Building Happy Habits for Long-term Joy

Welcome to the Happiness Squad Podcast. Your weekly dose of practical tips and inspiration to help you operate at your fullest potential, integrating the science of flourishing.

Into how you live, work and lead.

I'm your host, Ashish Kothari, the founder and CEO of Happiness Squad and author of the best selling book Hardwired for Happiness. I will be your personal guide on your journey to explore the many facets of happiness, well being and flourishing, from personal growth to building more positive environments at work. In each episode we will share powerful insight, tips and stories from our guests who are leading experts, company executives and flourishing solution providers that you can implement right away to make happiness your competitive edge. Whether you're looking to overcome life's challenges to go from good to great, or to enhance your team's performance through flourishing, this podcast is the place for you to find more joy, health, love and meaning in everything you do. Join us every week as we rewire for Happiness Together. Hi dear friends, I am so excited.

Today to announce that we are launching a new solo podcast episode series. In this series I will use our Hardwired for Happiness and the model that is in the book. It's the Sunflower Model. I'll share that with you shortly to help you see how you can tackle some of the challenges life throws in our way or help you achieve some of the dreams or goals that you might have for 2024 that you want to achieve. So in this special series, you know, we will cover topics like I was putting this together this morning. We will cover topics like how if you are working, you can accelerate your career or get a promotion, do better at work, infuse more meaning if the work you're doing has less meaning. We'll also at the same time address topics if you are recently one of those who have been affected by by a layoff or you are going through a transition from a career point of view, how you can use the Sunflower model to really not just get another job, to actually get a better job that is more suited to who you are. One of my dear friends talks about this notion of swabhava versus Swadharma. Swabhava being your nature, Swadharma being what you end up doing. And when these are aligned, our life has so much more joy. We are so much more effective in being able to achieve what we want out there. So we'll tackle that. So from a career point, how can you accelerate your career? Or if you're going through a transition, how do you land an even better job than the one that you left behind voluntarily or involuntarily. We'll also cover the topic of relationships. So maybe you want to deepen your relationship with your wife, your spouse, with your girlfriend or boyfriend in that matter. Or maybe you are going through a breakup, have had a divorce, or you are looking for a new relationship out there. We'll talk a little bit around how these nine practices can really help you be more successful there to really be able to find love or rekindle love in your relationship. We'll also cover topics like how can you actually build a healthier habit? Maybe this is a year that you recommitted for the 10th time or 11th time or longer, like I have to lose weight or to build up your cardiovascular. So we'll talk through that. You know, what gets in our way of building healthier habits, why despite our best intentions, we sometimes fail. And we'll also handle, you know, in an episode, how you can actually use these nine hardwired for happiness practices to maybe shed a bad habit, shed an addiction, you know, what lies underneath that addiction and how we can really connect deeply and address it at its root. We'll also cover topics like how we can actually live a more intentional life so that we can achieve more at work or in life by being more intentional rather than just doing more. I know so many that I interact with, that I coach, you know, are burning the midnight oil, they're working 12, 14 hours, and they're constantly on a treadmill and they're just struggling to say, I don't know how to meet the demands, you know, that are being imposed on me. So we'll talk a little bit about how these practices can actually help you be more intentional out there and be more intentional in here. We'll also talk a little bit about how you can handle stress better. Look, stress is a part of life, but we will talk a little bit around how you can truly make stress your ally, your friend, versus run away from it. Look, if we didn't have stress in our life, we would be bored. If we didn't have performance pressures, we would be bored. We'll talk a bit around how we can actually really use the power of coping and antifragility. This notion that you know, was coined by Nassim Taleb, an epistemologist. We are all antifragile. We are resilient. But in order to harness that capability, we actually have to do something. And we'll talk a bit about that. So these are just some of the topics we'll cover in these solo episodes. So be on the watchout for them. If what we cover really resonates with you, share it with others in your life who might be struggling with them and maybe they'll find some insights there. That's the intention mentioned for these solo episodes. And so for this particular episode, let me cover a little bit and just do a recap of what this model is. What is this hardwired for happiness model, why happiness in the first place? And also, you know, talk a little bit around some of the myths, right? Some of the things that we hear about happiness and some questions, commonly