So you see, here's the thing. If you have a belief about anything, if you have any controversial view or whatever it is, if you're using it as a weapon, you're using it wrong. If you're trying to convince people about your political opinions, for example, If you're using them as a cudgel against people with whom you disagree, you're doing it wrong. You know, you're going to get what psychologists call the boomerang effect. The more you argue, the less people are going to agree with you if you're using your values as a, as a, as a weapon. But if you use them as a gift, you can get away with a lot. You know, in, in my teaching, um, about human happiness, nobody watching us doesn't know that universities are tricky places these days. I mean, things that would have been ordinary knowledge, um, a few decades ago, you have to tread really lightly or walking on eggshells because there's been, especially over the past 10 years or so, this climate of sort of cancellation and self-censorship. And, and a lot of professors are frankly terrified to say anything even remotely controversial. But I'm committed to speaking the truth about the science, um, that I— the behavioral science and the neuroscience and the conclusions that it comes to. Which means I'm not going to lie to my students. I can't do it. It can't be done. It's not right. Unethical. So here's how I do it. I commit to myself that everything I'm going to teach my students is an expression of love and never something that's going to try to be funny for the sake of humor or controversial because I'm trying to be edgy. Those are a cudgel in their way. When by about the third week of the class, my graduate students, they trust me. They trust me because I have their best interests at heart. And literally before I go out to teach every day, I pray for them. I pray for my students. I say, make every word that comes out of my mouth a way to lift them up and bring them together in bonds of happiness and love, which I always say at the beginning of this podcast as well, because that's the prayer I say before I get on the air. So that's truth to heal, not truth to harm. And it will almost never lead you astray. I've almost never seen it turn into a big catastrophe for somebody who's trying to do good. People know your motives because once again, we have a spider sense about that. Now, one of the ways that you could do this too, by the way, when you're trying to love with truth as opposed to harm with truth, is you look for the virtues rather than the imperfections of others. And so this is something that I would recommend that you do systematically, that you look for something beautiful and tell them honestly. I mean, don't look for something and lie to them about something that's not virtue or something that's not an element of beauty in somebody else. Look for something that's actually there. And there's something good in everybody. There's something wonderful in almost everybody. Look for it and tell them. And that's the kind of truth that establishes the credibility such that even when you have to say something that's difficult, they're going to know that it's not motivated by animus. It's not motivated by ill will. Now, at this point, let me take a slight detour and and make this point. Telling the truth all the time, not lying, is not the same thing as going out of your way to point everything out, right? And again, I'm not trying to split hairs here, but when your spouse says, do I look good in this? And she or he doesn't. And you say, I don't think it's the best, right? That's very different than when your spouse, you know, comes downstairs wearing some particular clothes and you don't think it looks good to say, hey, you look terrible today. That you don't have to do that. You don't have to volunteer absolutely everything because that's not an expression of love either. It's being judicious and having prudential judgment about this as part of how you're going to be a truthful person as well. They ask, you don't lie, but you don't have to bring things up constantly either. It's not a lie of omission to not give every criticism that crosses your cortex. All the time. And that's another way that you offer truth to heal, not to harm. Number 3, make the truth appealing. Turn, you're wrong into, here's a way I think you can think about this issue differently. See what I'm saying, right? I mean, both of them are the truth, but one of them is constructive as opposed to destructive. You're making it appealing for other people. If your boss asks, hey, do you like working here? It's not right to lie and say you do when you don't, but you can say, you know, there's a bunch of things that I've been thinking about that could make this job a lot more interesting and fun. And that's a constructive answer to that question. You answered his question, by the way, and he's going to get it that what you just said, but at the same time, you're not just laying it out there like, no, this place, this place is crummy. It sucks. It's this place could be better. And I have some ideas and I want to make it better. And there are very few bosses who are so thin-skinned that they're going to fire you over that. Your honest feedback will not always be appreciated, of course, but it can help you hold on to some of the benefits of what would have been pro-social lies without the costs of losing other people's respect and losing respect for yourself. I've been imitating my friend with his love conversations and experimenting with a lot more honesty. And this is a lifelong project for me. I mean, again, according to my wife, it's something that comes pretty naturally to me, but we could all be better me too. Okay. So I am trying to make sure that that's the case. And one of the ways that I'm doing that is by asking people to give me their unvarnished views, which is why I ask you as viewers of this to tell me the truth. And as you see it in the comments, it doesn't mean I'm going to agree with you, but you know, there's no reason for you to write something you don't think. And, and, and I would appreciate it if you wrote me what you do think. If you feel like doing that. I'm also, out of a spirit of respect, more forthcoming with my personal views, even when they're out of step. And, and again, I'm an academic, and a lot of my views— I have very heterodox views about many issues, social issues, political issues, economic issues. I'm just not a typical academic. And I'm, I'm, over the past 7 years in particular, I've been quite open about that. So far so good. I haven't gotten divorced or beaten up or fired, and I feel freer than I ever have before. And perhaps paradoxically, I'm actually less concerned of the opinions of other people as I do this. And you can as well. You can be free. And when you're freer, you are happier. That's the bottom line. So consider this. Would you like to be freer and happier? Well, maybe honesty is the way for you to love yourself and love each other more. Take a couple of questions and we'll be done. One from Kenwood, just one word, Kenwood. It's like share, but Kenwood. Officehours@arthurbrooks.com. What are a few things, Kenwood asks, that I should focus on during this coming summer and then my senior year of high school? I have almost nothing planned. Don't want to waste it. Well, already you're winning, Kenwood, to say I got a whole summer and I don't want to waste it. Good for you. Fantastic. So, here's what I would recommend. A couple of things, a couple of resources. Go back to my protocols for health and happiness, morning protocols and evening protocols. There's two separate shows. Watch those. We have PDF downloads that you'll actually get in the show notes, the documents that take you through the science and how to set up your day. Now, don't make the perfect the enemy of the good. You don't have to do it exactly the way that I do, but I would recommend starting to get into habits of living, habits of living that will take them out of willpower and cognitive load. And turn them into automatic things in the way that you pray, the way that you exercise, the way that you eat. That will be really science-based and really helpful for you. That's the first thing I would recommend. Second, I go to my reading list. I have a reading list on my website, very easy to find, and go through a few of these things and maybe more because it's summertime. I mean, that's what you read in the summer. That's the best thing ever. And actually reading things you don't have to read but are of your own volition, but are highly intellectually and psychologically nutritious. Morally so as well. I really recommend and love everything on that particular reading list and anybody else's reading list that you want as well. Read more and think more, ponder more, use it for that. And then here's the third thing I would recommend. I would recommend if you've got a lot of time is to find a way to serve other people more. I would recommend finding a way to volunteer, going places where you have never seen yourself exactly in communities of people that you wouldn't ordinarily encounter and actually serving them in a spirit of love more. I would have a summer of discipline, learning, and love through service. That's the summer that I would build, and that'll be one of the best summers of your life. Blake writes in at the website, what's one principle or practice in your morning and evening framework that you personally find really hard to follow? Yeah. I mean, there's a few. I mean, it's like, I wouldn't have to have a protocol if it were all easy, just falling off a log. But the evening protocols are much harder for me than the morning protocols. Getting up at 4:30 in the morning is easier for me than a lot of stuff for staying really disciplined at night. Sometimes, I'm not as disciplined about my device use as I should be because I got something I'm thinking about or I'm waiting for messages from people or I'm just distracted. So, messy device use. But even more, here's the big one, sweets. I just can't. I can't get off the sweets. It's not good for— I mean, look, this is not the end of the world. I know. But the truth of the matter is that the research is getting stronger and stronger that highly refined sugar, especially with highly processed foods, it's really, really bad for you. And if you gave me on a desert island, I only had a week to live and one food item, it would be graham crackers with Nutella. It's like I'm like a baby or a bag of candy corn. It's pathetic. The bottom line is that My brain loves glucose spikes. And, and, and so the one thing I really struggle with is sweets. Now I don't drink alcohol, which probably has something to do with it, by the way. I used to drink a lot of alcohol, especially in my 20s and 30s. And when you drink a lot and then you stop, one of the things that, that people have in common is that we do that is that they tend to get really, really addicted to the, to the sweet stuff. So it's probably related. Last but not least, uh, is Mohammed Al Kamil. Arthur C. Brooks writes in, what are the benefits and disadvantages of naps? What's the optimal time and duration for a retired 57-year-old person to get a better energy, get better energy during the day and a good sleep at night? Very dependent. Different people respond to this in different ways, but there are a few napping protocols that I recommend. Number 1 is that, is to keep in mind that people who nap, if they do it right, they can get better overall rest, but they almost always have worse night's sleep. So there is a trade-off. No matter what, there's going to be a trade-off. Here are the two rules if you're going to nap. I don't nap because I'm a bad night sleeper to begin with. And if I take a nap during the middle of the day, I'm probably not going to sleep at night. So you got to do you. My friend Arianna Huffington, she takes tons of naps and it's one of the great secrets to her career. And she's even written a book about it. So different strokes and, you know, different physiologies. But here are the two rules for people who take naps. Number one, don't nap in the 7 hours before you go to bed. If you go to bed at 10:00 PM, don't nap after 3:00. It's really, really important that your body, your circadian rhythms will be interrupted. Your sleep architecture will get messed up if you're napping too close to bedtime. Second is don't go into a deep sleep, generally speaking. So make it short, you know, and a 3-hour nap is highly problematic where you actually get into cycles of deep sleep. Stay in the more shallow cycles of sleep. And by the way, those are the two protocols that people follow in countries that nap a lot. I've lived off and on in Spain. In Spain, the siesta, when does it happen? It happens right after lunch. Now, that means that people will typically take a catnap at 3:30 to 4:00 or something like that. And that's because they're not going to bed before midnight. If you're in Madrid, for example, people are up all hours. As a matter of fact, that's a— you say, "4:00 nap, that's so late." Not in Spain. And they, generally speaking, try not to go into a deep sleep. My father-in-law, lifelong after-lunch siesta taker, he would have keys in his hands. He would go to sleep with his keys in his hands and a big, you know, it was like an old guy with the keys, like 75 keys, old school. And he would keep them in his hand and he'd be falling asleep, falling asleep, and falling asleep until his hand would relax and his keys would fall on the floor and wake him up. That was just That was his secret. That's what he did. So that's what I recommend. It's actually, um, if you're going to do that, make sure that you're doing it in a disciplined way that doesn't interrupt your nighttime sleep and, and experiment. Thanks, Mohamed, with that and a happy nap. Uh, we're done. Let me know your thoughts at officehours@arthurbrooks.com. Like and subscribe on Spotify, Apple, YouTube, wherever you are getting this podcast. Leave me a comment. Again, just be honest. It's all good. I can take it. Follow me on socials, Instagram, LinkedIn, all the other platforms where there's original content coming out every single day. And please do order The Meaning of Your Life, my newest book. Get it for somebody that you love. Get it for a million of your closest friends. And to learn more about all these ideas, and please do share this podcast because I want to reach as many people as we possibly can. I'll see you next week.