held misconceptions about happiness. I get many of these in my talks that I give in workshops that I lead with clients. So first, let's talk a little bit about happiness and why happiness is so important. See, for me, happiness is, at its heart, human performance. I just invite you to tune inwards and just think about this. When are you at your best, most creative, innovative, kinder, the best version of you? Is it when you're stressed, anxious, angry, resentful? Feeling shamed, guilty, afraid? Or is it when you are happier? Is it when you are happy? Happiness is human performance. And the science is really clear on this. It's happier. People who live longer are more creative, are more successful, are more resilient. They live longer than others. They have higher immunity. So happiness is actually a really important state to cultivate now. Notice I called it a state. That's one of the most common myths that people have about happiness, that happiness is an emotion. And people say, oh, I don't, you know, I am happy. That's the other piece that people talk about. Or, how can you be happy all the time? Why worry about happiness? It seems such a trivial thing in this world right now, where we have so much suffering. There is so much, you know, we have a crisis at every level. We have a crisis ecologically. Our planet is getting warmer, faster than ever. We have a humanitarian crisis in so many places, even in our own communities. We live in Boulder, and homelessness is on the rise in Denver and Boulder. We have a humanitarian crisis around the world, right? If you look at what's happening in the Middle east, there is so much suffering on both ends. The Israelis as well as the Palestinians. If we look, the war in Ukraine, the earthquakes, the floods, the fires, there's so many who are suffering right now. There's a huge humanitarian crisis and there's a lot of people who are helping, too. There is a political crisis. You know, in almost every country out there, you know, there is increasing polarization within the countries. US is a big example of that, you know, where as Democrats or Republicans, we just reject the idea because it comes from the other party versus recogniz. We are all elected representatives, you know, trying to serve the nation and help progress the nation. We have a crisis in terms of the economic crisis, right? Inflation has been high, it's starting to come down now. But that's actually causing a huge pressure, especially on those who are in the lower or middle classes. So there's a lot of crisis everywhere. So why talk a little bit about, you know, why. Why worry about we have a refugee crisis. Why the hell. Ashish, are you talking about happiness and talking about, you know, really focusing on happiness? And my answer to them is the following. First of all, happiness, yes, happiness is an emotion. And like all emotions, happiness comes and goes. Anger comes and goes, fear comes and goes. Everything is impermanent in life and it comes and goes. And we are not talking about happiness as an emotion, we are talking about happiness as a state. Think about your own childhood. When you were younger, something needed to happen to make you unhappy. You could spend hours playing, you were happy and just smiling when you saw somebody. For most babies and young kids, when we are young, something needs to happen to make us unhappy. Maybe we fall down and get hurt, maybe we are hungry, maybe we wet our diaper or soiled it and it's causing us discomfort. But along the way, as we get older, that's not the state in which we inhabit. I wasn't that way 20, you know, when I look at my 20s and 30s, something needs to happen to make me happy, to make me feel joy. That's the cycle, the if then else cycle so many of us live in. So happiness as a state, joyful as a state is about how can we cultivate that? And that's what these nine hardwired for happiness practices do. That regardless of what is happening out there, we can meet it from a place of joy. We can meet it from a place of surrender. We can meet it from a place of curiosity. We can meet it for a place of compassion, for self and for the other. That's what the state of joy allows. Because we cannot avoid suffering in life. We cannot avoid hardships in life. We cannot avoid people who might act in ways or say things to us that really in that moment leave us off balance. They really trigger us, they really affect us. But what we can do is cultivate that inner state of calm, that joy, peace that allows us higher ability to navigate whatever the world is throwing at us. And that's why we care about happiness. That's why we care about helping people build habits that help them be happier, healthier, and have more love and meaning. Notice emphasis on happier no matter your base state of happiness. And I can talk a little bit about that as well from the work that Professor Sonia Lyubomirsky did. We all have different states. Some of us, as you know, always see glass half full, others see glass half empty. So genetically, as well as how we brought up, there is a state. There's a base state of happiness that we kind of are born with or live with. But that's only 50% of the story. 10% is the life circumstantial things that come at us, the things we constantly keep chasing, the if then else. Only 10% of life circumstances are actually contributors to that state. Long term state of happiness. 40% are activities that we can do voluntarily. And that's where these Hardwired for Happiness practices, the Sunflower model that you might have heard about quite often on our podcast, comes about foreign.

We hope you're enjoying this episode. If you'd like to start building habits and integrating the Hardwired for Happiness practices into your life, come check out Rewire, our program on the Happiness Squad website. Rewire contains 35 minute micro practices that can help you truly build habits for a happier, healthier life filled with more love and meaning. The program uses the science of habit formation and the power of community to.

Support you in moving from knowing to doing to being. Now back to the episode. These nine practices, let me share them with you here so you can see them for a minute. These nine practices are truly these practices that can help us rewire away from this base state of fear that our brains have evolved to keep us in. I'll talk a bit on that, but a bit on these practices. So these practices, these nine practices, you will recognize that they are in every wisdom tradition that has ever existed. They are in the Yoga sutras, they are in Christianity, they are in Islam, they are in Buddhism, they are in Stoicism, they are in Taoism. They've been around forever, two, three thousand plus years. Our wisdom traditions, our spiritual traditions talk around these. But we have evidence now from the field of positive psychology and neurosciences that if we truly integrate these practices into our life, we can truly experience the world differently. The field of neuroscience highlights that the reason we experience these differently is because our neural structures in our brain change. Yes, we have evolved. Our brains have evolved and they are wired for fear, not for joy, but that's not the full story. Our brains are neuroplastic, which means we can form new neurons and new neural pathways all through our lives. I'm sure you've heard this saying, neurons that fire together, wire together. And so we truly can, with these nine practices, learn to dance with complexity. Learn to dance and smile and play in the face of obstacles that we face. Because only that state of curiosity, joy, playfulness, learner mindset that can help us navigate these better. So let's talk a little bit around what these nine practices are, so you have an overview, because in the following episodes, we're going to use the sunflower model to see how you can navigate the challenges or the goals that you have for your life. So at the heart of this model, and it is designed as a sunflower. You know, sunflowers are beautiful flowers. They're one of my favorite flowers. And the sunflower, if you notice, always faces the sun. In fact, it changes the direction as the sun moves across the sky. Now there is darkness, there is a shadow beneath the sunflower. But the sunflower is always looking up, looking up at the sun. It's choosing to follow the sun. In the same way we can choose happiness, we can choose to be happy or happier. That state is what I'm talking about. Meet the world from that state of happiness so we can navigate it better. So that's the analogy. At the heart of this model is self awareness. And it's the most important foundational practice to begin with. Anais then was talking about self awareness and how important this is, and captured it beautifully in the saying, we see the world as we are, not as the world is. And in this practice of self awareness, I talk a lot around three different levels at which we can build this capacity for awareness. At the base level is how we make sense of the world. And we often make sense of the world through certain beliefs, certain belief sets that we capture early enough around ourselves and around the world. One of the biggest belief is that if then, else, or, hey, if I make money, I will be happy. We know from research that beyond 70 to $90,000, incremental dollars, at least in the US stop providing additional utility. Okay, it's not by this logic, you know, billionaires and millionaires would be happier than ever. So it's a false belief. Money by itself and things we can buy don't bring us happiness. But there's so many of us who are caught in this rat race because we believe, you know, if we make money and more money and more money, we'll be happy. Self awareness is also something that every wisdom tradition has talked about. And so there is another level of awareness which is at the level of consciousness. You know, who is it that is actually making sense of the world? Where does ego come from? What are all the different elements in the role of emotions and moods and, you know, our somatics, our body, how tired, or what we hold in our physical space, how that shapes that unique observer. So we talk a bit about that. You can learn more about that from the book. We also have a rewire program that you can enroll in, so you can engage more with self awareness there. But really recognize that it's this fundamental belief set that is critical for us to examine if we have to achieve anything out there. Because often many obstacles at the first level appear like an obstacle. But when we look below, there is something within. There is a deeper obstacle hidden beneath the surface of the iceberg that we really need to tackle. What we see at the top is only 10, 15% of the story. And that's what awareness is, critical skill. So we'll talk a bit around that. You know, think about addiction. In addiction, on one level, we can talk about how do you break free from alcohol or from, you know, other hard drugs, but what is that drug doing? What are we trying to numb when we take that drug? What are we trying to escape? If we don't face that head on, we won't be successful in navigating that. So the second one is purpose. We know that meaning and finding meaning in what we do is so important. In fact, one of the things that keeps us stuck in a state which is not serving us, but yet we are afraid to take the next move is we don't have a clear why. You know, I used to coach so many who were kind of unhappy with their jobs, and I said, why don't you change? And often what you find is in my advice. Biggest advice as they kind of navigated and looked for another job is I said, don't run away from what you are facing right now. Find something to run towards. Because if you don't do that, you'll just find that the new place is the same as the old one. So this notion of meaning in life is really important. Meaning is really important in health shifts that we want to make. You know, so much research done in the field by Richard Boyasic and others that says when there is meaning around a shift, a more positive meaning, hey, I want to lose weight and be healthier and quit smoking because I want to be around for my grandparents, you know, for my grandkids birthdays, and seeing them go to college is a lot more powerful than if you don't stop smoking, you're going to die. Or, you know, if you don't start changing your diets, you're going to die because of, you know, the condition of your heart. So purpose is a really big deal. And to really find that purpose again, you can notice you can't find it out there. Awareness is so key. So we'll talk about purpose as part of these different life situations that we have to navigate and how it can be such an important north star. Mindful living is the third practice in the Sunflower model. And it's all about tuning our mind to be in the present moment. We are blessed with unbelievable gifts. Our brain is unbelievable in terms of its memory. So we remember from our past, we learn from our past, and it has an unbelievable imagination. So we project the future. We can imagine multiple futures, the possibilities. And the problem is not that. The problem is that we have lost control of this core amazing instrument. And instead of consciously creating space to learn from the past and go into the future, we constantly seem to be stuck flitting between past living in resentment or in anxiety worrying about the future. Because our brain also is designed, remember, to keep us safe, evolved over millions of years to spot the danger and alert us so that we could take action. You know, it has a huge negativity bias. So we'll talk a little bit about how mindfulness is so important in helping you navigate whatever you're navigating, in being able to get out of the amygdala, hijack this fight flight, freeze this huge amount of cortisol and adrenal rush that we feel in our bodies. So we'll talk a bit around mindfulness, gratitude, one of the most powerful practices for us. We'll talk a bit around that and how we can use gratitude, noticing what we do have versus what we don't have. If you're going through a job transition, I think we'll talk a little bit around how this can be such a powerful immediate relief for you. I was coaching somebody once who had lost their job and they thought it was just the worst thing that had ever happened and life was miserable. You know, we actually said, let's count our blessings. I said, listen, would you trade off your wife or your family for your job? And he said no. I said, would you trade off your health for your job? And you know, health? We can go a lot deeper, right? Your ability to see would you trade off your sight for your job. Okay, what about, would you trade off a leg for your job? No. So notice how many things we have. There's so many people who can't see, there's so many people who can't walk. There's so many people who don't have those relationships and we can go on and on. And at the end of that conversation, it's not that he had a job, but he was experiencing a level of lightness because he had regrounded on all that he already had. We'll talk a lot about mastering your emotions. This is actually a big one for me personally. Even though I do so much of this work. I read continuously around happiness and around habits and how we can build habits. I often lose my cool, I lose my temper. We have a 13 year old and often he can bring out the worst in me. And we'll talk a little bit around, you know, how we navigate and deepen relationships. If you have a teenager, we'll talk a bit around how these practices can help you. It's a constant journey. I think I'm better at this than I was 18 months ago, way better at it than where I was six years ago. And I hope that these help you too. We'll talk a bit about compassion. Compassion for ourselves and for the others. No matter what you're navigating, no matter even if you messed up, you did something that you might have even faced public shaming. You know, we all make mistakes, but we can always grow from it. I'm reminded of this beautiful story around this notion of don't throw a stone unless you have not committed a sin. We all make mistakes, but we can grow from them. So we'll talk a bit around how this particular petal of compassion can help us give ourself a break and still learn from it. We'll talk a bit about well being, one of the key elements around a happier life. You know, we are living longer than ever before. Kids born today are probably going to live into their 90s. But unless we really do something around building healthier habits, taking care of our body, our mind, our spirits, our later 15, 20, 30 years are going to be not happy years, but filled with suffering. And our bodies fail us as our minds fail us. We don't want to live like vegetables. And so we'll talk a bit around well being and even in some of our struggles how we can actually truly make build these habits. It's definitely something that I will be exploring with you and I'll share a lot about my battles with weight and living healthier. There's some of these that come easy for me, others that don't. And that's just part of all of our life, how we can still invest in our well being regardless of how busy we are. It doesn't matter if you're a startup founder, it doesn't matter if you're a CEO. It doesn't matter if you're a blue collar worker. It doesn't matter if you're working two jobs or three jobs. We'll talk about simple things in any of these contexts to be able to increase our well being. Community One of the biggest drivers of flourishing and success. We'll talk about this and how you can, no matter what you're tackling, which life situation you're tackling, you can harness the power of community whether you have a vibrant community or not. If you don't have one, we'll talk about how you can start it. It's never too late. And finally, my favorite living intentionally. There's so many of us who are caught in this rat race of morning to evening, starting our day, running around so much to get done, and ending the day exhausted in front of Netflix or with a drink in our hand. We're just tired, trying to give ourselves a relief and start all over again. And days become weeks, weeks become months, months become years, years become decades. And we wonder where life went. So we'll talk a lot around regardless of how busy you are, how you can use the power of intentional living and all of these other practices that are in here to really achieve more by being more rather than doing more. So that's what's coming up. Dear friends, in this solo episode series, I hope they are helpful to you. I will try my best to integrate and bring to you the latest and greatest thinking from multiple experts and bring them to life to you in the context of how you can apply it by dancing on the petals of the sunflower. Thank you for listening or watching. Thank you for forwarding this to others in your life who could benefit from it. Thank you for integrating this into your work with your teams at Happiness Squad. I've dedicated my second half of my life to help a billion people integrate the science of flourishing into the way they live, lead and work. So excited to be on this journey with you. And stay tuned for the next set of episodes, which are going to be solo episodes. We're going to release one a month, tackling some of the biggest obstacles we hear our listeners face and achieve some of the biggest goals they have in their life. Take care and have a wonderful day.

That wraps up another episode of the Happiness Squad podcast. We hope you found the insights actionable to enhance your journey towards happiness and fill your life with more joy, health, love and meaning.

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